And though it wasn't much, and it wasn't enough, it was all I had. So I did my best, trying not to vomit or cry or show my fear, and then I washed my hands in the snow.
When Nazeer was sufficiently recovered, he insisted on burying Abdel Khader Khan with the strictest adherence to ritual. He did that before he ate a meal or even drank a glass of water. I watched as Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer cleaned themselves, prayed together, and then prepared Khaderbhai's body for burial. His green-and-white standard was lost, but one of the mujaheddin provided his own flag as a shroud. On a simple white background, it carried the phrase:
La illa ha ill' _Allah There is no god but God Mahmoud Melbaaf, the Iranian who'd been with us since the Karachi taxi ride, was so tender and devoted and loving in his ministrations that my eyes went again and again to his calm, strong face as he worked and prayed. If he'd been burying his own child, he couldn't have been more gentle or clement, and it was from those moments during the burial that I began to cherish him as a friend.
I caught Nazeer's eye at the end of the ceremony, and at once I dropped my face to stare at the frozen ground beside my boots. He was in a wilderness of grieving and sorrowing shame. He'd lived to protect and serve Khader Khan. But the Khan was dead, and he was alive. Worse than that, he wasn't even wounded. His own life, the mere fact of his existence in the world, seemed like a betrayal. Every heartbeat was a new act of treachery. And that grief, and his exhaustion, took such a toll on him that he was quite seriously ill. He looked as much as ten kilos lighter. His cheeks were hollow, and there were black troughs beneath his eyes. His lips were cracked and peeling. His hands and feet worried me. I'd examined them, and I knew that the colour and warmth hadn't fully returned to them. I thought he might've suffered frostbite in his crawl through the snow.
There was, in fact, a task that did give his life purpose at that time, if not meaning, but I didn't know that then. Khaderbhai had given a last instruction, a last duty to perform, in the event of his death during the mission. He'd named a man, and ordered Nazeer to kill him. Nazeer was following that instruction even then, simply by staying alive long enough to carry out the murder. It was what sustained him, and his whole life had shrunk to that forlorn obsession. Knowing nothing of that then, as the cold days after Khader's burial became colder weeks, I worried constantly for the tough, loyal Afghan's sanity.
Khaled Ansari was changed by Khader's death in ways that were less obvious but equally profound. Where many of us were shocked into a dull, dense attention to routines, Khaled became sharper and more ener- getic. Where I often found myself adrift in stunned, heart broken, bittersweet meditations on the man we'd loved and lost, Khaled took on new jobs almost every day, and never lost his focus. As a veteran of several wars, he assumed Khaderbhai's role of adviser to the mujaheddin commander Suleiman Shahbadi. In all his deliberations, the Palestinian was intense and tireless and judicious, to the point of being solemn. They weren't new qualities for Khaled-he was ever a dour, fervent man-but there was in him, after Khader's death, a hopefulness and a will to win that I'd never seen before. And he prayed. From the day we buried the Khan, Khaled was the first to call the men to prayer, and the last to lift his knees from the frozen stone.
Suleiman Shahbadi, the most senior Afghan left in our group- there were twenty of us, including the wounded-was a former community leader, or Kandeedar, from a clutch of villages near Ghazni, two-thirds of the way to Kabul. He was fifty-two years old, and a five-year veteran of the war. He was experienced in all forms of combat, from siege to guerrilla skirmish to pitched battle. Ahmed Shah Massoud, the unofficial leader of the nation wide war to expel the Russians, had personally appointed Suleiman to set up the southern commands near Kandahar. All the men in our ethnically eclectic unit felt such awe-struck admiration for Massoud that it wasn't too strong to call it a kind of love. And because Suleiman's commission had come directly from Massoud, the Lion of the Panjsher, the men gave him an equally reverential respect.
When Nazeer was well enough to give a full report, just three days after we'd found him in the snow, Suleiman Shahbadi called a meeting. He was a short man with big hands and feet, and a sorrowful expression. Seven lines and ridges like planter's furrows creased his broad, high brow. A thickly coiled white turban covered his bald head. The dark, grey beard was trimmed around the mouth, and cut short beneath the jaw. His ears were slightly pointed-an effect that was exaggerated against the white turban-and that puckish touch combined with his wide mouth to hint at the cheeky humour that once mightVe been his. But then, on the mountain, his face was dominated by the expression in his eyes. They were the eyes of an unutterable sadness; a sadness withered and emptied of tears. It was an expression that engaged our sympathy yet prevented us from befriending him. For all that he was a wise, brave, and kindly man, that sadness was so deep in him that no man risked its touch. With four sentries at their posts around the camp, and two men wounded, there were fourteen of us gathered in the cave to hear Suleiman speak. It was extremely cold-at or below zero-and we sat together to share our warmth.
I wished that I'd been more assiduous in my study of Dari and Pashto during the long wait in Quetta. Men spoke in both languages at that meeting, and every one after it. Mahmoud Melbaaf translated the Dari into Arabic for Khaled, who transformed the Arabic into English, leaning first to his left to listen to Mahmoud, and then leaning right as he whispered to me.
It was a long, slow process, and I was amazed and humbled that the men waited patiently for every exchange to be translated for me. The popular European and American caricature of Afghans as wild, bloodthirsty men-a description that delighted Afghans themselves endlessly when they heard it-was contradicted by every direct contact I had with them. Face to face, Afghan men were generous, friendly, honest, and scrupulously courteous to me. I didn't say anything at that first meeting, or at any of those that followed, but still the men included me in every word they shared.
Nazeer's report on the attack that had killed our Khan was alarming. Khader had left the camp with twenty-six men, and all the riding and pack horses, on what should've been a safe-passage route to the village of his birth. On the second day of the march, still a full day and night from Khaderbhai's village, they were forced to stop for what they thought was a routine tribute exchange with a local clan leader.
There were hard questions asked about Habib Abdur Rahman at the meeting. In the two months since he'd left us, after killing poor, unconscious Siddiqi, Habib had instituted a one-man war of terror in what was for him a new area of operations-the Shar-i Safa mountain range. He'd tortured a Russian officer to death.
He'd dealt similar justice, as he saw it, to Afghan army men, and even mujaheddin fighters whom he judged to be less than fully committed to the cause. The horrors of those tortures had succeeded in nailing terror to everyone in the region. It was said that he was a ghost, or the Shaitaan, the Great Satan himself, come to rend men's bodies and peel the masks of their human faces back from their very skulls. What had been a relatively quiet corridor between the war zones was suddenly a turmoil of angry, terrified soldiers and other fighters, all pledged to find and kill the demon Habib.
Realising that he was in a trap designed to capture Habib, and that the men surrounding him were hostile to his cause, Khaderbhai tried to leave peacefully. He surrendered four horses as a tribute, and gathered his men. They were almost free of the enemy high ground when the first shots rattled into the little canyon. The battle raged for half an hour. When it was over, Nazeer counted eighteen bodies from Khader's column. Some of them had been killed as they lay wounded. Their throats had been cut.