ARRIVAL

"If you see a blind person walking around a well, and remain quiet, it is a sin."

—Dari proverb

June 29, 1973

The brittle lion teeth of the desert rages, until we swoop down on a green strip in a salt desert, and see the New Mexico type adobe arches of an airport. We are at Kandahar, where natives are greeted like royalty as they descend from this miracle bird which has effortlessly soared over the hot sand hills. Dark, bearded, sun-wrinkled men push a staircase up against the plane, we glimpse camels and straw in one wing of the solo structure, then as quickly the stairs are pushed away, and we are airborne again, for Kabul.

It is Thursday, almost noon, when we land in Kabul, nine and a half hours from the ESDT. We had watched Kabul develop from the air, rugged, uneven patches of green and gray linked and edged by arteries of streets and roads, bowled by gray hills on two sides, and the ice laced Hindu Kush on the other—dusty hot, full of mirages in its large plain position in the middle. After deplaning, feet down on the cracked cement, we are dazed from the long trip and the falling heat like an out of season coat. Someone huddles us unprofessionally together for a group picture, collects our passports stuffed with visas like dealt out poker cards, as turbaned men and women squatting under thick scarfs, and children with dark round eyes watch us from the observation patio above, like so many strange intruders. We move into a bursting stuffed room of people to gather our baggage, fill out a form, then rattle through a sort of customs, to pause in a a waiting room/receptacle hall of chadris-ed women and modern-heeled, mothers-to-be, and skinny pairs of boys and girls clutching welcoming bouquets to greet their liberated brothers or fathers who have traveled beyond them.

Like limp laundry, we are scooped up, dropped in Peace Corps hands, cradled together volunteers, but not before the pajama-billowing, drab gray-dressed porters, one-half my weight, have carried away the baggage and shuffled disappointedly when we pay with the only funds we have, a German mark. Piled into an old Toyota truck, our luggage in another, we are swept into the city down one long straight street.

Now we know we have come to another side of the world: the baked faces of turbaned men walk stoically along the treeless avenues; donkey- burros and men carry stone-heavy long burlap bags, curved over their narrow backs like some outrageous sculpture of a hunchback; they sit on their heels along the jewie, the open ditches sewers loud with their filth and collection, as other vehicles swerve and scream by, driven without apparent rules. A bus swerves between us and another bus, loosely clothed men clinging out the windows like stickers on a bush, inanimate this moment. Women, ghostlike beneath their veils, or blatantly westernized in too high hairdos or raised shoes, appear as infrequently as ice in this broiled culture. Bazaars with their nut-brown owners settle among the rich colors of fruits or small packaged items, and colored soda water. But watching out of dry nervous eyes, we have not yet seen the fullness of this place.

At the Peace Corps complex, a repossessed hotel, full of wooden chairs with fine-rope supports, whitewashed walls, and a roomful of well-wishing Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs), we are greeted, warned, briefed and then as suddenly in line to be vaccinated for polio, tine-tested, shot to ban rabies, doused with malaria prophylactic pills (Aralen), and injected with gamma globulin by a sprite, white-goateed and teasing Dr. Jenkins.

Our group is arbitrarily divided; Tom and I are sent to the Ashraf Hotel, where a bulbous manager-guest with an idiotic fawning smile and a young thin boy with the posture of a coveted dreamer, proudly nod and point as they show us our rooms for the next two nights. We weave down a dark, narrow corridor and push open a door. Before us, resting on a linoleum checkered floor are two straw mattresses beds; their side boards and bottom rest alternatively on cinder blocks and akimbo wooden legs, as the beds lean wryly from the four corners. The mattress in its lumpy shape suggests an upright chaise-lounge; each is covered with two coarse sheets and a rough felt blanket. Against one white-washed wall (abundant with unidentifiable holes the size of potholes and loose cracked plaster, electric wires to engage the straggling bald bulbs in the ceiling to shine on call) stands a yellow-spun wooden dresser with drawers at the bottom, strangely heavy like the air in this room, a plastic table and two metal chairs with black vinyl covers for seats, a limp dusty pair of everyone's universal draperies over a design of glass and punctured screens, and a short door going out to a one and half-foot balcony ledge.

There is not yet time to absorb the senses of this places; we are whisked back to lunch at the PC training quarters, a lunch of iodine-basked tomatoes and cucumbers, nan, tea and boiled water, a pilau of rice, raisins and nuts and some mystery variety of meat; then we wander back to the bleak hotel room, test the water in the lightless bathroom which spits out of the spigot after long gurgling, nod at the spongy dampness around a tub and the putrid smell from the clogged waste just below the flush toilet, then sling our backs over sleeping bags, for a brief rest. We push ourselves awake again. It is 5:00, and seeking company, and wanting to sate our curiosity, rather than feed any appetite, we return to the PC office, where dinner comes large and plentiful, with mellow apricots and the national dish of ground beef and sauce (awshak), rice, carrots and raisins and yogurt, more nan, more tea. We drink unquenchably, our throats tight from the heat and dust, our noses full, even as we easedrop on the TEFL coordinator, our boss-to-be, who gives out details of our training and language instruction to begin the next day, as if dispensing rare, overly-culled mysteries.

It is 7:30 p.m. as we move along the streets of shadows, the darkness unnatural, past bent or staring men motionless along the bazaars, silent, suspended now like garish pus on a broken...