Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [108]
Ahmed was fighting to keep her. He was besotted, obsessed. Maybe he needed that to get through the days, the illusion of working for something, the promise of payoff, pretty and good. Ahmed scraped together spare money to take her to restaurants, sometimes. He took her to Internet cafés. But not too much, he added quickly. “There’s a lot of curious guys. She’s a very beautiful girl. And she’s not helping me with this. She says, ‘Why are you getting angry? There’s no reason to get angry.’ She says, ‘I can’t fall in love. Don’t talk to me about this subject.’ I said, ‘No problem.’ She’s faced a lot of bad things in the past.”
She was torturing him; anybody could see that. Earlier in the war they’d dated for ten months. “The first sixty days we flew to the stars together,” he says, “so she got inside my heart.” But they squabbled and split. She started dating another student, a man Ahmed knew.
“We don’t like each other, but we smile, face each other, say hello, how are you,” he muttered darkly.
Seven months after they’d broken up, they bumped into each other on campus. All the feelings came back to Ahmed, all in a wash. He began to spend a little time with her, just friends, they agreed. She needed to go to the doctor to check on a skin rash, and he gave her a lift. Afterward Ahmed bared his soul. I’m starting to love you, he said. I can’t call you my friend. Now they were together every day, and Ahmed was living a sweet torment.
“I can’t reach anything with her!” he told me woefully. “She always gives you a different opinion. I don’t know how I should do, what I should think. It’s strange for me, because I’m always thinking the right thing, doing the right thing. Not with her. Sometimes she’s trying to trick me. I’m sure of something, but she says, ‘No, it’s not like that.’”
She knew when she was being discussed; she’d sit up straighter, bat her hazel eyes, and rub against her chair like a cat, in an awkward, exaggerated imitation of wiles she’d seen on television. She was all dressed up in a skirt cut from tulle like a ballerina’s tutu, woven with sequins of silver and gold, tottering forth on high heels, chubby fingers heavy with rings, eyes weighted down under thick, runny makeup.
Ahmed and I both looked at her.
“The one thing I dreamed in my life was to make her love me,” he said balefully. “But it’s too hard.”
With Ahmed, I couldn’t make it clean. Why did he keep coming, risking his life? Was he bored, curious, did he hope I’d give him money or help him get a visa? Maybe he just wanted to impress his girlfriend, to show her that an American woman found him so fascinating she bought him tea and spent hours copying his words into lined notebooks. Maybe he himself didn’t know, perhaps he just said yes because I asked and he wanted to see what would happen. And there I was, sopping at puddles of spilled words, sponging it all onto paper. He was a character and a type. Even as he spoke I was seeing him as a soul built of black letters on a bright electronic backdrop, a spine and legs and arms constructed of short newspaper paragraphs, representing a generation, representing a sect. Imagining how his words would reconstruct themselves for the reader, hoping these quotations I snatched up would transport Americans into this boy’s world, into this filthy, exhausted war. I wanted that badly from Ahmed—the impression he left. I was trying to steal—not his soul, but his shadow.
I was pushing my luck, asking for too many meetings. I wanted Ahmed’s story to be good. I knew I’d never be able to visit his home, but I sketched diagrams as he described the rooms—the kitchen, the family tree and Koranic verses framed on the wall, the nylon bag where he kept his few pieces of clothing. Then I had a better idea: I’d give him a camera, and he could shoot pictures of his home, his world.
We never got around to it.
One day I met Ahmed, as