‘Please spare him,’ she said. ‘He is just a boy. You know that. You must have sympathy.’
In the Pashtu language it sounded to Durrani as if she could see that he was one of them, one of her kind, a Hazara.
The other Taliban were watching the display as they held the struggling boy, looking between Durrani and the girl, something Durrani suddenly became aware of.
‘Please,’ she cried, stepping even closer to Durrani. ‘You are not the same as the others. I can see that. Spare my brother. I beg you.’
She could see compassion in his eyes but had failed to recognise the overriding fear behind them. Durrani squeezed the trigger of his AK47 and shot the girl once through the chest. She fell back to the floor but managed to support herself on her hands defiantly, refusing to fall all the way back. Her brother wailed on seeing the bloodstain grow down the front of her dress. She never took her eyes off Durrani even as they filled with tears. She looked more like his mother than ever as death came to claim her, a trickle of blood on her lips. She raised a hand towards him as if she wanted him to take hold of it. Durrani wanted her to stop and the only way he could do it was to fire again. The second bullet killed her instantly.
Durrani’s colleagues approved of the execution and pushed past him, taking the girl’s brother outside. A few seconds later more shots rang out.
Durrani remained staring at the girl’s body for a long time, a confusion of emotions swirling inside his head. He felt neither approval nor satisfaction. What he did feel was something that up until that moment in his life had been alien to him. It was guilt.
He left the house, walking past the limp body of the girl’s brother hanging lifeless over the front-garden gate, and continued down the main street and out of the town. It was not so much because he was disgusted by what was going on but because he was lost inside himself, consumed by his experience in the house, wondering what was happening to him.
The memory of the girl remained with him for the rest of his life - until his very last breath, in fact.
The Taliban plan to control the whole of Afghanistan did not succeed. The fighting continued for years against the Northern Alliance until the attack on the World Trade Center when it was the Americans’ turn to invade the country.The Afghan weapons and strategies that had worked so well against the Russians were no match for US might and the Taliban were swept aside.
Durrani took to the hills and eventually escaped into Pakistan where he stayed for several years. He remained in the employ of the Taliban, for his own security as well as to earn his keep. Occasionally he was sent back over the border on sorties, gathering intelligence on US troop movements, sometimes getting into fights with American or Pakistan border patrols. Some of his comrades-in-arms joined the fight in Iraq but Durrani did not want to move that far from his country. Most of his compatriots believed that, as with the fight against the Russians, and against the British many decades before that, a protracted guerrilla campaign against the Americans would eventually see the Afghans victorious. But the Americans had also learned from those past campaigns and the Taliban found it far more difficult to operate in the same way they had under the Russian occupation.
A degree of order descended upon many parts of the country, Kabul in particular, but this time Durrani could not go back to being a taxi driver or live a normal life in any Afghan city. It would not take long before questions about his past were asked and so his only chance of survival was to stay among those like himself.
He often wondered what his life would have been like if he’d married the Tajik girl. It might have kept him from joining the Taliban, for one thing. But such speculation was pointless.The Durrani who had wanted to marry and settle down was very different from the one who always went to war and there was little left of the former one anyway. Durrani was under no illusions as to how it would all end for him. Thousands of men he had known had died, and all he could remember of them were blurred images of their faces over the years. One day he knew he would join them. He could not look forward to paradise either for he was not a devout Muslim. Deep down he did not believe in such myths. It did not make sense to him that a life devoted to death and destruction could be rewarded with everlasting beauty. He could imagine nothing after life, only dark emptiness.
Durrani drove along a dark narrow street with dilapidated single-storey homes on either side, the rooms illuminated by kerosene lamps or lonely bare bulbs. Grey water trickled from waste pipes onto sodden, crumbling concrete pavements strewn with decaying rubbish. His eyes glanced everywhere as he reached the rear entrance of a sturdy mosque in the midst of the squalor, the largest building in the neighbourhood. The side streets he had used for much of the way after entering the city were unlit and quiet but traffic was busy along the main road that passed in front of the holy building.
He pulled to a stop in a wet and muddy gutter, turned off the pick-up’s lights and engine and sat still, his window open, waiting for his senses to grow accustomed to the sounds and shadows.
Durrani looked down at his wrist and the Rolex watch, now clean and shining, more to appreciate his treasure than to note the time. He had few possessions, only those he could carry. The watch was the prettiest trinket he had found in years and he hoped he would not have to sell it, for a while at least. He was curious about the engraving on the back. The next time he met an educated man who could read the language of the enemy he might ask what it said.
He lifted the Tajik scarf off the passenger seat to reveal his AK and the charred briefcase with the chain attached. He placed the case on his lap, the weapon on the floor and the scarf back over it. He wound up the window, checked that the passenger door was locked and looked up and down the street to ensure it was empty. He climbed out of the cab, locked the door, crossed the narrow road, stepped carefully between two parked cars to avoid the muddy gutter, crossed the pavement and passed through a small brick archway.
He entered a stone courtyard, immediately turned the corner towards a large wooden door and on reaching it he knocked on it. He turned his back on the door and studied the dark, silent courtyard that was surrounded by shadowy alcoves. A gust of wind blew a collection of leaves in a circle in the middle of the courtyard before scattering them into a corner. A bolt was loudly thrown back behind the door and Durrani turned around as it opened wide enough for a man with a gun in his hand to look through and examine him.
The man’s name was Sena and Durrani had seen him before in the service of the mullah. He was tall and gaunt and, despite the gun, looked unthreatening. Durrani suspected the man had never fired a shot in his life and would probably drop the weapon and run if he were to kick the door open. Sena stepped back to allow Durrani inside, secured the door again, and led him along a corridor, holding the gun at his side as if it was a tiresome appendage. Two Taliban fighters lounged on the floor, staring up at Durrani. They were dressed in grubby black and brown robes and wore long black beards. Two AK47 rifles were leaning against the wall between them. Neither man made any attempt to shift his dirty sandalled feet out of the way as the other men stepped over them.
Sena opened a door at the end of the corridor and led the way down a short flight of stairs to the bottom where two more fighters stood smoking strong cigarettes - the small space stank of tobacco. Sena knocked on the only door on the landing and waited patiently. A voice eventually summoned them and Sena pushed the door open and stepped to one side, indicating that Durrani should enter.
Durrani stepped inside a long narrow windowless room illuminated by a lamp on a desk at the far end. The door closed behind him. Sena remained in the corridor outside.
The room was sparsely furnished: a chair behind the desk, two more against a wall and several cushions on a worn rug. A mullah, dressed completely in black, was replacing a book on a shelf behind his desk. He turned to face Durrani as the door was closed and he studied his guest solemnly. A moment later his face cracked into a thin, devilish smile. ‘That was a good job you did today,’ he said.
‘It was my duty,’ Durrani replied courteously.
The mullah’s gaze dropped to the case in Durrani’s hands.
Durrani stepped forward and placed it on the desk. ‘You have not opened it?’ the mullah asked as he put on a pair of expensive spectacles.
‘Of course not.’
The mullah took hold of the chain, raised it to its full length, released it and turned the case around so the locks were facing him. A brief test proved that they were locked as he suspected. ‘Sena!’ he called out.
The door opened and Sena looked in.
‘A hammer and screwdriver,’ the mullah ordered.
Sena closed the door.
The mullah took a packet of cheap African Woodbines from a pocket, removed one, placed it in his mouth and offered the pack to Durrani.
