The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  I stepped out. A three-inch window slid open in the gate. Words in Dari. A steel bolt slid, the door opened into a walled enclosure. Two men, both holding AKs, one with a 9-millimeter strapped to his thigh. Twenty feet later, another steel door. It buzzed, and I passed into a concrete room three feet square, facing another steel door, a man holding an AK watching me through a window. When the first door shut, the other one buzzed, and I slid into a world of Christmas lights and the warmth of Kabul’s parallel universe, a world of expat journalists and aid workers and diplomats drinking wine behind walls and guns.

  I FELT EXHAUSTED AND ANXIOUS. The Ariana flight had been two hours late, the plane an aged Boeing 727. It felt crazy coming to Afghanistan. The country was in turmoil, the Taliban regaining power every day; they were said to be encircling Kabul itself. And Ariana’s nickname was “Scariana.” It had a deliciously checkered history, and in college I’d read Robert Byron’s 1937 travel classic The Road to Oxiana, in which he’d written, “I’d left England in August with two hopes: one, to see the monuments of Persia; the other to reach this town,” this town being Mazar-i-Sharif. It was one of those names that stuck in my memory—exotic, far away, the epitome of romance. I’d wanted to get there ever since, and it lay in the north, traditionally anti-Taliban territory from which the assault after the September 11 attacks had been launched by the Northern Alliance with the help of the U.S.

  The flight itself didn’t scare me, although I’d heard nothing but horror stories from people who’d taken it. It was banned from flying into the European Union, and thus forbidden to most contractors and UN personnel even within the country. As the plane throttled up and the captain said over the PA system, “We wish you a pleasant flight to Kabul,” I hoped it would be as easy to get out of Afghanistan as it was to get in. There was no turning around, no turning back; in a way I felt like I was for the first time really keeping some macabre promise about traveling to meet danger. It was a short flight, a leaping of time and space, from the chaotic but warm swirl of India to the extreme hardness and violence of a medieval state in the throes of a war, India green and fertile at takeoff, Afghanistan pure unadulterated brown and snow-swept, serrated mountain ridges, all in two hours. As I settled into my room and its cozy bed with down comforter behind layers of walls and guns and razor wire in a city where lived men who would slit my throat in an instant, I was alone but not lonely, for the first time in a long time. My phone pinged; an incoming text from Delhi: “Don’t be sad. Be excited. You have adventure to find.”

  I had no idea what the future held for me. But I had a growing sense that I would know soon, and that it was this journey that was pointing me in the right direction. That clarity was in my power to have, and that I knew there was, in fact, an other side and I could get to it, find it.

  I WASN’T SURE what the security situation was in Kabul, whether it was safe to walk around or not. In Delhi I’d had dinner with a woman who worked for the UN, who’d said she was forbidden to walk anywhere in the city; she had to be driven to and from work. Only months ago the five-star Serena hotel was attacked, gunmen running amok, spraying bullets. Around the corner from my hotel, two Americans working for DHL had been gunned down.

  I taped my knife onto my right forearm with a slender piece of duct tape, the handle just protruding from my sleeve, grabbable, and walked out. Brightness of a cloudless blue sky, the high mountains of the Hindu Kush covered with snow surrounding the city. Choking smell from car exhaust and the diesel generators that lined the sidewalk of every storefront. Men wearing salwar kameezes, with keffiyehs around their necks; gnarled faces and beards, ancient-looking, as old and weathered and of the earth as trees, hills, mountains. Roadblocks. Brand-new green Toyota pickups carrying police with machine guns. I pieced together what I’d read about kidnappings: a car, always a car. Guns probably. Time: you had to be spotted, your location known, while the men and the cars and the guns came together. People were abducted from restaurants, from their cars at roadblocks or on routes they drove daily that had been scoped out over days. So I walked fast, crossing the street every hundred yards or so, switching, changing constantly. Kept my back to walls as much as possible. Walked against traffic in the street, so no car could overtake me from behind. I scanned constantly, like Nasirbhai. Plunged into the market of downtown Kabul, past ministries sheathed in high blast walls and razor wire, got nervous when I went into a store to buy an Afghan SIM card for my phone. The salesman had to copy my passport, fill out forms; the minutes ticked by. I stood in the corner opposite the door, my back to the walls, watching the door, my left side forward, my left hand by my right, with the knife. I figured there would be a gun; but I was worth more alive than dead, wouldn’t be expected to resist, and was likely dead if I was taken, anyway. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe it would never work, but I was ready, ready to explode in violence: a fast and hard kick to the knees to bring their hands down, a vicious slash across the face, and go. There could be no delay—that was the first rule of self-defense. The moment one or more men came close enough to touch me—and I knew I’d know by their eyes—the moment that I saw a weapon or that a hand reached for me, that was the moment to seize the initiative and strike, like two cocks coming together in a cockfight, like a rattler lunging the second its threat is in range. A bomb was another matter. Bombers liked crowds and crowded marketplaces. In that case, there wasn’t much to be done. Again, I just had to keep moving.

  Crowds filled the streets, mostly men, but women in blue burqas ambled by and every now and then a woman in blue jeans and headscarf. But there were no other westerners; I didn’t see a single one. In the throngs, among the storefronts selling cell phones and computers and office supplies, I could almost forget where I was. But the moment I looked up, a wall of brick and mud houses rose steeply up a hillside behind the road, a world without running water, power, or heat beyond coal-and wood-burning stoves. I walked for two hours; I wanted to stop and drink tea and sit and just watch, but I couldn’t. The city felt simmering, anxious, waiting, fingers on triggers everywhere.

  Christmas dawned bright and blue and cold, and that evening alone in my room I called home, watching my family open Christmas presents—a bundle of which I’d sent from India—through the wonders of the Internet. My computer’s camera wasn’t working, so, in a telling metaphor, I could see them and they couldn’t see me. I was there and I was not there; I felt part of the morning, got to ooh and ahh at the presents and laugh and shriek, but then with a push of a computer key I was gone, a world away, alone again, missing them and wondering and hoping that once that screen went black I wasn’t forgotten. And I knew that for all of my efforts to send gifts and call home and be there, I wasn’t, and that was no one’s fault but my own.

  THE NEXT MORNING I met Najeeb, a fixer meeting with a photographer in the hotel, and asked him about taking a bus across the Salang Pass and northern Afghanistan to Mazar. He wore a tweed sport jacket and slacks, looked like a professor. He thought a long time in silence. “I think it is possible,” he said, speaking slowly. “Maybe a seventy-five-percent chance you will be safe. But this is a serious question and I have to give you the right answer. The question is the driver. If you find the right one, who works for a good company, then they will guarantee your safety. If not, sometimes the driver will call their friends. And the Salang Pass is full of snow right now; last week people were stuck there for three days.”

  Najeeb had a friend, he said, who might be able to go with me, and an hour later Khalid Fazly showed up. He was young, twenty-five, with alert, bright green eyes, spoke perfect English, wore striped slacks and a long black peacoat. We drank tea outside in the cold under a warm winter sun, as Blackhawks and old Russian Mil helicopters clattered and thumped overhead.

  You should not have walked so long downtown, he said. “It is too long to escape attraction. A German was kidnapped one month ago from where you were.” In Afghanistan I was less a man than a big jewel, a glistening diamond, almost unimaginably valua
ble. “Don’t take any taxis,” he said. “The driver might call a friend and betray you.” Khalid said he’d ask around, suss out the safety, and get back to me. Which he did, a couple of hours later. “I think it’ll be no problem,” he said. He’d talked to a bus company, felt it was safe. But, he said, I had to get a salwar kameez, a local Afghan costume. I could not stand out. We’d leave in two days.

  MEANWHILE, I WAS CURIOUS about Ariana, so I called its president. And got through to his assistant, who scheduled a meeting the next morning, and I ended up in a labyrinth of security, totally lost. A soldier with green eyes flecked with gold led me down dirt roads, a canyon between concrete walls topped with coils of razor wire and sandbagged gun positions, to a dilapidated three-story concrete building painted a once-bright but fading blue. Guards frisked me and didn’t find the knife, now strapped to my leg, and I went through an unheated hallway staffed by an old man with a tattered blue notebook. Up three flights of stairs lay a doorway that said PRESIDENT.

  Inside, sofas full of waiting men in suits, carpets, warmth. A tall Afghan in a brown corduroy suit and an electric orange tie stood up, introduced himself. Mohammed Omar, the president’s assistant. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I tried your mobile many times. The appointment has to be postponed until eleven; President Karzai called and he could not refuse.”

  I hung around in the dust and cold outside for an hour, returned, and Mohammed ushered me into a spacious office with a big map of the world on one wall. Oriental carpets covered the floor. Moin Khan Wardak’s desk was the size of a car, covered in glass and piles of paper. Wardak wore a blue three-piece suit. He was big, burly, clean-shaven, with short-cropped black hair. A servant brought trays of raisins and almonds, cups of hot tea. The story of Ariana mirrored the story of Afghanistan. Once upon a time Kabul had been a city on the rise, and Ariana had been partners with Pan Am, beginning in the 1950s. It had a fleet of DC-3s, DC-9s, Boeing 727s, a big DC-10, routes to Paris, London, Frankfurt. But things turned ugly as civil war broke out and Ariana flights had a habit of being hit by rockets or crashing into mountains. The Northern Alliance captured a plane in Mazar and sold it to Iran. An insurance company grabbed a plane that had been hit by rocket fire. In 2000, to escape the Taliban, two brothers hijacked a 727 with 180 people aboard, which ended up in London, after stops in Tashkent and Moscow. The U.S. bombed three 727s and a Russian-made Antonov. By the end of the Taliban era, Ariana had no planes left. None. “We lost everything!” he said. India donated three aged Airbuses to restart the airline, and now Ariana had five Boeing 727s flying and one leased Airbus based and maintained in Germany, allowed to fly to the EU. The phone rang.

  “You are asking for five lakh and ten lakh; how much in dollars? If you kindly send me the invoice I will transfer the money, but you need to release the engine! I will pay, I promise!” He hung up, shook his head. “We have an aircraft stuck in Ankara and it needs an engine and we have a deal with Air India but they won’t release it!

  “Inshallah, we are growing day by day.” He’d been a pilot for twenty-four years, had flown with a beard “down to here,” he said, holding his hand by his chest, during the Taliban years. “There were no nav-aids in Afghanistan, not a single one. Now I have an instrument landing system in Kabul and runway lights in Kandahar.” Pilots had flown with handheld GPS units. Which was scary, considering Kabul was surrounded by 13,000-foot mountains. And even now, he admitted, “Kabul is a very dangerous airport, especially at night and in bad weather, and the runway is only 6,000 feet long.”

  I MET KHALID at 5:00 a.m. wearing a gray salwar kameez, a ratty ski cap, a keffiyeh wrapped around my neck, and I hadn’t shaved in three days. I felt like a clown, but Khalid was encouraging. “You don’t look like a foreigner,” he said. “You look like an Afghan!” The morning was still pitch black, freezing, stars sharp like strings of Christmas lights overhead. Most of Kabul had no power, nothing but dim shapes of mud and brick piled on top of each other, a world of shadows and darkness and, I imagined, huddled bodies inside. Three buses were waiting at a muddy parking lot in the darkness on the edge of the city, a vendor selling tea and bread in the glow of a kerosene lamp. Formless women in burqas. Men in flowing green robes and lamb’s-wool caps, and in leather jackets. For the first time in Afghanistan I felt hidden, safe. No one noticed me in the dark and in my clothing. And, I realized, out here, away from hotels and ministries, there were no gunmen, no barricades, and their absence felt safer.

  “One year ago,” Khalid said, as we stood drinking tea in the dark, “there were many women walking through town. Now, almost none. The security has gotten much worse.” The latest security bulletin, in fact, posted in my hotel was twenty pages long. Taliban were encircling the city from the south, east, and west, were infiltrating it, and had been spotted at the gates. The north, we both hoped, would be safe. But Khalid’s life was on the line here as much as mine, or more. When I asked him if he was nervous about his safety he said, “Only when I’m with you.” If we ran into trouble, after all, I’d probably be kidnapped. But he would be killed.

  We boarded and pulled away a few minutes after six, rolling and bumping through the dark, silent, and sleeping city. Paused at a checkpoint—big speed bumps, soldiers, guns—then picked up speed, the driver hurtling into the countryside, careening around corners, through a world of brown fields, brown mud walls, brown mud houses, toward the sharply rising wall of the jagged and snow-covered peaks of the Hindu Kush. A man walked up the aisle, handing out plastic vomit bags. The sun poked over the horizon, and the murmur of prayers echoed through the bus. Khalid passed his hands over his face. “I’ve prayed for a safe trip.”

  We hurtled around curves, hit the mountains, and started climbing. Up, up, and up again, the two-lane blacktop running alongside a river, as we headed toward the Salang Pass, a tunnel built by the Soviet Union in the 1960s at nearly 13,000 feet. Brown and barren, houses turned from mud to stone. Cubes of rock clinging to steep scree, a hard, cold, barren landscape that turned to snow quickly. At places, muddy, icy shoulders and vendors selling tire chains out of rusted shipping containers. Men and women coughed—the coal and wood stoves, the generators, the cold—everybody, it seemed, had a hacking cough. Then just snow—we could have been winding through the Rockies. And Khalid told me about surviving through the Taliban, his three arrests. Once he’d been with his mother and thirteen-year-old sister, who was not wearing a burqa. The Taliban stopped them, his sister must be properly dressed. “She is too young,” said his mother. “There are none her size.” The men didn’t care; they beat her with a flagpole on the street. Once Khalid was picked up on the street for not having a beard—he was still a teenager—and taken to prison. “I was scared,” he said, “because they had no record of who was who, and I didn’t want to be lost and forgotten with the political prisoners.” He was just plucked off the street; no one called his family. After five days the guards asked if any of the prisoners knew how to cook. Khalid raised his hand, said, “‘I am a good cook!’ But I didn’t even know how to cook an egg!”

  He cooked potatoes for his jailers the first day, beans the next. At least he was out of the cell, had some freedom of movement. The fifth day a bus brought a load of prisoners from the north. Khalid went to the bus driver. “I am here just for shaving my beard,” he told the driver, “and now I am free, so please take me with you when you leave.” Okay, the driver said, but I can’t guarantee what will happen at the gate.

  “Don’t worry,” Khalid said.

  Before they got to the gate, some Taliban jumped on the bus. “Give us money,” they said. Khalid can’t remember how much he had, but he gave them all of it, and an hour later walked into his house, almost a week after being taken.

  We hit the tunnel, which had seen violence for years, as the principal route between northern and southern Afghanistan. Mujahideen had ambushed the Soviets in the area repeatedly; even now the hulks of tanks and APCs littered the sides of the road. The Northern Alliance had
blown up both ends to keep the Taliban from heading north. Minefields lay everywhere. “Almost died here once in a car accident,” said Khalid, as we entered a dim, dark, dripping world, the road covered with hard ice, the air thick with exhaust from cars and trucks inching through, bumper to bumper.

  On the other side we emerged into intense sun and started descending on switchbacks, swerving around slow-moving trucks and into an ancient and untouched land. We stopped at around 9:00 a.m. at a long, low, concrete building, a restaurant. It was cold inside, unheated, a knee-high platform covered in dark red and brown Afghan carpeting running along the walls and in the center of the room. We sat cross-legged on the platforms, and boys ran back and forth, bringing us aluminum trays of lamb kabobs and tea and flat, warm Afghan bread. The meat was salty and tender. Nobody seemed to notice me. No one had guns. No women—I wondered where the women on the bus were supposed to eat. I was just here, deep inside Afghanistan. A fly on the wall.

  We drove on. The land flattened; we sped through broad valleys of brown, a place called Disho, the fields dusted with the barest green lace. Mud brick compounds. Round cow patties drying on the walls like hubcaps on the junkyards of D.C.’s New York Avenue. Donkeys and children playing, and scarlet blankets drying on dusty shrubs. Huge piles of hay. It struck me there was no trash on the ground. None. No plastic water bottles, now ubiquitous throughout the world. Which meant that here there were few manufactured things, few things bought in stores. Bumped through Baghlan Province and the city of Pul-i-Khumri, where the bus suddenly ground to a halt and couldn’t be restarted. I started to get up when Khalid warned me about Hekmatyar and that I should stay still and quiet. Then he started praying, and I broke into a cold sweat.