Suleiman pressed a red leather cowboy boot to the accelerator of his Ford Mustang and gunned past a bullock cart with two gleaming white stoves and a refrigerator in tow. Appliances on the road to where? Lily blinked and wiped at the sand in her eyes, the perspiration on her brow. It didn’t matter. She knew where she was headed. Despite the desert heat, which had to be approaching a hundred, she rolled up the car window, sank happily into Suleiman’s fleece-lined car seat, and contemplated the horizon. The dusty vanishing point from which sprang the Himalayas. Monster mountains—if you could find them in the haze.

“Suleiman’s the only Afghan I know who can wear cowboy boots and get away with it!” Max shouted over the worn muffler.

Lily looked over her shoulder at Max and winked assent. Max’s arms were draped across the top of the front seat, chin resting against the tops of his hands. Max was repose in motion, indifferent to the breezy heat that was flattening the curls in his red hair.

“There is a saying in Dari, Max!” Suleiman brushed at the beads of sweat trickling from his mustache into the gullies lining his mouth. “The Afghan, he is only half a Muslim. And that half is Muslim only because someone, he is chasing him with a big stick!”

Lily grinned at Suleiman and gazed at his boots, admired the baby blue inlay and tracery stitched up and down the sides. How he acquired such exotica in Peshawar, Pakistan, she couldn’t say, or follow. Suleiman had sources. She left it at that because his descriptions of those sources made her eyes glaze over and fogged her brain the way talk of sports did. His lavish love for, and faulty use of, English pronouns confused her. Forced her to ask questions. And questions gave Suleiman license to free-associate through stories of relationship and commerce so twisted, they left her winded. Disturbed.

At age twenty-nine, Lily Durand preferred to pick and choose her own disturbances. And there was one up ahead. Somewhere in that conflation of mountain and horizon lay the Durand Line. A fine line on old paper. The Afghani border. A not so fine idea that helped destabilize an entire region, according to Suleiman. A stroke—a doodle?—drawn across a map by one Sir Mortimer Durand on one day in 1893 that enlarged India’s image of itself and gave Afghanistan a phantom limb. That she, Lily, might be descended from one with so mighty a pen was, well, it kind of made her brain do a wheelie.

“Suleiman, do you have a cigarette?” Max shouted.

Suleiman had focused on something white and small a mile or so down the road. He patted at the Marlboro box in his kurta shirt pocket and shook his head. “Empty!” Then he secured both of his exceptional hands on the wheel. Big and fleshy. The kind of hands her fingers liked to explore. Not that she’d ever experienced Suleiman carnally. The leap between cultures overwhelmed. With India and Pakistan at one end of his storyline and Afghanistan and Central Asia at the other, Suleiman was a Shahrazad who could easily have spun the drama needed to survive a thousand and one nights, and then some. But Lily could only take so much stimulation. No, it hadn’t been his hands or the size of his person that had first attracted her to him eight years back; rather, it was the giant diamond enthroned on his stout finger. She had spotted it clear across a dark Delhi lounge; as a young jewelry designer she’d been farsighted, had the eyes of a jewel thief.

Suddenly, Suleiman stomped on the brake. Lily braced herself against the dashboard. All at once, they sat facing what appeared to be a white telephone booth. It clung to the roadside, tilted. The bright white sun overhead shone on the sentry who stood in front of the booth, legs spread comfortably, the barrel of his gun fixed on their black Mustang.

“Suleiman,” Lily whispered. “Suleiman, he’s got a gun.” She tried not to move her lips. She didn’t want it to be her lips that brought this man to life.

“That is no gun, Lily,” Max said. “That is an AK-47.”

Suleiman sighed and put the car into park. As he eased himself from the car, he threw the motionless guard a little wave. The sentry made a cough it up gesture with his chin and gun. Suleiman raised his hands helplessly and indicated Lily in the front seat of the car. The sentry gave Lily a sidelong look, but didn’t seem impressed. As Suleiman crossed the thirty feet between car and booth, the two of them might’ve been shouting back and forth in Persian? or Pashto? or Urdu? but Lily could follow only the body language, which alternated between an adamant shake of the sentry’s head and Suleiman’s gesture in her direction. When the sentry grew tired of shaking his head, he retrained his gun on the Mustang. Suleiman looked lost for a moment, then shook his head and slinked back to the car.

“There’s nothing I can do, Lily.” Suleiman rested his hands on the wheel. “He’s mad at America.” Then he released his foot from the brake and eased the car in the opposite direction. “Lily, next time, next trip, I take you through the Khyber Pass. All right? We see the Khyber Pass, the Afghani border—and your Durand Line. Then,” he slowly depressed the accelerator, “I take you into Afghanistan.”

Max groaned and crossed himself, plunked his elbows against the back of Lily’s seat, and started to massage his temples. “Lily, before you get into the nitty-gritty of this next tour here with Suleiman, a little F-Y-I.” Max moved his mouth close to her ear and lowered his voice. “This is a checkpoint. That last checkpoint Suleiman zipped past—without stopping? The one where the fellow was flailing his arms? That was a checkpoint. We are on the edge of a war zone. People stop at checkpoints. They have papers.” He turned to Suleiman. “Suleiman, I thought we were meeting for tea. Why am I here? Why does she have no papers?”

“What to do, Max? Lily, she could not find me in Peshawar. There was no time to get the right permissions. Not to worry.”

“Not to worry? Paperless! And not to worry?!”

Now Lily inhaled deeply, felt the blood rush back to her head. “Whoa!” She turned to Max. There were the beginnings of wrinkles at the corners of his tired eyes. The assignment here at war’s edge was aging him. “Max, I’m sorry. I really am. Whoa. I never planned on this.” She patted her chest. “I’m breathless. Wow! Oh my God. I’ve never been at the wrong end of a gun before—I mean an AK-47.” She leaned back in her seat and laughed. “Max,” Lily looked over her shoulder again, “just think of the photos I’ve promised to send you.”

“You’re not going to get any at this rate.”

“Max, when you return from your stint with the State Department—”

“DEA is Justice.”

“Right. When you return to the States, and gaze up at my photos on your den wall and rub your toes in those plush carpets on your oak floors, you’ll be ever so happy that you helped one American citizen, without time to collect the proper permission through no mistake of her own, do her thing.”

Lily indicated the space around them. “Max, don’t be such a kill-joy. This is hallowed ground. You can tread in the footsteps of Alexander the Great. Just a couple photos and you can go back to your State—I mean Justice Department desk.”

“I don’t have a desk job.”

“I’m sorry. I’m only here a couple days more. Indulge me.”

Suleiman drove until the guard post had disappeared, then slowed the car. “Is this all right with you, Lily? You can take some snaps here, then we’ll head back?” He pulled onto the shoulder of the road.

Lily stepped out of the car and stretched. Wet with perspiration, her yellow kurta peeled away from her skin. She pushed back her dark hair. It felt dusty to the touch. “Come on, Max.” She bent over to adjust the pleated fabric at her ankles. “Take a walk with us.”

“You like wearing those?” Max stepped out of the car.

Lily looked down at her black cotton trousers, designed so that the extra length gathered like bangles around the ankles. She stuck out a foot. “Churidars?”

“They don’t look that comfortable, that’s all.”

“They’re very comfortable, Max. And their design is ancient. Like this place.”

“What are you going to photograph? The Afghan border—it’s at the other end of the Khyber Pass.”

“I’ll use my imagination.” Lily walked around the front of the car and slipped her arm through Suleiman’s.

“Ah, yes.” Max said. “‘Alym tamam halqa-e-dam-e xyal hey . . .’ The entire world is but a loop in the snare of imagination. How does the rest of that couplet by Ghalib go, Suleiman? The one you taught me the other day? Lily’s got the point. Fall not into the deception of existence; / the entire world is but a loop in the snare of imagination.” Max patted the hood of the car. “No, I’ll wait right here, thanks.”

Lily and Suleiman strolled fifteen yards or so. “How ’bout those boulders over there?” Lily scrambled down the slope and sat on the planed top of a boulder, hugged her knees and waited for Suleiman to join her. She nodded at the mountains ahead. “The Khyber Pass runs through those?”

“For thirty, thirty-five miles.” Suleiman sat beside her, crossed his legs, and pulled out the pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket. He emptied a cigarette of its tobacco and rolled a joint with some shavings off a nugget of hashish he also produced from the box. He lit the joint and offered it to Lily.

“So that’s why you told Max you had no cigarettes.” Lily took a drag and passed it back to Suleiman. “The DEA agent wouldn’t approve.”

“No, that’s not why.”

Lily smiled and looked out over the plains at the craggy rock formations, the mountains, to the unseen border beyond. “When were you last in your country?”

“1979.”

“I’m sorry, Suleiman,” Lily said. What to say to the Afghan who’d lost his country? Everything happens for the best? What kind of condolences does one offer for a revolution gone bad and a million dead Afghans?

“So are you a descendent of this man, Durand?” Suleiman asked.

“The connection is so indirect it hardly counts. But it does pique my imagination. My name on a map, an important border like that.” Lily scraped her sandal heel against the gravel at her feet. “Next time I’ll see it. Right? For now,” she removed her Leica from her bag and panned the landscape, “I’ll have to be satisfied with a couple of pictures.” She adjusted the aperture and shutter speed. “God, it’s bright. It’s beautiful. Gotta stop this way down.” She framed a piece of sand-colored moonscape, then pressed the shutter release.

Suleiman tapped her shoulder and pulled out his Marlboros again. He glanced back at Max who lay on the hood of the car, head against the windshield, eyes closed. “Now. Let me show you something you’ll really appreciate.”

“What’s that?” Lily framed another picture and pressed the shutter release. She removed her eye from the viewfinder to look at the plastic packet Suleiman was removing from the Marlboro box. “What’ve you got there, Suleiman?”

“Something that will make a difference.”

“A difference?” Lily set the camera in her lap and took the joint from Suleiman. “For whom?” Lily inhaled. “Ahhh, Suleiman. Jewelry. Is there a lady?”

“No, no.” Suleiman set the packet in her lap. “This is to help win freedom, not lose it.”

“May I?”

“Go ahead.”

Lily stared at the zip-lock packet. “Stones?”

“I’m going to Delhi this week on business. I wish you hadn’t given up your interest in jewelry.” Suleiman shook his head. “What is this anyway? Stills photography?”

Lily removed the tissue from one of the stones. “God.” She unwrapped another. “God Almighty. Suleiman. Are they all as—this size? Who’s buying these? These—emeralds. You’re going to see Anil?”

“No.”

“But who then—who knows stones like Anil?”

“Oh . . . I have a friend.”

“In Connaught Place?”

“No . . . near Turkoman Gate.”

“Who, Suleiman?”

“You won’t know him . . . a Habib and Sons.”

“Habib? Suleiman, I’ve never seen—why not give Anil the business? I don’t get it.”

“These are for a very big cause.”

“Anil deals in big causes.”

Suleiman laughed.

“Real estate, right?” She narrowed her eyes. “I’m serious, Suleiman. What are you doing with these?”

“Lily, my sweet. My habib. We adapt in war.”

“The Russians left Afghanistan! The war’s almost over!”

“Ha!”

“Ha! What?”

“Peoples, they are saying that since the early eighties.”

“‘Peoples.’ Right. ‘Peoples,’ I know they say a lot of things.” Lily studied the emeralds. “Maybe I’ll just have one of those cigarettes.”

Suleiman handed her the pack. “There’s one left.”

“Have they discovered a new mine in Afghanistan? Such deeply colored emeralds . . . they’re rare.”

Just then Lily heard the faint rumble of a vehicle, a speck of green emerging from the hills. She looked behind her. Max had sat up on the hood, alert. Suleiman smiled and indicated the emeralds. Careful not to let the oils from her fingers touch the gems, Lily rewrapped and placed them in the packet.

The lorry slowed. Finally it braked about twenty yards away. Medallions were suspended from, and ran the length of, its front bumper.

“Are we all right, Suleiman? Do you think it’s one of those fellows from the checkpoint?”

Suleiman squinted. “They’re just curious. Can’t make out if I know . . .”

Lily stuffed the packet of emeralds back into the Marlboro box. Just then a slender man stepped down from the cab, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a broad turban on his head. He planted himself in front of the lorry, at the center of his stamped metal galaxy.

“Lily, I’ll be back in a minute,” Suleiman said. He held her gaze for a moment, then giggled with trepidation.

“What?” Lily tried to make out the man’s features. “Do you know . . . ?”

But Suleiman was already struggling up the slope. The hashish hadn’t made it any easier for him. He had headed down the road about twenty feet when Max called quietly to her. Max had slid to his feet. He motioned for her to return to the car.

Now Suleiman called to her. “Go back to the car, Lily!” Lily turned to Suleiman. She was starting to feel dizzy. “Go back!” he called again.

“Who is it, Suleiman?” Lily cried. The hashish made it hard to focus. “What’s going on?” But he didn’t answer. He just continued down the road. Finally, he waved a friendly hand at the turbaned stranger. The man just shifted his weight in response.

“Lily!” Max shouted. Lily swung around and waved her hand to acknowledge him. She nodded as vigorously as her high would allow. She dropped the Marlboro box into her bag and yanked the Leica from her neck.

She looked up as Suleiman reached the stranger. With one graceful maneuver, the man trained his rifle on Suleiman. Next, he took a step forward. He stroked Suleiman’s paunch with the tip of the barrel, then poked at it, as if to test its consistency. “What?” Lily said and rose to her feet. The stranger then flipped his rifle around like a baton and drove the butt end into Suleiman’s belly. Lily watched Suleiman crumble to the ground. “Suleiman?”

“Lily!”

She heard Max’s stern voice—from behind? She turned around. Started toward him. Despite the heat, she was shivering. “Max?”

Max slid down the slope on his rear.

“Do you think it’s the man from that checkpoint? The one with the gun?”

“No, Lily.”

She turned back to watch Suleiman. “Max, he’s hurting Suleiman—”

Max grabbed her by the wrist. “Lily, come back to the car. His business is with Suleiman. Not us.”

“But Suleiman needs our help!”

Max tightened his hold. “Lily, I’m not armed. Come back to the car. We can’t do anything.”

“No!” Lily pulled in the opposite direction. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the stranger place a boot on Suleiman’s chest.

“No!” she cried. Max pulled her towards him. Lily slipped in the loose gravel and lost her grip on the camera that banged against, then slid down the side of the boulder.

“Your passport!” Max let go of her arm long enough to grab her bag from its perch on the boulder and to scoop up her camera. “Help me, Lily!” He started to drag her, half walking, half crawling, towards the road. Just as they reached the slope, a shot rang out.

Lily turned to look. “Suleiman!?”

Suleiman lay on the road, still. The stranger removed his boot from Suleiman’s chest.

Lily sank to her knees. She turned to Max. The sun overhead obscured his features. And the words—what was he saying? She couldn’t follow the words his mouth was forming. Tried to form? She attempted to crawl, but the gravel scraped her knees. Burned. Had torn the knees of her churidars. Now Max yanked her arm. Now she could hear his words clearly. “Help me, Lily! Get up and walk! Help us, Lily!”

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© 2003 Wendelin Johnson

For further reading on the history of the Durand Line and/or information related to the history of the region, see: "Taliban" by Ahmed Rashid, "Out of Afghanistan" by Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, "The Fragmentation of Afghanistan" by Barnett R. Rubin.