Page 8 of What Remains (John Worthy #3)

Sarhad had no infrastructure. Electricity came from large car batteries or, for some, solar panels.

There was no running water, no hospital, no road past the village.

Just as well: there were few vehicles because petrol was both expensive and hard to come by.

With little ready cash, people bartered.

With no reliable cell service, a person went by yak or donkey or camel or horse to within a few kilometers of the Tajik border to pick up the T-Cell network.

Yet there was a school. A few shops. The village even had a nurse.

There was also a police station. Two officers were tasked with checking tourist visas for the Wakhan Corridor, a narrow panhandle bounded by Tajikistan to the north, Pakistan to the south and, far to the east, China.

Since there’d been no tourists for several years, the officers mostly picked their teeth.

Mami decided not to wait for the police to notice them and marched into the station the day they arrived. The duty officer studied their papers for a moment then asked after their business and where they were staying.

“With my husband’s third cousin,” Mami said smoothly and gave a name.

“I see.” The officer cocked an eyebrow. If anything, his frown deepened. “And your husband?”

“Dead. I travel with my son, as is only proper.”

“Indeed.” The officer flicked only a cursory glance at Poya. “And where did your husband die?”

“Kabul, when the Americans fled.” By then, Mami had repeated this so many times, her tone sounded as if she agreed that, yes, the weather was fine. “His death certificate is in the back of the packet.”

His mother might be cool, but this was always the moment Poya’s palms grew damp.

No telling just which way the next few moments would go.

He watched in quiet agony as the officer riffled through their papers to the back—and then paused.

His hesitation lasted for so short a time that only the astute observer, or Poya with his heart pounding, might notice.

“This seems to be in order.” Face now as smooth as fine porcelain, the officer proffered the packet between right thumb and forefinger the way a croupier did in a movie Poya once had seen.

“Say hello to your cousin,” he said while his left hand—and the money Mami had slipped into their packet—disappeared into a pocket.

Because, of course, there was no death certificate. How could there be, with no body claim?

Time passed. They waited for Baba’s American to appear. Mami paced the streets; Poya read books he’d scavenged from their home in Kabul. His mother had fussed, pointing out he needed clothes, but he couldn’t leave so many books behind knowing the Taliban would only burn them.

Eventually, Mami took a teaching job. Her pay was food and supplies.

The local school was integrated. Boys and girls took the same classes, sat in the same rooms. There were only three other children Poya’s age in his form, all boys, and none were particularly bookish or even ambitious.

None knew a language other than Wakhi, which Poya hadn’t known when he arrived.

Languages were easy for him, though, always had been, and Wakhi was close to Dari. So, he picked up the language fast.

Things were not fine , only livable. At night, he and his mother would plot and plan, though there were few choices.

With no relatives and Baba’s American having forsaken them, only Khorog in Tajikistan seemed an option—and a bad one, at that.

They might try crossing the river that divided the two countries, but the river was icy with melt in spring as well as deep.

Snow was not unusual even in July. Given the altitude, there was little natural cover and certainly no trees.

Plus, the Taliban rumbled by on regular patrols.

They might bribe their way aboard a lorry; people knew people who knew other people who knew smugglers.

These same people who knew people knew others who’d heard horror stories of refugees who ended up as food for wolves.

Even if they managed a safe crossing, Khorog was many miles away.

His mother knew no professors there either and living in a city, even a small one, would be expensive.

They went round and round for hours but never reached any conclusion about what to do or where to go.

Until the beginning of the end was forced upon them: the day when the Taliban came.

The first truckloads of men and equipment rumbled through what passed for Sarhad’s village center in the early spring of 2022.

It was like watching one of Baba’s American movies when the outlaws ride into town.

If the stony faces of the other villagers were any indication, Poya thought every single Wakhi knew that things were about to get much, much worse.

“This is not good.” Mami’s voice was tight. That day, for the first time since they’d arrived, she had veiled so only her eyes showed. She wasn’t the only woman in the village to do so either. “This is very, very bad. Look at them, those workers. See how skinny? And their clothing, do you see?”

What clothing the men wore was all similar: an odd camouflage pattern of greens and browns, like something from an American war movie. “Soldiers?” Poya said.

“Yes. Afghan National Army. I remember when they started wearing these. You were young then, only five or six. The uniforms, they call them ‘forest camouflage,’ came from the Americans, but the choice was made by a defense minister, oh, long ago. I do believe the Americans tried to talk the minister out of the uniforms. As if there are forests in Afghanistan.” She huffed a derisive laugh. “Better to dress them in pink.”

He remembered seeing cast-off uniforms in the streets north of their house in Kabul. “Do you think they surrendered?”

“Who can tell? Captured or surrendered, it makes no difference. This is bad,” Mami said again. “The Taliban will be here around the clock now, until winter. We need to be careful.”

They were. Even so, things got worse. In the months that followed, Taliban overseers walked up and down the line of men laboring with shovels and pickaxes and wheelbarrows at the hard earth.

Anyone who flagged from exhaustion was beaten.

Any man who tried to run was shot. A man foolish enough to argue with a Taliban had his tongue cut out.

After all, there were always more ex-soldiers to find, more traitors to root out.

Then, one day in the late spring of 2022, something strange happened.

Poya and his mother lived in a cramped house of sun-hardened brick perched on the far eastern edge of the village.

Essentially a very large square, the house contained a pot-belly stove on a brick platform at the center.

They slept on pallets by the stove, pumped water from a well, and did their business in an outhouse with a corrugated tin roof.

Their house was also a stone’s throw from where the road had ended before the Taliban showed up.

This meant they often saw and heard the Taliban as well as their prisoners who were housed in yurts.

At first, so many Taliban milling around made Mami nervous, but after the first two weeks and no one showing up to arrest them, she relaxed.

By and by, they grew accustomed to the racket, which started early and ended late.

Being so close, though, meant that Poya sometimes saw things he probably wasn’t meant to see. One morning in the dawn’s thin light, the distant grumble of a truck woke him. The sound was at first distant but grew louder. This was unusual. New prisoners normally arrived at midday.

His mother slept on. Curious, he slipped from his pallet and padded quietly to one of their four windows. Each faced a cardinal direction and had no proper glass, though they did have shutters with slats. Sidling up to the east window, he peered through a sliver between two slats.

There was only one truck, with a dark canvas cover over the rear cargo bay.

This was strange; the Taliban weren’t normally shy about their prisoners.

If anything, they wanted people to stay afraid.

As he watched, the truck braked. A moment passed, and then the driver and another man clambered down from the cab.

Both were armed. Instead of releasing the tailgate so their prisoners could jump down, they waited, rifle butts resting on their hips, and looked east down the stretch of new road.

Nothing happened for another few minutes and he was about to go back to bed, when he heard the distant clop of hooves and a whinny.

Horses.

The riders trotted in from the east. He expected to see nomads.

These were herdsmen who belonged to various clans and rotated their sheep and goats between various pasturelands in late spring through to early fall.

Before the first snow fell and as soon as the melt began, these men would come to Sarhad for supplies, with their sheep and goats serving as payment.

The nomads were different from the Wakhi, not only in their dress but their looks.

To Poya, the nomads always seemed as if they’d just stepped over the border from China.

Instead of nomads, though, seven men, in traditional pakools and baggy trousers, trotted up to the truck. They rode with their rifles slung over their chests and double bandoliers of gleaming bullets, like something out of a Clint Eastwood western.