Page 12 of What Remains

Poyaand his mother lived in a cramped house of sun-hardened brick perched on the far eastern edge of the village. Essentially a very large square, the house contained a pot-belly stove on a brick platform at the center. They slept on pallets by the stove, pumped water from a well, and did their business in an outhouse with a corrugated tin roof. Their house was also a stone’s throw from where the road had ended before the Taliban showed up. This meant they often saw and heard the Taliban as well as their prisoners who were housed in yurts. At first, so many Taliban milling around made Mami nervous, but after the first two weeks and no one showing up to arrest them, she relaxed. By and by, they grew accustomed to the racket, which started early and ended late.

Being so close, though, meant that Poya sometimes saw things he probably wasn’t meant to see. One morning in the dawn’s thin light, the distant grumble of a truck woke him. The sound was at first distant but grew louder. This was unusual. New prisoners normally arrived at midday.

His mother slept on. Curious, he slipped from his pallet and padded quietly to one of their four windows. Each faced a cardinal direction and had no proper glass, though they did have shutters with slats. Sidling up to the east window, he peered through a sliver between two slats.

There was only one truck, with a dark canvas cover over the rear cargo bay. This was strange; the Taliban weren’t normally shy about their prisoners. If anything, they wanted people to stay afraid. As he watched, the truck braked. A moment passed, and then the driver and another man clambered down from the cab. Both were armed. Instead of releasing the tailgate so their prisoners could jump down, they waited, rifle butts resting on their hips, and looked east down the stretch of new road.

Nothing happened for another few minutes and he was about to go back to bed, when he heard the distant clop of hooves and a whinny.

Horses.

The riders trotted in from the east. He expected to see nomads. These were herdsmen who belonged to various clans and rotated their sheep and goats between various pasturelands in late spring through to early fall. Before the first snow fell and as soon as the melt began, these men would come to Sarhad for supplies, with their sheep and goats serving as payment. The nomads were different from the Wakhi, not only in their dress but their looks. To Poya, the nomads always seemed as if they’d just stepped over the border from China.

Instead of nomads, though, seven men, in traditional pakools and baggy trousers, trotted up to the truck. They rode with their rifles slung over their chests and double bandoliers of gleaming bullets, like something out of a Clint Eastwood western.

The man at the head, who was clearly the leader, rode a tremendous, muscled black stallion. The horse held its head high and the man looked like a king. His eyes were dark and his beard as black as his stallion’s coat. When the man turned in the sun, a large golden pendant with a deep blueyaqutstone at its center winked and a massive golden ring set with another stone of lapis lazuli gleamed on a forefinger. If the stallion had been white and his owner a curly-haired blonde with a sword insteadof a big pistol, the pair might have leapt from one of Poya’s books on Alexander the Great and his fabulous horse, Bucephalus.

Curious now, he quickly slipped into trousers and a loose tunic then eased the front door open and tiptoed along the side of the house until he could spy from a corner. He was in time to see the man he would come to know as Sarbaz dismount and approach the soldiers. Gesturing, Sarbaz said something; in the next moment, the driver had pulled aside the canvas flaps and lowered the truck’s tail gate?—

And boys jumped out.

What?Poya blinked in surprise. The two who jumped down first were clearly the oldest. Maybe sixteen, seventeen? Men, or nearly so. The others who tumbled out were younger. All were thin, in ragged clothing, and smudged with dirt. The younger ones, their faces etched with fear, cowered as if wondering not who would hit them but when.

He noticed something else about them, though, especially the two older boys. They were…pretty. Their hair was longer than was normal for most boys. A few seemed to have fine skin, and they moved differently. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what they did. He just knew they were doing it.

“Ah,” said someone behind him. “So Sarbaz has bought more ruined boys.”

What?Poya nearly jumped out of skin. Wheeling on his heel, he saw that he’d been joined by an old man named Zahid. He didn’t like Zahid much. The old man was a religious sort in a town where religion meant virtually nothing and was always going around uttering pronouncements and curses. No one paid him any mind. Life was hard enough without worrying about retribution and bad luck.

“They arebacha bazi.” Zahid’s face screwed into a knot and his jaws worked as if turning over something foul. “Dancing boys,” he said, cupping the head of his walking stick withboth gnarly hands. He spat to the left to ward off any evil. “I’m surprised the Taliban haven’t kept these chai boys for themselves.”

“What’s a chai boy?” What could possibly be wrong with brewing tea?

“I cannot speak of these things. To do so is to invite calamity, although…” The old man finger-combed his beard which was very long, stringy and stained with henna not because he had been to Mecca but because he was vain, and henna was permitted to cover gray whereas black was not. A bad job he’d made of it, too; from the stain splashed at his temples, he looked as if someone had taken a hammer to his skull. “If such were the case, there would be few Taliban fighters left. I can tell because of the way chai boys mince,” Zahid said. “The way they prance. They don’t walk like proper men.” Zahid let go of a dry cackle. “Or perhaps they are like dogs, trying to cover their arses up tight.”

What?He was about to ask more, but that was the moment the horsemen’s leader said something to the two older boys. Poya wished he could tell what, but then one boy pulled himself up straighter and replied. Too far away to hear the boy’s tone, Poya could tell from the boy’s stance that he’d said something either defiant or maybe only something the leader didn’t like because there was a blur of movement and then the teenager was on the ground and the leader had a boot on the boy’s chest and the muzzle of his weapon in the boy’s face.

A moan went up from the boys. No one moved, not the boys or horses or soldiers or the other men. The boy on the ground was frozen, hands up and palms out. He looked a little the way Poya had seen strays in Kabul behave when beaten or cowed: on their back, tail between their legs. Only this boy didn’t have a tail. If he had, Poya thought that would’ve been just like a dog’s, too.

A moment slipped by and then another—and then the man took his boot from the boy’s chest and made a curt flick with his free hand. At that, two more men dismounted and took coils of rope from their saddles. In only a few minutes, they’d bound all the boys’ hands and linked them one to the other at the waist along another longer rope. When the boys were properly tethered, the soldiers stuffed money into their pockets and climbed back into their truck, while the leader and his men swung up onto their horses. Then everyone went his separate way: the soldiers back toward Kabul, the boys in their stumbling, staggering line further east and deeper into the Wakhan.

Like a chain gang. Poya’s father once had a great collection of American films. One had centered on a man in a prison. The movie’s star had intense blue eyes and a cool hand—Poya wasn’t sure what that meant—and, in the movie, he’d eaten a lot of hard-boiled eggs. Poya had never understood the point, but his father said that the character was showing the other prisoners he was up to the challenge of showing other men what it was to be unbroken and unbowed. Poya thought a man didn’t need to eat a lot of eggs to do that, but what did he know?

One thing hedidknow, though? Those boys looked pretty broken.

Later,Poya learned that the man’s name was Sarbaz. No one knew much about him other than he was rich, and a magic charm was chiseled into his ring’s lapis stone. From the chatter of the other kids, no one was quite sure what the charm did. Some swore the charm conjured up jinn. Not all jinn were evil, but there weren’t all that many stories about good ones either. Others said Sarbaz used to be a warlord from Bini Kamar, duenorth of Kabul. Yet another said that, no, no, Sarbaz was an engineer from the Weka Dur and Kadar where—as everyone knew—there was supposed to be a lot of yaqut and endless deposits of gold.

This latter story he thought was probably the most accurate. There were the man’s necklace and ring, after all, and that horse. Only what was an engineer doing here?

This scene would be repeatedat regular intervals every week or so over the remainder of that summer and into the region’s short fall before whatever operation Sarbaz had going closed down for the winter. That translated to a lot of boys being trucked in and hustled out, tied together like criminals while the villagers gawked. Zahid said Sarbaz must be working the boys to death. Otherwise, why did he need so many? And another thing: at the end of every and before the first snows came, truckloads of men were carted out for the winter.

But no trucks ever came through with boys leaving Sarbaz’s employ. It was, some wit at school said, like that American commercial for some brand of cockroach killer: boys checked in, but they never checked out.

And one more thing.

As the road crews worked and new black asphalt stretched into the Wakhan, the trucks carrying boys bound for Sarbaz never went past the village but always stopped in the same place at the end of town. Later, he would think this was probably a way of breaking the boys down and shaming them. Maybe anydestination would look pretty good after suffering that kind of humiliation, even if was a labor camp.

Once, the driver brought a few women. If not for their grimy hijabs, they might even have passed as boys from a distance. No one could figure out what type of women they were, although their clothing was the same: khaki pants, loose khaki shirts, boots.

---