Kara Kush

  Pendergood, listening to the radio over his morning cup of Earl Grey tea one day, heard two scraps of news. The first was that the Geneva Conference, supposed to solve the ‘Afghan problem’, had collapsed. The second was that the proportion of Afghan civilians already killed was greater than those who might have died in a world nuclear war. Pendergood had made up his mind even before the newsreader came to the item about the alleged use of poison gas …

  He was single, fifty-three, and had been described in his local newspaper as ‘amiable and massively-built, a pillar of the community, Rotarian and transport king’. Mr Pendergood reckoned that, amiable or not, the time had come: enough was enough.

  He bathed, did his fifty press-ups, dressed in one of his impeccable, grey chalk-stripe suits, and called his general manager. Then he visited his lawyer to arrange for the sale of his extensive assets, and told his secretary to call the travel agent who specialized in Middle Eastern matters for top people, with efficiency and discretion: Hogg Robinson in London’s Kingsway.

  Before lunch he was getting a hundred and thirty miles an hour out of the car as he flogged it down the motorway towards Heathrow Airport.

  As the English countryside, in all its astonishing neatness, flashed past, Pendergood wondered whether a police patrol would pick him up: he almost hoped they would. Providing he did not refuse to stop, they would not arrest him. They only gave you a summons. And who was going to enforce that, and where?

  On the empty passenger seat lay the object he had taken from the wall, inside the front door of his mock-Georgian house, on the way out.

  An Afghan dagger with the Seal of Solomon on the hilt, mark of one of the master smiths of the Frontier. Tucked into a slit in the deerskin scabbard was the usual trophy: the scrap of fading, coarse material; cloth from the knife’s first victim. From the uniform jacket of a redcoat in the first Anglo-Afghan war.

  It had been his grandfather’s, and given to Pendergood when he was only ten years old. As a boy he had never looked at the weapon with particular pride: never thought that he, Painda-Gul, would one day be a United Kingdom citizen, anglicized into the respected Mr Pendergood, company director, who read the Daily Telegraph and was from time to time invited to give prizes at charity occasions.

  Most of his fellow Britishers, certainly until a few months ago, would not have been able to locate Afghanistan on a world map. But Pendergood, like his ancestors since long before the ancient Greek geographers had reported to the West about his tribe, the warlike Apridae, the Afridi of today, knew where it was. And he knew that the people of the Free Land needed him.

  Pendergood parked the Jaguar at the Heathrow Long-Term Car Park and took the courtesy bus to Terminal Two. Then he checked in for Flight TK 90, takeoff time 0945.

  His neighbour in the jetliner introduced himself as a scientist, heading for Anatolia to advise on soil erosion problems, sent by a major British university.

  ‘I am honoured,’ said Pendergood in his agreeable north country English voice, ‘and as for me, I am the Khan Painda-Gul Khan, of the Pashtun Land. My name means “Everlasting Flower” in the transborder territory. I have a business matter to attend to.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the academic, turning his grey face, grey-rimmed glasses and grey look upon the swarthy tycoon. ‘And what might your avocation be?’

  ‘I have recently retired from commerce,’ said Mr Pendergood, ‘and my family have trouble with their neighbours over who owns what so I am going back to help them sort it out.’

  The conversation lapsed, and Pendergood’s thoughts went back to that day – thirty-three years ago – when he had taken a flight to Paris, on the off-chance that he might be able to meet another man, also of Pashtun blood. Two decades before the man’s father and Pendergood’s had, at the head of the Pashtun armies, stormed the stronghold of the tyrant usurper of Kabul’s throne. Now the son’s standard waved over the Crillon Hotel. His name was His High Royal Presence King Zahir Shah.

  Inside the hotel Pendergood had put on his Afghan cap, of rare golden karakul fur with tiny curls, and sat in the lounge while he watched various people coming and going. He followed some of them, finally, up the broad stairs to the first floor. More people were standing on almost every step and in the corridors, waiting to see the great man. Some had parcels, others letters. One man had a huge and elaborately polished saddle, fit for a king, at his feet. They all looked like Frenchmen, and as if they wanted something badly. Probably money. Pendergood ignored them and pressed on.

  Finally he saw a door, and a small group being ushered into an anteroom. Pendergood followed them and, like them, sat down. After a few minutes they disappeared, at someone’s beckoning, through a door at the far end of the room. A few minutes later the courtier showed them out. Coming back, he looked at Pendergood and, assuming that he had an arranged audience, signalled him to follow.

  In a few seconds, Pendergood was in a large room with two rows of straight backed Louis XIV chairs down the middle. The rows faced one another and only one chair was occupied. On it sat the King: a tall man with black, piercing eyes and an athlete’s build. The half dozen courtiers present were standing along the walls of the room where they could not hear any conversation. Pendergood walked up to his monarch, took and kissed his hand and, with the Pashtun’s usual aplomb, sat down and began to talk. After all, a king was just a type of tribal chief.

  ‘Painda-Gul of the Pashtuns, from Afridiland, at the service of his Majesty,’ said Pendergood.

  ‘You are welcome. May you never be tired. What work are you doing?’ The King was wearing a grey, single-breasted suit, and sat very straight. He had a moustache, and he was going bald. He was about forty, Pendergood knew, although he looked rather older; certainly older than his photographs. Still, he’d been on the throne since he was nineteen. His father, Marshal Nadir, was killed by a disaffected student in 1933, and Zahir Shah had reigned since then.

  ‘May it be acceptable to his Majesty! Engaged in commerce in England, and free for any service commanded by the Imperial Presence, sir!’

  The King sat quietly. Pendergood said nothing. He had, after all, only come to render homage to his king. He’d used the customary formula but didn’t need a job.

  ‘Painda-Gul Khan. You are welcome to come to Kabul, to serve your country. We can find some work for you; there is need of people with experience.’

  ‘Your Majesty has honoured me, and I rejoice that we have such a great king.’

  ‘All my work is for you, for the people,’ said Zahir. ‘Thank you for coming, Painda-Gul Khan. May your life be long!’

  ‘May his Majesty live for ever!’

  Pendergood had taken his hand and kissed it, as the King made the customary modest gesture of snatching it away.

  It wasn’t the content of the meeting: Pendergood knew that chiefs and monarchs seldom said anything of consequence at audiences. It was the fact that he had now met the King. And he had pledged his loyalty to the Afghan Land. The King had, later, not acquiesced in the Russian occupation. From his Italian exile, he had just stated that it was his wish that things could be put to rights. He took no active part, but saw himself as the unifying element. Pendergood understood. Others were trying to form a government in exile: but the war would have to go on.

  He was now on his way to see an arms dealer in Istanbul. He would do some buying: after that he would join the fight.

  Pendergood thrust Paris and the Crillon out of his mind as the stewardess came past, making sure that seat belts were fastened. Turbulence, she said. Turbulent: that’s what the British had always called the tribes. The Romans had called the British that, too, once upon a time …

  The pilot’s voice came over the intercom. ‘This is Captain Kayser. In a few moments, at 1605 local time, we shall be landing at Yeilkoy Airport, Istanbul. Thank you for being with us, and please fly again with Türk Hava Yollari.’

  Pendergood had forgotten to fill in his disembarkation card. The woman at the immigration contr
ol window said that she would do it for him, to save time. She took his British passport from him. ‘No, I’d better do it,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a foreign name, you see. It’s Gul, spelt –’

  She smiled at him. ‘You think I can’t spell “Gul”? It’s one of our own names, too.’

  Nobody in England had ever been able to spell his name.

  I’ll soon be there, I’m halfway home at least, Painda-Gul told himself as the bus took him through the outer suburbs towards Taksim. At least the Turks were not asleep, he thought, as he passed the huge posters with their slogan: Crush Communism! The Russians had been trying to conquer Turkey, too, for centuries.

  He would make certain arrangements with the arms merchant in Istanbul, and then visit the gunrunners of the Afghan borderland.

  5 A Caravan for David Callil

  Inside Afghanistan

  On the road west of Chitral, Pakistan

  MAY 31–JUNE 8

  The straggling line of animals which formed the caravan – donkeys, mules, camels and here and there a horse – crept through the defiles north of the Khyber Pass, plodding towards Kabul. It was not taking the usual lowland route. Nowadays, everything which moved between Pakistan and the Afghan capital by established ways was checked and double-checked; the communist regime at Kabul and the Russian overlords hated ‘the colander’, as they called the open transborder territory. Too many people, too much news of the outside world and too many guns were trickling into the former God-given Kingdom, now the People’s Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

  Daud Khalil hugged his belted fur coat around him as the icy wind from the Hindu Kush seemed to tear at his throat, seemed to scream defiance at everyone. Every now and then there was a miniature avalanche. Boulders loosened by the wind or the melting snow, at some incalculable height above, would roll and thud, blocking the way before the stumbling animals. In this never-ending mountain wind, Khalil had been told, people went mad.

  ‘When you feel both starving and ready to vomit,’ the old cattleman had said, ‘that is the first sign of the diwanagi, the madness. It is partly the height which does it. If there is anyone with you, have him open a vein, to release the pressure of your blood. If you are alone, do it yourself, with a penknife. You may bleed to death, but you may live.’

  Khalil pressed his clenched fist down upon the camel’s neck, and thought he felt it respond with gratitude. Central Asian two-humped Bactrians, he knew, were sensitive; if badly treated, they often run away. Hardship breaks their hearts. Well-treated, they are the finest mounts on earth. ‘We learned kindness,’ the cattleman had said, over the fire one night, ‘from having to treat the camels well. Then we applied it to people.’

  It was the cattleman who had taught him Pashtu, the ancient Afghan tongue, sitting night after night under the stars, encamped under the Southern Cross. ‘Afghanistan Zindabad! – Long Live Afghanistan. There’s probably no more than a dozen people in this country, Cobber, that speak Pashtu now, or know much about camels. But it wasn’t always like that.’

  Even above the shriek of the wind, Khalil heard the now-familiar thunder of an avalanche. It sounded as if it was just above him. As one man, the thirty members of the caravan pushed their animals against the rock wall, covering their heads with their hands and crouching against the grey conglomerate. It was either that or the precipice on the other side of the ledge. Within seconds a cascade of boulders, stripped of their snow and dust by the wind’s lashing, hurtled past, within a foot or two of the little group. When the avalanche was over they started moving again. Khalil, nudging his camel forward, thought of Sydney, New South Wales, where he was born.

  David Callil he was then, of course, in the Anglicized version of his name, grandson of the Afghan Anwar Khalil of the Yusufzai clan. Anwar had been a companion of the great Dr Allum, known throughout Australia in the nineteen thirties as a wise man and a healer, almost a saint. Khalil still had the clippings from the Melbourne Age, with pictures and testimonials of the doctor at work. Before the railways were built in Australia, both Anwar and Allum had learned their camel-caravan skills in just such terrain as this, alternately whipped by wind and rain and baked by the Central Asian sun. The Australians had needed transport, and the Afghans had come, halfway across the world, and made the great trans-continental roads, treading them out with their camels. To settlers in remote districts, the link with the outside world had been the Gan. Even when the railways and motor transport came, the trains were called the Gan. Then the camels, no longer useful, had been let loose in the desert, had run wild. Now, generations later, they were being rounded up and sold to Saudi Arabia, for a new life in a new land. Dr Allum’s name, too, had come to the fore again, as Australians embraced the new vogue for herbal medicines, the remedies in which the ancient Hakim had specialized.

  ‘One day,’ the old cattleman had said to Callil, ‘your turn may come; your Afghaniyyat, Afghanness, may be needed. Listen, I shall recite to you the words of the national bard, Khushhal of the Khattak clan, who roused our nation against the Mogul conquerors, the Mongols from the north. Who knows, they may sweep over Afghanistan again …’

  At twenty-eight, David Callil was fluent in Pashtu, well versed in the traditions of an ancestral land which was as shadowy as that in any fairy-tale – and assistant manager of a factory in Sydney, making small machine parts. After the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the Russian takeover in 1980, The Australian featured something about Afghanistan almost weekly. But Callil could not connect himself, his life and hopes, with this far-off land where hippies used to go, or through which thousands of Antipodean overlanders in battered Bedford trucks, seeking their roots, raced on their way Home, which generally turned out to be London’s Earl’s Court and a job washing dishes in a pizza parlour.

  In 1982, the old cattleman was long dead. Callil was watching the television news when he saw the documentary film made in the Panjsher Valley by the British newscaster Sandy Gall. Commander Mahsud was preparing for a strike against the Russian forces. A line of ragged, bearded men, ill-equipped and thin from hunger, spoke laconically about driving over a hundred thousand well-disciplined troops out of their land. Some of the Afghans had muzzle-loading guns, unrifled, such as had not been used in any real war for two hundred years. There they were, making their own gunpowder, firing at helicopter gunships which dropped explosive charges disguised as toys, for children to pick up …

  Countryside like this ledge in the mountains, people like that muleteer in front of him, men who were not afraid to die …

  Five days before, asking questions and hanging around the bazaar of a tiny frontier town, he had met the caravan as it was assembling. A week before that he had been in Sydney, buying his single ticket to Pakistan. Now he was in Afghanistan: and Pakistan, thirty miles distant, already seemed a world away.

  Suddenly the way ahead opened up, and the caravan moved onto a small plateau. On one side stood a massive stone-built and fortified building: the Sarikoh Caravanserai. When the animals had been fed and stabled in a roofed area sheltered from the wind, Callil went into the huge barnlike room which seemed to form the main dining, resting and sleeping space of the serai.

  Khalil began to doze, less and less aware of the smell and his body, aching all over.

  A kaleidoscope of Sydney flashed through his mind. The decision to get to Afghanistan, to see if he could help, even in some small way. He’d gone into a shop, attracted by a poster proclaiming The Truth about Afghanistan. The man inside was friendly enough at first. ‘Welcome. What’s your name? Right … No, you can’t go to Afghanistan yet, mate, there are too many bandits about. But the Soviet Union will soon help to sort them out.’

  He was in a communist office!

  ‘But the Afghans are fighting for their freedom against the Russians!’

  ‘Balls! The Russians were called in to help defend the Afghan Revolution against the capitalists and the American imperialists. Look at these photographs of captured Yankee arms and poison-gas can
isters …’

  He’d then gone to see his employers, giving one day’s notice. The boss had started to shout and bang his fist on the desk. ‘Afghanistan – are you crazy? That’s just a load of effing Arabs. Look, no time ago our Deputy Prime Minister lost his job because of a scheme to raise four billion dollars from the Arabs for mineral exploration. It’s this bloody Asian connection that’s ruining the country! We never had unemployment and inflation before it. Abbos, the lot of them. We’ve given rice to Indonesia, technical help to South Korea, rehabilitation money to Vietnam, we’ve helped Indochinese refugees to Thailand. We’re up to our necks in a barmy plan called ASEAN, together with a dozen woggie countries. They’re worse than the pommie commies who’re wrecking labour relations in Australia. I ought to know: it’s ruining my business. Keep out of it, son. Arabs!’

  ‘The Afghans are not Arabs. They’re Caucasians …’

  ‘Oh, get out, bastard!’

  The fire was out and the dim pre-dawn light was spreading through the hole in the roof. Suddenly, as Khalil snapped awake, there was a wild cry from the Mulla’s sleeping place, a heaving and threshing, while the Hazara beside him jabbered, ‘He’s been bitten by a scorpion!’

  ‘Bagir o naman! Hold him and don’t let him go, dog, son of a dog! Swine, child of adultery! Accursed infidel!’ The Mulla’s voice was raucous, hysterical.