Read Online Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou - Free Book Online Page B

while there, and I needed a translator. Along the way I passed an Uzbek man wearing a traditional pillbox hat who was preparing street food in his market stall. He was kneading a ball of dough and then stretching it into strands between his fingers, folding them over and stretching them again. Ever longer and ever thinner. I recognized what he was making and smiled.
    â€œBrother,” I said to him in broken Russian. “Lagman?”
    He nodded. I ordered a bowl. For some reason the familiar dish made me deliriously happy. I called Janyce on the satellite phone and left a rambling message on her answering machine.
    The day went downhill after that. I did manage to find a student who spoke good English and was happy to work for the day as a translator. But trying to probe below the surface to find out what people really thought proved to be near impossible. Uzbekistan was a police state and politics was a potentially dangerous topic of discussion. “They’re afraid to say anything critical,” my translator told me after our sixth or seventh interview with someone who said only that she wanted peace and trusted her president. I went back to my hotel and dictated a cliché-ridden story to the desk back in Ottawa. I thought I could save the Citizen some money by using the hotel phone rather than my satellite one, but the hotel manager charged me $100. I wasn’t yet in Afghanistan, and already I was worrying about running out of cash. I lay on my bed and waited for the cab driver to come back and take me to the border in the morning.
    He arrived at dawn as I stood outside the hotel’s front doors. The light was grey. A man was pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with shovels along the sidewalk. He looked far too old and thin to lift it. He padded by quickly in his flip-flop sandals.
    â€œOkay?” the driver asked.
    I threw my bag into the trunk. “Okay. Let’s go.”
    We left the city before any traffic appeared on the roads. Soon Tashkent disappeared behind us. The sun rose above the horizon. On either side of the highway stretched ocean-flat cotton fields, another leftover of Stalin’s forced collectivization. When we reached the border with Tajikistan, an embarrassed-looking teenaged soldier with an AK-47 demanded a five-dollar bribe.
    â€œWhat are you doing in Khujand?”
    The man who approached me in the small airport in Tajikistan’s northernmost major city was thin with high cheekbones and a thick toothbrush moustache. He wore a fake leather jacket and held a smouldering stub of a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, which he neither brought to his lips nor discarded. I was pacing back and forth in front of my backpack, which I had tossed on the floor, periodically stopping to stare at the departure schedule. No flights were leaving for Dushanbe until late that evening.
    At the time, I was obsessed with filing stories back to Ottawa as frequently as possible. I had convinced myself that if a day went by in which I didn’t send the newspaper a story, Scott might decide the gamble of sending me to Central Asia had failed and I’d be called back home to account for ruining his reputation. Waiting for eight hours in a smoky airport meant a wasted day and a newspaper edition without my byline in it.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” the man asked again.
    â€œIt’s a long story,” I said. “I’m trying to leave. Afghanistan. Well, Dushanbe first.”
    â€œWait here.”
    I knew the man was a cab driver, or at least knew people with access to cars. And sure enough he returned with news that a friend of his, Bachrom, was willing to drive me to Dushanbe. I looked at the very basic map in my Lonely Planet and calculated that Dushanbe was two or three hundred kilometres away. The cartographer had drawn some rough mountains between Khujand and Dushanbe, but I didn’t pay them much notice. Four, maybe five hours, I thought. I’ll be there