Tanner 06 - Tanner's Virgin by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-03-12T06:00:00+00:00

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TANNER’S

VIRGIN

103

But wait a minute—wasn’t he in Israel a minute ago?

Something about getting on a camel?

True. Except that it wasn’t a minute ago, really, but several weeks ago, and since that camel (and if you have never ridden a camel you cannot possibly know how bad they are) there had been donkeys and mules and broken-down cars and a truck and a lot of walking and, all in all, an almost incredible spate of boredom.

Well, not boredom, exactly. It wasn’t boring sitting around a mountain campfire with a band of Kurdish rebels. It wasn’t boring at a village a few miles from Teheran, eating sheep’s bladder stuffed with cracked wheat and almonds and apricots, which is at least a thousand times better than it sounds. The mountain views through Afghan Turkistan were never boring, nor were the languages (some new, some half-known) or the people.

It was just such a grind. I kept on the move constantly and I just couldn’t find any real way to speed things up. The distances were great, the roads fairly primitive, and my own lack of valid papers kept me away from main roads and speedier methods of transportation.

So it took a while. It took more time to live through than it does to put down a quick summary of what happened. What happened was that virtually nothing happened, and I stayed alive and wound up in Kabul, and all of a sudden the rest of the world decided I had lived too long and to too little purpose and did what it could to change all that.

I reached the outskirts of Kabul after nightfall, and it was another hour by the time I got as far as the center of town. I stopped at a coffeehouse, where an old man 104 LAWRENCE

BLOCK

with a wispy beard and stainless steel teeth was playing an instrument that was a cross between an oud and a round-backed mandolin. I had a cup of coffee—very thick, very bitter—and a pilaf of cracked wheat and currants. I kibitzed a backgammon game, had another cup of coffee, and asked a fellow kibitzer if he knew a man named Amanullah.

“I know Amanullah the Seller of Fish, and Amanullah the Son of Hadi of the Book Stall.”

“Perhaps he means Amanullah of the Lamps and Old Artifacts,” one of the players suggested.

“Or Amanullah Who Has But One Eye. Is this the Amanullah you seek, kâzzih? ”

Amanullah, it seemed, was as rare in Afghanistan as flies in a latrine. Kabul was positively buzzing with Amanullahs. I explained rather haltingly, which is the only way I’ve ever learned to speak Pushtu (also known as Pakhsto and Pakkhto and Pashto). It is the language of the Afghans, and it is one of those unnec-essarily complex Asian tongues to which I attribute the illiteracy of such a large portion of the population. Of course they can’t read and write. There are thirty-seven classes of verbs, thirteen intransitive and twenty-four transitive. No one should have to contend with that sort of nonsense.

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