Ground Zero(54)

Reshmina exhaled. It wasn’t a ghost at all. It was just a statue. A statue carved out of white marble, with blank, empty eyes.

“I’m all right,” Reshmina told her mother. “I just … saw something that scared me. I’m all right,” she added in English, for Taz.

The shiny white statue was the top half of a bare-chested man wearing a toga. His face was young, his nose was long and flat, and his stone hair was curly.

Reshmina hadn’t seen anything like it before. Islamic art almost never included human figures, so this statue must have been very old. From the time when the Greeks had invaded and ruled Afghanistan, perhaps? But that was thousands of years ago. Had this statue really been sitting here, hidden away in this cave all that time?

“What’s in there?” Taz asked.

“An old statue,” Reshmina called back to him. “And other things too.”

Reshmina played the flashlight over the artifacts in the room, relics of times long past she knew only from her history lessons. There was a round brass shield with a black winged horse painted on it that must have been from ancient Greece. Next to that was a white pith helmet, like the kind British soldiers had worn when they had invaded Afghanistan two hundred years ago. Along the far wall were a few old English Enfield rifles, and next to that was a stack of curved bows, like the kind the Mongols had once wielded in their conquest of Afghanistan. There were Soviet weapons here too—rusty old land mines and automatic rifles and belts of bullets. Like the statue, everything was covered by a thin gray dust.

Nobody had been in this room in a long, long time.

On the other side of the wall, Taz sang softly.

We’re here because we’re here because

we’re here because we’re here.

We’re here because

we’re here because

we’re here because we’re here.



“What is that song?” Reshmina asked softly. She didn’t know why, but this room made her want to whisper.

“It’s nonsense, really,” said Taz. “Something I heard my sergeant singing years ago, when I came back for my third tour of duty. It comes from World War I. The soldiers in the trenches sang it while they were waiting to be sent charging straight into the enemy machine guns. The tune is something we sing on New Year’s Eve. ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ Do you know it?”

“No,” Reshmina said.

Taz sang another song.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

and auld lang syne.



The lyrics didn’t make any sense to Reshmina, but she didn’t ask. She searched the chamber for a way out while Taz kept talking.

“The soldiers back in World War I, they changed the words of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here’ because they didn’t know why they were fighting,” he said. “You asked me why the US is still here. I think we’re still in Afghanistan because we got in, and we don’t know how to get out. If we stay, it’s bad, and if we leave, it’s bad. There’s no right answer. I think it’s the same as those boys back in World War I. We’re here because we’re here, and we don’t know how to leave.”

Taz was quiet for a moment. Reshmina’s flashlight moved across old military medals and flags and pennants. Little statues of the Buddha. A bust of Lenin, the Russian revolutionary leader. Greek and Persian and English coins. Bits of pottery with colorful drawings and a British pocket watch and a furry Russian cap with a red star on it.

“One of the new guys I knew back at Bagram, a rookie soldier named Garcia,” Taz said. “He was born after we invaded Afghanistan. He stepped on a roadside bomb that hadn’t been there the day before, and now he’s dead. He died fighting a war that started before he was born. You have to be eighteen to join the army. Eighteen! We’re still fighting the same war almost twenty years later, and for what? We’re never going to change this place.”

As Taz’s words sank in, Reshmina realized what this room was. This wasn’t an arsenal, like the cave where she and Pasoon had found the Taliban cache. This was a kind of shrine. A memorial to all the armies who had invaded Afghanistan and conquered it, just like Taz and the Americans, only to learn that they could never rule it.

Reshmina’s flashlight caught some Pashto words painted on the wall, and she took a step back. The paint was very old and the dialect a little strange, but Reshmina could just read the words. It said, We are content with conflict. We are content with fear. We are content with blood. But we will never be content with a master.

“Reshmina, do you see any way out?” her mother called.

There was no other entrance to this little room. But there was a little crack in the wall at the back. Reshmina clicked off her flashlight, and—yes! She saw a tiny sliver of daylight through the crevice.

“This wall,” she called. “It leads outside! If we can just break through it.”

“I’ll come through,” Taz said. “I can chip away at it like I did this one.”

THOOM. THOOM. THOOM.

The cave shook with more blasts from above. Apparently the fighting wasn’t over. Dirt and rock rained down from the ceiling of the cave, right around the little hole to the other room. The statue of the Greek half-man toppled to the ground with a thud, and the shield clattered as it fell.