The original AK-47 was made of forged and milled steel. The AK-74, produced in the 1970s, was made from stamped metal parts. Some of the older Afghan fighters rejected the newer weapon, with its smaller 5.45-millimetre round and its orange plastic magazine, preferring the solidity of the heavier AK-47. Some younger fighters chose the 74 model, dismissing the heavier gun as an antique. The models they used were produced in Egypt, Syria, Russia, and China. Although they were essentially identical, the fighters often preferred one to another, and the trade in the weapons, even within the same unit, was energetic and intense.
Khader’s workshops repaired and refitted the AKs of every series, and modified them as required. The workshops were popular places. The Afghan men were insatiable in their desire to know about weapons and learn new skills with them. It wasn’t a frenzied or brutal curiosity. It was simply necessary to know how to handle guns in a land that had been invaded by Alexander the Great, the Huns, the Sakas, the Scythians, the Mongols, the Moghuls, the Safavids, the British, and the Russians, among many others. Even when they weren’t studying at the workshops or helping out with the work, the men gathered there to drink tea made on spirit stoves, smoke cigarettes, and talk about their loved ones.
And for two months I worked with them every day. I melted lead and other metals in the little forge. I helped to gather scraps of firewood, and carried water from a spring at the foot of a nearby ravine. Trudging through the light snow I dug out new latrines, and carefully covered them over and concealed them again when they were full. I turned new parts on the turret lathe, and melted the helical metal shavings to make more parts. In the mornings I tended to the horses, which were billeted in another cave further down the mountain. When it was my turn to milk the goats, I churned the milk into butter and helped to cook naan bread. If any man needed attention for a cut or graze or sprained ankle, I set up the first-aid kit and did my best to heal him.
I learned the answering choruses of a few songs, and in the evenings when the fires were smothered and we huddled together for warmth, I sang with the men as softly as they did. I listened to the stories that they whispered into the dark, and that Khaled, Mahmoud, and Nazeer translated for me. Each day when the men prayed, I knelt with them in silence. And at night, enclosed within the breathing, snoring swathe of their soldier-scented sleep-smells of wood-smoke, gun oil, cheap sandalwood soap, piss, shit, sweat soaking into wet-serge, unwashed human and horse hair, liniment and saddle-softener, cumin and coriander, peppermint tooth powder, chai, tobacco, and a hundred others-I dreamed with them of homes and hearts we longed to see again.
Then, when the second month ended, and the last weapons were repaired and modified, and the supplies we’d brought with us were all but exhausted, Khaderbhai ordered us to prepare for the long walk home. He planned to make a detour west, toward Kandahar and away from the border with Pakistan, to deliver some horses to his family. After that, with marching packs and light weapons, we would march by night until we reached the safety of the Pakistan border.
‘The horses are nearly loaded,’ I reported to Khader when I’d packed my own gear. ‘Khaled and Nazeer will be back up here when it’s all done. They told me to let you know.’
We were on the flattened top of a tor that gave a commanding view of the valleys and then the desert plain that stretched from the foot of the mountains all the way to Kandahar at the horizon. For once, the cloudy mists and snow had cleared enough for us to take in the whole, panoramic sweep of the view. There were dark, thick clouds massed to the east of us, and the cold air was damp with the rain and snow they would bring, but for the moment we could see all the way to the end of the world, and our wintry eyes were drowning in the beauty of it.
‘In November of 1878, the same month that we started this mission, the British forced their way through the Khyber Pass, and the second Afghan war with them began,’ Khader said, ignoring my report, or perhaps responding to it in his own way. He stared toward the ripple of haze on the horizon caused by the smoke and fire of distant Kandahar. I knew that some of the horizon’s shimmer and drizzle might’ve been exploding rockets, fired into the city by men who’d lived there once as teachers and merchants. In the war against the Russian invaders, they’d become devils in exile, raining fire upon their own homes and shops and schools.
