Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [10]
In the yard, they split firewood and hoisted water. Inside, they sweetened the air with drugstore perfume. They rolled their words out quietly, petted one another’s arms, stroked the children’s hair. They had pierced noses, brilliant eyes, and dark hair woven into complicated braids creeping from embroidered scarves. Gold vines crawled up sleeves, a wink of bead, a glimmer of thread, lace shawls. The world never saw any of it. I watched Sediqa, Naseer’s wife, rip off her burqa one afternoon and throw it on the bed.
A few days before the battle of Tora Bora, Sediqa went into labor. They brought her baby girl home from the hospital and carried her out of the darkness and over the dirt yard. Naseer had invited Brian and me to celebrate with the family. “The baby is here!” the women called from the yard, and the men spilled out to regard the tiny creature in buttery light from the sitting room window. “Come and see her, she’s here!”
One of Naseer’s brothers shook his head and whispered: “This is not so good for Naseer, because it’s his firstborn. Everybody wants his firstborn to be a boy.”
“For me, they’re both good,” Naseer argued, overhearing. “A boy is okay, a girl is okay. This is a democratic house.”
The men withdrew to talk politics. The women grabbed my hand and pulled me into a back bedroom. Sediqa lay with blankets to her chin, pale and silent. The other women dribbled tea into the baby’s mouth. Somebody slipped a cassette into a dusty tape player, and Indian music wailed from the speakers. There was music here all along, even when the Taliban banned song and the men of the family had to stuff cassettes into their pockets and smuggle them from Pakistan.
And then, in that cramped little room, we were all dancing. The women were stomping and arching, shaking their hips, describing small pictures with their fingertips. It was sexy, sultry, joyful. They were dancing for a new life, another soul indoctrinated into their private sorority. Even the smallest girls, the ones who were babies when the Taliban came, knew how to dance. They had learned from their mothers and aunts, even when it was illegal, even when the women were weary from chores, even when the government told them it was frivolous and wanton and sinful. The women didn’t care. Maybe there would be more years of Taliban, maybe the American occupation would replace the Soviet occupation, maybe anything would happen. But they believed in their bones that Afghans would dance again one day.
And when the dancing came, they wanted their daughters to be ready.
The money finally came through, and the warlords got their war. Workers scrambled out to Jalalabad’s shattered airport to patch up the runways. Soon we began to see the traces of U.S. Special Forces, who moved into the region but stayed hidden from view. They left empty bottles of Poland Spring scattered at abandoned campsites. On December 4, America’s proxy troops began a ground assault into the Tora Bora cave complex, hoping to capture Osama bin Laden. Zaman, Ali, and Abdul Qadir, the third powerful anti-Taliban warlord, split responsibility for the Afghan troops, arguing and elbowing each other every step of the way.
As the battle began, the mujahideen prowled the mountains underfed and shivering, clad in tattered tennis shoes and old sweaters. Many of them were young, and had spent their adolescence in a seamless stream of war. They didn’t know how to read. They didn’t know how old they were. When the tanks bellowed they leaped around and shouted and clapped hands. Their commanders spent their time arguing cartoonishly over who controlled which chunk of hillside, whose men should do what. The mujahideen mooned around, stroking one another lovingly and dreaming of their next meal.
Watching the mujahideen, I tried to imagine how this war looked to them. Afghanistan was a sandbox for generations of men who wanted to play at war, one conflict bleeding