Most Dangerous Most Unmerciful Read online

  MOST DANGEROUS,

  MOST UNMERCIFUL

  STORIES FROM AFGHANISTAN

  J. MALCOLM GARCIA

  SEVEN STORIES PRESS

  NEW YORK • OAKLAND • LONDON

  Copyright © 2022 by J. Malcolm Garcia

  All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Garcia, J. Malcolm, 1957- author.

  Title: Most dangerous, most unmerciful : Afghanistan stories / J. Malcolm

  Garcia.

  Description: First Edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, [2022]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021047334 | ISBN 9781644212035 (Hardcover) | ISBN

  9781644212042 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Afghan War, 2001-2021. | Afghanistan--Social life and

  customs--21st century. | Afghanistan--Social conditions--21st century.

  Classification: LCC DS371.413 .G47 2022 | DDC 958.104/7--dc23/eng/20220314

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047334

  These stories first appeared, some in different versions, in Alaska Quarterly Review (“Mother’s House”); bioStories (“Farmer by Day”); Fourth Genre (“In Those Days”); Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics (“Book Lady,” “Old Guns”); Huck (“Weight of the World”); Latterly Magazine (“Grave Digger”); The Massachusetts Review (“All That Is Yet to Come,” “Displaced Persons”); New Letters (“Animal Rescue”); Tampa Review (“Feral Children”); VICE Magazine (“A Mercy Killing,” “Fire in the Hole,” “Weather Did Not Destroy This House”); The Virginia Quarterly Review (“Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful”); and War, Literature & the Arts (“Maybe One Day”).

  Some names were changed for privacy.

  Printed in the USA.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For David Littlejohn

  1937–2015

  Only the dead have

  seen the end of war.

  —PLATO

  CONTENTS

  NOT THE WEATHER

  OLD GUNS

  MOTHER’S HOUSE

  DISPLACED PERSONS

  ANIMAL RESCUE

  FERAL CHILDREN

  GRAVE DIGGER

  FIRE IN THE HOLE

  IN THOSE DAYS

  WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

  MOST DANGEROUS, MOST UNMERCIFUL

  SHERPUR CEMETERY

  FARMER BY DAY

  A MERCY KILLING

  BOOK LADY

  MAYBE ONE DAY

  ALL THAT IS YET TO COME

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOT THE WEATHER

  The man beside me drops a pill in his mouth and swallows it with a sip of green tea, and together, from beneath a thin angle of shade, we stare out at the dirt road and beyond it to the smog-heavy skyline of Kabul. The stony ground beneath our feet stinks of dried dung. Chickens scramble around us and flies dart above our heads.

  “Your hotel?” the man asks me and raises his chin toward Kabul.

  “Yes, I’m staying there.”

  He nods, says nothing further. A boy urges some cows forward and they pass us wide-eyed and lumbering, their heads lethargically thrusting back and forth with each step forward.

  This morning, I woke up and decided to take a bus out of Kabul. Any bus to the first village it stopped at, just to leave the city. Its congested streets and thick layers of smog had begun to bear down on me like a weight. I needed a break from what in my mind was a boomtown in the midst of war.

  Near my hotel, the Hazim Supermarket sells washing machines when just months ago it sold only laundry buckets. An Italian restaurant will open soon in a local hotel two doors down from a new Chinese restaurant. International aid organizations pay up to $10,000 a month for housing.

  After making several stops in the city, the bus I boarded drove into the village of Bini Sar. I got off and saw a man brewing tea in a kettle over a pile of smoking coals beneath a tree. Behind him stood a closed shop. Other men sat nearby smoking. I offered the man brewing tea a dollar. He waved my money away and poured me a cup. I sat beside him. From an envelope, he shook a pill into his hand and reached for his tea. I drank from my cup and looked out on the road.

  “English?”

  “American,” I tell him.“ Journalist.”

  He nods, tells me his name, Nasir. He says he had worked as a translator for American troops in Helmand Province south of Kandahar. He quit two months ago when an Afghan soldier on patrol with American forces stepped on an IED. He heard the explosion and ran over and saw the body lying crookedly on the ground and the blood and torn pieces of flesh like chipped paint strewn about.

  Two days later he could still hear the explosion, still see the dead man and the blood and body parts. So he left and returned home to Bini Sar. He continues to hear the explosion, see the body. He takes tablets for depression. He shakes some pills into his hand and shows them to me and then puts them back in the envelope and his pocket. Later in the morning, he will open the shop behind him. He repairs hunting rifles and sells petrol.

  “More tea?”

  “No, thank you,” I tell him and slap at flies collecting above my head.

  Most mornings, Nasir wakes up, makes tea, and drinks it with other merchants. Then he changes clothes, opens his shop. He organizes the guns that need to be repaired and inspects his gas pump. At night, he returns home and sits with his wife and five children. They eat dinner. The sky darkens, the day concludes. They sleep. There is nothing more to do. He feels he is wasting his time with his shop but he can’t find other work.

  “Does he know what will happen in our country when the Americans leave?” a vendor asks Nasir and raises his chin at me. Nasir translates.

  “I don’t know what he knows,” he says.

  He takes an apricot from his pocket, splits it open, and tosses the pit into the road. We watch it bounce through the wheel spokes of a cart harnessed to a donkey. Flies buzzing in clouds above the animal’s head break apart and swarm the pit.

  Nasir tells me that as a translator he earned about eight hundred a month. The American soldiers he worked with were involved in mountain fighting. The Taliban would shoot down at them and the Americans would move to the side of the mountain and crouch down seeking cover. Rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, IEDs set beneath bridges. It was very loud. The noise would thrust Nasir backward. The Pakistan Taliban always attacked American and Afghan forces. The Pakistan Taliban trained the Afghan Taliban to fight.

  During combat, American soldiers yelled a lot. They seemed very scared. For Afghan soldiers, combat was like a game. After all, the country has been fighting wars since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded. Then the Soviets left in 1989 and civil war followed and after that the Taliban. For a while, it seemed the fighting would stop when the Americans invaded a month after September 11th and toppled the Taliban, but then as th
e years passed the war dragged on and the US began seeking a way out and the Taliban became strong again and the fighting continued.

  “Do you want a biscuit with your tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  One time in Nuristan Province two Afghan soldiers were blown to pieces, Nasir says. He thanks god he did not see this. They were put in coffins and taken to their families. The families were given nine hundred seventy dollars apiece and enough food for three days of mourning and no more.

  Sometimes when there was no fighting, American soldiers wearing only shorts and T-shirts would visit with Afghan soldiers. The Afghans had to explain that for a man to show so much of himself was a violation of their culture and they would ask the Americans to leave.

  Nasir worries that life will become difficult when the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. There are places the Afghan army can’t reach but the Americans can with their planes and helicopters. You can’t do anything without air support, he says.

  “What do you think is next for Afghanistan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cigarette?”

  I don’t smoke but I take it hoping the smoke will ward off the flies. Nasir waves a hand and the flies scatter. He points to the broken walls of a mud-brick house across the street.

  “I was born there,” he says.

  In the mid-1990s, feuding Afghan factions destroyed the compound. Pashtun and Uzbek forces pounded Bini Sar with mortars and grenades. Nasir and his family left the village and built a new home a few miles away.

  He stands and we cross over to the house. An enormous padlock gathers dust on the massive front doors. Peeling wood curls into clumps the size of fists. Dogs ramble out an open side door, leaving paw prints in the dust and scattering chickens. I step around the chickens and peer inside. Nothing but a ruined staircase and balcony, and broken pottery and wooden beams. The scarred earthen floor bears the remains of the broken roof and a ruined fireplace. A shorn wall reveals a weed-clotted courtyard and empty animal stalls. The buzz of insects rises from the ground.

  “As a boy, I made snowmen there in winter,” Nasir says.

  The house was built almost two hundred years ago. His great-grandfather died there, as did his grandfather and father, and his mother and two cousins. Nasir will die in the home he now occupies outside Bini Sar. It was cheaper to leave and build a new house rather than repair the old.

  “There is no room for sentiment,” he says.

  He runs a hand over the mud-brick walls bristling with bits of straw. I ask him how homes built from mud withstand rain. The walls are very strong, he explains. The family of his great-grandfather stomped the mud with their feet and then cut it into squares and baked it and made bricks. After one or two years, they sometimes had to patch the roof, but nothing more. The bricks held.

  “Afghans,” Nasir says, “have an expression. When someone asks, ‘How long will your house stand?’ the answer is, ‘As long as people don’t destroy it.’”

  “Weather,” he tells me, “did not destroy this house.”

  A man approaches us and asks Nasir about me. Nasir tells him I’m an American journalist. The man wants to know what Afghan president Hamid Karzai will do about education, health, and other social problems once the Americans leave. I shake my head. I don’t know.

  “What is the United Nations?” he asks.

  “Representatives from countries around the world meet and discuss the problems of the world,” I tell him.

  “It is not my fault that I ask you these questions,” the man says. “I didn’t go to school. Now I know nothing. I have nothing. The Americans support Karzai but he does nothing. Everyone is angry at the Americans. As an American you are a target of people’s anger.”

  “Please, there will be no more fighting,” Nasir says. “Not today.”

  We watch the man walk away. Somewhere a generator coughs and starts, and I look toward the noise. A merchant has opened his shop. He stands on his toes and turns on the one bare bulb hanging above a counter stacked high with bags of rice. Behind his store, shadows retreat up a rocky hill, exposing a barren graveyard where the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of Nasir lie buried beneath nameless slabs of stone shaped like large arrowheads.

  Nasir and I wander back to our spot outside his shop. He withdraws his envelope of pills, looks inside it, and counts silently. He folds it and puts it back in his pocket. Flies collect on our feet and legs. Nasir waves his arms but I don’t bother. The flies won’t go no matter what we do. They gather in bunches on my knees but I ignore them. I watch them spin in circles, uncertain without the threat of my hand hovering above them.

  OLD GUNS

  The antique-weapons dealer remembers me from my visit last spring.

  “You were the American reporter who bought a pistol.”

  “Not a pistol. Flintlock rifle. 1852.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “On my way back to the States, I was stopped at airport security in Pakistan, Dubai, and London. They were worried about the gun.”

  “They thought you were a terrorist with an ancient rifle?”

  “I guess. No one stopped me here.”

  “Why would they? After thirty years of war, why we would we care about an old gun leaving Afghanistan?”

  I follow him up some broken stairs to the second floor of his shop. He points to a rug and we sit on the floor near an open balcony. Rifles and pistols, decorated with ivory and tin, hang from the cinder-block walls beside circular shields and swords brown from rust and age. Knives and spiked battle flails lie tangled in the corners.

  Below us on Chicken Street, Kabul’s tourist district, laborers slap cement on the walls of a new apartment building. American soldiers cradling AK-47 rifles roam the jammed sidewalks. Merchants call to them, point at the old red and yellow carpets hanging outside their shops. New carpets lie on the muddy street and passing trucks and cars flatten them, grinding in dirt and stones. This quick and easy aging process fools the unsuspecting foreigner into believing that the worn, dusty carpets harken back to bygone eras. There is a common expression among carpet merchants: Three days on the street, three hundred years old, three hundred dollars.

  “Please come look,” they shout. “No charge for looking.”

  The antique dealer calls to a boy and tells him to bring hot water for tea. The boy rinses two glass cups with steaming water from a kettle. He offers the cups to us and sits beside the antique dealer, pouring us green tea from another kettle. Sunlight spills into the room from an open balcony, the sky a brilliant blue, and we shift our positions to keep the sun’s relentless heat off our backs. The lumbering weight of trucks outside shakes the shop, and the antique dealer, the boy, and I put our hands on the floor until the building stops trembling.

  The antique dealer’s father opened the shop in 1939. At first he sold old clothes and furniture, but when it seemed that war in Afghanistan was a thing of the past, lost to history and memory, and the guns and pistols seemed to have no purpose other than as souvenirs, he began selling those instead.

  “In this time, the 1950s and ’60s, there were many tourists in Afghanistan searching for old things,” the antique dealer says. “Why is this? I think some countries move too fast and the people do not know who they are and so they come here. Here our history is all around us.”

  I sip my tea, listen to the noise of bicycle riders frantically ringing their horns on the crowded street below us, racing past buildings that still bear scars from the civil war that nearly destroyed Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.

  When I watch BBC news reports from Syria in my hotel room and see the shorn remains of buildings in Aleppo, I have a small sense of what the fighting here must have been like during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and the later civil war, the Taliban and the post–September 11th American-led invasion. Eleven years later, figh
ting continues. The United States has learned, as did the Russians and invaders before them, that Afghanistan won’t yield to would-be conquerors. Plans now call for all American combat forces to draw down by 2014 with no pretense of victory.

  Today, the Taliban controls large swaths of Afghanistan, areas that function not unlike independent city-states. Maidan Wardak Province, for instance, just a forty-minute drive from Kabul, is dominated by the Taliban. As is Logar Province, a ninety-minute drive from Kabul, and Nangarhar Province, a two-hour drive from Kabul, and so on. The Taliban governs southern Afghanistan so thoroughly that the divide is nearly as stark as that between North and South Korea.

  But on Chicken Street the war feels far away. The laborers dip shovels into mounds of stones mixed with cement and cover their faces with prayer shawls to protect themselves against the dust the cement mixers produce as they turn in slow circles. Donkey-drawn carts haul bricks, and men pull wagons stacked with wood. Above them, signs on nearby buildings—Baha DVD Store, Kabul Computers, A. B. Samey Hamayoun Desk Top Publishing—promote a new Afghanistan rushing to catch up with the twenty-first century. Boys fly kites from rooftops near billboards advertising “Afghan Wireless: Your connection to the world.”

  “When I was young, the foreigners were not like they are now,” the antique dealer says. “They were not soldiers. They came here to see Afghanistan. They slept outside in tents and no one bothered them. My shop was open until one o’clock in the morning and I never locked it. The police were not like they are now. They did not take bribes. They were not former militia. The police in that time would stop by and I’d asked them in for tea.”

  Two American soldiers in desert fatigues walk into the shop. They nod and smile, and the antique dealer stands and bows slightly, pressing his right hand over his heart. One of the soldiers picks up a pistol, drawing cobwebs with it. He makes a face and puts it down, slapping dust off his hand. The antique dealer stands and points to other guns.

  “Very clean, no problem,” he says. “Two hundred years old.”