An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World by William T. Vollmann Page B

dinner smells of kebab and mutton tika and curry. Entire streets sizzled with frying meat. As twilight came, a weariness settled over the town. In the fabulous garden of Shahi Bagh they stopped beneath the trees, and the Pakistani bought him a Sprite and a 7-Up. Shahi Bagh smelled like flowers. In the fading light, he saw men sprawled in the grass, or sitting with one another talking quietly. —“Who are they?” he asked. —“Afghan refugees,” the man said. “They sleep here.” —“Where do they sleep if it rains?” —“In the mosque,” the man said. “If there is room.”
    When it was dark the man got him a rickshaw, paid his journey to Saddar for him in advance, and disappeared.
A QUESTION
     
    Did the man do this for refugees, too? If so, for how many? And if not, why not?
ANOTHER QUESTION
     
    Does asking the first question get at something useful, or is it an insult to the man’s simple kindness? And this tendency that I now have years later to recall the Young Man’s journey as a sort of failed Pilgrim’s Progress, does it give me a chance to make practical generalizations about how people ought or ought not to be, or was that my problem in the first place? If these memories were only “travel experiences” for you, the reader, to nibble at, would you like them better? Would that be a more honest presentation of the
understatedness
of life? For as it is, I have excavated and reworked what was once a random if picturesque trail into something resembling one of the freeways in my country, with road signs and billboards writhing with strange secret symbols. —And yet, encrusted though the route may be, I think, I hope it goes somewhere …

Statement of the Afghan waiter
     
    I n the days before he left his hotel room for the General’s, the Young Man spent time with an Iranian student at Peshawar University and his friend, a Jordanian. They were tormented people. The Iranian was effectively an exile, because upon hearing about Khomeini’s executions he’d gone to the Iranian consulate and torn up his passport. “Now they will put me in jail, maybe shoot me, if I go back,” he said. —The Young Man took a bus out to the Iranian’s apartment at Jabbar Flats, and they got a watermelon and the three of them sat on the bed and ate it. The Iranian and the Jordanian were outraged at the condition of the camps. —“Two, maybe three million Afghan refugees are living here!” the Jordanian shouted. “They don’t have shoes, they don’t have clothes, they don’t have food, they don’t have books for school; they don’t have anything! Every day they become more and more poor, and, you know, they have got only sickness over here.” —The Young Manwas a little skeptical. For one thing, he recollected that according to both the World Health Organization and the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
, in Afghanistan in 1965 (around that time the Soviets were offering the Afghans arms against the Pakistanis), thirty percent of the population had tuberculosis, ninety percent had helminthiasis, malaria was ubiquitous, and so was, let’s see, typhus … There were 1,564 cases of cholera; thirteen percent of the residents of Kabul had trachoma (this figure ascended as high as seventy-five percent in the rural areas); 30,000 people had leprosy; and of course the infant mortality was one out of two—so how could you blame the camps for disease? —On the other hand, with all the overcrowding, conditions were probably worse now. But how much worse? That he never found out. f
    They introduced him to a refugee who had once been the editor of a prominent newspaper in Kabul. Now he drove a rickshaw and hauled loads on his back. He was in his sixties. —The Young Man asked him why he did not register as a camp inmate to collect the refugee allowance. The man stared at him; the Iranian had to explain that this Young Man was just an ignorant foreigner who had not seen the camps. “In the camp they must live like