The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  This was the first time in eighteen months of walking anyone had thrown a stone at me and it was only my second Hazara village. I ran up the hill toward the grandfather, with the children sprinting away in front of me. "Why don't you stop your children," I shouted. "Is this how Hazara treat a traveler?"

  The old man shrugged. Various adults emerged from their houses to watch. Another village dog leaped onto Babur's back, and I hit him hard with my stick so that he limped away. The men said, "Kids will be kids. Why did you bring a dog? It's your fault. That's what encouraged them." I wondered if they would have reacted any differently if one of the stones had cut open my head.

  ***

  Half an hour farther along the road, I reached a small bazaar where three young Hazara men were standing. One came straight up to me and smiled a little too easily and asked whether I was tired and where I was going. Usually people were wary of me and the dog, but he was very confident. I answered and walked on.

  After a few minutes, the path turned into a narrow gorge beside the Hari Rud. The sun was about to set. There were no houses, just a scree slope and the cliff falling on my left toward the water. I looked back and noticed the three men were following me. I continued. There was a sudden crash behind me. I started, turned, and saw they had dropped a boulder into the river. I stopped and waited for them.

  "What is your name?" I asked the one who had spoken to me.

  "My name?" said the man, smiling more broadly.

  "Yes. What is your name?"

  "My name is ... Muhammad."

  "And yours?" I asked the second.

  "Aziz," he said just as the first man said, "No, his name is Hussein."

  "What village are you from?"

  "One of the villages ahead."

  "What is its name?"

  "Its name?"

  "Yes. What is the name of your village?"

  "Emir Beg."

  "Where is Sang-i-zard?"

  "Two days' walk away."

  I slowed my pace and so did they, and when I stopped to tie my shoelace they gathered around. One of them was whispering to the others. I turned and saw a man coming along the path, three hundred yards behind us. I started walking back toward him.

  The three men sauntered on a little way and then stopped, waiting to see what I would do. The man coming toward me was an old Hazara with a wispy white beard.

  "Peace be with you," I said to the man. He was quite old.

  "And with you," he muttered, and tried to step past me as though he did not like being stopped on this path at dusk.

  "I am from Scotland," I said. "I am a traveler, a guest in your country. Can I walk with you?"

  He took a couple of steps as though he was going to ignore me and then stopped and looked at me and Babur. "Yes. Walk with me."

  I walked on beside the old man and the three men began walking again ahead of us.

  "Those three," I said, "are they from one of the villages ahead?"

  "No, they are from the village behind us. They are bad men."

  "And what is the village's name?"

  "Mukhtar."

  It began snowing. We walked together in silence. After a few minutes we reached a group of houses. The three men turned around and saw I was still walking with the old man. They were not wearing coats and could not have been comfortable standing in the snowstorm.

  After a moment, they shuffled toward a house, went inside, and closed the door.

  "Where is Sang-i-zard?" I asked.

  "About half an hour's walk away. Would you like to stay with me in this village?" asked the old man. "This snowstorm will not stop for a couple of days."

  "Thank you, but I should keep going."

  "God be with you."

  The snow kept falling and the three men did not follow me.

  It was twilight when I saw a village on a slope on the far bank of the Hari Rud River. The valley was narrow and its sides were steep. Dark, troubled patches of quickly moving water showed through the broken river ice. There was no bridge. Babur and I crossed thirty feet on a narrow, snow-dusted causeway of ice, then climbed through the snow to the edge of the village. The houses were low mud huts, cut into the hill. Snow lay in drifts up the walls and over the flat roofs, covering the twigs and the dried dung that had been stored for fuel. The snow on the path had melted, revealing a mixture of mud and human excrement. Perhaps because it was so cold, there was no smell.

  This was Sang-i-zard. It had no canals, gardens, or avenues of trees such as those near Obey. The fields were narrow. Qasim had called the irrigated flatlands "poor." This was a much poorer place. We walked up the steep path to the castle gate, followed by a crowd of children.

  The castle walls were forty feet high. At each corner stood a round tower topped with battlements. Through the gate, which was twice the height of a man, a group of women with pale Chinese faces came running at the children and hit them with thorn switches. The children scattered. I stepped into the courtyard, which seemed very small for such a large castle.

  I showed the eldest woman my introduction letters from Abdul Rauf Ghafuri, the wealthy commander of Daulatyar. "You can leave your dog here but you cannot stay here," she said. "My husband is away. You will have to sleep in the mosque."

  I settled Babur in a stable and returned to the mosque at the bottom of the hill, where I took off my wet socks. I was drenched and the mosque was cold. As soon as I sat down on a prayer rug I began to feel ill. I wondered when I could change out of my wet clothes. For an hour I watched the prayers and answered questions about my journey until a man called Akbar asked me to stay in his house.

  He lived at the edge of the village in a two-story house with a pair of rooms above and a large sheep pen below. Only one sheep was in the pen.

  I took off my shalwar kemis, put on my extra clothes, and hung the wet set near the stove. Then Akbar fed me a rich bean soup. As I ate, his women gathered along the walls to watch me. One of them was breast-feeding her baby. Akbar's grandmother asked me where I came from. The Aimaq had told me, "The Hazara have a quite uncivilized attitude to women." Perhaps they were referring to the old myth that the Hazara lent their wives to their guests. Perhaps they merely meant that Hazara women talk to guests.

  This was the first time I had been allowed in the same room as a woman in an Afghan village. I wondered if this was not one of the few legacies of Mongol customs among the Hazara. In a Mongol tent, women play a prominent, respected, and noisy part in conversation.

  On his guest room wall, Akbar had a photograph of himself taken five years earlier. It had been hand-tinted in the studio so that his pink cheeks and lime green jacket were highlighted by the backdrop of a vivid tropical sunset sky.

  One of the sons of Bushire Khan of Sang-i-zard

  LEAVES ON THE CEILING

  Nine times during the night I had to clamber over Akbar, who was sleeping by the door. I groped my way down the unlit stairs and past the sheep pen, opened the heavy wooden doors, and stumbled into the continuing snowstorm. The candles in the village had been extinguished shortly after dusk and there was no light anywhere. My dysentery was so bad I twice soiled my trousers before I could get to the door. I was losing a lot of fluid and none of the antibiotics or antispasmodics I was taking seemed to be curing me. The nearest primary medical care was three days' walk in the wrong direction and they would not have the appropriate drugs. I had to hope I could recover by myself. I wondered whether this was going to be the way I died.

  It had now been snowing for most of three days and it was still snowing hard the next morning. The villagers insisted I not try to walk through the storm and, for once, I was pleased to take their advice. I was invited to rest in the castle guest room and spent most of the day on my back on the floor. The castle could not afford much fuel and therefore did not light the stove although I was allowed to light a small fire. It was as cold as any Scottish castle. I wore my coat but I kept shivering.

  The castle ceiling, which I stared at for hours, was
made from a frame of poplar branches, their brown, curled leaves still attached. The mud floor was partly covered by a shabby striped blanket, two pieces of dark felt, and a small cheap rug in the Bokhara style. Mattresses were stacked in the corner under a grimy white sheet. The walls were undecorated except for a photograph of my absent host, the feudal lord Bushire Khan, with a pencil-thin mustache and trilby hat. He looked like a 1930s Shanghai gangster.

  My fever made everything slow and indistinct. I could not follow a train of thought for more than a moment without it collapsing into surreal and disconnected events. I kept seeing myself stumbling through snow with occasional interruptions by angry dogs. I wondered if it was going to be the same all the way to Kabul.

  That afternoon a young man shook me awake. "I am sick, what can you give me?" he asked.

  "I am not a doctor," I said.

  "You have medicines. We have seen you take them."

  "What is wrong with you?" I asked.

  "My whole body is aching," he replied.

  I gave him two of my eight Ibuprofen tablets and closed my eyes. I was woken again by an ancient lady dressed in what seemed to be seven layers of printed cotton cloth. She was seated on the ground with her thin legs stuck out in front of her. "I am sick," she said.

  "What is wrong with you?"

  "My whole body is aching."

  I took out my six remaining Ibuprofen and gave her two. She snatched the other four as well. I took them back.

  She moaned at me about her pain and the unkindness of the world, so I found a Panadol at the bottom of my bag and gave her that.

  A man with a scarred face entered, stooping under the low lintel. He was called Mohammed Amir and he was wearing faded camouflage trousers and a black bomber jacket. He lectured me on the drought, the wrecked fields, and the empty wells, and made me write down statistics about the harvest: "eight thousand tokm-roi-Zamin," I wrote in my diary. I didn't understand what the words meant except they had something to do with land yields. Then he asked me to get help from international organizations in Kabul and requested some pills for the wife of a friend. He said she had very bad diarrhea and I handed over my last course of antibiotics—gloomily because I felt I needed them myself. He asked me to draw him and I did, although I found it difficult to concentrate on the page.

  Mohammed Amir of Sang-i-zard

  I woke later feeling a little better to find a girl by the fire. She looked about seventeen. Her beautiful pale face was scrunched in concentration as she crumbled dry animal dung into the hearth. Both her hair and eyebrows were very black, as though she had dyed them. She wore a gold cap wrapped in a blue embroidered turban and, over her dress of blue chintz, a purple waistcoat and a green embroidered wool cardigan. A pair of blue corduroy trousers showed beneath the skirt. She raised her head and met my eyes. I smiled. She looked at me expressionlessly and then turned and left the room.

  The next day, a different girl with dark eyes watched me talk to her father. She wore a long necklace of artificial pearls over a purple waistcoat embroidered with gold and silver thread. She held the pearls in her hand and swung them slowly from side to side, staring at me all the time. I looked back as I left the room and said good-bye to her but she turned away, smiling, and did not reply.

  FLAMES

  That night Bushire's old uncle slept in the room with me and snored throughout the night. I woke feeling rested and more cheerful. I walked outside into bright sunshine to find the children had let Babur out of the stable and he was prancing on the roof of the castle. He did not usually respond when I called, but he came running when he saw me.

  In the dusty guest room the flames were bright beneath the blackened kettle. The old uncle was warming his socks by the fire and stroking the few wispy tufts of hair that grew on his jaw and upper lip. Other Afghans mock the Hazara for being unable to grow proper beards. When we sat down to our bread and tea, I asked him about the chiefs of the area.

  "I am sorry," he said, "do not judge this castle and this family by its current position. The owners are Begs, chiefs of the Blackfoot tribe of Hazara, descended from Muhammad Ali Beg Tehsildar of Sang-i-zard, Tehsildar for King Abdul Rahman, and hereditary chiefs of two thousand households. One of four great families in this valley with Daulatyar, Mir Ali Hussein Beg at Taras, and my own family at Mukhtar."

  "And now?"

  "They cannot afford the firewood for one stove to heat the castle guest room."

  "Why?"

  "Because they did not fight well in the wars."

  "Were the Russians here?"

  Hussein, son of Bushire Khan of Sang-i-zard

  "No. The fighting was between and within villages. The Iranians gave arms to mullahs and paid them to take land away from the feudal Begs and give it to the people. This family has lost everything in the last ten years, all their flocks and all their land. This castle is all that remains."

  "And who has their land now?"

  "Our new commander. He lives in a house down in the bottom of the village and no one can touch him."

  My host asked a man called Nadir to guide me from Sang-i-zard. When we set out from the castle, Babur blinked and turned away from the wind and I pulled my blanket up around my face. It was difficult to judge the temperature, but I guessed it was minus twenty.

  Perhaps because I was rested, I was unusually aware of the landscape. A dark blue sky stretched over the snow, and where the sun fell the furrows in the earth showed like shadows on white velvet. We walked in the very center of the frozen Hari Rud for about an hour, the snow being so thick we could only guess where the banks lay. Babur the Emperor described such conditions in his first attack on the Hazara:

  That winter the snow lay very deep, which rendered it dangerous to leave the common road. The banks of the stream about the ford were all covered with ice and it was impossible to pass the river at any place off the road, on account of the ice and the snow...

  Tall bushes resembling dogwood stood along the Hari Rud. Their branches were orange and yellow, and they rose out of the river ice like stands of flame. There were silver-trunked willows, too, with dark brown buds and a few pale gold leaves that clattered like cicada wings in the freezing wind. As the snow melted in the sun, the Hari Rud became at first a clean turquoise ice sheet and then a torrent of black-blue water. We climbed onto the bank.

  The snow crust held us for our first hours on land, but after a while we were plunging up to our knees. We began to step in the compacted footprints of people who had used the path that morning. Sometimes we passed a pair of bright nylon flags marking a martyr's grave on the hill.

  Despite my protests, Nadir carried my pack for the first three hours. I had always carried my own pack in Afghanistan, but I was grateful for the rest. I took it back for the next five hours, and then we saw the coffee-colored walls of Taras castle, dwarfed by mountain slopes piled with smooth scoops of snow like ice cream.

  The castle guards were keen for me to stay with them, but when I heard none of the Beg's family were at Taras, I decided to press on to Mir Ali Hussein's other castle at Katlish. I thought it would offer better food and conversation than the guard room, and I wanted to try to get a letter of recommendation from the Begs since they were the most important rulers in the valley. Nadir and the villagers tried to dissuade me, saying it was an hour till dark and four hours' walk to Katlish. But something about their tone suggested this was not true.

  Babur, however, was less keen on continuing. He lay down in the snow and refused to move. I tried to pull his leash, but he remained immobile. I half lifted him and, finally, in an effort to get some movement into his exhausted limbs, dragged him stumbling down a snow slope to what I thought was a snowfield—where, to the delighted screams of the village, he and I fell through the ice into the Hari Rud.

  We pressed on for the next hour, very wet. The sun had left our bank of the Hari Rud and the wind was strong. A strong mauve light played on the peaks above us. We reached Katlish just after dark. People wer
e reluctant to find shelter for Babur but I insisted. The argument went on for some time and he must have been very cold by the time it was resolved. I was relieved to finally dry him, get him some food, put him to bed, and go inside myself.

  ZIA OF KATLISH

  That night I was again asked to sleep in the mosque. Zia, the twenty-year-old nephew of the feudal lord Mir Ali Hussein Beg, apologized and said it was only because his castle was unheated, but it seemed to me that visitors usually slept in the mosque. The mosque functioned not only as a chapel and a guesthouse but also as a dining hall, a conference room, and a school. The walls were of scratched mud, stained with grease, dimpled with worm casts and moth holes, and hung with a blackboard and a small embroidery of the Kabaa at Mecca. In Iran there would have been posters of Ayatollah Khomeini, but here there was no government figure to idolize, no father of the nation, no king. Nevertheless, the Beg had clearly spent money on the mosque—it had a felt carpet, three full-length windows, and plaster flowers on the ceiling.

  As if to confirm the building's secular aspect, three ibex heads with curling three-foot horns hung in the atrium. The ibex, a very large mountain goat, is with the snow leopard the most revered of the Asian mountain animals. It once lived along Asia's bird-shaped mountain massif from Afghanistan to the Hazara's original homeland in Mongolia. Like the snow leopard, however, it is now almost extinct. There were certainly none left in this area.52

  About forty men gathered in the mosque that evening. Zia sat at the head of the room with me on his right and the mullah on his left. The villagers were well wrapped for the winter. The older men wore hemp trousers and thick socks knitted by their wives and tied with wool at the calf. Many of the younger men wore camouflage trousers. All had put on shirts, vests, cardigans, waistcoats, and jackets, one on top of the other, and they may have had more layers underneath. They had wound their black turbans under their chins and over their ears, framing lined, tanned, and bearded faces. Villagers don't wash in the winter and there was a strong smell.