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  Trying to eschew the savagery and brutality that had characterized his early years as a secret-police officer, Leo proposed a force that was moderate and restrained. His proposals were dismissed as naive. The police force created by the new Communist regime followed a Stalinist model. It pursued vendettas and arrested indiscriminately. After years of caution and striving to achieve power the President became quickly drunk on terror. Decisions on whether citizens should live or die were presented to him daily, lists of names for him to tick or cross. Ironically, Leo was marginalized by the Party’s success. He was no longer needed. He wrote reports to the Kremlin updating them on the nature of the monster that he had helped create.

  Unchecked by laws, the President desecrated mosques and arrested religious leaders. The anti-religious campaign was so misguided yet pursued so rigorously, Leo speculated that the concept of God must be irritating to any newly formed dictator, one fashioned with god-like powers. The President’s attempts to sculpt Afghanistan into a Communist model overnight were equally misjudged. With Decree Number 8, the President limited the amount of land held to six hectares. The rest was confiscated by the State. The response was uproar among the population. There was a deep cultural attachment between the population and its land. Families lived where they were born: their identity and location were tightly bound together. These sentiments far outweighed any grievances felt by the landless labourers working as tenant farmers. An insurgency took shape while the President tinkered with the things he could control, not his people’s thoughts or beliefs, but their flag, redesigned, removing the minbar, the pulpit in a mosque, as the emblem and replacing it with a five-point star. On the day the new flag was hoisted, the President ordered the colour red to be celebrated. Pigeons were smeared with red ink, residents of Kabul were ordered to apply red paint to the exterior of their apartments, students painted their chairs and desks red. Leo was sent a note asking him if he’d consider painting his bicycle red. He saved the letter, marking it as evidence and including it with the report he wrote that night to the Kremlin describing the catastrophic failure of their satellite regime and predicting the imminent collapse of the governmnt.

  The only choice had been for the Soviet Union to involve itself directly. They invaded at Christmas, 1979, three months ago. With the new influx of soldiers Leo was no longer a solitary Soviet in the city. Russian tanks controlled the streets of Kabul. The former president was assassinated and a new president, Babrak Kamal, was installed, suppliant to Soviet commands. A radio broadcast denounced the excesses of the previous leader and promised to uphold fairness and the rule of law. The new regime was presented as just rather than thuggish, wide-reaching rather than savage and punitive. Yet any goodwill created by the removal of a despised leader was offset by the hatred inspired by the presence of foreign troops, troops the President legitimized by requesting their assistance, as if they had yet to arrive, using the Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighbourliness as the legal framework. It was a political charade, transparently cynical to even the casual observer. In February anti-Soviet demonstrations in Kabul turned into a riot. Three hundred people were killed. Even these deaths were not enough to quell the violence: Kabul’s shops were closed for a week. A fly-over of jets and helicopters was ordered, a show of force, an implicit threat that troublesome districts would be destroyed, levelled to the ground if they did not submit.

  The need for a powerful and effective secret police force grew more pressing. The force was renamed, now known as KhAD, the State Information Agency – the Afghan equivalent of the KGB. False promises were made. The era of senseless savagery was at an end. No more rivers of blood. No more red pigeons. President Kamal designated 13 January 1980 as a day of national mourning for all those killed by the previous president, and the very next day Leo began his classes, engaged as a teacher for the newly recruited Afghan agents.

  With his coarse grey beard and skin aged and cracked by the hot Afghan summers, his Soviet colleagues joked that Special Adviser Leo Demidov had gone native. They’d concede that he didn’t wear a shalwar kameez, traditional local attire, but he didn’t wear a uniform either – he was not one of them. His clothes were a blend of styles, locally knitted shirts, Soviet army-issue trousers, American Ray-Ban sunglasses and plastic flip-flops mass-produced in China. He was one of the few Soviet advisers who spoke fluent Dari, a dialect of Persian, the language of the governing classes in Afghanistan less commonly spoken than Pashto. Dari was the first foreign language Leo had learned and he now spoke it more often than Russian. In his idle hours he read about the culture and history of this land and discovered that the only thing to rival the power of opium as a form of escape was academic study. Excluding Communist dogma, for thirty years Leo had hardly read a book; now he did little else.

  The authorities tolerated Leo’s unorthodox behaviour and eccentricities with a leniency unheard of in the Soviet Union. Rules and regulations that applied back home were quietly ignored here. The concept of discipline was re-defined. Kabul was a frontier town, a revolution perched on a cliff face that every day was in danger of crumbling into anarchy. Many advisers begged to return home, resigning their posts, citing health problems, even cultivating dysentery. They argued that they could never be naturalized in the way that Leo had been. Yet though he was the longest serving Soviet adviser in Kabul, Leo did not consider himself any more Afghani than the day he’d arrived. The claim that he’d gone native was made by scared Soviet soldiers who’d just stepped off the transport plane, many of whom had never been abroad before. None of the Afghans Leo came into contact with thought of him as one of them. He was acquainted with many: he as a friend to none. He was foreign and being foreign was not scored on a graded scale. He was recognized as different from other Soviets. Seemingly without beliefs of any kind, whether nationalistic or spiritual, he did not sing praises for his homeland. While he seemed restless and unsettled, he did not appear to miss the place where he was born. He spoke of no wife. He did not talk about his daughters, nor did he show anyone their photographs. He said nothing about himself. He was not of this land, nor did he belong to the land he’d left behind. In many ways it was easier to understand the more conventional Soviet forces, in uniforms, with ideology and purpose, objectives, strategies and timelines. They represented something, even if it was something to be despised and a force to be defeated. Leo represented nothing. Nihilism was a notion even more alien than Communism itself.

  *

  Leo squeezed his brakes. Up ahead a truck had caught a tyre in a pothole and spilled thousands of plastic bottles of treated drinking water. There was shouting between those involved. The traffic had backed up. Impatient drivers honked their horns. Leo glanced at the rooftops, at the casual spectators – he’d seen enough road accidents in Kabul to tell when something was staged and the set-up for an ambush. There were no Soviet vehicles in the traffic, and unable to see any reason for the obstacle than the perilous state of the roads, he weaved his way through the scattered bottles, ignored by the angry participants, before continuing past the truck. Glancing over his shoulder he saw children filling their ragged shirts with bottles before scuttling away with their loot. He’d passed through the accident as if he didn’t exist.

  Picking up speed, he recited a poem by Sabbah, written many centuries ago: Alone in a desert

  I have lost my way:

  The path is long and I am

  Without help or companion,

  Not knowing which way to go.

  Unlike the voice in the poem, the destination for Leo had always been clear. The torment was that he could not get there. He knew what he wanted to achieve but could not achieve it. With the road empty, mumbling the words of the poem, Leo closed his eyes, taking his hands off the handlebars and stretching them out to the side, snaking his bicycle from side to side.

  Greater Province of Kabul City of Kabul Kabul Police Headquarters Dih Afghanan

  Same Day

  Trainee agent Nara Mir was content to read her b
ooks while waiting for her teacher Comrade Leo Demidov to arrive. He was several hours late, a not unusual occurrence. Unreliable and erratic, he was perhaps the most peculiar man she’d ever met, certainly the most foreign, quite alien to her sensibilities. Despite this, she looked forward to his classes even if it was hard to imagine that he’d once been a member of the world-renowned KGB. At twenty-three, her training was nearly complete and soon she would become an agent supervising ideological education at schools and monitoring the students, assessing them, deciding which were likely to be assets to the regime and should be marked for government jobs and which were likely to prove problematic, perhaps even a threat. She did not consider such work spying: every teacher evaluated their students asd I t of their job, whether they worked for the State intelligence service or not. Excited by the prospect, she was at the forefront of the social changes, presented with an opportunity that hadn’t existed for women just a few years ago.

  Nara’s recruitment was recent, part of the reformation of the Afghan secret police instigated less than three months ago. The previous organization, KAM, had been notorious, a cabal of butchers and sadists who pursued no greater purpose and served no ideology. She would never have worked for them. The dark days of their rule were over. A new president promised an era of restraint and probity. The Soviets were intent on developing her country into a great nation, as great as the USSR itself. Nara wanted to play her part in that development. The neighbouring Uzbek Soviet Socialist republic could boast of a population that was one hundred per cent literate. In Afghanistan only ten per cent of men could read and only two per cent of women. Life expectancy was forty years, compared to seventy in Uzbekistan. Almost half of all children died before reaching the age of five. No one could claim the status quo was worth preserving. In order to achieve these breakthroughs radical changes were needed. Opposition was inevitable. For progress to stand any chance people like her were needed to protect the regime. Vigilance was required against those who sought to cling on to the past. There were regions of Afghanistan that were locked in a way of life that hadn’t changed for thousands of years and consequently there had been and would continue to be dissent against any reforms. That was inevitable. Unfortunately, there would be loss of life. That was regrettable. In the city of Herat last year there had been an uprising against the compulsory education of women. Soviet advisers working in the city had been dragged into the streets and beheaded, their mutilated bodies paraded in a grotesque display. The only solution was a bombing campaign and the deaths of many civilians before the uprising was tamed. Violence was a necessary tool. She was sure these outbursts of bloody resistance were orchestrated by a few key influential traditionalist elements, men who would gladly see her stoned for taking a job, wearing a uniform. By isolating those dissidents many thousands of lives would ultimately be saved and the lives of many millions would be vastly improved.

  She checked her watch. With still no sign of Comrade Demidov, she flicked through the pages in her exercise book, reading over the collection of quotes: Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

  The insurgency was largely illiterate, most fighters could not read or write. Yet they were possessed with a powerful idea – that this was an unjust invasion, that Communism was a foreign abomination and that they would ultimately prevail no matter how many well-equipped soldiers were sent here to die. God was on their side. History was on their side. Destiny was on their side. These ideas were far more dangerous than their outdated weapons. The challenge was how to disavow someone of the belief that victory was inevitable.

  Hearing the door open, she looked up. Her teacher had arrived. With silver hair, greying stubble and skin that was much darker than many of his fellow Soviets, he was unique among the foreigners both in appearance and personality. She’d never seen him wear a uniform. She’d never seen him make much of an effort over his appearance. He seemed perpetually distractd, as though in a permanent daydream, with reality only infrequently demanding his attention. He was handsome, she supposed, although she quickly dismissed the observation as irrelevant. Belatedly he noticed that Nara was the only student in the class. He asked, his voice raspy and dry:

  – Where is everyone?

  She said:

  – The others have gone home.

  He looked around at the empty desks neither annoyed nor amused, his expression blank. She added by way of explanation, nervous that it would sound like a criticism:

  – The class was supposed to start at midday.

  Comrade Demidov checked the clock on the wall. He was three hours late. Turning back to Nara, he asked:

  – You’ve been here for three hours?

  – Yes.

  – How long were you planning to wait?

  – I’m happy to catch up with my work. It’s quieter here than at home.

  He walked towards her, picking up her exercise book, reading through her list of quotes. She explained:

  – I wanted to make sure I understood our party’s wisdoms.

  Every time she referred to the party, Comrade Demidov would look at her carefully, no doubt evaluating her loyalty. He said, reading from her page:

  – Trust but Check.

  She explained, trying to impress him:

  – No matter how much you trust a person, they should always be kept under watch. The point is that as an agent we do not have the luxury of presuming people to be innocent.

  – Do you know who said this?

  Nara nodded, and declared proudly:

  – Comrade Stalin.

  Leo regarded his student speaking Stalin’s name as though he were a wise and adored village elder, friend to all and tyrant to none. Nara’s facial features were remarkably soft. There was hardly a harsh line in her face, round cheekbones, a small round nose and most notably large pale-green eyes. The weakness of the colour made them more striking, rather than less, as though only a few drops of colour had been mixed with water. They gave an impression of intense curiosity and, combined with her earnestness, it was as if she were trying to absorb and understand every detail of the world around her. Her face and demeanour reminded him of a young deer, an animal striving to appear magnificent, the keeper of the forests, but still young and scared. It was odd to associate her so strongly with a creature she’d never seen, and perhaps never even heard of. From appearances alone he would wager that she did not have the personality of an agent. There was a softness and openness that made it difficult to imagine her taking what were commonly referred to as necessary measures. Could she arrest her fellow countrymen? However, he accepted that appearances could be deceptive and he’d been wrong about people far too many times to put faith in such a superficial observation.

  As for her understanding of Stalin’s words, they were abstract notions that she’d memorized in order to fulfil her ambitions. She’d never implemented those words, or seen an entire society changed by them, a population unable to trust anyone, even family, friends and lovers. To her Trust and Check was a Communist aphorism, something to repeat and to be praised for repeating. She was not merely ambitious but idealistic, a Utopian who genuinely believed in a vision of a perfect society, serious about the promise of progress, without a hint of cynicism, or a doubt in her mind. In this regard, she reminded Leo very much of Elena. Perhaps that was why he tolerated her fanatical loyalty to Communism, understanding it within the context of a character that could not live without a dream of some description. Perhaps also he warmed to her because underneath her certainty there was a touch of melancholy, as if her optimism had been painted over a troubled soul. He did not believe she’d stayed in the classroom merely because she wanted to work. She was hiding from something at home. Related to that, her assertiveness did not come naturally: it was practised. Sometimes she caught herself and retreated from a comment or observation, worried she’d gone too far. And just as Raisa had found beauty to be a dangerous asset, so did this young woman who made a
conscious effort to be plain, wearing a uniform that was too large for her, the poor cut hiding her figure. Her hair was always tied back. There was never any suggestion of makeup, never a hint of perfume. Leo had seen her blush at attention, hating to be stared at, perhaps hating her own beauty because of it. Her beauty and her sadness had always struck him at the same time, as if it was impossible to observe one without the other.

  Since there were no other students in the class, Leo was about to send her home when Captain Vashchenko entered. It amused Leo that the captain appeared to consider knocking a weakness and barging into a room an act of strength, a triumph over etiquette. They’d spoken on several occasions since the Christmas invasion and Leo found him to be straightforward to deal with. Ruthlessness was often far simpler to understand than moderation. If presented with a choice, the captain always took the most aggressive approach. He didn’t stand on ceremony. He wasn’t interested in privilege, nor seduced by the comforts available to a military officer. Not particularly tall, he was physically robust, well built; everything about him seemed dense and compact, his body, shoulders, chest and his jaw. To his own surprise, Leo found it hard to dislike him – it would be like disliking a shark, or another lethal predator. There was no outward or obvious psychological darkness, no sadism or perverse relish in violence – he was interested only in expediency. In short, he would do whatever it took and he would never back down.

  The captain impatiently addressed Leo, speaking in Russian:

  – A high-ranking officer from the 40th Army disappeared last night. There was no security breach in the headquarters. No sign of a disturbance. We believe it to be a desertion. A car is missing from the grounds. My men are looking for him. We have checkpoints on all the roads. We have found no sign of him. We need your help. No one knows Kabul as well as you.