by Dayna Curry
Heather: I got stung just days before our departure. It became a running joke among us that all health travesties seemed to happen to me. I barely missed being stung by a scorpion, I contracted a stubborn case of head lice, and I got stung by a wasp.
The wasp inflicted the sting as I was sitting on a toshak near the window making a card for my mother’s forty-eighth birthday. I was trying to apply some of Silke’s fabulous card-drawing techniques. Just as I moved my leg to readjust my position, the wasp stung me. I have a minor allergic reaction to insect bites and stings, and the back of my thigh swelled up and turned purple. The sting looked like a gigantic bruise.
Heather & Dayna: To the left of the bathroom door—on the same side of the corridor as the small storage room Najib fixed up for Yvonne—was another small room, this one meant to be a bedroom for the Afghan women prisoners. The room contained a bed frame usually piled with the Afghan prisoners’ ancient, mildewing toshaks and filthy blankets. Unlike us, the Afghans were not given new bedding. Also in the room was a small shelf where the women would keep extra bread or rice.
The room smelled foul, especially if a breeze was blowing in from the outside and carrying the bathroom stench with it. When we got to the prison, the Afghan women inmates were keeping their toshaks out in the hallway to escape the odor. Eventually, Najib ordered the room to be cleaned, but the smell lingered.
We called this room the “spare room,” because for most of the nine weeks we lived in the prison, we did not share our corridor with Afghan prisoners. The three women and four children who greeted us when we entered the yard that first day were gone in two weeks. Two more women and a ten-month-old baby joined us for several days in early October around the time the U.S. bombing raids on the city began. Days before our departure, another woman showed up. Then we were gone.
We often used the spare room as a private prayer room. A mouse lived in a hole in the wall underneath the bed. The mouse would travel back and forth from the hole to the shelf, pilfering pieces of bread. One night the six of us agreed to hold an all-night prayer vigil for Afghanistan and the rest of the world in light of the pending war. Each of us signed up with a partner to use the prayer room for different time slots. The two of us—Heather and Dayna—took the 2 A.M. to 4 A.M. shift.
We had a great time until the mouse showed up to raid the shelves. The mouse would hit the bed on its way to the hole and make an awful racket. In an effort to avoid a face-to-face encounter with the mouse, we ended up cutting our time short and finishing our shift praying quietly in our bedroom.
On the floor above us were a prayer room for the men who worked at the prison, a “pharmacy,” though ammunition was stored there, and Najib’s office. All of the rooms looked out over our courtyard, which meant we had to wear our chawdurs whenever we ventured outside. Taliban officials could see us washing our clothes in the yard, pumping our water, and spending time in quiet reflection. Sometimes men would spit or throw water from the prayer room window into the courtyard. Najib often would call out to us from his window and ask us what we were doing.
Dayna: One time I was sitting in the courtyard writing in my prayer journal, and Najib called down from his office asking me how I was and what I was doing. I would often take a chair and sit in the corner of the courtyard, facing the wall to be alone. Mice would come out of a hole in the wall and rummage through our trash, which—with much nagging on our part—was collected once a week. As long as the mice stayed outside, I actually thought they were cute. I honestly thanked God they were mice and not rats, even as I thanked him for clean water to drink and the freedom to go outside. I tried to remain positive and keep the perspective that, for an Afghan prison, our conditions were not so bad.
When Najib called to me this particular day, he saw that I was writing.
“What are you writing?” he asked.
“I am writing what I think God is saying to me.”
“Well,” Najib inquired, “what is he saying?”
“He tells me that he loves me, that I’m going to be okay and not to worry.”
“Ah, but what does God say for me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I will ask him.”
Heather & Dayna: Though he was a youngish middle-aged man, Najib behaved toward us in a paternal way. He had nine children. On a few occasions, Najib took weekends off and went back to his village to spend time with his family. When he returned from one of these visits, he brought us a cloth sack full of almonds. His wife and sisters-in-law had collected them for us and offered us greetings, he said.
“Do you know how to open the shells?” Najib asked.
We did not know, which prompted a chuckle from Najib. He went out into the yard, collected some rocks, and came into our room to show us his method. We were to set the almond on one smooth rock and smash the nut with the other. Often we pulverized our almonds, leaving them all but dust. Eventually, though, we got the hang of shell cracking and used the almonds as a nice garnish on many of our dishes.
Najib told us he had lived in Pakistan for twenty years and moved to Afghanistan less than two years earlier to plant an orchard. He had just planted a thousand trees.
“I came here because it is peaceful,” he said. “And now we are at war.” We were deeply saddened for Najib. He just wanted to live, work, and care for his family, but it was not to be.
Najib’s personal cook prepared our food. Every morning at seven, someone would come to the door with bread and ask us what we wanted to eat that day. Before the bombing started, the women jailers would interact with the guard for us. Once the jailers stopped sleeping at the prison, we took the morning bread from the guard and put in our own menu requests for that day.
Trying to figure out what we wanted to eat every day took time. Diana, usually the only one awake when the guard came, would go out and give him our order. Diana knew only a little Dari, and many times the guard would ask her, “Can you go get Dayna-jan to come explain?”
At lunch and dinner, Najib’s cook would come down to the gate himself and hand the food over to us. The women jailers took the food from him at lunch. After the bombing started, we collected the food in the evening, as the jailer on duty would already be gone. The cook would give us the pot, his hands always black with soot, and ask, “How was your lunch?” or “Did you like what I made you last time?”
We would encourage him by saying, “We enjoyed it. Thank you.”
Sometimes when we met the cook at the gate, he would take a spoon and sample the meal to show us that it was truly tasty—and that it was not poisoned. He wanted us to know that he, too, would eat his own creations.
One day the cook asked us if there was anything else we wanted to eat besides his regular fare. Given the limited selection of ingredients we could obtain in Kabul, we could only think to suggest that he try making macaroni instead of rice. The cook had never heard of macaroni, but one of our women jailers told him where he could buy it. In turn, we proceeded to give him the recipe.
We explained that he needed to boil water and then place the macaroni in the water for approximately ten minutes. Afterward, he could pour out the water and the macaroni would be ready to eat.
What we received was a more complex version of the dish. The cook did bring us macaroni, but the pasta was floating in a pot of oil. Apparently, he had boiled the macaroni in oil and failed to drain it. To an Afghan, a meal is not a meal unless it is prepared in oil. We did not put in a request for macaroni again.
One day we gave the cook a pair of socks and some sugarcoated almonds as an appreciation gift. He accepted our offerings graciously, and from that time on we had a friend in the cook.
In addition to our hot meals, Najib brought us fruit, vegetables, and yogurt from the bazaar on the house, so to speak. At the reform school prison, we paid for these items out of pocket. By the time we got to the intelligence prison, our money supply had diminished significantly, and we were grateful for Najib’s generosity. All of us were sharing Silke’s
money at that time—the money she had managed to collect from her house the day she was arrested.
Shortly after our arrival, we learned that in the midst of America’s war on terror the dollar had dropped to nearly half its value, which forced us to scale back on our spending. We cut out jam, cheese, bottles of cola, and other luxuries, and reduced our shopping list to bottled water, cleaning supplies, and medicine. After our lawyer started making trips in from Pakistan, we received care packages from our parents. When these goods would run out, we resorted to buying cheese once in a while so that we would have protein at breakfast.
One of the delicacies sent in by our parents was coffee. We tried to maintain a two-cups-a-day rule. We ended up stretching the rule to allow for three cups a day. We would usually have one or two cups at breakfast and then one or two cups around three o’clock in the afternoon. The afternoon coffee ritual helped break up the day, providing a welcome rest from mundane activities.
To pass time in the afternoons—and to quench the nagging anxiety about how and when we might ever be released—we played cards, exercised, and read books. Most of us collected some of our own books on the trip to our houses in Wazir. Kati and Silke brought page-turners like John Grisham’s The Firm and The Chamber, for instance—though The Chamber, about a man sentenced to death, was a bit too intense for us given the pressure we were facing. Donahue brought us a cache of books at the reform school prison before evacuating to Islamabad. He and our parents retrieved these books from the dusty shelves of the library at the American Center/GSO/Club compound, which the United States closed along with its embassy compound in 1989.
Among the books the diplomats brought us were some Reader’s Digest fiction anthologies; a book authored by Geraldo Rivera in the mid-seventies called Special Kind of Courage: Profiles of Young Americans; Elsie Reif Ziegler’s Light a Little Lamp, which told the story of a woman reformer working with refugees in Chicago; and many others. Our parents sent more books in with our lawyer later, including The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis and a biography of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan.
Dayna: A Reader’s Digest book, They Beat the Odds, told stories of individuals who persevered through serious trials. One man survived a plane crash in Alaska and endured subzero temperatures for more than a hundred days before he was rescued; another man, already blind, lost his hearing, too. The stories challenged me to make the very most of our prison experience—to enjoy life and live it fully. Our circumstances could have been so much worse.
Heather & Dayna: In between nerve-splitting bombing raids, we tried to maximize the small pleasures. Sometimes we would read while soaking our feet. Our feet became severely chapped over our prison stay. We soaked them often. We would heat up water in one of the green plastic washtubs, sit together, soak our feet, and read. Then we would scrub our feet and moisturize them with lotion or Vaseline. We ordered the Vaseline from the bazaar; it was cheap and came in a plastic bag. We transferred the bagged Vaseline into an actual Vaseline jar and a canister for cream. We would pass the jar and canister around during our morning and evening worship meetings and tend to our feet then.
Dayna: Diana made our daily shopping list for the women jailers. At the reform school prison, I made the shopping list and then communicated it to Mariam, who would write the list in Farsi, which uses the Arabic alphabet. Since two of the women jailers in this prison could not write, Diana would make the list. Being from an Arab family, Diana could write Arabic script. Kati happened to have a Dari school-book with her, and Diana would use it to look up any vocabulary she could not recall. Then she would spell out the words in script.
If Diana had trouble communicating with the guard who was taking the list, I helped her. Heather spoke good Dari by this point, but she usually was asleep when Diana was dealing with the guard in the morning. Kati’s Dari was very good, but she tended to intervene in complex situations involving Najib or other Taliban officials. She was a brave straight-talker. I preferred helping out with day-to-day communication needs. Confronting or dealing with authority figures made me nervous.
Heather & Dayna: Four women jailers looked after us up until the time when the bombing started—Sweeta-jan, Maria-jan, Rohena-jan, and Trinaa-jan. After the bombing commenced, we heard that Trinaa-jan had left the country. Of the remaining three, we were closest to Sweeta-jan and Maria-jan.
Maria-jan was six months pregnant with twins when we arrived. She wore her hair down under a small head scarf, and she wore makeup. Maria-jan was very poor; she lived on the side of the mountain with no electricity in a two-story mud house. She had been married off at thirteen and would tell us how scared of her husband she used to be in those early years. Now things between them had improved.
Maria-jan had several children, including a daughter who wore a prosthesis. The prosthesis did not fit her daughter’s leg properly, and Maria-jan would often tell us that her girl was bleeding and in pain.
Before the Taliban came to power, Maria-jan’s house was rocketed during some cross fire between warring Mujahideen factions. That day she returned to the house after work—she was working in the same prison—and found two of her children dismembered.
Maria-jan was not afraid to ask us for things. We gave her some clothes, tea, sugar, and money. Diana, petite in stature, offered one of her dresses to Maria-jan to take to her daughter. Maria-jan was thrilled to receive the dress and decided she would claim it for herself. She badly needed new clothes. On her next several shifts, Maria-jan wore Diana’s colorful dress with the purple sweater she daily used as a cover-up.
We always shared our extra food with the women jailers. By the time we got to the prison, the women already had gone two months without salary and needed any help we could offer them. Najib, struggling financially himself, understood his employees’ dilemma and on one occasion paid some of their wages out of his personal income. He often brought them gifts when he would return from visiting his village. The women jailers thought highly of Najib and treated him with reverence. They would sit down to tea with him, clucking, “Amir Saeb, Amir Saeb.” Commander Sir. Commander Sir.
Sweeta-jan, an educated widow, grieved over her dire circumstances. She had little at home to eat. After the bombing started, Sweeta-jan said, “I wish America would just come and kill us all. It’s better to die than live hungry.” She had tears in her eyes. We rarely saw her cry.
Sweeta-jan was short and stout. Most of the time she smiled and made jokes. She patted and comforted us. She was always trying to help. “Let me pump water for you,” she would say, or “Let me wash your clothes for you.” We never allowed her, but she always offered. She was very active and frequently cleaned the hallway. She was older than Maria-jan, maybe in her forties, but she looked much older than that. Her skin was worn and leathery. At the corners of her eyes she had prominent crow’s-feet.
Heather: Surprisingly, Sweeta-jan had no gray hair. She wore her long hair up in a bun most of the time. One day I started pulling out some of my gray hairs, and she gasped, “Do not pull out your gray hairs! More will grow back!” Sweeta-jan mothered me. One of her daughters was my age—twenty-four. Whenever I got upset, Sweeta-jan would come and take care of me. “Do not be upset,” she would say softly. Unlike Mariam’s exhortations, Sweeta-jan’s encouragement actually diffused my fear.
One day some weeks after the bombing had started Sweeta-jan made me afternoon tea. We sat down together in the spare room for conversation. I was barely making it emotionally. Tensions with the other five women were high. Planes dropped bombs on the city both day and night. The political situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating rapidly. Progress on our case seemed to be at a standstill. I knew it truly would take a miracle to get us out of the country alive, and I was hardly able to hang on to the promises of God for our deliverance.
Suddenly, a series of explosions erupted nearby. The whole prison shook, and my body vibrated with every boom. I jumped to my feet, and my tea went flying. I was soaked throug
h to the skin and covered in tea leaves. That was it. I started shaking and crying. My nerves were shot.
“It is okay, Khatera-jan,” Sweeta-jan said lovingly, calling me by my adopted Afghan name. “The soldiers are just testing their guns.”
Najib came in to investigate the commotion.
“Sir,” I choked, “you said you would tell us the next time the guards tested their weapons. You said that they would not shoot their tanks inside the compound.”
Uncertain what to do with me, Najib reassured me that he would address the issue and have the tanks removed from the compound. I had a hard time believing him.
For the next hour, Sweeta-jan held me in her arms and stroked my hair. “Do not cry. It will be harder if you cry.” She told me she loved me like her own daughter. Her tender voice comforted me. At that point I just wanted to know that I was loved and that someone cared enough to hold me.
Heather & Dayna: Sweeta-jan was on shift our first night at the prison. She told us she doubted we would be kept at the prison more than a week or so. People sent to this prison were usually on the verge of being released, she said. After a week had come and gone, we let this hope die.
Sweeta-jan served as a source of information. She loved to read and often read a newspaper to keep updated as best she could on the details of the war. She also owned a radio and would bring news when she came in for her shift.
Heather: A few days after we arrived, Sweeta-jan reported that she had heard my father on Pashtu BBC radio offer to take my place in prison. Sweeta-jan spoke both Pashtu and Dari. She did not want to tell me about my father’s offer, because she feared I would become upset. Instead, she mentioned it to Georg as he and Peter were leaving our courtyard after visiting us. I overheard the conversation and managed to pull the information out of them. It bothered me that they pampered me. Though I greatly appreciated Sweeta-jan’s kindness and compassion, I did not appreciate information being withheld, especially when it related to me.