Hashim will hear nothing of it. “No pictures,” he says. “Danger. Planes.” He points to the sky again and then mimes a pair of binoculars over his eyes, which I assume means that somehow a Soviet pilot might see me taking pictures and realize we’re not a ragged band of refugees but rather what we are, a group of mujahideen with a broken-down truck and a photojournalist in a burka along for the ride. It seems a bit overcautious, but I console myself with the thought that my batteries, the ones that power the light meters of my manual cameras and allow me to determine important stuff like f-stops and shutter speeds, have been in the cold for too long now to function anyway. “Here,” says Hashim, swapping me his Kalashnikov for my Domke bag. “Take gun. Hide it.”
Oh, great. I’m sure I’m breaking a cardinal commandment of journalism—Thou shalt not carry thy subject’s loaded weapons—but I do as I’m told. I lift up the side of my burka and throw the Kalashnikov over my shoulder, which, once covered, sticks out in back like a miniature blue tent. Some of the mujahideen point at me and laugh, and I wonder if they’re laughing because of the tent or because they find the sight of a girl with a gun amusing.
“I have to pee,” I tell Hashim, realizing it’s now or never if I’m going to deal with my little problem. As usual, Hashim assigns a mujahed to walk ahead of me to check for mines. I grab the remaining roll of toilet paper from the pocket of my backpack and follow the soldier, careful to step in his exact snow tracks as we move away from the group. After twenty yards or so, the mujahed turns his back, walks a few yards away, and lets me do my business. Before I even unbutton my jeans, I can feel the warm, gloppy blood running down my leg, soaking through my two pairs of white thermal underwear. I squat down to get started, but I forget about the Kalashnikov on my shoulder. The butt of the rifle hits the ground behind me, banging the cold metal barrel into the back of my head.
I know I should try to laugh. I know I should try to connect with the humor and irony in the situation, but somehow, with the frozen limbs, the bloody pants, our broken truck, my exploded tampons, a gun barrel at my head, the burka and the Soviet planes intent on our demise, I can’t.
After urinating, I do my best to wipe up the blood sticking to the inside of my thighs, but maneuvering under the burka, even seeing anything clearly under the folds of material, is close to impossible. I remove the old tampon and, at a loss for a better means of disposal, bury it in the snow with my hands. Then I make a huge wad of toilet paper and wedge it into my bloodstained underwear, hoping it’ll do the trick until I can figure out a better solution.
I button my jeans, readjust the Kalashnikov and am about to start walking back to the group when I notice the patch of snow at my feet is soiled, spotted with crimson droplets. Embarrassed, I kick some fresh powder on top to try to make the whole mess go away.
We spend the next eight hours trekking through the knee-deep snow in a single-file line, ants scurrying along as the Soviet planes circle overhead. The mountain range taunts us, never seeming to get any closer. I am exhausted and famished, on the verge of hypothermia. But my major problem is the burka. Not only is the rayon too thin to keep my head warm, the stupid thing keeps slipping down. Tripping me. Making me blind. How in God’s name, or Allah’s name, do Afghani women deal with these ridiculous things?
We women are cursed. Never mind the blood and the mess; that I can deal with. I’m talking about the fear of female sexuality, pure and not so simple. What is it about our bodies that scares men so, makes them take such extreme measures to put us in our places? If they’re not stopping us on the streets in the supposedly enlightened parts of the world to whistle, grab their crotches, lick their tongues between opened fingers, yell obscenities or proposition us with erect bananas—I, like most women, speak from a deep well of experience here—then they’re hiding us under burkas or veils in other parts of the world so that they won’t be tempted to do so.
I yank the burka off my head and throw it on the ground. “No more!” I yell to Hashim, which causes all the men to stop and stare. I look around me. I know it’s dangerous to be out of disguise, but under the current circumstances I could care less. Wow, I think. What freedom to see the world once again! To gaze at that beautiful, jagged, gigantic, imposing, soaring ice-capped mountain range in the distance!
“Put on,” Hashim says.
“No,” I say. “I won’t.”
“Put on,” he repeats, this time more slowly.
I stand my ground. “No.”
“Is dangerous,” he says.
I say, “I know. So make me a man.”
For a moment, the situation is tense. Hashim stares at me, at a loss for words. Some of the other mujahideen whisper to each other, point at me, gesticulate. I was told by countless mujahideen groups back in Peshawar that, as a woman, I would not be able to accompany their soldiers inside. “Women,” one of them told me, “are by their very natures cursed charlatans, bent on breaking the will and sapping the strength of the soldiers of Allah.” To which Pascal whispered, a little too smugly, “You see? I told you so.”
But now that I’m here and Pascal’s not, now that our truck has broken down and we’re cold and miserable and walking through an endless minefield of snow, now that I cannot walk another inch with this idiotic rayon cloth over my head, what are they going to do? Take me back to Peshawar? Punish me for not wearing it?
And then, suddenly, an amazing thing happens. One of the soldiers walks over and hands me his pakul for my head. Another gives me one of his brown shoulder blankets to hide the Kalashnikov. Then, Hashim, looking slightly defeated, takes a thick cotton scarf and ties it around my neck and mouth, so no one will be able to tell that I don’t have a beard. I have won. It’s a small victory, but I have won.
I am, for the moment, a man. A tiny, happy, bleeding man.
We trudge farther and farther through the snow. I have no clue where we are, other than somewhere in the Hindu Kush. I try getting information from Hashim, but every time I ask, “Where are we?” he smiles politely and responds, “Afghanistan.”
We finally arrive at the foothills of the mountains as the sun sets, turning the snowy tips of the smaller mountains behind us a deep orange, striating the sky above the darkened mountains in front of us into graduated shades from pink to blood red. It is the most breathtaking sight I have ever seen, and I stop for a moment to inhale the colors, convinced that they might warm my aching, frozen limbs with their fire. Up close, the mountains dwarf me, dwarf us all. It would be so easy to get lost here. To disappear.
Some of the mujahideen stop too, but not, apparently, to dwell upon the meaning of the universe and their place in it. Instead, they pass around a round metal container of green, powdery paste, a mild, teeth-rotting drug called naswar, which they stick in their mouths like chewing tobacco. I have no interest in trying their naswar, but I must say I am tempted by the large bags of opium I saw a few of them smoking that first night in the safe house. How pleasant it would be to stop right here, light a fire, smoke some opium and watch the red sky turn black, maybe have some great stoner thoughts about being a cell on a giant’s thumbnail, or a quark in a Milky Way dust storm.
After another pee stop, we fill our canteens with snow and march on and up. We have not heard a plane for over an hour now. The silence is profound, broken only by the wind and by the rhythm of our crunching footsteps. “Soon there,” Hashim says. “Very soon.”
By nightfall, we finally reach a cave. It’s a large cage, a furnished cave, actually, with a potbellied stove, a couple of heroic-looking framed portraits of various Islamic men hung, somehow, from the stone wall, some kerosene lamps, a black metal pot, a tin tray with a whole stack of glass cups for tea, a few stacks of tin bowls, a wooden box of tin spoons and a large gun rack to hold all the Kalashnikovs. The mujahideen step inside, lay down their brown blankets on the cold earth, face Mecca, and for the fourth time today begin to pray. “
Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim”—“In the name of the God, the beneficent, the merciful . . .” Knees bend, hands palm in palm, worry beads dangling, bodies up, bodies down, bodies prostrated to Allah, blessed be He.
Before leaving Peshawar, Hashim had asked me if I were a Christian. When I told him I was a Jew, his face tensed and he said it would be best if I did not admit this to any of the other mujahideen. “They no like Jew,” he said.
“Yeah, well, get in line,” I said, but when he looked at me quizzically, I said, “No problem. Our secret.”
Then, as an extra precautionary measure, he insisted on teaching me the first line of the Koran along with the kalima—the profession of faith—suggesting I mouth the words along with the mujahideen when they pray. “La ilaha il-Allah Muhammad al-rasul Allah . . .”—“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet . . .”—the men continue, and I dutifully move my mouth in unison. Apparently, if you can recite that one line from the kalima, you can be considered a Muslim. A snap, as conversions go. Unfortunately, I find that every time the mujahideen pray, it triggers the Hebrew tune “He Nay Ma Tov” to pop into my head, which competes with my mouth’s ability to recite the Islamic prayers. Probably some ancient Hebraic defense mechanism wired into my genetic code.
Another band of mujahideen—same Shiite group, the Harakat-I-Islami—have stopped here, too, for the night. The have a fire going underneath the metal pot, and four of them are sitting around it, stirring its greasy, glutinous contents with makeshift spoons, pausing periodically to puff on their Winstons. “What is it?” I ask Hashim.
“Fat,” he says. “From mutton.”
I feign excitement. “Oh,” I say. “Great.”
It must be either from this vat or from the tea water that I will contract the amoebic dysentery that will dog me for the next few months. As blissfully unaware of the single-celled creatures swimming around my food as they are of me, I slurp up the steaming fat with the rest of the men sitting cramped together in our cave, our new home, dipping in freshly baked nan and drinking glass after glass of sugary tea, feeling the warm liquids slide down my esophagus and into my cold, empty stomach. Life is good, I think. I’m not frozen, I have shelter, bread and a bowl full of warm fat. I can handle this.
After dinner, the men spread out their brown blankets, and I unroll my very expensive light blue French down sleeping bag, tested in the cold of the Alps, and prepare for slumber. Some of the men huddle together for warmth. Little puffs of steam emerge from our mouths. If I’m a bit concerned about being the only woman in a small cave full of men, I try not to show it. Besides, these are Islamic warriors, most with wives and families back in Peshawar; were they to commit adultery with me, their prescribed penalty would be death. This is a comforting thought.
One of the mujahideen tunes his radio to the Pushto version of the BBC, and though I can’t understand a word of this evening’s report, the familiar regal horns that usher in the hourly news is unexpectedly soothing, like a lullaby.
The voice from the radio begins. Suddenly, some of the men sit bolt upright. Then more. A few men start to speak angrily, gesticulating wildly. Two are laughing. Soon all the mujahideen are sitting up. Uh, guys, what’s going on? I strain to understand anything being said, and suddenly I catch a familiar refrain. “Blah, blah, blah, Salman Rushdie, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Salman Rushdie, blah, blah, Rushdie, blah, blah, blah.” I know Salman Rushdie is a writer, but why is a book review leading the top of the BBC?
I tug on Hashim’s jacket, but he shoves me away. “Shh,” he says, “must listen.” Then, after a minute or so, he says, “Ah, Miss Deborah. It’s book. Book. Salman Rushdie, he write very bad book.”
So no one will buy it, I think. What’s the big deal?
A lively discussion is now erupting all over the cave. The men grab their Kalashnikovs. What the hell is going on?
“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t understand.”
“Ah, Miss Deborah. Salman Rushdie write bad book. Bad for Allah. Not nice to Allah. Bad, bad, bad to Allah. We Muslim. Must kill him.” And with that, Hashim and his band of crazy warriors of Islam run out of the cave into the cold darkness, where they proceed to shoot off hundreds of rounds of ammunition into the starry night sky, yelling, “Allah akbar! Allah akbar!”—“God is great! God is great!”—each vowing to kill Salman Rushdie should the unfortunate writer stroll through our cave in our nameless mountain somewhere in Afghanistan. I follow them outside, but now Hashim tells me they’re yelling, “Down with America! Down with America!” and I start second-guessing my decision to be out here.
Amid the frenzied delirium, I try explaining to Hashim that Salman Rushdie is either British or Indian, depending on your cultural bent, but he’s certainly not American, and that in any case, weren’t we Americans funding this war of theirs anyway? We donate Stingers to your jihad, I remarked, but a writer—an Anglo-Indian writer, at that—insults Allah and now you want to kill Americans? Am I missing something here? The noise of the bullets is deafening. I feel a little ill. I make my way back into the cave, and suddenly I’m barfing semidigested mutton fat all over my fancy blue sleeping bag.
PASCAL AND I SPENT the week after our arrival in Peshawar in suspended anticipation of our trip. Hedging our bets, we hired a driver to take us around the city in search of other rebel contacts in case the Khalis trip fell through.
Not getting lost in Peshawar, let alone finding the scattered houses used by the mujahideen as their headquarters, was no easy feat. Peshawar, a warm and mild place even in the winter, seemed not so much a city as it did an outgrowth, a chaotic, crowded, litter-strewn jumble, a haphazard frontier town to its core. Its narrow, dusty roads, many unpaved and unmarked, were overrun with cars, colorful rickshaws and horse-drawn tongas and bordered on either side by squat, sherbet-hued buildings with Juliet balconies. The ground floors of these buildings housed tiny open-air shops and four-table restaurants, always crowded, always busy. Pedestrians, a variegated mix of clean-shaven Pakistanis, bearded Afghanis in their shalwar chemises—many of whom were amputees on crutches—as well as the random flock of Afghan women, walking in tight burka bouquets like boxes of crayons sprung to life, shared the bustling sidewalks with street vendors selling warm nan and various kebabs, whose steamy smoke mixed with the smell of burning trash and car exhaust to give Peshawar its distinct aroma: polluted mesquite, if I had to pin it down.
Once we reached the arid, flat outskirts of the city, where most of the mujahideen headquarters were located, the air was cleaner but more pungent, which was not surprising considering that at dawn, in certain parts of town, entire extended Afghani families lined up together to squat over the nearest ditch for their morning constitutionals.
It usually took our driver about half a dozen tries to find the correct building housing our mujahideen contacts, after which we had to convince the bored security guards to let us through the gate.
In deference to the soldiers, I kept my head covered under a veil during these visits, as I’d been told to do, but even so the mujahideen would often insist that I wait in an outdoor courtyard or on the floor of a tiled hallway while Pascal conversed, drank tea with and charmed the shalwars off the groups’ leaders.
“Ça va?”—“Everything okay?”—he’d say with a smile when he’d emerge from the smoky room.
“Oui,” I’d lie. “Ça va.”
The truth was that everything was not okay. During those long waits in the courtyards and hallways, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea by myself, I had way too much time to reflect and worry. I didn’t like having to depend on one person for so much: for contacts with the rebel groups, for my lodging, for sex, for comfort, for companionship.
Pascal had been acting irrationally lately, one minute playing the adorable clown in the middle of a busy intersection, pretending to direct traffic, smiling and blowing kisses at me and making everyone laugh
, the next minute losing his temper because I’d left one of my shoes on the bed. One minute skipping hand in hand with me through the colorful bazaars of Peshawar, buying me an army jacket and my blue burka and blushing as he handed them to me in a crumpled pink plastic bag. The next minute having a tantrum because he missed an important phone call.
PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN, 1989
Then there was the day he drove me to the squalid Kachagari refugee camp so I could photograph the war widows there. It was the only place, he said, where he was sure I’d be more welcome as a female photographer than as a male. “I know you’ve been having a hard time,” he said. “It’ll be good for you.” When we got there, since Islamic law forbade him from photographing the women’s faces, he helped me by distracting the hordes of curious children. He gave them ballpoint pens and peanuts. He bent over and tenderly wiped a smudge off a little boy’s face. He danced with the children in a circle, sang songs and held hands with them right there in the midst of makeshift tents and open pits of human feces, made them giggle and soar like children should giggle and soar.
But on the way home in the car, he realized he’d lost one of his notebooks. He started screaming, accusing me of leaving it somewhere. “Where the fuck did you put it?” he bellowed.
“I didn’t touch your notebook,” I said, trying to remain calm. I’d learned that with Pascal, it was best to remain calm.
When we got back to the hotel, he turned our room upside down looking for his missing notes and in his swirling frenzy wound up shoving me so hard I fell to the ground, hitting my head on the nightstand on the way down.
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