An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World Read Online Free PDF

even pass the Equal Rights Amendment!), and that the Afghans, too, could hope someday to serve on the Supreme Soviet in their national costumes—and why shouldn’t Afghan women be granted formal equality? —But maybe that consideration did not apply in Afghanistan; maybe wearing the veil was what was right there. If so, the Soviet re-educators should leave them alone. —And what about this business of “fighting religion in earnest”? I did not much like that. It seemed wrong to strike at someone else’s faith (if, indeed, that was what the Soviets were doing, for again our newspapers might be distorting things). Most disturbing, of course, was the fact that the upward evolution had to be forcibly sponsored.
    At the university I had met an old Maoist who was visiting through some exchange program or other; in the kitchen late one night I asked him about the liquidation of the landlords in China, for I was sure that that had not been right.
    We were alone, and the kitchen light was very bright. The night was hot. Crickets chirped. The professor said, “Maybe it could have been done eventually without the liquidations. But I doubt it. Once their land was expropriated, would they have been content with that? Why did they have more land than the small peasants in the first place? If we left them there to make trouble in the villages, you can be assured that they would have gotten their neighbors in debt to them again; they would have
schemed
to do it. The land would become theirs again. So there was no other way to do it.”
    “Do you think that the executioners should have been sorry?”
    “No,” he said, “I don’t think so. But I had nothing to do with it.”
    Later I remembered Vlad IV of Romania, who had abolished poverty by burning up the poor. I wondered how well and for how long this had worked.
     
    * The dislikes we have are such a mystery! My friend Seth was always terrified of whales, although he never met any, and I once met a little Afghan girl who screamed whenever she heard an airplane. Later I found out that an airplane had killed her parents and transformed her into a paraplegic.

3
DIFFICULTIES OF THE MIRACLE WORKER
(1982)
     
    And when they meet those who believe, they say, We believe; and when they are alone with their devils, they say: Surely we are with you; we were only mocking.
    Allah will pay them back their mockery, and He leaves them alone in their inordinacy, blindly wandering on.
    Q UR’ĀN , II:2:14–15
     

Difficulties of the miracle worker
     
    K ing’s “Restaurant” for lunch. He ordered chicken fry with
nan
. * The chicken was literally a skeleton in chicken-flavored oil. Evidently the bird had been boiled and boiled into soup, and somebody else had ordered the soup. —As he was a foreigner, he was brought a knife and fork. The waiter and the owner stared with almost religious interest at his attempts to eat with these utensils, which he had seen before in this life, but which had never been applied by him to such difficult usages. The skeleton swam about halfheartedly (if that is the right word) when his proxies pursued it through its frictionless bath. The liquid ran through the tines of his fork. A perfect drop of oil remained on each point after immersion, so every now and then he raised the fork to his mouth coolly, as if he were getting somewhere, and sucked at it. It tasted as if they had cooked the entrails and feathers along with the bones. Fishing politely for a velvety snippet of blood clot or rooster’s comb at the bottom of the dish, he accidentally overturned the skeleton and discovered some meat on the wing. The fork and knife could not pull it loose, however, as he hadn’t been raised in France or Italy, where in the afternoons you could watch old men peel a peach with their silverware, wasting scarcely a molecule of fruit-flesh as the skin came perfectly off; no, the Young Man was an American, and so finally he plunged his hand into the lukewarm oil to get