Farishta (36 page)

“Angela, I need to speak with you, but not here,” he replied, nodding toward the empty soldiers’ dining hall. He was not smiling.

“What’s wrong? ” I asked as he motioned for me to follow him.

When I picked up my cider to bring it along, he grabbed it out of my hand and slammed it down on the bar. “Leave it!” he ordered. It was too noisy in the pub for anyone but me to have noticed his angry gesture.

I followed Mark into the dining room and sat down across from him at one of the metal tables. “I don’t even know where to begin,” he said, his voice quavering. “A few minutes ago, I was taking a shortcut from the gym back to my room through the vehicle park when I heard a sound inside one of the empty shipping containers.”

I knew what was coming.

“Thank God, it was me and not one of the armed sentries,” he muttered through clenched teeth.

“I saw something red moving in the shadows and asked whoever was inside the container to come out and identify himself.”

My heart dropped. Nilofar had been wearing a red shawl when she came to talk to me in the afternoon about one of the girls she was trying to help. I thought she had gone home hours ago.

“Nilofar? ”

“Worse than that,” he replied. “It was Nilofar and Rahim, and God only knows how long they’d been in there or what they’d been doing.

“I told them they were both out of their fucking minds. Do you know what they did then? ” he asked.

I shook my head.

“They wrapped their arms around each other and laughed. Rahim’s reply to me was that they were indeed out of their minds, but so was the whole country.” I smiled inwardly at my young friend’s courage.

Two soldiers walked through the dining hall, discreetly ignoring our conversation as they passed the table. Mark waited until they were gone to continue.

“I told Nilofar to call her brother immediately and explain that she had stayed at the PRT to have dinner with you,” he said, his voice rising. “I hate all this lying you’ve been doing to protect them, Angela, and now I’m doing it, too! I told Rahim that if I saw him with Nilofar again, I’d go to the colonel.”

“Mark, I had no idea. I thought she left hours ago.”

“Angela, if anything happens to those two, you will be partly to blame,” he said. His face was rigid with anger. “You seem quite willing to put yourself at risk, but you must understand that sometimes your actions involve others as well—with the Russian, with your little slumber party at the warlord’s compound, your secret solar cooking outings, your election adventure in the Sholgara, but especially your rash encouragement of Nilofar and Rahim.”

I was stunned at the intensity of his anger, but I was not going to stop those two from seeing each other. They had too little time left.

“Mark, you have no right to interfere with their relationship,” I argued. “They’re both adults and they know the risks. Once Rahim leaves for France, they’ll never see each other again.”

“And you have no right to encourage them, Angela,” he replied.

He had gone too far. I stood and glared down at him. “I will admit that I was wrong about one thing. You and I really are far too different for anything to have worked out between us. You can at least be grateful that I had more sense than Nilofar and didn’t do anything to embarrass you in public.”

My eyes brimmed with tears as I walked out of the hall without another word.

Mark didn’t speak to me the following morning. He wouldn’t even look at me. Nilofar called in the afternoon to apologize for causing any trouble. I didn’t see Rahim, who had departed early for Kabul. This time, Nilofar did not try to follow him.

I begged her to come to the PRT so we could talk. She spent the afternoon with me in an unused conference room going over the previous day’s confrontation with Mark and voicing her despair at Rahim’s imminent departure. When I told her what had transpired between Mark and me, we briefly reversed roles as I burst into tears and collapsed into her arms.

With only three months left to my tour, and my brief relationship with Mark now at an end, I focused relentlessly on my work and began to prepare detailed briefing memos for my yet-to-be-named successor. Alone in my room at night, I would have plenty of time to feel sorry for myself, but I vowed that no one at the PRT would ever see that side of me.

I kept Fuzzy and Jenkins busy the following week with trips to all five provinces to meet the members of the new provincial councils. The PRT had already heard from council members in Sar-e Pol, who complained that they had nowhere to hold their meetings and were currently using one of the governor’s storerooms. There were similar reports about a lack of resources from the other councils.

I was counting the days until I could leave this place and had with great sadness added Mark to my long list of failed relationships. I deeply regretted that our friendship had ended this way, and I still missed our after-dinner conversations, but he was avoiding me like the plague. Thank God, he would soon be gone.

 

 

Rahim knocked on the door of my room the following Friday when he returned from Kabul. I hadn’t seen him since the incident with Mark.

“Farishta-
jan,
I am sorry to bother you on your rest day. I had to come to the PRT today because I am the duty interpreter.”

His face reddened, and he took a deep breath before continuing. “I am so sorry that Nilofar and I have upset the major and that you are now angry at each other.”

“It’s not your fault, Rahim,” I replied. “The major and I just had a misunderstanding. We’ll get over it. It’s you and Nilofar that I’m worried about.”

“Thank you, Farishta-
jan,
but Nilofar and I know we have no power to change our fate. All we can do is enjoy our last few months together as much as we can.”

He turned to leave, then reached into his pocket. “I almost forgot, Professor Mongibeaux asked me to give this to you,” he said, handing me a small box.

“Farishta-
jan,
I think Nilofar may be calling to schedule a meeting with you later this afternoon,” he added with a sly grin. “I will let her in when she arrives.
Khuda-hafiz
, God be with you.”

He was impossible, but I adored this boy.

Inside the box, nested on a square of dark blue silk, was a tiny silver medallion. It was a miniature replica of the Ai Khanoum plaque Jeef had shown me on my first visit to the museum.

“Angela, Fuzzy and I are making a quick mail run to the airport for Sergeant Major. I think there are some packages for you. Want to come along? ” Jenkins had spotted me eating a late lunch alone in the officers’ mess.

“I’d love to go.”

“Rahim is coming, too. He wants us to drop him at the university. We know what that’s for, don’t we?” Jenkins said, pursing his lips and batting his eyelashes.

“He’s going to meet Nilofar? ”

“Bingo!” Jenkins replied.

It was so risky for the two of them to be seen together at the university. I warned them repeatedly about this and begged them to confine their meetings to the PRT. Too many people knew them there and word might get back to her parents. They refused to listen.

The afternoon was sunny and dry, and we drove into town enjoying the breezes blowing through our open windows. With the monthlong fast of Ramadan in its second week, it was quieter than usual at midday. Rahim babbled on to his captive audience about how Nilofar had insisted her arranged marriage with the Hazara merchant be delayed until she graduated from law school. Her parents had concurred even as they informed her that her future husband would not allow her to work once she started having children. Fuzzy and Jenkins agreed with Rahim that this small victory was a wonderful development.

Rahim had apologized profusely to Mark after the incident in the shipping container, and Mark had stopped avoiding me completely, but our conversations were strictly professional. I now had no one at the PRT with whom to share my concern about Rahim and Nilofar. They were deeply in love with each other, and it was difficult for me to imagine them calmly shaking hands in January and saying good-bye forever.

Fuzzy was for the first time in a long time in a good mood. He smiled at Rahim’s story and waved at the children who ran alongside our vehicle.

Jenkins turned the Beast into the western entrance of downtown Mazār. As we approached the intersection in front of the Blue Mosque, he slowed for a small boy dragging two overloaded donkeys through the traffic.

A young man with a clipped beard, wrapped in a gray blanket—odd attire for such a balmy day—stared intently at us from the curb. Suddenly, with no warning, he threw off his blanket, pointed an AK-47 at the Beast, and began to fire.

Unbidden images of the black clouds billowing over the embassy in Beirut and Tom’s body lying in the rubble raced through my mind as I watched this young man calmly squeezing off round after round in our direction. I was frozen in place, staring out the window and hypnotized by the muzzle flashes coming from his rifle. Less than five seconds had passed.

Fuzzy reacted instantly. He pulled his weapon from between his knees, shoved it out the window, and prepared to return fire. Jenkins stepped on the gas and laid on the horn. Rahim, with lightning reflexes, hit the RELEASE button on my seat belt, shoved me to the floor, and covered me with his body. Bullets from our attacker made staccato pings as they punctured the Beast’s metal skin and shattered the front windshield.

Jenkins sped around the Blue Mosque and out of town, heading for the airport as fast as the traffic would allow until he noticed Fuzzy slumped over in his seat—his mouth hanging open. Fuzzy’s rifle was lodged under his arm, which dangled out the window. A thin trickle of blood poured from his left eye and from a hole in the back of his head where a bullet had pierced his skull.

“Jesus Christ, Fuzzy’s dead!” cried Jenkins. He was swerving dangerously, unaware that he had also been hit. Blood soaked his right sleeve as he struggled to keep the Beast from running into oncoming traffic.

I crawled back into my seat and pressed my fingers against the side of Fuzzy’s neck to check for a pulse. There was none.

Fighting back the panic that was beginning to rise in my throat, I began to talk myself down.
You’re alive, Angela. Get a grip. No one is shooting at you now. You have nothing to fear.
I could hear Mike’s clear instructions and my response:
“Morgan, if this happens again, you’ll know what to do?” “Yes.”
I could either curl into a helpless ball on the backseat of the Beast, or I could help my friends.

Fuzzy was beyond help, but Jenkins was losing blood fast.

The three of us were in shock, but we had to get to the airport quickly where there were medics to care for Jenkins. Rahim didn’t know how to drive.

“Pull over, Jenkins. I’ll drive.”

“I think you’ll have to, Angela,” he said as the Beast bounced across an empty patch of dirt at the side of the road. Jenkins radioed the PRT to report the ambush and crawled into the backseat, grimacing and breathing hard. He was growing weak from loss of blood.

Rahim wrapped Jenkins’s arm with bandages from the first-aid kit and kept pressure on the wound while I drove the Beast to the airport with Fuzzy’s bleeding corpse slumped against the window on the seat next to me. I resisted the urge to look over at him. There was no time to feel anything until we were safely inside the perimeter of the Forward Support Base.

Two medics pulled Fuzzy’s limp body from the Beast. One of the doctors drove Jenkins to the Jordanian Field Hospital just down the runway. Rahim and I were taken to the mess tent and offered cups of tea before we sat down with three security officers to tell them everything we could remember about the ambush. I was surprised at how calm I had been during the attack—how calm I still was.

Before coming to Afghanistan, I had worried for months that this tour of duty might send me over the edge of the emotional precipice I’d been teetering on since losing Tom. But since the possibility of being kicked out of the Foreign Service had ultimately trumped my fear of suffering a complete mental meltdown, I had come. It now appeared that the events of this year had made me stronger—at least when I was faced with a crisis. Dealing with the reality of Fuzzy’s death would be another matter entirely.

The morning after the attack, I was awakened from a deep sleep by an early call from a very excited Marty. “Ange, congratulations, I got you the London assignment, and you’re not going to believe this next bit. PRTs are suddenly the flavor of the month! The secretary of state came back from her one-day visit to Kabul last week and said we need to have PRTs in Iraq! ”

“Thanks for the news about the job in London, Marty,” I replied after a long pause. “I actually thought you might be calling because of the ambush,” I added, feeling no joy at learning about my dream assignment.

“What ambush? There were no attacks on the secretary, were there?” He sounded concerned.

“Marty, I’m talking about an attack here in Mazār. My vehicle was ambushed near the Blue Mosque yesterday. The guy who has been guarding me for the past ten months was killed, and my driver was wounded. I wasn’t hit. I’m okay, just a little shook up.”

“Jeez, Ange, I’m so sorry, but I’m glad you’re all right. I hadn’t heard anything about that. I’ll have to check CNN.”

“It won’t be on CNN, Marty. No Americans were killed, and this is Afghanistan, not Iraq, remember? ” My long-suppressed tears began to flow.

“Let me know if I can do anything, Ange,” said Marty before hanging up. I buried my face in my pillow and wept long and hard for Fuzzy. Several hours later, I forced myself to get up and take an ice-cold ship shower.

Colonel Jameson and his officers had been preoccupied since the previous afternoon with implementing increased security measures and investigating the attack. After returning to the PRT from the Forward Support Base, I had stayed up until midnight filing reports to the embassy.