Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard

by Nicholas Jubber

  Close to Lashkar Gah now, dust clouds are veiling the landscape, sometimes drifting apart to reveal fields of shriveled crops and the long-beards in black turbans riding motorbikes between them. They might as well be riding the skeletons of Western aid workers, because I am convinced their steeds have all been earned through the Taliban method. Every ten minutes I am struck by the thought that if I say a decade of the rosary I will be okay, which gives me sufficient reprieve to scribble down:This Country Seriously Scares Me or: Trees, Courtyard houses, Shrines made from sticks and Stone Mounds pierced by green flags.

  We drive under a metal arch and past a machine-gun emplacement marking the boundary of Lashkar Gah.78 Donkeys plod through the sand beside us, while long-bearded men race past them, some with guns over their shoulders. But I start to forget about those sinister-looking men, their turbans and Kalashnikovs: because behind a plain filled with nomads’ tents—stitched pavilions of colored cloth surrounded by camels and tribesmen with waist-length beards—rises the mud-brick shell of Sultan Mahmud’s summer palace.

  The structure swelling in front of us looks like a giant beehive. Crumbling walls of sun-dried brick stretch behind it, pockmarked and sunk in pebbles and sand as if they’ve been sucked into the ground.

  “It is beautiful, no?” says Hassan-Gul.

  “Yes! Oh yes . . . ”

  I would say more, but I button up after a glance from Haq, who’s watching us from the car. For the first time I can see him frowning at me, looking at me more carefully than before. I throw my shoulders back and take several giant strides, mimicking Hassan-Gul until we’re far enough away to lose ourselves in the wonders around us.

  It’s like an army of beasts rising out of the sand, with their mouths as the arched doorways, gaping in front of the mounds of risen earth as if they are fighting over who will get to gobble them up. Sometimes the walls cave in, sometimes they soar two stories high, with blind keyhole-shaped windows and lines of dog-tooth serrating the cornice. There are thick buttresses, swinging out like peg-ropes to pitch the walls to the sand, and huge stocky brick columns that make the pillars of Persepolis look as flimsy as reeds. This is the best available glimpse of Sultan Mahmud’s world—of a time when Helmand was the Balmoral of the region. I wonder what the Professor would think of it. He would probably say it’s not what it was, it could have been better preserved, it looks a lot more impressive in the books. But there would be a gleam in his eye as he crossed his arms behind his back and stomped about, acknowledging that yes it really is remarkable.

  There would have been a mosque and a bazaar behind us, a harem to the west and palace baths served by running water. Sultan Mahmud and his family came here on hunting-trips, bringing their cup-bearers and clowns to entertain them on the après-hunt. Beardless guardsmen in brocade robes with gold and silver maces would have flanked them, and there would have been a few of the sultan’s favorite vehicle—the fighter jet-cum-sports car of his era: his elephants. When they weren’t sticking their arrows into the backs of gazelles on Bost’s vast plains, the sultan and his boon-companions would have been sitting on elaborate barges on the Helmand River, hung with gorgeous Esfahani silks. Given Helmand’s current reputation as Afghanistan’s fiercest battle zone, it’s hard to see it as the setting for a sultan’s holiday home, but as I run my hands across these brittle walls, I think of Ferdowsi, imagining him exactly where I am now, his last major rest before Ghazni.

  It is here, as you take in this tiny glimpse of Sultan Mahmud’s court, that you realize how false the media comparison has been. In the run-up to Operation Enduring Freedom, every half-baked journalist rushed to brand the Taliban as “medieval.” Because of their book-burning and their misogyny and their rule that a man’s beard must be long enough to stick out of a fist. And sure, if you compare them to a medieval dynasty like the Ghaznavids, there are plenty of similarities. Both were Orthodox Sunnis and iconoclasts, as well as lovers of the hunt (the Taliban leader Mullah Omar liked fishing with dynamite and went on deer-hunting expeditions with Osama bin Laden, while Sultan Mahmud and his kinsmen preyed on gazelles). But what did the Taliban ever build? They tore things down, they didn’t raise them—the similarities they share with a dynasty like the Ghaznavids are vastly outweighed by the differences. Sure, the Ghaznavids could be grisly, but they had an appreciation for culture that puts the Taliban to shame. To call the Taliban “medieval” is an insult to medieval times.

  Figure 2. Ghaznavids and the Taliban 79

  Now most of this medieval world has disappeared: stolen or smashed up or swallowed by the sand, or in the case of the most precious of all the artifacts found here—the frescoes uncovered by a team of French archaeologists in the 1950s—destroyed by the mujahideen . In a mile-long soldiers’ bazaar excavated from the ruins in front of us, they revealed beardless Turkic guardsmen—4,000 of them in total—in brocaded tunics with jeweled daggers and feathered plumes. The frescoes lasted until the 1990s, one of Afghanistan’s many historical treasures to be destroyed by the recent fighting.80

  I can feel the air, dry and sticky, as we drive through a gateway and park beside a monumental horseshoe-shaped arch. Terracotta arabesques swirl across its surface where they haven’t been nibbled away by the wind, and among the strapwork and chevron patterns there are swastikas—suggesting the input of Hindu artisans culled from the Ghaznavids’ invasions of India.

  Shouldering over the arch is the fort—a giant mound crested by chambers and bastions. Oval niches inch into the crumbling flanks of the walls, where lamps could have been set, and at its back a round tower spirals more than a hundred feet down a pockmarked cavity, into the Helmand, which winds under the citadel’s rump like a moat.

  A man is standing by the banks of the river. He’s looking into the water, presumably to perform his ablutions before prayer. Then he does something surprising. He pulls off his shirt, undoes the drawstring of his trousers, slips out of them, and stands by the bank in his birthday suit. In a moment he’s disappeared. The surface of the river is rippling with bubbles; it breaks with a splash and out of it comes a head of black hair and a torso glossy with water, so his bark-like skin looks like it’s just been varnished.

  There is no one else on that side. But when I stroll back into the ward, Hassan-Gul is talking to the fort’s guardian. His face is patched with goatlike tufts of hair, which make me think of Mr. Tumnus, the gentle fawn in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Hassan-Gul introduces me as a Tajik—a Persian speaker (or, more precisely, a Persian listener, since I’m still dumb). The guardian smiles, taking hold of my arm and leading me back up the slope. In his free hand are a couple of coins and a clay stamp press.

  “These were made in the Ghaznavid time,” he says. “You can sell them on Chicken Street in Kabul. I ask only for 150 (about $3.50).”

  I take the stamp press and hand him some Afghani, but as he accepts the money, he holds onto my wrist.

  “Your skin is like milk,” he says.

  I notice a wrinkling above his eyes and become conscious that mine aren’t brown. I can feel the electricity between us, the sense he is working something out. But we are distracted by a noise behind us: a humming sound.

  A tractor.

  Three men are strolling into the keep, barefoot and long-gowned, one of them fiddling inside his robes. As they step closer, I see he is holding a Kalashnikov.

  What are they doing here?

  If I need to hide, the obvious place would be the fort. I climb back up the slope, trying to look as if I’m acting out of pure architectural curiosity—hmmm, interesting niche up there, on the inside of that half-collapsed wall, I wonder if that’s where they put their candles . . .

  “You wish to know about the fort?” says the guardian. To my surprise, he’s following me up the slope.

  I spread out my palms, tipping my head up and down—I feel for a moment like the mime-artist Marceau Marceau, transmatted off the streets of Paris.

  “It was built by Shah Anushirvan,”81
he says, “more than one and a half thousand years ago.”

  And why are they looking at us?

  “He was the Aryan king. In this time, all the people in Afghanistan were Aryan. It was before all the Turks came . . . ”

  Is it because they’re after a free motorbike?

  “ . . . The Ghaznavis and the Seljukis and the Mongols, all ruining our land. You know before they came, sir, you know all this land was green?”

  Or they’ve been sent here by the Taliban?

  “I heard President Karzai is digging wells. God willing, our land will become green again.”

  The man with the Kalashnikov has laid it on the ground. Which is reassuring. He is pointing at us, which is not.

  “You are a child of where?” asks the guardian.

  He is looking at me differently, looking through me as if he is seeing the real me behind the shalwar qameez. As if he is adding up the facts: the color of my eyes, my skin, my inability to talk.

  “You are not from here,” he says.

  My hand drops and he steps away, the crunch of his footsteps ominous in the sand.

  Behind the arch, Hassan-Gul is standing by the car, deep in conversation with Haq. At least, I thought it was a conversation. From Haq’s jerking arms and the submissively outspread hands of Hassan-Gul, I realize now it’s an argument. And I have a sickly feeling I know what it’s about.

  “Abbas!” shouts Hassan-Gul.

  Haq is behind the wheel and the engine is growling. He’s driving off without us! I start moving toward the car, but I’m blocked. The men from the tractor are coming toward me. One of them is shouting, but I’ve no idea what he is saying.

  Haq is trying to drive while at the same time pushing Hassan-Gul, who has muscled inside the door and is being dragged backward. It’s a mercy the car’s traction is being slowed down by the sand. One of the men repeats the question in Persian, but I’m not thinking quickly enough and my attention is distracted by the car. We are in the open air, but I feel like I’m in the most claustrophobic of caves, surrounded by thirty men, not three. I edge back, and one of the men steps toward me. I can feel my turban slipping. I try to shift it into place, but he grips the end and it comes away from my head, unwinding as it falls.

  I see this moment as if I’m watching it from outside: the turban spiraling on its descent, me stooping to pick it up. A look passes between the men, and I can imagine the anxious expression tightening across my face. I see the car, Hassan-Gul straining to keep inside the door, Haq pointing. Now I can follow the direction of his finger to see who he’s pointing at: me. A burst of sound, and I can hear the word he’s repeating, over and over again. It’s unmistakable, its meaning registered in the eyes of the men surrounding me—the one word that frightens me more than any other:

  “Foreigner!”

  I run. I leap between two of the men and race to the car.

  “Get in,” exclaims Hassan-Gul, throwing open a door.

  The men are a couple of yards from the car, peering through the window. Hassan-Gul speaks sharply to Haq, who is still glaring at the dashboard. They are nearly against us, they could reach out and yank open the doors.

  Then they step back. An arm is flung across their chests like a cordon, and at its end stands the guardian. There is a kindness in his eyes, gleaming through the windshield as we reverse out of the gate. We turn around, skidding back through the sand to Sultan Mahmud’s palace, and there Haq stops, smacking his head against the wheel.

  “What’s he saying?” I whisper—there’s no point in acting dumb anymore.

  No one answers. In fact, no one speaks until we are past Lashkar Gah, driving along the desert back to Girishk, with only the sound of Haq’s lentil-cracking to break the silence between us.

  “He wanted to leave us there,” says Hassan-Gul eventually. “He was very angry. He said he would be safer if he went back on his own. But he couldn’t leave us.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because how was it possible when I was standing in the door?”

  I remember wheat and barley fields, a cemetery where Afghan flags wave over mounds of stones, the long, fractured, crater-filled roads and the slow accumulation of city detail—auto-rickshaws, pony traps, clusters of iron rods poking out of apartment blocks peppered with bulletholes, buildings with signs advertising “rehabilitation program,” and the onion domes of silver-nosed Ahmad Shah Durrani’s mausoleum. We have reached Kandahar. After the tension of Helmand, arriving here, in the former Taliban capital, there is the atmosphere of a relative haven. A very relative haven.

  A rush of sound—horses’ hooves, the vroom of rickshaws, a smelder’s whirring. Vendors cry for custom outside the Nur Jahan Hotel, named after the wife of a Mughal king. I pay Haq and offer my hand.

  “Thank you,” I say, “and . . . sorry.”

  He’s about to get back in the car. He turns toward me, pulling himself up to his full height, looks me squarely in the eyes, then, to my surprise, says something in Persian:

  “Khoshal Shodam”—I became happy. More loosely: “I’m glad we met.”

  Until Bost, nervous of him working me out, I avoided eye contact with him; since Bost, angry at the danger to which I’ve exposed him, he has been avoiding eye contact with me. Here, for only the second time—and the last—we share a smile.

  PART FIVE

  IRAN

  “The season of drinking and kissing and hugging has come again . . . O saqi, open the door of the wineshop for me . . . ”

  —AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI, A JUG OF LOVE

  14

  The Bird in the Coffee Cup

  Tehran. August.

  “Tahmineh!”

  Khanom was getting no response, so she marched into the corridor, rapping on her daughter’s door. Over in the sitting room, Sina and the Professor shrugged. It was par for the course these days: I’d come back from Central Asia three weeks earlier, and not once had Tahmineh turned up for supper when she was summoned.

  “Well,” announced the Professor, “if madame insists on making us wait, we must find something to do with our time!”

  He opened up his green-jacketed copy of the Shahnameh and turned to the back. Over the past few months, I had read many passages with him. Snake-shouldered Zahhak had gobbled up the brains of the Iranian youth. The armies of Iran and Turan had clashed their maces, with Rostam in the goriest patch of the fray. Siyavash’s throat had been slit and his widow had scratched her cheeks in grief. Alexander the Great had filled the Persian battlefields with headless trunks and seized “the crown of shahs.” And the Sassanian dynasty—inventors of backgammon, the banker’s check, and the squinch—had loosened their grip on power, leading to their final defeat by the camel-riding army of Islam’s first holy warriors. This climactic event—“the catastrophe,” as the Professor called it—was the focus of our reading tonight, as we waited for Tahmineh to come out to supper.

  It begins with a catfight. The commander of the Persians sniffs at the Arabs for “drinking camels’ milk and eating lizards.” Well, what about you lot, retorts the Arab general: “You call yourselves men, but instead you appear / In colors and shapes such as women might wear.”

  Which are pretty much the same accusations Iranians and Arabs have been leveling at each other ever since.

  The battle at Qadisiya was arguably the most significant three days in Iranian history. Outnumbered four to one, the Arabs blinded the Persian elephants with their arrows, causing them to run back into their own lines. The fate of the Persian army—and their empire—was sealed. It was a turning point even more significant to Iranian history than the Battle of Hastings is to Britain.82 It changed the religion, language, and system of government, and destroyed the symbol of national identity—the shah—for several centuries. The poet Nader Naderpour compared this earlier “Islamic Revolution” to the events of 1979, arguing that both shattered Iran’s integrity. It also resonated in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, which Saddam Hussein declared “a new Qadisiy
a,” building a pair of triumphal arches in which his hands were linked with the crossed swords of the Arab general, Sa’ad bin Wakkas. For many Iranians, the mere mention of Qadisiya sends a shiver up the spine. Far more than just another historical event, it’s remembered as a national calamity, the effects of which are still being felt.

  In the aftermath of the battle, the last shah, Yazdagird III, flees to the city of Marv and hides in a mill. But the miller stabs him with a dirk and flings his body into the river. “Well done, / Thou crooked-back sky!” exclaims Ferdowsi. It’s as if, stricken by the calamities he is describing, he’s gone mad with grief. He can think of only one consolation: All men who are pious and prudent will praise

  My name when I’m gone in the far-future-days.

  For so I shall live as my word’s seed extends

  All over the earth and my fame never ends.

  There was a thud as the Professor let 1,500 pages drop. The expression on his face—his furrows stretched and his brow creased, his owl-like eyes flashing with anger—was just as I imagine Ferdowsi’s to have been when he composed those lines a thousand years ago.

  “So now,” said the Professor, “you know the story of our people.”

  He pushed the green-backed volume across the table. “It is for you,” he said.

  “Really?” I was stunned. “Oh, but I can’t! It’s . . . well, it’s just too kind. I don’t think I can accept it . . . can I?”

  “Of course you can!” said the Professor. “Now take it with you and may God help you in that dreadful place.”