Tanner’s Virgin

If nothing else, I was certain that I didn’t know anybody in Afghanistan. I know people almost everywhere, and on the whole I found it quite remarkable that I didn’t know anybody in Afghanistan, since a friend in need in Kabul would have been a friend indeed, indeed. And if no one knew me, there would be no reason for anyone to be putting daggers in my turban or poison in my wine.

I went back to the Café of the Four Sisters a couple of times in the course of the afternoon. Amanullah never did get there. I spent the rest of my time sort of wandering around and getting the feel of the city. It was what guidebooks call a study in contrasts, with broad avenues as wide as the streets of the old quarter were narrow. There were a few foreigners in the city, most of them Pakistanis from Kashmir, a few Russian types of one sort or another. Mostly, though, there were Afghans, and most of them were dressed more or less as I was – leather sandals, a loose-fitting robe more like an ancient Roman toga than anything else, and a sort of turban.

By sunset I was hungry. I had started drifting back in the general direction of the Four Sisters, and I stopped along the way at a hut from the central chimney of which wafted the odor of broiling mutton. I went inside and stood at a long counter. A thickset man took a mutton steak off the charcoal fire, sprinkled a mixture of unidentifiable spices over it, and slapped it onto a cast-iron plate, which he placed on the counter before me. There were no knives or forks. When in Rome, I thought, and picked the meat up in my hands and began gnawing at it. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed another man glaring at me. I turned. All of the other diners, I saw, had selected knives and forks from a bin against the far wall. All of the other diners looked at me as if I were a barbarian. Chastened, I went to the bin for knife and fork, returned, and went to work on the food.

While I was eating, the chef spooned a mixture of cracked wheat and rice onto my plate. The mutton was rare on the inside and black on the outside and very tangy. The cracked wheat and rice was a successful combination. I noticed another man drinking some sort of beerish concoction, and when the chef passed my way again I pointed at my fellow diner and made drinking motions. It turned out to be beer, but with an unusual taste to it that I finally identified as cashew nuts. This didn’t seem to make sense, as the cashew nut is native to the Western Hemisphere, and world trade would have to advance to an extraordinary degree before South Americans took to shipping cashew nuts to Afghanistan breweries. I found out subsequently that an Afghan nut vaguely similar to the cashew is used to flavor the beer.

I had two liters of the beer and finished my mutton steak. I ordered another beer – it wasn’t the best beer I’d ever tasted, but there was something habit-forming about the taste – and I drank a little of this, and then I realized that I would have to get rid of some old beer in order to make room for the rest of the new beer.

There was no lavatory as such, just a trough at the base of the back wall. I went out there and did the sort of thing one does at urinals, and as I was concluding this operation the little hut blew up.

For an insane moment I thought I had done it. The Man Who Pees Dynamite. I suppose that’s the feeling a woodpecker gets if he goes to work on a tree just as the lumberman gives it the final chop. After all, it was a pretty extraordinary experience. One minute I was urinating on this building, and the next minute the goddamned building was gone.

The damage was close to total, the destruction approached utter, and the chaos was absolute. There was the sound of the explosion followed by complete silence. This held for maybe ten seconds. Then everybody in Kabul set up a hue and cry.

The blast knocked me flat on my back, which was probably just as well, because most of what was inside the little restaurant was blown outside, and it wouldn’t have been wise to be standing in the way. By the time I was back on my feet, neither bloody nor unbowed, the chaos had reached absolute pitch. There were sirens wailing in the distance, and it occurred to me that I was in what might well turn out to be a bad place for a foreigner without papers.

So I manfully ignored the cries of help rising from the near-dead, and heroically resisted the temptation to come to the aid of my fellow man, and didn’t even go back to look for my beer. I don’t think I’d have had much luck anyway; the counter was gone, and the charcoal stove, and the chairs, and most of the people. I got the hell out of there as fast as my legs could carry me, which turned out to be somewhat faster than I had suspected. I raced down the block and around the corner, and I very nearly collided with the man with the spade-shaped black beard.

He stared at me. “You’re alive!”

“You speak English,” I said, cleverly.

“Curse you, Ta

He pulled out the world’s biggest pistol and stuck it in my face. “This time you don’t get away,” he said. “Knives don’t work on you, bombs don’t work on you, it’s impossible to drown you. But with a hole in your damned head perhaps it will be different.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, reasonably. “Do you realize what you’re doing? Do you have any idea?”

He stared at me.

“You’re making a terrible mistake.”

“Talk,” he demanded.

“Well,” I said, and kicked him in the groin.

Chapter 9

Nothing succeeds like a kick in the groin.

I suppose it must be at least partly psychological. Even when the kick is wide of the mark, men tend to double up and moan for a few moments before they realize that nothing hurts. The mere suggestion of a kick in the cubes is harrowing, and I gave my bearded friend more than the suggestion. I got him right on target, and I put enough into the kick so that it was unlikely that he would ever sire children. Which, considering the type of genes he’d be likely to pass on and the already crowded state of the world, was just as well.

He fell apart. He dropped the gun, which I picked up and tucked into my robe along with the dagger that was my souvenir of his first visit. He dropped himself, too, sprawling on the ground, clutching his crotch with both hands and making perfectly horrible sounds.

Everyone ignored us.

I’m damned if I know why. Whether it was simply that the bombed-out restaurant was a greater source of interest than an argument between two strangers, or whether the basic sense of privacy of the Afghan led him to choose not to get involved I ca

“If you’re going to shoot someone,” I said, reasonably, “you should just go ahead and do it. It serves no point to tell him about it first. It just gives him a chance to try and do something about it.”

“You kicked me,” he said.

“Good thinking. I’m glad you’re in condition to think, because this is important. I want you clowns to stop trying to kill me.”

He set his jaw and glared at me.

“Because there’s really no point to it. You know, I had forgotten all about you morons.” I switched to Russian, remembering that they had been speaking it on the boat. “You and Yaakov and Daly and the rest of you. I forgot all about you. You wouldn’t believe what I went through getting here. Did you ever ride a camel? Or try to convince a Kurd that you aren’t spying for the Baghdad government? Or eat zebra sandwiches in Tel Aviv? Of course I forgot about you. It was a pleasure to forget about you.”