Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  By the fourteenth century, the Pashtuns’ power had expanded. “They hold mountains and defiles and possess considerable strength,” wrote the traveler Ibn Battuta, “and are mostly highwaymen.” The introduction of firearms only increased their influence, enabling them to dominate their sedentary Persian-speaking neighbors. From the rise of Ahmad Shah Durrani75 in the eighteenth century, the Pashtuns have been the most powerful force in the country. They were so disruptive to the Raj that the British diplomat Sir Mortimer Durand divided them in two when he drew the borders between Afghanistan and India in 1893. It’s a division that is still being contested.

  “You know about Pashtunistan?” asks Nasrullah, spreading out a large map across the rug. “This should all be part of Afghanistan. All the Pashtuns want to be in Afghanistan, the ones in Pakistan included. And we should have more of Iran, and parts of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan too.”

  Hassan-Gul is standing behind him, windmilling a finger beside his head to indicate what he thinks of his friend’s idea.

  “Maybe Nasrullah has a heart like a lion,” he tells me later, “but his brain came out of a donkey. Afghanistan was always a Persian-speaking country—the kings of our country, even if their tribe was Pashto, the language of the court was always Persian. But in the 1950s President Daoud made the Pashtun issue for political reasons, so he could claim a passage to the sea, even though he always spoke Persian when he was with his family.”

  This is the Dari or Persian-speaking perspective, contradicting the Pashto point of view, as is the case in just about every matter of importance in Afghanistan. Nasrullah and Hassan-Gul might be friends but, like the country at large, there is no political subject on which they can find a common line.

  “Well,” says Nasrullah, finally conceding his territorial ambitions for the Pashtun empire might be a little bit excessive, “at the very minimum we should certainly have double what we have so far.”

  I am warming to Nasrullah. The idea that a country as troubled as Afghanistan could even consider extending its borders is insane, but it provokes plenty of laughter, which rolls on throughout the afternoon. At least—until Nasrullah’s war experiences come up, when the conversation takes a more somber turn.

  “We had to fight them,” he says—I have just asked about his experience as a mujahid. “Who will permit a foreigner to rule his country? But when we drove the Russians out, I put down my gun. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I wish I hadn’t fought.”

  “I thought you said you had to?”

  He looks at me, his calflike eyes gently probing. “When the Taliban came,” he says, “they accused me of being a mujahid and they came to my house—to punish me. But I wasn’t here. My brother was here and they beat him. They beat him very hard.”

  Hassan-Gul touches his friend’s shoulder, a terrible silence articulating what happened to his brother.

  Over the next couple of days, I get the easy job: hanging around with Nasrullah. Hassan-Gul, meanwhile, is scouring Farah for the needle in our haystack—someone who will actually be prepared to drive us to Helmand.

  Nasrullah’s friends live in gated mud-brick forts like his own, and their guest rooms are just as foggy. We cross our legs on the rugs, waiting for the rolled-up flute of paper to be passed, or a carved wooden pipe, or a beaker with a straw at the top. Nuggets the size of kidney beans are rubbed between our hosts’ fingers and stuck to the tips of red-hot wire, while everyone makes a point of offering me tea—“so your throat doesn’t become dry”—poured out of large metal pots and thick with sugar. The smell of the roasted poppies floats in the air and another portion of the afternoon is carried off with the swirls of smoke.

  Farah isn’t the first place I’ve come across opium—a few months ago, in the eastern Iranian region of Sistan, I met a self-styled traveling salesman who told me he was there to sell socks. For some reason he had an enormous supply of the brown stuff too, which he heated over a paraffin stove while reciting from a dog-eared copy of the Shahnameh. Since opium is one of the oldest things mentioned in this book, I suppose I could argue that it was all part of my research.

  It was known by the Sumerians as the “joy plant,” while the Babylonians mixed it with licorice, the Greeks crushed its pods in wine (Helen of Troy mixes one such cordial in the Odyssey, serving up an early form of laudanum), and the Roman doctor Galen made it an apothecary’s catch-all, encompassing headaches, deafness, epilepsy, asthma, and leprosy in its vast orbit of cures. As the Dark Ages descended and Europe fell into the sort of forgetfulness that opium can induce (but forgot opium too), it became a trading commodity in the Islamic caliphate, which was how Europe renewed its acquaintance, during the Crusades. The favor was returned a few centuries later, when the British showed the East how to get high on it. Men in Persia, India, and China fell into slumbers, and the British made a lot of money. Since then, opium has been connected in the Western imagination with the East, distributed by Fu Manchu gangsters, white slavers and—currently—Afghan warlords.

  Sitting on the floor of someone’s guest room, with Nasrullah beside me and the sickly sweet smell of the opium around us, I’m not exactly bombarded by chatter. But there are occasional attempts at conversation, some of which are provoked by curiosity about my origins.

  Much to my delight, a number of Nasrullah’s friends connect my fairer skin with Nuristan, the region to the northeast where Hassan-Gul has been saying I’m from. Someone else rubbishes this and insists I’m from Azerbaijan.

  “I met others like you,” he declares, talking of encounters on “business” in Iran (although Nasrullah later tells me this man has never been there—he was just trying to look sophisticated in front of the others).

  Whatever his reasons, it takes a good five minutes before I can wipe the smile off my face—for a few people, at least, I’m not immediately identifiable as a Westerner, which is surely a good thing! But I haven’t been congratulating myself for long when I’m brought back to earth by the bizarre attribution of another of Nasrullah’s friends.

  “He wants to know if you are from Pakistan,” explains Nasrullah. “It’s because your skin is soft. He thinks you are a Taliban agent.”

  Naturally, I should find this association alarming, but for some reason I’m feeling strangely detached from it all. . . .

  “You shouldn’t smoke this rubbish, you know!”

  A tall man with a waxed mustache and several gold teeth is standing over me, his large, leathery face scored by a frown.

  I don’t know how many rugs I’ve sat on, how many different paraffin stoves I’ve crouched beside, how many squeaking gates I’ve stepped through. But I remember Rishad’s, because the air is clear and books are piled against the walls.

  “Most people here have no interest in books,” he says sadly, stroking his mustache. “They say, ‘Why do we need books? We can learn our wisdom from the elders.’ But elders need to sleep, don’t they? Books you can read whenever you want!”

  He picks out a volume, drawing it gently off the shelf with a hand on each side of the cover. It’s the poetry of Rahman Baba, a seventeenth-century Sufi dervish who lived in Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan.

  “We call him the Nightingale,” says Rishad. “You know, when I meet Tajiks in Kabul (i.e., the Persian-speaking population), they tell me the Pashtuns have no poetry. But there are more than three hundred poems in this book! And we Pashtuns have no poetry?”

  As I sit, cross-legged on the carpet in front of him, it’s as if I’m still among the Persians: sitting on a rug, drinking tea, listening to poetry. Except the rug is a little more frayed, the tea a little less sweet, and the poetry a little harder to understand. Rishad may not represent all the Pashtuns, but I suspect from listening to him, and from the verses quoted by Nasrullah, that there is the same poetic spirit I enjoyed among the Persians.

  Even the ideas suggest a link. When Rishad reads out one of Rahman Baba’s most famous verses, in which he declares, “Humans are all a single body, / He who tortu
res another is wounding himself,” it recalls the medieval Persian poet Sa’di, who wrote a similar verse that currently adorns the lobby of the UN building in New York: “The people of the world are limbs from one body, sharing one essence. / When a single limb is oppressed, all the others suffer agony.” Given the ethnic fighting that’s torn this country apart, both poets are expressing an apposite idea.

  Rishad’s is a larger house than the others I’ve visited, with a mound of cement in the courtyard and an obstacle course of planks and buckets to negotiate before you reach the guest room. There’s still space for two pots of red geraniums, although I doubt they’re going to last very long, what with all the poles piled above them.

  “Please excuse all the mess,” he says as he leads us through. “I am having renovations.”

  In the early nineties, soon after the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan, he left the country and made a fortune for himself in China.

  “Now,” whispers Nasrullah (who is filling me in on Rishad’s status as one of the local “big men”), “he has seven houses in this district.”

  Before Rishad set off for China, he was a teacher. He lived in Kabul and taught Pashtun literature at the university. A gentle sigh creaks out of his mouth as he remembers this time, and I’m itching to learn more. Why would a man leave his country soon after the invaders had been expelled?

  A wife appears at the door with a tray: rice doused in sheep’s fat, with raisins and shredded carrot and a bottle of Pepsi. I’m surprised she isn’t wearing a burka—I can see part of her face. Her hair might be hidden, and her figure is lost in the shapelessness of her long black gown (the ends of which she has to grip between her teeth to hold the tray), but after the concealment elsewhere in Afghanistan, her appearance has an erotic intensity to it. She disappears behind all the clutter in the courtyard, but as I listen to the clanking of the planks and buckets she has to move among, I can understand why Nasrullah is stirring, his face slightly redder than usual, beside me.

  Sitting in such close proximity with Rishad, I feel comfortable enough to tell him where I am from (unlike some of Nasrullah’s other friends, he knew straight away I was a Westerner) and trust him not to go spreading it around town. He returns my trust, by telling me about his own personal experiences, and why he left Afghanistan after the Russians had been defeated.

  “You have to remember, I was in Kabul,” he says. “And at this time it was taken by the Northern Alliance. Well, it is okay if you are a Tajik, but I am a Pashtun; for me it was a dangerous place to be. One day they took me out of my car, they covered my eyes with a scarf, and on the way to the jail they beat me with the butts of their rifles. Before I was even in my cell, they had already broken my teeth.”

  He ended up in an underground pit at Kabul’s Northern Palace, just a couple of meters square, and stayed there for three months.

  “They tied my legs and hands with chains,” he says. “Occasionally they would give me boiled water with sugar and bread, but many times I would go for two whole days without anything to eat at all. They called me ‘Afghan ghol’ [or “ogre”]. It’s an insult; they are saying I am mindless! Ha! And the man who took me, you want to know what happened to him? Now he is a professor at Kabul University!”

  He takes a mouthful of rice in his hand and swallows it down.

  “So you see,” he mutters, “between Pashtuns and the Persian-speaking people here, there are many problems still.”

  Rishad has been so generous with his rice he might as well have shoveled it into my mouth, and a couple of Nasrullah’s other friends have offered food as well—so by the evening I’m finding it hard to raise an appetite. But Nasrullah has specially slaughtered one of his chickens: I can see by the droop in his calflike eyes (not to mention the grease and blood on his fingers) that he’ll be put out if I don’t put away.

  By the end of the meal we’re all bloated. Nasrullah calls it a night early, but Hassan-Gul and I stay up, smoking in the guest room (we’re only on cigarettes now—after Rishad’s ticking-off, I’ve decided to go cold turkey; my half-a-day addiction is over). It’s good to be able to speak in English again—the different languages have been making my head spin—and we lie on the floor, with bolsters under our heads, exchanging stories about our lives back home.

  “You don’t have a girlfriend?” asks Hassan-Gul.

  I tell him about a girl I stepped out with a few times in Tehran. We’d walk up Valiasr Street in the center of the city, occasionally stopping in a coffee shop and a couple of times we went to the theater, where thanks to the Iranian hospitality code (extended to foreigners in general) we were given some of the best seats in the house.

  “She was only interested in you because you’re a Westerner,” says Hassan-Gul.

  “Oh, thanks!”

  “It is true. Iranian women, they are interested only in money.”

  “Well, thanks for the vote of confidence!”

  “You know,” says Hassan-Gul, twisting round and propping himself up, “I once had an Iranian lover.”

  “Lover?” I wriggle closer: This sounds like a story I want to hear.

  “She was from Shiraz. Her lips, I am telling you, Mr. Nicholas, they were like the petals of a rose. It is true what they say: The daughters of Shiraz are the most beautiful girls in the world! We discovered each other in Mashhad; she was a student.”

  “What were you doing there?” I ask.

  Hassan-Gul nods solemnly, a streak of sadness crossing his face. “It was when the Taliban attacked my city,” he says, “a lot of people went to Mashhad at that time. You know, I was only eighteen years old.”

  He reaches out for his cigarettes and lights two in his mouth, then passes one of them across.

  “We did many nice things together,” he says. “We walked in Malek Abad park, we visited the shrine of Omar Khayyam and the Martyrs’ Cemetery. I wanted to marry her, but she said her family will not accept me because I am from Afghanistan. I said, ‘Well, mine will say you are sandwich-eaters!’ She laughed when I said that. She had a nice laugh.”

  As I listen to him, I want to reach out and give Hassan-Gul a consoling pat on the shoulder, to touch him somehow in the way you would with a friend. But my fingers are still greasy from the food—and I know better than to make a mess on his blazer. That would be a definite faux pas.

  “Goodnight,” he says a few moments later.

  I can hear the bark of a dog outside and the tinkle of water. Perhaps one of Nasrullah’s womenfolk is doing some washing-up. I fall asleep easily, imagining Hassan-Gul, in his polished black brogues and his shiny-buttoned blazer, strolling through Mashhad’s central park with the beautiful girl from Shiraz.

  “Be careful,” says Hassan-Gul, stepping cautiously beside me the next day. “There may still be mines here.”

  “Mines?” I gasp. “But we’re not in a military zone, are we? I mean, this place, it’s . . . medieval.”

  We have just crept inside the gateway of Farah’s principal landmark—the fort. From a distance, it looks like it’s made out of giant sponge fingers arranged in a ring. As we draw closer, they resolve themselves into stocky pillars of mud, melting into the ground and shoring up the barbican. I wipe the sweat off my forehead (the author of the medieval Regions of the World was right when he described Farah as “a town in the hot zone”) and point to the mounds ahead of us. With each step we take, it’s becoming increasingly clear they aren’t mounds at all.

  They’re tanks and armored personnel carriers. A dozen are clustered together like giant toads whose legs have been ripped off and their eyes gouged out. Their skin blistered, their side-skirts dribbling, their tracks and tires torn off and their gun turrets shattered, they are melting, slowly, under the firepower of the sun.

  There is more. At the back of the keep is a mud-brick hut, with a rusty rocket tripod on its roof. A sniper’s bandolier is dangling beside it, and as I spin around to the crumbling fortress walls behind, I realize this is just the tip of the iceberg. B
ullets of every shape and size, for assault rifles and mountain guns, some of them gathered in a mound, with a couple of bandoliers strewn among them; two hundred or so mortar shells, laid out in neat rows like fish at a market stall, their tail fins sticking under the noses of the row behind; and an enormous tube like a telescope, which I think is a mortar gun. There is enough ammunition here to supply an army.

  The reason for the artillery is introduced by a wisp of smoke and a cough. Out of the hut, wearing a tank operator’s helmet over his shalwar qameez and carrying a bent-out safety pin with resin on its tip, comes a man with droopy eyes and ankles so narrow they look like you could snap them with your fingers. First he offers a flurry of Pashto, then his hand, and finally his opium.

  “He thinks,” explains Hassan-Gul, “that you represent the Americans.”

  “What do you mean ‘represent’?”

  “The army.”

  “What?”

  Our new acquaintance is called Reza. His uncle was the mujahideen chief in Farah, and gave “those sons of dogs” (the Russians) a whole heap of trouble. Later he turned his arms against the Taliban but was outmaneuvered and forced to flee across the border, before being assassinated by the Iranian Secret Service—which sounds like a pretty standard career pattern for a regional mujahideen leader.

  Reza himself is a gentler sort of fellow. He shows us the Tower of the King’s Daughter, where a dozen clay columns rise out of a basin of weed-choked earth; points out the ancient army headquarters, where shards of pottery are scattered among the foundations; and leads us onto the northern ledge of the fort, where we look down into the stubble fields and grazing enclosures below.