by Dayna Curry
“I will take you to a secret meeting with Peter and Georg,” he explained.
We welcomed any contact with Peter and Georg, but this meeting was scheduled for an unusually late hour. When we got to the men’s room, we understood the reason. Revising Karim’s original report, Georg informed us that two planes had flown into New York City’s World Trade Center towers and another plane had hit the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, he said. The death toll numbered somewhere around six thousand.
Unbelievable. Within seconds two planes had become four, and four hundred casualties had become six thousand. In my heart, I guessed the perpetrator likely was Osama bin Laden, which meant the Taliban and Afghanistan would pay heavily.
Karim, who was in the room, continued to insist that Afghanistan was not behind the attacks. Georg seemed somewhat relaxed, but I could read his face. Unless we got out of the country soon, we would be caught up in a sea of potentially deadly consequences. Georg did say he believed that America would not retaliate without doing extensive research and assured us we should not expect an immediate response.
SEPTEMBER 15, 2001
Heather:
Oh Lord Jesus, I struggle so much with fear here. Every moment of every day I battle the fear that either a [Talib], a bomb from [the Northern Alliance], or an angry [terrorist] will kill me. I want so much to live and proclaim the miracles you have done. Oh Lord, I beg that you might spring open this door and let us go free alive and unharmed … You alone can rescue us. Please rescue us soon and save us from violence and revenge.
—JOURNAL ENTRY
SEPTEMBER 17, 2001
Dayna: In the days following the attack on America, we learned that many top Taliban officials were evacuating Kabul. Several reportedly went back to their home village of Wardak, located on the road to Ghazni toward the south. Mariam, also from Wardak, sent her two daughters home. The boss began releasing some of the prisoners.
The woman we called “beggar lady” got to leave with her daughter, Tooba. A teenager was released in order to marry. She had been arrested for running off with her beloved in order to get away from a man to whom she was engaged. Now she was being made to marry that man. We put together a little makeup package for her, using some gifts that came in one of Donahue’s packages. Two more girls who had been taken for interacting with men unrelated to them also were let go.
We were so happy to see the women released. The Afghans wailed when the time came to say goodbye. They always cried when others got released, wishing they, too, could go free.
In the midst of the departures, we had the sense that something was about to happen to us. The boss seemed nervous about keeping us at the compound. There was talk of moving us to a safer place. We did not understand the Taliban’s intentions.
On the morning of the seventeenth, Mariam came to me while I was praying in the courtyard. “You need to start getting your things together,” she said.
Heather: I was sitting across the courtyard from Dayna. Mariam approached and asked me, “How would you like to go to Wardak?”
“The Taliban are moving us today?” I asked.
“Yes, go pack your things.” The idea of Wardak appealed to me slightly. At least we would be out of the city if America bombed. I casually collected my possessions, expecting that the move, like many things about life in Afghanistan, would take hours. Then an abrupt knock came at the door.
In walked the boss. “We are taking you to a nice place today,” he said, noticeably anxious. “You will be very comfortable there and much safer. But you have to hurry.”
“Are we going to Wardak?” I asked.
“No, just beyond Wazir, over the far side of the mountain.”
Now I was not so excited. One place in Kabul would be no safer than any other. I wondered where they truly were taking us.
Everyone packed frantically. We ended up leaving much of our food behind. But if we were going to a nice place, then perhaps we would not need all the extra food.
We had scarcely any time to say goodbye to the Afghan women. More than anything, before I left I wanted each of them to know she was loved. They all came out of their lesson to see us off. I cried as I hugged them. “I love you,” I whispered to each one.
When I reached Nafisa, my heart sank. How could I say goodbye to this precious girl? I hugged her. “I love you, Nafisa. I will never forget you. I would take you to America with me if I could.” We pulled back and looked at each other. Tears ran down our cheeks, and we made the sign we had used across the courtyard when forbidden to talk. We each covered our heart with our right hand and smiled.
I found Samira and her little girl in the bathroom. Samira was bawling. We embraced, and I prayed for them. Meanwhile, Dayna and the others went down the row of Afghan women hugging and kissing them goodbye.
Living with these women had become my great joy and a source of strength. As we walked out, I stood at the gate waving as long as I could.
part three
WAR GAMES
fourteen
OUT OF THE FRYING PAN
He ran out from under a leaking roof and sat in the rain.
—AN AFGHAN PROVERB
Heather Dayna: “Are Georg and Peter coming?” we asked the boss. About twenty armed men loitered near the van outside the reform school compound. We set our bags down on the pavement. Big Eyes stood nearby. Karim was nowhere to be seen.
“No, they are not coming,” the boss said. “They are going to stay here.” We did not like the sound of this answer.
“We will not be going anywhere without them,” we said firmly. “If they are not being moved, we are not being moved.” The boss went back inside his office building. About fifteen minutes later, Georg and Peter came out carrying their bags. They had refused to be moved at first, then the boss told them we were all standing outside ready to go.
“Do not worry,” the boss kept saying. “We are taking you to a nice, comfortable place in Kabul. You will be well looked after. You will be safe there.” We wondered where such a place might be, but we believed the boss could be telling the truth. Maybe he planned to take us to Wazir and put us up in one of the foreigners’ homes the Taliban had confiscated.
Instead, our caravan of vehicles set out in the direction opposite of Wazir, eventually turning into a desolate section of town. Dust coated the buildings. Many of them looked abandoned. We pulled through the gate of a large compound. Barbed wire topped the high wall bordering the property. Several guards were stationed at the gate. We thought, Surely we’re just making a stop on the way to our destination.
Once inside the compound, the boss told us we would be getting out here. We were astonished. If the boss had lied about taking us to a safe, comfortable place, what might the Taliban really be planning to do with us? We cautiously unloaded our bags.
Guards led Peter and Georg away. Big Eyes escorted us—the women—through a rickety wooden courtyard door not fitted properly on its hinges. A chain and padlock were fastened on the door. Two feet of barbed wire ran around the top of the courtyard’s mud brick wall; this wall also served as the outer wall to the whole compound.
The wooden door opened onto a dusty wasteland. Rocks covered the ground, and there was nothing green to be seen. A silver water pump was positioned in the center of the yard. A couple of broken metal chairs languished nearby. Shoved up against the wall opposite the courtyard door was a soiled toshak. To our left stood four wooden posts wrapped with burlap. Inside the enclosed area was a mountain of feces.
Is this supposed to be our outhouse? we wondered.
A two-story, concrete prison building formed the right-hand wall of the courtyard. Rusty bars covered the windows. A set of windows on the ground floor was bricked up. Pieces of concrete that had fallen off the building were strewn over the ground below.
Two women jailers greeted us. “Welcome,” they said, and showed us to a room the size of a large closet just inside the building.
“Put your bags in
here,” we were told. We stood at the entrance to the room and looked in. The dusty room contained a bunk bed and a desk, affording only a sliver of standing room. One small window let in precious little light.
“So this is where they are putting us.”
We laughed anxiously. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” someone muttered.
As we stood there, we noticed some Afghan women and children peering at us through a barred door several feet away. We found out later that the women were imprisoned for transporting weapons across town. Someone had hired the women to do it. Now they were stuck here.
Ursula was sick the day we arrived and needed to lie down. The jailers brought a corroded metal bed frame out into the courtyard and placed a toshak on top of it. The legs of the bed were secured precariously with ropes to the bars on one of the ground-floor windows.
In the courtyard, Big Eyes and some other men were wrapping up the details of our handover to the authorities at this prison. The men in charge wore especially large turbans. Our boss from the reform school was not in the party.
Heather: I approached Big Eyes and began asking him to please identify the prison and these men.
“This is Commander Najib,” said Big Eyes. “He is in charge of the prison.” In front of us stood a healthy-sized man in his late thirties or early forties. He wore a large, black turban. His beard was dark brown and pointy toward the bottom. He had an olive complexion, round eyes, and a prominent nose. He looked stern, as if he had just completed an important business transaction.
We greeted him warily.
I turned to Big Eyes. “You are a Pashtun,” I began. “You told us that, as a Pashtun, you would take good care of us. You promised you would not harm us because we are your guests. As a Pashtun, you must treat your guests with respect.”
Big Eyes nodded in agreement. Overhearing the conversation, Najib spoke his own words of affirmation.
“Oh, you do not have to worry,” he assured me. “You will be my guests. You are our guests, and we will take care of you.” In time, Najib proved himself kind and gracious; he did take care of us.
Heather & Dayna: Meanwhile, another man who we later learned was Najib’s superior, Sonan, walked onto the scene. The men talked briefly, and before Big Eyes left, he assured us he would return regularly to check on our conditions. We never saw him again.
The moment Big Eyes walked out of the courtyard, we sank. We felt betrayed, depressed, and sick over our circumstances. Foreigners and Taliban were fleeing the city. The United States might start bombing at any moment. Who could guess whether our governments knew where we were? We were terribly anxious.
Someone suggested we sit in the courtyard and sing worship songs to encourage ourselves.
Heather: I went to Najib and asked him for permission to sing so that we would not start off burning bridges with these new Taliban. Najib consented.
Heather & Dayna: Once we began to sing, Sonan—a stocky, youngish man—quickly intervened.
“Please,” Sonan said. “You sing loudly. People will be able to hear you over the wall. You can sing later once you are inside, after your room is ready.” Workmen would have us a large room prepared before nightfall, he promised.
The news of a large room marked an upswing in the mood of the group. Of course, time would tell whether Sonan was speaking the truth, but not much time was necessary in this case. A crew of men soon arrived and began knocking the bricks out of the ground-floor windows. We had never seen Afghans move so quickly. The men swept all the dust and rubble out of the room and carted it away; they measured the windows for glass and within an hour had returned with brand-new panes.
We learned from the Afghan women prisoners—two young women and one elderly—that men had come the day before and cleaned out the room, which to that point had served as a storage area. The young daughter of one of the women told us that before we arrived the men had carried weapons out of the room.
This piece of information worried us. Were we being held at a military installation, a prime target for U.S. bombers? Later, a guard denied that weapons were being stockpiled at the compound, but we knew that the room directly above ours contained at least ammunition. We could hear bullets drop and roll on the floor over our heads late at night as the prison guards prepared their guns.
Najib, our new boss, ordered us a nice lunch that first afternoon. We were served rice, meatballs, potatoes, and yogurt, an excellent meal by any Afghan’s standards. Late in the day men carried in some worn, dusty carpets for our room. We cleaned the floor as best we could before the carpets were laid. The men moved toshaks into the room to accompany two sets of bunk beds. Close to eight o’clock, the men brought us blankets. The women prisoners sewed the toshaks and blankets, we learned, using brand-new fabric.
“They sure went to a lot of trouble for us,” we observed. “Maybe this will not be so bad after all.”
Our second prison, what we later learned was a high-security intelligence prison, proved a happier arrangement in some respects than the reform school prison. We did have a bathroom, and we did not have to share it with thirty other women. We met with Peter and Georg nearly every day. Privacy was still hard to come by, but at least we were not dealing constantly with people and clamor.
The metal door from the courtyard into the prison opened onto an entryway. Just off the entryway to the right was the closet-sized room where we put our bags after arriving the first day. The women jailers used this room when they were on shift. Four women rotated twenty-four-hour shifts; after the United States started bombing Kabul, three women rotated six-hour day shifts. The fourth woman fled the country, we were informed.
From the entryway, a barred door led to a narrow corridor. Turning left on the corridor, we came to our room on the left-hand side.
The doorway to our room was short and wide. We entered facing a large picture window that looked out on the courtyard. Our walls were painted mint green. Against the right-hand wall, the two sets of bunk beds were lined up head-to-foot. We put a toshak against the left-hand wall. A tall metal cabinet stood in the front left-hand corner; we used it as a combination pantry and medicine cabinet. We placed a second toshak in front of the window and a third toshak to the right as you walked in the door. We had just enough space in the center of the room to spread out a destarkhaan during mealtime.
Out in the hall to the left of the room was a small table where we set our heating plate for cooking. A four-tiered metal shelf—where we kept pots, plates, and metal bowls—stood to the right of our door. The prison supplied our cookware, utensils, and the heating plate.
The heating plate plugged into a precarious socket, which dangled by a cord from a nail in the wall. Live wires ran out of the socket, and the holes in the socket were cracked and melted, presumably due to electrical fires. The fuse box in the hallway looked worse, amounting to a tangle of live wires interlaced with plastic bags. It, too, apparently had experienced a couple of meltdowns.
Silke took on the job of electrician. Almost every day, something in the socket next to our room went awry, and the heating plate remained cold. Silke would take her manicure kit to the scene and use her implements—previously employed in the business of mural carving—to make sense of the mess.
Across the hall from our room was a small storage room. Several weeks into our stay, Najib had the room cleaned out and a toshak brought in for a colorful, but soon-to-be-released, prisoner—British journalist Yvonne Ridley. Yvonne never ended up staying in the room, though Ursula and Silke slept there on occasion. Apart from a picture of a mosque painted on one wall, the room was sparse. A plank of wood covered a large hole in the cement floor. When left uncovered, the hole became an entranceway for mice.
The window in this storage room looked out toward the men’s courtyard, a less barren plot of ground than ours. Springing up from a patch of garden were red, pink, and white roses, flowers famously tended and appreciated by Pashtuns. On occasion Taliban guards would pick the roses
and put them in the barrels of their Kalashnikovs.
Our bathroom was situated at the opposite end of the hallway. When we entered the tiny room, we faced a sink. The sink turned out to be cosmetic, not that it brought any sense of aesthetic comfort—it was not attached to a water line. On the right was a porcelain squatty potty that we flushed manually using buckets of water we would carry in from the pump in our courtyard.
We set up a cleaning rotation for the bathroom. Whoever had bathroom duty would clean the concrete floor with soap and water and then sweep the water down a hole in the floor. We cleaned the sink and toilet with bleach and emptied the sack of toilet paper hanging on the wall. We did not want to flush paper since at the reform school prison our paper flushing had clogged up the plumbing.
We washed dishes and clothing in the courtyard next to the pump. A laborious activity, washing clothes at least anchored our daily routine. We ordered washing powder every week from the bazaar. Wringing out thicker items, such as sweaters and towels, required two people when we were involved; the Afghan women, however, had strength to wring such garments and linens without assistance.
When we first arrived at the prison, the bathroom door was bereft of a lock. This turned out to be a problem. The four children staying in the prison with their mother—one of the three women arrested for weapon smuggling—were a pesky lot. One of the little boys would stand outside the bathroom while someone was inside and flick the light switch on and off. Sometimes the children would open the door while one of us was bathing. We complained to a prison deputy, and Najib had a lock put on two days later.
The only thing we complained about that Najib neglected was an enormous wasps’ nest located just outside our bedroom window. The wasps were loud and sometimes got inside the building through a small hole. A few of us got stung.