by Dayna Curry
Some of the Afghan women appeared to be staying in this room. By the light of a single, dangling bulb, we observed pillows and dirty toshaks pushed up against the wall and some bags in the corner. The Qur’an, along with other books and papers, rested on a makeshift shelf—a piece of wood rigged to the wall with string and nails. Arabic calligraphy art decorated another wall, and a coat tree draped with burqas and sweaters stood near the door. The floor of the room was covered with a dirty, red-and-white piece of plastic and a thin green carpet with black stripes. Both floor coverings were worn through with holes.
As we looked around, a small crowd of young women gathered at the room’s large window; its vertical glass panes were standing open. “Faarsee mayfaamee?” one asked. Do you speak Farsi? Another remarked, “They look like dolls.”
Mariam fed us a bite to eat, and the Afghan women crammed into the room to talk with us. Others remained at the window staring. Most looked like they were under the age of twenty-one. Their dresses and head scarves were threadbare and torn. Many of the women wore thick black eyeliner. They smiled and looked at us with curiosity.
“Who are you?” they wanted to know. “Where did you come from? Why are you here?”
We told them we had been to visit an Afghan home and that the Taliban had brought us to their school. The women tried to comfort us: “You poor girls!” they exclaimed. “Do not worry. It was probably a mistake.”
“You will be out of here tomorrow,” Mariam assured us. “They will not keep you here long.” We knew the matter was more complicated.
That evening the Afghan women slept outside in the courtyard because of the heat. Some slept by the tree; others slept on a concrete slab at the end of the courtyard to the left of our room. To make their beds, the women spread out dusty burlap sheets and then put toshaks and pillows down. They covered themselves with soiled blankets.
As the nights became cooler, most of the women moved into a large room just off the concrete slab. This was the room, we learned, where the women had their lessons each day and drank their tea. The bathroom, which we all shared, was situated at the top of another small staircase in the corner of the courtyard between our room and the women’s room. On the opposite end of the courtyard, to the right of our room, was a concrete area and a freestanding water faucet. A concrete sidewalk surrounded the whole courtyard.
Our first evening, Heather suggested the two of us stay up all night and pray. We imagined we would be questioned the next morning, and we had no idea whether any of our friends knew where we were. Heather kept looking at her watch. “I’m sure they know something is wrong by now,” she would say.
We tried to put the anxiety out of our minds and pray. Most of the time we prayed for the Aamir family, especially for the man whom the Taliban had locked in the trunk of the green sedan. “Lord, let him be released,” we prayed. “Don’t let the Taliban beat him or kill him.”
Throughout the night we sang songs to God, and as we sang, I felt myself relax inside. I began to experience the peace and comfort of God in a deep way. He was in control. Things would work out. We were going to be okay.
Late in the night, one of the girls came to the window. “Your singing is beautiful,” she whispered. “Keep singing.”
eight
ARROWS BY DAY
Heather: Saturday morning, the senior Talib with the large nose who searched our purses and confiscated our property came to our room with two other men. They wanted to ask us some questions. We kindly refused.
“We do not want to answer any questions until we get permission from our boss,” we stated.
Even a note from our boss—indicating he knew our whereabouts and the circumstances surrounding our arrest—would be acceptable. We also told the men we would not answer any questions without a translator. Too much was at stake for us to rely on our elementary language abilities. The men listened to our requests and offered to see what they could do.
Several hours later, the senior Talib returned to our room, this time with six men. One he identified as our English translator, though the man’s English was rudimentary at best. The senior Talib also informed us that he could not—or, perhaps, would not—get a letter from our boss. Regardless, we were told we had better start answering the Taliban’s questions.
“If you do not answer our questions,” the senior Talib remarked coldly, “it will be very bad for you.”
We did not seem to have much choice but to comply. Who knew what the senior Talib’s statement truly meant? On certain issues, I was prepared to stand my ground—even to get beaten—but not this time. Not on account of having no note from my boss. Dayna and I conceded to answer the senior Talib’s questions and did so for seven consecutive hours. For three days the Taliban drilled us with little reprieve.
During those first three days, the men conducted the questioning in our ten-by-twenty-foot room off the Afghan women’s courtyard. When the men entered, we quickly wrapped ourselves in our chawdurs and stood up in a customary show of respect. Meanwhile, the Afghan women would flee from the courtyard into their room for the duration. They were not allowed to be outside while the men were in our room questioning us.
Between six and ten men would come to our room each morning and stay there all day. None of us had enough space to move, and the summer heat was oppressive. The walls and carpets were filthy. Flies would come in and out of the window. Meanwhile, Dayna and I would field a grueling and sustained barrage of questions.
Usually the senior Talib and the chief prison commander—the raees, or boss—would lead the questioning. At first, the senior Talib’s tough, stoic demeanor stood in sharp contrast to the heavyset boss’s jolly, friendly personality. It was not long, however, before the boss proved himself to be manipulative.
Early on, the boss and his interrogators tried to get us to sign our names to answers written in Afghan Farsi, or Dari, potentially in an effort to frame us. The Taliban took this approach: An interrogator would write a question out in Farsi. We would state our answer in English. A translator then would write our answer in Farsi. It was this answer the boss wanted us to sign.
I refused. In my mind, it seemed foolish to sign anything that I could not read or understand. I would only sign my name next to my own handwriting in English. How were we to guess what an answer written in a foreign script might say? For all I knew, the Taliban might write out a preposterous confession and wave it in front of the world as justification for convicting us of a high crime. I determined that the Taliban were not going to win this war of wits, not with our fate—and the fate of our Afghan friends—hanging in the balance.
Dayna and I developed this system, which the boss ultimately accepted: An interrogator would write a question in Farsi. The question would be translated and written in English. Dayna and I would write our answer in English. Someone else would write out a Farsi translation of our answer, and we would sign the English version. With every word I wrote, I tried to anticipate how my answers might be altered or misconstrued. I tried to cover all the bases necessary to protect both our friends and ourselves. The process was extremely laborious, and at times it took hours to answer only a couple of questions.
Just two days into our detainment, a Talib brought a tape recorder attached to a microphone into our room.
“Speak your answer into this microphone,” he demanded.
We might have presumed that the boss did not want to fool with the tedious business of writing out questions and answers when he could finish his job quickly with a tape recorder, but he never communicated this logic to us. In fact, no one ever explained what exactly would be done with the recording of our voices. How were we to know where the tape might be broadcast? Perhaps the tape would be manipulated and spliced to convey something that would suit the Taliban religious police. Under no circumstances would I allow my voice to be recorded.
“I am sorry,” I explained. “I will not speak into that microphone. I do not know what you plan to do with the tape. You could
change my answers to say anything you want.”
The boss pressed the matter: “We just need your answers on tape.” But he never gave me a sufficient explanation as to why. I refused to move on the issue.
Several days into the interrogation process, the boss took what I perceived to be a more cunning tack in his effort to record our answers on audiotape. By this time, Dayna and I no longer were being questioned in our room. After those first three days, a Talib would come daily to the courtyard, escort us to a nearby office building, and lead us upstairs to the boss’s office. There we would sit on brown velour couches, and a low-ranking Talib would serve us tea with hard sugar candies. The boss frequently took his position behind a large wooden desk in the corner while we were questioned. At other times he sat on one of the couches glaring at us with suspicion—or what seemed to me to be ill intention.
“After you have written your answer,” the boss instructed us on this particular day, “please read it back to us very loudly.” I was amused at his assumption of our naïveté. It seemed obvious the men wanted to tape our answers—what else could they have in mind? I refused point-blank to read my answer loudly, and on this point I did not intend to budge even if it meant getting beaten. “I will only write my answers,” I stated flatly.
My resistance clearly frustrated the boss, but I would not yield. When the men found they could not get anywhere with me, they began to pressure Dayna. In general, Dayna was more obliging during interrogations. She tended to take the Taliban at their word, while I was inclined to disbelieve everything they said. This discrepancy in our perspectives created real discomfort for Dayna at times. Whenever the men saw I was not going to bend on a given issue, they pushed her. Dayna found herself in the unpleasant position of wanting to obey the Taliban’s requests but not wanting to go against my intuition and firm positions. In the end, Dayna always supported me, and I was grateful.
A day and a half after our arrest, four of our Shelter Germany women coworkers were brought to the courtyard. They arrived on Sunday afternoon. Kati Jelinek and her roommate, Silke Duerrkopf, a bespectacled, artsy woman in her thirties, came in first. When they walked through the gate, my heart sank. The ordeal had expanded beyond Dayna and me.
At the same time, Kati and Silke were our first connections to the outside world, and I was relieved to see them. Kati hugged us, and for the first time I broke down in tears.
“We are so proud of you,” Kati said lovingly.
Half an hour later, we heard another knock on the rickety wooden gate. This time, Diana Thomas and her roommate, Ursula Fischer, walked in.
“What in the world is going on?” I wondered.
Diana, the fifty-year-old Arab Australian nurse who originally accompanied me to the ICRC hospital in the spring, smiled warmly.
“I prayed I would get to see you today,” she said, remarking that she was glad the Lord had answered her prayer, though in an amusing manner. She hugged Dayna and me and told us she was happy we were not hurt.
Ursula, a fashionable, subdued woman in her forties, greeted us, too. She had only just returned from a break in her home country of Germany.
Our friends encouraged us and informed us that many people were praying for our quick release. Sadly, they reported that Peter Bunch, our Australian coworker, had also been detained. A few days later, we learned that a total of eight foreigners were imprisoned. We gathered the eighth person was likely Georg Taubmann, our leader, who was the only married detainee.
None of us knew where Georg and Peter were being held, and we did not see them for weeks. Eventually, we learned that the two men spent a week and a half in a wretched, insect-infested Vice and Virtue prison before being brought to our compound. Once Peter and Georg arrived at the reform school compound, the boss put them in a room below his office. The four Shelter Germany women slept in this same room for the first ten days of interrogations before being moved into the courtyard we shared with the Afghan women.
Dayna and I were kept separately from the other Shelter Germany women at first because the Taliban did not want us comparing notes. We compared notes anyway. Even though the other four were sleeping in a separate building, they spent their days in our courtyard, and every now and then, our overseer Mariam would let Dayna and me visit with our friends.
In total, interrogations lasted for about three weeks. The sessions were most intense during the week and a half Dayna and I were separated from the other Shelter Germany women, and on the whole the interrogation process itself was chaotic. It became a running joke with all six of us, the foreign women, that almost every time we were questioned—or so it seemed—we had to fill out a form giving our father’s name, our grandfather’s name, our province, and our village. Diana, who did not know her grandfather’s name, took to filling in a different name each time the information was required. No Talib ever noticed.
One Taliban translator heavily involved in our case was a young man named Karim. A slight, fair-skinned Pashtun in his late twenties, Karim became our friend and was on our side. He spoke excellent English. His gentle presence during questioning brought us great relief. Eventually, we started referring to Karim as our “Taliban angel friend.”
Karim coached us through the interrogations. He would escort us from our room to the boss’s office, all the way whispering about what we should and should not reveal. “Whatever you do, do not ever say you have given anyone a Bible,” he once advised.
Frequently, he softened our answers in translation. “What you said was very dangerous,” Karim would say, “but I changed it.” When other translators were going to be present, Karim forewarned us: “Be careful what you say. They will understand you. But do not worry, I will be with you.”
Karim was not naive—he knew the risks involved in helping us. But he believed that we were being treated unjustly. We had come to Afghanistan to love and serve his people, and in his eyes we were like his sisters. We learned much later that many people prayed we would have an ally within the Taliban, an inside connection. Karim was the answer to those prayers. Again and again he risked his life for us. He risked discovery, and perhaps execution, and no one ever asked him to do so.
As much as Karim advised us, I knew I could not lie to the interrogators. I was not going to help the Taliban develop their case by giving them unsolicited information, but if they asked the right specific question, I would have to answer truthfully. Our goal was not to deceive but to provide as little information as we could and make the Taliban draw their own conclusions. While remaining truthful, we gave vague answers as far removed as possible from the people involved in the situation at hand. If the interrogators wanted a certain answer, then they would have to ask a specific question.
For instance, Dayna and I did not know whether the Aamir family had confessed to seeing the film on the life of Jesus. Having heard nothing of their fate—whether they had been harmed or even killed—we desperately wanted to protect them. We knew that the less the Taliban believed the Aamirs had seen of the film, the better it would be for the family, so we tried to withhold on the subject as much as we possibly could. Instead of saying straight out that the family had seen the entire film, we truthfully stated that we had experienced computer difficulties on the afternoon we visited the home, leaving it up to the Taliban to determine how much of the film the family actually viewed.
The Taliban were not satisfied. They came back later and told us the family had discussed the content of the film with them. “The family says they have seen this film twice. They described the entire movie.” The interrogators never asked with whom the Aamirs had watched the film the first time.
Then the boss asked directly, “How long did the family watch the film this second time?”
“For more than an hour,” I replied.
“Kha,” the men said. The answer satisfied them. It was as if they were congratulating themselves for finally having asked the right question. We had completed the round of questioning, but we did not feel good. We
wondered what would happen to a family who confessed to having seen a film about the life of Jesus not once, but twice.
When we left that particular session Karim chastised us for having admitted too much. “Why did you confess to showing the film for more than an hour? That is very harmful for you. You should have stopped answering after you described your computer problems.”
At such moments I found myself wondering why Karim was trying so hard to help us. His assistance, though greatly appreciated, was unsolicited, and I struggled at times to believe he was truly an ally in this whole business. I wondered on occasion if the Taliban was using Karim as an inside source to gather more information from us.
Another difficult series of questions had to do with the origin of the actual “Jesus” CD. As best we could, Dayna and I wanted to protect the foreign friend from whom we had picked up the film on the day we showed it. When the boss asked us where we had gotten the CD, we evaded and answered indirectly. “It came from Pakistan,” we replied. This was true. “Someone brought the CD in from Peshawar,” we added in the next go-round on the same question.
“Who brought the CD into the country?” the boss demanded. I said, “Perhaps a language teacher who used to work in Pakistan.” I was not sure. Our uncertainty about the CD’s origin, and our unwillingness to confess the name of the last person to have the “Jesus” film in hand, enabled our interrogators to discern holes in our story. They dug deeper into the language teacher theory, and before we knew it we were in a huge mess.
After exchanges like these, I left the interrogations deeply disturbed. How do I maneuver through these tricky questions? How much do I share? When should I be straightforward? When should I remain vague? On these points I truly wished I’d had some training.
Dayna and I lied outright about one thing. We stated that the Aamir family had never shown any interest in learning about Jesus. We claimed all initiative in showing the film as our own. We apologized for having caused so much trouble both for the family and for the Afghan government. It was our fault, not that of the family. “Please forgive us,” we petitioned.