"What's he saying?" I asked Mahmoud desperately. I'd spent the last four weeks avoiding Khaled's eye and coldly rejecting his friendship. Suddenly, I was unbearably afraid that I was going to lose him; that I'd already lost him.
"It is the Koran," Mahmoud replied in a whisper. "He is telling Suras from the Koran."
Khaled left the cave and walked to the edge of the compound. I ran to stop him, and pushed him back with both hands. He allowed the shove, and then came on toward me again. I threw my arms around him and dragged him back a few paces. He didn't resist me.
He stared directly ahead at that infuriating vision only he could see while he chanted the hypnotically poetic verses of the Koran.
And when I let him go, he continued his walk out of the camp.
"Help me!" I shouted. "Can't you see? He's going! He's going out there!"
Mahmoud, Nazeer, and Suleiman came forward but, instead of helping me to restrain Khaled, they grasped my arms and gently prised them away from him. Khaled immediately began to walk forward. I wrestled myself free, and rushed to stop him again. I shouted at him and slapped at his face to waken him to the danger. He didn't resist and he didn't. react. I felt the tears hot on my cold face, stinging in the cracks that split my frozen lips. I felt the sobbing in my chest like a river rappling and rolling against worn and rounded rocks, on and on and on. I held him tight, with one arm around his neck and the other around his waist, my hands locked together at his back.
Nazeer, even as thin and weakened as he'd become in those weeks, was too strong for me. His steel hands grabbed at my wrists and peeled them away from Khaled. Mahmoud and Suleiman helped him to hold me back as I struggled and reached out to grab Khaled's jacket. And then we watched him walk from the camp into the winter that one way or another had ruined or killed us all.
"Didn't you see it?" Mahmoud asked me when he was gone. "Didn't you see his face?"
"Yes, I saw it, I saw it," I sobbed, staggering back to the cave to fall into the crumpled cell of my misery.
I lay there for hours unsleeping, filthy starving, angry, and broken-hearted. And I might've died there-some pain, sometimes, leaves you without legs or arms-but the smell of food brought me round. The men had decided that they couldn't wait to cook the last of the rotting meat. They'd boiled it in a pot during those hours, fanning the smoke away continuously and concealing the flame with blankets.
The soup was ready long before dawn, and every man took a bowl, glass, or mug of it. The stink of the rotting meat was more than our empty stomachs could bear, at first. We all vomited the foul, retching sips we took. But hunger has a will of its own, a will that's much older than the other will we praise and flatter in the palace of the mind. We were too hungry to refuse the food, and by the third try, or the fifth for some of us, we kept the repulsive, stinking brew down. Then the pain caused by the hot soup in our empty stomachs was as sharp as a belly full of fishhooks; yet that too passed, and every man forced himself to drink three helpings, and to chew the rubbery, rotting chunks of meat.
For two hours after that we took turns to dash into the rocks as the food worked through intestines and bowels that had seized in our starving bodies, and suddenly erupted.
At last, when we recovered, and when all the prayers were said, and when each man was ready, we gathered near the south-eastern edge of the compound at the place Habib had recommended for our attack. He'd assured us that the steep slope was our one chance to fight our way to freedom; and since he'd planned to fight in the attack with us, we had no reason to distrust the advice.
We were six men. The five others were Suleiman, Mahmoud Melbaaf, Nazeer, Jalalaad, and young Ala-ud-Din. He was a shy man of twenty with a boy's grin beneath an old man's faded green eyes.
He caught my eye, and nodded encouragingly. I returned the nod with a smile, and his face broke into a wider grin while his head nodded more vigorously. I looked away, ashamed that I'd spent so much time with him, months of hard time, without once trying to engage him in a conversation. We were going to die together, and I knew nothing about him. Nothing.
Dawn put fire in the sky. Wind-driven clouds streaming across the far plain were aflame, crimsoned with the first burning kisses of the morning sun. We shook hands, embraced, hugged one another, checked our weapons again and again, and stared down the steep slopes toward forever.
The end, when it comes, is always too soon. My skin was tight on my face, drawn back by the muscles of my neck and jaw, those muscles in turn pulled taut by the shoulders and arms and frostbitten hands, clutching the final agony of the gun.
Suleiman gave the order. My stomach dropped and locked, and froze as hard as the cold unfeeling earth beneath my boots. I stood up, and crossed the lip of the ridge. We started down the slope. It was a magnificent day, the best clear day for months. I remembered thinking, weeks before, that Afghanistan, like prison, had no dawns and no sunsets in the stone cages of its mountains.
Yet the dawn that morning was more lovely than any I'd ever known. When the steeper slopes eased into a more gradual decline, we picked up the pace, jogging over the last of the rose-pink snow and into the grey-green rough ground beyond.
The first explosions we heard were too far away from us to frighten me. Okay. Here it comes. This is it... The words chattered through my mind as if someone else spoke them: as if someone, like a coach, was preparing me for the end. Then the explosions were closer, as the enemy mortars found their range.
I looked along our line, and saw that the others were running harder than I was. Only Nazeer was still beside me. I tried to run faster. My legs seemed wooden and numb: I saw them moving, running, step after step, but I couldn't feel them. It took a gigantic effort of will to send the message to my legs, and command them to greater speed. At last I stumbled into a faster run.
Two mortars exploded quite close to me. I kept running, waiting for the pain, and waiting for the killing joke. My heart was churning in my chest, and my breathing came in gasping, grunting little puffs of cold air. I couldn't see the enemy positions. The mortar's range was well over a kilometre, but I knew they had to be closer than that. And then the first shots spattered, the tun-tun-tun-tun of the AK-74s-theirs and ours. I knew they were close. They were close enough to kill us, and close enough for us to kill them.
My eyes raced ahead on the rough ground, looking for holes or boulders, trying to find the safest path. A man went down, left of me, along the line. It was Jalalaad. He was running beside Nazeer, and less than a hundred metres from me. A mortar shell exploded directly in front of him and ripped his young body into pieces. Looking down again, I jumped over rocks and boulders, and I stumbled but didn't fall. I saw Suleiman, fifty metres in front of me, clutch at his throat and then fall forward, running a few more paces doubled-up as if he was searching for something on the ground in front of him. His body crumpled and collapsed over his face, tumbling to the side. His face and throat were bloodied and broken and torn open. I tried to run around him, but the ground was rough and strewn with rocks, and I had to jump over his body as I ran.
I saw the first flashes of fire from the enemy Kalashnikovs. They were far away, at least two hundred metres, much further than I'd guessed. A tracer bullet fizzed past me, only one step to my left. We wouldn't make it. We couldn't make it. There weren't many of them-there weren't many guns firing-but they had so much time to get a sight on us and shoot us down. They were going to kill us all. Then a wild flurry of explosions crunched into the enemy lines. The idiots! They blew up their own mortar shells, I thought, and gunfire like fireworks rattled the world from everywhere at once. And Nazeer raised his assault rifle, and fired as he ran, and I saw Mahmoud Melbaaf firing ahead of me, on my right, where Suleiman had been, and I raised my weapon, and pulled the trigger.