A Rainbow Umbrella
Spring in northern Afghanistan brings with it an impossible green and patchworks it all over the hills, enough to make you feel like running forever for the sheer gigantic joy of it. My friend wrote that a new wheat field is “so green it breaks your heart” and I can’t think of any better way to say it. I was driving back home today over roads bad enough to ruin tanks, my heart breaking over and over at the sight of the world, the sun cutting through the rain clouds and the mountains up so high I couldn’t believe they weren’t falling over. Then a man came walking through the fields holding a bright rainbow coloured umbrella up like he was Arnold Palmer at Palm Springs and I swear I heard God laugh out loud.
This week I have walked up hills steeper than avalanche chutes, smelled mint underfoot, stumbled upon the fireplaces of shepherds. I have visited springs so old they still have the forgotten magic of the world in their waters, and divided bread with nut-brown men whose eyes crinkle in thousand year old smiles. I have shared secret shyness with barefoot children, shared my bedroom with scorpions. I have traded political manoeuvres with wealthy men and governors, handed money to shivering workers, discussed the ratio of sand to cement with engineers, weighed the merits of dynamite over hammers, and stood with afghans quiet as gravestones under the moon while the earth shook beneath us. In the silence afterwards we heard the mountains come loose and roll down like thunder.
In the evenings after work we walk the streets of Baharak in the falling twilight. It takes a long time for the light to leave the sky purple and dusky and then the moon rises like a queen between two peaks and spreads her soft glory. In the bazaar, men chatter, buy food, shout, push each other around, tell their stories, laugh. Girls slip through the crowd, buying candy, whispering and giggling while they are still young, before they become women and disappear. Children trail after their fathers or bounce on donkeys, always looking back over their shoulders at what has passed, absorbing it with their already ancient eyes. The place is full of movement and age and secret allegiances I will never understand. One of my friends is buying a vest, a hideous denim piece with gold zippers. The rest of us joke around in English so our jokes are never complicated and they are always for my benefit. We move on, buy oranges, move on. Outside the market there is a field, a patch of dirt surrounded by the skeletons of Russian tanks. The Tajiks are playing volleyball. The Pashtuns, recently come from Pakistan, are playing cricket. Women skirt the edges, a blue and white border, silent. I watch and spit mandarin seeds on the ground. I am as peaceful now as ever. A lazy evening in the park. I feel … accustomed.
Some small secret knowledge comes to me, as it has been coming to me all my life: I will never belong here. I am a witness; I do not collaborate. All of these scenes flicker past me on a screen as big as the world. I’m convinced they mean something and I’m trying to catch the edges of it, the trailing joy, the streams of glory, the terrible, beautiful ache of longing, and my words are always glancing off into men with umbrellas and earthquakes and the rising moon. Annie Dillard says, “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” So that is what I’m trying to do, the least thing: just be here.
A small girl, cute as anything, is running and looking back in a game of tag and she nearly crashes into me. She looks up with a wary, dark brow and skirts around me carefully. I turn now and walk back to the surrounding walls of the office compound that is my home. For now.
This week I have walked up hills steeper than avalanche chutes, smelled mint underfoot, stumbled upon the fireplaces of shepherds. I have visited springs so old they still have the forgotten magic of the world in their waters, and divided bread with nut-brown men whose eyes crinkle in thousand year old smiles. I have shared secret shyness with barefoot children, shared my bedroom with scorpions. I have traded political manoeuvres with wealthy men and governors, handed money to shivering workers, discussed the ratio of sand to cement with engineers, weighed the merits of dynamite over hammers, and stood with afghans quiet as gravestones under the moon while the earth shook beneath us. In the silence afterwards we heard the mountains come loose and roll down like thunder.
In the evenings after work we walk the streets of Baharak in the falling twilight. It takes a long time for the light to leave the sky purple and dusky and then the moon rises like a queen between two peaks and spreads her soft glory. In the bazaar, men chatter, buy food, shout, push each other around, tell their stories, laugh. Girls slip through the crowd, buying candy, whispering and giggling while they are still young, before they become women and disappear. Children trail after their fathers or bounce on donkeys, always looking back over their shoulders at what has passed, absorbing it with their already ancient eyes. The place is full of movement and age and secret allegiances I will never understand. One of my friends is buying a vest, a hideous denim piece with gold zippers. The rest of us joke around in English so our jokes are never complicated and they are always for my benefit. We move on, buy oranges, move on. Outside the market there is a field, a patch of dirt surrounded by the skeletons of Russian tanks. The Tajiks are playing volleyball. The Pashtuns, recently come from Pakistan, are playing cricket. Women skirt the edges, a blue and white border, silent. I watch and spit mandarin seeds on the ground. I am as peaceful now as ever. A lazy evening in the park. I feel … accustomed.
Some small secret knowledge comes to me, as it has been coming to me all my life: I will never belong here. I am a witness; I do not collaborate. All of these scenes flicker past me on a screen as big as the world. I’m convinced they mean something and I’m trying to catch the edges of it, the trailing joy, the streams of glory, the terrible, beautiful ache of longing, and my words are always glancing off into men with umbrellas and earthquakes and the rising moon. Annie Dillard says, “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” So that is what I’m trying to do, the least thing: just be here.
A small girl, cute as anything, is running and looking back in a game of tag and she nearly crashes into me. She looks up with a wary, dark brow and skirts around me carefully. I turn now and walk back to the surrounding walls of the office compound that is my home. For now.
posted by rjs | 9:44 PM
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