Kara Kush
As an Uzbek, Azambai knew a great deal about hostages. Some of his family had been through that in the nineteen thirties. Now they were tame. He would always behave himself, he realized, because of his family.
The Soviet Union was obsessed by legality and correctness. Was it that bureaucracy, taken to extremes, became oppression? Or that oppression needed the fiction of legality, a craving for the respectability that it could never have?
Azambai was still wondering when, the papers served, they sent the girl back to the communal cells below.
9 Captain Azambai, Soviet Red Army
South of Khaja Rawash Airbase
Kabul Road
MAY 2
Captain Yusuf Azambai. That really stood for something in Uzbekistan. People in Russia often said that the Uzbeks were not warriors – not nowadays at least. They said that centuries of the soft life of Central Asia’s most cultured land had made them effete. That their lack of interest in the Russian advance into their homeland for a hundred and fifty years had helped the Slavs to consolidate their empire deep into Asia.
Let them say it, he thought.
The Central Asians, people like Azambai, had ruled European Russia itself for two hundred and fifty years. That was longer than most Europeans had held their own more recent empires. Even in Slavic Russia it was still remembered that those old Russian princes, the stiff-necked aristocrats, traced their ranks and titles from Mongolian – and not Russian – yarliks, permits to rule, granted at Saray, the great capital of the Khan. Turkestan was not pacified by the Russians until the 1930s; and Captain Azambai, though a good communist, had heard the tales of the resistance, of the deeds of the Basmachi, and in one part of his mind he was almost proud of them.
He was only twenty-eight, a product of the policy of Nativization, assimilation into Slavic culture. His father had remembered the days when their country had been free, as he called it. He always called Nativization ‘Russification’.
But the older generation also spoke of their fear of the tortures and dungeons of the old-time Emirs, of the taxes and seizures of their goods, of the forced labour and the uncontrolled epidemic sicknesses. Many of them had found, after the Bolshevik Revolution, that they could survive well enough under the Soviets, and left it at that. It was the foreignness of the Russians, and their monopoly of the real control, which they disliked. But there were many advantages. A man would be left alone if he kept quiet. He had to vote for a certain candidate, but if he behaved himself, would not be flogged just for nothing. The Slavs had a saying which they quoted to minority peoples. ‘Why should you care who’s holding the goat, if you’re allowed to milk it?’
But the curious thing was that the younger people, people of the captain’s age and younger, were starting to question Nativization. Some were in prison for ‘agitation’. There had been show trials of separatists lately. They wanted more milk, and even part control of the goat.
Yes, something was stirring in Turkestan. From time to time in the papers one saw that bands of Murids, disciples of Sufi spiritual teachers, had been rounded up. Unofficial mosques had been established, and everyone could hear the broadcasts of ‘the message of Allah’ from the three thousand kilowatt transmitter in Iran. And there was Radio Pakistan, mentioning unheard-of luxuries which were apparently available for ordinary people there. And Soviet Asians had come back from the Great Patriotic War against Germany to tell, in Bokhara or Stalinabad, that they’d seen the Russians run ‘both ways’: in retreat as well as in attack.
And something was stirring in Captain Azambai, as one of those seventy million non-Slav Soviet citizens that, had they known it, Moscow was already privately calling, ‘our Eastern time bomb’. Before the end of the century their birthrate would make them the majority in the Soviet Union.
When he was off-duty, Azambai would put on a civilian suit and a plastic raincoat, perch an Afghan fur cap on his head, and pass the time walking through the Kabul bazaars or sitting in a teahouse, making friends. Doing this really helped; many of the Soviet soldiers, cut off from all contacts except those of the barrack room, were showing unwelcome psychological symptoms. Many had been sent home; the worst cases had even developed delusions; some had become violent. Civilians would not talk to them, pretended they did not exist, or spoke to them confusingly; and shopkeepers, except for the greediest or poorest, would not seem to comprehend even the simplest words in Russian, or even in English or the other languages which all the Kabul traders knew quite well.
Yes, the teahouses helped. Although they numbered a quarter of a million, most Kabulis seemed to know each other, or at least could place anyone after a few sentences. The captain was never quite sure whether the Afghans knew from his accent, his clothes, or his lack of mutual friends or geographical knowledge, betrayed by his conversation, that he was one of the occupying army. Nobody ever said anything about it. But then, nobody ever mentioned the Russians in his presence, either, in the teahouses.
One day Azambai had gone into a café where he had guessed, by the atmosphere, that the regulars had been talking about him. They had all fallen silent and looked guilty as he entered. He even thought that he had just caught the words that the owner was saying: ‘He is really one of our own – he’ll come home.’
Az khud-i-ma hasten, you are one of our own. That was the phrase that Afghans used to one another, and it showed a deep affection, a bond that made their eyes light up. One could feel the effect, almost physically. So far, however, nobody had said it to Captain Azambai. To them he was what he had represented himself to be, Yusuf the Turkestani, ‘an official’. There was an Afghan Turkestan, too, of course. Exactly the same sort of people lived on both sides of the Oxus. Members of families separated by the water would wave to one another at the narrower points.
All over the Soviet Union there was a great yearning for peace and security: but the Party, and most of the highest officials, were obsessed by fear. Azambai was becoming convinced that his rulers feared losing power and had displaced that fear onto the external enemy, the Capitalist Imperialist.
But those who had little to lose, the ordinary people, seemed to fear the West less and less.
Friendship with the people of other countries: not to be an outcast nation; that was what the great mass of Russians wanted. It might take a lot of time, and in the meantime Captain Yusuf Azambai sensed, day by day, a fellow-feeling among the Afghans which the foolishness, as much as the evil intent, of the regime had brought about.
Who would ever know what did it, had made him change his life? He started to wonder, and then stopped; and started to think again. Of course he had thought of getting out, of going to America, perhaps, where you might have your own farm, or a small shop. Even Russians spoke of it. They were all immigrants over there, in the United States, or the children of immigrants, weren’t they?
Was it only the shock of how things had changed, that had changed him: or had he intended it all along?
It had just come to him, the plan, as he was driving along the road. He was in an army car, with some sticks of dynamite needed for training exercises. And in civilian clothes: he was off-duty. The two-way radio was on, so that he could be called up by the new commander if there was a crisis, to do his active duty job of spotting badmashes.
He had been to the great Soviet Army base, at Khaja Rawash, six miles north of Kabul, to see about the delayed supplies for the fortress garrison. Halfway back to the city, he had felt filled by something, well, like light: that was all you could say about it. Everything seemed changed; suddenly he felt as if he knew the truth.
The Eagle that they talked about was right, was the hope, the real man of the time. It was as if a voice was saying, ‘Must go to him, must go to him.’ But of course there was nobody in sight. A disembodied voice. Could he do it?
His relatives in the Soviet Union would be arrested, made to suffer. His name would be besmirched, used in propaganda as a man who’d taken American money, or fallen prey to Zionist brainwashin
g, cosmopolitanism. A traitor.
Then the solution, fully rounded, all of a piece, came to him. He saw the scene in the officers’ mess. The colonel talking.
‘Died on active service, ambushed by terrorists. A pension for his dependants. Such a promising young officer, a really good product of Nativization, you know. A toast, Comrades, another vodka …’
He stopped the car. There was nobody, not even a patrolling helicopter, in sight. This road had been quiet for some days now, since the last batch of bandits had been wiped out trying to mine it. Usually it was forbidden to travel on it without an escort, but a shortage of spare parts meant that vehicles were scarce. After clearing a road, the army would risk using it for a day or two. Until the guerrillas came back.
Captain Azambai tied together and fused the packets of dynamite which he had collected from Khaja Rawash. Then, removing the raincoat and radio from the vehicle, he drove it off the road and blew it, expertly, into pieces. It made a satisfactory, but not too loud, bang. One heard that particular sound all the time these days. The official explanation was that it was blasting from the quarries in the hills.
It was only a three-mile walk to Kabul from there and the new guerrilla, dressed in his respectable off-duty civilian suit, trudging along the road, looked perfectly natural. There was little petrol to be had these days; salaries were so small that the middle classes, people who wore clothes like these, walked everywhere when they could not get on the crowded buses.
Something was coming from the direction of the airfield. He turned.
‘Hoo-raa!’ With clenched fist salute and the new Afghan cry of salutation, pioneered by the Party, he greeted the vehicle coming up behind him. It was a five-ton BTR scout car, with the top shut. The standard reconnaissance vehicle of the Soviets, in green and khaki camouflage. Like most Soviet Fraternal Force vehicles, it carried the blazon of the Afghan Army. The teenage driver, a Russian conscript corporal with a Slavic face, opened his hatch and called to him.
‘Jump in, uncle, if you’re going to town. I’m delivering this to Kabul. We’re not allowed to pick up Afghans, but you seem to be a good Party man.’ Obviously a Komsomol member, doing his good deed for the day. He spoke in Russian, with a couple of Dari words to help out, in case the Afghan comrade didn’t understand.
‘Thank you, I don’t speak much Russian.’
‘Never mind.’
‘What was the explosion, off the road, a few minutes ago?’ the Russian asked his passenger.
‘Da da, vodka, bravo! I like drink too much,’ smiled the captain. Azambai was overdoing it a little, but the noncom didn’t know. He just said, ‘Afghanistan very good’ in his best Pashtu, and left it at that. He was thinking about something else. In Kabul he might sell a couple of gallons of petrol, for money to buy himself a ring, silver with lapis lazuli set in it.
They sped on, past the lines of caterpillar-track mounted surface-to-air rockets defending the city against possible capitalist bombers, towards Kabul.
How strange, thought Yusuf, I’ve been purified, made clean and whole. I am a new man. I was born only today. And, of course, anyone who talks like this is insane. Perhaps it is as well, for the Soviet Union, that they’ve only lost a lunatic. If I’d been there, they’d have had to put me in a madhouse. It costs the State so much to give therapy to dissidents. Medical treatment is expensive.
Lunatic or not, his surname, Azam, meant ‘the great’, with the honorific bai denoting descent from what the western Turks called a Bey, a governor. Well, Lenin himself was an aristocrat of the noble Ulyanov line. But he might now have to be more like a fox, he thought, to reach the Paghman range or Kohistan, that really wild country of the hillmen, to find The Eagle and his men. He was momentarily startled to find that a part of his mind was working out a programme for him.
It was impossible to walk all the way to the foothills; the transport corporal was only going as far as Kabul, and it would not do to tarry there. And the radio was quite heavy, even though it was one of the new ones. Most of the Soviet equipment was incredibly bulky; the radios had vacuum tubes, which blew or shattered easily but, oddly enough, would be safer than transistorized ones in nuclear war, less vulnerable to EMP, the electromagnetic pulse which followed a nuclear explosion.
They were in the town, rolling over the dusty asphalt. The scout car stopped.
‘Thank you, officer!’
‘A pleasure, sir, gospodin!’
He jumped down from the motor near the centre of old Kabul’s crazy jumble of shopping streets, a mixture of open-air market and tiny stores, among the offerings of silks, vegetables, kitchen knives, meat and fur caps, old clothes and auto-parts.
There were no Russian civilians in the street at the moment, though they were sometimes to be seen, in groups and carrying guns, stocking up on blue jeans and scents, karakul furs and Western candies, anything they could not get at home.
The military were being kept off the streets: too many of them had been killed recently by angry Afghans. Only the civilian ‘advisers’ – there were perhaps ten thousand of them in the whole of this huge country – and their wives and children could walk about with impunity. Despite the cruel provocations of the regime, Afghans still clung to the principle of sparing non-combatants. Yet some of those specialists, Azambai knew, were more deadly in what they could do than any ordinary soldier might be. There were, for instance, the KGB, security, running the Afghan KHAD, the political police, to whom a network of informers gave their information, leading to death, destruction, torture, hostage-taking.
As he was walking, determined to keep moving in case a zhondarm decided to ask for papers, Azambai realized that he was in familiar territory. Yes, this was the street of Banafsha-i-Koh Chaikhana, the Teahouse of the Mountain Violets, which he often used to visit. There it was. Time for a cup of tea. Almost from habit he turned and walked straight in. There were about twenty people of all ages and kinds, sitting smoking, sipping green tea with cardamoms, gossiping as usual. Just the same as always. He sat down at a table and called for tea.
It was still only eleven o’clock in the morning of the day on which he had got up as a smart and promising captain in the fraternal forces of the Soviet Union. Now he was skulking, like a fox. He would have to accomplish more by sunset. Get to The Eagle.
The tea came, hot and sweet with a dollop of clotted cream swimming on top – a drink that was almost a meal. He fished some coins out of his pocket, waved away the change. The lad smiled thanks. Now a shadow had fallen on his table: there was something between him and the sunshine pouring through the dirty windowpane.
He hadn’t got a gun, but he picked up a knife from the table, to be as ready as possible for anything.
But it was only Wasif, a petty official from the Ministry of Frontier Affairs.
‘May you not become tired, Mr Yusuf of Samarkand stock. You are early today, janim, my life.’
‘May you not become sad, Mulla Wasif.’ In Afghanistan everyone was addressed by his father’s title, if he had none of his own.
Wasif sat down. ‘Backgammon?’
‘Forgive me, I’m a little tired.’
‘Your flocks and your house are well, I hope?’
‘Thanks to God. Are you well?’
‘Praise Allah.’
‘Any news?’
‘None.’
Azambai sipped his tea, while Wasif eyed him, rather narrowly, he thought. ‘Things are bad among the tribes, you know.’ But Wasif was always conspiratorial. He liked to hint at deep secrets, known only at the Ministry.
‘I thought there wasn’t any news?’
‘That’s not news, it’s going on all the time.’
‘Not a revolt?’
‘Among the tribes, you can’t tell whether they’re having a revolt or celebrating a marriage. Kabulis say that when they hear two Pashtuns singing love songs, they think that they’re swearing at each other.’
‘Yes, I’d heard that.’
Suddenly Azambai
felt very tired. It was almost as if someone else was talking as he said, ‘Listen, Wasif. Where can I find The Eagle, and how soon can I do it?’
Wasif looked at him as if he’d just disclosed an unbelievable secret. His mouth opened once or twice, then shut. Then he shook his head as if to clear it. Then he gulped a couple of times. Finally he said: ‘No, you must be all right. But I always thought you might be a big man in the KHAD.’
‘No, I’m nothing like that. I … I just want to join The Eagle,’ was all that the Turkestani could manage.
‘Then who are you – what work do you do?’
‘Until a few hours ago I was a captain in the Askari Sowyeti, the Soviet Army.’
‘Unmentionable interior parts of a swine!’ Wasif’s face was a picture of astonishment. ‘Who are you now?’
Azambai shrugged. ‘You tell me, my friend.’
Suddenly, and very alarmingly, Wasif was standing up, waving his arms and shouting: ‘O people! O brothers, come here, hear this!’
Azambai grabbed his arms and tried to stop him, to pull him down on the bench beside him. Wasif was laughing though, fit to burst, and the people of the teahouse were gathering around with puzzled but interested faces, peering.
‘It’s nothing,’ was all that Azambai could find to say. He repeated it several times.
The crowd leant forward. It was always something, it couldn’t be just nothing. People came to the teahouse to hear things. That is why these places were called the Newspaper made of Bricks.
‘Shut up.’ The owner of the café, the massive Dilaram (it means Heart Ease) Khan, bellowed from beyond the cooking-pots. ‘We don’t want the zhondarm here.’
‘Zhondarm, zhondarm, calamities upon the spiritual teacher of the zhondarm’s mother!’ raved Wasif, tears of laughter running down his cheeks. He was capering with excitement.
But the crowd demanded more. Seizing Wasif, they insisted on knowing what all the fuss was about. ‘Stop screaming, you Tajik! Tell us.’ A burly hillman grabbed him by his pyjama jacket, using the name for Persian-speakers which implied scorn in the Free Land.