Tanner’s Virgin

She kept doing this.

Once we were in the city we got off the poor goddamned horse and sort of abandoned him. I suppose it’s not good policy to abandon horses, and there’s probably a local ordinance against it, but abandoning a horse can’t be any worse than stealing it in the first place, and I had a hunch that whoever took over the horse’s ownership would do at least as good a job as we had done. As far as I was concerned, if I never saw a horse again it would be fine. I had what are probably called saddle sores, except that this particular horse had not had a saddle, so I guess what I had were bareback sores, if there is such a thing. There was such a thing as far as I was concerned. I staggered along, cross-eyed and bowlegged and wholly out of sorts. Phaedra, too, looked a little bowlegged, but I don’t know whether that was caused by the horse or by the way she had spent the past two months in Anardara. Bowleggedness is an occupational disease of maradóosh.

“I’m going to miss that horse,” she told me, on the way to Amanullah’s house.

“I can believe it.”

“I never realized the rapport a human being and a horse can establish.”

“Yeah, rapport.”

“I mean-”

“I know what you mean.”

“Evan, I can’t help it.”

“I know.”

“I just have to-”

“I know.”

“You always wanted me. In New York, in your apartment-”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“I just-”

“Forget it.”

“Maybe I should kill myself.”

“Yeah, kill yourself.”

“Evan, do you mean that?”

“Huh?” I snapped to attention. “No,” I said. “No, my mind must have been wandering. Don’t kill yourself. Everything’ll be all right. Believe me. Everything will be all right.”

“But you don’t want me. You came halfway around the world to save my life and now you don’t even want me anymore.”

“I’ll get over it.”

“You hate me.”

“Oh, hell. I don’t hate you.”

“You must. You came all the way to Afghanistan to save me from a fate worse than death and now you find out that I’m actually a whore at heart. Aren’t I?”

“No.”

“But I am,” she wailed.

I turned on her. “Now shut up for a minute,” I roared. “This goddamned city is absolutely crawling with a bunch of crazy Russians. Crazy, murdering Russians. And I only know one man in the whole damned city, and he’s the man who gave me that car. It was his car and he was very proud of it, and he loaned it to me and now it’s gone. And I have to tell him the car is gone, and that he’ll never see it again-”

“Why do you have to tell him?”

“Shut up. I have to tell him this, and then I have to get him so mad at the Russians that he’ll get the rest of the city equally mad at them. And then between the two of us, Amanullah and I have to lead mobs to root out the stupid Russians and hang them from the streetlamps, and I have a feeling that there are more Russians than streetlamps in this crazy city. And I have to do all this without getting killed, and without getting you killed, and then the two of us have to get the hell out of here. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

“I guess so.”

“And do you understand why I have more important things on my mind than your twat?”

“I-”

“Come on.”

Amanullah was not at his house. We found him at the Café of the Seven Sisters. He was eating a leg of lamb.

I told him the whole story while he ate, and it hit home with such force he almost stopped eating. As it was, he quit while there was still a little meat clinging to the bone. He pounded the bone down on the top of the table and roared. Every eye in the place was on him.

“To attempt to destroy our country is an outrage,” he bellowed.

A murmur ran through the crowd.

“To attempt the assassination of my young friend and his woman is barbarism,” he cried out.

The crowd surged forward, muttering agreement, adding shouts of encouragement.

“But to destroy my automobile,” Amanullah screamed. “To destroy my automobile,” he shrieked. “MY AUTOMOBILE!”

The crowd was roaring its agreement.

“Twenty miles to the gallon,” Amanullah bawled.

The crowd pressed at the doors of the café.

“Automatic transmission! You never had to shift!”

The crowd was in the streets.

“Snow tires!”

The crowd was adding new members. Lurking in the shadows I saw the Bulgarian with the pointed beard. “It’s one of them,” I called out, “Don’t let him get away!”

They didn’t let him get away. Men and women, screaming hysterically, took hold of his arms and legs and tore him apart. Little children used his head for a soccer ball. And the crowd, wild with the taste of blood, surged down the street toward the Soviet Embassy.

“Vinyl seat covers,” Amanullah screamed. “A heater! A radio! An emergency brake! Oh, the villains!”

The Afghan police, reinforced by soldiers, took to the streets. They flooded the area around the Soviet Embassy. There were whispered exchanges between the police and the crowd.

The police joined the crowd.

The army joined the crowd.

“Onward,” shouted Amanullah. “For Kabul! For Afghanistan! For your lives and your country and your sacred honor! For my car!”

Those poor goddamned Russians.

Chapter 15

I sat cross-legged on the ground. I was wearing a white loincloth and holding, in both hands, a yellow flower. I did not know the name of the flower. I knew that names were but an illusion, and that what one must seek to know is not the name of the flower but the essence of the flower, the flowerness of the flower, and through it the flowerness of oneself and the selfness of the universe. And I poured the selfness of myself into the flowerness of the flower, and time opened and flowed like wine, and I was the flower and the flower was I.

The Manishtana sat cross-legged beside me. I handed him the flower. He looked deep into its center and said nothing for a long time. He returned the flower to me. I looked at it some more.

“You meditate,” he said.

“Yes.”

“It is beauty, the flower, and you meditate upon it in the peace of the ashram, and you sense the beauty, and it becomes a part of you as you in turn become a part of it. And there are three parts to the beauty. There is the beauty that exists and is perceived, and there is the beauty that exists but is not perceived, and there is the beauty that is perceived but does not exist.”

I studied the flower.

“You meditate, and your mind recovers.”

“It does.”

“You regain health.”

“I am much better. I have stopped vomiting.”

“That is good.”

“I can concentrate again. And I no longer break out in cold sweats all the time.”

“But you do not sleep,” said the Manishtana.

“No.”

“So you have not yet healed yourself.”

“I do not think that is to be healed.”

“Man is to sleep. There is the night that is for sleep and the day that is for wakefulness, and there is no time between the two, just as the Holinesses in their infinite wisdom give us no state between wakefulness and sleep, or between yin and yang, or man and woman, or good and evil. It is the principle of dualism.”

“It is my special difficulty,” I said. “I was wounded long ago in a forgotten war. The powers of light took the art of sleep from me, and they alone can return it.”

“The perfect man sleeps of night,” said the Manishtana.

“Nobody’s perfect,” I said.

I found Phaedra sitting in the garden beside the waterfall. She was smelling a flower. She had her eyes closed, and she was curled up in the fetal posture clutching the flower in both hands. She had her nose in it and she seemed to be trying to inhale it.

“Good day,” I said.

“I am a flower, Evan. And the flower is a girl named Phaedra.”