The Punishment of Virtue

by Sarah Chayes

  Afterward, the elders stayed seated in the grass at the end of the garden. Only Akrem came back to join me, and his right-hand man, Shafiullah.

  I’d had almost no interaction with this young cousin of Akrem’s over the years—it was he who had delivered the letter ordering me to leave my house in the graveyard, and I had avoided him ever after. But suddenly he was coming to life for me; our shared affection for Akrem was beginning to forge a kinship. In Kabul I had begged Shafiullah to make him get some exercise.

  “So, Sarah,” Akrem asked. “What’s happening in Kandahar?”

  “Comandan Saab, I keep telling you. I’m out of politics.”

  Akrem smiled.

  We started discussing the assassination, two days before, of a local mullah, or religious leader. This was a major event. The man had been the head of a provincial council of mullahs, and was an outspoken supporter of the current regime. A distinguished religious scholar, he had debunked the resurgent Taliban’s interpretation of Islam in his sermons, staying the course with the fundamentalists, verse for holy verse.

  This man had been murdered in downtown Kandahar, on the guarded street that runs between the old governor’s palace and the sacred mosque with the relic of the prophet Muhammad. In broad daylight, two men on a motorcycle had ridden up to him, shot him dead, and ridden away.

  “What Taliban?” Shafiullah was saying. “The Taliban wouldn’t dare!”

  “How wouldn’t they dare?” I countered. “It doesn’t exactly take daring. There’s no security in this town. There are no searches. I could drive around with a gun in my car; no one would know the difference.”

  “Agha!” Asma appeared, Akrem’s daughter: a little girl now, sparks for eyes framed by a pageboy cut, earrings in her ears. Leaning against his knee, she stood on tiptoes and peered over the edge of the table, reached for a plate of apricots, and then carried it carefully away in two hands.

  “His family’s been saying that if it was the Taliban, why didn’t they kill him in Arghandab or in Malajat, one of those places where they have power? He went to those places every day. Why kill him in the middle of town?”

  “But Shafiullah, that’s the whole point! They want to make a splash. And what could make more of a splash than nailing him in broad daylight, right in front of his office.”

  I saw what Shafiullah was driving at, though.

  “That street is barred. There are soldiers on the gate. There are fifteen soldiers posted at the entrance to the governor’s palace, right next door to the building he was leaving. You’re telling me a gun goes off—even if no one is killed—a gun goes off and not one of those soldiers steps out into the street to see what’s going on?”

  What Shafiullah was saying, and I agreed, was that “the Taliban,” as such, as an autonomous movement, did not exist. The “Taliban” were creatures of the Pakistani authorities, and if they had committed murder in Kandahar, they had done so with the connivance of other creatures of the Pakistani authorities who held positions in provincial government.

  “Pakistan’s strategy,” Akrem remarked, “is always the same: to make haste slowly, to take one step forward and ten steps back.”

  He was right; the proof was before us. Here was the murder of a mullah—and not just any mullah, but the top religious leader of the province, in the middle of town, at one o’clock in the afternoon. This was much worse than what had been going on back in the summer of 2003, when I had been so stricken with foreboding. Mullahs had been killed then too, but little-known ones, out in the districts. This assassination represented a quantum leap. Just as Akrem’s mole had predicted before the ambush of that ICRC engineer, two years earlier, the killings had started in the districts; they had slowly circled Kandahar. Now this one had happened right in the heart of town. And we were discussing it calmly. We had been inured. The violence had been carefully dosed, so we needed it in ever-higher levels to register the shock.

  “You’re right, Comandan Saab,” I said. “Do you remember when you infiltrated that training camp two years ago? They were teaching the targeted assassination of public figures, you remember? That’s just what you’re saying. They were training it back then, and now it’s started.”

  “Woh…” Akrem assented, in an intake of breath. “Now it’s started.”

  But, my God, I wasn’t thinking of him. He was in Kabul. He was chief of the Kabul police. We were impregnable in our garden.

  The evening call to prayer threaded the eye of our conversation. Akrem stood up. Our host insisted we stay for dinner. “No, no, we’re going home,” replied Akrem. He called to his soldiers to “throw those kids in the car.” The shouts of his children had edged into the register that indicates the end of the day.

  I think he wanted me to come with him. This was my difficulty with his elegant manners. I always felt that each of us was silently trying to work out what the other wanted, so we could comply. I think he assumed I would join him at his house. But I was imagining his homecoming that day: he had scarcely seen his family in a year and a half. I wanted to give him space. I stuck out my hand. Abruptly, formally, he shook it.

  “I’ll call you,” I said.

  And I followed his convoy out the gate. He turned left; I turned right.

  CHAPTER 31

  INVESTIGATION

  JUNE 2005

  I WAS UP to my wrists in newly batched soap, mixed from our own sweet almond oil and another—vivid, dark green, pungent with fragrance—that we had extracted with our hand-crank press from anise seeds. The putty-like soap was a pale lime color and smelled like heaven as I wrestled it into some metal sugar bowls we were using for molds. I had tried to tune into the BBC, but I couldn’t pick up the signal. In a huge concession, I had handed my little shortwave radio over to Karim, so he could put on some of that vile music he was addicted to—one thing in Kandahar I absolutely detested. Karim twiddled the dial, locked on to the local news.

  “…an explosion…” came the announcer’s voice, and then a name: “Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal.” That’s all I heard. After a stunned second, Karim started a commentary, keeping up for me. It was a suicide bombing, in a mosque in the bazaar. Akrem was killed or wounded, there was no confirmation yet. At least nineteen people were dead.

  It felt as though my entire being flew to my eyes as they met and held Karim’s. As though, if we could only keep staring at each other, we could make it not be true.

  We leaped for the truck. With a competence I had kept under wraps till then, I raced it through the streets, slowing for each traffic bump, turning at the last instant to flow over it at the perfect angle, speeding to the next. At the hospital gates I pushed the truck through a clamoring crowd. The soldiers let me by. There were about four U.S. Humvees in the circular drive. I rushed up to an officer. “Do you know where the chief is?”

  Impassive, without a glance, the American answered, “No.”

  I waded through another crowd to enter a building. A doctor asked, “Who are you looking for?”

  “Comandan Saab.”

  The doctor looked at me. “Comandan Saab’s not here. He’s home.”

  I knew what this meant. I had known all along. This whole trip to the hospital was just pantomime. But I kept it up. I stared into the doctor’s eyes, as though my exaggerated surprise could ward it off. The doctor turned away, busy with other distraught people. There was nothing he could do for me.

  A colleague of Akrem’s was outside; he had on a beautifully embroidered tunic, pale blue. He was on his way to the house too; we could drive together. He just needed to get a stretcher.

  “One of those stretchers they put dead people on,” Karim defined a word I had never heard. I didn’t listen to him. I followed the man’s truck around the side of the hospital to the place, Karim explained, where people pick up the bodies of their dead. It was a refrigerated cargo container. Impatient, I went inside, hoping to wrest whatever this stretcher was from someone’s hands. There were bits and pieces of people strewn around the
floor. But no blood, somehow. I remember two legs, stacked against a wall like firewood. I was less horrified than I dimly thought I should be. I didn’t have time. I had to get to Akrem’s house—as though there were any reason to hurry anymore.

  I left, without Akrem’s colleague. I found my way out of the hospital, and sped through town and across the canal.

  The radio had lied. There was confirmation. Right here. It was in everyone’s faces. It was under his blanket. “There he is, your friend!” Akrem’s brother cried, pulling it back.

  Then came the vigil on the verandah, and my time in the black van, next to Akrem’s lonely body. Mullah Naqib arrived. I had asked people earlier where he was. “In Arghandab,” someone had said. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Shouldn’t we send someone?” I had asked.

  I gripped the grizzled commander’s hand as he strode into the schoolyard. “How are you, fine?” he said, mechanically, not seeing me. His eyes were filled with tears. They were running down his face. “But how is it possible? I didn’t even know he was here!” I followed Mullah Naqib to the verandah and rejoined the circle on the mattresses. “If I had known he was here, we would have gone to the mosque together!”

  The event at the mosque had been a prayer service, a memorial for the very mullah Akrem and I had been talking about the previous night. He was such an important figure that there were two days of services, one at the main mosque that enshrined the Prophet’s shroud, and a second that morning, at the old mud-plaster mosque I loved, in the bazaar, which was the mullah’s own.

  “I couldn’t make it yesterday, so I went today,” Mullah Naqib was saying. Then he and the bodyguards plunged into the chronology.

  “I think you left just as we were arriving,” said the black-haired soldier who had been driving Akrem’s car. “You were in your white Land Cruiser, right?”

  “Yes! How did I miss you? I didn’t even recognize your car. I went straight on to Arghandab. If I’d known Comandan Saab was in town, I would have waited and gone to the mosque with you.”

  Mullah Naqib passed over in silence what that would have meant for him. Twenty-two people lay dead right now.

  “And, you know, there’s something else,” he pursued. “When I entered that mosque, I tripped on something. By God, I remember; I said it out loud: ‘Why didn’t they sweep the ground properly before laying down the carpet?’”

  Our tuning forks were ringing out a note. This just did not feel like a suicide bombing.

  At the very least, it was not possible to blame it on an Arab. I had seen the remains. How could anyone determine the nationality of one of those darkened hunks of meat in the container at the hospital? And yet, Gul Agha had proclaimed it, within an hour of the explosion. It was a suicide bombing. An Arab had done it. There were documents to prove it.

  Documents?

  I spoke up. “Look, guys. The governor is never going to investigate this crime. And neither is the deputy chief of police”—a notorious ISI man. “No way they are going to look into this properly.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “But we’re the police too, right? Why don’t we do our own investigation?”

  I was surprised at how much urging it took to rouse them. In their place, with what I presumed was their training, I would have been all over it. But they, suddenly, seemed to feel helpless.

  I could see that I was going to plunge into things again, into the politics and the hypocrisy. There was no choice. It was the least I could do for Akrem.

  After a few moments we stood up and piled into his forest-green Land Cruiser. It was a distraction; it made the bodyguards feel useful, almost as though they were out on a mission again on Akrem’s orders. Following in a separate car was an officer from one of the Kabul precincts, the head of criminal investigations. He was very competent, Akrem’s friend the businessman assured me. He had a master’s degree.

  But something about the man made me uncomfortable. “Is he really a friend?” I asked, on our way to the mosque.

  “Sarah,” replied Shafiullah, “no one is a friend. You’ll see. When you don’t have power, no one is your friend.”

  I was not all there; I know it now. Beyond going to the mosque, I’m not sure what I had in mind. But one thing did pierce my haze when we arrived. There was absolutely nothing there. No crime scene tape, no one guarding the site. No investigators taking pictures or picking up objects, no debris, no blood, no nothing. Only, at the back of the courtyard above our heads, by the rooms where the taliban lived—the dead mullah’s religious students—two municipal employees on the balconies, sweeping up the broken glass. I can’t forget the sound.

  That was the only sign that something had happened here. I turned about, feeling dizzy.

  We were not actually in the mosque; we were inside the compound wall, facing the mosque building some fifteen yards away. There was a small sepulcher beside us, with a tree, and a single course of bricks leading straight ahead, toward the steps to the mosque.

  “But where was the bomb?” I asked out loud.

  “Over there.” A mosque employee, ugly, like Quasimodo, pointed to a place just left of the course of bricks, outside the mosque proper.

  It was a patch of dirt, maybe three feet by a foot and a half, studded with some stones, sort of like the road to Kabul before it was paved.

  “Was this concrete before, like the rest of the courtyard?” I asked Quasimodo.

  “Yes,” he answered. “No. Uh…there was some construction work. The trucks broke the cement…” His voice trailed off.

  I was still disoriented. None of this added up. I envied Shafiullah, somehow managing to focus, poking around by the sepulcher and along the compound walls. He came over and showed me something. A ball bearing, a quarter inch in diameter or a little less. There were lots of them. I took it. To be doing something, I walked over to the compound wall, and fitted it into one of the holes that pocked its surface. The investigations officer joined me. “You see? You see how high the splash is? It had to be a suicide bomb.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  I zipped the little ball bearing into my contact lens case and put it in my shoulder bag. We had to go. We were supposed to leave for Khakrez at four.

  But a second point was penetrating my consciousness by then. This thing could not have been done by a person in military uniform bending down before Akrem, the way the radio kept repeating. I had seen Akrem’s face. It was clean, peaceful, stern. Nothing had hit him from the front.

  I did not understand what had happened that morning, but I did know one thing. The governor was lying. Within an hour of the explosion, he had come out with a lie, prefabricated, complete with details plausible enough for the media to pass them along. And just in case anyone might want to test the official story, the scene of the crime had been sanitized. Something was going on.

  Two days later, when we were all back from Akrem’s burial, Shafiullah wordlessly set about gathering strands of evidence. One night, he came to my house with the bodyguards in tow, including one I didn’t know, Landau. He was the round-faced man with the drooping mustache and the bandoliers who had been injured on Akrem’s midnight drive to Kabul nearly two years before. He looked so much like a B-movie Mexican that I caught myself asking: “Do you speak Pashtu?”

  “Of course,” he answered.

  Landau’s legs were injured. He pulled up his baggy trousers to show me. From the tops of his feet, inside one leg and outside the other, ending where a bit of a bandage was taped to the bottom of his ribcage, were small scabs that matched those ball bearings.

  So. The splash wasn’t so high after all. It had started at ground level, at the tops of Landau’s feet.

  “Where were you standing?” I asked him. I flipped back the cover of my notebook and sketched a map of the compound. It was the first of dozens I would draw over the next two weeks. “Here’s the wall, and here’s the gate to the compound. Here’s that little grave; here’s the line of bricks. Whe
re were you?”

  When Landau’s dots on my map got too impressionistic, I made him stand up: “OK. Let’s say the edge of this rug is the little course of bricks. You’re Comandan Saab; I’m Mir Wais. Which direction was Mir Wais facing?”

  Mir Wais was another bodyguard. He had been killed.

  The bomb, Landau was telling me, exploded after Akrem had said his prayers in the mosque and exited the building proper. The courtyard in front, starting at the course of bricks, was covered in carpeting; there was a tent strung overhead. On the way in, Akrem had left his shoes by the bricks, stepping barefoot onto the carpet and signaling to a couple of bodyguards to remain behind to watch his back. When he emerged from the mosque, Landau was on post at the line of bricks, facing him. He saw it all. He saw Mir Wais approach Akrem with his leather slippers and lay them down—that accounted for the man in uniform. He saw Akrem step into the right shoe, raise his left foot to step into the other, his left arm stretched slightly backward for balance. And then he saw the explosion. “Behind him,” Landau emphasized. And that was all he saw. The air was choked with dirt and smoke; his ears were clanging. He was upside down.

  “Who was near Comandan Saab?” I pressed him.

  “No one. Just us, just the bodyguards and family.”

  This was starting to make sense. But the image still wasn’t precise enough. We went back to the mosque next day and walked it.

  “So Comandan Saab was here.” I was insisting on this, dragging them through it again, obsessively. “Where was Mir Wais? Oh, here, to his right, facing left.” Mir Wais’s face had been blown off. “And where was his nephew?” The son of Akrem’s brother, our host at Khakrez, one of the other two biers at the burial. Now I was understanding Akrem’s brother’s confusion, that morning on the stony Khakrez hillside. He had been torn between two graves. “Behind and to the left?” I remembered the boy’s wrapped body, face enveloped in a bloody white sack, tied off at the neck.