“Why is it too late?”
“Ah, kâzzih, drink your beer. These are sad times.”
“Is she alive?”
“Do I know? When I have sold a woman my interest in her ceases. She is no longer my property. It would be immoral for me to maintain concern in her. She lives, she dies, I do not know. Nor does it matter.”
“But if she is alive I will purchase her freedom-”
“I knew you would say this, kâzzih. You are young, eh? You have few years and no white hairs. The young speak too quickly. There is a proverb in my country, a saying of the ancients, that the old lizard sleeps in the sun and the young lizard chases his tail. Do you understand?”
“Not really.”
“Ah, the sorrow of it! But this slave girl, this Phaedra, she has been two months in one of the houses, she has served for two months as maradóon. Do you not know what two months as maradóon does to a girl? You can use her no longer, my young friend. Let her remain with the rest of the maradóosh. Whatever you paid for her would be too much.”
“But that’s horrible!”
“The life of a slave is horrible. It is true. The whole system of humans owning humans, you might call me a firebrand to say so, kâzzih, but the entire institution of slavery should be brought to an end.”
“And yet you deal in slaves.”
“A man must eat,” he said, decimating the cheese. “A man must eat. If there are to be slaves bought and sold, it is as well that I profit by their purchase and sale as another.”
“But,” I said, and stopped. America is too full of socialists who work on Wall Street and humanitarians who sell guns; I had met Amanullah in sufficient other guises as to know the foolishness of arguing with him on this point.
“But,” I said, starting over, “you said that I neglected to purchase Phaedra when I might have done so.”
“Yes.”
“Before coming here, she was not a slave.”
“But this cannot be. The man who brought her, she was his slave.”
“No.”
“But of course she was!” He lifted his mug and was less than thrilled to find it empty. He roared for beer, and the ugly sister came running with full mugs for both of us.
“Of course she was a slave,” he repeated. “All of those girls, all the girls I buy are slaves. If they were not slaves, how could they be sold?”
“You do not know?”
“Kâzzih, what are you talking about?”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, I see. I’ll be damned. You didn’t know.”
“Kâzzih!”
So I went over it for him, the whole thing. I told him how Arthur Hook had worked his little gambit in London, conning a covey of quail into thinking they were taking the Grand Tour and then selling them before they knew what was happening.
Amanullah was horrified.
“But that cannot be,” he said. “One does not become maradóon in such a manner.”
“These girls did.”
“One cannot be sold into slavery for no good reason. Not even in my grandfather’s time did such barbarism occur. It is unthinkable. There is an Afghan proverb, perhaps you know it. ‘The lamb finds its mother in tall grass.’ Is it not so?”
“No question about it.”
“Unthinkable. A girl is sold into slavery by her parents, as with the girls of China and Japan. Or she is captured as booty in tribal warfare. Or she is the daughter of a slave and thus enslaved from birth. Or she chooses slavery as an alternative to death or imprisonment for her crimes. Or she is given in slavery by her husband when she proves barren, although I must say that this barbarism occurs only among several tribes to the west of us and I could no more strongly condemn it. But these methods which I mention, they are the ways in which a slave is brought to me, these are the elements of her background. ‘Neither sow in autumn nor harvest in the spring,’ it is a saying of ours, a saying of great antiquity. That someone should sell me a girl who was not already enslaved – and he has done this before, you say? This Englishman?”
“Yes.”
“He offends me and wrongs me. He makes me party to his evil. You must draw his likeness for me, and when he returns to Kabul I shall have him put to death.”
“That would be impossible.”
“I am not without influence in high places.”
“You’d really need it,” I said. “He’s already dead.”
“He was executed by his government?”
“He was executed by me.”
The eyes widened, the jaw dropped. Astonishment registered on Amanullah’s pendulous face. Radiance slowly replaced it and the fat Afghan slave trader beamed at me.
“You have done me a great favor,” he said. “The man did me a great wrong. Ah, you might say, but he did not cheat me! And this is true. I made a fine profit on every girl purchased from him. But he made me a partner in his sinfulness. He made me a criminal, a corrupt one. May the flames torture him throughout eternity, may the worms that eat his flesh grow sick from the taste of him, may his image fade from human memory, may it be as if he had never been.”
“Amen.”
“More beer!”
After more beer, after an infinity of more beer, after a veritable tidal wave of more beer, Amanullah and I had repaired to his house, a brick and stone edifice on the northeast outskirts of the city. There he made me a small pot of coffee and poured himself – guess what? – another beer.
“But coffee for you, kâzzih. You have no head for beer, eh? It makes you sleepy and stupid.”
Sleepy, no. Stupid? Perhaps.
“You like my city, kâzzih? You enjoy Kabul?”
“It’s very pleasant.”
“A peaceful city. A city of great wealth and beauty, although there are yet the poor with us. Great beauty. The mountains, sheltering Kabul from the winds and rain. The freshness of the air, the purity of the waters.”
The only problem, I thought, was that a person could get killed around here.
“And in recent years there is so much development, so many roads being constructed, so much progress being made. For years we Afghans wished only to be left to ourselves. We asked nothing else. Merely that the British leave us alone. And the others who dominated us, but largely the British. And so at last the British were gone, and we lived under our own power, and it was good.
“But now the Russians give us money to build a road, and so we take the money and dig up a perfectly good road and replace it with a new one built with the Russian money. And the Americans come to us and say, ‘You took aid from the Russians, now you must take aid from us or we will be insulted and offended.’ Who would offend such a powerful nation? And so we permit the Americans to come into our country and construct a hydroelectric power station. And the Russians see the hydroelectric power station and force upon us a canning factory. The Americans retaliate by shipping bad-smelling chemicals to be plowed into the soils of our farms. And so it goes. So it goes.”
He hoisted his beer, drank deeply. “But I talk to excess. I am a man of excess. I feel that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. You will have some cheese? Some cold meat? Ah. Everything worth doing is worth doing to excess. There is a saying-”
“A hand in the bush is worth two on the bird,” I suggested.
“I have never heard this before. I am not entirely certain I understand it in its entirety, but I can tell that there is wisdom in it.”
“Thank you.”
“I myself was thinking of yet another adage, but it does not matter now. I am in your debt, kâzzih. You have purged the world of the man who most dishonored me. Only tell me what I might do to liquidate the debt I owe you.”
“Phaedra.”
“Your woman.”
“Yes.”
“But that is less than a favor,” he said. “That is merely another debt I owe. If the girl was not a slave, she was never that man’s to sell. So although I may have purchased her, she was never mine to sell when I sold her, for I could not acquire a true and honest title. Do you follow me?”
“I think so.”
“Thus although she may have been sold to a house of maradóosh, they cannot own her. But, because I must do business with these people, and because it was proper for them to trust me and foolish for me to trust this Englishman, the burden must fall upon me. Do you see?”
“I’m not sure.”
He sighed. “But it is elementary, kâzzih. I shall buy the girl’s freedom. If.”
“Pardon.”
A shadow darkened his face. “If she is alive. If you find her… worth taking. The men who work in the mines live in grim villages devoid of women. There are no women anywhere about except for the houses of the maradóosh. And when they receive their pay, the mine workers rush to these houses and stand in long lines to wait their turns with the slave girls. They are men of no culture, these miners. In Kabul it is a joke to call them Yâ’ahâddashún. But you are a foreigner, you would not understand. It is remarkable enough that you speak our language as well as you do.”
“Thank you.”
“Often I can understand almost all the words you say.”
“Oh.”
“But these mine workers, they are crude. Rough boorish men. They use women cruelly.” He lowered his head, and a tear trembled in the corner of one big blue eye. “I could not say with assurance that your woman, your girl, is alive today.”
“I must find her.”
“Or that you would want her. So many women, the experience ruins them. Some have in their lifetimes known only a handful of men, and then to embrace thirty or forty or fifty a day-”
“Thirty or forty or fifty!”
“Life is hard for a maradóon,” Amanullah said. “There is a labor shortage.”
“No wonder.”
“Ah. If you will permit a delicate question, had this Phaedra considerable experience before she was brought here?”
I burned my mouth on my coffee. I barely felt the pain. I remembered a taxi racing through garbage-laden streets, a head on my shoulder, a voice at my ear. I have things to tell you. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I’m not anti-sex or frigid or a lesbian or anything. And I don’t want to be seduced or talked into it. People try all the time but it’s not what I want. Not now. I want to see the whole world. I want to find things out. I want to grow. I am a virgin. I am Phaedra Harrow. I am a virgin. I am eighteen years old. I am a virgin. I am a virgin. I am –
“-a virgin,” I said.
“Eh?”
“She is eighteen years old,” I said. “She was never with a man in all her life.”
“Extraordinary!”
“A virgin.”
“Eighteen years without knowing a man!”
“Yes.”
“And the likeness you showed me – she is a beauty, is it not so?”
“It may not be so now,” I said. “It was so then. A beauty.” I thought for a moment. “A beautiful face and body, and a beautiful spirit, my friend Amanullah.”
