The Farther I Go Out

The farther I go out into these villages, the less patience I have for the selective art of conversation, & pity unto those on the receiving end; I want to describe everything, everything, but even the sounds alone would take pages: the muezzin's call, for the day's final prayer, the snap of wood succumbing to fire in the iron stove, from which the smell of baking bread arises both delicious and terrifying in its sameness to yesterday and the day before, the distant low of sheep, the beep of a text message alert downstairs, and under all of these and more sounds the sound of water just below my window, coursing through the canal that traverses the compound, that traverses the village, in a plumbing system almost as old as the river that feeds it with water drawn from the Pamirs that retain their caps of snow even in summer. But of course the sounds are just sounds and not the story, so for example the canal water which seems so gentle and –to me –bucolic, is, for the team of bearded Kabul engineers downstairs, the enemy, the evil, the polluted cryptosporidium dragon who for decades of war enforced an iron dominion over the bowels and livers of his subjects, these villagers. And at night the canal stops and that's another story, where the water goes, turning the micro-hydroelectric plant that gives just enough electricity for every villager to watch their favorite Indian soap opera, and maybe charge their cell phone, & after these and more stories of the sounds one would have to tell the sights, harder to evoke because none of them, save the carved rock face of the mountain that fills my window, seem any of them other than ordinary. And even a mountain is nothing so fantastic. I wish I could explain then why it is that the foreign feels familiar and the familiar, foreign, for instance, here is my room: a ceiling of checkered orange and blue squares, over which my eyes play a kind of ceaseless billiards, walls of concrete painted scholastic blue, a corner fan that turns on and off with the whims of electricity, a hard wood bed, which serves as my desk, while I sleep on the cushion on the floor; a bouquet of paper flowers pushed into a blue vase. Outside, more of the foreign sameness: the bazaar, really a long line of aluminum shipping containers that serve as shops, barely big enough for the shopkeeper and his wares which are the same wares in every bazaar and the faces – whether suspicious or stupid or crafty or woeful or wondering or wise or blank – always the same faces.