بخش 8

Again, the car sickness. By the time we drove past the bullet-riddled sign that read THE KHYBER PASS WELCOMES YOU, my mouth had begun to water. Something inside my stomach churned and twisted. Farid, my driver, threw me a cold glance. There was no empathy in his eyes.

“Can we roll down the window?” I asked.

He lit a cigarette and tucked it between the remaining two fingers of his left hand, the one resting on the steering wheel. Keeping his black eyes on the road, he stooped forward, picked up the screwdriver lying between his feet, and handed it to me. I stuck it in the small hole in the door where the handle belonged and turned it to roll down my window.

“Tashakor,” I muttered. I leaned my head out of the window and let the cold midafternoon air rush past my face. I tried to keep my eyes glued to the snowcapped Hindu Kush, but each time my stomach settled even a bit, the truck skidded around yet another turn, rousing a fresh wave of nausea.

“Try a lemon.”

“What?”

“Lemon. Good for the sickness,” Farid said. “I always bring one for this drive.”

“Nay, thank you,” I said. The mere thought of adding acidity to my stomach stirred more nausea. Farid snickered. “It’s not fancy like American medicine, I know, just an old remedy my mother taught me.” I regretted blowing my chance to warm up to him. “In that case, maybe you should give me some.”

He grabbed a paper bag from the backseat and plucked a half lemon out of it. I bit down on it, waited a few minutes. “You were right. I feel better,” I lied. “Old watani trick, no need for fancy medicine,” he said. He flicked the ash off his cigarette and gave himself a self-satisfied look in the rearview mirror. He was a Tajik, a lanky, dark man with a weather-beaten face, narrow shoulders, and a long neck punctuated by a protruding Adam’s apple that only peeked from behind his beard when he turned his head. He was dressed much as I was, though I suppose it was really the other way around: a rough-woven wool blanket wrapped over a gray pirhan-tumban and a vest. On his head, he wore a brown pakol, tilted slightly to one side, like the Tajik hero Ahmad Shah Massoud—referred to by Tajiks as “the Lion of Panjsher.” It was Rahim Khan who had introduced me to Farid in Peshawar. He told me Farid was twenty-nine, though he had the wary, lined face of a man twenty years older. He was born in Mazar-i-Sharif and lived there until his father moved the family to Jalalabad when Farid was ten. At fourteen, he and his father had joined the jihad against the Shorawi. They had fought in the Panjsher Valley for two years until helicopter gunfire had torn the older man to pieces. Farid had two wives and five children. “He used to have seven,” Rahim Khan said with a rueful look, but he’d lost his two youngest girls a few years earlier in a land mine blast just outside Jalalabad, the same explosion that had severed toes from his feet and three fingers from his left hand. After that, he had moved his wives and children to Peshawar.

Farid was first on the list of preparations Rahim Khan and I made, a list that included exchanging dollars for Kaldar and Afghani bills, my garment and pakol—ironically, I’d never worn either when I’d actually lived in Afghanistan—the Polaroid of Hassan and Sohrab, and, finally, perhaps the most important item: an artificial beard, black and chest length, Shari’a-friendly—or at least the Taliban version of Shari’a. Rahim Khan knew of a fellow in Peshawar who specialized in weaving them, sometimes for Western journalists who covered the war.

Rahim Khan had wanted me to stay with him a few more days, to plan more thoroughly. But I knew I had to leave as soon as possible. I was afraid I’d change my mind. We had crossed the border and the signs of poverty were everywhere.

“I feel like a tourist in my own country,” I said, taking in a goatherd leading a half-dozen emaciated goats along the side of the road.

Farid snickered. Tossed his cigarette. “You still think of this place as your country?”

“I think a part of me always will,” I said, more defensively than I had intended.

Farid snickered again.

“Why do you do that?” In his rearview mirror, I saw something flash in his eyes. “You want to know?” he sneered. “Let me imagine, Agha sahib. You probably lived in a big two- or three-story house with a nice backyard that your gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras.” He grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of prematurely rotting teeth. “Am I close?” “Why are you saying these things?” I said.

He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. “That’s the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.”

The sun hadn’t quite set when we drove into Jalalabad, capital of the state of Nangarhar, a city once renowned for its fruit and warm climate. Farid drove past the buildings and stone houses of the city’s central district. There weren’t as many palm trees there as I remembered, and some of the homes had been reduced to roofless walls and piles of twisted clay.

Farid turned onto a narrow unpaved road and parked the Land Cruiser along a dried-up gutter. “Let’s go,” Farid said impatiently. We walked up the dirt road past a few leafless poplars along a row of broken mud walls. Farid led me to a dilapidated one-story house and knocked on the wood-plank door.

The adobe ceiling was low, the dirt walls entirely bare, and the only light came from a pair of lanterns set in a corner. We took off our shoes and stepped on the straw mat that covered the floor. Along one of the walls sat three young boys, cross-legged, on a mattress covered with a blanket with shredded borders. A tall bearded man with broad shoulders stood up to greet us. Farid and he hugged and kissed on the cheek. Farid introduced him to me as Wahid, his older brother. “He’s from America,” he said to Wahid, flicking his thumb toward me. He left us alone and went to greet the boys.

Wahid sat with me against the wall across from the boys, who had ambushed Farid and climbed his shoulders. Despite my protests, Wahid ordered one of the boys to fetch another blanket so I’d be more comfortable on the floor. He asked about the ride from Peshawar, the drive over the Khyber Pass.

“I hope you didn’t come across any dozds,” he said. The Khyber Pass was as famous for its terrain as for the bandits who used that terrain to rob travelers. Before I could answer, he winked and said in a loud voice, “Of course no dozd would waste his time on a car as ugly as my brother’s.” “At least I have a car,” Farid panted. “How is your donkey these days?” “My donkey is a better ride than your car.”

“Khar khara mishnassah,” Farid shot back. Takes a donkey to know a donkey. They all laughed and I joined in.

“So what do you do in America, Amir agha?” Wahid asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said. I thought I heard Farid chuckle at that.

“A writer?” Wahid said, clearly impressed. “Do you write about Afghanistan?”

“Well, I have. But not currently,” I said. My last novel, A Season for Ashes, had been about a university professor who joins a clan of gypsies after he finds his wife in bed with one of his students. It wasn’t a bad book. Some reviewers had called it a “good” book, and one had even used the word “riveting.” But suddenly I was embarrassed by it. I hoped Wahid wouldn’t ask what it was about.

“Maybe you should write about Afghanistan again,” Wahid said. “Tell the rest of the world what the Taliban are doing to our country.”

“Well, I’m not . . . I’m not quite that kind of writer.”

“Oh,” Wahid said, nodding and blushing a bit. “You know best, of course. It’s not for me to suggest . . .”

“What brings them all back to Afghanistan, dear brother?” Farid said, speaking to Wahid but fixing me with a contemptuous gaze.

“Sell this land, sell that house, collect the money, and run away like a mouse. Go back to America, spend the money on a family vacation to Mexico.” “Farid!” Wahid roared. “Have you forgotten your manners? This is my house! Amir agha is my guest tonight and I will not allow you to dishonor me like this!” Farid opened his mouth, almost said something, reconsidered and said nothing. He slumped against the wall, muttered something under his breath, and crossed his mutilated foot over the good one. His accusing eyes never left me.

“Forgive us, Amir agha,” Wahid said. “Since childhood, my brother’s mouth has been two steps ahead of his head.”

“It’s my fault, really,” I said, trying to smile under Farid’s intense gaze. “I am not offended. I should have explained to him my business here in Afghanistan. I am not here to sell property. I’m going to Kabul to find a boy.” “A boy,” Wahid repeated.

“Yes.” I fished the Polaroid from the pocket of my shirt. Seeing Hassan’s picture again tore the fresh scab off his death. I had to turn my eyes away from it. I handed it to Wahid. He studied the photo. Looked from me to the photo and back again. “This Hazara boy.” “Yes.” “What does he mean to you?” “His father meant a lot to me. He is the man in the photo. He’s dead now.” Wahid blinked. “He was a friend of yours?” My instinct was to say yes, as if, on some deep level, I too wanted to protect Baba’s secret. But there had been enough lies already. “He was my half-brother.” I swallowed. Added, “My illegitimate half brother.”

“What will you do with him?” “Take him back to Peshawar. There are people there who will take care of him.”

Wahid handed the photo back and rested his thick hand on my shoulder. “You are an honorable man, Amir agha. A true Afghan.”

I cringed inside.

“I am proud to have you in our home tonight,” Wahid said.

“You could have told me,” Farid said later. The two of us were lying next to each other on the straw mats Wahid’s wife had spread for us.

“Told you what?”

“Why you’ve come to Afghanistan.” His voice had lost the rough edge I’d heard in it since the moment I had met him.

He rolled to face me. “Maybe I will help you find this boy.”

“Thank you, Farid,” I said.

“It was wrong of me to assume.”

I sighed. “Don’t worry. You were more right than you know.”

His hands are tied behind him with roughly woven rope cutting through the flesh of his wrists. He is blindfolded with black cloth. He is kneeling on the street, his head drooping between his shoulders as he rocks in prayer. He is muttering something under his breath. I step closer. A thousand times over, he mutters. For you a thousand times over. Back and forth he rocks. He lifts his face. I see a faint scar above his upper lip.

We are not alone.

I see the barrel first. Then the man standing behind him. He is tall, dressed in a herringbone vest and a black turban. He looks down at the blindfolded man and raises the barrel. The rifle roars with a deafening crack.

I follow the barrel on its upward arc. I see the face behind the plume of smoke swirling from the muzzle. I am the man in the herringbone vest.

I woke up with a scream trapped in my throat.

I stepped outside. Stood in the silver tarnish of a half-moon and glanced up to a sky riddled with stars. Crickets chirped in the shuttered darkness and a wind wafted through the trees. The ground was cool under my bare feet and suddenly, for the first time since we had crossed the border, I felt like I was back. After all these years, I was home again, standing on the soil of my ancestors. This was the soil on which my great-grandfather had married his third wife a year before dying in the cholera epidemic that hit Kabul in 1915. She’d borne him what his first two wives had failed to, a son at last. It was on this soil that my grandfather had gone on a hunting trip with King Nadir Shah and shot a deer. My mother had died on this soil. And on this soil, I had fought for my father’s love.

We said our good-byes early the next morning. Just before I climbed into the Land Cruiser, I thanked Wahid for his hospitality. He pointed to the little house behind him. “This is your home,” he said. His three sons were standing in the doorway watching us. I glanced in the side-view mirror as we pulled away.

Earlier that morning, when I was certain no one was looking, I did something I had done twenty-six years earlier: I planted a fistful of crumpled money under a mattress.

In the old days, the drive from Jalalabad to Kabul took two hours, maybe a little more. It took Farid and me over four hours to reach Kabul. And when we did …Farid warned me just after we passed the Mahipar dam.

“Kabul is not the way you remember it,” he said.

“So I hear.”

Farid gave me a look that said hearing is not the same as seeing. And he was right. Because when Kabul finally did unroll before us, I was certain, absolutely certain, that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Farid must have seen my stupefied expression; shuttling people back and forth to Kabul, he would have become familiar with that expression on the faces of those who hadn’t seen Kabul for a long time.

He patted me on the shoulder. “Welcome back,” he said morosely.

Rubble and beggars. Everywhere I looked, that was what I saw. I remembered beggars in the old days too—Baba always carried an extra handful of Afghani bills in his pocket just for them; I’d never seen him deny a peddler. Now, though, they squatted at every street corner, dressed in shredded burlap rags, mud-caked hands held out for a coin. And the beggars were mostly children now, thin and grim-faced, some no older than five or six. They sat in the laps of their burqa-clad mothers alongside gutters at busy street corners and chanted “Bakhshesh, bakhshesh!” And something else, something I hadn’t noticed right away: Hardly any of them sat with an adult male—the wars had made fathers a rare commodity in Afghanistan.

We were driving westbound toward the Karteh-Seh district on what I remembered as a major thoroughfare in the seventies: Jadeh Maywand. Jadeh Maywand had turned into a giant sand castle. The buildings that hadn’t entirely collapsed barely stood, with caved in roofs and walls pierced with rockets shells. Entire blocks had been obliterated to rubble.

“Where are the trees?” I said.

“People cut them down for firewood in the winter,” Farid said. “The Shorawi cut a lot of them down too.”

“Why?”

“Snipers used to hide in them.”

A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn’t been good to him, that he’d become homeless and destitute.

“My father built an orphanage in Shar-e-Kohna, the old city, south of here,” I said.

“I remember it,” Farid said. “It was destroyed a few years ago.”

“Can you pull over?” I said. “I want to take a quick walk here.”

Farid parked along the curb on a small backstreet next to a ramshackle, abandoned building with no door. “That used to be a pharmacy,” Farid muttered as we exited the truck. “What’s that smell?” I said. Something was making my eyes water.

“Diesel,” Farid replied. “The city’s generators are always going down, so electricity is unreliable, and people use diesel fuel.”

“Diesel. Remember what this street smelled like in the old days?”

“Lamb kabob,” Farid said, tasting the word in his mouth. “The only people in Kabul who get to eat lamb now are the Taliban.” He pulled on my sleeve. “Speaking of which . . .”

A vehicle was approaching us. “Beard Patrol,” Farid murmured.

That was the first time I saw the Taliban. I’d seen them on TV, on the Internet, on the cover of magazines, and in newspapers. But here I was now, less than fifty feet from them, telling myself that the sudden taste in my mouth wasn’t unadulterated, naked fear.

The red Toyota pickup truck idled past us. A handful of stern-faced young men sat on their haunches in the cab, Kalashnikovs slung on their shoulders. They all wore beards and black turbans. One of them, a dark-skinned man in his early twenties with thick, knitted eyebrows twirled a whip in his hand. His roaming eyes fell on me. Held my gaze. I’d never felt so naked in my entire life. Then the Talib spat tobacco-stained spittle and looked away. I found I could breathe again. The truck rolled down Jadeh Maywand, leaving in its trail a cloud of dust.

“What is the matter with you?” Farid hissed.

“What?”

“Don’t ever stare at them! Do you understand me? Never!”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

“Bas. Let’s go,” Farid said, pulling me by the arm.

We found the new orphanage in the northern part of Karteh-Seh, along the banks of the dried-up Kabul River. It was a flat, barracks-style building with splintered walls and windows boarded with planks of wood. A short, thin, balding man with a shaggy gray beard opened the door. He wore a ragged tweed jacket, a skullcap, and a pair of eyeglasses with one chipped lens resting on the tip of his nose. Behind the glasses, tiny eyes like black peas flitted from me to Farid. “Salaam alaykum,” he said.

“Salaam alaykum,” I said. I showed him the Polaroid. “We’re searching for this boy.”

He gave the photo a cursory glance. “I am sorry. I have never seen him.”

He closed the door. Locked the bolt.

I rapped on the door with my knuckles. “Agha! Agha, please open the door. We don’t mean him any harm.”

“I told you. He’s not here,” his voice came from the other side. “Now, please go away.”

Farid stepped up to the door, rested his forehead on it. “Friend, we are not with the Taliban,” he said in a low, cautious voice. “The man who is with me wants to take this boy to a safe place.” “I come from Peshawar,” I said. “A good friend of mine knows an American couple there who run a charity home for children.” I felt the man’s presence on the other side of the door. Sensed him standing there, listening, hesitating, caught between suspicion and hope. “Look, I knew Sohrab’s father,” I said. “His name was Hassan. His mother’s name was Farzana. He called his grandmother Sasa. He knows how to read and write. And he’s good with the slingshot. There’s hope for this boy, Agha, a way out. Please open the door.” From the other side, only silence.

“I’m his half uncle,” I said.

A moment passed. Then a key rattled in the lock. The man’s narrow face reappeared in the crack. He looked from me to Farid and back. “You were wrong about one thing.”

“What?”

“He’s great with the slingshot.”

I smiled.

“He’s inseparable from that thing. He tucks it in the waist of his pants everywhere he goes.”

The man who let us in introduced himself as Zaman, the director of the orphanage. “I’ll take you to my office,” he said.

We followed him through dim, grimy hallways where barefoot children dressed in frayed sweaters ambled around. Skeleton frames of steel beds, most with no mattress, filled the rooms.

“How many orphans live here?” Farid asked.

“More than we have room for. About two hundred and fifty,” Zaman said over his shoulder. “But they’re not all yateem. Many of them have lost their fathers in the war, and their mothers can’t feed them because the Taliban don’t allow them to work. So they bring their children here.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand and added ruefully, “This place is better than the street, but not that much better. He stopped and turned to me. “There is very little shelter here, almost no food, no clothes, no clean water. What I have in ample supply here is children who’ve lost their childhood. But the tragedy is that these are the lucky ones. We’re filled beyond capacity and every day I turn away mothers who bring their children.” He took a step toward me. “You say there is hope for Sohrab? I pray you don’t lie, Agha. But…you may well be too late.” “What do you mean?”

Zaman’s eyes shifted. “Follow me.”

What passed for the director’s office was four bare, cracked walls, a mat on the floor, a table, and two folding chairs. As Zaman and I sat down, I saw a gray rat poke its head from a burrow in the wall and flit across the room.

“What did you mean it may be too late?” I said.

Zaman tilted back in his chair and crossed his arms on his chest. “What I have to tell you is not pleasant. Not to mention that it may be very dangerous.”

“For whom?”

“You. Me. And, of course, for Sohrab, if it’s not too late already.”

“I need to know,” I said.

He nodded. “So you say. But first I want to ask you a question: How badly do you want to find your nephew?”

I looked at the hallway, saw a group of kids dancing in a circle. A little girl, her left leg amputated below the knee, sat on a ratty mattress and watched. I saw Farid watching the children too, his own mangled hand hanging at his side and I realized something: I would not leave Afghanistan without finding Sohrab. “Tell me where he is,” I said.

Zaman’s gaze lingered on me. Then he nodded, picked up a pencil, and twirled it between his fingers. “Keep my name out of it.”

“I promise.”

He tapped the table with the pencil. “Despite your promise, I think I’ll live to regret this, but perhaps it’s just as well. I’m damned anyway. He was quiet for a long time. “There is a Talib official,” he muttered. “He visits once every month or two. He brings cash with him, not a lot, but better than nothing at all.” His shifty eyes fell on me, rolled away. “Usually he’ll take a girl. But not always.”

He buried his face in his hands. None of us said anything for a long time.

“He took Sohrab a month ago,” Zaman finally croaked.

“You call yourself a director?” Farid said.

Zaman dropped his hands. “I haven’t been paid in over six months. I’m broke because I’ve spent my life’s savings on this orphanage. Everything I ever owned or inherited I sold to run this godforsaken place. You think I don’t have family in Pakistan and Iran? I could have run like everyone else. But I didn’t. I stayed. I stayed because of them.” He pointed to the door. “If I deny him one child, he takes ten. So I let him take one and leave the judging to Allah. I swallow my pride and take his goddamn filthy …dirty money. Then I go to the bazaar and buy food for the children.” Farid dropped his eyes.

“What happens to the children he takes?” I asked.

Zaman rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. “Sometimes they come back.”

“Who is he? How do we find him?” I said.

“Go to Ghazi Stadium tomorrow. You’ll see him at halftime. He’ll be the one wearing black sunglasses.”

We rode silently through the square and headed toward the Wazir Akbar Khan district. Everywhere I looked, a haze of dust covered the city and its sun-dried brick buildings.

To my surprise, most of the houses in the Wazir Akbar Khan district still had roofs and standing walls. In fact, they were in pretty good shape. Trees still peeked over the walls, and the streets weren’t nearly as rubble-strewn as the ones in Karteh-Seh.

“This isn’t so bad,” I remarked.

“No surprise. Most of the important people live here now.”

“Taliban?”

“Them too,” Farid said.

“Who else?”

He drove us into a wide street with fairly clean sidewalks and walled homes on either side. “The people behind the Taliban. The real brains of this government, if you can call it that: Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis,” “I think that’s it!” I said. “Over there.” Farid turned onto the street. I saw Baba’s house right away.

Gingerly, I walked up the driveway where tufts of weed now grew between the sun-faded bricks. Like so much else in Kabul, my father’s house was the picture of fallen splendor.

Insanely, I wanted to go in. I wanted to step into the foyer, smell the orange peel Ali always tossed into the stove to burn with sawdust. Sit at the kitchen table, have tea with a slice of naan, listen to Hassan sing old Hazara songs.

Another honk. I walked back to the Land Cruiser parked along the sidewalk. Farid sat smoking behind the wheel.

“I have to look at one more thing,” I told him.

“Give me ten minutes.”

“How much more do you need to see? Let me save you the trouble: Nothing that you remember has survived. Best to forget.” “I don’t want to forget anymore,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

We hardly broke a sweat, Hassan and I, when we hiked up the hill just north of Baba’s house. Now, by the time I reached the top of the craggy hill, each ragged breath felt like inhaling fire. Sweat trickled down my face. I stood wheezing for a while, a stitch in my side. I leaned against the gray stone gateway to the cemetery where Hassan had buried his mother.

Hassan had said in his letter that the pomegranate tree hadn’t borne fruit in years. Looking at the wilted, leafless tree, I doubted it ever would again. I stood under it, remembered all the times we’d climbed it, straddled its branches, our legs swinging, dappled sunlight flickering through the leaves and casting on our faces a mosaic of light and shadow. The tangy taste of pomegranate crept into my mouth.

I hunkered down on my knees and brushed my hands against the trunk. I found what I was looking for. The carving had dulled, almost faded altogether, but it was still there: “Amir and Hassan. The Sultans of Kabul.” I traced the curve of each letter with my fingers. Picked small bits of bark from the tiny crevasses.

I heard a honk and saw Farid waving at me. It was time to go.

We drove south again, back toward Pashtunistan Square. We passed several more red pickup trucks with armed, bearded young men crammed into the cabs. Farid cursed under his breath every time we passed one.

I paid for a room at a small hotel near Pashtunistan Square. There was no hot running water and the cracked toilet didn’t flush. Just a single steel-frame bed with a worn mattress, a ragged blanket, and a wooden chair in the corner. As I lowered my suitcase, I noticed a dried bloodstain on the wall behind the bed.

I gave Farid some money and he went out to get food. He returned with four sizzling skewers of kabob, fresh naan, and a bowl of white rice. We sat on the bed and all but devoured the food. There was one thing that hadn’t changed in Kabul after all: The kabob was as succulent and delicious as I remembered.

That night, I took the bed and Farid lay on the floor, wrapped himself with an extra blanket for which the hotel owner charged me an additional fee. Farid told me about growing up in Mazar-i-Sharif, in Jalalabad. He told me of the day helicopter gunfire killed his father, of the day the land mine took his two daughters. He asked me about America. I told him that in America you could step into a grocery store and buy any of fifteen or twenty different types of cereal. The lamb was always fresh and the milk cold, the fruit plentiful and the water clear. Every home had a TV, and every TV a remote, and you could get a satellite dish if you wanted. Receive over five hundred channels.

“Five hundred?” Farid exclaimed.

“Five hundred.”

We fell silent for a while. “Amir agha?” Farid said, startling me from near sleep.

“Yes?”

“Why are you here? I mean, why are you really here?”

“I told you.”

“For the boy?”

Farid shifted on the ground.

“No . . . What I mean to ask is why that boy? You come all the way from America for …a Shi’a?”

“I am tired,” I said. “Let’s just get some sleep.”

Farid’s snoring soon echoed through the empty room. I stayed awake, thinking that maybe what people said about Afghanistan was true. Maybe it was a hopeless place.

A bustling crowd was filling Ghazi Stadium when we walked through the entrance tunnels. Thousands of people milled about the tightly packed concrete terraces. There was no assigned seating, of course. No one to show us politely to our section, aisle, row, and seat. There never had been, even in the old days of the monarchy. We found a decent spot to sit, just left of midfield, though it took some shoving and elbowing on Farid’s part.

I remembered how green the playing field grass had been in the ’70s when Baba used to bring me to soccer games here. Now the pitch was a mess. There were holes and craters everywhere, most notably a pair of deep holes in the ground behind the southend goalposts. And there was no grass at all, just dirt. When the two teams finally took the field—all wearing long pants despite the heat—and play began, it became difficult to follow the ball in the clouds of dust kicked up by the players. Young, whip-toting Talibs roamed the aisles, striking anyone who cheered too loudly.

They brought them out shortly after the halftime whistle blew. A pair of dusty red pickup trucks, like the ones I’d seen around town since I’d arrived, rode into the stadium through the gates. The crowd rose to its feet. A woman dressed in a green burqa sat in the cab of one truck, a blindfolded man in the other. The trucks drove around the track, slowly, as if to let the crowd get a long look.. Next to me, Farid’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he mumbled a prayer under his breath.

The red trucks entered the playing field, rode toward one end in twin clouds of dust, sunlight reflecting off their hubcaps. A third truck met them at the end of the field. This one’s cab was filled with something and I suddenly understood the purpose of those two holes behind the goalposts. They unloaded the third truck. The crowd murmured in anticipation.

“Do you want to stay?” Farid said gravely.

“No,” I said. I had never in my life wanted to be away from a place as badly as I did now. “But we have to stay.”

Two Talibs with Kalashnikovs slung across their shoulders helped the blindfolded man from the first truck and two others helped the burqa-clad woman. The woman’s knees buckled under her and she slumped to the ground. When they tried to lift her again, she screamed and kicked. It was the cry of a wild animal trying to pry its mangled leg free from the bear trap. Two more Talibs joined in and helped force her into one of the chest-deep holes. The blindfolded man, on the other hand, quietly allowed them to lower him into the hole dug for him. Now only the accused pair’s torsos protruded from the ground.

A chubby, white-bearded cleric dressed in gray garments stood near the goalposts and cleared his throat into a handheld microphone. He recited a lengthy prayer from the Koran, his nasal voice undulating through the sudden hush of the stadium’s crowd.

When the prayer was done, the cleric cleared his throat. “Brothers and sisters!” he called, speaking in Farsi, his voice booming through the stadium. “We are here today to carry out Shari’a. We are here today to carry out justice. We are here today because the will of Allah and the word of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, are alive and well here in Afghanistan, our beloved homeland. We listen to what God says and we obey because we are nothing but humble, powerless creatures before God’s greatness. And what does God say? I ask you! WHAT DOES GOD SAY? God says that every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin. My head was pounding and the sun felt much too hot.

“And what manner of punishment, brothers and sisters, befits the adulterer? How shall we answer those who throw stones at the windows of God’s house? WE SHALL THROW THE STONES BACK!” He shut off the microphone. A low-pitched murmur spread through the crowd.

Next to me, Farid was shaking his head. “And they call themselves Muslims,” he whispered.

Then a tall, broad-shouldered man stepped out of the pickup truck. The tall man’s sparkling white garment glimmered in the afternoon sun. The hem of his loose shirt fluttered in the breeze, his arms spread like those of Jesus on the cross. He greeted the crowd by turning slowly in a full circle. When he faced our section, I saw he was wearing dark round sunglasses like the ones John Lennon wore.

“That must be our man,” Farid said.

The tall Talib with the black sunglasses walked to the pile of stones they had unloaded from the third truck. He picked up a rock and showed it to the crowd. The noise fell, replaced by a buzzing sound that rippled through the stadium. I looked around me and saw that everyone was tsk’ing. The Talib, looking absurdly like a baseball pitcher on the mound, hurled the stone at the blindfolded man in the hole. It struck the side of his head. The woman screamed again. The crowd made a startled “OH!” sound. I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands. I don’t know how much longer I sat with my face in my hands. I know that I reopened my eyes when I heard people around me asking, “Mord? Mord? Is he dead?” The man in the hole was now a mangled mess of blood and shredded rags.

When it was all over, when the bloodied corpses had been unceremoniously tossed into the backs of red pickup trucks—sep-arate ones—a few men with shovels hurriedly filled the holes. A few minutes later, the teams took the field. Second half was under way.

Our meeting was arranged for three o’clock that afternoon. The swiftness with which the appointment was set surprised me. But I was reminded of how unofficial even official matters still were in Afghanistan: all Farid had to do was tell one of the whip-carrying Talibs that we had personal business to discuss with the man in white. The guy with the whip then nodded and shouted something in Pashtu to a young man on the field, who ran to the south-end goalposts where the Talib in the sunglasses. He nodded. Said something in the mes-senger’s ear. The young man relayed the message back to us.

It was set, then. Three o’clock.