The snow had come down off the passes on Christmas night, which Mirwais knew was Christmas only because for seven months of his life he had known Americans, and Americans did not let a man forget a thing like that. It had not stopped since. It fell straight down in the windless cold, small and dry, and by the fourth day it had filled the ruts in the bazaar road and put a white cap on every blue plastic barrel the shopkeepers used to hold up their awnings. The street was busier than it had been all autumn.
People came in out of the snow because there was nowhere else to go. The tea room at the end of the row had a stove made from an oil drum, with a pipe that went out through a hole in the wall where a window had been, and Haji Sabur kept it full of wood he bought from a truck that came up from the river towns twice a week. For the price of a pot of green tea a man could sit by the stove all afternoon and charge his phone from the car battery under the counter, wired to a strip of six plugs, three of which worked.
Mirwais had the table in the back corner, beside the strip of plugs. That was his arrangement with Sabur and it was a good one for both of them. Mirwais sold telephones.
He had a cardboard box from a Chinese television that held the stock, and a square of green felt he spread on the table to show it. Old Nokias, the little gray 105s that would run nine days on a charge and that the shepherds liked because a man could drop one off a cliff and it would ring at the bottom. Two Samsungs with cracked backs. A Tecno with a good screen and a bad speaker. SIM cards from both networks in paper sleeves, and a coffee can of chargers. He bought the phones from a man in the provincial capital who did not ask where they came from, and sold them to men who did not ask either, and the difference paid for rice and tea and the kerosene his daughter worried about whenever she called.
He was sixty-one. People in the bazaar had been calling him Old Mirwais since he was forty, when his hair turned white in a single winter for no reason any doctor could name. He had been a schoolteacher, and then a translator for a company that drilled water wells, and then for seven months eleven years ago he had been an interpreter for the American parachute soldiers at the outpost on the spur above Dar-i-Sang, the ones with the maroon hats. After that he had not worked for anyone. His wife had died four years ago of something in her blood. He lived alone in two rooms behind the mosque on the hill, and he read old English novels he bought from the same dealer in the capital who sold him the phones, and he was careful.
The whole bazaar was careful now. The bearded tan hats had gone home at the end of the summer, and the new battalion that replaced them on the plain drove fast and did not come to the bazaar at all. A man from the governor’s office had been shot in his car in October. A boy who sold fuel had been found in the river.
So when the young man came in out of the snow at twenty past three and stood stamping his feet inside the door and looking around the room, every head turned to him once and then turned away. The talk at the tables went on, quieter, about nothing.
He was perhaps twenty-two, and he wore a good jacket. That was the first thing anybody noticed. Dark green down, the kind with the little puffed squares, clean, with a fur collar that might have been real. His boots were black leather and the snow had not soaked through them. His beard was trimmed close along the jaw and his hands were soft.
He looked at the stove and then at Mirwais’s table, and he came back.
“Salaam aleikum, uncle.”
“Wa aleikum salaam.”
“They said you have telephones.”
Mirwais moved his hand over the felt. The young man bent and looked. He picked up one of the Samsungs and turned it over, put it down, and picked up the Tecno.
“This one,” he said. “How much?”
Mirwais told him. It was a high price, the price he gave to strangers so that there was room to come down. The young man did not argue. He took a fold of money from inside the good jacket and counted it out on the felt, and then he counted out more, nearly half again what Mirwais had asked, and pushed it across.
Mirwais looked at the money and did not touch it.
“That is too much.”
“It’s cold,” the young man said. “You have to buy wood.”
“Sabur buys the wood.”
The young man smiled at that. He had good teeth. “Then buy yourself something,” he said, and pulled the other chair out from the table and sat down in it, which nobody had asked him to do, and held his hands out toward the stove.
Mirwais folded the extra money once and set it at the edge of the felt where both of them could see it.
“Tea,” the young man said, “if you’ll drink with me.”
Sabur’s boy brought it in a tin pot with two glasses. The young man poured, which was correct, and handed Mirwais his glass first, which was also correct, and Mirwais began to feel the thing a man feels in his stomach when somebody is being that correct with him for a reason.
II
The Tea Room, Sharq
1545 Hours Local, Tuesday, 29 December
They talked about the snow. The road to the capital was closed at the second pass. Flour was up again. The young man said he was from the river towns and had come up to see an uncle who was sick. He did not say which uncle.
“They say you worked with the Americans, uncle. Before. With the ones at Dar-i-Sang.”
So, Mirwais thought. So that is what this is.
He set his glass down on the felt. Over by the stove two men from the vegetable stalls were arguing about a cousin’s wedding, and Sabur was behind his counter wiping the same glass he had been wiping since the young man walked in.
“Many men worked with the Americans.”
“Not like you. You were with the sergeant. The big one.” The young man watched him. “The one who died in the stream.”
Mirwais had wondered for three months when it would come. In September, the night before the tan hats flew away, he had sat at this table after dark with three or four men and a pot of tea gone cold. An American came in, one of the helicopter mechanics who liked Sabur’s tea, to give away the coffee and sweets they never carried home. One of the young interpreters asked him about Korwal, and the mechanic told it: the young one who took charge in the orchard when his sergeant was killed. Reade, he said. And the crazy part, his old man was a paratrooper who got killed up here. Same valley. Then he went out to his airplane. And Mirwais, because it was late and because he had not said the name out loud in eleven years, put down his glass and said that he knew that sergeant. Sergeant Pat. That he wrote the names of the children in a little book. Then he went home to bed, and the next morning he wished every word of it back.
One of the men at the table that night had been left-handed. Mirwais noticed because he held his glass in the wrong hand. He asked one question too many. After that night he stopped coming to the tea room.
“He died a long time ago,” Mirwais said.
“Eleven years. I remember the helicopters.” The young man filled Mirwais’s glass, though it did not need filling. “What was his name?”
“I don’t remember. They all looked alike to us. They were all big and they all had sunglasses and they all said ‘Hey buddy.’” He said the last two words in English, in an American voice, and the young man smiled, but his eyes stayed where they were.
“They say he was kind to the children. That he wrote their names.”
That stopped him, because they were his own words. He had said them at this table and nowhere else. The soldiers in the squad had known about the notebook, and the children, and the children were grown now, married, in the capital, in Pakistan, dead. He looked at the soft hands and the good jacket and understood that the young man had not come up from the river towns to see a sick uncle and was not asking for himself. He was the end of a string. Somewhere up the string somebody had heard the story of Korwal, and the name, and wanted to know about the sergeant. Somebody who had been in that valley eleven years ago, and who paid for wood.
There was only one man anyone would mean, and nobody said his name either.
“Yes,” Mirwais said. “He wrote their names.”
“Why?”
“So he could ask after them. The next time he came. So he could stand in the road and say, Where is Zarghuna, where is the little one with the bad foot, is the foot better, and the mothers would hear him say it.” He drank. It burned his lip. “He said a man who knows the names of your children has a harder time being your enemy. And you have a harder time being his. His Pashto was very bad. It was the idea.” He put the glass down. “It didn’t work. That valley killed him anyway.”
“And the notebook?”
“He kept it here.” He touched the left side of his chest. “A green book, the Army gives them, with a pen in the wire at the top. When he died they took him away in a helicopter with everything in his pockets. I never saw it again. They closed the outpost and they all went home.”
The young man nodded slowly, as if this were exactly what he had expected. “Did he talk about his family?”
“They all talk about their families.”
“Did he?”
Mirwais looked at the stove for a while.
“He had a son,” he said.
He should not have said it. He knew it while he was saying it, and he did not afterward understand why he had, except that nobody had asked him in eleven years.
