Tanner’s Virgin

So I bent down to get it, and my turban blew off.

That seemed silly. There was hardly any wind at all, surely not enough wind to blow a turban off somebody’s head. I said, “What the hell?” which probably means nothing at all in Pushtu, and I turned around and picked up the turban, and there was a dagger sticking in it.

If I hadn’t dropped the change purse, the dagger would have landed in the small of my back or thereabouts.

I looked around and didn’t see anyone. I looked at the dagger again to make sure it was still there, and it was. I was suddenly reminded of all those terrible movie bits where a guy walks into a bar in Boston and asks questions about a man named Kyriatos, then gets on a jet to St. Louis and charters a private plane to the Sun Valley slopes. Halfway up the ski lift somebody sticks an automatic in his back and a voice says, “I am Kyriatos. What do you want with me?”

I’d always objected to that sort of garbage in the movies. But here I had gone into a coffeehouse and asked some dumb questions about Amanullah, whom evidently no one had ever heard of and cared not at all about, and then I took three steps out the door and somebody put a dagger in my turban.

It couldn’t be co

I removed the dagger from my turban and found a place for it in my robe. It was a very impressive affair, that dagger. The handle was some sort of bone with an elaborate inlay of mother-of-pearl. The blade was of fine steel with a geometrical pattern etched on either side. It was the sort of weapon that used to be found in English gentlemen in very early Agatha Christie novels.

The idea of resuming my search for Amanullah made me a little nervous at first. But I told myself I was being silly, and after telling myself this for a few minutes I began to believe it, and off I went on the trail of Amanullah of the White Hair.

The next few hours produced a few offers of slaves for sale and very little else. Slavery, I learned, is illegal in Afghanistan, just as off-track betting on horse races is illegal in the United States. From what I could see, it was about as hard to purchase a slave in Kabul as it was to get a bet down in Manhattan. Perhaps it was even easier, because the slave-selling business seemed more competitive than bookmaking. I kept shuffling around asking for Amanullah the Slave Trader, and I kept finding myself referred to other men with slaves for sale who did not, sad to say, happen to be Amanullah.

Kabul gets very quiet between midnight and dawn. Almost everything closes and the streets are empty. There was a cold dry wind blowing down from the north, and I spent the early hours of the morning huddled in the doorway of a saddler’s shop, trying to get warm and organize my thoughts. The one was as hard as the other.

The sun came up in a hurry. I shook the dust out of my robes and resumed wandering through Kabul, asking more questions, nibbling dough cakes here, sipping coffee there, and gradually finding my way to the oldest section of the city. The streets were extremely narrow, with the huts on either side taking up where the street left off. Motor vehicles could not negotiate those streets. Heavy-boned Afghan work horses and little Persian donkeys plodded patiently through the streets. The air was heavy with an air pollution centuries older than carbon monoxide. The sun rose higher in the sky, and the heat, trapped by the too-close huts and shacks, became oppressive.

And in the early afternoon a sidewalk vendor of doubtful sausages closed his good eye a moment in thought, stroked his beard with tobacco-stained fingers, opened his eye again, and nodded pensively at me. “A great man with white hair that hangs to his shoulders,” he said. “A man with a furious appetite, a man who eats day and night and whose belly would press through his robes if it could. A man who deals with the foreigners, with the men of Europe and India and with the sons of Han from the Chinese hills, purchasing women from them and placing them in houses in the countryside where the miners use them as maradóosh. Is this the Amanullah you seek, kâzzih?”

“It is, old one.”

“He is the brother of the husband of the sister of my wife.”

“Ah.”

“You have business with him, kâzzih? You have women to sell?”

“I have business with Amanullah.”

“By your accent you have come on a journey of many miles. You are an Afghan?”

“My mother was an Afghan.”

“Ah. If you go to the Café of the Four Sisters, kâzzih, you find him there. Amanullah. You tell him you bear good wishes of Tarsheen of the Sausage Pot. May your business prosper, kâzzih.”

“May your road run downhill and the wind be at your back, Tarsheen.”

“Blessings attend you, kâzzih.”

The Café of the Four Sisters was a little wineshop deep in the heart of the old part of town. Two of the sisters passed among customers seated on cut-down wine barrels. One brought me a glass of sweet white wine. If all Afghan women looked like the two sisters, I could understand why Amanullah’s business was prosperous. I couldn’t remember ever seeing a more unspeakably ugly woman.

Unspeakable or not, I spoke to her. I asked for Amanullah and was pleased to note that she knew precisely whom I meant. We didn’t even go through the vaudeville routine aimed at defining precisely which Amanullah I had in mind.

“He comes here every day, kâzzih.”

“Is he here now, then?” I had seen no one who fit the description.

“Ah, but he is gone.”

“He returns soon?” There is, incidentally, no future tense in Pushtu, which is why the conversations reported up to now have been somewhat stilted. Just a present tense and an imperfect tense. The present is used to convey present time and all future and conditional time. The imperfect covers all past time. “He comes again to the café this afternoon?”

“It is said that he goes on business to the west. He returns by nightfall, but if he stops here for wine I know not.”

“I thank you, sister.”

I set my wine glass down. Someone brushed my table and nearly knocked it over. I rescued the glass, raised it, set it down untasted. Something struck a chord in my mind but I couldn’t pick out the notes. That man who had passed my table-

I got up, glanced around for him. He was just leaving the café. I followed him out, lost him in the crowd. I caught a glimpse of his small eyes and spade-shaped black beard and then he was gone.

I returned to the café. In the corner an old man was coughing violently, pounding the earthen floor with his fists. His face had a bluish cast to it and he seemed to be dying of something. A few of his friends were clustered around him. The rest of the drinkers ignored him.

I got back to my table, but my wine glass was gone. I decided that the waitress must have picked it up, and I remembered how cloyingly sweet the wine had been and decided I didn’t want any more anyway.

On the way out the door I heard the death rattle in the old man’s throat.

The third time was the charm.

I don’t really think anyone would have figured it out on the basis of a simple dagger through the turban. I suppose, though, that I should have gotten the message in the Café of the Four Sisters. My own wine glass gone, an old wino coughing himself to death, a man who looked familiar passing my table and almost spilling my wine – I guess anyone with half a brain would have figured out that the man with the spade-shaped beard had put some poison in my glass, which the other man had cadged when I ducked out of the café. If I had read it all somewhere I’m sure I would have figured it out for myself, but instead I was living through it, and it’s always harder that way.