Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  “You see where the fields are now,” he says, “there used to be water. People could only get to the castle by boat.”

  “What happened to it?” I ask.

  “It dried up.” He sighs as Hassan-Gul translates his words. “In the past this land was green, but now look—it is dying.”

  Like the thirsting deserts of Central Asia, it is this—more than war and dodgy governments—that’s having the most devastating effect: the cruelty of nature as the water recedes from the land.

  We have now been in Farah for three days and it’s time to move on. On our last night, I’m eating supper with Nasrullah in the guest room when Hassan-Gul bursts in, panting.

  “I have found a driver for tomorrow,” he announces.

  Tomorrow! The most dangerous journey so far—when we will attempt to make it to Sultan Mahmud’s summer palace. But this is no lush, idyllic paradise. It’s deep in the Helmand region, near its principal city, Lashkar Gah, which half the people I talked to in Herat labeled the “Taliban capital.” The other half said it’s where most of the opium is sold.

  “He will take us to Helmand and on to Kandahar,” explains Hassan-Gul. “But he is worried Lashkar Gah is too difficult. He wants to check the situation when we arrive at Girishk.”

  “He’s worried about taking a foreigner?” I ask.

  “Of course, Mr. Nicholas! Of course he is worried about taking a foreigner! You understand this place we are going to? There are warlords and drug chiefs and many people with evil in their hearts. Farah is a garden and we want to enter a pit of poisonous snakes!”

  We are eating lamb’s fat stew and rice—it will be our last decent meal for a while. Some of the flecks fall out of Hassan-Gul’s hand. I look at him but he won’t meet my eye. He picks up the flecks one at a time, being especially fastidious when they land on his blazer, and makes a pile on the tray.

  “But I must tell you,” he continues, “the driver, he is not very worried. As far as he knows, Mr. Nicholas, you are not a foreigner.”

  I remember the man who thought I was a Taliban agent and Reza at the fort—one deciding I’m a Pakistani, the other an American. They might not have established my exact identity, but my disguise can hardly be said to have been a roaring success.

  “He’ll work it out,” I protest, “especially if we’re his only passengers.”

  “Well, he told me he will not take any foreigners, so you will have to be Mr. Abbas.”

  “What do you mean he won’t? . . . He’s not Taliban, is he?”

  “In this area it is hard to tell. But probably it is because he knows it is dangerous to be with a foreigner.”

  In that case, I feel I need to improve my Afghanness.

  “Too many people know I’m a foreigner,” I say. “Am I not wearing my turban properly?”

  “No, the clothes are fine,” replies Hassan-Gul. “The problem, Mr. Nicholas, is you. You do not walk like an Afghan.”

  “Walk? How am I supposed to walk like an Afghan?”

  “In a straight line, for example, and you should take bigger steps. Foreigners look at the floor and their steps are always short. When I look at them, sometimes I think there is a cloud in their minds and they don’t know which direction to take.”

  For epic heroes, putting on a disguise was never this complicated. Rostam might have been eight times the height of a normal man, but in the Shahnameh all he had to do was don the enemy’s clobber and he could steal into their camp. It wasn’t much harder in Ferdowsi’s time, when the great physician Ibn Sina disguised himself as a Sufi dervish to steal out of prison. But for me, disguise requires more than just the costume: I need the body language too.

  When Hassan-Gul walks, it’s with long, regular paces: Perhaps he was a panther in a previous life. Now, as I watch him marching across the room, I’m trying to mimic his movements.

  “Yes, congratulations! That’s right!”

  Nasrullah is clapping at me from the doorway, cheering me on as I point my chin to the ceiling, push back my shoulders as far as they will go, and make large, purposeful strides.

  “You became an Afghan!” he exclaims, laughing.

  “Now,” says Hassan-Gul, “all you must do is practice.”

  The oil lamp is flickering, an hour or so later, as I sit on the carpet scribbling in my notebook. Usually I jot down the main events of the day and try to remember all the little details. But tonight I’m blocked by anxiety. All I can think about is what lies ahead, and my entry is full of doubts about my purpose. Up until now, I’ve been faintly aware there is something ridiculous about what I’m doing—but only faintly. I’ve been in thrall to Ferdowsi’s world. It’s as if I could hear his voice all around me, urging me on. I’m in a land of big gestures—a romantic, impractical, extraordinary land—where a great poet, rather than accepting a significant but unsatisfactory payment, tossed it away and scribbled a furious satire against the sultan. To feel I’ve fully immersed myself in Ferdowsi’s world, I need a big gesture of my own—and traveling in the poet’s footsteps is the only one I’m capable of.

  But now, out of earshot of the Persian language, Ferdowsi seems more distant than ever. His voice has gone quiet for the first time since I flew to Tehran. Now, just two days away from the target of my quest—my Dark Tower or Emerald City—doubts are buzzing in my head like flies around a corpse.

  I step outside and light a cigarette on the stoop. A stray dog is having what sounds like an altercation with the wind, as tempestuous as the thoughts in my head. I try to block them out, peering into the shadows, tracing a figure who’s darting across the ground. The silhouette and the braided hair swinging behind her shoulders suggest a girl—one of Nasrullah’s daughters, I assume—on her way to the outhouse toilet. Tiptoeing back, she seems to stumble, the ground being rocky and uneven, stops and sees me and freezes. I press a hand on my chest; she bows her head. Then, as fast as a hunted deer, she is off.

  13

  A Holiday House in Helmand

  Farah. September.

  “Nicholas!” Hassan-Gul is whispering, in the tone of a jailor leading a convict to the gallows. “It is time.”

  It is, to be specific, twelve past four in the morning. A Corolla engine is buzzing outside Nasrullah’s gate, waiting for us to come out. I have one last task to perform before I join Hassan-Gul—I must say a final decade of the rosary, my third of the morning.

  Since coming to Afghanistan, all the religious beliefs knocked into me over five years at my monastic boarding school have burst back to the surface. I can’t go for half an hour without offering a “Hail Mary” and every time I hear an unexpected noise it inspires a “Glory Be.” Religion is like a branch you cling to when climbing up a mountain, and it makes the strength of religion around me all the more understandable. You need something to hold on to for fear that other - wise you’ll fall.

  The driver only speaks Pashto, so I can’t understand anything he says; still being mute, I can’t say anything back. He is in his mid-twenties, with a checkered turban over a cotton jacket. He asks Hassan-Gul something in Pashto, and after he’s replied, Hassan-Gul speaks to me in Persian.

  “He asks about your parents. I am saying how your father was killed by the Russians.”

  He speaks again to the driver, whose voice drops to a softer pitch when he replies.

  “He says that is sad,” explains Hassan-Gul.

  I catch the driver’s eye in the rearview mirror and exchange a fleeting smile, before I nervously look down. There is something strangely ironic about his name: Haq or “Truth.”

  The sun is breaking out of its hiding place to paint a golden halo around the castle we passed a few days ago. Apart from the odd oasis of trees, the land is a pebbled wasteland, like the dried-up aftermath of a volcanic eruption. This is the Desert of Death, named after the fate it’s dished out to the invading armies audacious enough to attempt a crossing, from Cyrus the Great to the Soviets.

  Haq has a bag of dry lentils, which he cracks be
tween his teeth, and for most of the morning this is the only noise I hear. The combination of official muteness and my anxiety isn’t exactly a great conversation prodder, but Hassan-Gul isn’t talking either—he stares out of the window, as if he’s been hypnotized by the sullen wasteland around us.

  A couple of hours in, we hit a metaled road and spin across a bridge spanning a flat, rocky valley as gray as the moon. To our right, the mountain sits behind a shroud of white sky that sucks all color and reduces it to an outline. To the left, it is closing in on us—craggy sinews and high muscular walls, with lumps of rock scattered around them like giant clots of blood.

  But nature’s hostility is less alarming than the increasingly regular toll booths, pulling us to a stop with a length of rope stretched across the road. The toll police might nominally claim government patronage; many of them, however, wear no uniform other than combat trousers and turbans, and they swing their Kalashnikovs with the casual confidence of men who haven’t been trained but know how to use them. Several times they peer into the Corolla and shoot questions at Haq.

  Once, there are two of them, neither in uniform. One is stocky and black-bearded; the other is thinner and has a sallow complexion, lit by the flame-colored henna in his hair and the kohl around his eyes. He dangles his Kalashnikov loosely over his shoulder, catching the sun on the raised edge of the gunmetal, and stares at us through glazed, empty eyes.

  The black-bearded officer is addressing Haq, who laughs. He speaks again. Hassan-Gul leans across and says something. This time there is no laughter. The henna-dyed officer rests his beard on the lip of the window, muttering to Haq. Hassan-Gul dips into the inside pocket of his blazer, counts out some banknotes, and hands them over. They are taken by the black-bearded officer, but when his colleague tries to snatch them, he pushes him away. The henna-dyed officer turns back to the car, exchanging an angry word with Haq, then reaches in and turns off the ignition. Haq tries to turn it on again, but his forearm is seized, as the officer’s glazed expression transforms with startling elasticity into a tiger’s snarl. He leans farther into the car, pricking my nose with the bitter smell of his addiction, and settles his angry expression on me.

  THIS MUST BE IT.

  He’s going to recognize I’m not an Afghan, demand a thousand dollars or some ridiculous sum, and when I can’t produce it he’ll shoot me.

  How lucky I am! No, really—how incredibly lucky! We’re being held up by the sort of brigands who would have accosted Ferdowsi when he came this way all those years ago. This, at least, is what I’m telling myself; it’s the only way I can think of to block out the sound of henna-hair’s Kalashnikov. . . . And opium has an honorable pedigree in this region, after all—it was recommended by Ibn Sina, as “the most powerful of the stupefacients.”76 And . . .

  But the sound of the Kalashnikov is too regular, too loud, too insistent . . .

  It’s actually not an unpleasant sound, a rhythmic beat against the driver’s door. If it weren’t for the circumstances, it would be quite musical, even soothing. Now it’s growing fainter, and I realize it is only knocking against the officer’s leg, because he’s being pulled back by his colleague, the percussion of his weapon drowned by the rumble of the engine. There is an outtake of breath in the front passenger seat. Hassan-Gul is smoothing down his blazer.

  We drive through Delaram—which amounts to a few houses and shops, though like many such places it merits capital letters and a large circle on my map. Lavishly decorated trucks pass us in convoys, with trees and streams painted on their gunwales, as if to distinguish themselves from the landscape around them. I’m always pleased when trucks are near: Traffic is a reasonable assurance against bandits, as are the mine-clearance teams working in the fields.

  I am feeling very nervous now. After the toll booth incident, every time I see another human being, I sink lower in my seat. The fact that more and more of them are wearing black turbans and riding on motorbikes, as the Taliban are famous for doing, isn’t exactly pushing down my heart rate. In fact, there is only one way to keep myself calm.

  Every so often, when the tension of the journey is especially thick, I pick up the green-jacketed copy of the Shahnameh. I’m not sure if it’s the discipline of translation or the content of the stories, but one way or another they distract me from my fear of the world outside the Corolla.

  Mostly I turn to stories about journeys. There is the tale of a knight called Giv, who sets out in search of Prince Kai Khusrau, the son of the slain hero Siyavash, and frets that his quest is like “throwing walnuts at a dome,” before eventually finding the prince and guiding him back to Iran. There is the leech Borzuy, who is sent off to India in search of the Elixir of Life, and instead comes across a book of fables much like the tales of Aesop. Best of all are the adventures of Rostam. It’s amazing what a sense of perspective can do for your fear—I might be worried about Taliban informers and Kalashnikov-wielding opium addicts, but at least I don’t have any dragons to deal with. Compared with Rostam, I’m in the comfort zone.

  THE TALE OF ROSTAM’S SEVEN COURSES

  The shah has been captured! The evil divs are holding him in the kingdom of Mazanderan and there is only one knight who can rescue him—Rostam. Saddling up his jet-bellied horse, known as the Rakhsh, he rides out to the cave where the king is held, bracing himself against a series of obstacles along the way.

  First there is a lion. Rostam has fallen asleep after feasting on a wild ass, but the Rakhsh does his work for him, bringing down its hooves on the lion’s head and tearing it to pieces. Next the hero must cross a desert where the heat is so intense it turns the birds to powder, before slicing off the head of a dragon. After all this activity, Rostam is feeling understandably weary, not to mention hungry, so when he spots a feast of roasted sheep, sweetmeats, and a bowl of wine, he settles down and tucks in. A fair maiden appears, but he works out she’s a witch and cleaves her with his blade.

  Now close to the stronghold of the divs, Rostam binds the local marchlord, slays a few of the local chieftains, and scatters the divs, before stepping inside a murky cave, where he finds the terrifying White Div—a gigantic pasty-faced monster with hair like a lion’s mane. They charge at each other, hacking and ripping “till all the ground was puddled with their blood”; but after lopping off a foot and one of its hands, Rostam raises the beast above his shoulders and dashes it to the ground, before stabbing it in the heart and plucking out its liver. The shah is now free, and the divs will never pose so great a threat again.

  At the edge of Delaram, we stop at a teahouse to check out the situation in Lashkar-Gah, the town where Sultan Mahmud’s summer palace is located. A black stove rumbles at the back and carpets stretch across raised tiers for us to sit on. Hassan-Gul orders tea and a bowl of fava beans, which we crush with a pestle and eat with soggy bread.

  A couple of men come over to our tier, apparently to ask where we’re from and if we have any news along the way—bandit incidents or gunfights. One of them, who has an alarming mass of thick black beard, looks at me several times and eventually addresses me, but Hassan-Gul steers him away, explaining I’m incapable of speech. I press a hand to my chest and bow my head—grateful for all the formal gestures that make it possible to communicate here, even if you’re mute.

  “They said the situation in Lashkar Gah is okay,” explains Hassan-Gul as we make our way back to the car. “Less than ten people have been killed there in the last few days.”

  The river Helmand is trickling beside us now, running toward the summer retreat of the Ghaznavid sultans. This is the country of Bost, where, according to the tenth-century Regions of the World, the “inhabitants are warlike.” Medieval guidebooks can be strangely resonant.

  But they also underline how badly the decline has set in. In Ferdowsi’s time, the geographer al-Maqdisi declared, “In all the countries of the earth which I have traveled through, I have never seen one superior to Bost in beauty, healthiness, abundance of provisions, dates, sweet-smelli
ng herbs and cultivated vegetables.” What is surrounding us now is a different world.

  It’s total desert—a vacuum of sand and pebbles where once or twice a car approaches, whipping up a dust cloud through which it takes several seconds for us to be able to see. A hamlet of mud farmsteads rises out of nowhere, though apparently with nothing to farm. In a few more weeks, Hassan-Gul later tells me, they will plant opium seeds here—the only crop resistant enough to thrive in this parched soil.77

  The absence of any other plant life is, visually, the greatest change this land has undergone since Ferdowsi was traveling here. It isn’t a modern phenomenon—it goes all the way back to the thirteenth century, to one of history’s most famous military sweeps—the invasion of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. “With one stroke,” wrote the contemporary historian Juvjaini, “a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert and the greater part of the living dead and their skin and bones crumbling dust.” The Afghans’ resilience worked against them: So hard were they to subdue that the Mongols tired of conventional tactics and destroyed their irrigation works.

  A century later, another conqueror came marching down from Central Asia—Tamerlane. Any chance the Afghans had of recovering from the Mongols was shattered: Not only did Tamerlane inflict his own damage on the region’s fragile water sources, but he wasn’t especially nice to the people either. When he left the town of Sabzawar, he probably thought he was being generous: After all, he hadn’t actually killed most of his prisoners. He’d just piled them on top of each other—a tower of prisoners—and cemented them together with bricks and mortar.

  Once at the center of East-West trade routes, Afghanistan was about to be wiped off the merchants’ maps. With the discovery of sea routes to India and China a few generations later, it would be consigned to its current position of commercial—if not political—obscurity. Ferdowsi, riding toward Ghazni with his freshly finished epic in the early eleventh century, was approaching the fulcrum of his world. For us, driving across Helmand, we aren’t just in a different era—we’re on a different planet.