Opening The Water Supply

We are sitting on the hillside around the reservoir, which stands like an altar of stones on some high place, while the village mullah sings a prayer into the dead quiet and the wind. He is standing on a higher rock above us and we are looking off into space, into the valley, into the mountain. Before he began there was a bustle and milling among the men of the village, who have come to inaugurate this drinking water supply. Then he stepped up to stand like a prophet on his rock and began to sing. We fell silent before the song and sank to the ground to sit as we do now, in memory, perhaps, of where we came from.

When the song ends it lingers awhile in the air, until the speeches begin and diminish its sanctity with too much pride and flattery. My attention wanders. I’m supposed to be taking photographs, but the light here at mid-day is far too bright overhead and everything looks overexposed. The camera has its uses, however. It is a good excuse to disconnect myself from the proceedings and distract people from noticing that I’m not falling all over to congratulate myself and everyone else for the good work we’ve done here.

Of course it's true; we have done good work. These people used to drink out of muddy ditches. The water they are passing around now in a polished ceremonial cup is clear, cold, and sweet, and it comes right to their doorsteps. The grubby children peeking at the proceedings from the safety of the peripheral rocks will no longer have to collect water three times a day, rain or shine, freezing winter or burning noon. The diseases that attacked them every summer from dirty drinking water will recede. The villagers worked hard for this. They neglected their fields to dig straight up the mountain, to break rock with hammers and their bare hands, to haul sand and cement and pipes up a forty-degree pitch day after day. Now it’s finished and worth a celebration. So what is bothering me?

I look up the mountain, as if the answer to my discontent is somewhere up there where the spring water is pouring out of the rock. The pipe ditch cuts like a scar up across the green furrows of the hillside. Up above us, sitting with her chin in her hands and her headscarf slipping back off her forehead, is a little girl. She is quiet, and still like a stone. She simply watches, with her head cocked to one side, all of these men and their words and their words and words. The Governor is congratulating my organization, the village mullah is congratulating the Governor, my colleague is congratulating the head of the village, and everyone is carefully deferring to the local commander, who accepts all of it with bored detachment, his eyes shifting around like spiders in the web of lines years of murder have etched on his simian face. I have a sudden urge to sneak off and sit with the girl on the hill. We could sit there and leave the overwhelming task of the world below us. All the speeches would drift away in the wind and float up the valley and disappear, leaving us with only the mountain and the river and the sound of clean water flowing down into hollow stone. Maybe if we were to sit quietly enough, these men would leave, too, following their words, and when peace returned to this hillside we could recall again the mullah’s song. We would think about why such songs are sung and where praise belongs. We would sit with our chins in our hands, our heads cocked to one side, and remember things that most men forget, things that should not be forgotten.

When the ceremony is finally over and all the elaborate farewells said, we leave the village and drive back to Faizabad under the falling sun. In Afghanistan the light of dusk changes the landscape from a tumble of rocks into a glowing kingdom. The houses catch gold on the hillsides and the river is a shining ribbon rolling through the valley. It is late spring, almost summer, the season of nomads, the Kuchis, who drive their flocks up to the summer pastures in the mountains. We pass endless rivers of sheep with shepherds in leather boots and green turbans, their faces as dark as earth, their cries as old as the world. Their camps sprawl along the river with great spreading brown tents and tethered camels standing frozen with one leg cocked or lying like mountains on the grass. Strange children play amongst the baggage and peek from behind the embroidery. From the dust of the road and the dusk the final column appears, with an escort of warriors on horseback, turban tails wrapped around their faces and rifles slung from their saddles. High on the backs of camels are the women, swaying on velvet saddlebags with gold tassels. They are covered with the purple cloth of queens, their faces hidden like the blank faces of dolls, empty of features and full of mystery. Veils billow out behind them with the rhythm of camel trot and evening wind, catching the light and sparking the fevered imagination of men with rumours of unthinkable beauty.

“I thank God that I was not born a Kuchi,” someone in the car says. “Without a home.”

“Yes, but aren’t we all that way?” I say. “Looking for a country of our own?” But I say it quietly, and maybe only the passing nomads understand. Maybe they, and the little girl still up on the hill with her head cocked to one side, after everyone else has gone.