He imagined being caught with the Mujahideen in some sandy gulley by a patrol of the Roos. They must surrender; they were disarmed. Then, one by one, the prisoners ahead of him were machine-gunned. Did he say, “Ameriki!”—at first softly, out of shame, then in a shout, so that everyone heard, and the Mujahideen, the doomed ones, turned their backs on him contemptuously, the guards understanding him at last, pulling him away, offering him water before his first beating, primping him for his television appearance as a spy, as meanwhile the Mujahideen, muttering earnestly, “Allah, Allah,” were shot behind him? — Or did he loudly insist, “Yah — Afghan!” as the guards led him up for execution, and as he hid his glasses to hide his foreignness, the fanatic Gholam Sayed, who had not permitted the Young Man to give Suleiman medicine when he was sick,i because it was Ramazan, cried to the guards, “Mr. Ouilliam — Kaffir, na Muslim!”j so that he would not even have the satisfaction of that stand? Which, oh which would have been worse?
The Commander in Blue invited him to accompany them on the raid. He lay in his charpoy, trying to ignore the flies, waiting for the sun to come up, the ordeal to begin. At 4:30 a.m. he had tea and eggs in the tree-house while the Commander in Blue stared into the foliage. At 6:45, old Elias came to him. —“Alootooka — chakar!” he cried. — Right, he thought skeptically, but the old man kept grabbing his arm and yelling, so he put on his shoes, took a camera, and ascended the red hill. As always, there was nothing but a group of Mujahideen practicing with their guns. They were astonishingly good marksmen. Maybe he had been too slow to see the plane.
They were to leave for the battle at ten. At twenty of eleven the whole camp was asleep. The Commander in Blue, that source of kebabs and consolation, lay wrapped in a cloth in his loft. No tours for the Young Man today, no viewing of the anti-aircraft gun, no U.N.I.C.E.F. tablets of condensed milk with sugar glaze to cheer him, no Poor Man for him to pester. At least some new guests were here, travelers carrying grenades to Herat, who distracted most of his flies. The sky was cloudless. In an hour and a half it would be time for the pathetic dusty rain.
The hill was not that red, actually, but more of an ocher color. It was a series of nondescript curves with local exceptions, such as the Russian and Bulgarian food tins, the spring, the stone walls, the shooting pits, the dead bombs. On the whole, the hill still interested him because he was careful not to look at it too much. He had a feeling that if he ever became bored with it, that is, really bored with it, there would be difficulties for him. Every day, Suleiman and Elias sat up there behind the dusty trees, watching for the Roos with their binoculars, and their Kalashnikovs gleamed in the sunshine, every curving groove of the banana magazines outlined in precious silver, and the wooden stocks gleamed and glowed, and the sun was white on the two men’s caps and noses and foreheads, and it seemed that the world ended just behind them because they sat at the very tip of the ridge, beyond which the mountains fell into a distant sun-dusted wrinkle of bluish-gray dunes far below like waves of infinity; in this sea the Roos trolled. And so Suleiman and Elias trolled for the Roos.
He lay in bed dodging the flies, whose angry whining voices reminded him to kill them. The songbirds emitted sounds lethargically from their wicker cages. Gholam Sayed sat reading his Qur’an in a semiliterate stammer. From the far side of the red hill came a gunshot — certainly another Mujahid practicing late. A breeze began to blow through the sour grapes, and the wooden airplane stirred. Soon it would be afternoon.
The man in the bed beside him stirred, pulled a canvas shirt away from his face, scratched his mustache and went back to sleep.
He thought about getting up quietly to ascend the red hill one last time, and continuing down into the desert where the cities were, and the tanks. What were the Roos doing right now? What would it be like when he met them? — Then again, suppose they came to meet him; suppose that right now something shiny were to poke itself over the crest of the red hilclass="underline" a gun barrel, a turret, a tank with a big red star on it …?
“Mister,” said Poor Man, striding over to him, “Russian soldiers coming this way. Five hundred tanks. Tomorrow we fight.”
“Oh,” the Young Man said.
“You ready? Your legs good now?”
“Very good.”
“We go early.”
The Young Man lay back in his charpoy. All around him, the men slept the afternoon away. He could not sleep. When the breeze picked up, he climbed aboard the wooden alootooka and soared over the red hill. He flew for a long time. Finally an interceptor beam got him, and the plane fell into splinters. They picked him up a few yards from the wreckage, ushered him into a black jeep, and brought him into the presence of the Commander in Red, who was the Commander in Blue’s counterpart, and had sworn to destroy him. Within a twinkle of a Slavic eye, he’d poured the Young Man a shot of vodka, or whatever the Russians drank in Afghanistan. (The General had said that many of the Roos were addicted to hashish.) Then it was time to talk business.
“Now, where exactly is this rebel base you came from?” the Commander in Red would say.
“If I tell you, you’ll destroy it.”
The Commander in Red shrugged. “Destroy it, pacify it, save it from feudalism,” he said, “make it safe, let us say, for us to visit.”
“And if I don’t tell you?”
“We’re both clever — no need to even answer that.”
“Well, you see,” the Young Man explained, “I have good friends there.”
“Friends? What did they ever do for you that we can’t? Why, I bet they made you walk all the way there!”
Now, this was in fact a sensitive point with the Young Man, for the Brigadier had promised him that he would be given a horse, and when he told that to Poor Man, gasping his way up the mountain, Poor Man gave him a piece of snow to slake his thirst, and then called the Brigadier a son of a dog. “He lies!” Poor Man continued; “he told me nothing! He is nothing; he is no leader; he is C.I.A.; he is K.G.B.!” So evidently it was all the Brigadier’s fault. Or his own. Or someone else’s. When he got more tired still and asked the Mujahideen how far it was, they said, “Tsalor kilometer!” and when he walked four kilometers and asked them how far it was, they said, “Pindzuh kilometer!” and when he walked those five more kilometers and asked them how far it was, they said two, then six, then one, then another, then seven… — Nonetheless, the Young Man was no Benedict Brezhnev. He hoped that he wasn’t, anyhow.