An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World by Vollmann William T

Author:Vollmann, William T. [Vollmann, William T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781612191997
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-07-08T21:00:00+00:00

8

“… DESCRIBED FORMALLY AS REFUGEE CAMPS …”: CORRUPTION

(1982)

AFGHAN WOMAN: You are a tourist?

YOUNG MAN: NO, a fund-raiser.

AFGHAN WOMAN: You raise lots of money, or only a few thousand dollars?

YOUNG MAN: Probably just a few thousand dollars.

AFGHAN WOMAN: I think you should either really help us or not help us at all. You are not helping us.

An Afghanistan Picture Show [1]

Meanwhile his eyes were blinking, and his Afghanistan Picture Show, with which he would galvanize the world, was staring at him like the two little girls who stared at him between tents. One’s hair was combed, and she wore a clean white dress. The other was unkempt, with a dirty face and a faded wrinkled dress; she scratched an insect bite on her knee. Both were beautiful; both were shy. They stared and stared at him; they would never have enough of him. How strange he was! What did he want? Why had he come to them? Why was he so thin and pale and sweating? Something must be wrong with him. The two girls watched him, hoping that he would neither go away nor come closer. His Picture Show was staring at him like the two small boys who squatted down between the tent and the clay box that they lived in; they clasped hands over knees; they smiled, and between them was an empty tin that said: BUTTEROIL 99.8% MILKFAT GIFT OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC COMMUNITY, and another empty tin which had been made into a bucket stood on top of their house and the ground was packed baked cracked clay; it was staring like the square-eyed houses of clay watched him, thatch hanging down over their foreheads like the bangs of the refugee boys, and inside one of them the wide-faced boy who had lost his father to the Roos stared at the Young Man through brownish-green eyes, one hand pressed against his temple as if to help him stare even harder, and the Young Man thought: well, maybe I can do some good after all; maybe I can at least be a diversion; and behind the boy, a patterned blanket made a rainbow.

But he could not yet see what these things meant. He was too busy analyzing and solving once and for all (as he had all the other problems) the issue of

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