by Rory Stewart
THESE BOOTS
Half an hour later, Qasim suggested I go with him to see the bazaar. He wanted to buy some boots. I followed him down the street into a small hut. A pair of white suede boots with fur tops stood on rough planks nailed to the sagging mud walls. Qasim asked the shopkeeper to get them down and then sat on the floor, struggling to put them on. They went well with his camouflage trousers, he thought, but they were too small for even his tiny feet. He and the shopkeeper then rummaged through the pills, rice, cigarettes, and batteries and found a pair in red leatherette. They were very big. In exchange, Qasim gave the shopkeeper his pair of battered combat boots. The shopkeeper seemed to have got a bad deal. Combat boots were everywhere, supplied free by the CIA. I assumed, however, that the shopkeeper could count on calling on Qasim and his contacts for something later. I was more worried for Qasim. The new boots seemed guaranteed to shred his feet.
Qasim was delighted. He stepped, hand in hand with the shopkeeper, over a tray of onions and into the sunlit street, roaring "Salaam aleikum" (Peace be with you) at some passing men. The men shouted, "And also with you." They hugged, kissed, and, Qasim still holding hands with the shopkeeper, began a lengthy patter of formal greetings. Qasim had apparently forgotten about me. I was left alone in the shop front, looking at the street.
The landscape reminded me of a Victorian print of the Orient. To the north, beyond the crumbling mud buildings, flocks of sheep moved on a gravel desert that wrinkled gray and green under a deep blue sky. To the east, my destination, I saw the distant snow peaks of the Paropamisus, half dissolved under a paler light. Men in black turbans with thick white beards walked very slowly down the street of the bazaar, rosary beads trailing from their hands and their ankle-length coat sleeves teased by a flurry of pale dust. The low sun glinted on tiny mirrors in the prayer caps of two young men wrestling on the roadside, and on the package of Iranian crackers beside them. A white pickup raced across the uneven track, its windshield displaying a large card that read, SHIPPED FOR MR. SHAFIQ, KABUL FOR THE UAE, FREE OF DUTY. In the truck bed a man in a black turban stood holding a mounted Russian antiaircraft gun.
I stepped out of the shadows into the street. A crowd was watching an argument between a policeman and a bus driver, who was shouting that under the new government even policemen should pay for a ride. Suddenly the two shook hands and parted, laughing. Perhaps because the bazaar was full of strangers no one seemed to look at me in my Afghan clothes. I wandered on slowly with the sun on my face in the late afternoon heat.
Herat had been overcast and cold, but here the day was warm. The air was very clean and the desert floor pristine. I looked along the gentle lines of the shop fronts. The clear light was absorbed in the baked mud of the walls. I was pleased to be in this place. But these things were also signs of poverty. There would have been more cement and plastic in this bazaar thirty years ago, before the war. Even this desert was new—it had appeared out of the fields in the recent drought. I wandered down the womanless street, listening to the rich roar of the unemployed mullahs and the illiterate gunmen discussing cousin-marriage. No one was buying anything; everything, it seemed, was bartered or given. Everyone knew each other. Two young men talked to each other about me, where England was, and what a foreigner ate and carried and enjoyed. It was an easy rolling chain of speculation that didn't require my participation.
"He may be tougher than he looks," one of them said as I passed, "but I don't think he understands what he is doing." They smiled at me and I grinned back.
Men resting
After half an hour, Qasim and Abdul Haq reappeared with another soldier and suggested we visit the garden outside the bazaar. About a kilometer away, we turned toward a cemetery up an avenue of cypresses that hid us from the village. The men were all carrying their rifles and Qasim's new friend was for some reason holding a naked bayonet. I was still trying to understand Afghanistan, as I did other countries, in terms of its scenery, history, and architecture. But this was a country at war and I was not in control of the gunmen beside me. I still could not believe the Security Service had any interest in protecting me for free. Nor could I believe that they would let me walk across the province if they thought I was a spy. It was possible that they had simply told Qasim and Abdul Haq to take me outside the city and kill me. No one would notice in the middle of a war. I felt it would be ludicrous to be killed only eight kilometers into my journey and not for the first time worried that when I was killed people would think me foolhardy.
But the soldiers weren't thinking of killing me. They only wanted to show me other people's graves. They left me and climbed onto the roof of an abandoned building to smoke cannabis.
"This is the shrine and mausoleum of Saint Ulya," Qasim shouted down. "He was a very important man; he was 'Ten-Feet-Tall.'" It was a fittingly large grave. I returned to looking at the landscape. In front of me was a two-hundred-foot-long mud wall with a gate. I entered and continued down a dark tunnel for about thirty feet until a courtyard opened on my left. From the sunken floor, mud surfaces billowed twenty feet into the air, forming steps and roofs, walls and courtyards. I watched the play of shade and refracted sunlight on curving ramparts, wooden struts, granite keystones, and beehive domes. At one of the miniature windows a pair of young eyes, above a veil, appeared and disappeared. The floor was scattered with grain husks from the autumn harvest and the door frames were stained with soot. I climbed some stairs onto the roof and found a lean-to of dead branches that served as a kitchen, containing two faded machinemade rugs, a hurricane lamp, and a tea towel depicting a mosque.
"That is all that the family possesses," Qasim shouted up, appearing with the others. "One hundred people live in this building." I could not understand this medieval tenement block—a village in a single building with circular stairs, half-stories, and abortive tunnels.
"They are very poor," I said.
"Jang-e bist-o-se saal bud. Ab nist. Mardom-e-karia gharib...," he replied. I did not need him to complete the phrase because I had heard it word for word from men in Herat and Kabul. "There has been war for twenty-four years. There is no water. The villagers are poor, illiterate, mad, and dangerous. Afghanistan is destroyed." In this standard analysis, Islam and ethnicity did not feature and violence was the product of crazy rural illiterates. It suggested a little education, money, and counseling might restore a golden age that existed before Afghanistan was "destroyed." But I was not sure how the exact words of the slogan had become so fixed or what part the media had played in it all. It told me nothing about this community.
We walked back into the garden. Beyond the avenue was a shriveled, formal box parterre and faded roses, and in the center a dry concrete pool. Despite twenty-four years of war and four years of drought, the grass was green and mown. I still expected Afghanistan to look like an apocalyptic wasteland, with untended fields and a shattered society held to ransom by the dangerous and the traumatized. I had not anticipated the smiling warmth of the bazaar or the peace and beauty of this elaborate garden on the edge of the gravel sands.
When Babur had visited, Herat was planted with many gardens.
In Herat I saw the garden of Ali Sher Beg, the public pleasure grounds
at Gazergah, the Raven-garden, the new Garden, Zobeideh's garden, the
White garden, and the City garden.
Babur pursued a passionate interest in creating watered paradises in the arid soil of his kingdom in Kabul. This is his entry from 1504:
In the mountains [west of Kabul], the ground is richly diversified by different kinds of tulips. I once directed them to be counted and they brought in thirty-two or thirty-three different sorts of tulips. There is one species which has a scent in some degree like a rose ... On the outside of the garden are large and beautiful spreading plane trees, under the shadow of which there are agreeable spots finely sheltered ... I directed this fountain to be built round with stone ... At a time when the Arhwan flowers begin to blow, I do not know there is any place in
the world to be compared to it.
The slender shadows of thorns fell like a jagged Kufic script over the new mud wall. Out of sight, beyond the wall, the desert into which we would walk stretched unbroken. We stood up and Abdul Haq picked a pink flower and put it in my cap. There was a large full moon to the east, the air had stilled enough for the snow to be visible on the upper slopes, and a low orange sun was descending dust-muffled to the west. I, with a tiny pink flower in my cap, strode with the three armed men down the avenue of cypresses toward the sunset.
A rare flock of pigeon-doves—perhaps the kind that Babur's father kept—dipped among the fruit trees. Abdul Haq unslung his barrel-chambered Kalashnikov and handed it to me. It was heavy.
"Go ahead," he said, smoothing his drooping mustache with his right hand.
"What?"
"Kill the bird." He pointed at the last dove, descending, wings folded, toward the empty pool.
"No, thank you."
"Don't worry. Go ahead. It's the government's ammunition, not mine."
Part Two
Heraut ... stands in a fertile plain, which is watered by a river [the Hari Rud] crowded with villages and covered with fields of corn. The inhabitants of the country around Heraut are for the most part Tajiks ... a mild, sober, industrious people.
—Mountstuart Elphinstone,
The Kingdom of Kaubul and Its Dependencies, 1815
Day 1—Herat to Herat Sha'ede
Day 2—Herat Sha'ede to Turon
Day 3—Turon to Buriabaf
Day 4—Buriabaf to Dideros
Day 5—Dideros to Rakwaje
Day 6—Rakwaje to Chist-e-Sharif
QASIM
We stayed that night in the house of the village headman, Haji Mumtaz. The next morning, after a breakfast of dry nan bread and sweet tea, we began again.
Abdul Haq walked with his long, gangling stride, shouting into the static roar of a radio that had no reception. It had only been light for two hours and it was already hot. Sweat spread from the shoulder straps of my backpack, and gathered on my forehead beneath my woolen Chitrali cap. I shifted the heavy stick from one hand to the other and hoped the pain in my left knee would pass. Behind me Qasim shouted at Aziz. They were both limping slightly, probably from blisters, and Aziz was coughing. He adjusted his black-and-white scarf around his neck. Qasim looked at me, smiled, and snapped at Aziz again. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I noticed that Aziz, although the smallest and apparently weakest of the three men, had been given the others' sleeping bags and Qasim's rifle to carry.
I still knew very little about my companions, but I had learned something about Qasim's status the previous night when Haji Mumtaz met us at his courtyard gate and invited us to stay. We accepted. He asked us to enter ahead of him. We refused; he pleaded; we tried to push him; he struggled, smiling. Finally, it was Qasim who went first, followed by Haji Mumtaz, Abdul Haq, Aziz, and then me. We were led to the threshold of a small mud building, where we wrestled again:
"Please, you are my host."
"Please, you are my guest."
Again, Qasim entered first. There were red carpets from Iran on the floor and some mattresses piled in the corner, but no furniture or decorations. Three men stood to greet us:
"No, no—please sit down ... don't stand for us."
"Of course we must—have my seat. But I insist."
We arranged ourselves on the floor with Qasim seated farthest from the door, and then, after a short pause, one of the strangers turned to Qasim, placed his hand on his chest, and said:
"Salaam aleikum, Manda na Bashi, Peace be with you, May you not be tired. I hope your family is well. Long life to you."
Qasim replied at the same time, "And also with you ... may your health be good ... may you be strong ... I hope your house is well."
When Qasim had finished, the man turned to Abdul Haq. "Peace be with you...," he said, "Manda na Bashi." And Abdul Haq replied in kind. After the man had greeted each of us in this fashion, we in turn went round the room saying the same things to each man, one by one. Our host picked up the teapot.
"No, no," said Abdul Haq. "I will pour it."
"I insist—you are my guest."
Abdul Haq grabbed the handle; Haji Mumtaz took it back.
This was a ritual I had gone through almost every night as I walked across Iran. This village had been part of an empire centered in Persia for most of the previous two thousand years. In both Iran and Afghanistan, the order in which men enter, sit, greet, drink, wash, and eat defines their status, their manners, and their view of their companions. If a warlord had been with us, he would have been expected, as the most senior man, to enter first, sit in the place farthest from the door, have his hands washed by others, and be served, eat, and drink first.4 People would have stood to greet him and he would not normally have stood to greet others. But we were not warlords and it was best for us to refuse honors—not least because no one else's status was clear. Status depended not only on age, ancestry, wealth, and profession, but also on whether a man was a guest, whether a third person was present, and whether the guest knew the others well.
Qasim had not struggled very much before taking the most senior position. He probably thought he deserved it as a descendant of the Prophet, the oldest guest, and the most senior civil servant present. But he could have made more of an effort to hold back. Our host, Haji Mumtaz, showed his manners by ostentatiously deferring to Qasim. The more he did so, the more we were reminded that he had done the pilgrimage to Mecca, was the village headman, and was twenty years older and much richer than Qasim, his pushy guest.
Abdul Haq sat himself at a junior position, folding his long legs beneath him with a natural easy smile. Aziz's poverty was evident from his scrawny frame, ill-kept beard, and poorly fitting clothes. He was only walking with us because he had married Qasim's sister. He moved to the bottom of the room with a defensive scowl. Only I deferred to Aziz, but then I was very low on the scale: visibly young, shabbily dressed, traveling on foot, and, although they might not know this, not a Muslim. But, perhaps because I was a foreign guest and had letters from the Emir, I was promoted after a long debate and made to sit beside Mumtaz. When other senior men from the village entered, we all rose in their honor. But when the servants brought the food, I was the only one to look up. Servants, like women and children, were socially invisible.
Qasim leaned against the wall, his arm draped over his knee, and pushed his overlarge pakul cap back on his head. He looked at me with his blue watery eyes, and I thought his smile indicated a sympathy between us that recognized our very different lives, our difficulties in communication, and our shared experience of the journey. He was old enough to be my father, and there seemed something paternal in his weather-beaten face.
"Your Excellency Rory," said Qasim, lingering thoughtfully over the name. "Where are you from?"
"Scotland," I said. There was a pause.
"What do you do, Haji Mumtaz?" I asked.
All I understood from his reply was "in three meters of snow on the road to Chaghcharan."
Having walked across Iran I knew some Persian and they were speaking Dari, a dialect of Persian used across northern Afghanistan. But I had been speaking Urdu and Nepali for a year and I was struggling to resurrect my Persian. I guessed his trucks were stuck in the snow. "Three meters is a great deal," I said vaguely.
"Haji Mumtaz has a great deal of respect for me," interrupted Qasim. "This is because he is a religious man and he knows I am a Seyyed—Seyyed Qasim."
"Indeed," said Mumtaz.
"Of course, Qasim, you are a Seyyed," I said, "a descendant of Muhammad."
"Of the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him."
"OftheProphetpeacebeuponhim," I added quickly.
There was another pause. Qasim laid his hand on my knee as though he knew me better than he did, and sniffed. "I am a very poor man; Afghanistan is a very poor country. We have no money. Haji Mumtaz has no money. I have no money." I d
idn't believe him; it looked like a prosperous house.
A servant laid a cloth between us on the bright carpet and unfolded it, revealing thick roundels of nan bread. The conversation stopped. Bowls of soup and plates of rice—tender pieces of boiled and salted mutton hidden in the mounds—were brought in. No one spoke during the dinner. We ate quickly with our hands. No one dropped any food except for me, who dribbled rice grains onto the carpet.
When the seniors had finished they passed the leftovers to the men at the bottom of the room, all of whom were younger and thinner than Haji Mumtaz. Aziz, who had already eaten the equivalent of three large plates of rice, continued until he had picked every grain off the two platters, and burped in appreciation. Trays of walnuts and apples and oranges were laid out, more tea was produced, and, after an entirely silent meal, the conversation began again.
The Kurdish areas of Iran had had no vegetables, meat, or fruit in winter, and I usually ate unleavened bread for breakfast and bread and white goat's cheese for lunch and supper. In Pakistani and northern Indian villages, I relied on bread and lentil curry. In Nepal, they ate at ten or eleven in the morning and again in the evening, which did not fit my schedule, so I carried cheap crackers and ate rice and lentils, some nights adding black millet bread. This Afghan dinner had been an impressive feast in a poor and hungry country.
"Where is our guest from, Commander Seyyed?" asked Mumtaz.
"From Ukraine," said Qasim confidently.
"He is a communist then, Commander Seyyed?"
