Authors: Amber Green
The shopkeeper with the better chooras wanted Pakistani rupees for them. Three to four lakh, he said. I knew a lakh was a thousand rupees, and that most of my remaining money was in the crimson hundred-rupee notes, but I had no idea what the conversion rate would be.
Before I could ask, Oscar showed me an iPad screen with conversion tables on it. The starting prices for what I wanted ranged from forty to forty-five bucks. Steep, but having a good knife was worth doing without other things. Besides, I could probably get the shortest-bladed one for less than thirty.
I picked up a midlength choora. “Two lakh."
"You are mad!"
I looked at the blade, shrugged, set it down, and moved to the next booth's machetes and chrome-plated kukris.
He called me back. The dickering began in earnest. When it ended, I had a choora with a seven-inch blade, along with a plaid cloth that would serve either as a sash or a secondary shemagh, for twenty-nine bucks in rupees.
In a warm section out of the wind, a thin man in a gray turban and a much-mended
kamiz
wept as he stood two boys on stones—ancient blocks Alexander the Great might have sat on to drink his tea. The younger boy wore a green Notre Dame baseball cap while the older—aged fourteen or so—wore a too-small embroidered cap. Their shoes had been mended with duct tape.
Both boys were trembling hard, despite their pullovers, and the older one curved his right hand protectively over the younger one's eyes. A crowd was forming, as if expecting high entertainment.
I moved with some trepidation to see the boys’ faces. Instead of terrible disfiguration, I saw beauty. The older boy looked a little like Elijah Wood, but formed in the image of a darker, blunter God. My skin tightened. He was up for sale.
Or lease, I guess, since payment for a son's services normally comes due twice a year.
A woman in burqa murmured “Zarr,” and another low voice agreed. “Zarra zarr."
As the Cat in the Hat would say,
What a shame, what a shame, what a shame!
One stout man, with a fleece vest and a beard so red it might have been dyed with cherry Kool-Aid, waded to the front of the crowd. He rudely fingered the beautiful boy's shoulder and neck and asked how well he could dance.
The thin man pulled his beard with hooked fingers and cried out a prayer for guidance.
What, had he thought to sell such a beauty as a shepherd or a shopboy? Idiot. Even if he only asked the price of a shepherd, the kid would be naked and sprawled under Red-beard or someone like him in the half hour it would take to get him stripped, scoured, and oiled.
I shoved my new wallet with the rest of the rupees at Oscar. “Buy me a donkey, a good one, now. Right fucking now. Demand a full load of whatever grain the man has, too. If it costs more than I've got, I'll owe you. Go!"
He looked down at me, his shades mirroring my face. “Chill, Zu. You want packed ass, you get packed ass."
It's not funny
! “Do it. Now!"
I elbowed my way to the front of the crowd and asked the thin man in English what he thought of this fine, brilliantly sunny day. Though I spoke English, my voice automatically took on the ingrained courtesy of a culture where every man is, or might be, armed to the teeth.
Which, actually, I now was.
Red-beard eyed me sideways and faded back into the rapidly scattering crowd, leaving the thin man to explain to me the extraordinary depths of his regret that he spoke not a word of my language. His voice was scratchy, tired, defeated. Yet still it held the pride and the courtesy I had so missed in softer lands.
I studied his turban as he spoke, but the folds and turns of cloth weren't the way I'd been taught to build a lungee. His accent didn't match mine either. Not the soft southern Pashto, but the in-between sound of the far north. He wasn't my kin. He was my people, though, and so were his sons. I couldn't save every kid in this land, but if Oscar got back quickly enough I could buy an extra year for two of them.
Bismillah, that grace period might bring their family back from the brink of the cliff they so obviously faced.
The boys stirred uneasily, and the crowd reassembled with studied nonchalance just inside eavesdropping distance. I'd been silent too long, and they were staring at me.
I moved closer to their father, but not close enough to challenge him. Personal space was different here; men can get closer than can Americans, but only when the niceties are observed. After my disastrous visit before, I didn't trust my command of the niceties.
I murmured quietly, in English, that I was shopping for a partridge in a pear tree and hoped he could help me.
He shrugged elaborately and begged my forgiveness for his ignorance.
A boy in bright pink plastic shoes shuffled toward me and offered, in Bronx-accented English, to take me on a tour of the bazaar.
I shook my head and smiled at him. The crowd drew closer behind him.
But here came Oscar. Peculiarly enough, he knew better than to lead the donkey. He walked beside it instead, giving it a quick jab in the kidney when it lagged.
He handed me the donkey's halter strap, and I passed it to the thin man, dropping my voice to an intimate level. “Call your son Ismail, for he has been sacrificed and yet returned to you,
fi Sabillallah
."
For a moment he didn't understand. Then he did, and his joy tore at me. He shrieked blessings on me, on my fathers and sons for a hundred generations.
My face burned. I turned away.
Echo blocked my path. “What was that about, Zu? You can't feed all the beggars, you know. There's always more."
He wasn't begging
. I felt a tiny tug at my belt and grabbed a little boy's hand before he'd fully unsheathed my choora. I straightened my arm over my head, dangling him for anyone to see.
He was maybe five, too young to be out alone, and had horrible scabbing on his face. Leishmaniasis. From sand flies, accidentally imported in the last few years from Iraq.
The little thief should have fought and screamed, but he just hung there by one arm, his eyes closed, waiting in misery. Which meant he'd already gone through more horror than I could stand to visit upon him.
I set him down. “That's one family less."
Echo wanted to find a true Kashmir ring scarf for his girlfriend. Mike said this was the bazaar for it. I took the sudden notion that if I did find my family, I didn't want to come to them empty-handed. I needed to bring something, and by now it needed to be extremely cheap and extremely portable. “Mike, I want to buy garden seeds."
He turned his covered face toward me and nodded. “They don't take up a lot of room. Have at it. Keep close watch on his ass, Oscar."
"Roger that,” Oscar promised.
My grandmother had grown flowers and herbs in glazed pots all around the house. She'd particularly loved blue flowers. Echoes of heaven, she called them. Even if she'd died in my absence, some of the aunts and cousins would appreciate a present of flower seed. Maybe some herbs and vegetables, too.
I scanned up and down the block, looking for stalls without the overflow of cheap electronics.
About a block ahead, a little girl in brightly embroidered skirts and orange plastic shoes played furtively in one doorway. She hid her toy in her vest when men passed the doorway, but glancing back, I caught a glimpse of a straw doll and solemn, frightened eyes. She ducked inside.
I'd heard of hard-nosed students beating little girls for playing with dolls. How could a man do that?
To save her soul, maybe. When a people feels itself sliding into death and hell, it will reach for the strongest available lifeline. Around here, the mullahs and their students had been the only lifeline for a while. They were still the only ones who seemed untainted by foreign condescension, foreign maneuvering, foreign values.
I'd seen American kids her age on TV, their faces glowing with fervor a
talib
would aspire to, in the God-hates-you demonstrations at military burials. They claimed a moral purity that would be very at home here. Was it worse to beat a child's back or to twist her soul?
I finally did find a shopboy who called out to us in good English and rattled off a list of exotic spices we must surely wish to buy.
The shopkeeper, haggard and with the collapsed mouth of the nearly toothless, might have been forty or seventy. He came out into the late-winter sunlight and waved his arms—the stumps of his arms—so that his sleeves flapped like flags.
I dropped my shades and pushed aside my shemagh to bare my face as a show of respect. Looking straight at him, I wished him a good afternoon and declared my hope his family would prosper in the coming spring, trusting the boy to translate. He did, with remarkable accuracy.
The man's grin exhibited six teeth so widely spaced and dark I couldn't see why he kept them. He bowed deeply, wishing me blessings and my sons enlightenment—the polite greeting for an unbeliever.
I remembered to wait for translation before I touched my heart and thanked him. I expressed my desire that fortune and wisdom fill his house, and could he please advise me as to where to purchase garden seeds, flowers and vegetables alike, such as my grandmother might plant.
The boy translated perfectly. I cocked an ear at him but kept my eyes on the shopkeeper; from what I'd heard on NPR, looking away from the man I was supposedly speaking to would be rude.
Oscar remained silent behind me. Big surprise.
The boy translated suspiciously well.
Maybe not suspiciously well. He probably had learned his first English the way I'd learned my first Russian, but while my father had taken us out of Kabul quickly enough I forgot my Russian vocabulary, this boy was still surrounded by people who wanted to speak English.
So it wasn't necessarily suspicious. Then again, I'd always been told a healthy dose of suspicion is the best way for a Pakhtun to stay healthy.
The shopkeeper bowed from the neck again and again. “You speak to me like a man, and so I tell you as a man, do not go to Fat Ali, for he will sell a feranghi only that which is old or broken. Short Mohammed has a stall in a place very safe for feranghi to go, but has few seeds. Stuttering Mohammed has many, many seeds—fat and fresh and ready to burst forth with life as God wills, but his prices are very dear. Also, I am devastated to say it, but his shop is in a zone forbidden to the unbelievers."
And here I had to pretend to be an unbeliever. I flicked a glare at Oscar, but he looked back impassively.
I bowed to the shopkeeper. “Please understand, I would risk stoning to bring my grandmother that which she might otherwise never see. However, would it be possible to send a messenger to Stuttering Mohammed, whether with euros, dollars, or rupees, to see what might be so obtained? The messenger's efforts of course deserve compensation.” Ah, no—the kid's translation stumbled on the flowery language. “I mean that the messenger's work of course deserves payment."
The wind picked up suddenly, gusting, and he paused to study the sky. Then he bowed, “The boy would be delighted to do this very small thing for you. Please allow him the exercise in manners, for the day has been long, and I fear his attention wanders."
I handed the boy six euros and a ten-dollar bill. “Your generosity reflects well on your ancestors, sir. Please ask the boy to go there and select many kinds of flowers and such vegetables and herbs as might please an old woman. No poppies. We would have trouble should our...uh...elders find us with poppy seeds."
Regardless, my grandmother jealously guarded the purity of her personal strain of poppies, which had blue petals and a generous yield of seeds.
The boy's eyes glittered, his pupils dilating, and the man snarled at him to guard his face. The kid flushed and bowed with his hand over his heart, dutifully translating what I'd said. Then he stood respectfully while the man repeated my instructions back to him, along with admonitions to go directly to his uncle and bring back enough that no shame would fall on the roof.
As the boy pelted off, the proprietor invited us inside for tea. I started to accept, but in midbow Oscar bumped my elbow. “What did he say?"
Without the boy, we had no translator. I bowed again to hide my face and told the man in English that I wished I knew what he was saying.
He bowed to me and motioned us inside, flapping those empty sleeves.
I threw a look at Oscar, to see if that was good enough for him. He didn't look thrilled, but he didn't stop me from going in.
The room was dim, lit by a break in the roof and the cold bluish light spilling in from the doorway. It looked like the beam from a cheap fluorescent tube, only stronger. To the right, a large brass dish had been set to catch the light and reflect it over the wares in brass dishes on a shelf to the left.
The proprietor raised his voice and told someone to put the tea on for visitors and not to piss in it this time.
I turned to study his wares in case my understanding showed in my face. All he had out in his brass dishes were meager piles of pistachios, peppercorns, cloves, something that looked like mustard seed, dried
za'atar
, and some other herbal stuff. No wonder he couldn't afford false teeth.
I followed the shopkeeper through the rear door to the room he probably lived in, and remembered to clear the doorway while my eyes adjusted. I couldn't make anything out, except blocky shapes against the closer wall, and the ghostly paleness of the proprietor's clothing.
I had no idea where Oscar stood. I suspected I was no more visible, though—being Oscar—he probably could find me by scent or instinct. Echolocation, for all I knew.
A match scratched against the wall at belt height. At the other end of the room, a little girl, no more than seven or eight, lit a lamp. She hurried to light a second on the wall to my right, but the match burned down to her fingers before it caught. She bit her lip and shook her hand, but made no sound.
The proprietor snapped at her to bring a twist of paper to light this lamp from the other.
I blinked at his harsh tone and looked away. Oscar emerged from the gloom, all copper and black and narrow, glittering eyes. I imagined Cochise coming out of the night, blade clenched between his teeth, and blinked. No blade.