Neil Shea

Repetition, Truth

---

The room is full of old men who remember the Russian war. They sit on couches beside me in long, loose shirts and pants, wrapped in blankets, all the colors they wear reflected in the landscape—gray, beige, coffee. Black turbans on their heads coiled like cloth serpents.

They are from the far-out villages and they have come to talk and argue and ask for things. Demand, threaten, beg. It is all in Pashto, and I don’t understand. So I drift. An elder to my right thumbs caramel-colored prayer beads. They click softly as he spools through them, the sound of prayers rising to heaven.

Outside a peacock marches through the sunlit courtyard. It is the most colorful anything anywhere. All else is dull and dust-covered: the little glass tea tables, the red carpets, the wool rug bearing Hamid Karzai’s likeness. All of my clothing, the inside of my mouth. I look at the soldier sitting next to me and he too is dusty, all his gear—his radio, his ammunition clips, his vest—fuzzed with dust as if he had sat still as a rock for a year.

The elders have stopped talking. They listen to a soldier explain to them, for the third or fourth time, how the new system is supposed to work. You can’t come ask us to build you a madrassa or a clinic or a well anymore. You have to go to your own government. The language of leaving, of withdrawal.

But it doesn’t work. After each repetition the elders pause and then present a list of things they want. A madrassa, a clinic, a well. The soldiers can do nothing; no matter how many times they say it the message does not sink in. They say it again anyway, because that’s what they must do. No, you can’t come to us ... and the cycle is old and new, beginning and ending.

So I drift. The room smells like unwashed men and it is very cold and slowly I am freezing. My toes numb down, my fingers. If I’m not careful I will fall into a cold sleep. The tea glasses have been drained or if they have not been drained they steam like little engines, the tea yellow and the sugar unmelted at the bottom. Along the wall there is a plastic lemon tree, its petroleum-based fruit slightly less radiant than the peacock.

But we need a project, one of the elders is saying.

Well, we need you to stop shooting at us, one of the soldiers replies.

We cannot do anything about the Taliban.

How about we go to your village and have a meeting?

No. If I bring you there they will cut off my head.

It is not in order, I am remembering out of order. It doesn’t matter, though, because it is all true and everything is confirmed, the circular nature of all this talk, the great swirling problems of this place, the whirlpool of Afghanistan. Charybdus in the desert. I am waiting for the whirpool to swallow us all but it doesn’t and yeah it would be pretty bad if I fell asleep. A young policeman brings more tea. His hands are long and slender, a girl’s hands, and his nails have been painted red with henna. Though he wears a uniform he has not the rough disheveledness of the other policemen. He is too delicate. Possibly he is not meant for policework at all but for some far other thing. I look at my own hands and the skin is dry, alligatored. Little red spots appear, blood deep down, where I have split open from sun, wind, cold. I remind myself again to do something about this, and then I try to remember the last time I saw a pretty girl. I try to remember her hands.

Suddenly the elders stand and remove to the sunlit courtyard. I am jealous that they will be warm so I get up, too, and walk out. They squat on their ankles in a circle, violently discussing something, throwing fingers, voices in waves rising and falling. I’m glad that I do not know the Pashsto word for well because I know that they are just sitting there shouting it at each other over and over. Well! Well! Well, motherfuckers!

I look for the peacock. It has stepped into a room off the courtyard. I follow. The room is a mess, bird shit and straw and bits of leftover food too ignoble for the cock to eat. This is its home; whoever keeps this bird in the government center keeps it here, in a room of its own. It preens in a corner, tail held low, the green-blue eyes in the tail staring at the ceiling, at nothing, as though in a trance, the feathers dreaming of a time before feathers, dreaming of dinosaurs.

Through a set of dirty windows, children peer in at the peacock. They are not as pretty. They are covered with dust and probably have not washed in a long time. The children are like shadows at the window, blurred and dark. The peacock ignores them though they tap at the glass as though at a zoo. Not even the cock’s tail-eyes glance at them. The bird understands it is too pretty for this place. Like a young film star flush with her first success, the critics generous, the fans adoring, multiplying. Tomorrow does not yet exist. The room is a prison she cannot recognize and the shapes at the windows might be, for all she knows, harmless as tree branches moving in the wind.

But anway the elders are standing in the courtyard and returning to the couches. I go back, take my place, and ask the elders if they understand this new system the Americans have devised for them to get construction projects approved in their villages. They do not even answer. Instead, they begin describing their fantasies of infrastructure—a well, a clinic, a madrassa. These old men who remember the Russians. Their faces eroding, furrows in their skin the same as the furrows in the hills beyond the window.