Outside the butcher shop, Hussein opens the rear double doors of the van and checks the interior. Khaled removed the straw after the morning market, but the vehicle parked in the sun still carries the stink of animal fear. As Hussein reaches to pack Mustafa’s bags away, the soldier keeps hold of them, saying, “Let me take care of them, Lieutenant.” A withering glance from Hussein tells him that he has no choice.
The older man gauges the weight of the large rough canvas duffel in his hands before sliding it as far back in the van as it will go. Its contents, he can tell, include a barrel and a butt of some sort. The other bag, squatter in size, is heavier than Hussein expects, its bulk coming from clothes or soft wadding wrapped around other metallic pieces—another dismantled weapon. As the soldier wedges his knapsack carefully between the bags, his former commanding officer comments drily, “Souvenirs from your travels?”
Both men climb into the van’s tiny front cab. Squashed together in the minuscule space that is no bigger than a rendition cage, Hussein starts the engine. “No wonder you moved cautiously through borders. How did you cross? Leave the bags, scout out a route, double back and pick them up?”
Mustafa’s gaze is fixed out the window. “I didn’t want to travel without protection. A wrong move in a Shia or Sunni district in Iraq, no one comes to your aid. I stayed away from Daesh and the Peshmerga. It’s a quagmire of angry religion.”
“Like everywhere else.”
Hussein prepares to drive off but not before a shadow flits across the window of the Marvellous Emporium. In seconds, Abu Za’atar is hurrying across the asphalted patch of the main street faster than an attack falcon on a pair of mourning doves. The Featherer, craning his neck to get a better view of the bearded stranger in the passenger seat, is gesticulating frantically at the butcher’s van. Before he reaches them Hussein leans out his window and waves him off with a forced smile: “Amo, we catch up later.”
The van pulls away. Now isn’t the time for introductions. Hussein still has a few questions of his own for Mustafa.
Keeping his eyes on the road, he casually remarks, “We were told that the Taliban were using whatever the Soviets left behind from the war in the 1980s, in addition to the antique rifles of the British and the Russians when they fought over the Khyber Pass in the 1800s. Any gaps were filled by replica ‘made in Peshawar’ automatic rifles and grenade launchers.” It’s amazing how much information he retains from those antiterrorism briefings.
“Afghanistan is awash with guns,” confirms Mustafa. “The situation is seriously dangerous but funny too. During every government amnesty for weapons, clan lords collect rifles old, new, and automatic from their men and sell them to the Taliban. The weapons bazaars are flooded with equipment from Serbia and Croatia. But the Americans are in a class by themselves.”
“How so?” asks Hussein.
“Imagine, they buy modern Russian-made ammunitions with US tax dollars and give them to their allies. The Afghan army and the police then sell these weapons to the Taliban.” The soldier can hardly believe it himself. “Everything goes full circle. There’s a joke among the fighters. Need or want anything? Buy it online. It can be delivered wherever you want, like ordering pizza. They don’t have Amazon there yet, but they will. It is a country where middlemen do very well.”
“The reason war lasts so long is because of the profiteering.” Hussein is reminded of Abu Za’atar and his trucks.
“But not everyone is making money,” points out Mustafa. “Afghan askar privates paid poorly by their allied keepers have to support large families—small armies themselves. So askar and police sell all sorts of things: ammunition, gasoline, and damn good boots.” He glances down, but the confines of the tight van restrict his view of the sturdy footwear that his commanding officer secretly admires and that covered the five thousand miles to the butcher shop. “Probably off a dead US serviceman.”
For someone so long on the road, Hussein assumes any mode of transport would be welcomed. But the soldier squirms uneasily in his seat and nearly smashes his head on the van’s roof. Hussein realizes he is not used to being so exposed. Mustafa probably did most of his traveling at night and laid low during the day.
Hussein jokes, “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I sure as hell know how you’re feeling. This van can barely hold a tin of sardines, much less the two of us.”
He was never any good at making his men laugh, but in the past they appreciated his efforts. He slaps his hand hard on the dashboard and the sound effectively clears the air. Mustafa leans back, settles in his seat, and starts talking.
“When Sayeed and I were kids, the men of our neighborhood were like giants to us. We lost our father when we were young. And despite every hardship our mother pampered us. We were badly spoiled! Sayeed was selfish. How could he leave us like that without saying a word? I blame it on the men we admired. We wanted to emulate them no matter what. By the time we learned the truth about them it was too late.”
“Even if your heroes had been brutally honest about their shortcomings, you and Sayeed wouldn’t have paid any attention at all.” Hussein remembers the impressionable young men formerly in his charge as he maneuvers the van through narrowing streets. “The values of your childhood are useless today. Look at Afghanistan. The tension between the old and the new is ripping apart a country that never recovered from the last devastation. Add drones to this time bomb and everything goes to shit pretty damn fast.
“But tell me,” Hussein continues, genuinely curious, “what good are nineteenth-century bolt-action rifles such as Russian Mosin-Nagants or British Lee-Enfields against an army on the verge of biochips and robots?”
“Everyone thinks war is high tech, but it really is only bodies against sharp objects—bayonets and knives—and IEDs,” Mustafa observes. “The Afghans haven’t survived too badly off the scrap heap of history. The Taliban still put up a good fight despite ancient weaponry and handmade guns. When they lose, they collect their dead and leave nothing behind. No invader has stopped them.”
Time, Hussein agrees, is on their side. Once the Afghan people tire of being fleeced by a corrupt government, they will seek salvation in the arms of those who are equally crooked but pay lip service to God. It will be another way of reclaiming a life that was lost after the British, Russians, and Americans.
But Hussein still feels that Mustafa hasn’t been entirely straight with him. Sayeed went off with a known terrorist called Al Bilal, who in the end was obviously playing a double game. After his torture, Al Bilal became an agent for the GID, the Jordanian intelligence service. Hussein remembers reading between the lines of the news reports at the time. Whoever this man pretended to be, he had no difficulty walking into Forward Operating Base Chapman, a heavily secured facility used by the CIA, in Khost. Not even the US soldiers guarding the perimeters stopped and questioned him, because everyone knew he was their informant in the area. Once inside, Al Bilal detonated the explosives belt under his clothes and killed his handler, a member of the royal Jordanian family.
The suicide bombing had all the earmarks of an attack by Al-Qaeda, whose members weren’t grunts like the Taliban who operated in the field. They had a higher calling; their brains were hot-wired. In groups like Al-Qaeda and Daesh, more effective than a charismatic leader is the bomb maker. But the Taliban fighters are fast learners. Every spring when they come back after a hard winter of little or no action, there are spectacular bombings against the Americans, IEDs dug into major roads and asphalted over, ready for detonation at the optimum split second when casualties will be at their highest. It’s no wonder that the GID is looking for Sayeed.
“So who were you and your brother fighting for?” Hussein finally asks outright.
“I stayed with Sayeed, who was living with Al Bilal’s people. But I didn’t have the skill set they needed, so after my brother’s death I drifted away from them. When I asked the Taliban, ‘Akhee, my brother, can you help me?’ good Muslims that they were, they shared all that they had—including their enemies. I should have questioned the high price of their hospitality but I didn’t.”
As the van keeps to the edges of the Eastern Quarter, the soldier gestures at the heavily veiled women and men in traditional garb. “This looks familiar, poor and pious.” Whenever they slow down, bearded men stare in through the windows first at Hussein, then at Mustafa.
“They’re shocked by the company you keep,” Hussein mutters under his breath. He could have gone directly to the farm, but he wants to talk a little longer to the soldier by himself. So instead of heading toward the mountains, he veers off by the market and takes another route out of the town. The time has come to broach a difficult subject, one that has been on his mind since Mustafa’s arrival.
“A man came looking for Sayeed.” Although he is concentrating on a road that has shrunk into a winding dirt track in front of them, Hussein can again sense Mustafa’s disquiet. “He had some idea as to the whereabouts of your brother and asked me if I knew anything. He wanted me to provide him with some leads.”
“What did you say?” the soldier asks.
“Nothing.”
“Where was he from?” Mustafa is watching him closely.
“He said one of the ministries, but my guess is the GID. He didn’t mention you. He was waiting for me to do that. But I don’t discuss the activities of men under my command, especially with strangers. In the same way I don’t harbor jihadists.”
Hussein had pulled into an empty field abruptly and switched off the van’s engine. Despite the awkward space inside, he shifts his weight sideways, his face an inch or two from Mustafa’s.
“I’ve never been much of a killer, Lieutenant,” admits the soldier, who stares past him, “but those were my darkest days. It’s not easy to kill. Then you are told by the people who feed you and show you kindness that their children are being raped every day by American troops.” Mustafa, turning away, continues. “My main concern was for my brother. Once his life ended, so did mine. Much of what I have experienced has convinced me there is nothing left in the world worth fighting—or dying—for.”
For the next few minutes the two men sit together quietly. All around them the yellowing fields scorched by heat are as dry as kindling. From their vantage point they can just make out the town below and, to its west, where the ground rises sharply toward Jebel Musa, the prophet’s mountain.
Hussein speaks first: “In my childhood, it wasn’t the men who were giants. It was this”—he holds his hands aloft—“the land idolized by old and young alike. When I was a boy, we were repeatedly told stories about a remote time in history when the mountains were ringed with pine and spruce; the valleys and the plains filled with carobs, olives, and pistachios. There was even a farmer who, it was said, stumbled into a secluded grove of tropical vines and palms, a jungle filled with trees of frankincense and myrrh. But we never learned the farmer’s name or the whereabouts of his fabulous discovery.
“My father and the men like him,” he explains, “were so consumed by the potential of the land that every successful harvest took on mythic proportions. The infrequent good years, when a whole herd of camels transported the heavy burlap sacks of wheat, always heralded the start of the long-awaited turnaround. But the next growing season failed to fulfill expectations, and we were lucky to get a few misshapen eggplants and tomatoes for the storage bins. Abundance and wealth were one good harvest or one solid rainfall away. It would have been easy for me to spend my life believing that too.”
As a boy Hussein savored the rare times of plenty: when the great mounds of okra were taller than he was, or the summer he ate so much melon he made himself sick. But there was something in him that would not be convinced.
“There are too many parallels in these obsessive love affairs—the farmers with the land and your brother with religion. Both require unwavering faith that one more sacrifice or killing will turn everything around. But where does all the failed harvests of our lives leave us? Only in a dream about life deferred, never in the here and now.”
He returns to matters uppermost in his mind. “The travel souvenirs, who are they for?”
Mustafa adjusts himself in his seat and says, “Prepare for all contingencies.” He is once again a soldier and Hussein his commanding officer. He adds soberly, “Surely all the antiterrorism training taught my brother that.” Then he lets slip, “I just couldn’t abandon the few precious possessions that meant so much to him.”
Hussein revs the motor again, checks the rearview mirror, and swings the van around. The only sounds are the low rumbling of the engine and the crunching of the tires as they climb back onto the dirt track, which leads to the mountain and the farm, although they are not so far from the new house.
A thought occurs to Hussein. It is not revolutionary but it could be useful. Despite the fact there isn’t much in the containers at home, a man used to drinking his own urine in the mountains could probably shave with a few centimeters of water. Then Mustafa could begin his reintroduction to a semblance of normal life. Rehabilitation can take place only with small, incremental steps—something Hussein learned not in the army but alone by himself. And if the GID is planning to arrest the soldier, it might overlook a clean-shaven young man in a crowd, someone who could have been a protestor in Tahrir Square but has since learned his lesson and now knows his place.
“You might think about losing the beard,” Hussein suggests evenly.