The Lunatic Express

by Carl Hoffman

  We were on a slight incline. A crowd of men pushed the bus backwards and the driver popped the clutch. It roared to life. Sputtered. My heart spasmed. Started again, and stayed rumbling. Everyone poured back on, and off we went.

  It had been ten minutes. It seemed like a lifetime, and a few minutes and miles later the fear was a memory. Gone. Didn’t seem so bad. Which is the way it always seemed afterwards, despite how close I’d been playing it. The ferries, the planes, the buses on cliffs, it all seemed like nothing. The more I did it, the more natural it seemed. But I was riding a narrow line, especially here in Afghanistan. What if I was kidnapped? Disappeared. Poof, off the radar I’d go. Would I think it had all been worth it? Would my children ever forgive me, or would they think I’d died doing something I loved? Would anyone even tell Nisa? Death was so banal, so unromantic. Walking to the edge of the cliff could feel glorious, but when was the last step? The step into the abyss? You couldn’t tell until you got there, and that was the problem; I never knew if I was standing right on the edge or miles from it. It made me feel alive; that edge was a powerful aphrodisiac, and weeks without it at home made home seem quiet and boring. But its pursuit always came with a price. It separated me from everyone else in the normal world; no one could understand what I’d been through, done, unless they’d done it too. Unless it was a regular part of their life. And not just my friends, but the people I loved. My family. It was selfish. A selfish secret that I carried around, that I couldn’t share even when I tried to. I remembered once coming home from southern Sudan, and Lindsey was angry that I hadn’t called her. And just plain angry, which I couldn’t fathom. “I’m home!” I said. “Why are you mad at me? And how could I call?” I’d stammered. “I was in a war zone with drums in the night and men dying of gunshot wounds and starving children and there wasn’t a phone for hundreds of miles!”

  “How can I love you when you’re there?” she finally said. “How can you love someone who might be killed or kidnapped or die in a plane crash and puts his family through that pain and worrying?”

  But how could you not live that life, taste that taste, after you’d had it? The bus rolled on and my fear was a memory already, mitigated and rounded, its sharp edges sanded off. That moment was there, though. That moment of fear. Of intensity. Of feeling so afraid that I knew I was alive and didn’t want to be dead, and that I loved my family and missed them, even as I knew I had to straighten everything out and change my life. And that that was what travel was all about, showing you things in a starker way than you could ever see them at home.

  Past Pul-i-Khumri, the landscape became desert. Just sand and brown and flat. No bushes. No trees. No rivers. Whole villages of brown sand castles and, nearby, mass graves where the Northern Alliance had killed thousands of Taliban and buried them where they lay. And poor Khalid, he had girlfriend troubles, like everyone everywhere, but it was worse in places like Afghanistan and Bangladesh. “I am in love, but no one can know,” he said. She went to school with him. Somehow he got her cell phone number. Called her. Don’t call me, she’d said, when she answered. But then she’d called him back. “We see each other at University and we go to a park, but sometimes the police stop us and ask if we’re related. We can kiss and touch a little, but nothing below the waist. Our parents cannot know, hers especially. She would be beaten and forbidden to leave the house. And they might come and hurt me.” It wasn’t hopeless, though. If he told his parents he had seen her and wanted to marry her, he said, they would go to her parents and suggest it, say that she was suitable. “And then she’ll put pressure on her family, indirectly, to agree.”

  Khalid, too, was mystified by Western women. Once he’d worked with an American journalist and invited her back to his house for dinner. His parents, of course, were there; they were always there. In a strange reversal of Moolchand’s unsuccessful assumption that Western women were available for easy sex, she’d told him she had been shocked, that she thought he lived alone and would never have come to his house if she’d known his parents were there. “I didn’t understand that at all!”

  THE BUS DRIVER had been screaming along for hours, and we arrived at the gates to Mazar-i-Sharif an hour early. We stopped, the driver laughing and talking. “He says,” said Khalid, “that he’s driven too fast, that he’ll be fined if he arrives too early, so we have to wait.” Husks of Soviet APCs lay around; a few soldiers with AKs got on the bus and looked us all over. No one noticed me, and finally we started again and a few blocks later Khalid and I jumped off the bus at a dusty crossroads in a gauzy afternoon, the sky white. We walked down a cobblestone street, turned a corner, stumbled down rutted dirt roads, until we found an unheated concrete house behind high walls—the hotel.

  An hour later we were in a dusty brown field among two hundred horsemen—known as chapandaz—in knee-high leather boots and fur caps (and a smattering of old Soviet padded tank helmets) with high-pommeled saddles, surrounded by thousands of spectators for Mazar’s weekly Buzkashi spectacle. It was a wild free-for-all of macho horsemanship and brute strength and power, as each man tried to drag a hundred-pound calf carcass into the daira halal—a circle chalked in the dirt. The horses reared and pawed the ground and sweated and foamed at the bit, big, powerfully muscled beasts bred for the task. The men whipped them and fought them and fought each other and whipped each other in clouds of dust under a warm winter sun, as men and children—there were no women—crowded the field and ran for their lives when galloping horse muscle swept through them. There were no boundaries; imagine a football game in which the spectators littered the field and stood around the huddle. Live music throbbed amid the smell of hashish and horse, and the announcer proclaimed the proceeds for each round in dollars—$50 or $30 or $130—and the great, threatening Afghans pulled me out of harm’s way and tucked me behind them whenever the mass of hooves and whips and yells swept over us.

  It was serious business, said Aqamurad, thirty years old, astride his $20,000 mount, after the matches. “The best horses here,” he said, sweeping his hand over the field, “are worth $200,000. They surge for the circle; they know it, they go right there. They do not need to be pushed.” He was a horse breeder and trainer, and he drove his horses hard every day except Saturday, and made sure they were warm twice a night. Some of the chapandaz rode their own horses, like Aqamurad, and some were paid to ride the horses of rich businessmen.

  It was getting dark, a dusky world of white sky and heavy dust. There were no horse trailers here. For blocks in every direction the streets were scattered with booted horsemen and sweating horses clip-clopping home, a world where everyone looked like they’d been grafted from the gnarled roots of the very first tree. And I felt safe and free for the first time in Afghanistan, as Khalid and I settled down over an enormous pile of mutton in a chilly restaurant open to the street.

  . . .

  EVERYTHING ABOUT MAZAR was different from Kabul. The edge was gone, the fear and pathos of a city under siege. Mazar felt normal. Few roadblocks, gunners, sandbagged emplacements, blast walls, and razor wire. And yet the handful of expatriates living in the lodge who worked for the United Nations were forbidden to walk the streets, had to be driven from lodge to work and back every day. They were prisoners of their office and hotel, which seemed awful as Khalid and I ventured out the next morning. A cold wind blew, and fog lay heavy. It was all white; white sky, white haze—I couldn’t make out a horizon. We wanted to fly back on Ariana to Kabul but needed tickets and found a faded blue painted concrete building on an unpaved street, a row of muddy shoes outside the door. We shed ours, walked into the frigid unheated building, nothing but empty passages and a row of men sitting on a sofa in the hall. Upstairs, down a dark hall, lay the scheduling office. “We don’t know,” the man said. “Maybe there will be a flight tomorrow, maybe not, and the time is not exact.” Khalid persisted, asked more questions, was directed up another flight of stairs to an office where we found Ariana’s communications manager huddled around a kerosene
stove. “There is only one scheduled flight a week, on Fridays,” he said. “The rest are Hajj flights and if there’s room, they’ll take you. But no one knows anything; call me after eleven.”

  We walked through teeming Mazar. “Indeed, the whole town has been smartened up lately,” wrote Robert Byron. “The bazaars are new and whitewashed, and their roofs are supported on piles which let in light and air underneath. In the new town, where the hotel and Government offices stand, the roads are edged with neat brick gutters.” Things had changed. Mud and dust, the curbs broken and crumbling, the city as raw and broken by decades of war as the rest of the country. Cars shared the roads with pushcarts and donkeys. Nut sellers fanned charcoal braziers, the storefronts open in the chill; everyone cold and underdressed. “Come,” said Khalid. “I will show you something,” as we came upon a fantasy of minarets and tiles in blue and yellow and purple set within a courtyard—the shrine of Hazrat Ali, the tomb of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph and the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, which Byron described as “a cross between St Mark’s at Venice and an Elizabethan country-house translated into blue faience.”

  It was why Mazar existed in the first place and why Byron had come here seventy-two years before. Although most Shiites believed the caliph’s grave lay in Saudi Arabia, Ali himself was said to have appeared in a dream to the mullah of nearby Balkh in the first half of the twelfth century, and confirmed that his grave lay in what became Mazar, and a shrine was built there in 1136. Genghis Khan had been here, destroying the shrine, and it had been rebuilt in 1481, making Mazar a place of pilgrimage. We strolled into its outer gardens, amid pools of water and swans and thousands of white pigeons that alighted on the hands of delighted children with crusts of bread, a place full of men and women that felt, for the first time in Afghanistan, still. Peaceful and calm. Outside the gates was struggle, a constant struggle with cold and heat and between men and women and Afghanistan’s ethnic identities and for survival. “Shall we go inside?” Khalid asked.

  “Is it okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not. But don’t say anything to anyone; don’t talk, and just follow me and stay close. No one is staring at you. It is the way you walk; you don’t walk like a foreigner.”

  We passed through a low wrought-iron fence. An old man with a beard and deep lines in his face stood guarding hundreds of pairs of shoes. We slipped ours off, and padded down a red carpet leading to the mosque. Inside, it was hushed, filled with soft murmur. Rays of light streamed in, a world of carpets and huge wooden doors, and a low table behind which sat a row of mujawers—the men who clean and care for the shrine. Khalid approached. Knelt before them. I followed, imitated, feeling completely exposed, my heart beating. He passed his hands over his face, as if wiping away dust from his eyes and cheeks, made a quick motion with his hands over his chest. I didn’t have a clue. The mujawers watched me. An American in the holiest shrine in Afghanistan in a mutton-stained salwar kameez, wearing a North Face ski hat. I vaguely imitated Khalid as best I could. They held their hands out. Khalid passed some money their way, and I did the same. We stood up and he whispered, “We have asked for forgiveness.” No one seemed to see through me. In the center of the mosque stood a glass cube the size of a garage, surrounded in wood filigree—the tomb. Men and women pressed fingers, faces, bodies against it, circling it, and we made a circumnavigation and then left. I felt like Richard Burton in Mecca, and guilty and exhilarated and a little mystified, and ashamed that I knew so little, understood so little about someplace and something that was so important to so many people.

  We ambled through the growing fog of Mazar. Sat on a corner and drank pomegranate juice while Khalid had his shoes shined by a freezing, shivering boy with no socks and a runny nose. Beggars, old men and women, held their hands open to Khalid, who always gave, and they gave back. “I will pray for you so there will never be restrictions on your way of life,” said one man. We entered a candy store. Walls and aisles filled with homemade sweets of sesame and cardamom, carrots and cashews. We ate samples, sweet and nutty and milky, and Khalid filled two shopping bags. “I have a big family!” he said, eyeing the cold white sky outside. “I hope it doesn’t snow, because we will be stuck in Mazar.” Even without snow falling, Ariana remained opaque. We called five times between ten thirty and three, and each time were told to call in an hour. The plane hadn’t even taken off from wherever it was, still had to get to Mazar. If it got here, Ariana said, it would turn around fast and leave. Tickets could only be bought at the airport; we’d have to go and wait and hope. “This is Ariana!” said Khalid. “It is the most unreliable airline in the world, and so badly managed!” I thought of Ariana president Moin Wardak, sitting at his warm desk in Kabul. We hunkered down by the propane heater back at the lodge in Khalid’s room, watched American wrestling on the tube, and considered the problem. We could go to the airport and wait. The plane might come, but it might not. If it didn’t, it might not come the next day, either. And if it did arrive, it might not leave—it was already getting dark, the cloud ceiling was low and getting lower. It was an easy choice: in Afghanistan the bus was more reliable than flying. And probably safer.

  WE ARRIVED IN KABUL and flagged a regular yellow taxi. By now my beard was five days old and my clothes stained with mud and mutton grease. On the Salang Pass we’d been stopped in a massive traffic jam of buses and trucks and cars, skidding and sliding and putting chains on, and a man had walked up to me and started barking in Dari. Khalid exploded with laughter. “He thought you were the bus driver!” Which made him feel safer now that we were back in Kabul. And after hugging goodbye, I changed hotels to a smaller, cheaper one with less security, run by an Afghan family, my room heated by a woodstove, all of which made me feel more secure, less of a target in a much less obvious place than in the well-known hotels that stood out like big red bull’s-eyes.

  AND I WALKED, my initial fear of the place not wholly gone but considerably lessened, getting my hair cut in a barbershop, and entering an open-fronted kabob restaurant with a ceiling hung with salted haunches of beef, its walls sporting a wolfskin and the head of a deer. There I met Ali Musabah, a bull of a man with the worst cauliflower ears I’d ever seen, wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket. “I am a wrestler,” he growled in husky English. Afraid of saying I was an American, I stupidly told him I was Canadian, a lie that I regretted instantly and couldn’t pull out of. “I am moving to Canada!” he said. “With all of my family. I hate Afghanistan. It is violent. Full of guns and kidnapping and bombings and bad men. Afghans are mean like Americans, who are not good people. When I get to Canada, God willing, I will call you.” He brought me a heaping plate of fatty, gristly mutton and bread. “The fat is good!” he growled. “Eat it; this is my gift, my hospitality.” I asked him who he’d vote for in the coming election.

  “Nobody. There is nothing good here. I will not miss it at all. I will never marry here.” He sat with me, guarded me, peppered me with questions about Toronto, which I tried my best to answer, having been there once, desperately wanting to confess my lie. Ali refused to let me pay a cent for my meal, or for the meals I ate there over the next three days.

  The Kabul Lodge was nearly empty, and I woke up to falling snow and my bed shaking—a small earthquake. At breakfast I met the lodge’s only other guest, a tiny French woman with jet black hair and a sharp, exotic face named Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain. She taught nineteenth-century history at a university near Paris, and had been traveling throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen on and off for three years. Alone. She made me feel like a rookie. We compared knives; she had a six-inch switchblade and confessed to having carried a small automatic pistol in Yemen. She’d taken the bus all over Afghanistan, was headed straight into Taliban country in a few days. Had ridden on horseback from Pakistan into Afghanistan. She had balls of steel. “Come,” she said. “You will like this.” We donned our costumes—she in a long black abaya with a black headscarf—and set off through
muddy streets, the sun now out and melting the inch of snow on the ground. Hailed a taxi and jumped out in a throng of thousands thick in the streets which led to narrow passageways of mud and ageless wooden shops selling brown-speckled white pigeons with thin gold bands on their legs, and parakeets and red-legged fighting partridges. Smelling of spices and smoke, the bird market was supposedly a no-go area for foreigners, but it was rich and ancient feeling and alive, and I wished times were different and I could spend days there getting to know it without worrying about being blown up or kidnapped.

  Marie-Elise said no one noticed her—and she sure didn’t look Western—but she was wrong. Everyone noticed her, stared; it was the way she walked. Sure-footed. Fast. Head up. Pushing through throngs of men, a sense of power no Afghan woman would ever dare display in a public market.

  I was out of time, though, and I had a flight to China to catch. I was searched and searched and searched again, working my way through layers of security to the airport, the gate packed with Afghan and Chinese traders, who elbowed and fought their way to the bus that took us to the plane. At the stairs to the jet, the same aged Ariana Airlines 727 that had brought me to Kabul from New Delhi, I was frisked again.

  My seatmate was a Singapore Chinese living in Beijing who owned a company working for the American military at Kabul’s Bagram Air Base. “War, insecurity, unease,” he said, “wherever those are, the army spends more and that is good for me. And your new president is sending more troops! Business will be even better!” For so long, he said, everyone had been leaving China for someplace better. “Now,” he said, “it’s the other way around. Everyone wants to get to China!”

  Three hours later we slipped and slid down the steps into the zero-degree cold of Urumqi, China. I had turned twenty-four in China, in 1984, and I hadn’t been back since. Then, the wide avenues of Beijing had no cars. No signs. Just people walking and riding bikes in green and blue Mao suits. Five hours before, I’d been walking in a collapsed city with intermittent electricity and half the population hidden inside burqas. Airplanes were like traveling capsules, cans of preserved culture. The plane was mostly Afghan, and suddenly I was disgorged into a taxi blaring hip-hop—“I want your body” thumped the music—and we were rushing along freeways bathed in neon, and twisting through streets lined with modern glass high-rises and I was blinking my eyes at the affluence and style of once-provincial Urumqi—women in knee-high leather boots with four-inch heels and tight blue jeans and twenty-four-hour ATMs and hipster dudes in black Chuck Taylors and earrings. The cold, the sudden affluence and style—I had been in India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan for almost seven weeks—and the blatant sexuality made me reel, and again that dislocation in the world swept over me. I felt totally displaced. It was New Year’s Eve and the texts rolling in from family and friends could barely assuage my loneliness, as I sat at the hotel bar drinking a scotch amid glitter and Christmas trees and a few waiters singing to a karaoke machine. I was heading home, I realized. I had thousands of miles to go, still, but from now on I’d be traveling east toward the western United States, and there was still so much I hadn’t seen, so much I didn’t know. For the first time since I’d rolled away on the bus out of D.C., I was going toward something, not away. But what was home anymore? Did I even have a home to return to? I thought of Moolchand. What to do? I took another sip of scotch and went to bed.