Once Upon a Time on a Mountain Pass

I

The small town is on a mountain pass once used by Alexander’s army, in South Waziristan, near the Durand line, which separates the Pashtun tribes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is nighttime. Babies sleep peacefully in their cribs and the mothers sleep peacefully and the fathers sleep peacefully, for the babies and the fathers and the mothers know that the stillness is uncertain, so they must use it. In an unusually well-lit house, a bride sleeps still, and beside her, the new husband sleeps still. In other rooms of the house, the bride’s five sisters, staying over on the wedding night, as is custom, sleep still. Their bodies are night still—lost in serene forgetfulness; some things are good to forget at night time. In the same well-lit house, an old man—probably someone’s grandfather—sits in a large room, smoking his hookah. His breathing is measured, as if he knows something about the night, as if he knows that the fleeting stillness, this precarious poise, might vanish like a wizard in a fairytale children are told before they fall asleep on the still and not-so-still nights around the world. From time to time, he looks up at the sky through the window where somewhere, invisible to him, remote-controlled birds—called machar—are flying. And their buzzing, easily overheard most days, seems to ring a mournful siren in his head, a sound powerful enough to puncture the temporary peace of any still night.

Ii

Sergeant Murad—my adjutant, stationed outside—nods from his cramped position of relative proximity while I read Macbeth in the tender, dim light of a gas lamp. I cannot make friends with my men so I read tales of misunderstood kings late into the night. We are camped in the shade of a mountain covered with conifer trees, and the land around is abandoned treeless benchland. On the other side of the mountain runs the Kurram River and I have bathed in it, and its water is cold and ceaseless and I have heard that it has no memory. In the three months we have been here, I have found no respite from the afflictions of loneliness except the one phone call I make from the satellite phone every day, a perk, my prerogative as a captain, the third highest ranked officer in the regiment. I call my mother and I don’t apologize for it.

Murad keeps watch on a cherry lawn chair, which is an oddity in the foothills of Koh-e-Sulaiman, and he smokes from a pipe shaped like a crescent. A sergeant in the Pakistan army, Murad makes less money in a month than I used to make as a bartender in Bourbon Street, New Orleans, in one weekend night. But Murad’s nonchalance, which he exudes with a tasteful lethargy, in the same beat as the puffs of smoke, says that he owns the wide expanses of bouldered fallow and that there is some dignity in this. His moustache is wild and concave and interesting. He will be outside all night on the cherry lawn chair.

Iii

Machar: the name of a town in Ontario, Canada; the surname of South Sudan’s first vice president; the Hebrew word for tomorrow; the name of the Washington Congregation for Secular Humanistic Judaism; the name of a church, a saint, and a bar in Aberdeen; a colony in Karachi famous for its disease-spreading, mosquito-ridden street corners; the name for a mosquito in several South Asian languages; an Urdu word—two syllables, hard to pronounce without a faint hiss, whispered with a mixture of fear and contempt in this small town.

Iv

My commanding officer, Colonel Karamat, watches Pashto movies on vcr, asks for the morning rota at the staff meetings, and chews niswar. He and I have an unspoken understanding: we both think I cannot be trusted. During our first meeting—we were stationed in Miranshah then, around poplars and rice fields—he asked me if I knew any jokes, and I told him the one about the...