The Submission - Amy Waldman [142]
Batting away hunger and thirst, he crossed a bridge and began to climb a steep, dusty path. The air dried and thinned. Below, the city spread like a grand carpet of indecipherable pattern, every house, every life a knot. In the distance the mountains crested over a low-hanging haze.
He was in some kind of slum. The hills of Kabul had been left to the poor. Garbage clotted the gutters that ran alongside the unpaved pathways, which rain would churn to mud. Children lugged canisters and plastic jugs full of water back to their homes; the air rioted with cooking smoke. The earthen houses, well-fortified rectangular structures with walls and high windows that made it impossible to see inside, turned their backs to him, made a canyon of the path. Hide everything, show nothing. Women in burkas hurried past, their voices gurgling brooks beneath the cloaking fabric. Men stared, or smiled, or greeted him in soft streams of words that he couldn’t understand. A few boys trailed behind him. “Amerkan?” one asked, giggling when Mo nodded. Their faces were dirty and scabrous, their hair matted, their clothes dust-filmed, their eyes rich with curiosity and mirth.
Still hungry, even thirstier—and then without warning his stomach turned to liquid, made thunder, began to cramp and roil and clutch in pain. He revisited his meals—maybe the rare steak at the French restaurant—but the problem was not what he had ingested but where to excrete it. He saw an elderly man working his prayer beads in the shade of his house, his white skullcap above his white beard like the clouds over the snow-covered mountains. Mo’s approach sparked light in his glaucous eyes. His smile was riddled with stumps and holes, as if it had been mined.
“Asalamu alaikum,” the man said.
“Alaikum asalam,” Mo replied.
He waited, as his stomach squeezed in agony, for the soft murmur of the rest of the man’s greeting.
“Toilet?” he asked.
The man shook his head, uncomprehending.
“WC?” Again the man shook his head, and Mo tried to think if there was a universal gesture for bathroom. He clutched his stomach. The man pointed to his mouth, thinking Mo hungry, perhaps offering food. Desperate, Mo squatted, patted his rear end, again rubbed his stomach, turned up his hands, and scrunched his face in a question, looking searchingly around him. Chuckling now, the man nodded and motioned for Mo to follow him down a narrow opening between two houses. The foul smell grew stronger as they moved along the alley; then there was the small outhouse. Inside Mo shut the door and squatted over the hole, gagging before he remembered to hold his breath, trying to keep his balance without touching the walls. His bowels emptied in furious stinking squirts; he became pure animal. Standing up, rocking to get his balance, he looked down into a sea with islands of shit.
As he turned to urinate, a tiny side window revealed the flat roofs of the homes spilling down to the city below, and then, like a sunspot on his vision, a patch of green. When he left the outhouse, stepping over the waste trickling into a gutter nearby, he located the clearing again, seeing it now as a vast green square with the glint of water, cradled by walls all around. Fresh air, clean breath: he pointed to it, and his rescuer gestured toward a path that led down the hill. Mo put his hand on his heart in thanks.
“Chai?” the man offered.
Mo shook his head; he thirsted more for that green. The man called out and clapped his hands and two little boys appeared, impish in their salwar kameez, trying to hide behind each other even as they peered