Before I could deal with all that symbolic baggage, though: packing. Stuffing bags was never really about what I wanted to bring, it was about what I wanted to know I had with me—and there was nothing physical that could have made me more ready. But the simple act of returning to the tailors, sitting with them and taking notes, was enough to feel like preparation. I wasn’t just waiting to board a plane, nails bitten to the bone; I was doing something—it didn’t really matter what—and with Mountain Dew and handshakes I strengthened my resolve.
Serlatsum Afghanistan-la.
I bought my tickets into Kabul, and on to Islamabad. I was so excited that I forgot to buy a ticket home.
THE DISPATCHER AT THE TAXI STAND was confused; I was a paradox. “But . . . you’re wearing Pakistani clothes!” And yet, I had the Urdu skills of a wooden chair. At the airport, my looks earned me little but . . . was it discrimination? The metal detector guard merely grunted and poked. I thanked him in Arabic that certainly had no traces of a South Asian accent . . . American maybe . . . maybe French. Eyes widened.
I wanted to dissolve preconceptions for the good that I thought might come out of it, but a simpler mantra still burned under my tongue at all times: Stereotype this! Wearing my shalwar and Pashtun chappal sandals in Abu Dhabi, to Pakistanis I was at first fellow Pashtun but soon an idiosyncratic Western tourist; to Arabs I was a laborer who walked conspicuously like an American; sitting in the airport terminal, I was at first look a resource to Afghans searching with questions in Pashto for their gate—but soon just a Lebanese, for that was what I told them.
It was the first time I’d lied to anyone about my nationality. A touch of fear, maybe, but mostly it was my coy kind of research. I had so little idea how anyone would respond to so many parts of me—it would have been bad science to test every variable all at once.
To me, Afghanistan was half war zone, half news imagery, half quotes and impressions, observations and assertions disconnected from their footnotes. The other half was blank. When I landed in Kabul in Afghan shalwar and Pashtun chappal, I joined the files of other men in the same clothes, in similar sandals, with comparable skin tone—I wanted to be blank, too.
SHARP BROWN MOUNTAINS and splashes of greenery flowed toward the capital as the plane landed. A small group in Western clothes with boxes of gear mixed with the passengers in hats, vests, colors boisterously disembarking. Military planes roosted along the runway; a pair of helicopters kicked up dust. Idle budget airliners lined up like parents’ cars on a suburban street.
On the bus that shuttled us from the terminal to the exit through metal and cement barriers frosted with barbed wire, the driver served me tea. Another driver collected me from the parking lot to bring me to my room in the Gandamack Lodge, secure behind two sets of towering cement walls and barbed wire, two metal gates, a guard house, and security with AK-47s. (We stopped only to collect American dollars and afghanis from the high-end, Western brand-stocked supermarket Spinney’s, also manned with armed guards.) It was a sunny and warm June afternoon inside the hotel garden where a table of Americans were ordering brunch, birds whistling to one another. From here, Afghanistan was very pretty.
The manager and the guests told me that they never felt unsafe walking in Kabul during the daytime, that the streets were lined with police and well-meaning youth, infinitely more intrigued by Westerners than wont to harm them. Still, I left the compound in Afghan clothes, saying little to the officers casually manning the ubiquitous checkpoints around the city. One pair, a young policeman in uniform with Asian features and his scruffy backup in a wrinkled red plaid shirt and jeans, took special interest in me, “the Lebanese.” Red Plaid Shirt was cleaning his rifle, laughing: “You look Afghan!” From afar, maybe—but from up close, I always felt like they knew otherwise.
“Can you show me how to put that together?” I said, sticking my chin at the dismantled gun the plainclothes officer (was he even a policeman?) was inspecting. He smiled a big, friendly smile. I wondered why those words came out of my mouth.
I sat in the guard’s chair by the gate, in the little covered shed hardly wider than my shoulders, listening to instructions as he began to jam the pieces of the AK back together. He blew dust out of one cavity with the rifle balanced on his knee—I had wooden walls on three sides with him as my fourth. Red Plaid Shirt was looking down, visibly occupied with cleaning, but I saw something else: the barrel was pointed straight at me. My mind knew that the gun couldn’t function—the magazine was in his hand, half of the machinery was on a chair—but it wasn’t enough. On reflex, I squeezed myself against the wall of the tiny shed. What if? I grappled with a thousand questions at once: why they would want to shoot me, why this was such a good place to do it, how could they have known I’d ask them about the rifle, how I was going to be late to meet friends of friends for brunch at Le Bistro, how the gun looked really old, how I holyfuckingshit really didn’t want to be sitting there right then.
I stood and stepped to the side as he clicked the magazine into place. We shook hands and they waved me through the gate. I’d taken a wrong turn anyway—this was the driveway to Hamid Karzai’s palace, not the road to Le Bistro.
THIS WAS THE KIND of ignorance I let flourish.
If I had to preach the Gospel of Visitable Places to a stranger, I wanted to have answers not just to my own fears, but to his. Even if he believed my stories, he’d always say, you could only do that because you have this or you are this or you know this. He’d say: I wouldn’t know where I was going. The flash of confidence I felt retreating from the Karzai driveway was like having a good comeback up my sleeve. Neither did I.
And there is another bonus to that ignorance. Unburdened by guidebooks and online reviews and knowledge, everything was a little discovery. The thrill of novelty comes easy for the ill-informed.
AFTER FRIDAY BRUNCH at Le Bistro, I went to the park. Fridays on the Shar-e Now green in the heart of Kabul, men watch animals fight. Fighting animals are status symbols and prized possessions, with tiny fighting quail fetching up to several thousand dollars—many years’ salary for most Afghans. There is money to win, sure, but real winners glean honor from their birds’ bloody beaks. Today, near the intersection of Chicken Street and Garden Street, two or three hundred men circled around battling birds.
I joined the onlooker’s ring, conspicuously taller than most by a head, younger by half, and beardless by all. “There’s no other friend?” the man next to me asked in pidgin Arabic. It was strange to be alone. And I told him that I was Lebanese, still unsure what it would mean to come clean.
Two handlers stood in the center fanning identical caged birds to make them angrier. “Why are they doing that?” I asked.
“Wind,” he said. “After that, it’s good.”
They lifted the cages, suspense building, and stood back to monitor the carnage. The gray, duck-shaped birds stared at each other. They hopped. There is a need for patience in the Afghan original sport of kawk (partridge) fighting—not to be confused with cockfighting, which is also popular around Afghanistan, along with bullfighting, quail fighting, dogfighting, and egg fighting, where I try to crack your hard-boiled egg with my hard-boiled egg. In Shar-e Now park, handlers circle around their birds like boxing referees. One bird grabbed the other by his nape, and then they returned to hopping.
On another side of the city, families picnic and chill in the Bagh-e Babur gardens, designed by the Mughal empire. Lush and vast, the eleven hectares abound with midmillenium architecture, beggar children, and shisha. To walk through the city is to see its many axes of conflict: bomb-blasted ruins and five-star hotels, ragged penury and cautious opulence, dynastic history and political instability. Cradled by the hills of Kabul, the park looks out on minarets in town, on the houses that climb up over one another, on the remnants of the ancient wall that used to defend the city from everything.
At night, Westerners take hired cars to a small list of restaurants and bars. The Gandamack Lodge was one of the
m, with cans of Tuborg for six bucks and doubles of French Pastis for ten. For expats working in development or contracting, boredom blended with comfort—the work-driven still had their Happy Hour.
Everywhere the procedure is the same: knock and a door is opened in a heavy metal slab. One or two guards search bags and pat you down. The next door buzzes and opens with a click, and you exit the city into a Lebanese or Italian or French restaurant that could be anywhere at all.
This was the life for one segment of the population in Kabul, many of whom lived and worked comfortably without ever leaving the capital. But without novelty, others say, it’s not enough.
SATURDAY, TRAFFIC WAS LIGHT on the road from Kabul to the town of Bamiyan, nestled deep in a high valley lined with sandstone cliffs 150 miles to the northwest. But for all the paving efforts that have made it among the smoothest in the country, this route from the Afghan capital through the ten thousand-foot-high Shibar Pass is less than perfect. One week earlier, the head of Bamiyan’s provincial council Jawad Zahhak had been targeted and dragged from his convoy by the Taliban. Four days ago, they told me in the car, he was beheaded. Hussein pointed: “Right . . . wait—there.”
I had found a low-resolution flier for an Afghan tour company online and guessed an e-mail address from a mush of pixels. Success came in the confirmation of a car that would deliver me from outside the dead-bolted orange gates of my hotel in Kabul to their lodge in Bamiyan. At 6 A.M., I was late. The hubcap-less white sedan drew a stark contrast to the polished and armored SUVs that take Westerners to get mango milkshakes. And there were four men inside. Open the mind’s floodgates: this seems infinitely more kidnappy.
In the backseat were Hussein, alternatively smoking, chain-chewing gum and napping, and Qasim, texting and telling me truths about the country. The driver in black spoke no English. The man next to him never liked me. I wedged in between Qasim and Hussein, wearing shalwar kameez like everyone else, disguised and protected from the sun with a scarf that cost 90 afghanis, about a buck-eighty. Outside of the massive tanks, this was the safest way to travel, and certainly the most discreet—three fellow passengers made me three-quarters less suspect. For seven hours, I was ashamed for ever having feared them.
Danger, however invisible, was outside. I was numb to the tension in the car until, half an hour past Kabul, Qasim warned me of the anxieties building in the front seat: we had entered Taliban territory. The eyes and ears of the public, then, were also to be feared: “If they don’t support, so how the Taliban stay?” Hussein explained. Lifting a camera or cellphone could be enough to arouse suspicion, or to have the car stopped, or worse. It would be more than four hours before Qasim told me it was safe to take pictures again.
On the roads south and west out of Kabul, there were Taliban checkpoints within fifteen minutes. Foreigners, if any, could be seized and killed, perhaps held for ransom if their governments were known to respond to that sort of thing.
The northern route was considered much safer—no beard patrols, violence chiefly of the targeted sort, and the occasional convoy of heavy coalition trucks, armored to the gills. Still, because the lifeblood of the Taliban is social support, entering their territory meant traversing towns whose majorities were its champions.
Somewhere deep down, I was constantly scanning for as-yet unnamed feelings of impetuous regret—What hadn’t I done that I could have? What limits are here that shouldn’t be? Always, when kept away from a place by bureacracy or happenstance, I reacted doubly hard and opposite in desire. But now, as much as I scanned, I found no need to push west to Kandahar, or south toward Jalalabad. Like a rumble strip along the shoulder of a highway, these borders around Kabul said: here is an edge. This was a line between possible and impossible, and I could actually see it. I was content to go north and only north.
Where legendary explorers had sought to populate empty maps, to sketch coastline where there had been only waves at the edge of the earth, new adventurers are worth their weight only in detail, or in checked facts. For myself, I erased the bit of bad-reputation coastline that had been painted thick around all of Afghanistan, and penciled in a margin around two country roads.
HUSSEIN WOKE UP from another nap against the door as the road became dirt. “Eighty percent is related to Taliban.” I wondered how anyone could distinguish. “His style, his face . . .” Hussein trailed off. “Just see and watch.”
“Per house, one Taliban,” said Qasim with detached unhappiness. These were the armed militants, the rest—almost everyone in the towns that hosted them—were spies and donors, suppliers of food, shelter, money and the dearest commodity: information. Informants reported anything unusual by cellphone to men stationed farther down the road; to be discovered a foreigner, despite the increased peacekeeping presence, was exceedingly dangerous. But we had to have breakfast somewhere.
The man who never liked me twisted around in the front seat. “So,” he said, “do you want to have tea?” I nodded. “I won’t say anything.”
I would wrap the small scarf tightly around my neck and wear the northerner’s hat. I would imitate every act and gesture of my companions, removing my sandals next to theirs, wringing water from my hands just like Qasim had done. If asked anything, I would shove bread in my mouth and wait for deliverance.
We sat in the Afghan way, on carpets on the floor in a dark room with no chairs. I made no eye contact with the young man who brought kebabs on long, pointed metal skewers and laid them on the plastic mat that ran along the floor. I nodded for tea, and again for sugar. “They think you’re Tajik,” Qasim whispered.
Hussein picked up two pomegranate drinks for the road, and we left alive and full. (The backseat felt like a tighter squeeze.)
To Bamiyan and back, every cellphone, every gaze that lingered or seemed to catch mine was suspicious. In the car I alternated playing a twisted game in my head—Taliban, not Taliban—and chiding myself for profiling what might have been the caring, pacifist father of six. Squatting atop a tall pile of dirt, a beardless kid leaned on a Kalashnikov, fiddling with a cellphone in his other hand.
Silence was my weapon, a flowing shalwar kameez my shining armor. My camera in its bulky bag was the mark of my treason, and I shoved it down between my legs, covering the strap that read “Canon” with the hat that made me look like I was from Tajikistan. Hussein handed me a sickly sweet carton of the pomegranate juice while I picked kebab from my teeth. Qasim sent a few texts. I had no reason to be afraid. The dirt once again became pavement.
BAMIYAN’S NAME COMES FROM the Sanskrit varmayana, “colored.” The road approaches through vivid red hills that evoke my parents’ old Camry. In town, assorted shades of farmland are well tended. Far away in the distance are the brown and gold sandstone cliffs, marked by stark niches in the shape of a Russian nesting doll, the memory of their giant former tenants, the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Long before Islam and its arrival in the region, Bamiyan was a stop along the Silk Road at the heart of a thriving Buddhist empire. Two short millennia later in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a popular resting place on the hippie trail—the overland route to Kathmandu—where thousands of wayfaring flower children could smoke local weed and hash at the feet of the Buddhas in their man-made nooks: female Sha-mama, “Queen Mother,” and male Salsal, “light shines through the universe,” which was then the largest standing Buddha in the world at 180 feet tall.
Across the valley floor rises the Koh-e-Baba mountain range, always black and capped with white snow at 16,000 feet high; one peak known as Koh-e-Allah, “Mountain of God,” has snow drifts that spell out “Allah” in Persian script and never-melting ice. In the Bamiyan bazaar 8,200 feet above sea level, it is fifteen degrees cooler than in Kabul.
A rocky hilltop is always in plain sight from anywhere in town, bristling with the ruins of an ancient citadel where all of Bamiyan once lived: this is Shahr-e Gholghola, “City of Screams.” In the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan massacred everyone in the city because he wa
s really, really pissed off that he hadn’t conquered them quickly enough. From the top of the citadel the whole valley unfolds, not narrow and angled like a canyon, but round like the basin of an empty lake, like a pie crust rising in all directions.
A quiet man heaved open a heavy metal gate and the driver deposited me with Gul, the owner of the new lodge. (His name is pronounced “ghoul” in contradiction to everything he is: angelic, ruddy-cheeked and serenely smiley, as if his face couldn’t crinkle because the mountains all around were doing it for him.) As soon as we’d made our kind of international medium-small talk and he’d shown me where I was going to sleep, I disobeyed his instructions and went out for an evening stroll. Bamiyan is incredibly safe, he’d always say—but there was an uncertainty now where there hadn’t been. I was their first customer since the spring, and he wasn’t sure how the town responded to new faces.
THE SUN WAS SETTING over Bamiyan’s residential alleyways and children were playing in the shadows. One girl in all black but for a pink headscarf, the clear leader of the pack at about nine years old, had her hands at a friend’s throat. The friend was grinning in an azure dress. The other looked deadly serious. A dozen children of various sizes and degrees of disarray ran screaming in circles, slowing only to inspect me. “No Dari,” I would say, I understand nothing. I motioned to my camera, May I? Some backed away, and the leader tsked loudly with a stare of pure ice, never once lifting her fingers from their neckline clamp.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 11