Free Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou

by mid-afternoon. Lots of time to work. We negotiated a price.
    â€œOkay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
    A few hours later, crammed into the back seat of a tiny hatchback, I stuck my head out the window and stared up at the jagged peaks of the Fan Mountains that towered above us in all directions. They’d make your stomach turn if you looked too long. On our right, a few feet of broken rock extended beyond the edge of the paved road, and then a drop into nothingness. We rounded a corner and faced a truck coming from the opposite direction. It seemed to occupy the entire road and showed little sign of stopping or slowing down. Bachrom downshifted and guided the car closer to the edge of the road. The truck driver blared his horn. I closed my eyes.
    â€œMikhail, a little beer?”
    Ali, a round-faced man with thin, straight hair and a friendly manner, was squeezed beside me in the backseat. He held up a bottle and smiled. His eyes were clear. After several hours on the road, this was the first bottle he had opened. As soon as we started climbing switchbacks into the Fan Mountains, it became clear that the trip to Dushanbe would be an all-day affair. Fortunately, Bachrom, Ali, and Azirov, another passenger, were good company. Ali in particular befriended me immediately. He had been trained as a medical doctor during Soviet times, but Tajikistan’s civil war and its corrupt and dictatorial government meant that he sometimes earned less than five dollars a month. He decided it wouldn’t be right for a foreigner to visit Tajikistan without drinking fermented mare’s milk and insisted that Bachrom detour to find some.
    â€œIs it alcoholic?” I asked.
    â€œA little bit of alcohol,” said Ali. He smiled and rubbed his stomach. Bachrom hissed a whistling stream of air between his teeth and cursed. There were soldiers on the road ahead. They flagged us down. Bachrom wordlessly handed the soldier a small bribe and was waved on. “You will see that money solves everything in this country,” said Ali.
    By now it was getting late in the afternoon. Shepherds were bringing their flocks into the valleys. Some sold honey by the side of the road. Others set up camp and boiled tea over open fires. An old man on a horse picked his way down a mountain path and rode across the road ahead of us. He wore robes and an ancient long-barrelled rifle strapped to his back. A massive shaggy grey dog trotted beside him, lifting its muzzle often to look at his master on the horse. The man stared straight ahead and didn’t quicken his pace to clear the road as Bachrom stopped to wait for him to pass. He reached the other side of road and climbed back into the hills.
    We stopped for dinner at a bare-bones teahouse on the side of a hill. Ali bought yoghurt, mutton, tea, and bread, which we ate with our fingers from communal bowls while sitting on rope beds covered with carpets. Around us were shepherds who could afford to pay for food. Their dogs circled beyond the reach of a thrown stone. Farther down the mountain were visible the fires of shepherds without the means to pay someone else to cook for them. Ali insisted on paying for everything.
    â€œWe want you to know that you have friends here, Misha,” he said, using an affectionate Russian diminutive of Michael. “We are your friends.”
    Ali tried to smile, but his eyes were flat, and he was soon lamenting the state of his country. “We have no democracy here, no freedom. The police are always taking, taking, taking.”
    I tried to guide the conversation toward the attacks in New York and the war in Afghanistan that had just begun in earnest with the start of the American bombing campaign against Taliban targets. Nobody thought the war would affect them. “The Americans will come. The Americans will go,” said Bachrom. “We’ll still have our problems.”
    Ali (left) and Bachrom on the road between Khujand and