Authors: Amber Green
The shopkeeper leaned toward him. “You are Tajik?"
Ah, so he actually could be mistaken for a Tajik. So then what was I picturing, if not a Tajik face?
Oscar shook his head. “
Na
.” Then he surprised me by adding more, in rough Pashtun. “I am from the Desert People, Tohono O'odham."
The shopkeeper nodded thoughtfully. “I have not heard of such people, but surely they are great warriors."
Oscar's teeth flashed.
"Ze na poegam.” I don't understand.
I wasn't sure whether to believe him.
The little girl lit the second lamp as instructed, then brought a bright cloth to spread over the worn-out rug. We men arranged ourselves on it, Oscar choosing a spot where his back almost touched a wall and he could see the door.
She brought a tray of tea fixings, then set a blue-glazed ceramic bowl between my knees, and last brought a pitcher of water. She stood in front of me, expectantly. I put a hand out, wondering if she would hand me the pitcher. She toed the bowl squarely under my hand and carefully poured a thin stream of water over my fingers and palm.
I quickly brought the other hand into play, scrubbing my hands against each other in the thin stream of water. I'm not stupid—just not used to this. Since I supposedly couldn't converse without a translator, I took my time with the washing. I wasn't sure how long it would take for the tea water to come up to temperature, but the time had to be taken up some way.
Oscar followed my cue.
The girl took away the basin, then came back for the pitcher. After another moment she reappeared in the inner doorway, stepping carefully, her wide dark gaze fixed on the teapot she held in mittened hands. She crouched and set it down in the center of the tray.
"How graceful, Noori,” the proprietor murmured. “You haven't spilled a single drop. Your grandmother will be pleased to hear of this."
She glowed. Curling like a kitten under his arm-stump, she leaned against him and stared curiously at us.
No wife, however young or doted upon, would stare so openly at unrelated males. She had to be his daughter or niece then, or his grandchild. I liked him better.
Whatever the conventional rules for serving tea might be, the primary rule of a guest in any culture is to adapt to the situation and don't embarrass the host. So I took up the pitcher and poured a good taste into each of the three cups Noori had brought.
"Coalition troops inside the shop! Exit and identify yourselves!"
The little girl cringed at the bellow.
Oscar touched his heart to the shopkeeper and murmured a pardon-me equivalent in Dari, correcting himself by adding the Pashtun
Abhaka.
The shopkeeper bowed back, then he and I bowed to one another.
By now a large MP filled the doorway of the shop. “Show yourselves!"
Oscar and I rose, hands out. He tossed his ID at the MP's feet. I tossed my wallet with the substitute ID card face up and tried to look harmless.
The MP dropped his sunglasses to hang about his neck and picked up our ID and at the same time thumbed a phone-sized device just forward of his pistol holster. A woman's voice with the soft slur of the south came from the device. “Please excuse me for intruding in your home. Alas, it is my duty. Please put your hands where they can be seen."
The shopkeeper blinked and grinned, then quickly hid the grin. He rose gracefully and shouldered aside a curtain.
Oscar shoved me half across the front room, toward the door. I couldn't comprehend his rudeness and managed one look back over his shoulder. The shopkeeper was folding back down to his timeless squat on the floor, a small chest held between his arm-stumps. He toed the latch.
Oscar tackled me, knocking me through the street door. I landed on the MP.
"What
the fuck
, Oscar!"
He didn't answer, but after a second he relaxed over me and untangled his legs from mine.
The MP rolled from under me and up to his feet in a single motion. “I guess that wasn't a bomb, or it'd have gone off by now."
A bomb. Yes, that chest could have been one
. If it was, and Oscar hadn't thrown me out, I'd have been strawberry jam by now. My ears burned.
The shopkeeper cackled. “Come in, come in! You must have some tea!"
I stood and brushed myself off. “Since it wasn't a bomb, we need to go back in and be real friendly, to make up for our behavior."
The MP mumbled something under his breath. It sounded suspiciously like
Play nice
. His sunglasses were dusty and lopsided.
He'd probably landed on them. Or maybe I had when I'd landed on him. Hopefully, they weren't expensive.
He led the way back in, but immediately blocked the door by backing right out, slowly, his hand on the butt of his pistol.
I stood aside and let him by. The whites of his eyes showed all around.
"Now what?” I couldn't see around him, and Oscar blocked me when I tried to move around him.
"Now what?” The MP's voice rose an octave or more. “Now? I will
never
understand these rag-heads! I try to be respectful. I try to be friendly. I
am
respectful. I
am
friendly! And they throw this creepy shit at me! Where did that come from, huh? Where?"
Where did
what
come from?
I squinted to hurry my adjustment to the dimness and the shadows inside the chest. My first thought was gloves. Then I saw hands, a pair of mummified hands.
I met the proprietor's crinkled, sparkling eyes and worked to keep my face deadpan. “Is it possible, Sergeant, that your recording said anything like, ‘Show me your hands'?"
He swore, then checked a readout. In a calmer tone, he said, “It isn't supposed to. It's supposed to be just ‘please excuse us for barging in here.’”
Oscar squatted comfortably beside the proprietor, closed the chest, and lifted it back to its nook. Dust swirled in the lamplight. “You asked to see his hands. We learned that line first week in-country."
"No shit."
"No shit,” I agreed, letting my disgust show. “Now you have to bow to the ‘rag-head’ and sit down for a cup of his tea—if he invites you again."
"But Doc, he keeps dead pieces of his body in a box in his house!"
"
But Sergeant
, you wear dead pieces of a cow on your feet. He prolly just wants to be sure all his parts are buried in the same grave. You know, so he can be whole on Resurrection Day."
He frowned. “Islam has Resurrection Day?"
Of course:
Qimaya
. But I wasn't supposed to know too much, was I? I shrugged. “Come in and play nice."
He stiffened his back, bowed in the doorway, and asked in polite Dari if he could come in.
Where did all these people get off thinking Dari was the language this far north and east? Or had they all been trained down south?
The shopkeeper welcomed him effusively, of course, and us even more so, and called for the little girl to come back and pour the tea.
I eyed the MP. His body armor smelled dank and undersanitized. If he were a sailor, I'd outrank him. We were a long way from any ocean here, but it wouldn't hurt to take some control of the situation. “What's the problem as you see it, Sergeant?"
"Someone saw you two come in and suggested I bust up your drug deal."
"I don't smoke,” I said loftily. “It's against my religion."
"You, Gunny?"
Oscar shook his head.
I blinked. Oscar was a gunnery sergeant? He did outrank me, then. He'd made the leap to chief that I hadn't managed.
Terrific. Absofuckinglutely terrific.
"So what you two doing in here? No show, no food, no booze, no smoke. The only girls in this block are jailbait."
Oscar looked over the rim of his teacup. “We don't do kids."
"And...so? Spit it out, so I don't have to write the long-form report on you."
Oscar held his gaze.
I sighed. This was
so
not the time for a testosterone duel. “I went through the bazaar and then some of these shops looking for seeds for my grandmother's garden. This shop has nothing of the sort, but the proprietor is friendly, and his shopboy speaks enough English to run around finding what I want instead of giving me the
inshallah, bukhra
brush-off."
"'Fraid I'll have to look over whatever he brings you, Doc. Best for all of us if I sort of spill out anything that looks like wild mountain herb."
"Fine with me.” What wasn't fine was that I'd just invited him to sit in another man's home, drinking another man's tea. Which might be more than the shopkeeper could afford. “The dude's got to serve us tea, though, and it doesn't look like he lives too high on the hog. So find something to buy, if you can."
He glanced around, and his face lit up. “Oh, look! That stuff that isn't thyme! My cook was asking for some of this.” He bought a handful of za'atar, which was carefully wrapped in a newspaper packet, then followed the shopkeeper into the back.
Sitting around the fire with the tea was going to be awkward. I doubted the MP had much training in small talk, Oscar seemed to have taken lessons in being taciturn, and I wasn't supposed to know any reasonable amount of the lingo.
So what's next?
Oscar held his hands around his teacup and recited softly, in Pashto, a poem about a falcon.
I looked at the mystified MP, and the dawning delight in the shopkeeper's face, and remembered to look puzzled. I wasn't supposed to have a clue what he was saying. The recitation wasn't all that long, and his enunciation sucked, but it was definitely a poem, probably a famous one.
My father was a scholar. I should know things like this. I'd heard of the Prophet and his cronies passing time by reciting long poems, so why didn't I know any? My ears burned again. I sipped my tea in silence. When it was over, I congratulated Oscar stiffly, without the open admiration of the MP.
The MP shuffled through his fanny pack. “I got something y'all might like."
He hooked a speaker to his belt. A male voice crooned in Pashtun, “Close to heaven, West Virginia. Blue-mist mountains, broad and placid river..."
The MP sang along with Denver's original English, his tenor well suited to the poignant tune. Oscar joined in with a hard-edged baritone. I sipped the watery tea and worked at hiding my blush. I knew the academic argument, that nothing in the Quran forbade music—much less lifting the human voice in song—but I also knew the arguments against it. Especially for men. And my great-grandfather forbade it, which outweighed any argument.
The MP elbowed me, and I mumbled along with the English. I didn't actually sing, though. Bad enough to be associated with a stranger who had the gall to play music in a man's home.
A glance under my eyebrows shocked me. The proprietor was openly weeping, but not from mortification or helpless anger. He simply wept, unashamed of his tears. “Beautiful, beautiful."
Perhaps he meant the words, apart from the blasphemous melody? As verse only, a poem to recite in the long evenings, I tried to memorize the Pashtun version. “Shadows of the mountains, dark against the sky. I drink the taste of moonlight, and tears fall from my eyes..."
Long conditioning held my tears inside, but they scalded my eyes. The song suited the Pakhtun mood. And my mood.
I should have been home yesterday.
When it ended, we all sat together quietly in the afterglow.
In my khel, the women played hand-drums and sang, so long as their voices didn't travel outside where a male might be enticed or distracted. Men couldn't sing, though. Nor could we listen to musical instruments. Such music was not only frivolous, but likely to entrance the unwary—as I was now entranced—and create a vulnerability the deceiver could then exploit.
Singing while listening to music was doubly
haraam
, like fornicating under the influence of alcohol, which I'd also done my share of. But the recitation says, “God wishes to lighten your burdens, for man was created weak. Do not destroy yourselves. God is merciful to you...” What could he have been talking about, if not good music and a good fuck? I just had to make sure not to die at some time when I had more dirt than light in my soul.
The girl lifted the man's cup again, and when he refused it, she pouted just the slightest bit. He winked, and she smiled. In that instant, she was the perfect image of my cousin Nerie.
In spring, we'd walked the fields before the plow, collecting the larger stones that floated up through the earth every winter, carrying them to the wall edging the field. My brother Hamid and our cousin Nerie and I usually worked together. Nerie was a year older than me, my grandfather's youngest brother's youngest child. She took my side when Hamid bullied me. When he missed some foolishness, like when Kam Ali and I threw dirt clods at one another and risked spooking the plow horse, she scolded me in his stead.
Sometimes she called me her younger brother and finger-combed twigs or bits of dead leaf from my hair. I never corrected her, content in knowing that when she and Hamid married, her words would be true.
She liked to remind me that since she and Grandmother together would someday choose my wife, I truly must be nice to her. So—to the extent Hamid allowed—she got all the sweets from our communal lunch, and I ate the most burned piece of bread.
Whatever happened to Nerie?
I probably didn't want to know. As in really, really didn't.
The shopkeeper lifted his voice, high-pitched and ululating like a prayer. His song was so Pakhtun in sentiment I needed three lines to realize the lyrics were English. “Fighting soldiers from the sky! Fearless men who jump and die! Men who mean just what they say..."
Some moments brand themselves on a man's soul. I knew I would always remember this dank, lamplit room and this thin, tepid tea, and an armless mujahid singing the “Ballad of the Green Berets."
We met Mike and Echo for lunch and let our noses lead us to a cluster of restaurants.
The first place we came to smelled really good, but I took a hint from the cowering doorboy and shooed the group on past. In the doorway of the second, our uniforms got too audible a growl from the clientele crouched about the half-dozen tables inside, too bug-eyed a look from the proprietor. Echo growled back at the nearest table, but Mike pulled him out of the doorway before we had to fight.