I told the Professor what I was planning, imagining he would thoroughly approve. After all, it was he who’d started me off, when he recited Ferdowsi’s satire all those months ago under the poet’s statue.
“Ha!” He lit up a Bahman and blew out a cumulus of unimpressed smoke. “You think you can turn up in Ghazni and inform these people their hero is the son of a whore?” His furrows were showing as he flashed his owl-like eyes. “Child, they are Afghans! They will tear you to pieces!”
PART FOUR
AFGHANISTAN
“And separation has kept on driving us to a remote destination, buffeted this way and that, in all possible directions.”
—ABU DULAF AL-KHAZRIJI, ODE OF THE BANU SASAN
11
The Adventures of Abbas
Herat. September.
Dawn at Herat’s cavernous terminal. One “Abbas,” with a thin beard, wearing shalwar qameez and a checkered turban, is pushing a bundle into the trunk of a 4X4. Unfortunately, the driver notices that Abbas’s eyes are hazel, his skin is fair, and his accent isn’t very Afghan, and announces his conclusion—“Foreigner!”—in a voice loud enough to raise a lynch mob.
“Take your luggage,” hisses Hassan-Gul.
He grabs my arm, guiding me down the aisle between the cars.
“You spoke! You spoke! Why did you speak? You have to understand, this cannot happen again. Never! How can I protect you if you speak?”
Shouts are looping through the air, mixed with air-horn honks and punctuated by the odd squelch when a sack of grapes falls off an overloaded roof rack. There is a sparkle as a flashlight swings in front of me, and for a breathless moment I think someone is going to shout “Foreigner!” But the light arcs away to shine on an old jalopy where there’s a kerfuffle over jumper cables. Hassan-Gul nudges me into the front passenger seat of a Corolla, having dealt this time with the inquiries himself, and once our bundles are in the trunk he squeezes in beside me, tossing a greeting to the passengers in the back. Fists are gesticulating in the windshield mime-shows around us, engines buzzing like we’re in a hive that’s just waking up.
Traveling in Afghanistan makes one think a lot about death: both the risk to yourself and the regularity with which it’s visited on the locals. So it’s appropriate that the stony plain south of Herat is full of tombs—made of pebbles with masts wrapped in green Islamic cloths, occasionally encircled by a dry-stone wall to denote a popular Sufi, and guarded by a pollarded willow. The city is shrinking behind us but the mountains are growing. On one side pale and blue, they seem to float on a mist-shrouded lake; on the other, they are muscling across the vista, humpbacked and huge. We dive between them, snaking into the Paropamisus (literally the “peaks over which eagles cannot fly”), through a craggy gorge suited to banditry and sharpshooters.
At Shindand, we stop for breakfast. Bells tinkle on camels trotting beside a mud-brick wall, while an old man struggles to load a sack of roots onto the back of his donkey. Behind them is the Afghan version of a motorway diner. Long-bearded men sit around the teapots and aluminum spittoons, cross-legged on the carpeted tiers—except for one of them, who is slumped beside his prosthetic leg. A thigh of meat is swinging behind them, in front of a wall-hanging of the Ka’aba of Mecca, dripping its juice onto a fringe of rug. As we settle onto the top tier, a drop splashes onto the shoulder of Hassan-Gul’s blazer. Although he’s dispensed with his polished black brogues (replacing them with a pair of rubber sandals) and has left his signet ring in Herat, that doesn’t mean his standards have slipped. He twists his neck to see the blemish, wrinkling his nose at it, and tweezers out the spotted handkerchief from his top pocket to rub it away.
The men on the tier below are asking him questions. If we’d been in Herat, I might have been able to scramble for an interpretation, but now we’re in the land of the Pashtuns, so it’s impossible. I wouldn’t go so far as the nineteenth-century British officers who called Pashto “the language that would be spoken in hell,” but it’s certainly less easy on the ear than Persian. It means that for most of the journey to Ghazni I will be effectively deaf, as well as dumb, depending on Hassan-Gul for interpretation.
“They said your skin is fair,” he tells me later, “but I informed them your father was a Nuristani.73 Thanks to God they did not ask any more questions, because I told them your father passed away, so they are all going to pray for his soul.”
I must have creased my brow or shown some other sign of confusion, because Hassan-Gul leans closer, pressing down on my shoulder.
“Don’t you remember, Mr. Nicholas? It was the story you decided at my father’s house.”
Of course! Yesterday evening, Hassan-Gul took me to meet his parents in a concrete box on the outskirts of Herat. His father was a great admirer of the last king, Zahir Shah, as well as his successor, President Daoud (who toppled Zahir in a coup in 1973), and after showing me his hunting rifle, he spoke fondly of that time.
“I say the time of Zahir Shah was a golden age,” he declared. “We had peace, work, the prices were low. In President Daoud’s time also—he was progressive. Benzes were imported, we had television, a railway was started. But the Communists killed Daoud and his family—they brought destruction; they are the cause of all the disaster.”
Although Hassan-Gul’s mother was fretting in the kitchen, his father talked about our impending journey with excitement and reminisced about a boyhood hunting trip to Kandahar.
“But you must have a story,” he said, gesturing for me to dip my hands into an enormous bowl of rice, bright with red radishes and cheese. “You must say you are on a pilgrimage.”
“Yes!” I replied. “We could say I am asking for my voice back.”
“But they will want to know how you lost it. You will say you are from the north, because most people you will meet have never been there. And tell them your house was destroyed in the war; that will pull their hearts! You understand? It must be something sad, so the hearts of the people turn toward you.”
While Hassan-Gul is narrating my new biography to our fellow tea-sippers in Shindand, I sign that I need the toilet. I’ve work to do.
Because of my disguise, I can’t write in my notebook. It’s not that I’m worried our fellow passengers will turn hostile if they work out I’m from a little farther away than Nuristan. But I do fear it being mentioned at a teahouse or in one of the towns where we stop. I’ve no idea how easy it might be for such information to slide its way to someone who’s hankering for one of the Taliban’s free motorbikes, and under the circumstances it seems like a good idea to be cautious. So I stroll to a scrub field behind the teahouse and squat in a dip—an Afghan spending a penny. Slumped over my lap, I scribble down the mnemonic word-strings I’ve been keeping in my head to help me remember the details from the journey so far:Sultan Mahmud Was a Greedy Motherfucker
(Stony plain, Masts, Willows, Gorge, Mountains)
and
Crazy Dippy Tourist Killed by Cunning Sniper
(Camels, Donkey, Teahouse with Ka’aba Carpet
and Spitoons).
Back by the jeep, Hassan-Gul is on the back end of a conversation with a man in a sheepskin coat.
“This man is a doctor,” he tells me. “He saw you in the teahouse and asked about your disability. He says you have a problem with your neurons.”
He is saying this for the man’s benefit, and also I think for our fellow passengers, since he adds a few words in Pashto. They look at us with empty expressions, but they are listening. The man bids goodbye, offering “God’s blessing” to us both as he steps toward his car. Opening the door of his Corolla, Hassan-Gul is shaking his head.
“We were also talking about the road,” he whispers, in English this time. “He has come from Ghazni and he says there are bandits. He says one in eight cars is being attacked.”
After Shindand, the journey becomes increasingly sinister. Standing beside a truck is a long-beard with a Kalashnikov. He doesn’t look like he has an official
function, but he conforms to a pattern in which every man we see is holding a shaft—a shepherd’s crook, a whip for goats, a Kalashnikov or a telescopic pole attached to a disk hovering inches off the ground. The latter are carried by men in blue protective suits, with ropes and trowels: a mine clearance team. Some are placing white painted rocks where an area has been cleared, while others are holding on to dogs on leashes.
The road is tarred, but terrible. We tack across it, driving sideways to avoid cracks, ruts, and pond-sized potholes, and sometimes we dive off altogether, to overtake a gaudily painted long-haul truck, jangling with chains to ward off the divs. North of Farah Rud, we pull to the side and stop. I watch Hassan-Gul pull our luggage out of the trunk, trying to work out why he is doing this, because there’s no sign of our destination anywhere in the vicinity. I can feel an unpleasant shifting in my stomach, a sense that this journey isn’t going to turn out quite as I anticipated.
“What are you doing?” I whisper.
“Abbas!”
He gives me a look of warning as the passengers in the backseat turn around. I’ve forgotten again: my lips should be sealed.
“I am taking the luggage,” he continues. “This car is going to Farah Rud. But we are going to Farah. It is a different place.”
He is already striding onto the wasteland. If I don’t follow him soon, he’ll contract into one of the pebbles with which it’s speckled.
“You aren’t? . . . Hassan-Gul, you can’t be! . . .”
What kind of lunatic is he? Heaving my pack behind me, I jog until I am alongside him and reconsider. It wasn’t Hassan-Gul who asked to come here.
Hovering over the horizon is a bulky gray mountain, the sort of place where ogre-kings live in fairy tales. Its peaks seem to watch over us, and as we wander on in silence I imagine them whispering about what they might do to us.
“Mr. Nicholas,” says Hassan-Gul, “if we meet anyone, you must be sure to be quiet.”
I gesture toward the mountain—between us there isn’t a sign of a single living creature:
“Who are we going to meet?”
The answer comes an hour later, when the silence is broken by the rumble of a tractor engine. It’s half a mile away, but Hassan-Gul races across the plain until he’s flagged it down. How much we will pay is less a concern to the driver than whether we are carrying any weapons.
This is the snail’s pace of transport, complete with the slug’s trail of the herringbone pattern printed by the tires in the sand. What it lacks in speed, though, it more than makes up for in the opportunity to see the world around us. Men are squatting in the shade of their domed mud-brick houses or sitting on wooden bedsteads hooded by burlap canopies. Many of them are nursing cups of tea, but I spot a couple with flutes of rolled-up paper in their hands. They hold these to their mouths, leaning over a paraffin stove in the lee of a hut: opium smokers. A castle rises alongside us, bursting with round towers and frilled with battlements, light seeping through a gash in its curtain wall, and as we roll on, the driver starts whistling. I want to ask why he’s driving a tractor across the wasteland, but since I can’t speak, I concentrate instead on imagining what I would think if I were an alien.
Imagine: You’re from some distant galaxy and you’ve crash-landed on the Afghan plains. What would be your first impression? The modern traveler is saddled with so much psychological baggage that it’s difficult not to see potential death everywhere you look. Ordinary men become terror-in-a-turban because their beards are long and their headwear black; a motorbike is morphed from a practical way of crossing the dunes into Taliban ahoy! Even the mastiffs prowling in the ditches look fearsome, and they don’t sound any better. But for an alien, unprejudiced by extra meaning, I wonder if they would find Afghanistan any more frightening than if he were to land instead on Clapham High Street.
Nervous of the motorbike men and their Taliban-length beards, I wrap my turban tight around my face, which at least keeps out the dust. Men holding shafts—farming hoes and sickles, occasionally Kalashnikovs—peer at us from the plains, their guarded expressions burned onto my brain as we jitter over a dry riverbed where an old shepherd is coaxing his flock. Behind him are domed houses and high-walled homesteads, which grow more abundant until there are hundreds of them. A policeman is directing the traffic from a roundabout, chickens are squawking in their plastic yellow cages, and pomegranates are tumbling out of a handcart. They reappear, as flattened skins, on the tires of the tractor, their juices dribbling between the grooves. We have reached Farah.
Like most of his neighbors, Hassan-Gul’s friend Nasrullah lives in a fort—a house on stilts surrounded by a mud wall and barred by a metal gate, with an army of chickens charging around the yard, pecking at your fingers if you step too close. Nasrullah was a mujahid in the war against the Soviets, and with his broad, bearlike frame, it is easy to imagine him in warrior mode. But he has a softer side, signified by a red cardboard heart glued to his gate. Not that this allows for any contact between the women of the house and the foreign guest. When light footsteps sound outside, and his wife or daughter (her chador is too tightly wrapped to distinguish which) stands before us with a tray and a cloth full of bread, he takes it off her before I can offer a salaam and sends her away with a flick of the hand.
“You are looking very tired, Mr. Nicholas,” says Hassan-Gul. “You must rest.”
“Actually, I’d quite like to have a look around,” I say, reaching forward to taste the bread. “Isn’t there a famous fort in Farah?”
“No, no, Mr. Nicholas!” Hassan-Gul edges toward me, carefully studying my dust-caked face. “Don’t you think he looks tired?” he exclaims to Nasrullah.
“Oh yes,” replies our host. “Guest! Be comfortable.”
I have no choice. The afternoon vanishes in the languor of the guest room, nudged along by regular offerings of tea. Having been informed of my exhaustion, I am starting to feel fatigue creeping up on me, and what little energy I have left is sucked away by the chief activity of the afternoon.
It centers on a paraffin stove. Nasrullah sets it in the middle of the guest room, kneeling over it like an acolyte at an altar. He breaks up a mud-colored tablet, impaling it on a stretched-out safety pin; while Hassan-Gul raises a needle that’s been burning on the stove. Smoke rises like incense, and they both lean forward, with flutes of rolled-up paper bound with sticky tape, to inhale the holy essence. Islam might have its place in Afghanistan—but this afternoon at Nasrullah’s, opium is the religion of the masses.
“Guest!”
Nasrullah addresses me by the name he’ll give me for the duration of my stay, making a cross of his fingers to signal his invitation. I lean forward, exhaling a bitter, rubbery-smelling miasma.
“Do you smoke opium?” he asks me.
“Not as a habit.”
“Don’t be afraid! In Sistan we smoke it all the time. That is why nothing is ever done!” He points to the tray of green tea he’s set between us. “Drink, or your throat becomes dry.”
His own voice is so raspy as to imply it’s already too late for him. I take the glass and glug. The rolled-up flute of paper passes into my hands and I can feel myself sinking, slowly and unstoppably, into dreams and the gentle hug of the bolster.
12
How to Walk Like an Afghan
Farah. September.
“You mustn’t talk about Ferdowsi—not in front of Nasrullah,” says Hassan-Gul, whispering over the stove in Nasrullah’s guest room.
The opium has run out, so now the stove is being used for a more humdrum purpose—to boil the tea.
“Why not?” I whisper back.
“Well, he is a Pashtun, of course—they are not the same as us! Their hearts never soar when you speak of the Shahnameh. They have their own heroes.”
Nasrullah has been out in the yard, deciding on which chicken is going to be slain for tonight’s supper, but his hearing is acute.
“What is this?” he exclaims, plodding back into the room. �
��Our guest doesn’t know about the Pashtuns?”
I’m pretty sure he isn’t offended—because he is speaking in Persian, for my benefit. He delivers a defiant snort, followed by the seventeenth-century verse of Khushal Khan Khattak, a warrior-poet who fought against the Mughals:The very name Pashtun spells honor and glory,
Lacking that honor what is the Afghan story?
From the beginning, the best way of acquiring that honor was by fighting. When the tenth-century scholar Biruni writes of the “Afghans” (a word related to the ancient Persian for “noisy”), he means the Pashtuns who lived in the mountains east of Ghazni: warrior tribespeople who burst into the area in the first century BCE.74 There were “Afghans” (i.e., Pashtuns) in Sultan Mahmud’s army as early as 1008, although that didn’t stop other Pashtuns from plundering the frontier district of the sultan’s empire and blackmailing merchant caravans returning from India. What with silks, furs, pearls and paper heading across the trade routes, it was as good a time and place as any to be a highway robber—and the Pashtuns were cornering the market. According to the court historian Utbi, they waylaid Mahmud’s troops on the way back from a campaign in India. So incensed was the sultan by their cheek that he marched against the Pashtuns, surrounded their mountain haunts, and “did terrible execution among them.” If they could trouble the best army in the region, then for a solitary traveler like Ferdowsi, this tribe of Butch Cassidys would have posed an even more serious threat.
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