Then harassment raids had started.
Prisoners had been taken, in ones and twos.
Their fate was appalling.
Lila quoted lines that the old British writer Rudyard Kipling had put in a doom-laden poem about failed offensives and groaning abandoned battlefield casualties and cruel Afghan tribeswomen with knives: When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, and go to your God like a soldier. Then she said that what had been true even at the zenith of the British Empire's power was still true, and worse. Soviet infantrymen would go missing and hours later in the dark the winter wind would carry the sound of their screaming, from unseen enemy camps close by. The screaming would start at a desperate pitch and move slowly and surely upward into insane banshee wailing. Sometimes it would last ten or twelve hours. Most corpses were never recovered. But sometimes bodies would be returned, missing hands and feet, or whole limbs, or heads, or ears, or eyes, or noses, or penises.
Or skin.
'Some were flayed alive,' Lila said. 'Their eyelids would be cut away, and their heads forced down in a frame so they would have no choice but to watch their skin being peeled back, first from their faces, and then from their bodies. The cold anaesthetized their wounds to some extent and stopped them dying of shock too soon. Sometimes the process lasted a very long time. Or sometimes they would be roasted alive on fires. Parcels of cooked meat would show up near our emplacements. At first the men thought they were gifts of food, perhaps from sympathetic locals. But then they realized.'
Svetlana I bib stared on into the room, not seeing anything, looking even bleaker than before. Maybe the tone of her daughter's voice was prompting memories. Certainly it was very compelling. Lila had not lived through or witnessed the events she was describing, but it sounded like she had. It sounded like she had witnessed them yesterday. She had moved on from historical detachment. It struck me that she would make a fine storyteller. She had the gift of narrative.
She said, 'They liked to capture our snipers best of all. They hated our snipers. I think snipers are always hated, perhaps because of the way they kill. My mother was very worried about my father, obviously. And her baby brother. They went out most nights, into the low hills, with the electronic scope. Not too far. Maybe a thousand yards, to find an angle. Maybe a little more. Far enough to be effective, but close enough to feel safe. But nowhere was really safe. Everywhere was vulnerable. And they had to go. Their orders were to shoot the enemy. Their intention was to shoot the prisoners. They thought it would be a mercy. It was an awful time. And my mother was pregnant by then. With me. I was conceived in a rock trench hacked out of the Korengal floor, under a greatcoat that dated back to the end of World War Two, and on top of two others that were possibly even older. My mother said they had old bullet holes in them, maybe from Stalingrad.'
I said nothing. Svetlana stared On. Lila put her hands on the table and tangled her fingers loosely together. She said, 'For the first month or so my father and my uncle came back every morning, safe. They were a good team. Perhaps the best.'
Svetlana stared on. Lila took her hands off the table and paused a beat. Then she sat up straight and squared her shoulders.
A change of pace. A change of subject. She said, 'There were Americans in Afghanistan at that time.'
I said, 'Were there?' She nodded.
I said, 'What Americans?'
'Soldiers. Not many, but some. Not always, but sometimes.'
'You think?'
She nodded again. 'The US Army was definitely there. The Soviet Union was their enemy, and the mujahideen were their allies. It was Cold War by proxy. It suited President Reagan very well to have the Red Army worn down. It was a part of his anticommunist strategy. And he enjoyed the chance to capture some of our new weapons for intelligence purposes. So teams were sent. Special Forces. They were in and out on a regular basis. And one night in March of 1983, one of those teams found my father and my uncle and stole their VAL rifle.'
I said nothing.
Lila said, 'The loss of the rifle was a defeat, of course. But what was worse was that the Americans gave my father and my uncle to the tribeswomen. There was no need for that. Obviously they had to be silenced, because the American presence was entirely covert and had to be concealed. But the Americans could have killed my father and my uncle themselves, quickly and quietly and easily. They chose not to. My mother heard their screams all the next day and far into the night. Her husband, and her brother. Sixteen, eighteen hours. She said even screaming that badly she could still tell them apart, by the sound of their voices.'
THIRTY-SEVEN
I GLANCED AROUND THE FOUR SEASONS' DIM TEA ROOM AND moved in my chair and said, 'I'm sorry, hut 1 don't believe you.'
Lila Hoth said, 'I'm telling you the truth.'
I shook my head. 'I was in the U.S. Army. I was a military cop. Broadly speaking I knew where people went, and where they didn't. And there were no U.S. boots on the ground in Afghanistan. Not back then. Not during that conflict. It was purely a local affair.'
'But you had a dog in the fight.'
'Of course we did. Like you did when we were in Vietnam. Was the Red Army in-country there?'
It was a rhetorical question, designed to make a point, but Lila Hoth took it seriously. She leaned forward across the table and spoke to her mother, low and fast, in a foreign language that I presumed was Ukrainian. Svetlana's eyes opened a little and she cocked her head to one side as if she was recalling some small matter of arcane historical detail. She spoke back to her daughter, low and fast, and long, and then Lila paused a second to marshal her translation and said, 'No, we sent no troops to Vietnam, because we had confidence that our socialist brothers from the People's Republic could complete their task unaided. Which, my mother says, apparently they did, quite splendidly. Little men in pyjamas defeated the big green machine.'
Svetlana Hoth smiled and nodded.
I said, 'Just like a bunch of goat herders kicked her ass.'
'Undisputedly. But with a lot of help.'
'Didn't happen.'
'But you admit that material help was provided, surely. To the mujahideen. Money, and weapons. Especially surface-to-air missiles, and things of that nature.'
'Like in Vietnam, only the other way around.'
'And Vietnam is an excellent example. Because, to your certain knowledge, whenever did the United States provide military aid anywhere in the world without also sending what they called military advisers?'
I didn't answer.
She asked, 'For instance, how many countries have you served in?'
I said nothing.
She asked, 'When did you join the army?'
'In 1984,' I said.
'Then these events of 1982 and 1983 were all before your time.'
'Only just,' I said. 'And there is such a thing as institutional memory.'
'Wrong,' she said. 'Secrets were kept and institutional memories were conveniently erased. There's a long history of illegal American military involvements all around the world. Especially during Mr Reagan's presidency.'
'You learn that in high school?'
'Yes, I did. And remember, the communists were gone long before I was in high school. Thanks, in part, to Mr Reagan himself.'
I said, 'Even if you're right, why assume Americans were involved on that particular night? Presumably your mother didn't see it happen. Why not assume your father and your uncle were captured directly by the mujahideen?'
'Because their rifle was never found. And my mother's position was never fired on at night by a sniper. My father had twenty rounds in his magazine, and he was carrying twenty spare. If the mujahideen had captured him directly, then they would have used his rifle against us. They would have killed forty of our men, or tried to, and then they would have run out of ammunition and abandoned the gun. My mother's company would have found it eventually. There was a lot of back-and-forth skirmishing. Our side overran their positions, and vice versa. It was like a crazy circular chase. The mujahideen were intelligent. They had a habit of doubling back to positions we had previously written off as abandoned. But over a period of time our people saw all their places. They would have found the VAL, empty and rusting, maybe in use as a fence post. They accounted for all their other captured weapons that way. But not that VAL. The only logical conclusion is that it was carried straight to America, by Americans.'