f r o m ___ S i l k _ R o a d__________
by Mark Harril Saunders__________
When Luke was thirteen they lived in Kabul, in the American Embassy there, and the calm in the compound was siegelike-men out fighting, women and children at home; rebels slipping in everywhere. The masons from north of the city didn't come to fix the wall, and rats chewed through the mortar from the open sewer running outside. Every movement seemed magnified. The lank brown bodies lumbering down the garden path made his mother hysterical and she beat one to death with the handle of a rake, but the whimper of its dying made her cry. A year later their Ambassador was kidnapped as he drove through the streets from his Residence, pulled from the back seat of his long black Cadillac and shot in the head. His Afghan driver, whose son had taught Luke a few moves of the local kung fu, killed instantly by a bullet through the windshield-Luke's friend in the motor pool afterward, kicking that Cadillac's ridiculous skirts, while Luke pressed his eye to the deadly little star, peering at the darkness revealed in the glass. Twenty years later, there are still men who would kill to find the people behind it.The summer following the Ambassador's murder, Luke's father took him on a turbo-prop plane that flew low above a ruinous desert country to the north, erected by wind, through astonishing mountains and into a landscape of rocks that was then part of Soviet Asia, to an ancient city on the Silk Road, Samarkand. He took Luke and not his mother, who was sick, or his sister, who stayed behind to be with her. His father's deputy, April Lindstrom, travelled with them, and once during the flight they had to land at a remote border station.
"We don't want a missile in our laps," his father.
The plane descended in a crazy vibration, onto a strip of shifting dust, banged over the seams in the concrete and choked to a stop before a rusting quonset hut. Something fell forward from the baggage section and touched Luke's shoulder like a hand. He jumped, but it was only a fly rod, left over from a previous trip. When the pilot opened the hatch there was no sound but the wind.
A rumpled guard roused himself from his seat against the corrugated steel, scratched his coils of beard and dragged his rifle out to see their papers, which he grudgingly found in order. April tried to engage him in her limited Dari, a language of which she was proud for the very obscurity of it, but the guard was like a man waiting for a storm: he kept looking at the featureless sky.
As they returned to the plane, his father was kidding her about the uselessness of it.
"Learn a lingua franca," he said, "comme francais." It was embarrassing when his father spoke in one of the languages he knew-French and German, Latin phrases-and April knew it and she shot him a look. Luke's mother spoke French, and she had been teaching him since he was little; sometimes now a French word would come to him when he wasn't expecting it, and once a particularly stupid fourth-grade teacher had thought he was saying something obscene.
"Tais-toi, Papa." It was the only way Luke was allowed to tell his Dad to shut up.
"Ça ne te profit pas ..." his father began, but before he could continue, he was silenced by the sound of a small band of men riding beautiful horses coming down from the hills-not a sound exactly but a sudden disturbance in the ceaseless wall of wind, the creak that is made by the muscles of lathering horses, the power rippling their flanks as they galloped onto the runway. As they drew up between the Americans and the plane with a clatter of hooves, the air stopped in Luke's mouth. Saliva seeped from the insides of his cheeks, but his throat was bone dry.
We are Americans, he thought, as the leader dismounted in a whipping of cloth. Then he realized that his father knew the man. Together, they went into the hut, while April and Luke moved around the riderless horse and shuffled back against the steps of the plane. The pilot was smoking a cigarette. Several of the followers tried to draw Luke into what seemed a conspiracy with their whiskery dialect; they were nothing like Luke had always thought they would be. In Kabul, the mujahedin were spoken of as cruel and clannish, fanatical warriors who gave quarter to none, but up close they were only scruffy and rancid, with nervous faces and intense, dark, sorrowful eyes. Scary in the way of stray dogs, unpredictable. The pilot said a few words in Dari, two of which Luke's friend from the motor pool had taught him, and April shot the pilot a look that was different in a very subtle way from the one that she had given his father, but soon the men had climbed down from their horses and were smoking with him.
When they took off again Luke sat in the backseat with April-she had said that he could call her by her first name-and he thought she was beautiful, and that the pilot had said something dirty about her to the horsemen. She smiled at Luke from behind her curtain of hair-Veronica Lake, his father called it-and Luke thought he saw a flutter around her lips he recognized, though with his mother it could hardly be called a flutter anymore. April turned away to the window and he made out her body underneath her safari suit, breasts pushing the pleated flap pockets, thigh swelling the rough cotton pants.
His father was talking above the engines to the pilot-"Soldiers of God," Luke heard him say-and then his father lowered his voice to a tone that was lost in the noise. A spine of dry, trackless hills hunched up before them and the pilot took a drink from a flask; his father politely refused. He turned back to April and said, in a tone Luke relished, "The first time I saw a Viet Cong dead he had that same sort of meditative look in his eyes, and he was terribly slender, and I thought then that we were in big trouble, if they could get men like that to fight..."
"Those guys looked like horse thieves," April said.
"Oh, they're a whole lot worse than that," he answered, chuckling once. The pilot muttered something and touched his father's shoulder, and Luke heard him say "mines" and point at the pocked, ochre dirt. The feathery shadow of the plane blew across the expanse.
Luke was terrified then, but it was a different fear than he'd felt in the presence of the mujahedin. Now he felt completely alone, as if he were the only one who saw what was really going on. The soldiers of God he understood, but every other adult he knew was in some way oblivious. Still, when they landed at the airport in Samarkand, with its short square tower and breezy flyblown terminal with the flowers outside, he found himself disappointed to be out of that place in between.
In Samarkand, the minarets were silent. The madrassah with its symmetrical blue-tiled facade was empty of life. In the center of town, a hotel faced a large, shaded square, and the lobby had the feeling of a place for English travellers on the Continent: the old British ladies who played bridge in the cool dusty corner by the stairs seemed right at home.
On the roof was a garden strung with multi-colored lights, and on the second night his father and April and Luke boarded the creaky old lift to eat dinner-'en plein air,' his father said, helping April into her chair.
He was dressed in his khakis and white linen shirt and as his hand spread gently across her back, the tendons on his arm stood out as strong as bone. Children ran through the tables while their parents sat smoking over the wreck of their meal. The night air was blue with their fetid tobacco, which smelled more like pot, and the savor of herbs and roasted kebabs. In one corner of the garden sat a raggedy band-players with dried-apple faces and war medals flapping on their chests in time with the swing, and as Luke was chasing a last piece of cucumber around his plate in its pool of garlicy yoghurt, he heard his father ask April to dance. Luke looked up as the long arm extended in his father's easy, dignified way across the plates from which they had just finished eating with their fingers: it made the touch of their hands seem harmless, refined.
No one else joined them, and the old English ladies nodded approval; their milky blue eyes tacked from his father to April to Luke, trapped with his mandarin orange juice under the globe of cobalt sky. They said they hadn't seen a man dance like that since the Blitz, and then fixed Luke with some expectation that he couldn't figure out. The music was flat, an uneasy rendering of the big bands his father played in his study at home-their Washington home-and Luke felt ashamed, that something had been spoiled by the dry, spicy air. No scratch of cicadas, with their manic crescendo, no smell of honeysuckle like the Washington yard. So far from the promise of his mother advancing through the mild, firefly dusk, her flowered apron tied across hips that were bony and sharp, wrinkles in the fabric as she leaned over to pick out watermelon seeds. No Glenn Miller from the window below. There was something evil in this arid night, and his father and April glided through it with ease while the people talked about them in Russian and English and the keening of Dari.
The next day they were taken to historical sites by the local communist flunky, a short, fat man with black glasses resting on a porous, warted nose. Round stains bloomed in odd places on his trousers and his short-sleeved white shirt. He fawned before April and thought that Luke's father was the Secretary of State. Outside town, on the crest of a low knob of sand, Ulug-bek, descendant of Genghis Khan and grandson of Tamarlane, had built an observatory for charting the stars. His calculations were so far ahead of their time that his maps had been carried to Oxford, the flunky explained.
"Communists are like Mormons," his father whispered to April. "They induct people into the Party posthumously."
Resting his back against the cold stone walls, Luke didn't know what his father was talking about, and didn't care. He'd made some decisions during the night. The room where he slept in the hotel was tall and hot-the curtains and sheets had the prickly smell of disuse-and the sounds in the hall and in the square below were ominous: shutting doors with no footsteps, cars that idled forever or flew past, engines straining. On the alley behind was a tomb blacked by Zoroastrian fire. There was something about April-her love of this language only spoken in the farthest corner of the world-that made his father act differently around her, not the man Luke was used to at all. As Luke looked up at Ulug-bek's tower, all he wanted to be was this princely astronomer, watching the sky, while his grandfather's lands fell around him.
The next day they rode in a punishing four-wheel-drive vehicle with the flunky to some mountains several hours away. The fly rods reappeared and they stood in a shallow, swift stream-Luke, April, Luke's father, the flunky and the pilot; the pilot decked them all out in equipment from Orvis and Bean's. The pilot and April were the only ones who knew how to fish, the flunky just stood there in the current looking down at his waders and vest, and Luke's father's attempts at casting tangled his line in the bushes on the bank. April showed Luke how to let out the line, feel the strike and hook the fish and let it run, the spinner singing on the reel, and by the end of the day, his face tight from the sun and the swirling water a constant feeling in his ankles, Luke landed something that April said looked like a catfish.
That night, at midnight, he and April sat together on a bench in the square, while a public security car trolled for black marketeers. The bench and the walks were of pebbly cement which shone white in the moonlight, bright white stripes on their eyes that seemed to float between the silver-grey trees. Up the crumbling steps they could see the implacable face of the hotel, with its roof bleeding color and music into the sky. Beyond the square, the sky was the color of amber, liquid and dirty from the marketplace stalls.
"I thought I should tell you alone," April said, breaking a grapefruit between her thumbs. The fruit smelled ripe, a bit funky, and her face was sly but reluctant in the shadows; her hair glowed.
Her son Alec was Luke's best friend in the Embassy. Her husband, Jack, was an English teacher at the American school; he coached the Afghan National Basketball Team, for which brothers and cousins of the mujahedin were said to play. Jack Lindstrom had been in Vietnam for three tours, a recon Marine who was captured by Charlie but escaped. He listened to Jefferson Airplane, the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, and the Stones. He gave Alec and Luke books to read, novels by Steinbeck and Kerouac, and when he drove to the basket through the slender, flailing arms of his players, Luke imagined him as Japhy Ryder, the wine-guzzling poet from The Dharma Bums, humping a knapsack up the mountain. Jack was short and he moved so fluently, but he seemed to carry something, always, carefully, in the center of his back. Jack smoked hash, which he said was for the pain in his spine that Charlie had given him, and Alec sometimes stole a resiny lump from his stash and they smoked it together on the roof, where the helipad was. They'd been smoking and listening the afternoon that the first attack came, the one that made Luke's mother sick. Thinking of her made him feel like he was just now coming down, and although he was desperate to say something funny or wise to head April off, he didn't know what that would be.
"Alec and his father and I are going back to D.C.," she said. "In about a month."
Luke looked at the grapefruit, at the stringy pink meat.
"How do you feel about that?"
Luke passed her eyes, watching him carefully, on the way to the sky. What would Ulug-bek say? Here his heavens were leeched of stars, only a few weak dots far off over the desert where the border station was.
"I have mixed feelings," he said.
April smiled, tearing a section with her fingernails. When she had swallowed, she looked him in the eye. "You know what I'm going to remember about this trip?"
"Why couldn't Alec come?" Luke asked.
All at once, April seemed uncomfortable, as if she'd caught something in the soundless movement of the car. A cigarette glowed inside, showing dark figures slumped against the seats.
"I'm going to remember Ulug-bek," she said quickly, and her breast pressed the fabric as she pitched the spiral of rind beneath a tree. "I'm going to think of Ulug-bek reincarnated. Do you believe in reincarnation?"
"Not really."
"Well, I don't either, really, but I'm going to think of you as Ulug-bek reincarnated, out here in your place in the desert. You can think of me, too, if you want, looking up at the very same stars."
Luke reached out for her warm oval face, the shading of lace underneath her djellabah. Some great force like a magnet was pulling him to her. "But they're not the same," he started. His hand hovered by her cheek. "The curve of the earth, the constellations..."
April smiled. Tears brimmed in her narrow, feline eyes. She touched Luke softly on the back of his head, sifted her sticky fingers through his hair, then kissed him on the forehead. The movement of cloth caused her perfume to rise; her lips left a heat that spread in his cheeks.
"You're just like your father," she said, pulling away. His scalp tingled and her voice made him whirl.
She got up about an inch and sat down, the way women do to shake off a subject from themselves.
"You're too smart about things, Luke. Sometimes it's better just to feel the world. Feel where you are."
"It feels fucked up, though. You and Alec being here helped things."
April blinked and looked away, and Luke wondered if 'fuck' had offended her. He had used the word because his head was rushing with an exotic sort of menace; the colors of the sky were all wrong. The word seemed to chase away the dervish whisked up by their presence.
"Where'd my Dad go, anyway?"
"He had a meeting," April said.
Some quality to her voice echoed another conversation, perhaps the one while they danced beneath the multi-colored lights and Luke watched their lips move, the pulp in his queer-tasting juice beginning to settle on the bottom. He could hear that music again, strange and off-key but flowing, coming down off the roof beyond the trees like a falls of unseen water. The sound roused something inside him, and whatever it was began to move.
Mark Harril Saunders has never been to Kabul, Afghanistan, where the excerpt of his novel appearing in this issue takes place, because various armies have been shelling the city on and off since he was ten. His travels, real and fictional, have been circling the area, however, with stops in Uzbekhistan, China, Russia, Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Azerbaijan. In a departure, his most recent short fiction is a story about Connecticut, forthcoming in The Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife and daughter in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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