Nonfiction, Jeffrey E. Stern
This article has been excerpted from Jeffrey E. Stern’s new book, The Mercenary
For more on ongoing Afghanistan evacuations, visit www.30birdsFoundation.org
PART I
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
Aimal is scared.
He’s a child just old enough to know that the things he’s seeing now might become things he sees later when he closes his eyes.
He should look away, but this strange violence, the fire and noise, is happening just as he’s reached an age of fierce wonder about the world. Biology and history have conspired to press down a valve and let a flood into his mind. He opens his eyes at everything.
The civil war years are bad. Holy warriors fight around his house, Sayyaf and Gulbuddin, Massoud and Mazari and the rest. The words for storm systems drifting into the city and flagging on the mountains, aiming violence at each other but killing civilians down in the streets.
Some actually aim violence at the ground where the civilians go about their business; some warlords turn up the soil because it still holds trace amounts of communism, a pollutant requiring fire and violence to purge.
Down in the street, Aimal smiles at customers in front of his family’s shop. Not a shop but a garage door he and his brother Naheb lever open sometimes to let some cadaverous passerby in, to pick at the aimless inventory. Seven years old, and Aimal keeps it open, sometimes even on days when there’s fighting. Sometimes for just minutes at a time, before warlords perched on the mountains start lobbing mortars at each other again. Sometimes the men up on the peaks fire rockets for sport. A fighter up on TV Mountain hiding under all the antennae up there, launching a rocket for a little pageantry to break up the day.
Once, a bus pulled in front of the store and picked up a pretty girl he’d practiced his wink at. Already, at eight now, a flirt. The girl boarded, the bus grunted into gear, coughed out a black puff of diluted fuel, and then crumpled and stopped like a dumb draft animal. The girl dead, the bus sniped by some strong type of bullet. Steel squeezed bodies inside, and Aimal didn’t bother going close. This had been his clientele.
Another day, Aimal is in the basement being bored, listening to the familiar whistle of metal through air, when he hears a crash and thud that sound closer than usual.
A silent moment, then frantic footsteps and his brother Naheb bursting into the basement.
Upstairs, a rocket had torn through the store while Naheb manned the counter. It came through the roof, passed a few feet from his ear, crashed through the room behind him and into the neighbor’s house, where it lodged in the wall, a strange tumescence, Naheb waiting for it to detonate. And then when it didn’t—when the rocket just held there, sticking out in the silence as if it were now Naheb’s turn to say something—Naheb took off running. Aimal sees his panicked brother and can’t help collapsing into laughter, Naheb now panting before him, covered in crushed flower stem and dried mud the family fashioned the house from, easily pierced by a Russian-made dud. Naheb, orange over white, suddenly the color of an old man.
An older man: Naheb, just a few years older but a grown-up to Aimal, so when their father was killed, it was Naheb who slipped in as the first in a series of not-quite father figures Aimal would try on and discard. Naheb his partner in crime, Naheb with his bad luck, his good luck, never killed but almost killed, again and again. Playing volleyball out in Park when a rocket fell near the court and the lights went out for him, then he woke up to everyone else lying still, as if he’d missed a drill.
When the Taliban arrives in Aimal’s neighborhood, the rockets stop; there’s no more fighting. No buses with pretty girls dying in front of him.
Soon there is no food. Aimal scrounges where he can. Naheb learns calligraphy and tries to start a printing business. Printers and copiers are hard to come by, so the “printer” is just Naheb and his tired right hand. Hunched over paper, writing signs as fast as he can. He offers himself up to the few stores and charities that can find some way to justify paying. Aimal watches Naheb write bizarrely ornate advertisements for mundane things. Sweeping, triumphant script for a sale of old clothing. And then, finally, Naheb gets his big break when a charity from another country hires him to write two hundred metal signs for a sanitation project. Aimal watches his brother apply his intricate script to shitters. Until Naheb runs so far behind he enlists Aimal to help make a dent.
Aimal, nine years old now, with a reverence for the art of the deal. How you manipulate your environment to squeeze coins from a city without any in plain view, and a few scattered calories from a city without food.
In the garage, poring over signs for the charity sanitation project, Aimal knows they have no chance to fulfill the order. Two hundred hand-painted signs, it’s too much. They need a shortcut. They go out walking, looking for a hint, and find themselves near the hospital. As habit they pick through the garbage. Though there’s rarely anything of value in the trash anymore. The people of the city learned quickly how to beak through its waste.
Aimal oars a hand through the dumpster and it hits a substance he hasn’t felt before. He pulls it out, and now he’s holding up a photo of a ghost. Hazy white lines over black. He knows somehow this is part of a person, the inside part. The story of some internal war trauma a patient didn’t understand and discarded, but the brothers think they’ve found their answer. The film is nearly as sturdy as wood, but it’s thin and looks easy to cut. They bring it home and blade the charity’s name, the phrase “sanitation project” and the project number into it, curling the knife around a stranger’s bone. They place the carved X-ray over sheeted metal, daub the paint over it, and finish twenty signs a night. They quarter the time. They serve the order.
For Aimal, solving this one small puzzle is a high.
He wants more.
Life is boring. He’s tormented by the acid feeling of a stomach gone days without food. But the charity—foreigners, even when he doesn’t see them—mean challenge, chance, some money, food.
Wondering through the market with a little extra cash, the brothers notice a rusty old piece of tech, like a big kitchen dish with an arm sticking out. Naheb says he knows what it is. At home, he runs a wire from the dish to their tired old television. Aimal learns to aim it at the sky, and begins to basks in the colors beaming down at his forgotten corner of the world. They come up with a dance, Aimal and Naheb, how they catch the radio waves just after the sun goes down, when the Talibs can’t see. They wire the dish to the television set inside and watch. A soccer player, a breast, an explosion, a moaning coil of body parts that excite Aimal for reasons he doesn’t understand, snow. Before sunup Aimal retrieves the dish and hides it. After sundown, he goes back outside to aim the dish past the starving grapevines hanging over the yard, Naheb captains from inside. “Try to the right. Slower. Go back!”
Out in the yard, the dish comes up to his waist, so Aimal learns to twist his hips an inch at a time, aiming his crotch at the stars so many nights that he becomes an expert at finding the signal, and inside, at night, his family becomes close, absorbing the world. Aimal, his mother, his siblings huddled together the few nights they have power, bonding on Schwarzenegger, Bollywood, pornography, on propaganda and news. Others go off to sleep, but Aimal stays up communing with packeted data coming down from the entire large universe, often alone the entire night, once, disturbed by his mother’s early-morning laughter. Aimal turns to see her leaning on the doorjamb in her nightclothes, watching him: A boy kneeling before the TV and trying to sound like the paler people on the screen, but making only high-pitched falling silverware sounds. “My dear, are you trying to speak Chinese?”
He gets angry, gets over it, he loves her. Every night that they have power, Aimal goes out fishing for signal.
Every morning, he goes out to hide the dish so Talibs won’t see the fatherless family falling by their eyeballs into sin.
But so many mornings now, he barely has the strength to lift the dish. There’s no bread, sometimes not even tea. The leaves reused for a week are so bleached from re-steeping they don’t even muster color to shade the water. Grapes won’t grow. The Taliban are exuberant in their rules but seem unable to feed people. Aimal knows he has done something to earn this fate for himself and his family, but he isn’t sure what.
Sometimes, Aimal just looks at his mother’s face.
Even at ten he can’t bear the kindness in her eyes. Widowed young with an armful of children and no education. Her husband murdered by they still aren’t sure who, a mystery they agree not to speak of. It was war. People were killed. There are so many burdens. Aimal understands he himself is a burden. His hunger. She wouldn’t be able to handle knowing, so he keeps it from her: Aimal might be starving to death. A neighbor walking by with halwa, sweet and thin, and Aimal can almost taste it from the window. A blade in his belly. He goes to the stall where some holy man is handing out the sweet street food for free. The smell is out there, a funny insult to the air. Sugary and smoky, caramel in his nostrils, it triggers hope in his gut, and he’s just to the front of the line when he hears, “Sorry, brothers. Halwa is finished.”
Aimal scrunches his face to squeeze the tears back in. He feels eyes on him. He turns. An old man is staring. The man squints a little. Then says, “Hey, boy, will you try mine? It’s different from what I’m used to. Tell me if this one is good.”
But Aimal feels a liquid chill, something he’ll later know as pride. He shivers. This is what he’s come to. Taking food from the hands of a poor old man.
“No, I’m OK.” Aimal feels himself starting to shake. His whole body rebels, but he forces himself to say, “I’m not hungry.”
The hunger infects him. He’s cold even when it isn’t cold. The scrapes on his knees don’t heal like they’re supposed to. He carries the hunger with him, on him.
He decides he will deal with the hurt. He’ll keep it inside. He’ll use it, he thinks there must be a way to use it, as fuel. Fuel like the Talibs have to run their generators, generators the Talibs have even though the Talibs are connected to hydro and have power all day and all night. He can smell these generators coughing on some foul-smelling fuel that poisons the air. So he can too. He will use the hurt like some noxious thing to power a change, brighten the lights. His mother starves. He’ll find a way. He curses himself. Do something.
Whenever there’s power, they do the same routine with the dish, hiding their dirty habit from the Talibs, who are all around.
Aimal decides his job is harder because the family’s withering grapevines draped over the garden are blocking the stars. He climbs up with a handsaw and hacks away a dish-sized opening so the foreigners he’s trying to summon won’t get caught up in the vines. A hole big enough for Bollywood and Hollywood and the flashes of pale American breasts and square-jawed white newsmen in suits, but not so big that the Talibs he can see from up there on the roof will wonder about his strange-shaped harvest. And when he sees his next-door neighbor, a senior Taliban minister in charge of a Taliban office down the street, Aimal smiles and winks; Aimal is aware he has the camouflage of youth. He can feel how he appears, as corruptible, but not yet old enough to be corrupt.
The Taliban minister smiles back.
So. Some space to maneuver.
The hunger grows, he can’t address it, he tries harder to distract himself. He mans the family store when it’s his turn, but no one has money.
He closes the store and adventures. He walks down to the office his neighbor is in charge of, it seems to Aimal like a factory of judgement, where women are frog-marched in for their sins. Aimal wonders what they look like under their burkas. He watches men being led in, presented before his neighbor, for final judgement. His neighbor decides whether they’ll be jailed for listening to music or watching profanity or whether they’ll have a hand removed for using it to steal.
Aimal recognizes in himself fear, sometimes, but more than fear there is hunger, and more than hunger, there is boredom.
He starts going to school for a few hours a day, but in school nothing happens. Class has no puzzles to solve. No kids with backpacks like the ones from the dish, kids having interesting conversations about girls while slamming colorful lockers and invisible people laugh because it’s all so fun. No math or science because the Talibs think math and science contradict the Quran, so even school is just sitting, one teacher flitting between rooms like a trapped bird banging around for an open window.
There is nothing here.
He’s tired, being worn down. He has less and less energy to be respectful toward the Talibs. Their year in power stretches to two.
Food is no easier to find. He sees the Taliban as parents who offer nothing but punishment. They are elders, but maybe elders don’t deserve respect simply for being elders.
From the dish he knows other countries have governments that give people things. Other governments hire people to help put out fires and fix roads. Other countries have fathers who ask sons what they want for breakfast and then make it for them. It awes him.
He turns eleven and learns how poor he really is. The dish primes him to see, even here, when he looks around, how many people have better lives than he does. And what have they done to deserve it?
Even just next door. When he lets himself in to the Taliban minister’s house and jokes with his family, they seem just like Aimal’s family. They’ve accomplished nothing Aimal’s family hasn’t. So why do they have a father and he doesn’t? Why do they have electricity every night? Why are they connected to hydro when his family relies on a rickety old grid the Talibs never bother to fix?
He gets bolder. He plays with the Talib’s kids, jokes with the Talib minister. He’s less intimidated. Hunger drains him of restraint; he doesn’t have the energy for it. He grows more careless with the satellite dish every night.
He roams his neighborhood, walking into people’s houses without knocking, he sees if their homes are like the homes from the dish.
He looks for diversion, novelty. He walks into the Talib Minister’s house one day to ask if the kids want to come out and play and he sees brown bodies draped in sunset colors gyrating on a TV screen.
There’s a breathless moment before he registers that the Talib family has a television. The Talib’s wife is watching some blasphemous Bollywood soap opera, and the Talib’s wife is too slowly scooping up her clothing, leaping to her feet, fumbling to switch the television off, but all of it too late. Aimal feels a strange thing; he’s a young boy with a surge of power he shouldn’t yet have. It isn’t anger—perhaps a bit of anger—it’s mostly something foreign, something new, an interesting twinge in his chest: opportunity.
PART II
Bouncing off the blade of an antenna 22,300 miles up, thousands of hours of information shine down on Aimal all night long. Invisible light vibrating as packets of data that he reaches up and grabs. Not just some nights anymore, but every night. He’s made a deal with the neighbors, a ten-year-old kid standing with the Talib and the wife caught red-handed with the forbidden Indian soap operas. I’ll tell everyone, Aimal said, and everyone will know how you say one thing and do another. The adults hadn’t known quite what to make of the kid’s extortion, but Aimal had a proposition. Or, Aimal said, we can make a deal.
He made his calculated gamble. “We have a dish.”
He didn’t wait for the Taliban minister to fake disapproval.
“You’re just watching the same cassette over and over,” Aimal said, “but we have as many channels as you can imagine.”
With a splitter and a cable running from his living room to the Talib’s house, Aimal could provide the Talib’s family all the content in the world, while they sit in the secrecy of their own home. All Aimal wanted in return for his silence about the Talib’s hypocrisy, and for his gift of a thousand hours of programming, was for the Talib family to let Aimal wire into their power panel, so Aimal’s family could have twenty-four-seven electricity too.
So now Aimal consumes as much as he wants while one house over, the Talib watches whatever Aimal is watching because Aimal controls the receiver. Aimal, now twelve years old, controlling what the Talib family see.
Every night he dips his hands in the current of foreign lives, and then one day, in his classroom, in real life, a foreigner walks in.
Aimal rubs his eyes. It’s as if he himself, from such ardent nightly focus on foreign places, has summoned the visitor down to Earth. A white person from a charity. Offering something, Aimal doesn’t know what exactly; it doesn’t matter; he wants it. He wants to be with them, to put his heels on the dish and climb up the waves into space and then down again to the white world, white girlfriends, money, cheesecake, tall women. Fathers. The foreigner asks for anyone who could use some help from the charity to raise a hand, and for a moment Aimal forgets his pride. The other students know etiquette prevents them from admitting they’re poor, but right now, in this moment, all Aimal can see is opportunity. Everyone knows we’re all poor anyway, and he’s seen what his classmates haven’t. He knows there’s more to life in foreign places, where boys have their own bedrooms and girlfriends and dads who never died of anything violent and who come to them in the morning and say “Son, do you want cheesecake or pancakes?” or something like that, and a chorus of invisible people say awwww, and there are so many options of things to eat it’s sometimes hard for people to decide. He raises his hand.
The charity is a revelation. They teach him a trade, feed him, and give him things to bring home. He learns to make men’s clothes. They teach him the simple way the fabric falls. He takes to it, though the women’s clothes are too much. He can’t negotiate the million cuts and darts to make the fabric fold over a more complicated body; the female form holds too many mysteries. But working with all the fresh fabric, he begins to imagine himself in finery. It’s strange to be so close with clothing like that, exotic objects fashioned entirely from the same kind of fabric, rather than his own things sewn from a thousand patches. With the foreign charity, he learns what it feels like to provide. His brothers are too old for a program meant to keep young boys from idleness, so it’s him, the youngest rather than oldest male, who comes home once a month with seven kilograms of cooking oil, a sack of sugar, and a bag of beans. A surge of pride each time he arrives with supplies for his mother.
And the foreign charity teaches students the rituals of Islam. A gesture to the Taliban so the Taliban won’t worry too much about the charity leading children astray. Aimal learns from infidels how to be faithful. They teach him the duas for difficult times, how to come up with a vow when he’s in need. When the charity teaches each student a different specialty of Islamic ritual, Aimal draws the straw for funeral rites. They teach him how to wash the body and wrap it just so in the kafan. He memorizes the prayers and verses you use to send someone on their way. Forgive this person his sins so he can enter heaven with you. He learns all of it, and takes to it, and it’s as though they also know he might have to deal with death one day too.
And though the way home through his starving city hasn’t changed, it feels different now that he’s doing something with his days. It’s still a familiar trek through a forest of gaunt-limbed bodies, and he can read the creases on faces. All these wandering ghosts less connected to the foreigners than he is, until one day, as if by a snap of the fingers, he suddenly can’t read anyone at all.
Out on the street, a slow-breaking wave moves through the crowd. Squinting eyes but hiding meaning—as if everyone all at once knows something he doesn’t. He stops someone on the street. “Explosion in America,” the man says. “People are in trouble.”
Aimal is confused. Here people are in trouble.
At home, his brother seems stricken by the news. Aimal asks, “How far is America?”
Naheb tries to explain in a way that Aimal might understand. “It’s . . . well. By car, if you want to go to America, it would take . . . at least a week. Driving day and night.”
Neighbors begin to arrive quietly and slip through the door. Aimal watches them come. By now everyone knows he can speak the language of frequencies, but today is different. On all the channel numbers he knows by heart, there are only movies playing.
Behind him in the living room, as he fiddles with the receiver, he hears gasps and whispers, and now Aimal understands that everyone has been fooled. They haven’t seen as many movies as he has. They think what they see onscreen is real.
Whatever has touched people out in the street has them in its thrall here too. They’ve all gone stupid. The dish is picking up a movie. How can they not tell? It couldn’t be more obvious: The movie on screen takes place during the day, but all you have to do is look out the window to see that in real life it’s night.
Aimal changes the channel to show the actual news. But . . . strange: it plays the same movie.
He tries another channel; the same movie again. Every news channel, almost every channel, shows the same movie, and Aimal begins to feel haunted. Naheb comes to his side and whispers to him what no one ever has: Aimal dear, in different parts of the world, right now, it’s a different time of day.
Aimal tries to comprehend, but gasps from behind him crash into his thinking because one of the buildings is sort of kneeling down, like it’s done with all this. All that dust, he thinks, as a tidal flow of debris swells up from a building slipping down the screen toward the family carpet. Dust like we have here. He looks at his neighbors, who cover their mouths. Why do you care so much? This is dust like we have here.
Outside, Talibs are celebrating; they’ve begun singing.
The next weeks are the most wonderful of his life.
The dish no longer shows some foreign world but, miraculously, his own. What a strange and wondrous thing, he thinks. That his forgotten corner of the Earth is being shown to America, to Europe, to Africa, to itself.
Jeffrey E. Stern is a war correspondent and disaster response worker. His nonfiction books include The Last Thousand (2016, St. Martins Press,) and The Mercenary (PublicAffairs). His journalism has appeared in New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and he has been recognized with the Dine Award for best Humanitarian Reporting by the Overseas Press Club and the Amnesty International Award for Foreign Reporting.