The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

Chapter 50

I once met a kalachakra by the name of Fidel Gussman. It was 1973; I was in Afghanistan to see the great Buddhas before the Taliban came to power and destroyed them. I was travelling as a New Zealand national, one of the easier passports to move about with, and trying to brush up my Pashto in the process. I was fifty-five years old and had spent a good deal of my life hunting down messages left in stone by previous members of the Cronus Club. It was a running game–a joke left from AD 45 for future Club members which, if I could disinter, I would add my name to before burying in a new place, leaving behind a new set of suitably cryptic clues for future generations to solve–a sort of international time capsule for the overly bored. If feeling generous, participants also buried hidden treasures of a non-biodegradable kind. By far the most magnanimous contribution to the hunt had been a hitherto lost work of Leonardo da Vinci buried by a kalachakra from Renaissance Italy in a sealed jug of wine beneath a shrine to Santa Angelica in the highest part of the Alps. The helpful clues left behind had almost entirely been in the form of lewd rhymes, making the eventual discovery of the bequeathed artefact something of a treat. These games, more than anything else, took me round the world, and it was while visiting the Buddhas of Afghanistan that Fidel Gussman came calling.

You could see him approach from a mile off–a great man with a swollen neck riding on the roof of one of a convoy of trucks which kicked up yellow dust higher than their bobbing radio aerials. The people of the village scattered when he came into town, fearing bandits, and indeed bandits are precisely what they looked like. I made no attempt to hide–a fair-skinned New Zealander in the middle of Afghanistan doesn’t have many places to go to ground–and stared down this European-faced arrival and his multinational convoy of AK-toting men as a tourist might stare at an obstructive police officer.

“Hey, you!” he called in heavily inflected Urdu, gesturing me over to his truck. If it had been any colour other than the summer soil before, now there was no way to tell. The engine ticked, unable to cool in the blasting heat, and already pans were coming out and being laid on the bonnets, ready to fry the mid-morning breakfast–no need for flames. I approached, quietly counting up the weapons and making an assessment of the type of men who’d so rudely disrupted my sightseeing. Mercenaries and thieves, I decided, the only sign of uniform being a red bandanna that each wore somewhere about their person. The man who’d called to me was clearly their leader, a great smiling face above a stubbly beard.

“You’re not from around here–you CIA?” he demanded.

“I’m not CIA,” I replied wearily. “Just here to see the Buddhas.”

“What Buddhas?”

“The Buddhas of Bamiyan?” I suggested, doing my best not to let my contempt of this bandit’s ignorance show. “Carved into the mountainside itself?”

“Hell yeah,” mused the man on the truck. “I’ve seen them. You’re right to go now–twenty years from now they won’t even be standing!”

I stepped back, surprised, and had another look at this ragged, smelling, dust-covered man. He grinned, touched his hand to his forelock and said, “Well, nice to meet you, even if you aren’t CIA.”

He hopped down from the truck and began to head away.

I called out, surprised at myself for even doing it, “Tiananmen Square.”

He stopped, then swung round on the spot, toe pointing up and ankle digging into the dirt as he did, like a dancer. Still grinning his easy grin, he swaggered back towards me, stopping so close I could feel the stickiness coming off his body. “Hell,” he said at last. “You don’t look much like a Chinese spy neither.”

“You don’t look like an Afghan warlord,” I pointed out.

“Well, that’s because I’m only passing through this place on the way to somewhere else.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

“Wherever there’s action. We’re men of war, see–that’s what we do and we do it well–and there’s no shame in that because it’ll happen without us anyway, but with us–” his grin widened “–maybe it’ll happen that little bit faster. But what’s a nice old gentleman like you doing talking about Chinese geography, hey?”

“Nothing,” I replied with a shrug. “The word just popped into my head. Like Chernobyl–just words.”

Fidel’s eyebrows flickered, though his grin remained fixed. Then he gave a great chuckle, slapped me so hard on the shoulder that I nearly lost my footing, stepped back a little to admire his handiwork, and finally roared out loud. “Jesus, Joseph and the Holy Mary,” he blurted. “Michael fucking Jackson to you too.”

We ate together. The family whose house we ate in were told in no uncertain terms that they were going to receive guests, but Fidel’s men at least supplied most of their own bread and threw bottle tops at the kids, who seemed excited enough to collect these trinkets. The mother stood in the door, watching us through the blue veil of her burka, daring us to break a single one of her pots.

“I’m born in the 1940s,” explained Fidel, tearing off hunks of roast lamb from the bone with an impressive set of well-worn teeth, “which is shit, because I miss a lot of the good stuff. I’m usually OK to go do the Bay of Pigs though, and obviously–hell–obviously I do Vietnam. I spend a lot of time on the conflicts in Africa too but, you know, so much of that is just about scaring the natives and I’m like, where’s the craft in that? Give me proper war to fight, damn it; I’m not some psychopath who likes seeing infants cry! Iran and Iraq are starting to get good round this time, though Iran’s no fun once the shah’s gone, I can tell you that. Kuwait’s a good ’un, and I’ve tried the Balkan shit too, though again that’s all so much ‘Kill the civilian, kill the civilian, run from the tank!’ and I’m like, Jesus guys, I’m a fucking professional, do you have to give me this shit?”

“Are you a soldier most of your lives?” I asked.

He tore off another strip of meat. “Yeah. My dad’s a soldier, which is where I guess I got it from–spend a lot of kiddy years growing up on Okinawa and, my God, the people there, they have something, I mean like, something iron inside, you gotta see it. I’m paid up with the Club,” he added, an afterthought needing clarification, “but all that sitting around, all that sex and the politics? Jesus, the politics, it’s all so-and-so-said-this-three-hundred-years-ago and so-and-so-slept-with-such-and-such-but-then-so-and-so-died-and-got-really-jealous, and I just can’t be having that. I mean, I dunno, maybe it’s the Club I grew up with–do you find it like that?”

“I don’t spend much time with the Club,” I admitted, embarrassed. “I get easily distracted.”

“Hey, for immortals, Club guys are really inconsistent? You know they killed me with an overdose once? I was like, Jesus guys, I’m only thirty-three and now I’ve gotta go through potty training again? What the fuck?”

“I tend to self-medicate in my later years,” I admitted. “Mid-sixties, early seventies, I always get the same disease…”

“Fucking tell me about it,” he groaned. “Small-cell lung cancer, aged sixty-seven, bham! You know, I’ve tried smoking, I’ve tried not smoking. I’ve tried clean living, and every time I get the same fucking disease. I asked a medic once why that should be, and you know what she said? ‘Hey, stuff just happens.’ I mean, fuck me.”

“So,” I asked carefully, deciding not to elaborate on my own medical career, “why war?”

He eyed me beadily over the rapidly appearing whiteness of the lamb bone. “You done much fighting? You look like you might have been old enough to do a bit of World War Two, no offence to you.”

“I’ve seen a few wars,” I admitted with a shrug, “but I tend to steer clear. Too unpredictable.”

“Fuck, man, that’s the whole fucking point! You’re born knowing everything that’s gonna happen in your lifetime, every fucking bit of it, and you’re like ‘Let’s just watch’? Screw that–let’s get out there, let’s live a little, get surprised! I’ve been shot–” he bristled with pride “–seventy-four times, but only nineteen of those bullets were fatal. I also been blown up by a hand grenade and stood on a mine, and this one time, back when we were fighting the Vietcong, I got stabbed to death with a sharpened bamboo stick, can you fucking believe it? We were clearing this patch of jungle which didn’t even have a fucking name, and the place stank cos the air-force boys, they’d fried the land to the left and the land to the right–funnelling the guerrillas into a killing zone, they called it–and Jesus, we’d done some killing, and I’m feeling on top of the world, I mean like, knowing every second could be my last, it’s this buzz, this amazing buzz. And I don’t even hear him, I don’t even see this guy; he’s just there, coming out of the ground, and I get a shot off which takes out his stomach and he’s gonna bleed to death, but that doesn’t even slow him down–he’s on me, bham, bham! Guy can’t have been more than sixteen years old and I thought, hell yeah, you’re a sight worth seeing.”

He threw the chewed bone out of the door for a three-legged dog to hobble over and gnaw on. Wiping his hands on his shirt, he grinned at me and said, “You Cronus Club boys, you’re all so scared of doing something different. Problem is, you’ve gone soft. You’ve got used to the comfy life, and the great thing about the comfy life is no one who has it is ever gonna risk rocking the boat. You should learn to live a little, rough it out–I’m telling you, there’s no greater high.”

“Do you think you’ve ever made a difference to the course of linear events?” I enquired. “Have you, personally, ever affected the outcome of a war?”

“Fuck no!” He chuckled. “We’re just fucking soldiers. We kill some guys, they kill our guys, we kill their guys back–none of it fucking means anything, you know? Just numbers on a page, and only when the numbers get big enough do the fat cats who decide this shit sit down and and go, ‘Wow, let’s make the decisions we were always gonna have to make anyway.’ I’m no threat to temporal events, partner–I’m just the fire in the stove. And you know the best bit?” He beamed, climbing to his feet, tossing a fistful of bunched-up notes into the corner of the hut, like a master throwing scraps to a pet. “None of it fucking matters. Not one bullet, not one drop of blood. None of it makes any fucking difference at all.”

He made to go, then paused in the doorway, grinning, his face half in the shade of the hut, half in the blinding white light of day. “Hey, Harry, you ever get bored of this archaeology shit, or whatever it is you do, come find me on the thin red line.”

“Good luck to you, Fidel,” I replied.

He grinned and stepped into the light.