Red Rubber Boots and Trust

Driving up to Faizabad. Again. You want a picture for this land, a single image that will gather all the things you feel and see driving through it, and convey in one rushing, cinematic frame the largeness of the experience. But I am left with words, like a man in a desert of scattered stones and only his hands to gather them one by one, pile them one by one into phrases, into sentences, into paragraphs, until the shape of the thing is clear, or close, because it is never the thing itself but only a shape. The thing itself is a boy with twelve years under his belt, which is rope anyway, and he has the leathered face of an old man and the dull eyes of a beaten woman, which turn slowly and watch you as you pass, and his legs poke out like he is riding an out-of-control bicycle, except it’s not a bicycle but a donkey and on the end of his bouncing legs are a pair of astonishingly red rubber boots. And the thing itself is that in the end, you notice the red boots more than the face because every person you pass has that face. Perhaps it is the face we all would wear, if we were not so hard at work covering it with make-up and teeth-whiteners and tans and skin creams, if we were not such experts at the civilized art of masks and smiling in all directions, if we admitted that we, too, get weary of life and still go on and on with it. It is hard to be conceited enough to fling out hope to this boy in his rubber boots when you realize that where you are from, people are just as hopeless, they’re only better at hiding it. And it’s hard to realize even that, because we, the privileged, are so good at hiding it from ourselves.

But the boy is gone now, bouncing on his donkey in his red boots, and you are still here, bouncing along the road or what’s left of it in your Russian Jeep. It’s hard to stay present, in the moment, like a saint, while everything in your body – including thoughts – are jolted and jerked every few seconds. It’s hard to not want to be anywhere else, at any other point in time, than this one when your bones are slowly switching places and your muscles are stretched like a man on the rack and your clothes twist and ride up around your limbs with every bump. It’s hard to rejoice with Paul the good apostle in every circumstance, although you’re ready to concede that between his snakebites and shipwrecks and floggings of forty minus one he might have had it a bit worse than you do; still, at the third twist of your underwear and the banging of your head against the window frame as you almost get the relief of sleep, you could also be convinced that this takes the cake. Then you come across some poor sod on a motorbike, banging his way through the series of pits and boulders that count for a road, choking on the dust that also gives your own throat a tangy taste, and you have what might pass as a saintly thought, that he might be uncomfortable too, that other people might be uncomfortable too. Worse than you even. Worse than him even, like maybe the woman on the back of his bike, hidden and sweltering under the white burqa like a ghost, unable even to see the harsh and unexpected beauty of the land we’re all driving through, and the rest of us unable to see the unexpected beauty of her because all we can really expect is that she will go everywhere he goes, always under wraps, and if anyone is kind or cruel enough to enlighten her as to what we know as freedom, all her dreams about it will stay under that thing with her face.

The thing is, you see these two poised on the edge of a mountain road, with the river flashing blue in the gorge below them and the mountains behind them canting in a strata of rocks where the crust of the earth tipped up an edge so that it looks as if a slice of another planet crash landed with its tail feathers fossilized toward heaven. And the lines of his face catch the shadows of the brightest sun on earth, and the pure white of her burqa reminds you of doves or angels and against the blue of the river and the sparkle of the water and the mountains reaching up it’s hard not believe that whatever else this is, it is also beautiful. If you just had the right camera, the right lens, the right light, and the right moment this could be a full-page spread in the National Geographic you read in the doctor’s office and wonder why you are not bold or exciting enough to be in a place where you see such things for real. Only what you don’t know is that you are also in this Jeep when you are there, and you have to go pee, more with every bump, and you’ve just banged your head again, and you know that the burqa has nothing to do with angels, and that guy would use National Geographic to light his stove and still freeze in winter. You must exist like this for as long as you are here, with beauty and discomfort twisted together like wheat and weeds in your mind. Even going home is no relief, because these images don’t ever really leave. You want to take the red rubber boots and the angels and the breathtaking view and separate them from the potholes and the banged heads and the ancient 12-year olds and the prisoned women and the beaten men. You want to rid the world of evil, and keep only the beauty.

Then you catch yourself, because that is why you are here, ostensibly. You are here to set the prisoners free, cover the orphan, lift the broken. And if you are me, you are also here to pay down your student loan in the quickest, most adventurous and exciting way possible. So you are here, part of some high call, perhaps that highest that exists, trying to squirm your clothes to untwist and hoping you can hold it until the next bathroom, which is God knows where, as God knows all things, even how to call things that are not as though they are, even to make the world beautiful in spite of it all, even what beauty such as you can resurrect in such a place as this.

But one more image before we are done, one more stone to add to the shape of things, not so much because it fits with the theme of the things, but because I love it. She is maybe 7 or 8, sitting high above the entire world on her father’s horse while he rides the donkey in front. She does not even lift a finger in her passage, for daddy holds the reins. Her headdress is a brighter blue than princesses wear and it is as if she has transferred all her cares to the withered man who leads her. She looks at us squished and banging together in our Russian Jeep with the smug look of the one who has triumphed after all, pulled out the royal flush and raked in the take from under our noses after we were sure we had it in the bag.

She looked at us like that the whole time it took us to pass, and I’m sure she kept looking like that after we passed, because her victory had nothing to do with our loss, nothing to do with things we understand. I suspect she knew what only saints and children know: how to trust Someone and live every moment and love it.