We discussed the merits of horse meat.
The sultan said, “My father said horse meat was good to eat. Yes, indeed. But it’s very heating.” The sultan placed his hands on his shirt and found his paunch and tugged it. “You can’t eat too much of it. It’s too heating.”
“Have you ever eaten horse meat, Your Highness?”
“No, never. But the syces eat it all the time.”
The match began with great vigor. The opposing team galloped up to the sultan’s goal with their sticks flailing.
The sultan said, “Was that a goal?”
“No, Your Highness,” said the woman, “but very nearly.”
“Very nearly, yes! I saw that,” said the sultan.
“Missed by a foot, Your Highness.”
“Missed by a foot, yes!”
After that chukka, I asked the sultan what the Malay name of the opposing team meant in English.
The sultan shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ll have to ask Zayid. It’s Malay, you see. I don’t speak it terribly well.”
The Hotel in No-Man’s-Land
“CUSTOMS OVER THERE,” SAID THE MOTIONING AFGHAN. But the Customs Office was closed for the night. We could not go back to the Iranian frontier at Tayebad, we could not proceed into Herat. So we remained on a strip of earth, neither Afghanistan nor Iran. It was the sort of bedraggled oasis that features in Foreign Legion films: a few square stucco buildings, several parched trees, a dusty road. It was getting dark. I said, “What do we do now?”
“There’s the No-Man’s-Land Hotel,” said a tall hippie, with pajamas and bangles. His name was Lopez. “I stayed there once before. With a chick. The manager turned me on.”
In fact the hotel was nameless, nor did it deserve a name. It was the only hotel in the place. The manager saw us and screamed, “Restaurant!” He herded us into a candlelit room with a long table on which there was a small dish of salt and a fork with twisted tines. The manager’s name was Abdul; he was clearly hysterical, suffering the effects of his Ramadan fasting. He began to argue with Lopez, who called him “a scumbag.”
There was no electricity in this hotel; there was only enough water for one cup of tea apiece. There was no toilet, there was no place to wash — neither was there any water. There was no food, and there seemed to be a shortage of candles. Bobby and Lopez grumbled about this, but then became frightfully happy when Abdul told them their beds would cost thirty-five cents each.
I had bought an egg in Tayebad, but it had smashed in my jacket pocket, leaked into the material, and hardened in a stiff stain. I had drunk half my gin on the Night Mail to Meshed; I finished the bottle over a game of Hearts with Lopez, Bobby, and a tribesman who was similarly stranded at the hotel.
As we were playing cards (and the chiefs played in an unnecessarily cutthroat fashion), Abdul wandered in and said, “Nice, clean. But no light. No water for wash. No water for tea.”
“Turn us on, then,” said Lopez. “Hubble-bubble.”
“Hash,” said Bobby.
Abdul became friendly. He had eaten: his hysteria had passed. He got a piece of hashish, like a small mudpie, and presented it to Lopez, who burned a bit of it and sniffed the smoke.
“This is shit,” said Lopez. “Third-quality.” He prepared a cigarette. “In Europe, sure, this is good shit. But you don’t come all the way to Afghanistan to smoke third-quality shit like this.”
“The first time I came here, in ’68,” said Bobby, “the passport officer said, ‘You want nice hash?’ I thought it was the biggest put-on I’d ever heard. I mean, a passport officer! I said, ‘No, no — it gives me big headache.’ ‘You no want hash?’ he says. I told him no. He looks at me and shakes his head: ‘So why you come to Afghanistan?’ ”
“Far out,” said Lopez.
“So I let him turn me on.”
“It’s a groovy country,” said Lopez. “They’re all crazy here.” He looked at me. “You digging it?”
“Up to a point,” I said.
“You freaking out?” Bobby sucked on the hashish cigarette and passed it to me. I took a puff and gulped it and felt a light twanging on the nerves behind my eyes.
“He is, look. I saw him on the train to Meshed,” said Lopez. “His head was together, but I think he’s loose now.”
Lopez laughed at the egg stain on my pocket. The jacket was dirty, my shirt was dirty, and so were my hands; there was a film of dust on my face.
“He’s loose,” said Bobby.
“He’s liquefying,” said Lopez. “It’s a goofy place.”
“I could hang out here,” said Bobby.
“I could too, but they won’t let me,” said Lopez. “That scumbag passport shit only gave me eight days. He didn’t like my passport — I admit it’s shitty. I got olive oil on it in Greece. I know what I should do — really goop it up with more olive oil and get another one.”
“Yeah,” said Bobby. He smoked the last of the joint and made another.
With the third joint the conversation moved quickly to a discussion of time, reality, and the spiritual refuge ashrams provided. Both Lopez and Bobby had spent long periods in ashrams; once, as long as six months.
“Meditating?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, meditating and also hanging out.”
“We were waiting for this chick to come back from the States.”
Lopez was thirty-one. After graduation from a Brooklyn high school, he got a job as a salesman in a plastic firm. “Not really a salesman, I mean, I was the boss’s right-hand man. I pick up a phone and say, ‘Danny’s out of town,’ I pick up another one and say, ‘Danny’ll meet you at three-thirty.’ That kind of job, you know?” He was earning a good salary; he had his own apartment, he was engaged to be married. Then one day he had a revelation: “I’m on my way to work. I get off the bus and I’m standing in front of the office. I get these flashes, a real anxiety trip: doing a job I hate, engaged to a plastic chick, all the traffic’s pounding. Jesus. So I go to Hollywood. It was okay. Then I went to Mexico. Five years I was in Mexico. That’s where I got the name Lopez. My name ain’t Lopez, it’s Morris. Mexico was good, then it turned me off. I went to Florida, Portugal, Morocco. One day I’m in Morocco. I meet a guy. He says, ‘Katmandu is where it’s happening.’ So I take my things, my chick, and we start going. There was no train in those days. Twelve days it took me to get to Erzurum. I was sick. It was muddy and cold, and snow — snow in Turkey! I nearly died in Erzurum, and then again in Teheran. But I knew a guy. Anyway, I made it.”
I asked him to try to imagine what he would be doing at the age of sixty.
“So I’m sixty, so what? I see myself, sure, I’m sitting right here — right here — and probably rolling a joint.” Which seemed a rash prophecy, since we were in the No-Man’s-Land Hotel, in a candlelit room, without either food or water.
Somewhere at the front of the hotel a telephone rang.
“If it’s for me,” Lopez shouted, but he had already begun to cackle, “if it’s for me, I’m not here!”
The Pathan Camp
THE CENTER OF KABUL IS NOT THE BAZAAR, BUT THE RIVER. It is black and seems bottomless, but it is only one foot deep. Some people drink from it, others shit beside it or do their washing in it. Bathers can be seen soaping themselves not far from where two buses have been driven into it to be washed. Garbage, sewage, and dirt go in; drinking water comes out. The Afghans don’t mind dying this way; it’s no trouble. Near the bus depot on the south bank bearded Afghans crouch at the side of a cart, three abreast, their faces against metal binoculars. This is a peep show. For about a penny they watch 8mm movies of Indian dancers.