Missionaries Page 2

  A period of great fear began. Without warning, the evangelical school shut down. Maria told Abelito the guerrilla had taken the teachers and made them pay, or were holding them in the jungle until they paid. She said everyone in Colombia must pay a monthly vaccine to the guerrilla, especially the wealthy, and when people don’t pay it they must be put in prison until it is paid. But the guerrilla do not have prisons, she said, so they took Abelito’s teachers to the thickest parts of the jungle, where there were twenty-foot anacondas that ate men alive, and chained them by the neck to trees. She said they would stay like that, a chain around their necks, until money from America set them free, or they died. But after a time, even this became normal, and the people worked for less money without complaint, and the fear became something in the background, like the heat of summer, something you acknowledge and sometimes even complain about but which you do not expect to change.

  When he turned thirteen, Abelito started working coca, which was good, hard work. That same year one of the paisas got Abelito’s mean sister, Mona, pregnant. When Abelito’s father heard of it, he tried to beat her but found he could not even raise his arms to strike his child, so his mother did it for him with a switch. The family became deeply sad. When they asked the paisa if he would marry Mona, the paisa just laughed, and everyone was too afraid to say anything. Mona said it was better this way. She never said the paisa’s name, she just called him “that son of a bitch,” and that she’d rather cut his baby out of her own stomach than be married to him.

  Abelito prepared for life to change, for his sister to give birth and for him to help his father and mother and sister with the baby, but everything changed, for everyone in the town, much faster than that, when Franklin finally found the courage he’d spent years searching for.

  The Carpenter had been sleeping with many of the girls of the town, but especially Jimena. She was fifteen, and had already birthed one of his children. Franklin waited for the Carpenter to come see her. He followed the Carpenter and caught him alone with Jimena, who was very beautiful, and very timid, and had always spoken kindly to Abelito, and who he loved. Franklin stabbed them all over, in the neck, arms, hands, and head. Franklin told me he had wanted to cut out the Carpenter’s tongue, the tongue that had told the paisas about his brother’s plan, but when he turned the body over and saw his face it had terrified him and he’d run.

  Only one man in a hundred will stand up to a true killer, the way Franklin had done. But Franklin only had enough courage in him to do it once. He fled, and his whole family fled with him, while the rest of the town waited like a pig facing the knife.

  2

  LISETTE 2015

  It didn’t begin with the bombings. By which I mean, Kabul was no longer Kabul well before then. There used to be thousands of us Westerners, mostly military and contractors, but also aid workers, missionaries, adventurers, diplomats, and journalists like myself, trying to make our mark or our fortune in the “good war,” Afghanistan, as opposed to the “dumb war,” Iraq. The money we brought kept things kicking in our Kabul, the Westerner’s Kabul, the city within the city that was unaffordable or just plain off-limits to ordinary Afghans. People called it the Kabubble, and the Kabubble meant imported steaks at Boccaccio, bootleg Heinekens on Flower Street, and rooftop parties overlooking the lights that crawl up the sides of the mountains around the city at night. It meant a place you could let your hair down, drink alcohol, and tell strangers the lies you told yourself about why you were there, what you were doing, and what a difference you were making.

  By 2015, those days were long gone. Troop levels down from a peak of over a hundred thousand to less than ten thousand, and for all the cheerleading for a military exit I’ve heard from self-righteous European aid workers and twenty-two-year-old journalists seeking to “give voice to the Afghan people,” I couldn’t help noticing that as the American military left, those folks’ numbers thinned out, too. You didn’t see as many correspondents, or NGO administrators, or even heavily armed white dudes in cargo pants on Street 15 those days. “The tide has turned,” Obama had told us in 2012. Indeed.

  Then, early morning, early August, the sound of an explosion. We hear the boom in the office, the window frames rattle, and Aasif, one of my Afghan colleagues, looks at me and says, hopefully, “Maybe the military blowing up a weapons cache?” It’s eight thirty, I haven’t had my coffee yet, and neither of us is eager to run out to a bomb site and try to count dead and injured.

  We both run up the stairs to the roof. Just a few years prior, there would have been a gaggle of photographers and cameramen already there, filming black smoke, placing bets on what got hit. To the extent that people cared at all, they cared then. In 2015, there’s a lot less interest in random explosions in Kabul. The offices are depleted, and when we get to the roof it’s just Omar, languidly snapping photographs and sucking on the tiniest nub of a cigarette. I’m not sure of Omar’s exact age—he was a young boy during 9/11, so he’s probably barely in his twenties, but he affects a hard-bitten cynicism. “Big, maybe even big big,” he says. “But early for too much people traffic, so I guess”—he surveys the scene with an expert eye—“ten dead.” This is how Omar talks when sober. Drunk, I have seen him cry about these things, and speak idealistically about the work he does bringing his country’s suffering to the world’s attention. It tends to make everyone around him embarrassed.

  After calling his relatives and confirming that everyone’s all right, Aasif says he’ll head down to the site. Since I figure Bob’ll want me to write the snap, I go downstairs, call the military press office. They confirm there’s been no controlled det, but they can’t confirm an explosion, so I write, “Explosion sounds in Afghan capital. Plume of smoke seen rising.” I read it over once, twice, press send.

  Not a lot of information, but two minutes later, while I’m working on my second paragraph for the urgent, Bob swings by from the back office with a cup of coffee and says, “You beat the AP by two seconds.” He places the coffee in front of me, my reward.

  I take a sip, finish off the last paragraph, it’s clocking in at 125 words, and send it. Four minutes from start to finish. Good enough.

  Now the work begins. Aasif’s already heading to the scene—he’s got a motorcycle, which means he’s way better at getting through Kabul traffic than those of us relying on taxis or the agency car. Bob tasks me to write, Denise to work the phones. Denise is twenty-three, and plain looking, but she’s so much younger than I am that even when we’re together, and even though I know I cut a striking figure when I want to and she ties a head scarf like a homeless bag lady, she turns heads. She’s catnip to a certain kind of guy, the kind of guy who’s not quite sure his time in Afghanistan has proved his manhood, and besides, is secretly terrified of death and needs to work that anxiety out by fucking the young. “Terror sex,” that’s what my friend Cynthia calls it, and both of us are a little uneasy that terror sex doesn’t hold as much appeal for us as it used to. “I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar,” we’ll say, quoting Frank O’Hara. But we’re not that alive anymore, and not even really sure we want to be. After all, we hold the Denises of the world, and our younger selves, and the men who fuck them, in contempt.

  “Can we say this is rare?” Denise asks, a little tentative.

  “When was the last one?” Bob’s style of instruction is Socratic.

  “Three weeks,” I say.

  “Does that count as rare?” says Bob.

  “For a war zone?” says Denise.

  “Kabul’s not a war zone,” I say. “Last bombing killed five people . . .”

  “How many dead would it take to make Kabul unsafe?” says Bob.

  “Point of comparison. Is Kabul’s murder rate worse than New Orleans?” says Denise.

  “Is New Orleans safe?”

  Aasif calls in, the bomb went off near the Interior Ministry, or possibly beside the Interior Ministry, t
he police aren’t letting him in but he’s convinced a storekeeper to let him onto his roof, he’s got Omar taking shots of the damage, hopefully he’ll get something artful, something beautiful enough to get picked up and extend the reach of the violence, make some dent on the public mind. The great democratic public relies on the intrepid veracity of the free press to cut past the political rhetoric with hard-hitting fact so they can make informed decisions. Which, fourteen years into this war, hasn’t happened yet, but hey, maybe could someday.

  Denise gets a contact at the local hospital to confirm seven dead, but we don’t know who the dead are, and that matters. If they’re Afghan forces, ISAF will spin this as a good news story. Afghans stepping up and courageously defending their country, protecting it from greater harm. If the bomb went off somewhere inside the Interior Ministry, though, that will make the Kabul administration seem weak, hopelessly compromised. If it’s a civilian target, well, it’ll be another data point in the shift the Taliban has taken to kill innocent Afghans. The Afghan government will issue a statement vaguely laying the blame on Pakistan. The U.S. military will say it shows the Taliban’s increasing desperation, whatever that means.

  Bob turns his computer and shows me a Twitter conversation between @ISAFmedia and the Taliban. “The outcome is inevitable. Question is how much longer will terrorists put innocent Afghans in harm’s way?” reads the ISAF tweet. And a self-appointed Taliban spokesman tweeting back: “U hve bn puttng thm n ‘harm’s way’ da pst 10 yrs. Razd whole vilgs. Dnt talk bout ‘harm’s way.’”

  “Worthless,” I say.

  I look at my watch. I’ll want to get to the site before the police have cleaned everything up, in time to get some “color”: a newly orphaned child wailing and looking around helplessly for her parents, the green pickup truck used to bring the wounded to the hospital, the shattered glass and ruined fruit stalls, businesses, livelihoods, lives. Omar’s photos will help . . . not just the ones we’ll use, but Omar’s always good at taking a few purely documentary shots so we can run down mundane details that don’t do much in a photo but pop in a story, like the elderly Pashtun man in the last bombing, who with blood running down his arms held his coat over the corpse of a woman to protect her modesty. The key is finding a detail that might make someone, some reader looking over the morning paper, drinking coffee, eating a hard-boiled egg, about to rush to work, to make that person stop, and care. It’s difficult, in part because these days I find it hard to get those details to even make me care. When I first came here, I was full of rage at the indifference most people back home showed to the deaths of Afghans. All these human beings, suffering, dying, and fighting with unbelievable courage to live in this brutal country, courage that can inspire you for at least a few years. It’s a feeling I doubt I’ll ever get back. These days the thought will sometimes run through my head as I lie in bed, trying to sleep: I am broken, I am broken, and I do not know how I will ever fix this hole I’ve carved into my soul.

  And then I hear the much larger sound of the second bomb.

  3

  ABEL 1999

  Abelito was in the boat with his father when they came. “Quick!” Father said. He pushed Abelito under the seat and put rags and netting over his body, the stench of stale river water at the bottom of the boat filling Abelito’s nose. Parts of his body poked out from underneath the seat. Surely, no one could fail to see him there. But Father made a quick circle of protection with his index and middle finger, sealed it with the sign of the cross, and Abelito became invisible. The guerrilla called out to Father and, as before, as always, he obeyed.

  “Everyone must come,” they said. “For the justice of the people.”

  Someone laughed. It was a cruel laugh. Or a nervous laugh. Or both.

  Father said nothing, but Abelito felt the boards in the boat shift, and then Father pulled the boat ashore, and he heard the guerrillero saying, “Don’t bother to tie it off.”

  Abelito felt taps on the wood of the boat. His father’s knuckles, rapping four times. “I love you,” his father’s knuckles were saying. Stale air filled Abelito’s lungs, the sound of his own heart filled his ears, an enormous sound, as if his heart had grown bigger and stronger to protest his cowardice. The boat shifted again as Father released it, and the current of the river pulled and tugged at the boat until it released the shore. Abelito felt himself moving downstream, toward all the places his grandfather had told him about, but where he no longer wanted to go.

  Justice, the guerrillero had said. Abelito knew that meant an execution, but who? No one would have dared speak about Franklin—to speak of evil was to invite more. The guerrilla only knew that those paramilitary sons of bitches in this paramilitary town had murdered the Carpenter, a good and kind man, who always took pity on the orphans whose parents he had killed. Worse, they had killed his pregnant lover, which is not just a crime against man, and not just a betrayal of the revolution, but a sin against God.

  I have spent far too much time wondering if there was anything Abelito could have done to save his family. These are stupid thoughts. The most he could have done was die with them, but he didn’t have the courage for that.

  Instead Abelito, sick with worry, got up and piloted the boat to Cunaviche. The town was filled with scared and angry people. A man in a torn shirt and dried blood spattered around his left eye shouted at a crowd of women with their heads down. Two old indios who Abelito recognized from the town next to his sat in the street, heavy sacks plumped beside them in the dirt, food and pans and tools spilling out from the top. There were people carrying bundles wrapped up in sheets, people with household items thrown this way and that in carts, people with hunted looks, milling about, people who wanted to run but did not know where to go, carrying their lives on their backs or dragging them behind like pack animals. Abelito ran to the church, but outside of the church was only more chaos, more hunted people, more anger.

  “Animals!” a woman shouted. He heard the sound of wailing. The sky above was pure blue, mocking the earth below. Abelito pushed his way in through the doors. Inside were more people, more shouting, a crowd bunched in a rough circle near the altar, under the Holy Christ. Abelito pushed forward, knowing nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. As he approached, the eyes of the Holy Christ followed him and only him, ignoring all the crowd, and the wound in the side of the Holy Christ seemed no longer to gape and devour, but to scream along with the people in the street. Abelito pushed to the front of the rough circle of men and women, and at first did not understand what he saw. An old woman, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor.

  “Father Eustacio was playing a stupid game,” a man said. “And he lost.”

  She was cleaning up some liquid spilled across the floor of the church. It was only Abelito’s stupidity, his childishness despite everything, despite every reason to be a man, that did not allow him to see what the liquid was, spattered and oozing across the floor, the awful shape of it slowly disappearing and the old woman moved forward, hands and knees, wiping with rags, dragging the liquid across the floor in an arc, creating a rainbow of one color.

  “He had no option,” another man said. “If he hadn’t worked with the guerrilla . . .”

  “They castrated him and let him bleed to death. Why do that to a priest?”

  “The paras like to send a message.”

  “The paras?” Abelito said, the sound of his own voice surprising him. “But . . .”

  No one paid him any attention. He looked back at the old woman, making her way through the stain. Blood, thought Abelito. Blood. He felt ashamed. The wound of the Holy Christ screamed. He pushed his way back out of the crowd, out the back door of the church. Heaviness hung over the town. The road down the river was full of people with their bags and carts, leaving. The road up the river was full of people with their bags and carts, coming.

  Father Eustacio is dead, he thought. The thought made him calm. The heavi
ness eased. A voice told him, You must return home. It was the animal instinct that tells birds and beasts at the end of their lives to retreat to their nests, their burrows, to find a fallen branch or rock to die under, so as not to leave death in the open.

  Abelito walked against the stream of people coming into Cunaviche, receiving strange looks and, from a Motilon woman, a warning. “The paras,” she said. Which didn’t make sense to Abelito, it was the guerrilla, the guerrilla. His town had not seen paras in years.

  Or had it? Back then, Abelito had no real understanding of the groups operating in and around his town. Paracos and guerrilla and narcos and bandits and police and soldiers and even a few smaller groups, local militias put up by Motilones or other indios. And there were different types of guerrilla, and different types of paracos, and different types of narcos. He knew the guerrilla wanted communism. He knew the paracos wanted to kill the guerrilla. He knew the narcos wanted coca. But he also knew they sometimes worked together. Even the paracos sometimes cooperated with the guerrilla, working out agreements or banding together against local militias that threatened their power. It was all too much. The one thing he understood, the one thing that mattered, was that there was no one in this world a poor town or village could appeal to for protection.

  After an hour the road cleared of even the stragglers headed in the other direction, and Abelito found himself alone beneath the clear blue sky. Or almost alone. His mean sister, Mona, and his smart sister, Maria, and his father and mother and grandfather, they still existed in his mind, somewhere near the gunfire he heard off in the distance. Somewhere near the smoke rising in the sky. Hiding in the back corners of his mind was the knowledge of a great evil. He walked to that evil. He belonged there, in the space that used to be a town, with drunk old men, cruel little boys, ugly women, and spiteful little girls. With young wives faithful to their husbands. Young men eager to spend coca money on radios and clothes.