“Kâzzih, you talk but I cannot understand you.”

“A fine car,” I said.

“You understand its operation?”

“I do. I owned one like it ten years ago, Amanullah.”

“But that is impossible. This car was made not four months ago.”

I looked at him. “But that’s why they called them 1955 Chevrolets,” I said. “Because they were made by the Chevrolet people. In 1955. It explains the name.”

“This car was made this year.”

“Huh?”

“And not by these Chevrolet people, whoever they may be. This car is a Balalaika.”

“Don’t be absurd. A balalaika has a triangular box and three strings, and… oh. A Russian car.”

“A triumph of Soviet technology, we are told.”

“A Russian Chevy. They went and built a 1955 Chevy.”

“I do not understand.”

He didn’t understand, eh? Well, I didn’t understand what I was doing zipping through the Hindu Kush at speeds in excess of 90 kilometers an hour – which sounds more impressive than 57 miles per hour, even if it amounts to the same thing. Zipping through the Hindu Kush, that is, in a 1955 Chevrolet. Here it was, thirteen lucky years later, and the crazy Russians had invented the ’55 Chevy.

It certainly does make you think. I remember a few years back shaking my head sadly when Nixon wagged his finger at Khrushchev and told him we were ahead of them in color television. But there’s no getting away from the fact that the Russians do have a sort of cavalier attitude toward the whole question of consumer goods.

Though I don’t suppose there’s anything specifically wrong with the ’55 Chevy. I had always liked mine, until the neighborhood juvenile delinquents had stolen so much of it that there was not enough left to drive. I suppose, actually, there was something I ought to be grateful for. After all, the Russians could have stolen the Tucker.

The first whorehouse was a compound of mud huts clustered together at the side of a mountain near Rustak. It took me a hard day’s driving to reach it, and of course it wasn’t the right one. That would have been too much to expect.

The madam was a gaunt hollow-eyed crone with a bald spot on the top of her ancient head. I showed her the letter from Amanullah, a letter addressed to her personally and requesting that she assist me in locating a particular girl. I was to be given the girl outright, and he would reimburse her at a later date for the girl’s price. Amanullah had given me four letters, one for each of the madams. This one read the letter through several times, then wrinkled her brow at me.

“It does not say how much he pays for the girl,” she pointed out.

“He pays what you ask.”

This delighted her, and I was offered food and drink while she paraded her stable of whores past me. There were fourteen or fifteen of them. There were Oriental girls and Arab girls and Negro girls and European girls, and despite their infinite variety they all looked alike.

“They all look alike,” I said.

“Only if you turn them upside-down,” the madam said, and giggled lewdly.

I didn’t want to turn them upside-down, or inside-out, or anything. I only wanted to turn them down and myself away. I had never seen such a sad-looking bunch of women in my life. They shuffled their feet as they walked, and their eyes stared vacantly ahead, and their faces were utterly expressionless. They looked like zombies, like the living dead. No, they looked even worse than that; they looked like a Tuesday afternoon Mah-Jongg group in Massapequa.

“She is not here?” The hag fastened a hand to my arm. “You show me picture again, kâzzih.” I showed her the picture again. “She is pretty, but other girls pretty too. You pick one out, you buy her.”

I started to tell her to forget it. Then I stopped and thought it over. Amanullah had given me four individual letters to the madams. They would not know that I was only authorized to liberate one girl, Phaedra Harrow by name. I could, if I chose, free a girl at each of the whorehouses. The liberation of four whores is admittedly a far cry from the abolition of slavery, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or, as an Afghan proverb of Amanullah’s would put it, ‘No sooner shear a camel than ride a sheep.’

So I looked at the girls again. With my luck, I thought, I would select the one girl who enjoyed being a whore. And what, I wondered, would I do with three liberated prostitutes? The conventional answer, the obvious answer, somehow did not appeal to me. Nor did it entirely answer the question. What would I do with them afterward? If I simply released them in Kabul, they would either starve to death or get shipped back to the cathouses and sold all over again. If I took them to their original homes – well, maybe I could do that, but it sounded like a lot of trouble, and there was no way to be certain that they wanted to return to their original homes. If, as Amanullah had suggested, they were the daughters of slaves, they probably had no original homes in the real sense of the term. And if they had been sold into slavery by their parents, well, home was probably not the wisest place in the world to take them.

What really made up my mind, though, was that I would be sticking Amanullah for a debt he had no reason to pay. True, he was a rich man and could well afford it. True, too, that he had made money in the less than wholesome world of white-slaving and could thus be legitimately shafted by this sort of stratagem. The fact remained that Amanullah was a man of the highest ethical and moral standards, a man with a rich sense of hospitality and friendship. When I must choose between my friends, however corrupt and disreputable they may be, and strangers, however pure and innocent, I choose my friends.

The closest house to that one was the one in Shibarghan, but you couldn’t get there from there. The mountains got in the way, and not even the pragmatic generosity of the Russians had led to the construction of a road from Rustak to Shibarghan. Maybe things would change after the Russians took over the country, I thought. Or maybe they would simply close down the whorehouses and let the miners work things out for themselves. In a free economy, you almost invariably find a whorehouse, wherever you have a large concentration of single men, except for places like Fire Island. But in a planned economy – well, consider the car I was driving, as far as that goes. The Soviets have never shown the proper attitude toward the whole topic of consumer goods. And hookers are consumer goods, even if some of them are pretty raw material.

It was with shining thoughts like this that I diverted myself as I drove all the way back to Kabul.

I stopped there long enough to buy gasoline. I filled the tank of the Balalaika, and I also filled the dozen or so five-gallon cans which filled the back seat and the trunk. When you start a trip in Afghanistan, you make sure that you have enough gas to get you where you’re going and back again. There are no roadside gas stations in the countryside, no clean rest rooms, no free tourist information, no uniformed attendants to wipe your windshield and check your oil. No green stamps, no Tigerino cards, no chance to play Flying Aces or Dino Dollars or Sunny Bucks or any of the great American gas station games. Nor, for that matter, does Afghanistan have much in the way of lung cancer or emphysema or heart disease or air pollution.

I think they’ll catch up, though. Kabul, surrounded by mountains on three sides, is a natural for smog once a sufficient degree of industrialization is reached. The mountains should sock in that rotten air as well as they do in Los Angeles.

From Kabul I took the southern route to Kandahar. The Russians had had nothing to do with this stretch of road, and I felt they were wise. I’d have preferred to have nothing to do with it myself. It was vaguely paved in that someone from the government had once dribbled a load of gravel down the middle of it. The rains had washed away most of the gravel and the rest of it was of little practical benefit, since it was right in the center of the road and the tires of the Balalaika passed on either side of it. The road twisted and dipped and swung this way and that, and periodically I would glance outside my window and see a couple of miles of nothing, pure nothing leading down to a barely visible valley below. The road had no shoulder. It just sat there alongside of the drop, and I held the car as close as I could to the wall on the other side of the road, and I tried to pretend that heights didn’t bother me, and I was very careful not to look over the side of the cliff any more than I had to.