16

HOMEWORK

“We have a problem, Sergeant Paris,” Colonel Minotto said, as soon as I—sighing with relief—crossed the threshold of the command hut. June was suffocating. It was already 86°F at seven in the morning, and might reach 122°F by noon. The sun was an incandescent brass disk that burned in a cloudless sky for weeks, the heat turned our rifles red-hot, singed our hands, and cooked the soles of our boots. The glare seared our eyes, the dry air flayed our lips. It was hard to breathe, and agony to go outside in the daytime. Inside the sealed Lince we roasted like meat on the grill. During downtime I would gasp for air on my cot, or drag myself to the shower, where the refreshing water would make me shriek with delight, but it lasted only a second; after only a few steps toward my bunk I’d be drenched in sweat again. The tents and containers were cremation ovens, so hot that the day before, my thermometer exploded. The wind had kicked up—an obsessive, furious wind that the Afghanis call the sad-u-bist ruz, the 120-days wind. It had raged for five days and the weather report warned us that this was only a brief reprieve. It was sandstorm season in the Persian Gulf. The sad-u-bist ruz would calm down at night, but then it would pick up again, worse than before. It was like a tornado, but instead of forming a spiral turbine, it moved at ground level, like the hellish breath of a dragon. The earth had turned to dust; the sand inflamed our eyelids and scorched our lungs.

At that moment it was 115°F in the shade outside the command hut, and my fatigues were tattooed to my skin. I was swimming in sweat, I felt I was melting like ice cream. My skin, my hair, and my underwear were all boiling wet. None of my physical training had prepared me to handle this climate. I was afraid I would faint. And I worried about the kids on guard duty at the entrance to the base, in their helmets and bulletproof vests under that murderous sun. It must have been like wearing an iron breastplate in a furnace. The command hut had air-conditioning, but it couldn’t be turned on because it used too much electricity and shorted out the system. Three fingers of sand had collected beneath the rusty window. The colonel was suffering from the heat, too, and trickles of sweat ran down his cheeks. I remained at attention, wary. Minotto was forty-six, with a basketball player’s build, a pelican’s nose, and beady eyes that sank into his cheeks, as if they’d been chiseled absentmindedly in his face. From his grim expression, I expected to be bawled out.

The rapport among officers, NCOs, and troops had broken down. Once we’d passed D+120, in other words two thirds of our tour of duty, the platoon leaders limited sorties from the FOB as much as possible. Even though it brought bad luck, the soldiers were counting the days till they could go home. The officers were tired, and the slowness, the bureaucracy, the lack of coordination, the delays, and the unexpected difficulties, which they had faced boldly in the beginning, now discouraged them. Captain Paggiarin nearly wept with rage over the cancellation of a cooperative project—the construction of a bridge on the Farah River—that had cost the regiment a great deal of effort and the Italian government a great deal of money. It was whispered that Carlo Paggiarin of Feltre, the imperturbable Skinny Buddha whom no one, in his thirty-eight years of life, had ever seen get angry or lose his cool—until he came to Afghanistan—had broken his hand punching a wall. And sure enough, his right hand was bandaged. The soldiers’ discontent was even more physical. Fights broke out over nothing—for refusing to lend a cigarette, or cutting in line, or over a box of cookies that went missing. Some people’s nerves gave out. Others sought doctors’ excuses, the infirmary was always crowded. Complaints of crippling stomach pains and headaches that the doctors were convinced were made up. Nevertheless, orders came from headquarters to eliminate all dead weight, so as to avoid slander spreading about the competence of the health care. Private Rizzo—who faked an asthma attack every time he was supposed to leave the base—was sent home. A soldier from Cerberus platoon was repatriated for insubordination. But I didn’t want to go home. I felt I was just beginning to understand Afghanistan.

Still, I was scared of what the colonel wanted to tell me. One of the NCOs from the Ninth—I could never figure out who—had complained to the captain, accusing me of causing hierarchical confusion among the troops and their superiors. He insinuated that I was having a relationship with Corporal-Major Diego Jodice, which was—in addition to being regrettable—also prohibited. He therefore requested that Sergeant Paris be sanctioned with repatriation.

“What do you know about Karim Ghaznavi?” Minotto asked without any sort of preamble. “The interpreter?” I replied, relieved. No, it wasn’t about me. The captain hadn’t given any weight to the complaint. He had plenty of other things to think about besides gossip. The colonel nodded. Ghaznavi was a bright little man, with amber skin, refined manners, and sad eyes behind his round glasses; he wore tired leather moccasins, and too-short, Western-style pants that revealed a pair of droopy, coffee-colored socks. He was always sweaty, dusty, breathless. He slept in a hut at the entrance to the base with the other two interpreters, younger than him by at least thirty years, and much more resourceful. His every gesture displayed the exhausted, impoverished dignity of a man who has seen better days. When I was introduced to him, I instinctively called him Professor, and I could tell that he appreciated the nickname. I didn’t trust the Afghani officers, whose pasts, I imagined, included stoning women and cutting off the hands of thieves; I was suspicious of the Afghani police who collaborated with our regiment; at times I was afraid of the impetuous, arrogant, and careless ANA soldiers who roamed the base with guns loaded even though it was forbidden; I found the other interpreters greedy for money or gifts and superficial in their imitation of Western ways with their slicked-back hair and stylish sunglasses—or else unscrupulous and ready to betray us. I was always apprehensive when I went on patrol with them, afraid they’d sell us out to the insurgents by communicating our movements, our coordinates, or our itinerary, which I would choose with my squad leaders right before leaving the base. Whoever was planting IEDs always knew when and where the Alpini were going: my platoon alone had identified and defused five of them. Someone had to be informing them. But the sad Professor seemed trustworthy to me.

“For what it’s worth, sir, in my experience Ghaznavi is reliable,” I said warily. I didn’t want to go too far out on a limb because I gathered from the colonel’s grim expression that he, on the other hand, had a low opinion of the interpreter. I thought I knew Ghaznavi well. Ever since I arrived, I’d had the impression that he wanted to strike up a conversation with me, but wouldn’t let himself because I’m a woman. The pleasure of discovering that we shared a passion convinced him to overcome his reluctance. He’d surprised me one evening holding a book and said, rather ceremoniously, that Sergeant Paris must be a special person: soldiers and NCOs never read. “Maybe in Italy one has to be at least a lieutenant or a captain to love books. But that’s strange, because poetry is for everyone, and anyone can appreciate it. Poetry is like a flower growing in a field. It doesn’t ask permission to be there, it takes root wherever it pleases.” I’ve always loved reading to learn or to escape from the world, but I’d never read a book of verse: my indifference to poetry seemed shameful, so—to keep Ghazvani from realizing the misunderstanding—I slipped my volume on strategic analysis into my jacket pocket. “If I had met someone when I was young who knew how to talk to me about poetry with so much conviction, perhaps I wouldn’t be here,” I responded. Then I started to cough, because it was the time of the 120-days wind, and the blowing sand burned my throat. “Poets say that the wind is the voice of God,” Ghaznavi had commented. “He prefers to speak to mortals in a language that only sensitive people can understand.” “And do you believe them?” “Poets always speak the truth,” Ghaznavi assured me, “but my grandfather used to say that the summer wind is the army of angels that travels the country in order to inspect the battlefield before the Apocalypse, and my grandfather always spoke the truth, too.”

The Professor was from Herat. As an archaeology student he had worked with Italians on the restoration of Qal’a-i-Ikhtyaruddin, or the Citadel—sometime around 1976. It was a magnificent site, a fortress with eighteen towers over a hundred feet tall, covered in Kufic inscriptions, majolica, and frescoes. Almost totally destroyed. According to Ghaznavi, most of Afghanistan’s archaeological treasures had been lost, and the rest were at risk. No one understood art here. But Italians, then and now, always ask a lot of questions. And every time I saw a mound of stones I would ask him, “Are they ancient?” Ghaznavi had learned Italian from the archaeologists. He’d never been to Italy, though.

I sensed that the colonel wasn’t interested in the Professor’s archaeological experience, however, and I didn’t allow myself to express too forceful an opinion. I was only a sergeant, after all. “We’ve received a report from the Afghani police,” Minotto said, scribbling in a notebook. “It seems that Ghaznavi is selling drugs to someone on the base.”

“Drugs!” I exclaimed. “Impossible.” “That’s what I said, too.” The colonel sighed. “It has to be a lie, someone who wants revenge, or his job, you know he earns in a month what an Afghani working at a ministry earns in a year,” I added, and then repented immediately because a subordinate answers only what is asked, and doesn’t make inferences. “It’s a very detailed report,” Captain Paggiarin cut in. “It seems it’s been going on for a while. It mentions two female soldiers. Now, Paris, other than Lieutenant Ghigo, the only women at Sollum are you and Giani. The military police have already questioned Giani, discreetly because it’s a serious case, and the corporal swears she knows nothing about it. Besides, she handles supplies, she’s only been off the base once, it does not appear she has had any contact with Ghaznavi—whereas you, Sergeant, have often been seen conversing with him.”

It was true. But they were innocent chats. We either talked about books or theology. Ghaznavi told me he would have liked to be able to give me a volume by Rumi, the greatest classical poet of Persian literature. He wrote the Mathnawi, a fifty-thousand-verse poem in rhymed couplets, the Diwan, and a collection of maxims. Ghaznavi used to have an English version of Rumi’s Selected Poems, from the end of the nineteenth century, it had belonged to his grandfather. Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī was a poet but also a Sufi mystic, an enlightened man, it’s said he was crazy for God. “Do you believe in God, Sergeant Paris?” “Yes, yes,” I was quick to say, because during mission prep our instructors had coached us not to offend the Afghanis with our lack of faith. And to say that we were Christians, regardless of what we really believed. For them a life without God was inconceivable, and they wouldn’t trust anyone who did not fear him. The Koran teaches that God is closer to us than our own blood. “You really should read him,” Ghaznavi said. He believed that Sergeant Paris appreciated the beauty of light. Every thought that is not a memory of God is merely a whisper. And no one knew how to speak of God like Rumi, he had even written him a love song.

But Ghaznavi no longer had the book, unfortunately. During Afghanistan’s darkest years, he had burned all the books in his library, one by one. Out of fear. He wept as he poked the fire. All that beauty, flying away in the smoke and turning into a pile of cold ashes. He had learned a few bits of the Mathnawi by heart, and he would read it in his mind, eyes closed. As he told me these things, I wondered if I could accept a gift from him, and I told myself no. So it was just as well that he didn’t have that book anymore, or else I would have had to insult him by refusing. “Books are our truest friends,” Ghaznavi said. “They are your companions through good times and bad, they never desert you. You may abandon them, but they know how to forgive you.” And he was in need of companions because he had no one left. His brothers and nephews had emigrated to Canada. His wife and children were refugees in Iran, and he rarely saw them; it pained him. “Why don’t you have them come back?” I had asked naïvely. Ghaznavi looked at me with a sorrowful smile. And it took me weeks to understand what he couldn’t say: it was too dangerous, he’d been working for the foreigners for too long, by now a lot of people knew he was an interpreter, they would be hung.

“But even now,” Ghaznavi continued, ignoring my question, “it’s difficult to buy a book.” If any Alpini, when their tour of duty was over, wanted to leave him theirs, he would be grateful. “I’ll spread the word,” I had promised him, “I’ll collect everything I find.” And I had. Ghaznavi’s future library included Russo’s The Road to Oxiana, my history and travel books about Afghanistan, two novels from Barry Sadler’s series about the immortal soldier Casca Rufio Longinus that belonged to Spina, Lorenzo’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Giani’s Twilight books; other Panthers contributed The Lord of the Rings, three mysteries, and a book by Mauro Corona. Ghaznavi recited some verses of Rumi:

A narrow passageway runs between your heart and mine, my love.

I have found the door, and now I know what spring is.

My heart is a pool of clear water that reflects the moon.

Ghaznavi was quick to explain that the erotic language is a metaphor: the poet sings his love for God. I reflected that love, be it for a man, a woman, or God, called for the same words. I would have liked to have someone to say them to.

I tried to remember what else I talked to him about. Oh yes, I had asked him about the customs of the nomads, whose black goat-hair tents had appeared along the banks of the Farah River in the spring. Were they Taymanis? Or Kuchi? And about the local men’s gestures, which I couldn’t work out, and why they held hands, like lovers. About the kareze, the traditional canal irrigation system, which a cooperation project was supposed to restore. Operation Reawakening had already cleared two square kilometers for use. About the danger of the brown-and-white striped viper I’d spotted near the latrines. (Ghaznavi’s answer was comforting: hemotoxins, as deadly as a cobra, watch where you step, especially if you get up in the night, because it is an irritable nocturnal predator.) I’d asked him all sorts of things, and I’d also asked his forgiveness. “The wise man knows and asks,” he had replied with a smile, “the ignorant man doesn’t know and doesn’t ask.” But Ghaznavi never asked questions. He knew he couldn’t, and he didn’t want to step out of line, so he was saving them for a day when he might be able to get some answers. The accusation was insulting. But a river doesn’t become dirty just because a dog puts his paws in it. They could say what they wanted; the sad Professor was not a spy or an opium dealer, I refused to believe it.

“It’s ridiculous,” I protested stubbornly. “Just yesterday when we were searching the village of Tamyrabad, we confiscated six drums of gas from a truck driver suspected of supplying drug dealers.” “Paris, can you repeat the argument you made to me a month ago, in the mess tent?” Paggiarin interjected. “No, I don’t remember,” I said hastily. But I remembered all too well, unfortunately. I wanted to swallow my tongue. Fiery rivulets of sweat streamed down my spine.

“Sergeant Paris was struck by the quantity of poppies surrounding us,” Paggiarin reported, looking Minotto in the eye. “She asked me why the ISAF countries couldn’t legally purchase opium, to use in hospitals in the West. That way, the Afghani peasants would have an income and the Taliban would lose their principal source of revenue. That’s what she said. I didn’t report it because I hadn’t grasped its potential danger.”

“I know it may seem like a risky idea,” I said, trying to endure the radioactive gaze of Colonel Minotto. “But it’s not, actually. My father died of cancer, he suffered like a dog because the hospital wouldn’t give him any morphine. Not everyone understands the importance of pain relief therapy, and morphine is expensive, too expensive for many. It seems a tremendous waste to let all this opium enrich the drug dealers and the Mafia, to let it ruin the young, Italians included, when it could be doing good, helping Afghanis to live—and Europeans to die—with dignity.”

“It is not your job to come up with strategies to fight drug trafficking, Sergeant,” the colonel cut me off. “The best think tanks in the world are working to find a solution to this plague. Which, however, cannot be dealt with until the safety of this country is assured and its development set in motion. I am sure you will never propound such an argument again.” “Yes, sir,” I said.

“Have you ever noted any strange behavior in your men?” Minotto insisted, scrutinizing me. I knew what he was thinking. That he had discovered me when I was just a student at the NCO Academy, that he had believed in me. And had challenged me. The first time I met him, during training, he told me I should think of myself as a mosquito larva. If I settled in the first comfortable pond I found, I’d certainly be able to grow and to fly eventually, but I wouldn’t go far. If, on the other hand, I humbled myself and hid in the tire of a plane, if I survived the difficulties of the journey, I would travel the world. I accepted the challenge, and he taught me everything I knew; he had encouraged, supported, rewarded me. And I had disappointed him. I was sorry he suspected me. His esteem meant more to me than anything. At least up until that moment. “Nothing unusual,” I assured him. “It would be a matter of unprecedented and intolerable seriousness, and it would be my duty to advise my superiors immediately.” “Keep an eye on Ghaznavi. And report to the captain if there is any suspicious talk among your men,” Minotto concluded wearily. “Yes, sir,” I said. The next time I saw him was at the Celio military hospital. We never spoke about that conversation in the command hut at Bala Bayak again. But the fact that it occurred can never be erased.

As I walked in the sun toward my tent I was aware that I hadn’t been honest. I had not told the colonel that my men said suspicious things all the time. But what could Minotto have done to us? Set the military police loose on us? Asked the dog unit to intervene with their drug-sniffing canines? And what would TFS have said? He would have disgraced Ninth Company and the Alpini—for nothing. Besides, what else were the men supposed to talk about? We were literally living in the middle of a poppy field. In April their purple, white, pink, red, and yellow petals inflamed with color the valleys we crossed to get to the villages to be searched, cleared, and assisted. There the desert retreated. It was like a carpet of colored silk. We were surrounded by opium, growing out in the open. Something had to be done. The Americans had initially tried to use force. They wanted at first to bomb the poppies with napalm, though later they decided to simply uproot them. But good intentions do not always bring about good results—almost never, in fact. In reality, they condemned entire peasant families to abject poverty; the poppy harvest was their only means of subsistence, and when that was taken away, the Americans lost the peasants’ initial sympathy and ended up pushing them to the rebels’ side. So they changed their strategy completely: the allies promised incentives to peasants willing to grow saffron instead. They distributed bulbs and fertilizer; in fact, most of the convoys we escorted that winter carried tons of bulbs and fertilizer. The first harvest, the previous year, had been encouraging: a hectare of saffron crocuses yielded four times what a hectare of poppies did. But some of the peasants had their throats cut and their fields burned, and the changeover proceeded slowly—and in the meantime, the ISAF commanders, who were eager to conquer the hearts and minds of the Afghani people, preferred to resign themselves to tolerating the poppy fields to ensure if not benevolence, then at least neutrality. Whenever we left the FOB, we made our way through fields of flowering poppies.

If you cut the seed ball open with a knife, a milky white juice oozes out, which turns brown with contact with the air. It’s sticky, as thick as cream, and the smell goes to your head. The soldiers would talk about it when they thought the officers and NCOs couldn’t hear them. The peasants began the harvest in mid-April. Men, old people, and children moved through the fields, each with a knife in hand and a container hung around his neck. The soldiers could see, and they wondered how it worked. How that dark paste was transformed into opium and heroin. And where they refined the drug. But that one of them could think of buying it, or taking it, or smuggling it into Italy seemed impossible to me. We’d been living side by side for months, in such close quarters that we even knew how many times someone went to the shitter. Curcio had a brother who smoked heroin and had ended up in rehab, but you can’t suspect someone because of a relative. Nevertheless, I promised myself I would send him on patrol as soon as possible so I could inspect his kit.

Then I remembered that one torrid night in May, Lorenzo told me about the time he’d overdosed on opium oil. It was so hot I couldn’t fall asleep. Neither could he. We were sitting in the sand. I could see the whites of his eyes gleaming in the dark. We’d never been this close before. We were playing a sort of game of truth or dare, telling each other the very worst things we’d ever done. The moments we were most ashamed about, and which all the same we couldn’t truly regret. I had told him about Mrs. Ferraris. I was still in middle school and was hanging out with the gang from the new apartment buildings. When spring came, it was as if the cage I’d felt trapped in all year opened. Instead of going to school, I’d pedal my bike along the shore, my textbooks in the basket and the wind in my hair, go for swims at the Torre Flavia beach. I’d been bragging to my friends about how I’d been going swimming since the end of March, and the colder the water, the more the others respected me. I had chronic bronchitis, I could spit mucus ten feet, blowing it out my lips. I was so good at forging my mother’s signature on my excuses—Cinzia Colella, with little circles over the i’s—that not even she would have noticed the difference. On the days I skipped school, I’d wander around Ladispoli with a short, stocky kid with curly hair, whose nickname was Pitbull. He would tease the boys and make the girls fall in love with him. He made fun of the weak and timid kids in our group, calling them lice and making a show of humiliating them. Whoever caved became his groupie and slave, scorned by everyone else. I was the kind who never held back. To show I wasn’t afraid of anything, I’d cross the highway on foot, from one lane to the next, climbing over cement guardrails, indifferent to the tractor trailers that blinded me by flashing their high beams. I drank an entire liter of wine (I vomited so much afterward, it might be the reason I later stopped drinking). I stole T-shirts from a clothing store and bottles of whiskey from a roadside diner, in plain view of the security cameras and the watchmen. One morning in April, Pitbull asked me to get Vanessa’s motor scooter because he wanted to buy a cell phone. I like to think now that I didn’t realize the connection between those two things, but the fact is I did and I didn’t say anything.

I’d already been driving my sister’s scooter for a while, on the sly. Pitbull told me to circle around the market piazza, to maintain a good speed and not to brake. We went by the post office twice. “Keep going,” Pitbull said. I saw her first. She was crossing the street right on the white stripes, her blue leather purse dangling from her shoulder. She was slowed by age and the shopping bags she carried in both hands. As we pulled up alongside her, Pitbull shouted, “Gun it!” and so I did. I didn’t even turn around, I just kept my eyes on the road in front of me. But evidently he didn’t pull hard enough—lack of experience—or the leather strap was too resistant. The fact is, the old lady clung to her purse for a few feet and then took a disastrous fall, face-first, tomatoes, zucchini, and peppers rolling across the asphalt. I slalomed among the cars and fled along the promenade while passersby shouted and rushed to help the unfortunate woman. In the rearview mirror I could see a spot of red blood on the white crossing stripes.

After we rounded a turn, Pitbull tossed the purse and had me drop him at his brother’s garage. He said he was sorry; the old lady was dressed well and seemed rich, but she had only fifty thousand lire in her wallet. He handed me two ten-thousand-lira bills. I told him I didn’t want them. I hadn’t done it for the money. He kissed me on the mouth and I bit his lip. I didn’t do it for him, either. I revved the engine and took off. The beach clubs were closed, so I hid between the beach huts. I was afraid these were my last hours of freedom. I was afraid of going to jail. Of all the buildings rising up in the distance, the jail was the one that always terrified me. I’d look the other way when we drove by. A strange thought came to me as I sat there, teeth chattering from cold and shock. That the incident wasn’t really what it seemed. I hadn’t dragged to the ground, injured, and maybe even killed an old lady: it had been me—the other Manuela, the real Manuela, the one still waiting to be born. I’d killed her. They’d come for me now, I’d be tried and locked up in that frightening building, and the warrior Manuela would never exist. I wept, huddled in a damp changing room that smelled of mold and salt. But time passed and no one came. So I calmed down. Maybe they wouldn’t find me. They hadn’t recognized me. Maybe I could still salvage my dream. I abandoned the motor scooter at the dump and set it on fire.

When the police came looking for the owner of the blue Free motor scooter, my sister was shocked. She hadn’t ridden her scooter that day, she’d gone to school with her boyfriend, and he picked her up at eight. But the passersby had gotten the license plate, and it was hers. The police wanted to see it. Vanessa went down to the street with them, not worried in the least. It was a misunderstanding, it would all be cleared up. But her Free wasn’t parked downstairs. They searched for it all along the promenade, in case she’d forgotten exactly where she’d parked it. But they couldn’t find it. It had been stolen. “What happened?” Vanessa inquired, suspicious now. “Mrs. Ferraris got her purse snatched, she fell and hit her head. It was your motor scooter, and now it’s a real mess, because you didn’t report it as stolen,” the officer explained. “But what does it have to do with me?” Vanessa protested. “I was at school, ask my prof, she even quizzed me in class.”

“Is she dead?” my mother got right to the point. Knowing how insurance companies work, she was afraid she’d have to pay damages. And she didn’t have any money, her account was always in the red. She avoided looking at me, perched on the edge of the couch pretending to watch the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful. At the time I was wild about Stephanie Forrester. My mother had guessed what had happened, she had a sixth sense about the trouble I got into. But she also had a powerful sense of clan, and she never would have turned her daughter in. My mother’s concept of justice was very malleable. Mrs. Ferraris. The name sizzled in my head. I knew her; she was the principal of my elementary school. A kind old lady, always smiling. I adored her as a child. She’d give you candy if you behaved. I would have liked her to be my grandmother. My real grandmother—Leda Colella, my mother’s mother—would smack me on the head so hard I was always afraid she’d knocked the sense out of me. “She broke her nose,” the officer said. My mother gave a sigh of relief and practically kicked them out of the house, accusing them of wasting her time. “It was you,” Vanessa hissed when we were alone. “You’re a devil, Manuela, you’re out of your mind. I’m not going to start spying on you, but you have to buy me a new motor scooter.” I denied it. I swore falsely on my mother’s life, my sister’s, even my own.

“I couldn’t admit I helped Pitbull steal Mrs. Ferraris’s purse. It was too stupid a thing to do for the person I thought I was. I never fessed up. You’re the first person I’m telling this to. I ran into Mrs. Ferraris at the market in July. She had a sort of rubber mask on her nose. I was still afraid she would recognize me, so I stopped saying hello to her.

“When exams were over, I enrolled in tourism school and stopped hanging out with my friends from the new apartment buildings. I would read war comics, watch soap operas on TV, listen to my sister’s romantic confessions while I helped henna her hair, but I was never able to right myself and turn my mistake into an opportunity, like my grandfather recommended. I lost track of Pitbull, but I acted just like him. I enjoyed tormenting the new girls at school, whom I considered weak and timid. I would worm money out of them; I’d force them to pay me to leave them alone, to write my papers for me, do my homework. The superintendent called me into her office and informed me that my bullying would no longer be tolerated. I didn’t deny it that time, in fact I behaved as if I didn’t care at all. The superintendent felt threatened. She was afraid I would slit her tires with a box cutter, and from then on she would park two blocks away from school. I was solitary, arrogant. I was about to lose myself, Lorenzo. But I didn’t. If I hadn’t broken Mrs. Ferraris’s nose when I was thirteen, I might not be who I am today.”

“I was fifteen,” Lorenzo whispered, “I’ll never forget. We smoked this enormous pipe for half an hour—opium oil, a clear, harmless-looking liquid, it didn’t seem to do anything. Then all of a sudden I was flat on the floor. It was the most awful and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to me. I was dead for half an hour. Cold, frozen, completely numb. My friends wanted to dump me at the emergency room and disappear. I could hear them talking, I was totally conscious, in fact, my mind was a thousand times more expansive than before. I could hear and see everything. I could make out ants’ footsteps, hear the electric current crackling in the wires, and see what my friends were doing behind my back. But I couldn’t move. It was like I was suspended over my body, hovering a few feet above it, weightless. I moved through the air, drifting; I climbed the walls like a shadow, floated beneath the lamp like a cloud of smoke. Every barrier between my body, my mind, and the world had crumbled. I was both myself and everything. It was a beautiful feeling, Manuela, one of complete freedom. I would do anything to get it back, but I’ve never been able to. That’s when I understood what death is. Maybe that’s how it’ll be when we’re dead.”

But so what, what did it mean? He smoked opium when he was fifteen. Adolescence is a time of experimentation, challenges, mistakes. I’d changed, maybe he had, too. I didn’t report him. I couldn’t and didn’t want to believe that Nail was involved in something like that. In spite of everything, he was a good soldier. And when he had to, he, too, picked up his rifle and fired.

It could have been Schirru, though, an amiable slacker who had been counting the days till his departure ever since he arrived, and once I heard him theorize about the supremacy of black Afghan. Hashish, in other words. I could inspect his gear, maybe announce a bug extermination or a hygiene check as an excuse. But then I’d have to get the clinic involved. And explain everything to the military police, and that didn’t seem right. The other Alpini considered him a dead dog, and hoped they wouldn’t end up in the same squad as him. Even Venier shunned him. They had ostracized him, which already said it all.

The next day when Ghaznavi hurried to the meeting with the Ghor province chief of police, who had come to Sollum for a briefing at headquarters, I didn’t let him out of my sight for an instant. Ghaznavi didn’t even deign to look at the soldiers. He passed them, walking beside Captain Paggiarin, translating in a low voice for the police chief. But the soldiers—all of them—kept their eyes glued on him. I had the feeling they shared some secret, and I shuddered. My eyes sought out Lorenzo. My little brother, my epigone. He was in the piazza, tinkering with a flooded Lince motor. Sand had corroded the gears. I read no malice in those clear eyes of his. Just curiosity. As if he merely wanted to understand what that bright, agitated little man was mumbling, his eyes fixed on his dusty shoes.

Forgive me if I doubted you, Nail. If you are right, if death is like ODing on opium, you’re floating outside your body somewhere right now, maybe you’re close by, drifting like smoke, weightless, painless—free.

*   *   *

A few days after my conversation with Colonel Minotto, Ghaznavi, on his way from the infirmary, surprised me as I sat at the door to the hut, staring intently at the stars. Millions of them, emerging from the immenseness, nameless constellations in a darkness so complete, so pure, it was like a swath of velvet studded with incandescent embers. The Milky Way looked like the frothy wake of a ship. I’d always thought that only the sun and the moon lit up the sky. But that’s not true. In Afghanistan even the stars give off light, they can cast shadows. There were times, when all was quiet, not even a motor mumbling along the distant road, that the silence was so thick I could hear the sand rustle and the dunes crumble. Ghaznavi hesitated a second, then asked me if I knew what the Milky Way was. “It’s our galaxy, it’s where we are,” I answered coldly. “To us,” Ghaznavi smiled, “it’s the stardust that Mohammed’s horse Buraq kicked up when he crossed the sky on his way to Paradise.” I was afraid of being spied on, of someone noticing that we were talking, so I ignored him. Ghaznavi moved on, disappointed. His worn-out moccasins sank silently into the sand.

At dawn I was in the watchtower, binoculars aimed at the mountain that overlooked the base. An intelligence report had indicated suspicious movement up there. Nearby, Ghaznavi was on his knees praying, his forehead pressed to his dusty rug. From a distance came the call of the muezzin, carried on the wind. The first light of day sketched the empty contours of the hills, and I had the feeling that this was the instant of creation, that the world was yet to be born. Sand and sky, peaks and valleys all seemed to be awaiting something. An unspoken, infinite potential. As if all was yet to begin. That was freedom.

When I came down from the tower, I ran into Ghaznavi putting on his shoes and rolling up his rug. I couldn’t avoid him. “Perhaps you will be able to achieve what it is you desire,” he said with a smile. “This is what I wish for you. Sergeant Paris appreciates the voice of beauty, even though she doesn’t want anyone to know. But it is nothing to be ashamed of, it is a gift to be able to comprehend the poetry of the world. And Sergeant Paris has received that gift, even though she hasn’t realized it yet. But it is due neither to her merit nor to her fault. Unless something has been decided since the beginning of time, it cannot occur. The essential things are determined by destiny. To deny this is to limit the universe. Destiny can turn stones into water, and stars into dust.”

I waved my hand in greeting and quickened my step. I didn’t tell him that the beauty of his country had swallowed me up, or that I thought I now knew how to listen to the voice of the sand, the sky, and the wind, nor did I ask him what he meant. I never spoke to him again. It grieves me now, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

*   *   *

Karim Ghaznavi—I learned in an article that Stefano sent me—was the last to be identified, because no relative had come forward to claim his remains. Which is why he was originally counted among the anonymous civilian victims. Besides, Ghaznavi probably wasn’t even his real name. To protect themselves and their families, the interpreters chose new names, known only to us inside the base. Not even their relatives always knew what they did. Only one extreme left-wing newspaper spoke of Ghaznavi. The other papers dedicated not a single line to him. Their accounts of Afghanistan were abstract narratives, situated in a country without people; a tragedy performed only by stock characters: savage Taliban fighters, oppressed and abused women, shahid—incorrectly called kamikaze—devoted to martyrdom, and nameless victims of bombings and other attacks. They were the incarnation of principles attributed to them by those who wrote about them, or who watched the tragedy from the audience—not actual individuals. They were a mass, they were numbers—and no one feels sorry for numbers. If anything, those numbers, which were constantly increasing—the count of civilian victims had tripled in recent years—were a source of embarrassment and horror.

The person who wrote the article that mentioned Ghaznavi expressed a harsh, critical judgment of the mission and reflected bitterly on the fate of the interpreter and—more generally—the Afghani people. These reflections hurt and offended me, even though I shared them to a certain extent. But the author transformed Ghaznavi into an anonymous symbol of the massacre: he’d never seen him. Only I could have written about that man, who was an individual with a past and a life story, with good qualities and bad, memories and dreams, like Lorenzo, like Diego, like Nicola Russo. But no one asked me, and after that meeting with Colonel Minotto, I ripped the pages where I’d written about him out of my diary and burned them, fearing that someone might read them and blame me for being kind to a man accused of a crime. I’m sure Ghaznavi would have forgiven me, because he, too, had known the bitterness of reducing to ashes words that were essential to him.

Now the Professor exists only in a few scattered images in my head. The last one catches him a few seconds before the end. On June 8, Ghaznavi was working for Ninth Company headquarters, as always. Impeccable, sweaty, tired, with his dusty yellow moccasins and sad eyes. At the moment of the explosion he was standing next to First Lieutenant Russo, translating for him words that could have been essential or inconsequential, which now no one will ever know.