We swung out of the drive and in behind another SUV, which shot off down the street ahead of us. Strings of ‘Bale’s and ‘Khob’s issued from Meetra and the engineer above a beeping from within the car that seemed to go on for blocks and blocks until I was about to ask if they could turn it off and it suddenly fell silent. What was it for? A diesel monitor? A bomb checker? I’ve no idea.
We seemed to be travelling in a variety of directions: around roundabouts, past enormous wedding palaces with dark green windows like sun-spoilt cellophane among new blocks of flats and huge frameworks, covered in material the colour of blue burqas, that awaited unveiling into the pink poppy palaces, those sponges with their strawberry jam filling that rise in the midst of the mud pies. Sometimes a tin dome – could it have been a small minaret, or was it an elaborate air vent for a septic tank in this city without a sewer? Gone too soon to work it out. And everywhere doors, doors, doors, doors. What are they hiding? What have they to hide? All walled off and secretive so that, in this city of engineers, insurgents attach themselves to building sites and, from high vantage points, open fire on gated communities from above, slaying foreigners, aid workers, women who work and, of course, their children. Helga is the indirect victim of an attack on the German Embassy and has had to find a new place to live. ‘It’s hard,’ she said. ‘The embassy insists on bank vault doors and razor wire all around wherever we live and so we have a space that is all door and two to a bedroom. The bathroom is bigger than the living area.’
‘Who did it?’ I asked.
‘Pakistanis,’ said Meetra, but Helga said, ‘Oh, they come in from Pakistan, that’s true. But we don’t know whether they’re Taliban or operatives for some other group bent on destabilisation. They get in with the building gangs on new projects and find themselves with a target: a foreign embassy, an aid agency, you name it. Some Aussies I know have locked themselves into a labyrinth somewhere with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label in a bolted glass cabinet with a hammer hanging underneath it and a sign saying “Break in case of emergency”.’
‘Guess it’s hard to be anonymous.’
‘Oh we manage, don’t we Meetra?’
And Meetra nodded, her Meetra smile sliding conspiratorially into its berth.
Past newly planted trees on median strips, so close together that soon one half of the road will be completely invisible from the other, we went, past building yards stacked with the forest wood of Tajikistan. Meetra talked to the engineer about the refugee problem in Australia. On this topic, I’ve heard what she has to say and penetrated her frustrations. It starts with the massacre of the Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan Province in 1998. Some Afghan Australians, including Meetra, begged the Australian government to bring Hazara refugees to Australia as a matter of priority. The government thought they were doing the right thing and started to bring Hazaras from Quetta in Pakistan, thinking that they were the refugees from Bamiyan – but they were the wrong people. Australia had no one in Quetta to vet the integrity of people wanting to seek asylum. When the Hazaras of Quetta heard that Australia was taking Hazaras by preference, they, whose home had been in Quetta for generations, put themselves forward. The Afghan Australians went to help them settle in, bringing clothing and money and moral support, only to find that the new arrivals didn’t speak the language of Bamiyan. At most, they only had a few words. Back the delegation went to the government with this problem of mistaken identity, but the government responded by using it as an excuse not to bring in Afghan refugees at all. And sub-sequently… the boat people and a chain of illegal arrivals – people of all sorts, but not the true victims of Bamiyan, who still languish without a voice in Pakistani camps. Australia, unable to admit a mistake, blows the trumpet of righteousness and poisons everyone against the people who brave it in boats, whoever they are and wherever they come from. Ironically, the queue jumpers came in, fully protected, by plane.
Back in Afghanistan, a decade later, things are improving for Hazaras. They are industrious and well-organised people, who, through their own efforts, have good representation in the Loya Jirga, their Shi’ite religion is represented by a cleric in the upper house, they own TV and radio stations, they have very good access to university study, they occupy influential and prestigious posts and make their presence felt as an active part of the emerging middle class.
Other minorities, like the Kuchi and the Panjshir Tajik, are suffering now, or so says Meetra in no uncertain terms. In Australia, people hear what she has to say and the tone in which she says it, and immediately they say she is prejudiced – and thus, out of good will, bad will is born. As for me, I sat and said nothing while Meetra talked to the engineer. I just picked out the words and the emphases in Dari that signified where Meetra had got to in her story – brave, strong, energetic Meetra, whose country this is and whose feelings are those shaped over an Afghan lifetime. Meetra the human being, who sees the burdens and picks them up, knowing herself to be brave and strong enough to carry them.
Past dirt parks in the roundabouts, where boys rode bikes and played ball and women sat in the rubble with their hands out begging, we drove. Through traffic blare and sirens and past billboards advertising educational institutions and mobile phones. Past rubble, wheelbarrows loaded with faggots, a petrol station covered in the dust of thousands of cars and a big monument to Massoud, topped with a small black dome and surrounded by photographs: Massoud smiling, Massoud thinking, Massoud praying, fine-faced, intelligent, liquid-eyed Massoud; we dashed and we halted. Goats and sheep of the Kuchi pushed their way across the road in front of us.
Out of Kabul and onto the green plateau rolling towards us from the high, snowy peaks, we saw road stalls selling freshly slaughtered sheep and goat carcases – occasionally a severed sheep or goat head, prosaic on the ground – and we saw stalls selling truck tyres: do they sell them for recycling into buckets, or are the tyre stacks a way of advertising mechanics at work? Behind the stacks in the fields, there were more palaces, some quite different from the big pink Karachi cakes in Kabul.
Some palaces have pitched roofs, bright as Kentucky Fried or Red Rooster outlets. They stand in the yards sending out messages of wealth and Westernisation, while inside there is probably not a single woman who doesn’t have to wear full burqa on the street, should she be lucky enough to make it out of doors. The husbands of these households are probably landlords receiving rent from the Kuchi who bring their animals to graze here during the summer months; the landlords may have been nomads once themselves and are now settled and own the land by government decree, or so the conversation goes. The land-owning Kuchi are the ones with education and organisational or exploitative talents. As the suppliers of Afghanistan’s meat, the Kuchi have seats set aside for them in the Loya Jirga. A push is on to register them, settle them and educate their children, but although they want their children educated, they are fiercely independent and love their way of life. They move in and move out: they stay until October or November in this area in Parwan and lower Panjshir and then go back to Pakistan, through Jalalabad and down to Karachi.
Around the growing town of Charika it was very green and very lush. Women worked waist-deep in the crops. New villages were going up by the road, the quality of the buildings was higher than in general in Kabul; there was proper glass in shop windows, but the shops were still very close to the road and would have to go if the road were ever widened. It could have been an untidy but quite prosperous suburban construction in Australia. The Afghan United Bank was operating on the ground floor of an airconditioned shopping mall. There were plenty of opportunities for cafes or restaurants but I saw none and there were very few women on the street. Those few who ventured out were burqa clad. Outside the home, as in Kabul, there are no places for women to socialise in public.
Highly decorated mopeds sped from here to there through the up-to-date cars of Europe and Japan, advertising their businesses. I can’t read the language or interpret the signs, although I’m learning to re
ad numbers from car plates. It’s easy, really: yak, do, say chahahr, panj…Panj? Panjshir – five milk? Butter, cream, cheese, yoghurt, milk? I would have asked Meetra, but she was busy talking about Charika, the area we were in, where a vast mosque stood in a field alone, waiting for the housing to catch up with it. Meetra explained that Charika was at the centre of the war between the Russians and the mujahedeen and had been completely destroyed. This morning, it looked in better shape than Kabul, although further along the road, we saw a cluster of abandoned and shot-out Russian tanks on the former battleground.
After Charika we began to see huge decorated trucks pulled over to the side of the road. These enormous beasts, like the caparisoned Bedford in which Eli first went to Afghanistan, aren’t permitted to run on the roads on Fridays. We soon came on a protest blockade, where we were bailed up for a number of minutes before being directed through the crush by police.
Waiting for the curfew to pass or the blockade to end, the drivers squatted on their haunches among their Metz, MAN, Mercedes, Kreiss, GE and Willi Betz V doubles and triples, amid scenes painted along the sides, mythical birds coiling their necks around cabins and front bumpers fringed with sheep bells and zigzag valances. People had been busy with tin cutters making elaborate perforations in side panels and spare-wheel covers and those wheel whisk holders whose brushes are like large false eyelashes. Peacocks and horses, silver stars and diamonds showed under red and blue and green tarpaulins. Above some truck cabins were high decorated prows, embossed with shields as if they were battleships of the ancient world. What comes into Afghanistan on these? Goods, I suppose, returning people and fuel? One day it might be meat, doing the Kuchi out of their way of life.
As we climbed from the plateau and began our ascent of the Hindu Kush, we crossed a fast-running stream with high banks and entered the mudbrick and shipping-crate shop territory familiar from along the roadsides of Kabul. There were samovars and petrol for sale in a very damaged village, its houses shelled out and broken. A factory run by the government that once exported high-grade cement had been wiped out here: Pakistani insurgents of the type who shot up the German embassy came in and sabotaged the factory, looted it and took the equipment to Pakistan. ‘And now they sell it back to Afghans,’ said Meetra, turning up her palm.
A young woman walked by in a burqa, her spring skirt billowing out in front of her, and behind her came an ice-cream vendor pushing his little red boot-shaped wagon, playing the ubiquitous happy birthday and lullaby songs. There were nomads’ sheep and tents on high, rocky ground, dominated by a bombed-out shelter, stacked with sandbags – does someone live there now, or are there still gun muzzles nestling down behind the barrier?
New building was going on, a mosque and a huge school and a field fluttering with green flags that marked the many, many graves of the men, women and children who’d been killed fighting Massoud’s war or just getting in the way of it.
Engineer Asraf comes from Nangahar Province and he began to voice his distaste for Massoud. He called him selfish and egoistic. Meetra translated. ‘He caused a lot of instability, the engineer Asraf thinks, bu-ut,’ she continued, thrusting her proud Tajik profile high, ‘he was a national visionary. Engineer says all he brought was for the betterment of Panjshiri. He was Tajik Panjshiri – Panjshiri people are Tajik. So he did a lot and still helps the people; they are enjoying what he left for them. Engineer Asraf thinks that he was selfish like all warlords; he was selfish, a self-determined person. He didn’t want to move from what he was thinking.’
‘So he was very stubborn,’ said I to the Tajik Meetra.
‘He was very stubborn man.’ Meetra’s chin was getting higher. ‘He had made up his mind about something and wasn’t prepared to change his mind.’
‘Should he have?’ I asked.
‘Well, most warlords are like that.’
‘So really, they’re fighting for the survival of their group…’
‘No. He was fighting for the country. He didn’t want Afghanistan to be a part of anyone. The Russians were not supporting him.’
‘Because he was a nationalist?’
She drops her voice. ‘Then they started to have a good relation.’
‘Yes,’ said the engineer, who must have been listening and understanding the gist of our talk, and he said yes as if to say, You see, Massoud was a bastard after all. I wasn’t sure whether this meant that Massoud had actually courted or been courted by the Russians at some stage, but I didn’t get a chance to ask.
There was a wedding going on around the car. No bride in sight but a car decked out in red and white flowers and four men, obviously of the wedding party, walking briskly towards it…
Helga broke in. ‘He had good relationship with France.’
And Meetra. ‘Yeah. The best relation that he had was with France. And during his relationship he sold emeralds from Panjshir, exchanged it with guns and arms from France.’
Helga said, ‘He had a talk in the European parliament. They invited him to come. He actually announced the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center a few weeks before 9/11 and he asked for help, asking Europe because there would be very bad attacks. And then he died himself two days before the attacks.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘People posing as photographers and journalists killed him. They asked for an interview with him and blew him up at his hideout.’ But I wish I could have curbed my knowall tongue to elicit a response from Engineer Asraf, because this seemed like something very significant in Massoud’s defence.
‘We will see the hideout,’ said Meetra.
It was now very mountainous, a green grass and white rock-mosaic along the slopes that fell away quietly, surrendering themselves to the clear rushing water of the Panjshir River.
Awesome grey mountains rose in tiers; here and there, there were shell craters and war debris, the upturned cabin of a truck stuck out like a giant’s skull as if it summed up all the men who fell here, leaving the women and children to pine in the rocky landscape – or to die their own little flagless deaths.
On our side of the river, new trees started springing up and houses of better quality than those you see in Kabul climbed the gentler parts of the slopes. Across the river, an entire village that was ferociously razed has been left as a monument to speak for itself.
We were in a string of daytripping cars and I couldn’t tell if the car we’d been following was still in front or not. In fact, I’d forgotten what it looked like. There were fewer and fewer habitations and cars coming the other way. We had climbed very high. A few men passed us, carrying spades, and I marvelled again at the intense greenness of the grass.
At the tomb, Massoud lies under a slab of black granite surrounded by blood-red carpets of intricate design. Over his head a grey marble dome rises high with inscriptions all around the inside of the rim. Outside, a formal Islamic garden, austere, colonnaded in the same grey marble, might hold a thousand people at a time. The mausoleum occupies a copious plateau of its own, enfolded by grey mountain tops, a sombre, elegant and reverent place bespeaking a great martyr who died for a whole country. There is no ostentation here. Care and judgement have gone into the construction.
Even the Engineer Asraf walked slowly and appreciatively as, by silent agreement, we each wandered off on our own to think and photograph and wonder.
Massoud’s office, a small shabby pink building, hovers unassertively behind the mausoleum, left as it was the day he was assassinated. It will stay like that. We grouped with the rest of the party on the balcony outside the room where he worked while Abdullah, our driver, took our photographs, then we went downstairs to the back of the office and peeped in the windows of three black Mercedes cars parked end to end, as they were when the assassins arrived, in a modest sunken drive. The only ornamentation was an elaborate plastic tissue box between the front seats of the middle car with a tissue half out of it as ready to pull.
Yellow and orange graders stood idle in the act of smoothing a roadway up t
o the parapet around the edges of the park. An amphitheatre was under construction on a level below the mausoleum, its arms subtended by the tanks and armoured cars and field guns with which the war was fought.
Now we have left the tomb behind us and we are driving down a branch road edged with blossom and pollarded trees close beside a river with a rusted jeep chassis sticking out of it. They pull over among some parked motorbikes so I can take some photos and I’m clicking away through the car window, when someone from the first car walks up alongside and suddenly I’m looking into blue/ blue eyes. The Arnie Russell/Isobel Coretti cross and a voice is saying, ‘Hello Sibella.’
‘Eli!’
‘What I said?’ says Meetra.
‘Eli!’
‘Meet you down at the hideout.’ There are tears on his cheeks. He wipes them away with the back of his hand, his fine-boned, taper-fingered hand and he runs it down my cheek and kisses me.
‘Eli!’
‘Bah!’ says Meetra, and for good measure, ‘Hoh!’
But he is already up by the other car, giving me a baby wave as he climbs in.
How beautiful is the world! Although I saw the people from the first car at the tomb, I’d forgotten with all the looking that we were in a convoy. ‘Was he in there all the time?’ I ask Meetra.
Window Gods Page 33
