The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  I put my hands around my own neck: “No violence!” They laughed, understanding my sign language. “If you don’t stop, I’m going to take a picture.” I aimed at the girls—I could feel the other children jittering with excitement. Perhaps the boys had never seen her vulnerable before, hands still frozen in their chokehold. TCH-CHK. Squeals of delight as they heard the shutter click. The girls broke instantly to crowd around the back end of the camera, looking where I was looking, enthralled by the tiny screen’s ability to suck in the world. That is them! I could feel the smaller ones thinking. Ha!

  But I had reached the limit of my offensive—I could push no harder without being a monster, and I agreed to lay down my arms in return for amnesty. “Okay. You take pictures of me.”

  I handed over my Canon Rebel XT, a model older than some of the kids, and instigated a ferocious game—part rugby, part manhunt—with the camera as an instrument of unspeakable power. They pointed and fired upon each other shouting bikrum! bikrum!—ninety-seven shots, half of them completely blackened by underexposure. A small girl backed me up against the rock and mud wall and took my picture. I was not so dangerous now—if I had ever been.

  It seemed so fitting: women play a remarkably powerful social and political role in Bamiyan Province, whose Hazara ethnic majority was ruthlessly persecuted by the Taliban. Already outcast as Shia Muslims with physical features passed down from Turks, Tajiks and Mongolians (including Genghis Khan), Hazaras shun the burqa and send their daughters to school—nearly 80 percent of eligible girls in Bamiyan—a world apart from the 10 percent of many southern Afghan provinces. In 2005, Dr. Habiba Surabi became the country’s first female governor.

  I didn’t know this when I watched this little band explode with energy, or when I saw a little boy in a mussed dinner jacket wrestle with the girls twice his size. Bikrum! Faster and faster. Bikrum! (It finally got through to me: “Picture!”) It was their turf, for now.

  A large red van pulled into the alley. It carried two men, Pashtun engineers working to build a training center for midwives down near the bazaar. Hoping only to keep the peace, they returned me my Canon and opened their compound’s iron gate, turquoise and shaped like the twin tablets of the Ten Commandments. I thought maybe the rules had changed, and I snapped some pictures as boys ran through my field of view like gleeful soldiers; Dinner Jacket beamed in straight lines, a boy with few teeth giggled in dizzying circles. Soon they were all chasing me as a pack, pulling at the camera strap in unison. I kept clicking, backpedaling quickly—but without knowing it, I had already crossed a line.

  I saw that one boy had picked up a rock, and then they all had. All with stones as big as their hands. I couldn’t glean from their faces whether anger or playfulness had changed their minds, or politics or boredom. I was scared. Then, fleetingly, I relished my reason for being so among all the scenarios imagined and possible in Afghanistan. Then I was scared again.

  I was still facing the children when the engineers’ voices rang out behind me, delivering discipline in Dari. Rocks fell to the ground.

  “You will come have tea?”

  IN A SMALL ROOM there was a mattress for every wall, laid along the floor with floral sheets neatly tucked in. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, but the room was well lit with the last threads of sunlight weaving in through the bars on the window. I saw all fourteen of their eyes on me. Most gazed out from above friendly noses and a smile, some wore the blankest of stares—blank not with incomprehension but with openness to my whimsical appearance on their lonely residential backstreet in central Afghanistan. Naeem, one of the engineers, sat on my right side.

  “They are here for you,” he said in English.

  These men, born in Afghanistan, had lived much of their lives as refugees in Pakistan and now lived together in a small commune to do construction work on a midwife training center in peaceful Bamiyan. Naeem was tall and handsome, clean shaven but for a light goatee, with the kind of face that could place him anywhere. I hadn’t noticed an accent after a handful of words of introduction and suspected, in a flash of conspiracy, that he was another undercover American hiding in Afghan clothes. I tried to think of a hand sign only Americans would know, a secret Westerners’ salute, but craftiness came out as candor: “So, where are you from?”

  “Kabul,” he said.

  I didn’t pretend to be Lebanese anymore. Apart from Gul, these were the first Afghans in Afghanistan I told I was American.

  I didn’t look like their stock photo of “English”—their usual bracket for all native-English speakers. Naaem described this character, one who would arouse the wrong kind of curiosity on the road from the capital: “Big, big body . . . big and fat . . . and white. Blue eyes or green eyes—red faces.” Anything but a superfecta of these qualities and a refusal to dress locally was enough for safe passage to Bamiyan.

  And if they ever thought I was CIA, they never let on. My reasons for coming, just to come, did not have the sound of masked secrets.

  Naeem translated for many but spoke for most, and someone turned off the television for us to question one another rather than listen to mostly dispiriting news through static in Urdu. “Tonight you will be with us,” he told me in the way an oracle relates a prophecy. Hospitality is never in question in the Bamiyan Valley. If there is a guest, there is a meal, there is a bed, there is every frill the hosts have denied themselves. “We will bring you something special that you’ll like it,” Naeem said. “Wine, or something like this?”

  I never asked if they had access to alcohol, or if they would even drink it, but I certainly didn’t want to find out by sending them on a dangerous Grey Goose chase to find liquor for the American. The offer implied no possession, it merely evinced the willingness to give. I never once questioned that willingness—I knew they would have chased geese for me all night just to say welcome.

  We became simpler people. The man with an angular face and ebullient blue eyes, who had met me outside, who had saved me from a pack of excited children with stones in their hands, spoke in a quiet voice. “Take tea?” His name was Osama Latif. (The guys smirked, “Pay attention to the ‘Latif!’ ”)

  I fumbled with the phrase my Pashtun tailor friends had taught me in Abu Dhabi for just such an occasion: “Kataso skay, bya malahum raorey.” If you are drinking tea, then bring some for me also.

  For an hour we talked about each other. I looked for information with clumsy questions. (“Is there any cultural difference between Afghan and Pakistani Pashtuns?” Answer: “No.”) They took a very different approach, prizing my character from the looks on my face, the way I sat, the way I moved. They found information in the way I reported the opinions of my compatriots, with my tone, perhaps, as the only gauge of my consent: “What do American people think about the Taliban?”

  However much silence there had been, there was more. Men shifted on the mattresses and leaned in from the walls. I didn’t know where they stood. I summoned every ounce of diplomatic vagueness and gratuitous jargon that had pulled me through college political science papers. “The Taliban supports a way of doing something that allows for methods that are inhumane . . .” I said haltingly. No one spoke. As Pashtuns, Naeem and company were the country’s majority but the valley’s minority—two-thirds of Bamiyan province is Hazara; a thousandth is Pashtun. And as Pashtuns, these men fell into the ethnic group the Taliban claimed to represent. But these men were no supporters of the Taliban. Like much of Bamiyan’s current population, they had fled abroad during the height of the Taliban rule in the 1990s and returned to Afghanistan after Karzai (a Pashtun who had been living in exile in Pakistan) took over at the end of 2001; others had never left the country, but had come north toward the greater safety of the Bamiyan Valley. All of those displaced were nationally Afghan, some Dari speaking, some Pashto speaking, many ostracized by other coteries of local society. Mokhtar, Gul’s employee and my best source of information, was born in Tehran and had the accent to show for it. (“And we have better st
yle,” he said.) Refugees who were born or lived in Iran spoke Dari (almost identical to Iranian Persian); their skin is lighter, their features more Caucasian. The Pashto speakers (who also speak Dari) lived in refuge in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

  Their livelihood depended on the protection of this ethnically distinct, socially advanced province from militant onslaught. I ventured an observation before an opinion: “Afghans that are Persian think it’s the Pashtun—they’re afraid.”

  Naeem was nodding. “Persian people think Pashtuns are the Taliban. Here I’m Pashtun and I’m scared of Taliban.” This was the constant paradox of their lives: every vestige of Pashtun culture—clothes, facial hair, language, skin color, the nationality of their passport—these separated them from their Western contracting colleagues. So what they could change they did within reason, but beardless and Pashtun, they became typical subjects for Taliban interrogation.

  “That is not Pashtun,” said Osama Latif, denouncing extremists. In his mind, he belonged to an ethnic group defined not only by common language; his group was founded on ethics, too. As we might condemn with the word un-American, Osama Latif repudiated the Taliban for their rejection of basic ethics. To be Afghan is a privilege that can be rescinded.

  Identities had to have some moral backing because they had no clear face: Afghanistan’s quarter-million square miles have seen dynasties come and go and become other things—there is no one look to the populations indigenous to this land. I saw Mongolian boys and American men, Spanish women and Irish kids with red hair and green eyes and freckles. Whatever I’d pictured as Persian or Pashtun or Parsi or Tajik or Mongolian or Uzbek, all of this can be Afghan.

  Osama Latif mocked the militants’ real common trait: “Same cap and hat, now we’re Taliban!” We deny their ethnicity, and we can deny their nationality—they have only their hats. By this process, the men in this room had ostracized terrorists to the brink of humanity.

  Of course, in doing so they tended to overstate the role of foreigners. Taliban volunteers may be Chechen or Arab or Pakistani, but Osama Latif and the others were making a different point: they are not us, so they must not be truly Afghan.

  “When he goes on vacation, he goes to Pakistan,” Osama Latif said. If you’re a Talib, he meant, your heart isn’t in Afghanistan—not where mine is.

  In Afghanistan, blame fell often on “Pakistan.” In Lahore, two men would tell me the terrorists were coming from India. In northern India, I’m sure, they will say extremists come from the south. In the south, they undoubtedly come from Sri Lanka. And if Sri Lanka ever faces another terrorist threat, blame may rebound northward, or they may well accuse evil creatures that rise from the sea to tyrannize the innocent and go bump in the night.

  And so banished from the world of sense and reason, the Taliban were relegated to the one scrap of territory they had left: the domain barbed not by wire but by ridicule. Naeem asked me what I would do if the Taliban caught me, but spoke before I could try to answer seriously: “You fuck the Talib that’s killing you!” The Taliban were now the butts of jokes. (As it turned out, butt humor is ageless in Afghanistan. Every so often, Naeem would tease Khial Meer, the Khandahari man opposite me who wore a look of unflappable calm all evening. “In Khandahar, you sleep with your back against the wall,” Naeem joked with a big grin. “You know what they say over there? ‘Allah save everything. But wall save butts.’ ”)

  I asked to video them recounting jokes in Pashto, and though first enthusiastic, they turned fearful. They reckoned that if I were ever in danger, if the American government were to be looking for me, they would find records of these particular men . . . joking. (Earlier, Naeem had excitedly run in with knives when I asked if we could pose for a picture with them pretending to kidnap me. The others convinced us it was a bad idea.) It didn’t worry me that they had implied the possibility of my abduction (when I landed in Afghanistan, I’d already imagined worst-case scenarios and ignored them) but it was striking how powerfully they felt a joking attitude and a straight face might be perceived differently by outsiders.

  In this room, though, it felt like there was no performance. I didn’t censor myself as some kind of experiment, or for safety or popularity, and I trusted deeply that they weren’t performing either.

  That night we ate thick beans and yellow rice with the warm Afghan bread that is baked flat, punctured with hundreds of holes with two roles: keeping the bread flat and serving as a kind of baker’s signature. A much older man with a gray beard down to his breastbone joined us on the floor. “The leader,” Naeem stated proudly. The man finished eating and turned up the volume on the news; tanks rolled around somewhere in the north, no reports of violence from the south. Naeem wiped his fingers on the bread. “You’re Muslim?” he asked.

  “Jewish.”

  “What?”

  “I’m Jewish.”

  I saw no grain of malice in his eyes, only that I had steered him into uncharted waters—exploring the close kinship of our traditions. “We did chapter one,” I said. “Christianity is chapter two. The Quran is chapter three—it’s all the same story.” It wasn’t the most eloquent exegesis of Abrahamic scripture, but it felt like a start. “Honestly, I don’t really believe any of it,” I shrugged happily.

  This was a faux pas in the traveler’s Rulebook for Devout Places. I found that differences in religion were tolerated (and understood) far more readily than a lack of faith. If I didn’t subscribe to a higher power, how could I be trusted to live by any code of ethics? Who were we mutually afraid of?

  I mentioned Adam and Abraham, Ibrahim, and won brief nods from the room. The man from Khandahar agreed with every word and told me so in Arabic. We hadn’t gotten terribly far in our conversation, but we had opened the forum—and with that, the call to prayer sounded and the men dispersed to perform their ablutions.

  EVERY DAY in the central Afghan summer, wild wind and rain rage for a brief moment, usually around 2 P.M. Making a dash from the shelter of the Buddha shells, Mokhtar and I leaped over the irrigation ditches with jacket collars pulled over our heads, scampering through the fields.

  Little caves have always freckled the cliffs, once housing hermits seeking calm and stillness, or enlightenment, or a better view. Now, they were known to house those displaced by violence farther south. At the height of Shamama’s navel, one family peeked out from the refuge of one of these holes, reforging a millennium-old lifestyle.

  In 2001, only two years after he had promised to protect them, Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar forced townspeople to drill charges of dynamite into the Buddhas. With the help of antitank mines and rockets, the icons that had stood since the sixth century were reduced to rubble.

  But when they demolished the Buddhas, they unwittingly uncovered a series of fifty hidden caves and temples carved into the rock behind them. A dozen of these are decorated with oil paintings from as far back as the fifth century, many hundreds of years before Europeans ever painted with oil. In their crusade to eradicate idolatry, the Taliban helped discover the oldest oil paintings in the world.

  The alleyways gave way to little absurdities like this. In an underground shed below the Rah-e Abrisham lodge, Gul neatly stacked ski gear donated from Italy. In the spring, the town had hosted the First Afghan Ski Challenge, coordinated by the Swiss and Afghan members of the new Bamiyan Ski Club. Iconoclasm discovering icons; racism succeeded by ski races. Eight-year-olds with rocks more dangerous than the land mines in the hills.

  The Taliban government was ousted eight months after destroying the Buddhas; they now have no control in Bamiyan. And still, the absent niches in the cliffs are the loudest things in the valley.

  It was a place that was impossible to pigeonhole, and every time I began to construct the shortcuts I use to simplify spaces and consolidate people, Afghanistan said no. When contradictions were still possible, my mind was open, and delighted in absurdity, and took everything in.

  FIFTE
EN MINUTES BY TAXI due west is Dara-e Azhdahar, “Dragon Valley,” a land that is home to an indestructible legend. Past a small town pinched between sharp cliffs that look like petrified theater curtains, the road turns to face a massive stone hill with a smooth spine. This is a once-great dragon defeated by Ali, the fourth Islamic caliph, the defining patriarch of Shia Islam. A fissure wide enough to fall into snakes along the backbone and marks the strip of flesh that Ali cut from the dragon to save a young girl from sacrifice. The dragon weeps to this day: a gurgling opening at the end of the crevice spits clear, salty water in noisy, paroxysmal spurts.

  I let my eyes run over the grasses as we rode the dirt road out of town. And then, camera down by my knees: I was locked in the tractor beam of a girl’s gaze. Tiny, with a shaved head and bright eyes electric blue under black eye shadow, tightly wrapped in a red dress. She was about two or three and she held on to her mother’s finger and stared at me. For years now, I have called her to mind.

  Another fifty miles pass by beautifully through barren, sandy bluffs and lush farmland with sheep out to pasture, all with ice-capped mountains in the near distance. Paying very close attention to faded signs along the dust and mud road, ignoring them, and then relying on his instinct, our driver took a right turn through the grasses.

  And when my expectations finally hit zero, an enormous lake appeared a thousand feet below. This is the driveway to Band-e Amir, Afghanistan’s first and only national park, home to six sapphire-blue lakes magically sprung from the alpine desert. Entry costs fifty afghanis, one dollar, for a life-changing tableau.

  Towering cliffs form the walls of each lake, stunningly reddish brown and gray and changing colors with the sunlight. Each is separated from the next by a natural dam of bright white calcareous travertine that spills over its edges like an infinity pool. The lake’s overflow cascades down the calcium-rich rock in sparkling waterfalls toward the next lake. These dams are the park’s namesake—Band-e Amir, named for Ali, is “King’s Dam.”