Читать книгу Flashes of War - Katey Schultz - Страница 15

Into Pure Bronze

Now that schools are open again and there’s government and voting, we spend our days inside reciting numbers and studying legendary Afghans: our first king, Ahmed Shah Durrani; or the martyr Massoud, an anti-Soviet fighter killed by Al Qaeda; and our latest hero, Rohollah Nikpai, Olympic Bronze Medalist in taekwondo. Kabul Stadium even has new grass in anticipation of Nikpai’s welcome party.

Sometimes, our schoolteacher turns to the blackboard, and my friend Hadir and I thrust leopard fists into the air, saluting Nikpai. When she snaps to look at us, we sit on our hands and stare at our ledgers, pretending. We are thirteen, oldest in the class, so the other boys don’t point or tell. When the teacher turns again, we roll our eyes and snicker. The day goes faster this way, even though occasionally I feel bad for disrupting.

Hadir knows a secret way into Kabul Stadium. He believes practicing soccer on that field will one day make him a star, just like Nikpai. Some weeks there’s a night guard, but none ever keep the job for long. Nobody wants to go near, nobody but Hadir. At first, I tell him it isn’t right. That it’s strange wanting to be so close to the dead. But he calls me sissy, which he knows I hate even more than juggling the ball by myself, so I go with him. There isn’t actually anybody buried there, but so many Afghans were tortured inside the stadium, everyone knows it’s haunted.

At night, Hadir dribbles the ball down the alley between apartments and tosses pebbles onto the roof where my family sometimes sleeps. Once, a pebble hit my baby sister, and she had a fit, keeping my mother awake the rest of the night. “Hurry up, Pirooz!” Hadir will shout, “Let’s go!” And I’ll dash away, ignoring mother. My father works at night for the local police. Sometimes all he does is sit in a cement block building with other officers. Hadir is an orphan. We do as we please.

Inside the stadium, row after row of bleachers form a bowl around bright green grass that glows, even in the dark. There’s nothing else in Kabul this color, “the color of prosperity,” our newspaper called it. They didn’t mention how so much blood leeched into the soil, the top foot was dug up and replaced before officials got anything to grow. Hadir and I play barefooted, kicking up soil and clumps of grass. We make long passes with the ball, panting up and down the sidelines to train both legs for well-aimed kicks. “Faster, Pirooz, faster,” Hadir calls, and together we get lost in the work of it.

Our teacher used to wear a burqa, but now she doesn’t. I study her lips when she speaks, two plump dates that open and close in this way I can’t forget. I’ve never seen skin that looks so soft. Like you could press her lips with your fingertips and they would sink, as if into a pillow. I watch her silently and wonder. The Taliban executed teachers like her. Or sometimes, the Taliban amputated their hands. When our teacher moves up and down the aisles of the classroom, she runs her hands along the edge of each desk. I hold my breath when she comes near, imagining her wrists as puffy stumps, no hands or fingers with which to write.

Everybody knows the Taliban used to hang body parts from the stadium goal posts as an example. I never went to see the torture, but men in my neighborhood did. “Allahu Akbar!” they would shout when they returned home from the frenzy. I heard them talking, the bloodshed they described. They fired AK47’s and danced in the streets, sometimes chattering for hours as the families on my block tried to sleep. I was tiny, four or five, but their tone made an impression on me; men’s voices echoing through the alleys, a wretched, powerful kind of laughter that I understood had nothing to do with comedy.

Hadir often asks me to play goalie during our secret practices in Kabul Stadium. I stand in front of the repainted white goal posts that seem to float in the moonlight against the darkened stadium benches. He takes aim and kicks full strength, the leather ball slapping into my palms, against my chest, off my forehead. When I miss, I have to chase the ball to the outer edges of the field where I feel spooks trying to grab at me. Still, Hadir aims again and again, as though he can see a crowd roaring just for him all night long.

Later, we lie on our backs and look at the star-pocked sky. Hadir plucks fistfuls of grass from the field. Each clump radiates an infused, lime light from his palms, like he’s holding an electric gem. Grass blades scratch at my back and tickle my nose.

“This must be what it smells like at the World Cup,” Hadir says and tosses grass into the air.

“Maybe,” I say. I think about the souls of Afghans trying to claw their way out of the ground. “Maybe not.”

“By the time we’re old enough, things will be different,” he says.

“They already are.”

“Not really, Pirooz, not like our teacher promises.”

“Well, what do you mean?” I wonder if he’s thinking about his parents, whatever his life was like before.

“I mean, there could be people celebrating and people forgetting to be afraid,” he says. “Like all the infighting just disappearing so the rest of us can live our lives. There could even be soccer teams, coaches.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say. Hadir tosses the ball straight into the air a few times, catching it just above his nose. The wind blows and sweat cools on my skin.

“I came here once before the war,” he finally says. “The Taliban were rounding people up. I got swept into the crowd. A man picked me up and carried me into the stadium. There were other kids in there too, waving their hands. We filled all the rows in that first section.” He sweeps his arms in a circle around the stadium, indicating several thousand close-range seats.

“Hadir?” I say.

“They tortured women on the soccer field for adultery that day.”

“Hadir, I don’t want to know.”

“But there’s no way to tell if the women really did anything wrong.”

“I remember,” I say. I hated the trials the Taliban used to hold. They made it a game with rules that changed for convenience.

“I can still see them sometimes,” he says, and the way he carries on, I can see them, too. Half a dozen mothers buried up to their waists in the penalty box, helpless against the stoning, their blood-stained burqas flapping in the wind like wings that could never quite lift them to safety.

We walk home slowly that night, passing the ball in short punts across the narrow streets. Hadir likes to aim for the base of streetlights, aligning the ball so it will bounce my direction and set me up for the next, easy pass. A few stray dogs linger behind, limping and skinny. They’d probably eat Hadir’s soccer ball if we left it. Nights like this, I can almost forget our dim-lit city was the center of a warzone. The fighting moved north, so everyone calls this the good time. Some men linger outside their homes. Beggars sleep restlessly in old cars, under shop awnings. Mostly, though, people rest at this hour.

During recess the next day, Hadir and I show the other students our grass-stained feet. They cluster around, marveling at the color, bright green streaks against dusty, brown toes. One boy, Waafiq, doesn’t believe our adventures.

“That’s not from grass.” He points. “You found your mother’s makeup.”

But as soon as he says it the other boys laugh and point at him. “How would you know?” they jeer.

Waafiq shushes and sulks unsteadily toward the schoolhouse.

“Wait. Come back this way.”

“If you’re going to poke, I’m not coming,” Waafiq says. He’s younger, maybe nine. He limps when he walks, because there’s a piece of shrapnel in his calf the size of a cashew. Everybody knows.

“I won’t poke. I have an idea,” I tell him. “We need you.”

Hadir shoulders into the center of the circle, catching on. “That’s right,” he says. “We need everybody to play.”

For the next two weeks we train double-time, and it feels even more difficult to study. Our teacher paces the aisles during arithmetic. She paces during religious studies. She seems only to stand still for geography quizzes, using a long stick to point at countries with tricky names. Each time she turns her back, we raise our leopard fists—all of us now—saluting Nikpai who came from nothing and turned it into pure bronze around his neck. Recess, Hadir teaches the other boys—young or spoiled, smart or slow—about defense and offense, hand-balls and throw-ins. He shares his soccer ball and has more friends than ever. “We’re practicing for the Great Game,” he tells them, and we scheme and plan, deciding on a date. By nighttime, we two hustle to Kabul Stadium, the city blocks our warm-up drill. The second our heels sink into that soft, radiant field, we’re hearts-pounding, muscles-working ready to play. We walk home so tired, even the strays trot past, tails between their mangy legs. Hadir and I are always equals until we get to my block. Then I disappear into my family’s apartment, and he turns down the alley, shadow moving like a ghost along the sidewalls. He says he lives close, but that’s all. I never ask further.

The afternoon before the Great Game, our geography lesson is interrupted by an air raid. Sirens wail across the city like crying mothers. There’s no basement, no bunker. Our teacher lines us against the wall. “Sit,” she says. “Stay quiet.” I stare at the maps and imagine myself further and further away: Tajikstan, Uzbekistan, Turkemenistan. Between sirens, I brace for a bone-shattering blast that never comes. Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia. More sirens, my muscles woven as tightly as a rug. Turkey, Romania, Austria. I go so far I can’t even see war—Germany, Scotland—all the way to the North Atlantic Ocean. Then silence. Next, two footsteps. Three. Four. We are twenty-two boys in a room, forty-four feet that can run, one gigantic breath being held. I study our teacher’s face, but she seems lost, prayers spilling from her mouth like broken teeth.

The schoolmaster appears, face dotted with sweat. “There’s one hour before the next raid,” he says. “We move now, or we’re stranded overnight.” Our teacher nods, and we follow her quickly through the hallways. She helps the smallest children first, lifting them into the schoolmaster’s truck parked alongside our schoolhouse. “You and Hadir are oldest,” she says to me. “Take the rest to their houses. Don’t stop along the way.” She slides into the passenger seat and they disappear down the dusty road.

Hadir carries Waafiq on his back, taking alley shortcuts to our neighborhood. I shove and shuffle the others behind him. A few start to cry. “Where do you live?” I demand. I have to slap some to help them speak. Most are siblings and live together. When I get to my own home, I pound and pound until my mother unhooks the latch. Already, she’s gathered my sisters, a satchel of food, and two jugs of water, sheltering them in our back room with a pile of mattresses. Together, we wait for sundown, knowing things could very suddenly grow worse.

No school for three days. Everything quiets. My city must look like a sleeping giant, all its window-eyes sealed shut. Families on my block know exactly what to do, sharing supplies and whispering favorite Afghan folktales to soothe the children at night. They tell the story of Buzaak Chinie, the Porcelain Goat. Or my old favorite, The Silver on the Hearth, where the poor farmer is rewarded with snakes that turn into coins. But I’m older this time and see the adults gossip. Something happened in Pakistan, they say, and now angry defectors from the Afghan National Army want to organize in Kabul. Or five Marines were shot south of the city and we hide in fear of retaliation. But another man says it wasn’t Marines, it was an Afghan family, a mistake—a Red Cross station blown into a crater three meters deep. “But no bombs were dropped,” I hear his brother argue. “It’s all pretend to distract from the truth up north,” another says. The radio confirms nothing, only repeats its static messages about precautionary measures. There are no errands. No boys playing santoors in the alley. No street vendors. No hot chai or kites. And of course, no Great Game.

When school reopens, this time everyone returns, no missing students. But our teacher wears her burqa again, a stone-blue curtain of fabric separating her from us. It’s only her hands we can see now, and they appear more delicate than before.

“Hadir,” I whisper. “What does it mean? Why does she hide?”

“Didn’t you hear?” he says. “A doctor and three women were killed in Kunduz. He’d been helping female patients hide from their husbands.”

“Who did the killing?” I ask.

“Who do you think?”

Our teacher is too hesitant to be outdoors, so the schoolmaster stays with us for recess that day.

“I still think she’s foolish,” Hadir says. “She shouldn’t even be teaching. She should be at home. There’s a reason women are safest at home.”

“But aren’t you grateful?” I ask. “At least we have someone to teach us.”

Hadir glares at me. “Grateful? Easy for you to say.” He dashes across the school grounds to teach the others more of his soccer smarts. I watch for a few moments as they dart back and forth, the smallest boys tripping over the ball, tumbling in the dust. I should help, but something in me turns sour and I tell the schoolmaster I’m ill, air settling in my throat like paste. He lets me go indoors to rest out of the sun.

Without any students inside, the classroom feels suspicious, as though this is how it will look if a giant bomb ever takes our city. The teacher sits at her desk, shoulders curled inward, hands trembling like they’re holding a secret. I can hear the way she breathes, as quick and shallow as a shrew. Maybe Hadir was right. Why do we bother with her arithmetic? Her silly lists of famous men? At the end of the day, the smartest boy in school can’t undo his bloodlines, and no matter who our teacher is, Hadir will always be an orphan.

Our teacher shifts in her seat then lifts her head as if to look at me, eyes barely visible through the thick fabric. For a moment, I see how I easily could hurt her, how I could tear the burqa from her face as though every person in every country on that map could see her lies, those lips that promised us so much. But she is merely a grain of sand. She can never give her best like Nikpai. Not here, not now. My country won’t let her.

Hadir doesn’t come for me that night, so I find my way to Kabul Stadium without him. It’s a full moon and the grass looks a pulsing, bright gray, as though the entire city has turned two colors—the color of night, and the color of moonlight reflecting off whatever it touches. I see Hadir sprinting downfield, cutting through the lighted grass and hear the gentle thwap of his bare foot against real leather. When he turns to run back downfield, he notices me and stops near the side goal posts, leaning forward to rest his hands on his knees and catch his breath.

After a minute, he shouts my direction: “We can’t play on the same team.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone from school got scared to play in the Great Game. You have to be the captain of one side and I’ll be the captain of the other. That’s all we’ve got. One-on-one.”

“Okay,” I say. “But no keeping score.”

Hadir walks a few paces until he’s standing in the exact center of the goal. He squats slowly, gaze upturned, then leaps to catch the cross post with both hands. He dangles easily, feet swaying, one side of his body outlined by the angling moonlight.

“This is what they looked like,” he says and drops one hand so that his body hangs crooked, the other hand still wrapped around the post. “Except no body. Just an arm. Hanging there like it was a flag or something. And they never hung just one thing. There were always more…” He studies his own arm as though apart from himself.

“Hadir?” I say and walk toward him. “I’m sorry about today at school.”

He returns his other hand to the post and swings his body until he gains enough momentum to swivel up top. “It’s okay,” he says finally. “You should really see it from up here. It makes the field look like it stretches forever.”

I shimmy up the side of the goal post, teetering at the top. Hadir scoots my direction and offers his shoulder for balance. Once situated, we slide sideways toward the center of the goal, legs dangling beneath us.

“Wow,” I say and look out at the field. “You’re right.” It extends perfectly straight, yard after endless yard, cleaner and brighter than anything in all of Kabul.

“How many people do you think will come to celebrate Nikpai?” Hadir asks.

“Our teacher said four thousand can fit,” I say. “But I think even more will come.”

“I think so, too.”

We sit silently for some time, as the moon appears to move further away in the sky.

“You know what’s funny?” I ask.

“What?”

“I think this is the most peaceful spot in Afghanistan.”

Hadir laughs. “Yeah, maybe.”

Just then, an odd hissing sound erupts around us, quiet at first but louder with each second. My breath catches, heart pounding in my throat. Hadir and I glance at each other, then look down the ever-reaching field to see a symmetrical array of sprinklers raised in the moonlight, reflective umbrellas of water spraying from each head.

“One,” I say.

“Two,” he says.

“Three!” we shout together and leap from the goal post to land triumphantly next to the soccer ball. Just like that, Hadir runs and dribbles. I sprint down the opposite sideline, leaping over sprinkler heads, laughing at the mess of it all. He kicks a long pass and I push harder, feet pumping against the saturated soil, trying to beat the ball to the sideline. The leather slaps the inside of my foot. Trap. Go. Hadir darts downfield, shouting “Here, Pirooz! Here!” His feet slice through shimmering grass, and he’s almost to the penalty box, when I think of Nikpai, the way nobody thought an Afghan could win an Olympic medal. I make the final pass and fall onto my back, sprinklers showering me with water. When I hear Hadir grunt to take his shot on goal, I don’t have to look to see if he’s made it. I raise my leopard fist and shout at the sky. Somewhere in the distance, Hadir hollers back, the ghosts of Kabul Stadium hollering right along with him.