BUDABASH GOT FREE sometime in the night.
I didn’t know how. Just that he did and that we needed to go and find him. Me and Gul and Zia and Dawoud out on the roads of Logar, together, for the first time. This all happened only a few weeks into my trip, my family’s homecoming, back when it only cost a G to fly across the ocean, from Sac to SF to Taipei to Bangkok to Karachi to Peshawar all the way up to Logar, where, at the time, though the American war wasn’t dead, it was dozing a bit, like in a coma, or like it was still reeling off a contact high from that recently booming Afghan H or opium or kush, leaving the soldiers and the Ts and the bandits and the robots almost harmless, so that all that mattered then for a musafir from America was how he was going to go about killing another hot summer day.
Gulbuddin said it’d be a four-man operation.
He said it in Pakhto because my Farsi was shit.
“More than four,” he told me and Zia and Dawoud as we sat between the chicken coop and the kamoot, “and we’ll look like a mob, but any less and we might get jumped or robbed.”
He sat at the head of our circle twirling one end of the thick black mustache his older sisters were always trying to tear from his lip because it made him look too much like the beautiful Turkish gangsters from their soap operas.
Gul was my little uncle. About fourteen. The oldest of our bunch.
“What about four and a half?” I asked, thinking about my brother.
“What did I just say, Marwand?”
“More than four is a mob,” Dawoud answered.
“But an extra half might come useful,” I said.
“Not the half you’re talking about,” Dawoud said, squatting at the farthest edge of our circle, taking up too much space.
Dawoud was my other little uncle. Around twelve. Same age as me.
“Listen, fellas,” I went on. “Five is a good number. Five pillars. Five prayers. Five players on a basketball team.”
“Only five?” Zia asked.
“Well, is it four and a half or five?” Dawoud asked.
“Football is better,” Zia said. “In football everyone gets to play.”
“What do you think?” I looked to Zia, my cousin, but he just shrugged his skinny shoulders and pointed the barrels of his fingers at Gulbuddin. “Chik, chik,” Zia said, “pow, pow,” and pulled his triggers twice.
Gulbuddin nodded at Zia and pressed down on the air with his hands. His eyes, green like duck shit, shifted from his hands, to the gate, to the courtyard, where the rest of the family still slept. We quieted down.
“We’ll put it to a vote,” he said. “Raise your hand if you want Gwora to come along.”
Only my busted hand went up into that morning chill.
“Well, fuck,” I muttered, in English, and relented to the will of the jirga.
Wallah, the first time I saw big Budabash standing three-legged beneath his apple tree, pissing on the bark he was chained to, I thought he was the no-name mutt I met and tortured and loved the first summer I came back to Logar.
My memories of this dog, who I secretly named Mr. Kareem, haunted me all throughout grade school, since it was in third grade, when I learned how to read, that my American teachers also taught me dogs were supposed to be hugged and petted and neutered, but never beaten or tortured.
So on the afternoon of my second homecoming I arrived in Logar eager to see Mr. Kareem, even though I was already carsick, pockmarked, jet-lagged, and sweating floods in a black kameez and partug, two sizes too small, which my moor made me wear just before we crossed the border. When we entered my moor’s compound for the first time in six years, a flood of sparkling dresses and scarves and vests swallowed me up as I stepped through. I had so much Farsi hurled at me all at once; I didn’t know what to do with it.
They asked me if I was hungry, if I was sad, if I was tired, if I was thirsty, if I was happy, if I was scared, constipated, lonely, sick, confused, nauseous, stupid, smart, always this dark, always this cute, always this skinny, always this hairy, this tall, this quiet, nervous, shy, lost.
I said yes to every single question.
They asked me what I wanted more than anything.
“I want to go and see Mr. Kareem,” I said.
None of them knew what I was talking about.
Sag, I said in Farsi, I want to see the dog.
They blew up with laughter, cursed me and my moor, and dragged me out of the room.
In the orchard, as soon as I saw Budabash pissing on his apple tree, I broke off from my family and rushed his circle with nothing but sabr in my heart and love leaking out my fingertips (wallah!), and it was only after he crouched and lunged and swallowed forever the very tip of my finger, that I saw in his eyes, in the heart of the eyeball, that Budabash, the new dog of the orchard, the province, the millennium, was not a dog at all, but something more like a mutant.
Just outside the big blue gate, the road we walked curved upward into a bend that led into a maze of interconnected clay compounds. If you didn’t know your way, Gul explained, or if you didn’t have a guide, it was easy to get lost. After Gul led us out of the maze, we found ourselves on the main road. It was made of a hard, dark clay. Rows of chinar and a thin stream ran along its edges. In the fields near the road, farmers tended to their crop. “That’s where Budabash went,” Gul said, pointing at nothing in particular, pointing, it seemed, at the whole country. Then he started down the road.
While Dawoud paced ahead, sniffing for Budabash’s scent, Gul stopped from time to time to ask a farmer if they’d seen a big black dog roaming about.
Zia hung back with me. He held my good hand and pointed out the sights.
“That’s Haji Ahmad’s,” he said, pointing to an orchard, “and those fields belong to Mullah Imran. And that trench there is where little Zabi stepped on an old mine. Lost his foot.”
“In the name of God, Zia,” Gul called back, and slowed down and wrapped his fingers around my right wrist, just above the gauze covering my finger and palm. “You got everything wrong. The orchard belongs to Mullah Imran’s dad, who’s still living, so Imran owns nothing yet, and the fields are Haji Ahmad’s, and little Nabi got his foot run over by an army truck, not little Zabi. Little Zabi is fine. We played cricket with him a month ago.”
“We did?” Zia asked.
“Yes, bachem, go ask Dawoud.”
Dawoud walked ahead by himself. No one liked to hold his hands because of his warts, so he always had them busy. I tried to do the same thing, but the fellas were persistent. “This is what friends do here,” Gul kept trying to explain.
“Zabi still got both feet,” Dawoud shouted back.
“See,” Gul said, and pointed to Zia, “all this guy knows are hadiths. You listen to me, Marwand. I’ll tell you what’s what.”
And he did. He told me where we were and where we were going. He told me the names of the roads and where they would lead. He told me who died where and whose grave and flag and stick and stone belonged to who, and he told me the names of the trees and the fields and the plots of land. And as he held my hand, he pointed me one way and could tell me what way that way was and he could point the other and tell me what way that way was too.
But, still, he couldn’t tell me—for sure, at least—where Budabash went or why he ran away in the first place, though I had an idea.
Ah, but before I forget, here are a few more things I saw that day:
A cobra
Six kids, ages ranging from four to eleven, walking toward that cobra
A cobra, its skin stripped, its flesh bared, pelted to death by six kids
Laborers in the fields covered in mud
Laborers in the orchards covered in mud
Laborers, covered in mud, building a wall out of the mud that covered them
A little girl, about nine, walking with her donkey
The fields
My cousin or uncle (both?) Babrak, who stank of hash and couldn’t recall my name
Two strays that looked like what Budabash would’ve if he’d actually been a dog
Two American helicopters
Four kids playing cards in the corner of a field, betting walnuts and marbles
Four kids running from the stones we threw
Fifty-two cards left behind in the corner of a field
A man with a gun who might have been a T
One drone (I think)
1,226 white lilies
The wheat shaking in the wind
Ten million pounds of clay
One true God
No Budabash
A few hours into the search and we still had no real lead. Zia prayed his Dhuhr prayer without any sign from God. Gul interrogated almost everyone he saw, but heard nothing from a soul. And though Dawoud couldn’t sniff out Budabash, his nose did eventually latch on to the unmistakable scent of cheap hair gel, butchered meat, and unrequited love.
At Dawoud’s signal—and Gul’s confirmation—we leaped behind some chinar, into the sloping path of a river bend. A guy with his mouth masked in a dusmal and his hair slicked back into a weapons-grade pompadour came strolling down the trail.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“The butcher’s son,” Gul whispered, and then gently placed a stone in my hand.
The butcher’s son was walking the trail very slowly, carefully, and, luckily for us, unarmed. Dawoud gathered stones from the stream and set them at our feet, and just before we chucked them, we lifted our own scarves over our mouths, at the same time, like bandits out of an old John Wayne flick, and we rubbed the stones in our dirty little fingers, huffing quick breaths that shook the tatters of our masks, and then there came this moment between the holding of the stones and the ambush itself, when I was watching the butcher’s son walk the road, watching him and knowing what was coming for him, knowing what he didn’t know, would only know when it was already too late, and I felt so bad for him and for me too, wallah, because although I knew that the stones were coming, I didn’t know why, and in that way, the butcher’s son and I were the same.
Then we chucked.
Later, I asked the fellas why we did what we did, and they looked surprised that I didn’t know, that I was that much out of the loop over in America, but having taken part in the ambush I thought it was my right, you know, to be informed.
Luckily, they seemed to agree.
Really, the story of the butcher’s son was the story of Nabeela Khala. She was my moor’s younger sister, the third out of six girls, and as the oldest of the unwed sisters, also the next in line to be married. Problem was Nabeela wasn’t the prettiest girl in the family or the slimmest or the most polite. Word was she could slaughter a steer, chop down trees, and whup on her nephews. At a wedding, during a machine gun celebration, she’d snatched her brother’s AK and unloaded the whole clip before going back to the ladies’ side of the wedding to dance her ass off.
Nabeela was getting dangerously close to unmarriageable when the butcher’s son came calling. He was handsome, light skinned, with a head of hair like Ahmad Zahir and a pair of eyes like an English movie star. But also poor. Very poor. A butcher’s kid, and a failed butcher at that, so Baba, taking Abo’s advice, proceeded to reject his offer. But the butcher’s son, of course, came back.
The first three or four times a guy comes over to ask for a girl’s shawl, the father is supposed to reject him no matter what. But if you get rejected more than seven or eight times, the suitor has to start thinking about his honor, and most of the time, he’ll give up and move on. The butcher’s son had already been rejected some twenty times. He came over almost every Friday with his only pair of clean clothes, a dingy little waskat, his hair combed back, and his heart beating in his hands.
Meanwhile, Nabeela—to everyone’s surprise—had fallen madly in love with him. The last time he was rejected, she locked herself in a room and threatened to cut her wrists with her scissors, to hang herself with her dresses, to eat dirt until she vomited and died. Eventually, Rahmutallah Maamaa had to knock the door down with an axe, take up his sobbing sister in his arms, and drag her out of the room. After handing his sister over to Abo, Rahmutallah Maamaa began to shout at her, demanding that she allow Nabeela to marry the boy and end the madness. Abo stood square to her much larger son and cursed him and his lack of honor. So Rahmutallah Maamaa, saying nothing to anybody, went and got his rifle; walked all the way to the butcher’s house near Waghjan, in the middle of the night, with the Ts and the Marines loose and everything; and he knocked on his door and Rahmutallah warned the butcher that though their families had enjoyed many years of peace between themselves, and though they’d had no issues in the past, if he could not control his son, then the peace built up between the families would very soon, and very suddenly, come to an end.
He said that to him and then he left.
The threat worked for a while. But, about a week before my family arrived, the butcher’s son came back again, ready, it seemed, to die for Nabeela.
“That,” Gul explained, “is why we ambushed him.”
Around Asr, the sun dipped into the late afternoon.
Gul was getting so desperate for some sign of a clue, he suggested that we pray, and although he was very clearly trying to bribe God with our Salah, Zia was so ready to play the part of the imam, he didn’t seem to mind.
We made wudhu, one by one, in a nearby stream, and laid out our scarves on the dirt. Zia made the call to prayer, Gul said the iqama, and the three of us stood behind Zia and we prayed to Allah together, but by ourselves.
I had a list.
My list was in English, though it should have been in Arabic or at least Pakhto.
First, I prayed for Allah to forgive me and to save me from myself, and I prayed for him to assist me and my buddies on our journey because I knew that’s what Gul wanted. Then I prayed for my parents, my moor and agha, for her mind and his body. I prayed they wouldn’t have to be so lonely all the time. I prayed that my brothers might become men, Mirwais especially, who I thought might become a snitch or a coward, though in many ways I couldn’t admit, he was much braver than me.
Dawoud was praying on one side of me, fidgeting and cracking his knuckles and scratching his elbows, but I went on with my list anyway.
I prayed for my baba and abo, for my akai and athai, for all maamaas and khalas, and for my amas and my one dead kaakaa, Watek, and for all of my cousins, and I prayed for the health of the girl I might marry someday, and I prayed for the health of all the mothers on the earth but in Afghanistan especially, and I prayed for the men in the village who took care of their families and prayed all their prayers and watched over their neighbors and worked all day in the sun and never beat their wives and never sold their daughters and never snitched on their people and never joined the Americans and never hurt anyone they didn’t have to hurt, because I swear to God those sorts of men existed in Deh-Naw, in Logar, in the country. I swear to God.
A few villagers joined our line: farmers from their fields, laborers from their homes, and shepherds from their trails, until there were maybe thirty men or so praying behind Zia as he was wrapping up his final rakah.
I went on.
I prayed for all of my family and all of my friends and for all of the innocents and the martyrs, and I prayed for so many people and so many things that, wallah, just as Zia was turning his head to say salaam to the angel sitting on his right shoulder, Raqib, the recorder of good, I prayed one more time for Allah to bring us home, safely, so that I had no time left to pray for my enemies.
When Zia finished greeting Atid, the recorder of sins, and turned around to make his dua, he was only flustered for a second by the size of his congregation. He then recited a lovely little dua in what I assumed was perfect Arabic. Afterward, some of the men who had joined us in our prayer recognized Zia as Rahmutallah’s son, and they asked him what we were doing so far from home.
But before Zia could answer, Gul spoke up first, telling them that we were chasing after a dog, and a young shepherd stepped up and informed us that his flock had recently been attacked by something resembling a dog. He led us along a stream, the way we had come, to a clearing in a pasture where his flock was allowed to graze, and where he’d been briefly distracted by the erratic flight patterns of an American helicopter, and by the time he brought his attention back to his flock, his sheep were dripping red, and so, following one sheep after another, each of them getting more and more bloody, he came upon the source of the carnage: at first, he thought his poor little lamb had exploded from the inside out. That was until he saw the red paw prints leading away from the carcass.
We thanked the shepherd and promised to bring the dog to justice for the murder of his sheep. At which point, we started to follow the tracks, deeper and deeper into the valves of the country.
Budabash’s tracks disappeared just as we got to Watek’s marker.
So did his scent. Dawoud sniffed and sniffed as the sun dipped into the late afternoon but got nothing.
Watek’s flag didn’t look much different from any of the other flags littering the makeshift graveyards and the dirt roads all over Logar. It hung red and torn from a wooden rod. Stones gathered at the base of it. Ash too. It was the loneliest thing I had ever seen.
Near the flag there was a mulberry tree planted specifically in honor of Watek as a sadaqah. We gathered underneath it, catching our breath, rubbing our feet, and eating the toot from the branches, which belonged to Watek and so belonged to no one, or else, belonged to the whole village. We were so hungry and the toot was so sweet, we ate too much, too quickly, and our mouths got sticky from the juice. Gul said he was going to wash his face and he gestured for me to follow him. Past this hedge of chinar, we slid down a slope of clay into the bank of the canal.
“You know what happened here?” Gul asked me.
I told Gul I didn’t, which was true.
“You don’t know what happened to your Watek Kaakaa?”
Watek was Agha’s little brother. He was executed during the war by the Russians. He died really young, a kid practically. A shahid of the highest purity. That’s all I knew.
“This is where it happened,” Gul said, pointing to the earth beneath his feet as if that was the exact spot, as if we squatted right where he was standing when the Russians slit his throat or shot his face or filled his heart with lead.
The shade from the chinar fell slantwise against the bank of the water where we knelt.
He must have fallen in the water, I thought, it must have carried him.
“Shagha never told you that story?”
“Sometimes bits and pieces. But never the whole thing.”
“No one hears the whole thing.”
“Just bits?”
“Just pieces. Shagha’ll tell you the story piece by piece. And you’ll have to put it together yourself, and when you do, you have to come and tell me too. You understand?”
When we walked back out on the road, we found Zia and Dawoud whispering to each other. The two of them had created a secret pact in order to gather the strength to call for a second jirga, demanding that we, as a clan, a tribe, a nation, reinitiate our former council and vote on whether or not we should abort our prolonged mission.
“It’s getting dark,” Zia argued.
“I’m getting hungry,” Dawoud added.
Gul wasn’t buying it.
“Gul, you been saying a little farther, a little farther,” Zia said, “but you can’t force us unless we vote on it. Me and Dawoud want to head back. You’re the only one who wants to keep going.”
“Marwand wants to keep going.”
“Marwand wants to go back.”
“Well, what do you say, Marwand? You want to go home?” Zia asked.
“Or you want to go on?” Gul added.
The three of them looked to me for an answer and, wallah, I was trying to come up with one that might make everyone happy, but the toot juice in my belly wouldn’t let me think.
“What’s your vote?” Gul asked.
And just as my guts were about to give up and give in, I shouted, “Ghwul!” as loud as I could, and ran off through the chinar.
Hidden in between some bushes near the fields on the other side of the bank, I squatted and waited. Down the road the voice of a child called out the adhan from the speakerphone of a mosque’s citadel, and even with the static and the echo and the cracking of his pitch, it sounded so sweet in the fading light, with the fields darkening, and the crickets chirping their songs.
When the adhan finished, Zia stepped through the chinar and started to pray his Maghrib Salah near the stream. “Asalamalaykum Rahmutallah wa Barakatu,” Zia said to the angel sitting on his right shoulder, and just before Zia turned his head toward the angel on his left shoulder, to say his final salaam, I, too, peeked past my left shoulder, through Atid, God’s first snitch, and clenched my guts and watched the dark fields at my back, whose every single stalk of grain was trembling back and forth and side to side, while the whirlpool in my belly spun wildly into itself.
And all at once.
Zia finished his salaam.
I shat my flood.
Atid wrote this down.
The wind parted the wheat.
And a shadow leaped from the field, toppling me over, like a pile of rocks.
Gul came bursting through the chinar, shouting half phrases in Farsi and Pakhto: “Zia, goddamn it, Zia, Budabash, Zia, fuck, Zia, Budabash, Zia, quit praying, Dawoud, sniff, get to sniffing, sniff the Budabash, Budabash, and where the fuck is Marwand?”
I was still hiding between the bushes and the fields, desperately trying to wipe the shit off my clothes. I worked quietly, without breathing, and as soon as Gul left with a curse and a huff, I hobbled over to the canal with its water cool and clean and pure, took a deep breath, and hopped in.
Gul must have heard the splashing.
“Marwand…,” he started saying before he spotted Zia a little ways up the canal, still facing toward the Kaaba, his hands before his face, his head bobbing to the tune of a song we couldn’t hear.
Standing in the stream, I looked to Gul as Gul looked to Zia as Zia looked to God and I could see that Gul was being torn at the moment between his uncle’s inclination to beat the shit out of Zia for ignoring him and his long-held, almost primordial, Afghan’s esteem for the act of worship, whether faked or not.
Gul ordered me to stay and wait for Zia, but it took such a long time, I remember, for him to finish his prayers. At first, I sat beside the stream, watching him, waiting for him to finish, trying to guess which head bob, which dua, which surah, would be his last, but he just went on and on until I got tired of it and went back toward the road and sat beneath Watek’s tree.
It was cold on the road by myself as wet as I was.
About two seconds later, Zia came crawling through the chinar, finally finished with his prayers, and sat right next to me. I gave him a suspicious look like, “I see you.” And he, in turn, gave me an expression of innocence as if to say, “God sees all,” which was true, you know, but, still. Probably, I could have pressured him, made him explain why he kept on praying his fake prayer when Gul needed him most, but part of me, I think, didn’t really want to know. Besides, Zia was all I had left, and I was all he had left, and so, even though I stank horribly of toot-shit and mud, Zia unfurled his patu and wrapped it around me and him both.
To pass the time, Zia asked me for a story.
The roads darkened. The crickets chirped. The donkeys brayed. And everywhere there was a smell of smoke and sadness. Me and Zia huddled underneath his patu, underneath the mulberry tree, underneath the sky.
We watched the flag of Watek’s marker and smelled the ash and listened for every footstep of every killer in Logar: the psychopathic white boys, the ravenous bandits, the Ts and the gunmen and the drug runners, the kidney kidnappers, the robots in the sky, the wolves from the mountains and the coyotes from the rivers, the witches in the cesspits, the djinn in the trees, the ghosts from the graveyards, and the monsters in the maze.
I whispered to Zia, “It’s so dark.”
“You scared?” he asked.
“It’s just that back in America it doesn’t get so dark because we have lights going on all night in the streets.”
“But who pays for the fuel?”
“I think taxes.”
“You miss it over there?”
“No,” I said, “fuck America. I rather be here.”
“Wallah?” he said. “Don’t lie in the night, Marwand. Snakes will hear.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe not right this moment. But in general.”
“So you are scared.”
“Maybe a little.”
“All right,” he said, and asked me to give him my right hand, which I did, and after carefully unwrapping the gauze still clinging to my skin, he traced for me—with a single finger—his evidence of God’s existence.
In some way or other, I knew we would be saved, either in the night or in the days to come, that it was only a matter of when, not if. At some point, we both fell asleep, and for the first time in a long time, Zia forgot to pray.