The foreign linguists

The children understood his Pushtu the best, perhaps because they had not adopted one accent forever. It seemed that a man from one village might have trouble understanding a man from a village twenty miles away. The General’s son Zahid once told the Young Man that his family missed one word in five of the Brigadier’s speech. It must have been even more difficult to understand the Young Man, who had gotten his Pushtu only out of an old book.^* —The children were willing to make an effort with the Young Man because he was a novelty momentarily eclipsing their other recreations, which consisted (I am of course speaking of the male children, for I never saw the other kind doing anything but hard work) of spitting, gathering apricots, listening to the men talk beneath the trees, and punching each other. The men watched and laughed. The more impudent the boys were, the more the men liked it. The boys would gather around the circle of men at the end of the afternoon and begin spitting. They would spit closer and closer to the men’s feet. Finally they would just miss someone’s feet, and the men would scold them sternly. The one who had been scolded would be punched by the others. The men deigned to chuckle.

The four Mujahids with the Young Man believed that if he couldn’t understand something they’d said, all they had to do was yell it loud enough. When that didn’t work, they were angry and dismayed. One of them, Muhammad, could read. In Peshawar the Young Man had bought an English-Pushto dictionary. When they had something to communicate to him that he could not understand, Muhammad scanned the pages until he found a very rough equivalent for what he wanted to say (a procedure which, since the words were arranged entirely according to their counterparts in the Young Man’s alphabet, took Muhammad a long time), and put his finger on it. The Young Man, who could not read Pushto, would say the corresponding English word aloud, as if Muhammad could somehow tell him whether this was the one right word out of millions; and Muhammad always nodded. — They thought he wasn’t happy. After flipping through the English-Pushto kitab for a quarter of an hour, Muhammad pointed to a word at last. — “Tragic, ” the Young Man interpreted aloud. — Muhammad smiled at him like a psychiatrist. “ Tuh [you] tragic, ” he said sympathetically. “Do you understand my speak, Mr. William? ” —“Na, ” dissented the Young Man heartily. “Kushkal, kushkal.” —Happy, happy. Of course he would be even more kushkal if they ever crossed the border, if they came back alive, if his rehydration salts held out, which they wouldn’t — oh, he was an unhappy, even tragic Young Man, he was! They had been here for days, waiting for Poor Man, the guerrilla leader, to show up with the ammunition.^†

One afternoon the Young Man wanted to go out and take pictures of the mountains. They told him he couldn’t do that. Muhammad borrowed his English-Pushto kitab again and went off into a corner with a new arrival who knew a little English. Finally, beaming, they brought him back a note:

Not — the chawkar

becose this pipol is jahil

you is DAY Doyuo my

spieke M.R. — Uuiliam—

becose this pipaeli is not

have ajoucatan—

because this pipole is impolite

he spieke cam say topak.

In other words, said the Young Man to himself, interpreting the text like the student of comparative literature that he was, “Not the hills, because this people is ignorant. You is DIE. Do you understand my speak, Mr. William? Because this people is not have education; because this people is impolite; they say that your camera is a gun.” —Well, it was certainly nothing to DIE over, so he stayed indoors. It was all getting on his nerves.

The two men of the house kept picking up their rifles every day, taking them outside into the town and returning half an hour later with expressions of deep contentment. The Young Man looked up the word for “hunt” and asked Muhammad if that was what they were doing. — Muhammad laughed, pointed at the Young Man, and said, “Jahil.” —Ignorant. — Then he pointed at the malik and his gun. He perused the English-Pushto kitab and pointed to a word. — “Hostile, ” the Young Man read.

(Surely they didn’t kill people for half an hour every afternoon? He never found out what they did. Maybe it was like one of those American Civil War parades.)