Farishta Page 16

  Nauroz was the annual celebration of the spring equinox, which dated back to pre-Islamic times and derived from the Persian zodiac calendar. March 21, the first day of Aries, was also the beginning of the Afghan New Year. People came to Mazār from all over the country to witness the annual raising of the janda, an enormous flag-decked and beribboned pole, which would stand for forty days in front of the Blue Mosque. Many believed it had curative powers if touched.

  “I believe that after the ceremony you will both be expected to join the governor and his guests in the viewing stands at the buzkashi field for the final match of the season,” the colonel added with a suppressed smile.

  He turned to the major, who was still digesting this unwelcome news. “Mark, I’m counting on you to make sure that Angela does not gallop off on one of their horses again,” he said to a burst of laughter and applause, which did not include the stony-faced Major Davies.

  The night before the celebration at the Blue Mosque, I decided to skip my evening workout and finish assembling one of the cardboard solar ovens I’d been building. I planned to test this one and several others on the roof of the PRT to determine which design would heat water most efficiently.

  After dinner, I headed up to the atrium to get to work. This large, rarely used, and empty room with a balcony overlooking the distant Hindu Kush offered a perfect space for me to spread out my materials. The evening was mild, and I propped the balcony doors open. Shoeless and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, I knelt on the cool concrete floor surrounded by cardboard boxes, a can of paint, pots of glue, scissors, marking pens, a ruler, and rolls of aluminum foil. As I worked, I had an English-language tape of Rumi’s poetry playing in the background.

  The sound of footsteps in the stairwell interrupted my reverie as the uniformed figure of Major Mark Davies appeared in the doorway. I hit the STOP button on the cassette player.

  “Excuse me for the interruption, Miss Morgan,” he said, clearing his throat.

  Pushing back my increasingly unruly hair, and looking into those cobalt blue eyes, I swallowed hard and felt my pulse begin to rise. I was in too good a mood to deal with this man, who still insisted on calling me Miss Morgan.

  “Mark, we attend meetings together almost every day and, although we’ve yet to engage in an extended conversation, we have known each other now for almost three months. I very much appreciate the fact that you spoke up on my behalf when Richard tried to stop me from attending your meetings, and I think it’s time you start calling me by my first name.”

  “Of course, you’re absolutely right,” he said, stiffening in the doorway.

  “The reason I’m interrupting your—whatever it is you’re doing, Angela, is to inform you that the governor’s office just called. We’ve been asked to arrive at the Blue Mosque tomorrow morning by seven A.M. We’ll have to leave the PRT by six fifteen sharp.”

  He turned to leave, then spun around and faced me again. “Are you certain you want to do this? ”

  “I can’t wait, Mark.”

  When he continued to stare at me without speaking, I decided to provide him with a subtle opening to offer me some assistance. “I suppose I’d better start clearing up this mess, then.”

  He ignored my unspoken request for help. “I want to assure you, Angela, that I for one am not looking forward to our little adventure tomorrow.”

  “Is that so? I think it’s a unique opportunity.”

  “May I ask what you’re doing?” He stepped into the atrium and let the screen door swing shut behind him. “It looks like you’re constructing some sort of junior school science project.”

  I looked up at him without replying, annoyed at his tone of voice. Setting my scissors on the floor, I stood up and brushed bits of cardboard from my jeans. He was at least half a foot taller than the five feet six inches I stood in my bare feet.

  “I’m building solar ovens,” I said without further elaboration.

  “And what, may I ask, is a solar oven?” he replied, his brow furrowing slightly.

  “It’s an insulated box painted black inside, topped with a sheet of glass and an aluminum foil reflector. It cooks food with sunshine.”

  “And why are you building these—solar ovens? Don’t you like the way our cooks prepare food at the PRT?” He smiled, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of laughing at his little joke.

  “I love PRT food, Mark, but I’m not building these for myself. I’m building them because of what I’ve seen in the short time I’ve been traveling around northern Afghanistan. If you left that locked vault of yours in the basement once in a while, you’d know what I’m talking about.”

  His head tilted slightly and his eyes narrowed. “If you are implying that I don’t know what’s happening in northern Afghanistan, you are flat wrong, Angela. With the masses of information we’re collecting, my staff and I probably know more than anyone else about what’s going on up here. Except for you, of course.”

  If he was trying to provoke me, it was working. Leaning forward with my hands on my hips and rising up on my toes, I shot back, “Have you and your staff noticed that the Taliban, the opium traffickers, and the warlords aren’t the only threat in this region? ”

  “Are you saying that we’ve missed something? ”

  “I am.” I was straining to keep my voice steady. “You might have observed that the five provinces our soldiers patrol are completely barren in places where there used to be orchards and forests. None of the MOT commanders mention this in their reports. If you got out once in a while, you’d see young children, who should be in school, leaving their villages every day to harvest and carry home enormous bundles of brush for their mothers to burn in smoky cooking fires. They’re stripping the land of its remaining groundcover, causing massive erosion around the irrigation ditches and destroying productive farmland.”

  “And what does that have to do with the security of this region?” he asked, his arms folded defensively over his chest.

  “Once erosion depletes their fields, and once their remaining orchards—which took decades to grow—have been chopped down for firewood, farmers start planting opium poppies to replace their lost income. You must agree that the growing threat of an Afghan narco-state is a serious security risk.”

  “I do,” he said, nodding gravely.

  “The most urgent energy requirement these people have is for some kind of fuel to generate heat so they can cook their food. Afghanistan’s most plentiful source of free fuel is the sun, but these people don’t know how to access it. If they don’t start using renewable energy soon, their economy will never recover.”

  Mark looked down at the materials I had spread out on the floor with a new seriousness. “Continue,” he said.

  “The U.S. government is about to spend tens of millions of dollars on a new power grid for this country, Mark. But before any money is used to provide rural villages with electricity for lights, these people need a sustainable way to cook their food. I’m hoping to show a few Afghans in this part of the country a cheap and simple way to do just that.”

  “A worthy endeavor, I’m sure,” he said. “Saving the country and winning the war on terrorism without firing a shot.”

  “Diplomats don’t carry weapons, Mark.”

  “Of course,” he said training his eyes on mine again. “So your plan is to defeat the Taliban and revive the Afghan economy using cardboard boxes lined with aluminum? ”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or making another lame attempt at humor. “I don’t expect to win any wars or even reduce the production of opium poppies, but I may be able to help a few women and children.”

  “Is this a new task you’ve been given by your embassy? ” he asked, bending down on one knee to look at a square of foil-lined cardboard I had just finished gluing.

  “My embassy has no idea I’m doing this, but I’ll tell them if I’m actually able to get one of these things to work and demonstrate it in a few villages,” I said, brushing damp stran
ds of hair from my face.

  “During almost three months at this PRT, my sole accomplishment has been to write endless reports, e-mail them to my embassy, and wait for responses that never come.”

  “Angela, I seem to recall that you saved the life of a little girl in Andkhoy last month. Certainly, that counts for something,” he said gently.

  “Yes, I suppose it does.”

  I held up another box for his inspection. “I have to do something useful while I’m here.”

  “And for that I commend you,” he said, taking the box to examine it more closely.

  “I believe I heard you listening to Rumi when I came in.”

  A bolt of electricity shot through me at his mention of Rumi.

  “Yes, I . . . like Rumi very much,” I stammered.

  “So do I. My mother used to read his poetry to me when I was a child. May I?” he asked holding his finger over the PLAY button on my cassette recorder.

  Defending my project to Mark had been frustrating, but I was heartened by his support and was beginning to relax in his presence. The next poem on the cassette was one that had given me enormous comfort after Tom’s death. I must have let it carry me too far away because I suddenly felt Mark’s hand on my shoulder and noticed tears running down my cheeks.

  “Miss Morgan, Angela, is there . . . ?” He pulled back at the sound of someone running up the stairs.

  Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I hit the STOP button and faced the door.

  It was Jenkins. “Angela, we’re leaving at 0615 hours instead of 0700 hours,” he announced breathlessly as he bounded onto the landing and flung open the screen door.

  “Oh, excuse me, Major, sorry to interrupt, sir,” he said, snapping to attention when he saw Mark kneeling at my side and noticed my red eyes.

  “Stand easy, Corporal,” Mark replied, rising quickly to his feet and stepping back several paces. “I came up just before you to deliver the same message to Miss Morgan.”

  Mark turned to me and bowed his head slightly. “You’ll forgive me for the disturbance,” he said, walking quickly around Jenkins and out the door.

  “Are you all right, Angela? Did I interrupt something?” Jenkins asked with a worried look on his face.

  “Not bloody likely,” I said with forced laughter. “Now get in here and help me clean up this mess.”

  “You know that Fuzzy won’t be joining us tomorrow,” Jenkins said as we began stacking my supplies in the corner. “Sergeant Major has him working in the supply room for the next few days.”

  I nodded. I had witnessed Fuzzy’s meltdown in the pub Saturday night. “How is he?”

  “I’ve seen him better.”

  BBC TV had begun running a series of retrospectives in anticipation of the second anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Many of the soldiers at our PRT who had already served in Basra were growing increasingly agitated at the graphic footage being shown on news reports between soccer games.

  Fuzzy, who had not recovered from the loss of his mate, went over the edge that evening and tried to drown his sorrow in beer.

  “If the bloody politicians had given our boys the right kit, Billy would be alive. If I’d been there . . .” he muttered through clenched teeth, “but no, I’m here in bloody fucking Afghanistan riding around the desert in that fucking rattletrap Beast, assigned to guard a bloody Yank woman who doesn’t even want my protection.”

  I watched silently from the table behind him where I was having a beer with the French and Finnish liaison officers. Every man in the room studiously avoided making eye contact with me.

  “What the fuck are we doing here, lads? ” Fuzzy asked the soldiers at his table. “No one’s shooting at us and there’s no one for us to shoot back at.

  “Fucking terrorists, we should brass up and bomb the lot of them,” he mumbled. “Billy and me was best mates since we was six years old.”

  Fuzzy grabbed a full can of beer and threw it hard at the television. It smashed against the wall a few inches from the screen, spraying beer and foam over the men seated nearby. Jenkins and another soldier grabbed him under the arms and hoisted him to his feet.

  As they led him out of the pub, one of the other sharpshooters clapped his hand on Fuzzy’s back and shouted, “We hear you, lad. We’ll be going to Helmand in just a few more months. We’ll give it to those choggie terrorist cunts.”

  All the soldiers in the room, fully aware that Fuzzy’s outburst could mean Sergeant Major might close the pub for several days, nevertheless rose to their feet in unison, lifted their beers, pounded the tables with their fists, and shouted, “On to Helmand!”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  March 21, 2005

  At six fifteen the following morning under a cloud-streaked salmon sky, Mark and I climbed silent and unsmiling into the backseat of the colonel’s vehicle. The Beast was in the shop for repairs. Rahim was wedged unhappily between us.

  Jenkins was assigned as our driver, and the colonel’s spit-and-polish vehicle commander had replaced Fuzzy in the passenger seat.

  Only the governor’s official vehicles and those of his invited guests were permitted to enter the city center that morning, but it still took Jenkins almost an hour to maneuver through the crowds to the designated drop-off point near the mosque.

  Thousands of New Year’s Day pilgrims arriving on foot had jammed Mazār-i-Sharīf’s broad boulevards overnight. Everyone wanted to be as close as possible to the beribboned janda and its magical powers when it was hoisted into place in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque.

  Leaving the two soldiers with our vehicle, Mark, Rahim, and I followed an Afghan policeman along a narrow path into a fenced area near the mosque where VIP guests were being served steaming glasses of green tea.

  Hundreds of nervous Afghan policemen, their arms linked to hold back the frenzied pilgrims, did not hesitate to bring their wooden batons down on the heads of anyone who pushed too hard against their human phalanx.

  Just below the VIP viewing stand was the fifty-foot ribbon-draped janda. It lay on its side, tied down like Gulliver and looped with the ropes and pulleys that would be used to hoist it into position.

  We took our seats, which were still shaded from the heat of the rising sun by the dome of the mosque. Several members of the Mazār consular corps and a few of the governor’s ministers, whom I had met previously, recognized me and nodded in my direction, but the din of the crowd made conversation impossible.

  A loudspeaker blared prayers and religious music, while an announcer shouted futile orders to the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to move back. Mark and Rahim sat stiffly in their chairs, staring straight ahead.

  There was not a cloud in the sky as the sun rose higher and the shadow of the Blue Mosque slid slowly away under our feet. The heat became instantly oppressive, and the restive crowd pressed ever closer against our heavily guarded enclosure.

  “Angela, there’s Nilofar,” shouted Rahim, jumping to his feet. He grabbed my arm and gestured toward the crowd, where the young law student was trying to support an old woman. They were both about to be trampled by the crowd behind them.

  “She is close to the janda, and one of the policemen is trying to force her back. She is with her grandmother. May I leave you and the major here to help them? I can get to them through the VIP gate.”

  I looked at Mark. “You’re in charge. May he go? ”

  Rahim pointed Nilofar out to Mark. She was arguing with a very agitated policeman and was struggling to keep her grip on the old woman.

  “Go help her, Rahim,” Mark ordered. “Angela and I will be fine. If we’re still separated after the ceremony ends, meet us back at the PRT vehicle. Go, man! Quickly!”

  I watched anxiously as Rahim fought his way through a sea of blue burkas and turbaned men to reach Nilofar’s side. She was surprised to see him, but clearly relieved as he supported the old lady, pacified the policeman, and shielded both women from those behind them who were straining to reach the janda.

/>   “Is that young woman a relative of Rahim’s?” asked Mark.

  “No, she’s a law student we met when we visited the women’s prison last month. Rahim and I had dinner with her family a few weeks ago.”

  “Her family?” he said, sounding surprised. “She’s an unmarried girl, and they invited him into their home? ”

  “It wasn’t quite like that, Mark,” I replied. “Nilofar wanted to see Rahim again, so she invited us both to dinner. The men and women ate separately. She told her parents I was Rahim’s American cousin and said I had insisted he come with me.”

  “And you went along with this? ”

  “It was perfectly harmless, Mark.”

  “Angela, in this country, there is little we foreigners do that can be classified as ‘perfectly harmless’ especially when it involves interfering with the Afghans’ strict codes of conduct.”

  I rolled my eyes at this latest reprimand and turned to watch as Rahim struggled to hold back the crowd that threatened to crush Nilofar and her grandmother.

  “Her male relatives may not be very happy to see him getting so close to her,” Mark mused as he observed the unfolding drama below.

  “I don’t think the normal rules apply under these circumstances, Mark.”

  “Is Rahim involved with this young woman? ”

  “I have the distinct impression he’d like to be. Unfortunately, she’s Hazara and he’s Tajik, which would present a big problem for both of them if things actually get serious.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t,” he said before lapsing again into silence.

  Moments after Rahim arrived at Nilofar’s side, the governor finished his remarks. At his signal, a group of heavyset men wrapped thick ropes around their hands and began hoisting the janda into place. As the top of the pole rose skyward, people showered it with fistfuls of paper money and extended their arms to be the first to receive its magic.

  Cannons boomed while a group of men blew their horns and pounded their drums. When the line of policemen nearest the mosque dropped the barriers, the crowd, no longer restrained, surged with a deafening roar toward the janda.