The Places in Between

by Rory Stewart

  I looked down the row of men. My stick had been dropped. I was certain it was the tall man, but I was unsettled by his calm, martyred expression as he stared at the ground. "This man...," I said, and then I was fed up with the whole thing. "Forget it...," I muttered. I picked up my stick and walked off. I was so angry I could think about little else for the next two hours. I had insulted the commander in front of his men, threatened to report him to the governor, and then set off alone down an empty road. There was nothing to stop the commander from sending his men after me or radioing the check posts ahead.

  For the next ten kilometers, I turned around at every noise and considered cutting sideways into the hills. But after two hours passed and nothing happened, I concluded he couldn't be bothered with me. In India and Pakistan, security forces had acted worried about the possibility of hitting foreigners, being reported to superiors, or losing their jobs. But these men didn't seem to care. They probably thought the governor wouldn't mind their assaulting a traveler. Khalili's main priority (encouraged by millions of CIA dollars) was catching Taliban and al-Qaeda escapees, and I might be one. Nevertheless, they hadn't killed me, and I wondered whether that was because I had shown them the letter from the governor. The incident seemed to prove that despite the traumas of the last twenty-four years, Hazarajat was still in some ways an orderly society. If you had a letter and weren't a direct threat, people largely left you alone.

  I saw three more check posts over the next twenty kilometers and I held out the letter before I reached them. The first guard snapped that I was an infidel but let me pass. The guard at the second check post did the same. The third post was at the base of the red fort of Zorak. This had been a large Ghorid fortress. Here Genghis Khan's favorite grandson was killed by an arrow, focusing Genghis's fury on the mountain kingdoms. The check post guard read the letter, questioned me, let me go, called me back, read the letter again, and then, when I was on my way, called me back. The commander announced he was driving me to the headquarters in Bamiyan—fifteen kilometers back down the road I had been walking on for three hours—for further questioning. Despite having resolved only three hours earlier never to defy a policeman again, I lost my patience.

  "No, I refuse," I replied. "I am a guest. I am a close friend of the governor. I stayed in his guesthouse. He has given me permission." None of this was true. I walked on ignoring the angry shouts behind me, and to my relief no footsteps followed and the shouts faded. I turned up a narrow gorge toward the snow peaks, and saw no one for four hours.

  AND I HAVE MINE

  At dusk I came to the village of Lower Kalu near the edge of the Hazara district. In a couple of days I would reach Pashtun territory. I climbed a steep mud slope to the castle, past a crater made very recently by a coalition bomb. I was aware of the familiar smell of human feces outside the houses. I hammered on the gate, making the iron chain rattle on the dark wood. After a minute, an old man appeared.

  "Peace be with you," I said.

  "And also with you," he replied. He looked at the bruise on my cheek and then said, "Come in."

  I followed him through the courtyard to the guest room. He did not suggest I sleep in the mosque. He put a cushion under me, gathered twigs, fed the fire, and blew on it till it flamed fiercely. Then he asked if I would give him my socks so he could dry them. I did so gratefully. Then he left and returned with a pot of sugared tea and sat cross-legged in silence watching me drink. When I had finished, he brought plates of rice and spinach and said, "We are still the commandants in the valley, but the Taliban killed our flocks, so I am sorry that I can't give you meat. This food has been given by foreigners."

  Only when he saw I was warm and had finished eating did he lean forward and ask, "And who are you? And where are you from?"

  I answered and asked him about his family. Nasir-i-Yazdani said he was one of the chiefs of the Besut tribe of the Hazara, related to the great Begs I had met in the Sar Jangal valley two hundred kilometers away—the Sang-i-zard chiefs of the Blackfoot and Zia, the young Katlish chief of the Nauruz Beg. They were almost all descendants or relations of the great Hazara leader Mir Yazdan Baksh, and called themselves Mir Bache-ha (Children of the Mir). On the orders of the Afghan king Mir Yazdan Baksh had been executed beneath the Buddhas at Bamiyan at the end of the nineteenth century.

  After dinner Nasir-i-Yazdani's grandsons perched on his lap and his nephew sat beside him while Nasir-i-Yazdani discussed his grandfather's pilgrimage to Mecca in the 1930s and I told him a little about my walk.

  "You're walking alone?" said Nasir-i-Yazdani. "What has happened to Hazara hospitality? A guest cannot walk alone. My nephew here will accompany you tomorrow over the pass to Besut and my cousin there will see you to Maidan Shahr."

  While Nasir-i-Yazdani talked, I sketched him. I have the picture beside me now. With his thin beard, narrow eyes, and lined face, he looks like a solemn Mongol emperor. I have failed to capture his smile or his kindness.

  I had been walking through the Hazara district for weeks. I had seen the feudal grandeur of Sar Jangal, the destruction at Yakawlang, the aggression of Khalili's soldiers, and now this gentle welcome. But I realized I knew very little about the Hazara.

  After dinner we went outside into the snow. A half-moon lit the valley and the Kalu River ran heavy with meltwater. The river moved down the narrow gorge and vanished into the darkness, skirting the red castle that Genghis burned, on its way to the colossal Buddha niches. It flowed seventy kilometers to the charred beam that suggested a balcony in the Shaidan bazaar where, pressing into the parched fields, it drowned the winter wheat.

  Nasir-i-Yazdani

  Nasir-i-Yazdani said he'd hit a Russian vehicle with a rocket, near the crater where the coalition had blown up four Taliban in a car. Then he led me inside because it was cold and he thought I was tired. I told him I had hoped to understand the Hazara but had only gathered disconnected and puzzling anecdotes. I asked what could explain the Hazara to me. He smiled and put clean blankets on the floor. And when I lay down he removed a bundle from a carved wooden box, kissed it, said a prayer, unwrapped it, and, opening the Koran, read:

  And what can explain the steep path to you?

  It is the freeing of a slave,

  Or the giving of food in a day of starvation...

  And as I lay wondering who he was, he continued gently:

  Unbeliever, I do not worship what you worship,

  Nor do you worship what I worship.

  I shall never worship what you worship,

  Nor will you ever worship what I worship.

  You have your religion and I have mine.

  THE SCHEME OF GENERATION

  The next morning Nasir-i-Yazdani's nephews walked with me. We passed a bazaar where the Russians had killed seventy men and from which the Taliban had taken one hundred and fifty people. Three months earlier, a small group of Arabs had been stationed in the bazaar, fighting on behalf of the Taliban. We began the long climb over gentle snow slopes to the thirteen-thousand-foot Hajigak pass. Nasir-i-Yazdani's ancestor Mir Yazdan Baksh had crossed this pass, as had Genghis's army and the Afghan king Abdul Rahman Khan on his great campaign to conquer the Hazara a hundred years ago.

  On the other side of the pass, we came upon a chain of men clearing snow off the road. An old man supervising them swung a long rosary while they swung their spades. The supervisor was a cousin of the local chief.63 He led me into the side valley in which the castle of Harzard was hidden from the road and fed me dehydrated milk, called Makse. The chief's son then entered. I asked him about his family. He replied:

  Mir Waiz Hotak begat Shah Ashrafi Hotak; and Shah Ashrafi Hotak begat Shah Hussein Hotak, who was given the government of Kandahar by Nadir, the Shah of Iran;

  And Shah Hussein Hotak begat Malik Waisi Hotak; and Malik Waisi Hotak begat Abdul Rahman, who left Kandahar and built the castle of Besut; and Abdul Rahman begat Nur Muhammad, who built this castle of Harzard, and Amir Muhammad, from whom is descended Mir Yazdan B
aksh;

  And Nur Muhammad begat Daulat Muhammad; and Daulat Muhammad begat Isfand Wakil; and Isfand Wakil begat Lala Wakil; and Lala Wakil begat Saifullah Wakil; and Saifullah Wakil begat Aladad Wakil; and Aladad Wakil begat Khan Ali Wakil;

  And Khan Ali Wakil begat Haji Hussein Ahmed Khan; and Haji Hussein Ahmad Khan begat Haji Assan Jan Khan, of whom was born Muhammad Hakim, who is me.

  He had just recited fifteen generations from memory. This was more than the fourteen separating Christ from the exile in Babylon or David from Abraham; only ten separated Abraham from Noah and Noah from Adam. And he could, and did, go sideways as well, telling how Mir Yazdan Baksh was descended from Abdul Rahman and how Abdul Rahman in turn was related to Mir Zafr of Kalu—with whose great-great-grandson, Nasir-i-Yazdani, I had stayed the previous night. Although this man was young he was a traditional Hazara chief. Like his relative Nasir-i-Yazdani, he had started out in Shura-e-tafaq, the party of the Hazara landlords after the Russian invasion, but like Nasir-i-Yazdani, his family had quickly realized their error and allied with Khalili. This had allowed them to be relatively well supplied with weapons from Peshawar and to retain both their power and their land. Most landlords who had not joined Khalili had been toppled by Iranian-sponsored village revolutions.64

  I was quicker without Babur and I covered seventy-seven kilometers in these two days. I entered Dahan-e-Siar Sang an hour after dark, under a light snowfall with the ice cracking under my feet and no moon to light the way. My stomach had gone and I had a hacking cough. The zipper on my jacket had jammed; one of my bootlaces had snapped; and the rice bag covering my backpack had fallen to pieces. I had bedbug bites and prickly heat; my nails were long; and my hair had not been cut in four months. At the door of the commander's house in Dahan-e-Siar Sang, I ran my filthy hands over my failure of a beard, my black eye, my blistered lips and peeling nose, and looked at my clothes, which had gone unwashed for three weeks. I could understand why the commander was not immediately keen for me to sleep on his floor.

  THE SOURCE OF THE KABUL RIVER

  The next day I climbed through bright snow to fourteen thousand feet to cross the last pass, the Unai, and then descended from its ridge for two hours. In the late afternoon, I reached a half-crumbled fortress with six octagonal towers and arrow slits in the shapes of long-tailed clubs and diamonds. An Afghan king had built this Siahak fort to protect Kabul and Ghazni from the Hazara and had appointed a Persian to command it. This had still been the frontier with the Hazara in 1998, when the Taliban finally broke through Siahak, killing 150 people on their way to Bamiyan. It was the frontier again now, manned by a garrison of Besuti Hazara under the solemn-looking commander of the marches, Muhammad Hussein Fahimi.

  Beyond the fortress were the four sacred springs that formed the source of the Kabul River, which I would now follow out of Afghanistan. I had seen the river on previous journeys. I had watched it flow through the narrow Sarobi Gorge, where the journalists were executed, and past the olive trees of Jalalabad, where Dr. Brydon staggered to safety. I had looked at it tumbling beneath the foliage of the Shisham and the Kikul trees and the tumult of mynah birds, beyond Peshawar in Pakistan. I had sat beside it at Attock, where its brown torrent ran into the green water of the Indus, and where the last Khwarezmian overlord of the Ghorids spurred his horse over the cliff to escape Genghis Khan, prompting Genghis to say, "Leave him. There is a father that a son must have." Here at the source, it was a slender bubbling slurry of gray effluent, lined with eggshells, potato peelings, onion skins, and engine oil—signs of Siahak's prosperity and proximity to Kabul. The willows on the banks were bare.

  That evening, the commander of the Hazara marches showed his status by laying out pills labeled Drotaverine, Mefanamic Acid, and Rowatex. He swallowed one of each before offering them around and everyone except me took a handful. Then he drank from a bottle that had a picture of a brain on one side and an oxen plow team on the other. It looked veterinary.

  At breakfast, he reminded me that I had reached the frontier of the Hazara state. "Now you are in the flatlands of Wardak. Beyond are the Tajik and the Pashtun-Taliban-al-Qaeda. This is the first place where the roads are clear all the way to Kabul. The difficulties you must have met so far were problems of snow and mountains. Now the landscape is flat. It is only seventy-one kilometers to Kabul. But the people are much more dangerous. Get in a car. You will be in Kabul in two hours, not two days. Do not walk."

  I said I had to finish the journey to Kabul on foot. I couldn't explain why I was determined to walk every step of the way. I agreed it would be stupid to be killed on the last night of nineteen months of walking. But I did not feel I could give up so close to my goal.

  "Is the problem money? We can give you money for a jeep..."

  Eventually and very reluctantly, he said good-bye and ordered two of his soldiers to accompany me to Maidan Shahr. My escorts were new to their jobs and far from their home villages. The older of them, Nasir, was seventeen and had just returned from six weeks in Tehran. His clean-shaven chin and his yellow-tinted aviator sunglasses were the legacy of this trip. Just outside Siahak we passed a girl who looked fourteen. She glanced at us as she was drawing water. "Shall we catch her and fuck her?" he asked. His friend laughed loudly. Nasir asked, "How do you say 'fuck' in English?" and repeated my answer over and over again, laughing more each time. In Iran, people had often wanted to talk about the beauty of Persian girls, but Afghans, like Pakistani villagers, had never discussed women with me.

  The soldiers led me to a small shrine dedicated to the Prophet's uncle, where I admired twenty black carp swimming in a small pool of the Kabul River. There was no snow on the ground and the day was very hot. Now that we had crossed the final mountain pass, the land was immediately and obviously richer. The Tajik men in the fields had beards much longer and thicker than any Hazara's. Their houses had long balconies, and double avenues of poplar and willow lined their irrigation ditches. The Takana bazaar was filled with birdsong from cages slung on all the eaves, above crates of oranges, jars of eggs, onions, and open sacks of grain. For the first time since Kamenj I saw orchards.

  Beyond Takana, ten kilometers into our walk, we were stopped by a local commander who recognized my escorts as Hazara. He told them they were beyond their frontier, had no right to walk here, and should turn back. I intervened and after an argument he waved us through, but I could see the young men were worried. Every ten minutes thereafter they asked why we couldn't get a car; they were walking more and more slowly, and at this pace we would never make it to Maidan Shahr before dark. Finally Nasir, the seventeen-year-old, said, "We were told to deliver you to Haji Ghulam Ahmed, but he is not in Maidan Shahr at all ... He is in Bamiyan. We can't continue."

  That they could not continue had been clear for some time. I sat them on the track beneath some plum trees, gave them some money and the Kendal Mint Cake a soldier had given me in Bamiyan, wrote a reference to their commander praising their courageous work, and sent them home. Twenty-five kilometers were left to Maidan Shahr.

  TALIBAN

  Wardak had been an early Taliban stronghold, and an ex-minister of the Taliban still commanded it.65 In the Tajik and Hazara areas where I had spent the past month, most people seemed to support the coalition bombardment. Here in Wardak, a Pashtun area, most people probably opposed it. I was very conscious of being alone and hardly noticed the landscape during the next half hour—although I should have found it beautiful. The sunlight, much softer here than in the high mountains, fell through clouds onto russet hills, uneven terraces, and close-packed orchards.

  At the next small bazaar, I entered the first Pashtun village. A group of young men standing outside a shop called me over. As I approached, they turned to face me, squaring their shoulders. One had a weapon in his hand. I felt a change in the pattern of my breathing.

  I greeted them formally: "Salaam aleikum" (Peace be with you). "Manda na Bashi" (May you not be tired).

  They did not reply to my gre
eting. A fat, bearded man in the center snapped in Dari, "Where are you going?"

  "Do you speak Dari?" I replied.

  "Yes," he said, confused.

  "Well, then, perhaps you did not hear me," I said. "Let me repeat myself. Salaam aleikum."

  Pause.

  "Waleikum Salaam" (And also with you), he replied.

  "Is your house well? Is your body strong? Manda na Bashi. May your family prosper. May you live long."

  He replied immediately this time. "My house is well. Is your house well? My body is strong. Is your body strong? Manda na Bashi. Long life to you."

  I smiled and solemnly shook his hand.

  But when I tried to withdraw my hand, he would not let go. One of the men took a step back as though uncertain what was going to happen.

  "What is this?" I asked sharply. "Why are you holding my hand?"

  "Because I wanted to bring you to my shop," he replied.

  "Release it."

  He did. I turned to the others, explaining that I was writing a history book and that I had walked from Herat. As they discussed this among themselves, I said a crisp good-bye and set off down the path, waiting all the time for the whistle, or shout or shot, that would call me back, but that in this case did not come.

  Ten minutes later, I heard someone run up behind me. He was a young man with a black turban and a rifle. I stopped. "I am a hafiz of the Koran," said the man by way of introduction.

  "I am a teacher of history," I said.

  The man looked at me and said, "Show me your gun."

  "I said I am a teacher ... Do you understand? ... Not a soldier ... I carry books, not a weapon." I tried to keep my voice slow, businesslike, and a little weary. Two of his friends came running to join us, one of them carrying a rifle. I realized I could not understand what they said to each other—I had just moved from a Dari-speaking area into a Pashto-speaking area, and I did not speak Pashto. But they spoke to me in Dari.