Well, there had always to be people who cooked for officials and cleaned apartments. We can’t all be sixteen-year-old Malali, who snatched the flag and rallied the exhausted troops to win their great victory at the battle of Maiwand, near Kandahar. They named a school after her, and made speeches, every year, about her sacrifice. Perhaps there would be a school named after Safia Bakhshi, too, one day. The apartment was spick and span. The accounts for the month, the grocer’s bill and so on, were all paid up-to-date. This evening’s meal was ready to be served. Everything was clean, bright, ready. Tonight the chief had guests, and he liked things to be correct. Four for dinner, although it was the houseboy’s day off. Thorough, the chief, even if he was an atheist. Of course, they’d have to have an atheist as the head Russian of the Afghan Section of the KGB. He was ‘Direct from Section Five, KGB/Moscow: supervision of individual Fraternal Foreign Lands’. That’s what he’d said, and he made her memorize it.
She looked around again. Everything was in order. The beautiful silk shirts were freshly ironed; and she had even polished his new Japanese hi-fi equipment, the noise-chest she called it, which could wail like a herd of she-camels. Sometimes it gave out the sound of men and women screaming to music – well, some sort of music – while General Kirilyan lay back and drank.
Whisky, Chivas Regal, was what he liked. It came via the Soviet embassy. Funny how those Russians, who spoke all the time against the Franks, loved Western luxuries so. All except for sagmahi, fish eggs. Those were their very own, and they had a fascination for them – fish eggs, she thought, must be very common in their own country, and so they craved them, living so far from home.
The whisky was ready. Ah, there was the muezzin, giving the Call to evening prayer. That meant that General Kirilyan would soon be home, probably cursing everything about this lovely apartment, and promising Karima again that they’d soon move into one of those huge villas at Dar al-Aman, that the princes used to own. ‘Just as soon as we get some central heating in, Babushka. Then you’ll know what socialist life is really like!’ He looked like an ifreet, like the ifreet of all ifreets, legendary demons: with his huge cigar, shiny red face, and bushy brows, and that nasty-looking blue-black gun never far from his right hand. A violent man. Not like Mr Zoltan at all.
There it was now, the doorbell. He had a key, of course, but always rang to summon her as he came up.
She looked out of the window. The Afghan soldier at the entrance was presenting arms, his hastily thrown-away cigarette still smoking in the rhododendron bush. Karima smoothed her apron and ran to the apartment’s double door. The general swept in, without a word, followed by his aide, Major Hamdi, the Afghan who’d grown up in Russia and loved Russian chaqawdar shorwa, that soup made from beetroots. Hamdi, who was always boasting about the Russian food at the Khyber Restaurant in Pushtunistan Square, and the picnic boxes they sold you there. But you had to have armed guards at picnics nowadays. After him came a man in a neat Western suit, with big spectacles, and after him a shrimpy one, a male secretary with a small beard.
They sat down at the dinner table, as they always did, before the meal, for a conference. Karima stood respectfully by, waiting for an order: ice, perhaps, or salted nuts, or even to run to the shops or deliver a message.
In the years that she had been in contact with the Russians, Karima had learnt to understand almost everything they said. She couldn’t speak more than a word or two of their language, but then she didn’t have to. All they asked was that she should follow what they were saying to her, and should do what they wanted, fast. As she stood there humbly, before these important men, she was listening to their talk; and they talked freely. Servants soon become invisible to people who occupy a country.
‘This is the nineteen-eighties! We’ve got to take some account of world opinion and the damage this man can do. Don’t you know that Moscow has laid down the line? We have to fight the fight of words, all right, but there has to be consistency, and we have to know what to say.’ The general was very angry.
‘Comrade General!’ said the civilian, ‘as deputy director of training of the KHAD, it is not my function to produce explanations as to why the head of my department of the Secret Service should disappear.’
‘Lieutenant-General Ghulam Siddiq has not disappeared, you fool! I wish he had. He’s in Pakistan, giving press conferences, you lunatic! We trained him in Moscow, in Section Nine: Foreign Training, gave him the best that the KGB can offer, and what does he do? He goes over to the enemy. He’s got to be killed, I tell you! When he defected a week ago, the KGB Colonel Semensev was almost unhinged at the thought of the consequences. He shot an Afghan beggar in the market near the Pul-i-Khishti mosque, started a riot, and was beaten by the crowd. We must liquidate, destroy, kill Ghulam Siddiq. That’s all you can do with people who push you too far!’
Push me too far. That’s what Mr Zoltan had said. Karima’s concentration slipped. They wanted to kill someone, a general, an Afghan, who’d pushed them too far. Her mind went back to what she’d heard a week ago, and what she’d seen, the Event: the pictures that had been in her mind, night and day, for a week.
She had been in the Char-Chatta, the Four Arcades bazaar, after buying fresh vegetables for the evening meal, when a ragged man had come up to her, someone whom she vaguely thought she knew, but could not place. ‘Ana, mother, aren’t you the daughter of Chakmaq Khan of Kilichkoy?’ he said in Turki, the language of her village.
‘Yes, I am, but he is dead.’
‘I know that, he died, like the others, of typhus many years ago.’
Karima said, ‘I was the only one who got away. But who are you?’
‘I am your cousin, Lalbaz Khan. I was away, working as a labourer, at the big irrigation place, in Herat, when the plague struck at Kilichkoy. When I got back to the village, it had been destroyed, levelled and burnt, by the sanitary administration. They said I’d get compensation, but I could never prove my right to it. I thought I recognized you. Well. After all these years!’
He was a stocky peasant type, with second- or third-hand clothes, and a long white scar on his cheek. He must be over sixty now. The man she might have married. He looked undernourished and terribly poor.
Karima made up her mind quickly. ‘I have a good job, I am working as a housekeeper, for the Rouss.’
‘The Rouss, the Rouss, the sons of pigs!’ Lalbaz was shouting now. A crowd gathered and some stallkeepers murmured, ‘Chup sho! Be quiet; stop him: khatar de – it’s dangerous!’
Karima took his arm. ‘It is not safe to talk like that, Lalbaz. Come with me, I’ll give you food, and I have money. You’ll be all right. You can get work.’
Lalbaz squinted at her, hatred in his eyes. ‘I’m with The Eagle, I’m on my way now, to the Heaven-Born! I may be a beggar now, but I have the pride of the Afghan. I spit on the Rouss!’ At the top of his voice, he shouted, in Turki, ‘Yasha Kara Kush!’ Long live The Eagle!
A man stepped forward from the crowd. He looked like a Russian, a foreigner, at least. He drew a gun and shouted in perfect Dari, ‘Try spitting now, you scum!’ as he fired. In a second, Lalbaz was lying there, blood from his mouth spreading until it was swallowed, as if hungrily, by the thick dust.
That was the Event. A man had been killed, one of her own kin. Killing meant revenge. It started blood feuds among the people of the mountains. Men killed men, and women were left to grieve, with only, as the Afghan song said, the faces of their children to remind them of the men who died for honour. And they brought up their children, too, to die for honour. Their sons, that is.
But, on the radio now, you could hear the women of the New Afghanistan proclaiming the New Day. She had heard them a hundred times now, calling, ‘Sisters arise! Women are now the same as men, with equal rights and duties, in our dear land!’
A Russian had killed her cousin, Lalbaz. The murderer was a KGB man, like her boss.
Push me too far … any sacrifice … when I have found the way.
&
nbsp; The general was shouting again. ‘How can I explain this to Moscow? I can’t. But the Red Army has special long-range diversionary combat teams. They are specifically entrusted with the task of assassination of “important figures beyond ordinary military reach”. One of these should be sent out, to hunt him down, and to strike.’
He turned to the maid. ‘How long have I been calling you, Karima? Bring some more ice, this whisky is boiling hot, damn you!’
Karima bowed, with folded hands, as she had been taught to do. She went into the kitchen and filled a large bowl from the wonderful ice-maker which dispensed cubes when you pulled a lever. It was from America. Who would believe how the Russian general had got it? He’d said, coming in one night very drunk, ‘I got something useful for the flat today, babushka. Ice-maker, from the Pamir Room at the top of the Intercontinental. That fool of a head waiter didn’t want to give it to me. I had to show my gun to some manager of something. I claimed it as a prize for the way I dance the gopak. It’ll come tomorrow.’
And it had come, in an Iranian-made Paykan pickup truck ordered by the hotel from Shirpur Char-Rah, and delivered to the door. The general could, it seemed, do anything, get anything, he wanted.
She covered the bowl of ice cubes with a white cloth, and put it on a tray. Then she carried the tray into the dining room, which was full of stale cigarette smoke and argument. There was a small ornamental table by the wall. Karima put her tray down on the dumb waiter and placed the table next to the general. Then she carried the bowl over and placed it carefully on the side-table. She looked at the general’s bulky neck, muscles contorted as he roared, leaning forward to emphasize what he was saying. There it was. Cloth off, lean towards him …
Taking up the knife, sharp as a razor, Karima said, ‘You have pushed me further than I will go, Comrade General,’ and – with a single movement – she cut his throat.
As he slumped forward and Karima backed towards the door, the Afghan intelligence chief’s left hand was clapped to his mouth. He looked like an amazed child at the circus as he rose, uncertainly, from his chair. Then, kicking it backwards, he sprang at the woman with a curse. Karima, her work-hardened muscles twice as strong as his, pushed him to the ground. While the terrified secretary retched in a corner, she thrust the long, thin knife between the spymaster’s ribs, through the soft wool of his vest. As he went slack, she gasped, ‘For you Lalbaz, for you!’ The knife stayed in. She had to tug hard to get it out.
Major Hamdi still sat at the table, his head in his hands, rocking back and forth very slowly, as though regressed to early infancy.
The secretary was also clearly now in shock, sitting paralysed, bolt upright, like a man made out of stone. Only his bright eyes moved, rolling insanely out of all control.
There was hardly any blood on her. Karima walked into the alcove, through the kitchen, to her tiny room beyond, and changed her apron. She looked at her face in the unframed wall-mirror, and put her brush and combs, presents from Mr Zoltan and his dear mother, into the shopping bag together with her bank book. She took the voluminous, tentlike burqa cloak, which covered her from head to foot for modesty, from behind the door, pulled it over her and ran.
Through the kitchen. No, first turn off the butane-gas cooker. Into and then out of the sitting room by the far door. Close it. Then down the stairs and push the swing doors; about to pass the sarbaz on guard, the conscript, in his dowdy uniform, only about sixteen years old.
‘What’s the hurry, mother?’ He moved towards her, as if to start a conversation, jerking his head upwards as Kabulis do at the end of a question, and gave his usual foolish grin. His cheeks were hollow, Karima noticed. They really did not feed them properly, in the Army.
No sound from the apartment yet. Karima smiled and moved away, towards the road. ‘I forgot something. And now it’s all come back to me.’
He couldn’t see her smile, through the dense mask of the burqa, but he knew her voice. You always had to check, that was orders. The officers were very keen on checking. He gave her a mock salute, ‘Order me!’ Silly women, heads full of bubbles; of course, they forgot things all the time. She’d forgotten a can of oil, no doubt, and the general was roaring for his dinner. Well, there was men’s work and there was women’s work, and it had always been that way. Only three hours now to the end of his naubat …
Ten minutes later Karima was at the Shahr-i-Nau post office to draw her money. She threw up her veil to argue. ‘Not at this time of night, mother white-head,’ said the guard. ‘Come back tomorrow. Inshallah, God willing, you can have it then. Post office hours are nine a.m. to six p.m.’ Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d be hanged – after they’d taken her apart.
There was a grocer’s shop near the post office, open until very late. Kabuli grocers, she believed, had all the money in the world. The grocer took her savings book and looked at it. ‘You want it all? I can’t do that. Money is only worth half what it was when you put this in – it is called inflation – so I can only give you half. And, of course, I’ll have to bribe the postal clerk to let me take out someone else’s money. Just let me see your name, on your identity book.’
Perhaps it was only worth half, now, she thought. Of course, everything had gone up in price so much. ‘Here’s my name and fingerprint. Look, I’m Karima Chakmaqi. I work for a general, so hurry up.’
‘All right, here you are.’ He counted out the greasy notes slowly, lovingly, as if he was parting with letters from his lady-love, thought Karima. But she had to have it: had to be patient. ‘Look after your savings always, Karima,’ Mr Zoltan had said, ‘for they will mean your future safety.’ And, all the time she had known him, Mr Zoltan had never, never once, been wrong about anything.
When the fat, unshaven grocer had finished putting down the notes, counting them thrice in case he robbed himself, he looked at her with narrowed eyes.
‘What do you want all this money for, morak, little mother? And at this time of night, too. Surely you’re not eloping, are you – not at your splendid age?’ He covered his curiosity with the joke.
‘Better late than never,’ said Karima, in the same spirit. What a lot of money it looked, even half of what she’d thought she had was quite a bundle. What she was now holding in her hand must be enough to buy a cow, as her father used to say when he spoke of great riches. She put it away and started to leave the shop.
‘And see you buy the general’s groceries from me in future, I’ll give them to you at a good price!’ The grocer smiled like the predator he was.
‘With faith in God.’
‘I entrust you to God.’
And now? She walked towards the bus station, and spoke aloud, as she worked things out, making up her mind. ‘Mr Zoltan. You have led me up to now. But I’ll have to go and find The Eagle. He has to be my sultan now, my Mr Zoltan.’ Everyone knew that The Eagle was the deadly enemy of the Rouss. She knew that even General Kirilyan could not catch him, and had spoken about him more than once, as if he was afraid of him.
Karima slowed down near the Nau-Roz Carpet Shop opposite the Blue Mosque and rummaged in her shopping bag for the permit which officials’ servants carried, to travel free, even without question after curfew, on the buses. She found a small sheaf of papers as well. Surely those were the ones she’d seen in front of General Kirilyan, on the table, when she had … finished … him. She must have picked them up without thinking. Well, The Eagle would find them useful, she was sure. Mr Zoltan had been very particular about looking after papers. ‘Karima, papers can be the most important thing in this world.’
In this world. She was passing the mosque. She would not have to go in to say her prayers. People on a journey were excused formal prayer. But she always prayed in some form or other. She would recite the words as she walked.
Lead us onto the straight path, the way of those upon whom thou hast bestowed thy kindliness – not of those who have incurred wrath – of those who go not astray.
Amen.
The Eagle. Cousin
Lalbaz’s last words had been Yasha Kara Kush, Long Live The Eagle. She’d heard that The Eagle had started his fight against the Rouss alone, with just one other man. You could do a lot if you tried.
The Eagle, she thought, as she fought her way onto the big Mercedes bus for the four-hour journey to Jalalabad, four thousand feet below Kabul, might be able to use a good cook. Of course, as the radio was always saying, the people in the mountains with him might be starving. ‘Only two per cent are fighting against socialism, and will not obey the law. They are starving.’ Well, if they were, they wouldn’t need a cook. She could do something else instead.
4 Business on the Frontier
Manchester England
and Istanbul Turkey
MAY 25–26
Now and again, on British television’s networked news, there were reports from Afghanistan. Sometimes these were documentary films, taken at great risk by cameramen and reporters who had trekked across the mountain ranges from Pakistan and actually brought back film of the fighting. Sometimes there was only a map of leaf-shaped Afghanistan, stretching from China to Iran, with a voice-over saying that resistance was continuing, that this or that town or province was in revolt.
Mr Pendergood always followed those pieces of news with great attention. He listened to the radio too, both at home, the luxurious house in the northern English town where he had his prosperous road haulage and other businesses, and in his Jaguar as he gunned it along the motorways to visit one or other of his branch managers.
When he heard that the United Nations had condemned the Russians for the invasion, he had hoped that something would now be done; nothing was. Then he thought that the Soviets would withdraw after the unanimous resolution of the representatives of the Islamic States condemning them. After all, the USSR was supposed to be the champion of the emerging nations and the anti-imperialists. But they did not. Several western nations showed displeasure at the first Russian attempt to conquer a country outside the Soviet sphere of influence since World War II. The USA, for instance, boycotted the Moscow Olympics. But, after a decent interval, trade and cultural relations began to return to normal. Even the wrist-slapping was over.