The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  As Buddhism moved, it changed. In Tibet it incorporated the preceding Bon-Po religion and spawned new demonologies. In eighth-century northern India, it became scholastic; among the forest monks of Sri Lanka, pragmatic; in Newar, Nepal, married monks practiced inverted tantra; and in Japan, Zen devotees contemplated minimalist paradoxes. Afghanistan was where Buddhism met the art of Alexander's Greece. There, in the Gandharan style, it developed its most distinctive artistic expression: the portrayal of the Buddha in human form. The colossal statues of Bamiyan were the legacy of this innovation.

  From the base of the eastern Buddha niche, I climbed forty feet up a sloping mud staircase, into a long, open corridor lined with empty rooms. I followed more steps upward. On either side the walls of the cliff were carved with balconies, circular staircases, and octagonal rooms with vaulted ceilings, rising story after story up the rock. I continued over fragile sections of mud, and emerged two hundred feet above the valley floor, where the head of the Buddha had once been.

  This was distinctive mountain architecture. Afghanistan's Gandharan Buddhist sculpture is generally renowned for its grace and balance, but the Bamiyan Buddhas were ungainly and inflated. Their central function seems to have been to dominate the landscape. It was impossible to achieve detail or elegance of form in the loose crumbling rock. Everything had been sacrificed to allow the figures to climb up the face of the sandstone cliff.

  Descending toward the other Buddha niche, I turned into a side passage, where I found a room still decorated with traces of dark blue and gold paint depicting figures in a procession. The last Bamiyan Buddhists probably lived at about the turn of the first millennium. Their religion, initially weakened by a Hindu revival, was extinguished by Islam. By the time the Ghorids captured the valley in the twelfth century, hardly a Buddhist was left between Bamiyan and Bangladesh. We know little about what kind of Buddhism was practiced in Bamiyan. From tens of thousands of monasteries stretched over a thousand kilometers, only fragments of stupas, sculpture, inscriptions, and manuscripts, and the records of Chinese travelers, remain.

  At the end of another passage, I saw the Taliban had scorched the interior of a room, presumably to remove a fresco, and then stamped white boot prints over the ceiling. This must have taken some effort, as the ceiling was twenty feet high.

  The Turquoise Mountain Ghorids, who chose this valley as their second capital, perhaps felt some affinity for this alternative mountain architecture and left the cliff Buddhas standing. The Taliban, however, had dynamited them out of disapproval of idolatry. Many Hazara seemed to have difficulty believing this. "Perhaps they were looking for gold underneath," suggested a man in the donkey caravan when I asked him. But they didn't seem worried about it. Finding the giant statues absent after they had been visible from every side of the valley for a millennium and a half must have been strange. But as the man said, "There are things that matter much more to us."61

  I sat down in a monk's meditation cell, set back from a long open veranda, and looked out over the broad green valley, a hundred feet below, to the white peaks beyond. The scene might once have resembled a miniature version of Lhasa before the Chinese invasion: the edifice around the Buddhas painted in bright colors, prayer flags on the peaks, and the valley filled on holy days by chanting processions of monks in saffron robes. The dynamited niches now echoed the earliest pre-Gandharan depictions, in which the Buddha is represented by an empty seat, showing where he had once been.

  I AM THE ZOOM

  Bamiyan was now a garrison town housing a major airstrip, foreign military personnel, and the offices of a number of relief agencies. The town was dominated by the new governor Khalili's soldiers—cleanshaven teenagers in camouflage jackets and new CIA-supplied combat boots, too large and unlaced. The tails of their double-breasted shirts hung to their ankles. Many of the boys had used black eyeliner to make themselves look beautiful. They filled the street, shouting at acquaintances, peering into shop fronts, fiddling with the Kalashnikovs on their backs, and interrogating strangers. Land Cruisers rolled past carrying aid agencies' personnel and American special forces. An Afghan commander's pickup stopped, a cold man holding the heavy machine gun mounted on its bed. No women were to be seen.

  The northern passes were clear of snow and it was possible to drive to Kabul in eleven hours. A few vehicles were coming in every day. I wanted to find Babur transport to Kabul because he was too sick to walk the last hundred miles. I spent the afternoon in the bazaar talking to truck drivers but no one was prepared to take a dog. At dusk, I began to look for accommodation. Most travelers would have slept on the floor of one of the restaurants in the bazaar, but I was tired and didn't want to leave Babur in the street, so I resorted again to the international organizations. I tried not to bother MSF because I thought its staff had been generous enough in Yakawlang, but when none of the other agencies could take me in I fell back on MSF and was warmly welcomed.

  I spent much of my two days' rest with a French photographer who was also staying in the MSF house. Didier Lefèvre had traveled across Afghanistan with the Mujahidin in the early 1980s, and he was back to photograph the war. Most war photographers carry large digital cameras; Didier was using black-and-white film and two old Leicas. In a war zone most photographers prefer to use a zoom. Didier didn't have one. "I am the zoom," he said. While other photographers were using cars and helicopters to chase news stories in different Afghan cities, Didier had been in Bamiyan for a month, photographing Hazara refugees. Didier was returning to Kabul in an MSF vehicle, and he and the driver kindly agreed to take Babur with them and drop him at a friend's house.

  Taos of Bamiyan

  KARAMAN

  The next day I went to watch the Buzkashi game taking place on a series of fields—some fallow, some plowed and planted—just to the east of the empty Buddha niches. Buzkashi is a form of polo played with a dead goat instead of a ball. As I arrived, young grooms were walking their horses to limber them up while more horses cantered in through the dust, snorting into the cold air. White-bearded elders wearing suit jackets talked in low voices at the edge of the arena; and riders with turbans tightly tied beneath their chins strutted back and forth, tapping their whips nervously against their boots. No one was interested in talking to a foreigner.

  This was one of the very first games since the Taliban had banned the sport. The crowd was discussing some of the men who had gathered to play: the feudal landlords Nasir and Shushuri, and Karaman, a famous player from Dang-e-Safilak in a tall woolen hat. Commandant Yawari from Yakawlang, it was said, had traveled three days on the mined road to be here on a horse valued at ten million Afghanis.

  Some of the horses were village ponies with plain blankets, canvas girths, and reins made from string, but most were elaborately decorated. Abdul Qoudus from Shaidan was preparing his white stallion again. He had already dressed and undressed the animal twice. The horse was turning nervously on its halter and dribbling over its tight double bit. First Qoudus covered its back with the julum blanket he said had taken his wife a month to weave. It was a two-meter-long kilim with thirty bands of alternating black, white, and red designs, fringed with a line of quivering tassels. He laid a separate saddlecloth over the julum and tied a bright orange and green band, called a taule, around the horse's neck. He smoothed the tassels lying on the horse's nose and neck and flicked the glinting metal disks on the bridle to make them ring. He pulled a bright patchwork neck quilt with a diamond borderline and tassels over the horse's tall, blue-veined ears and stretched it to the horse's broad shoulders. In the center of the horse's forehead hung a brass disk set with green glass. Finally he lifted on the saddle, complete with high-rearing pommel. It was covered in burgundy carpet worked with black, orange, and white flowers and tassels of electric green and pink.

  Khalili's soldiers lined the steep ridges, silhouetted against the bright sky above the old cells of the Buddhist monks. Overweight security officials with radios and Russian hats wandered through the thousands of
spectators now gathered up the slopes and along the cliff walls to the north. On the south side of the arena, a team of foreign soldiers in civilian clothes carried large guns, and above them, on the hospital roof, chairs were arranged for Khalili.

  Abdul Qoudus, like many of the jockeys, was wearing a new American brown all-in-one thermal combat suit as his jodhpurs. He had wrapped gray felt bandages around his calves and, before jumping into his saddle, swapped shoes with his groom—taking off his white, battered baseball boots and slipping into a pair of highly polished brown tasseled loafers.

  The ground was more suitable for a steeplechase than polo. Qoudus joined the other riders, who were exercising their horses at full gallop—clearing ditches, furrows, field boundaries, rocky ground, and drystone walls, their bodies leaning almost horizontal, swept back into their saddles.

  More of Khalili's security forces stepped down from pickup trucks. Rumor held that BHL—Bernard-Henri Lévy, the celebrity French philosopher and now the French prime minister's special representative to Afghanistan—was to arrive by helicopter from Kabul and watch the match, but he didn't make it.

  The game began with the teams converging on the body of a goat. At a gallop the pack leader leaned out of his saddle till his right hand nearly touched the ground, grabbed the goat by its hindquarters, lifted himself back into the saddle, and, wrapping his leg around the carcass for extra grip, turned his pony on its back legs and spurred for the opposition's goal. He had the goat for only a few seconds before a man from Nayak tore it from his hand and raced off in the other direction. A mass of horseflesh plunged after him, spectators running from the flailing hooves, till the pack turned fast toward the other side of the pitch.

  Commandant Yawari, who was not playing but circling the pitch on his gray, called out for his jockey to be swapped. This was against the rules. The man cantered up to the edge of the crowd; a Buzkashi whip had opened his face from ear to chin. He tumbled off, another jockey vaulted into the saddle, and soldiers holding rifles ran up to stop the horseman from reentering the game. The jockey acknowledged neither their threats nor the crowd's cheers, but frowned in concentration, his eyes fixed between the ears of Commandant Yawari's best horse. He spurred toward the soldiers, driving them back on either side. When he was through, he held his hands above the saddle pommel as though in prayer, touched his heels to the horse's flanks, leaned back in the saddle, cast his eyes up to the ridgeline, and released his horse into a gallop. Beneath him, the horse's legs pounded toward the sand cloud and the screaming pack.

  As the north wind moved the dust, I could see the quivering hindquarters of Abdul Qoudus's white horse backing out of the knot and then being squeezed in again with the thighs of its roaring rider. Just as Yawari's jockey reached the tumult, Karaman emerged, at a canter and then a gallop, pressed against a man from Shaidan. They both clutched a leg of the goat. The loudspeakers shouted, "Karaman, Karaman," and the crowd shouted, "Karaman, Karaman," because no one knew the name of the other man and, to justify their cries, Karaman broke away with the goat and dropped it neatly for a goal.

  ***

  The next morning, I got a letter of introduction from Aziz, a friendly and intelligent official in Governor Khalili's office. I took Babur for a final walk. After a day's rest, he was again curious and active. We climbed onto the plateau next to the remains of the great Ghorid fort, and he trotted beside me marking tree after tree along the small canal. When he ran in front, I called him back. He ignored me and I gave chase. As he reached an old tank, he slowed enough for me to catch him by the scruff and to see what had excited him. Tied to a track was a young Asian wolf about half Babur's size. His rib cage was visible and he was turning desperately from side to side. A group of young soldiers sat nearby, smiling at his exhausted struggle. They said they had trapped the wolf as a cub and would sell him to a general.

  I turned and walked away, pulling Babur. He looked up at me warily with his yellow wolf's eyes. He was only half a domestic animal. Although he had chosen to follow me and trusted me to touch him and feed him, I would never own him. He never begged or tried to endear himself, and nothing would induce him to chase a stick or sit on command or come when called. I released him. He ran ahead and rolled in the dust, and as I approached he ran ahead again. This was a game he enjoyed. When I reached him, breathless, for the fourth time, he rolled over for me to tickle his stomach.

  I wondered whether he might not be strong enough to walk the four days to Kabul, but I wasn't prepared to risk it so I scratched him one more time and then led him back to the MSF compound, checked his water, and confirmed that Didier was willing to take him to the capital. Then I tied Babur to a post, pulled some dried mud out of his dusty coat, put my pack on my back, and walked out.

  KHALILI'S TROOPS

  I was now entirely alone for the first time since I had met Babur at Dahan-e-Rezak. Snow was falling past the empty niches where the Buddhas had once stood. At three check posts on the road out of town, Khalili's soldiers stopped and questioned me.62 They were mostly boys from distant villages, with new uniforms from America and salaries from Iran. They didn't care who they stopped. I was frustrated; my pack was heavy, and I had forty-five kilometers to walk that day. On the outskirts of town, an older man ran out of another guard post.

  "Who are you?" he shouted.

  "I am Rory from Scotland."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To Kabul."

  "Why are you alone? Why are you not in a vehicle? Come here." Twenty Hazara with rifles had appeared behind him.

  "I'm sorry, I've been stopped at three check posts already—I don't have time for this. I have letters from Khalili and I have permission to walk on this road."

  "I said, 'Come here.' Now, boy!" shouted the commander.

  "Good-bye." I turned and walked on.

  I had gone twenty yards when I heard running behind me; my sleeve was grabbed; I turned to shake the man off and he punched me in the face, his knuckles striking my cheekbone just below the eye. I stumbled and then turned around with my fists ready. He stepped back and we circled each other, me feeling clumsy under my pack.

  The commander and the rest of his men had now run up and were gathering around us. I was only just aware of the others. All my attention was on the man who had punched me and who was looking for a chance to punch me again.

  "What are you doing?" I shouted. "I am a mehman in your country, a mosafer."

  As I spoke the man lunged for my walking stick. We struggled for a second and then he ripped it from my hands. I couldn't believe this was happening. My reactions seemed stupidly delayed. I felt like a baited bear. The man swung the stick at me, slowly enough for me to move back. He was taking his time and the crowd was watching to see how he would hurt me. My cheek stung and I was very angry. He wasn't. He seemed excited instead, turning the stick in his hand, thinking about how and where to hit me next. He looked at the older man, who nodded at him from the crowd. Then he announced, "I'm going to knock you down."

  "Stop," I said. "This is wrong. I'm a Briton. I am a guest of your Governor Khalili. You have just punched me in the face. I'm a very important man; you can't do this to me. What is your name?"

  The man wasn't listening. He feinted with the stick. I stepped back. He feinted once more, slowly enough for me to duck. He was just getting the feel of my stick. His pupils were dilated, and his hands trembled slightly. His mouth was fixed into something between a grimace and a smile. The way he moved the stick from hand to hand was practiced, even graceful. He'd done this many times before and the other men had watched.

  I glanced at the crowd and saw an interpreter I had met in the MSF house. "This man," I shouted. "He knows me. He'll explain."

  The commander interrupted, "Do you know him?"

  There was a pause, the man with my stick turned to look at his commander, and then the interpreter said, very distinctly, "Yes, he is the foreigner who has walked here from Herat."

  "Why is he walking? Foreigners d
rive Land Cruisers."

  While they were talking, I swung my pack off, opened the top compartment, and drew out the letter from Khalili's representative. I handed it to the interpreter because I assumed the men were illiterate. "Listen to this," I shouted at the commander. "Khalili asks you to help me. Not punch me in the face."

  The interpreter read the letter in a calm, neutral voice: "The governor requests his commanders to assist and protect the historian of the Hazara people, Rory Stewart."

  "Why didn't you show us the letter earlier?" the commander demanded.

  "I told you about it," I shouted back, "and you wouldn't listen. You're coming with me to the palace to tell Khalili why you assaulted his guest. You will lose your job."

  "I advise you to forget this," the interpreter interjected firmly. "They didn't realize you were a foreigner."

  "The fact that I'm a foreigner is irrelevant. They shouldn't do this to anyone." The soldiers laughed. Hitting people was their job. "What are you all laughing at? You are evil men ... thugs."

  "You're the evil man," shouted the commander. "What do you expect? You can't just walk around alone..."

  To my relief, the MSF administrator had now appeared as well. I told him the story. He seemed a little embarrassed. I could imagine how I must look—a dirty foreigner sweating and shouting after a brawl with some soldiers. "Who exactly punched you?" he asked.