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The toy airplane
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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.
HELPLESSNESS [8]
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.
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?
HELPLESSNESS [9]
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.
HELPLESSNESS [10]
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 RED HILL [7]
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 hill: 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.
During the evening meal, which he ate with the Commander in Blue, the red hill turned slowly orange, like a photo of the surface of Mars.
No, it was really impossible to imagine what it was like in Afghanistan.
The red hill [8]
Then they were going into battle, over the red hill. But it turned out that there was actually not one red hill but a whole series of them, and they went over them for hours without seeing a Roos. Once they had to be very quiet, and tiptoe along the base of a dour red bluff, in a place where the river echoed. There were supposed to be enemy tanks on the other side. But they never heard a sound, except for a faint hum, which was either the Young Man’s imagination or the change in altitude. Going over red hill and red hill with the guerrillas, he looked up at the sky, but never saw a helicopter or even a cloud. Maybe they weren’t in Afghanistan after all. Maybe the Roos had long since died of some disease, like Wells’s Martians, and the Mujahideen were having a great time swaggering around their wasteland and firing Chinese candles at each other.
Then he saw his first alootooka.
They walked along down the river. After a while, they saw pomegranates and ripe red figs all around, and grapes so good that the village dogs stood up on their hind legs to eat them. Near the town of ——, where the Soviet garrison was, they stopped under the trees, unrolled their mats, and prayed beside their machine guns, each in his time. They kept asking the Young Man how he was. Elias and Suleiman embraced him. Poor Man looked for a long time through binoculars at an ancient clay fort in which nothing moved. They all sat there behind the trees, waiting for the hot daylight to go away. — “Roos, ” whispered Suleiman, pointing over the ridge. Elias was praying again on his blanket, his head touching the stock of his Kalashnikov, and the grenade launcher also prayed like a mantis, a single grenade pointing upwards toward the sky, and the other fighters sat patiently. — Now at last the country began to darken, and the men to tense themselves for what was about to come. They prayed again. Poor Man led them into the village, stepping only on the boundary stones of the fields so as not to damage the crop. The village dreamed under wide fig trees. The houses were made of clay. The Mujahideen bowed to the village malik, and he brought them fermented milk and beans cooked in oil. Then they sat there waiting. Presently it was completely dark, and through the sky passed a silent, eerie swarm of winking lights. Planes. They waited. In front of them rose a red hill (now a gentle black solidity in the moonlight). They walked along the edges of the rice fields, trying not to damage the crops. Crickets chirred around them.
POOR MAN’S STATEMENT (continued)
“Why are you fighting? ”
“I am not fighting for myself; I am not fighting for Afghanistan; I am fighting only for the God.”
THE RED HILL [9]
Ahead of them, at the summit of the red hill, there was a flash. Poor Man had begun to fire. The boy who carried the rocket launcher ran up to Poor Man, smiling happily. A Soviet shell exploded loudly somewhere near them. The Young Man felt cold. He looked around him. All his companions were happy. Another shell landed, flinging stones. While the boy prepared the rocket launcher, the other Mujahideen began to fire. They shot beyond themselves like the snap of the slide projector in darkness as he advanced the carousel, letting image after image tumble down into the abyss of light (more than ten seconds’ exposure is said to put the transparency at risk of fading, and now it has been eleven years!), and the Mujahideen fired in this long moment that was the reason that I came; I don’t want or need to say much more about it; they were fighting and I was not; they were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death, no fear in them as I honestly believe; they had crossed their river so long ago that I could not really comprehend them as anything except heroes shining like Erica on the far side of the water; they were over the red hill and nothing else mattered.