Poor Man seemed more relaxed now. The talk was slow — and then abruptly he ordered away the Mujahids sitting by the Young Man’s side on the charpoy.
The Flashy Commander stretched, got up, and put his sandals on. He winked at the Young Man and chewed a ball of sugar.
Poor Man said something about guns, and everyone laughed. He and Malik Elias gripped a Kalashnikov from opposite ends, inspecting it, and then he entered a note in his book. Someone handed him another gun. He looked it up and down very slowly, and then fingerprinted the next recruit.
It was half past seven in the morning now. The flies were coming out strongly. The battle was set for nine.
Poor Man took a cartridge and straightened it with a pair of pliers. — Was that safe? the Young Man wondered. He knew nothing about guns. It reminded him of the way the Mujahideen used hair tonic as lip balm, because it smelled like peaches and was thick and yellow. They wouldn’t believe him when he translated the label for them.
Poor Man checked over and rendered fit each of their weapons, attaching straps, loading bullets, with the same peaceful, unhurried spirit as when the Commander in Blue cooked kebabs and wetted down the mud floors every morning. — Sighing, Poor Man inserted a fuse in a grenade.
Elias borrowed the key from Poor Man. He went to the store-room and brought a sack of dried tutans. (So preserved, these fruits taste like very sweet raisins gone slightly bad. Fresh on the tree they resemble white, pink or black raspberries without seeds; then they taste like sweet grapes gone slightly bad.) Poor Man ran a few of them through his fingers and made a note in the book.
The council of war went on. Near the Young Man’s bed, suspended by two ropes so that it hung over the steep riverbank, a little wooden airplane twirled in the faint morning breeze. Beside it, three pairs of soldiers’ trousers swayed like hanged men.
Because the Young Man had never seen a battle, the associations he tended to make were with boyhood’s summer games. The Commander in Blue, for instance, slept in a tree fort, complete with real machine guns and a plate full of peaches that he could snack on at midnight, if he chose, spitting the seeds into the river below. To the right of the Young Man’s charpoy, a twin-log bridge led to a watch post in another tree. Down the riverbank and over the next rise was a real enemy somewhere in the dreamy distances of desert — namely, a division or two (what exactly was a division?) of the Soviet Army — but that had nothing to do with him. The exploded bombs and the downed helicopter that he’d walked past were also toys, like the wooden alootooka. Seeing Poor Man counting shells brought him a sensation of thrilling delight. Once again, I do not think the Young Man can be blamed for this.
The plane was really an ironic touch. He wondered which of the guerrillas had made it. In his imagination it had overflown a thousand English children’s gardens, the pilot bailing out every now and then as a flung stone or a division of scarecrows necessitated. Then, wandering for hours behind the enemy lines, ducking spiders’ webs and hungry moles in the shadows of the cornstalks, he was finally rescued by a little girl, who found him wedged in a tree root by a stream.
“Poor soldier,” she said. “Poor dear soldier. You’ve tried so hard, haven’t you, and it’s all come to nothing.”
And she rocked him in her arms, but he could not cry, being made of wood.
He knew that eventually he’d rot or burn or get lost among her worn-out stuffed animals (those other refugees from the Land of Counterpane, lovestained and tearstained, gaping at the world through scratched glass eyes); or the girl would grow up, nervous at first because the training wheels were off the bicycle, but the day she stopped being afraid of falling was the day she’d be too big to listen to the reading of Just So Stories, and that was when she’d get tired of him, because he could never be anything new. So he had the certainty of a negative future. He decided, therefore, to make the best of the present. Maybe she’d buy him clothes, or a toy gun…
But as the days went like clock-hands crossing, he began to miss the wooden airplane. The view at the window seemed the same, even though the leaves turned red and yellow and then curled and dropped off, and the children came back from school with their books in their arms, going around the corner until they were lost in gold leaf-shimmers; and while it was very nice to sit by the fireplace, the heat soon began to dry him out and warp him. Yes, her bed was lovely, but sometimes he’d get thrust under one of the pillows where he could scarcely breathe; or she’d jog him carelessly with her elbow. Even wood can feel, although his thoughts were empty like bombed-out villages with crossbeams of shadow resembling gallowses, rubble and emptiness inside the roofless rooms whose cracked walls were still strangely straight-topped; and through doors and window frames he could see the mountains to which the survivors must have fled. — One day he said that he had to be going. (At least he would have said that if his mouth were anything more than painted on.) He went out into the rain and found his downed craft in a stubbly field. With leaf and rubber band he made emergency repairs; then he took off again on his mission, which was to get from Point A to Point B. He skimmed his way through the backyard airspace of white houses, glimpsing sometimes the children at piano practice, or the families out together in their colorful automobiles…
Now, which do you think would be a sadder fate — to be rescued time and time again by the same person, and find that the accumulating separations were making her simultaneously more distant and more stale, or to travel forever through an afternoon above the many gardens, being rescued by different girls (that is every Young Man’s dream), for him the familiarity of an unfamiliar elbow in bed, the knowledge that the afternoon would go on and on like this until he broke? — At least in the latter case he’d be going Somewhere; whereas to be rescued by his first love again and again he’d have to fly in circles around her house, its field and brook. (Not that this is objectionable in principle: a kite is not unhappy for being attached to a string.)
The airplane beside the Young Man’s charpoy had no pilot. Something must have happened to him. Either he’d gotten killed or he’d gotten permanently rescued. Of course, everyone gets permanently rescued eventually (when one gets killed). But isn’t it better to get an early start on death, so as to at least taste permanence on one’s own terms?
The airplane still twirls and twirls there above the guerrilla camp, every afternoon, but for its pilot there must have finally come an hour when the lights came on, and the children were getting ready for bed, and there was time for only one more emergency landing.
The day passed. The battle was postponed. A skirmish with some Gulbuddin men had occurred, Poor Man said; someone had been injured. The Commander in Blue prepared for the Young Man a marvelous dish of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and peppers, all sliced thin and covered with salt.
Shadows began to stain the red hill across the valley. The Young Man’s own afternoon was ending. Flying finally on his night mission through the clouds of sleep, he sat among the red lights of the cockpit, bomb-bay switches in hand to deal with any nightmare, but as he flew on and on, he understood that anyone who might have been able to rescue him, should he need it, was long since in bed; that the fields and gardens had grown in the dark, widening and drying and crinkling into vast mountains, the entire Hindu Kush; and sand and snow and icy, filthy streams all around him, no moon in sight, and the Roos picking up the tenor of his night thoughts on their electronic gear — and he realized that he had succeeded in his objective of several years, which was to get himself in deep trouble.