The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  Not for the first time, Zakia and Ali approached the home with no guarantee of what reception awaited them. They were former neighbors, distantly related like nearly everyone in their village, but still they had no way to know for sure how these people would react. Fortunately, when the couple related to Haji and Zahra what had happened to them the past couple weeks, the older couple readily agreed to give them refuge.

  “At any home, when we were running, we would knock on the door and say, ‘We are running because we’re in love,’ and usually they would take us in and help us,” Ali said. “It was not because we were Hazaras and they were Hazaras. It’s because everyone has at least once experienced love in their early lives, and they knew what it meant to be in love, even if they didn’t have their love with them still. Even the governor, when Zakia-jan was in the shelter, she said, ‘It’s not because you’re Hazara that I’m helping you but because she loves you and she shouldn’t be without you.’”8

  The house of Zahra and Haji was the first place where Zakia and Ali had felt safe since their flight from Bamiyan town. It, too, was a mud-brick dwelling, but the window frames were all of hand-planed lumber, painted a cheerful sky blue; the compound was freshly swept and as clean as a place with packed earthen floors could be. The roof was supported with battens of crooked birch trunks. In the bottomland wheat and potato seedlings were already sprouting, the green making a startling contrast with the dull brown and pale golden colors of the dirt slopes above. Higher on the mountainside, another green smudge had started to appear, a dusting of grass sprouts, watered by the still-melting snow. “It was good to begin a new life with greenery and spring,” Ali later said. They took walks in the steep grazing lands, reminiscent of the slopes where they spent their childhoods together herding sheep. It was as close to a honeymoon as they were likely to have. “They seemed so happy together,” Zahra said. “For the whole week they were here, they were never fighting or angry.”

  Then one day Zahra’s children came home from school and said other kids had asked them who they were hiding. An old woman, another distant relative from Surkh Dar, heard what the schoolkids were saying. She stopped into Zahra’s house on her way home and spotted the couple.

  Haji told them they would have to leave soon; it was only a matter of time before word got from the old lady back to Surkh Dar and then to either Zakia’s family in Kham-e-Kalak or to the authorities in Bamiyan town. That evening Ali climbed to the top of the mountain, where he was able to get a cell-phone signal, and called his father. He and Zakia were down to their last thousand afghanis, about twenty dollars, and out of places to go. Anwar was also nearly broke and could not afford the cost of a taxi to reach them. “Call the journalists,” Ali said. “Maybe they can bring you to us.” His father said he would try, but he wasn’t at all sure he could trust us; he said he would also try to raise some money from relatives.

  My colleague Jawad had been doggedly calling Anwar every day looking for news, and he reached him shortly after he spoke to his son. Anwar said he did not know for sure where his son was, but he was running out of money and he wanted to try to find him. He agreed to help us reach him in the hopes that our involvement in the case could get the couple out of the country. We were on the next morning’s flight to Bamiyan. At the airstrip there we were met by our two most experienced Times office drivers, Fareed and Kabir, who had crossed the Hindu Kush from Kabul by car overnight; the risk of Taliban checkpoints was too great for any but the most foolhardy foreigners to travel by land. Fareed and Kabir took the precaution of stripping their cars, their persons, and the contents of their phones clean of association with foreigners; there have been occasions when the Taliban have murdered travelers in the Ghorband Valley route to the Shibar Pass simply for having dollars in their wallets rather than afghanis.

  We set out early in the morning, picking up Anwar and his son Bismillah a mile outside of Surkh Dar, lest Zaman’s family spot us, and began driving up into the heart of the central highlands. We were in two cars, with eight people including the drivers. Also with Jawad and me were Ben C. Solomon, a Times videographer9 and Diego Ibarra Sánchez, a still photographer who was on assignment for us then. Anwar was cautious about telling us where we were going, and Jawad said it was clear that he still wasn’t sure if he could trust us and was trying to decide whether he should. We shifted passengers around so Jawad and I could sit with the old man and Bismillah, and for the next couple of hours we set about trying to win Anwar’s trust and confidence. We assured him we would never give away Zakia and Ali’s location nor divulge his role or that of his sons in helping to hide them.

  Stopping in Nayak Bazaar, we all had a breakfast of freshly baked loaves of round flatbread and oily eggs in a long, low room with plastic sheeting stretched in front of the windows to keep the sun’s heat in, greenhouse style. Our presence in the bazaar, which was just a half-mile-long strip of shops along the muddy road, caused a commotion. Two carloads of foreigners were hardly low-profile; we might as well have been a traveling circus. We worked out with Anwar a plan to keep the photographers away from the couple’s hiding place, once we found it, until we could discern if it was safe or not for the couple to join us—and whether they were willing and able to cooperate.

  I had deep misgivings and a growing sense of guilt; it seemed likely that we would expose the couple if we did find them, without any guarantee that a more visual story about them would save their lives. In fact, the opposite could happen: It might make them easier for their pursuers to find. I thought about aborting it all but then thought that if the old man wanted us to come, it might be the right thing to do. This could not be great country to be a fugitive in for long; there just weren’t enough places to hide unless you really were staying in caves, and for how long could they possibly do that? The remotest corners of Afghanistan were populated, if thinly, and they would have to go out to get water and food.

  It was especially difficult for a woman to hide anywhere in this society. Amina, the teenager who was killed after fleeing her family’s arranged marriage in Balkh Province,10 was picked up by the police within an hour of her arrival, during daytime, at the bazaar in the provincial capital, Pul-e-Kumri. Bibi Aisha, sold as a child bride to a Taliban commander, fled when her husband was away fighting and went to the nearest market town, where police promptly picked her up and returned her to the family, even though in that area it would have been clear it was a Taliban family. She is the girl whose nose was cut off by that husband as punishment for having run away and later she was featured on the cover of Time magazine.11 Even being with a man is sufficient camouflage only if the man is taken for a brother or husband, and Afghans are quick to sniff out ones who are not. When sixteen-year-old Soheila,12 given away in marriage years before she was born to an elderly man, fled with her cousin Niaz Mohammad, the two were repeatedly stopped by police, even before her family pursued them. Policemen somehow could tell they weren’t married.

  How much harder it would be for the lovers to successfully flee with foreigners in their vicinity. In the course of our search for them, we were conspicuous as probably the only Westerners within a hundred miles. For several hours we wended our way up the Yakawlang Gorge, a place of spectacular but forbidding views and only this one dusty road, no side roads at all for many miles at a stretch. When we reached Kham-e Bazargan and the homestead where they were hiding, Anwar continued to insist on the fiction that he did not know where they were. Instead he said he would go and ask directions from that distant homestead on the little knoll, a mile off the highway. Worried that if they were hiding there, our presence would surely give them away, I told the drivers to split up our cars a little, parking a mile apart, and persuaded the photographers to keep their gear and themselves out of sight. For them this long trip without the prospect of a single frame was a bitter pill, which both Ben and Diego took with a mixture of equanimity and frustration.

  Anwar and Bismillah came back at a trot. This indeed was where the pair were hi
ding, and Zakia was still there—but not Ali. The night before, Haji had told them they would have to leave today; Ali took off before dawn—they weren’t sure where to, but probably he hitchhiked to the next village, three hours’ drive away. Haji had gone in pursuit, furious that Ali had not taken Zakia with him as Haji had asked. He took the minibus he owns, which plies the mountain roads as an informal, private bus service. As bad as all that was, it was a godsend that solved our conundrum: the worry that we would inadvertently give away the couple’s location and compromise their safety. We had found them just as they were in the process of eviction, and that had nothing to do with us.

  Zakia refused to come out even to talk to us, however, until her husband returned—even with her father-in-law, Anwar, there. We sat down with Anwar and Zahra to wait and to discuss what had transpired. “I’m deeply concerned. They have to go now, I did it just for God’s sake to help them,” Zahra said. “I support what they did—they love each other—but the problem is if it comes to a dispute between families, they might kill each other, and they might kill us, too. They might kill them and cut them into pieces.”

  Haji returned, having been unable to find Ali, but friends had called him to say that Nayak Bazaar was full of rumors that the pair were hiding in his place; they told him he should expect the police to arrive soon to apprehend them. “The police could arrest all of us for this,” he said, apologetic but adamant. “Now they’re calling it a kidnapping.” He wanted us to leave immediately, taking Zakia with us. But she refused to emerge from the women’s quarters, Zahra was not going to force her, and none of the men would dare enter. I promised Haji we would take them with us the moment Ali returned, which then put us in the uncomfortable position of providing them with getaway cars, but there seemed to be no alternative. I justified it by saying that we would use the car journey as a means to interview and photograph them in safety, which we could no longer do at Haji’s house without putting them all at risk of arrest. I was also uncomfortably aware that we were stepping over that line that separates journalists and their subjects. We were becoming part of the story, whatever we might tell ourselves; more accurately, whatever I might tell myself and, as the person in charge, compel the others to go along with.

  While we waited, Zahra told us about her hopes for her six children, who were all in school; her eldest, an eighteen-year-old, Ahmed Zia, was first in his class in twelfth grade, wanted to go to university to become an engineer, and was proud that he’d just been able to vote in the presidential election for the first time. (When we later spoke to Ahmed Zia, he was contemptuous about Ali and Zakia. “What they did was wrong,” he said. He would never tolerate one of his young sisters behaving like that, he said. But neither would he give Zakia and Ali away, out of respect for his parents.) Zahra herself could read and write but had only a few years of school; her husband was a schoolteacher as well as a landowner. None of this could have been possible in Afghanistan a decade ago; in fact, Zakia and Ali could not have been possible, Zahra said. If today they were pursued by society and its laws, it was only the fault of ignorant, uneducated people like their neighbor. “That stupid woman,” Zahra kept calling her.

  So much had changed since the Taliban time, Zahra mused, when she taught her daughters in secrecy in her home, since the Taliban had closed all the girls’ schools.13 Now they could study openly, and the Hazara girls in their community did so. They could watch Bollywood love stories on television and listen to romantic music on radios and mobile telephones, which also had all been forbidden. Yet they still lived in the shadow of that time. The Taliban had injected something new and malevolent into Afghanistan’s intensely private culture: the concept that honor, as it applied to women, was not an issue just for the man whose honor was at stake, the man who owned those women. Instead it was something that concerned everyone; not only the state but every man had the obligation to enforce honor, as he saw it. The Taliban had gone, but the intrusive attitude of its notorious Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice was left behind, among people like “that awful woman,” as Zahra called her. Or, for that matter, among the Bamiyan police, who were then pursuing an eighteen-year-old for the supposed crime of fleeing a place where she was staying legally and voluntarily.

  Anwar sat cross-legged, alternately dialing his son’s cell phone and looking out the window. The photographer, Diego, was restless and had disappeared; later we discovered he’d gone into the kitchen, in the women’s quarters, and found Zakia, posing her under a beam of sunlight coming through a chimney hole in the mud roof. Diego was fond of his sunbeams and was forever trying to find them in the dark dwellings of Afghanistan. He said he hadn’t understood that men were not allowed in the women’s quarters; it was a serious cultural breach, one that could easily get a man killed in the wrong house. Diego’s English was semifluent but spotty; it was hard to be sure what he didn’t understand, versus what he chose not to understand if it got in the way of a picture.

  I asked Anwar how it came to pass that, having beaten his son for starting his affair with Zakia, he now was going to the ends of the earth for him. “It is true that I punished him then, but now I have changed my mind. It happened because I saw that my daughter-in-law stood behind my son and was brave enough to say she loves my son, and now it is an honor for us to stand behind her,” he said.

  Zahra teared up listening to him.

  “Now she is a part of my family, she is my own daughter. She is a part of my family now, and I would do anything for her as well as for him. Even more for her.” As an answer it was pretty unsatisfactory, little better than a handy if heartfelt slogan. It was more likely that once Zakia’s family began publicly denouncing their son and threatening his life, Anwar’s pride and that of his sons was challenged, and perhaps that pushed them to rally to his side. Zaman’s pride wanted to see his daughter dead; Anwar’s pride would see his daughter-in-law honored instead.

  About midafternoon Ali finally showed up, his arrival heralded by half a dozen children from the compound who had staked out the path from the road; again he had hitchhiked. It turned out he had gone to a village farther up the highway where he thought he could contact us by cell phone; instead we had by then reached his hiding place, where our phones only worked from the hilltops.

  His ringtone that day, which we heard sometimes when we climbed the slopes to call him, praying we would get through to him before the police arrived, was a Pashto love song by Latif Nangarhari:

  Come here, my little flower, come!

  Let me tear open my breast

  And show you my own heart, naked.14

  It was an emotional few minutes as Zakia packed Ali’s bag for him and gathered her own plastic bags into one larger sack. We explained that we would give them a ride to the nearest safe place and wanted to interview them and photograph them on the journey as we went, so long as we could do it without compromising them further. They were strangely quiet and calm, even oddly cheerful at the prospect of this next leg of the run, while everyone else was taking it hard. They understood that there was no other course of action; everyone else felt complicit in forcing it upon them.

  I asked Zakia why she did not wear the all-covering burqa to disguise herself as they fled, and she laughed scornfully. “I will not put that thing on me,” she said. Similarly, I was surprised that Ali had not changed his look at all; his hair was still full, brushed up in the front and slicked back, and he had not grown out his beard much, one of the easiest things to do in a society where beards are commonplace, more so than clean-shaven faces. He laughed. “She would never agree to look at me if I did that.” It was too cheerful a moment; one wanted to grab these kids and say, Hey, you won’t be choosing your haircuts and dress in jail. They did agree, however, that they would change their costumes in the next day or two, so that their colorful outfits, especially hers, would not be so easily recognized from any published pictures.

  Diego had spotted another ray of light shining through a hole in
the roof somewhere and wanted to delay our departure to get both of them in it, but we insisted on giving him no more than a minute and then bolting. Ben had already run ahead so he could get in front of them for footage of them heading down from the promontory, finally together and really fleeing. The lovers held hands, unbidden, as they walked, and when they came to what passed for a footbridge—three spindly, skinny birch trunks laid across the rushing river, so thin they bounced at every step—they crossed one by one, Zakia not even bothering to take off her high heels. The rest of us crossed gingerly and awkwardly in our Gore-Tex boots, worried about all those phones and cameras falling with us into the icy torrent below.

  Before we piled into the cars, I slipped Ali a thousand dollars when no one else was looking. He had never asked for it, but neither did he question it, just tucked it into his shirt. I did it on impulse, although I’d been thinking of it earlier; I made sure none of my colleagues saw me. It was all money that various readers had pledged, even begged me to pass on to the couple, I reasoned, and they would follow through on those pledges in time, no doubt. And if they didn’t … well, it seemed the least I could do. Ali’s last thousand afghanis were not going to get them far, to be sure.

  Much more of an issue than the money, journalistically, was abetting their escape. It was one thing to talk to them and photograph them on the run, but we were now providing the getaway cars. Once we put them in the cars with us, the die was cast; I was no longer just an observer but in a pretty important way a participant. The money could be dismissed as a humanitarian gesture, like giving money to a starving family while reporting in a miserable refugee camp—who wouldn’t? This, however, was helping people flee criminal charges placed against them by their government. There was no chance to ask my bosses what they would think about this, but that was just as well, since I suspect I know what the answer would have been and I would not have been able to obey it. Zakia and Ali were here in part—I would come to realize how much a part—because of us. As the reader had said, “You’re responsible for them now.” What else could we do? We had the only cars available in Kham-e Bazargan; Haji’s minibus was out on its rounds. So should we have waited there until the police arrived and then photographed their arrest? How cynical and exploitative that would have been. It came down to this choice: abandon your principles and stick to your humanity or stick to your principles and abandon your humanity. True, documenting their arrest would have been the better story, dramatically speaking, but who could live with that? We all felt uneasy about it, but I told Ben and Diego, “Look, if we work with them here, they won’t want to cooperate, because they need to be running. If they run into the hills, we won’t be able to stay with them for long. If we put them in our cars, we’ll be able to work with them in some privacy and security.” Which was all true, to a point, but it was still an equivocation.