The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  Have no grief about the past,

  For the past has passed.

  Grief can never remake the past.

  Think of the future, of life, of joy.

  And if thirst should find no river,

  Just drink one drop, and be satisfied.1

  This time Jawad made some headway, and Ali agreed to meet with us that Friday; his commander had given him a three-day leave. “He was scared,” Jawad said. “I told him, ‘Look, we haven’t done anything to you. We’ve been to your house, been to your father, we could have turned you in anytime. You just have to trust us.’”

  “Even today I didn’t tell my wife I was going to see you, because she might have said no,” Ali said. “The last time you came to see us”—when Zakia’s brother was spotted near the Pamir Cinema—“… well, she’s very nervous about me. She doesn’t want me to go out at all. She thinks I’ll be arrested, so she’ll be in big trouble.”

  Again, we suggested, all the more reason to consider the shelter for her until their legal case was finished. Manizha Naderi of WAW had offered to make that more palatable for Ali by giving him a job as a security guard at the shelter, guarding the outside wall; he would not be allowed inside, since the shelters were female-only spaces, but he’d know Zakia was safe, and they could have chaperoned meetings from time to time. Nothing persuaded him.

  “My wife said she cannot be there for even one day. She cannot be separated from me even one day,” he said. I wondered if that was his wife speaking or him.

  Manizha and her top lawyer at the time, Shukria Khaliqi, came up with a solution. Shukria found a way to take the couple’s case to court without having Zakia stay in the shelter. “All they have to do is give us permission to take on the case,” Manizha said. “Both of them would just need to meet Shukria. Shukria can go to wherever they say and take their testimonies. Then, after the case goes to the judge, Zakia would have to come to court to testify on her own behalf. I am really worried that they will somehow be caught by the police.” If they were, it would be too late for Zakia to opt for placement in the shelter; women can voluntarily stay in shelters while their criminal cases are adjudicated, but only if they come in on their own. Once they’re arrested, they are jailed until their court date.

  Driven by a need for more money, Ali finally agreed to meet with Shukria, although without Zakia. They were broke again, and they could receive the donors’ money from WAW only in person, so that WAW’s accountants could verify that the right people had gotten it. In a society where corruption is the norm, people have to go to extremes to prove that their actions aren’t dishonest. Ali repeatedly asked us to pick up the money for him. It just wasn’t right for us to put ourselves in the middle of that, and besides, we wanted to get him in to meet WAW’s capable lawyers.

  Tough and articulate, Shukria is somewhat overbearing, and immediately on meeting him she dominated Ali, insisting he put his trust in her.

  “I’ll resolve this case in a month,” she told him. “I’ll work on this case until I find success. I’ll get my contacts in the Ministry of Interior to put pressure on the elders up there, and I’ll do it in complete confidence—I won’t even register the case, so even my staff won’t know about it.” Ali, on the sofa near her desk, leaned away from her as she spoke, seeming to diminish physically under her peroration.

  Then the accountant came in to hand over a thousand dollars to him from the donations WAW had received, following a ritual often used when an illiterate person is involved in a formal transaction. The accountant read out loud a document saying that Ali confirmed receiving the payment. Ali verbally confirmed that he understood that, put his inked thumbprint to the document, and exchanged the document for the money; during the transaction an aide videotaped every step.

  Afterward Ali was buoyed. “As long as they do not ask to remove Zakia from me again, it’s okay, they can take the case,” he said. “Whoever defends the truth, I am ready to serve them.” He was in such a good mood that he agreed to arrange for us to talk to Zakia in person and to bring her to Shukria so she could formally agree to be represented by WAW.

  Ali perked up even more when he heard that Jawad had received a call from one of the elders from Kham-e-Kalak, Zakia’s village, and the elder wanted to come and talk to us about their case. The elder had an idea that the New York Times was some sort of NGO and thought we might be able to act as intermediaries between Zakia’s family and the couple. His name was Abdul Rab Rastagar, and Jawad and I arranged to meet him at the Herat Restaurant in Shar-e-Naw, downtown Kabul. It was large and always crowded and very public, with the traditional raised eating platforms scattered among trees around a garden, but without privacy screening. Diners would leave their shoes under the platforms and sit cross-legged among mats and cushions. Eating on mats on the floor is the norm in Afghan homes; this was a refinement of that practice, probably originally designed to keep livestock away from the table. A peacock in full finery roamed the aisles between the platforms, trailing a six-foot-long tail array and squawking loudly. We went early and chose seats from which we could watch the front entrance, in case Mr. Rastagar came in heavy. We knew he had been in touch with Gula Khan. The last time Gula Khan had spoken to us on the phone, he’d sounded as angry at us as at his sister; apparently someone had been reading or relating to him Times articles on the case.

  Mr. Rastagar arrived alone and looked harmless enough. He was an older man, in his fifties probably, but quite self-possessed; the term “elders,” as Afghans apply it, can mean either very old men, revered for their antiquity, or somewhat older men of position, revered for their power. Mr. Rastagar was an example of personal advancement by virtue of massive foreign aid. For the first couple years after the Taliban fell, he worked for an organization called UN-Habitat, which carried out rural-development programs in Bamiyan. Then he went to work as a supervisor for the provincial juvenile-detention center, a government-run facility also financed by international donors. His lofty title gave him the position that Zakia’s family was so impressed by and in turn had made them entrust to him the important mission of contacting the NGO known as the New York Times, which they believed was in touch with the couple. Later we learned that Mr. Rastagar was just a glorified guard, a shift supervisor.

  When Mr. Rastagar took off his shoes, there were holes in the soles of his socks. He sat down cross-legged on the platform with us, dressed in a brown shalwar kameez and wearing the Afghan pakol, the flat felt cap common throughout the country. He got right to the point.

  “No one is telling you the truth about this case,” he said. “Mohammad Zaman had to leave everything and come here to Kabul to work like a common laborer because of this case. The truth is that the girl was betrayed by Ali’s sister. She brought her out so Mohammad Ali could come and rape her. Then the sister went to her and said, ‘Zakia, now your fiancé won’t marry you.’” Mr. Rastagar meant the putative fiancé that Zaman had arranged for Zakia—one of his nephews. “You see, the sister wanted to marry Zakia’s fiancé, and that’s why she did all this. So she said, ‘I’ll marry him, and you can marry Mohammad Ali. But Zakia absolutely didn’t want to be with Mohammad Ali. She was raped, and that’s why they took her to the shelter. They did not let her father and mother visit her because she was regretting what happened and she wanted to come home.”

  Mr. Rastagar paused, making eye contact with an effort, to see how that was sinking in. “There’s more.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, two of his other sisters, they’re prostitutes. We all know they’re prostitutes, and I’m sure it’s their fault that this happened.”

  How did he know this?

  “I worked with them at UN–Habitat,” he said. “Of course they’re prostitutes. They worked there for the foreigners.”

  As he did?

  “Yes, but they were girls. Everyone in the village knew they were prostitutes. When a stranger came to the village, we all knew whose house they were going to.”

  T
his counternarrative was delivered with smooth assurance, as if it were the most obvious explanation possible and, once apprised of it, any listener would see the rightness of Zakia’s father’s cause.

  I suggested that Zakia would not have climbed out of the Bamiyan shelter and eloped with Ali if he were her rapist.

  “The government set up that escape,” he said. “She didn’t want to. She’s in hiding. No one knows where she is. Or if she is with him in the mountains, okay, she is with him in the mountains, but she didn’t want to be there. Honestly, the father has been oppressed in this case.”

  Zakia’s father was the real victim of the entire story, he continued. “Now he’s in Kabul almost as a beggar because he’s lost everything, everything,” he said. “He didn’t take care of his children, especially his daughters. He didn’t do well by them, it’s true. I don’t approve of the man for this. He shouldn’t have let his daughter go into the fields for this affair to take place.”

  But you said it was a rape?

  “Or rape. It couldn’t have taken place if he didn’t let his daughter go into the fields unchaperoned. I wanted to beat Zaman myself, I was so angry at him.”

  He was particularly worked up about the shelter, letting a girl run away like that. “The shelter must have helped her escape,” he said. “I have twenty-five children under my charge, and why do they not escape? It is just not possible.” It was easy to imagine Mr. Rastagar subduing a passel of small children.

  Officials in Bamiyan had made everything worse by not listening to the old man Zaman and his sons and by throwing him out of their offices when he came to complain, which by all accounts he did often. “The governor said to Zaman, ‘Don’t talk to me anymore, or I’ll put you in jail next,’” Mr. Rastagar said.

  That had led to an unstable situation, a rent in the fabric of the social order that could have far-reaching consequences. “The outcomes are going to be bad. The husband will do something, the first husband”—the one he had earlier described as the fiancé—“he is armed now, and he would kill anyone in this. I saw the father, he wants to commit suicide. The father, Zaman, he is weak, a weak person, but he is saying he will kill himself or else he will go and join the Taliban and go to Ghorband”—a notorious, Taliban-controlled district athwart the highway between Kabul and Bamiyan—“and if he finds any Hazara on the road, he will kill them.”

  In other words, suicide and mayhem, the random execution of strangers of the wrong ethnicity—it’s the sort of thing that follows naturally when two people are foolish enough to fall in love.

  “I don’t like this father. He didn’t raise his kids right,” Mr. Rastagar said. Now he seemed eager to establish his credentials as an honest broker. “He didn’t send his kids to school, so they grew up blind, and when blind persons go out, they get into trouble.”

  How about five thousand dollars—would that be enough to make old man Zaman happy? Just asking theoretically.

  “I will work as hard as possible to resolve this case.” Mr. Rastagar ignored the sum.

  Seven thousand?

  “The father will not return to Bamiyan. There’s nothing left for him. Everyone turned on him. We have an Afghan proverb: When you are in need, your friends become strangers.”

  Ten thousand?

  “The outcomes now are going to be bad. The first husband will do something, and it will be something that no one will be able to undo.”

  Mr. Rastagar said he would talk to the father. He added that he knew that already the first husband had spent twenty thousand dollars as a result of the elopement, to pay the bride price for the bride he never laid eyes upon, the wedding party that never took place. He would talk to Zaman. He was meeting him that afternoon, in fact. We told him we would find someone who would be authorized to negotiate for the couple, something we could not do. Our questions were merely exploratory.

  When we parted, his last comment was peculiar. “If they do really love each other, it’s okay.”

  The meeting was a modestly encouraging development. However mean-spirited the narrative Mr. Rastagar was peddling, it was clear that he was ready to deal and was probably acting on behalf of Zakia’s father. Piling on charges of prostitution and rape was only a way of raising the stakes and improving Zaman’s bargaining position. For their part, Ali and Zakia were ecstatic at the prospect of a negotiated settlement with her family. Although they realized there was every possibility her family would take any settlement money and still try to kill them, nonetheless it would mean the criminal charges against them would be withdrawn, the law would no longer be looking for them, and they would be free to get their passports. Ali scoffed when he heard the amount of twenty thousand dollars. “That is ten lakhs of rupees,” he said, meaning afghanis. “In our village the usual bride price is less than three lakhs. You could marry three wives for ten lakhs.”

  There was no question of Jawad and I getting involved in any real negotiations, so with the couple’s approval we turned to WAW and Shukria. We told her that Rastagar had floated a twenty-thousand-dollar figure, and she just laughed. She would be surprised if the family would not settle for five thousand, which made possible a settlement within the range of what donors had already sent to the couple; we told her that there were donors as well who had pledged to make up a bride price if that was not enough.

  We were in Shukria’s office when she called Rastagar and began to talk with him about the case. She quickly took his measure and started barking orders at him. He would get Zakia’s father and he would bring him to her office to discuss the case, she told him. No, not next week, but two days later, on Saturday, she said. He promised to do so. “Don’t be late, I’m a busy person,” she said.

  “This is fantastic,” Manizha Naderi said. “Don’t worry about what the elder is saying now. They always do that. That’s what the people were saying about my nephew—that he raped and then kidnapped her. This is really great news, actually. We might have a chance in resolving this story.”

  Manizha was referring to the case of her own nephew and his wife, which was strikingly similar to that of Ali and Zakia. That couple eloped against the wishes of her family, who opposed it not because of ethnic or religious differences but because of class differences. The girl was from a family of Sayeds, people who consider themselves direct descendants of the Prophet Mohammad, a sort of Islamic nobility, who tend to want their children to marry other Sayeds. After the couple eloped, the girl’s family claimed that she had already been married to her first cousin, and they even produced a mullah and witnesses who claimed to have been present when her father (although not the girl herself) had tied the neka on her behalf; they produced a neka document as well. Manizha persuaded her nephew to bring the girl to the shelter, and she remained there while Shukria brought her case to court. She won it with a simple stratagem: She challenged the girl’s family and their witnesses to produce a single image of the alleged wedding ceremony. Since nowadays nearly everyone with any means at all has a camera phone, videos and stills of wedding ceremonies are typically taken by many of those present. When none of them could produce such an image, the judge invalidated the family’s neka and legalized the couple’s own marriage. It was that case that made Shukria so confident she could win Ali and Zakia’s case, since there were witnesses who could confirm that until they eloped, Zakia’s father had claimed only that she had been engaged, not married—and had changed his story regarding which cousin had been her intended.

  The good news about a possible reconciliation gave a welcome boost to Zakia and Ali just as the home front began to unravel. Relations with Ali’s aunt had become tense, and not just because the apartment was overcrowded. “They feel in danger, too. Even we do,” Ali said. “Until we negotiate and make a deal and come together, we feel in danger. It’s even risky when you’re together with your friends. Someone who is your friend can harm you worse than someone who doesn’t even know you. He might not realize what he’s telling someone about you. If he’s close to you
, he will be dangerous to you.”

  One day Ali called Jawad, deeply agitated. We had given him a letter, on New York Times letterhead in Dari and English, with a copy to both him and his wife, a “To Whom It May Concern” letter that asked whoever read it to please call our bureau in Kabul and included Jawad’s and my phone numbers. My thinking was that if one or the other of the lovers fell into the hands of police, the evidence of some foreign interest in their case might possibly prevent the worst from happening to them—particularly to Zakia—and it might help alert us to their situation more quickly. Now Ali was calling from his military deployment to ask whether that letter would protect Zakia from arrest by the police if she went out alone and was stopped.

  No, it wouldn’t, we told him. The most we could hope for was that it might protect her from summary rape, and that was iffy—the great majority of policemen cannot read or write, so she would have to be lucky enough to encounter someone who was senior enough to be literate and savvy enough to care what foreigners might think. It was a long shot.

  What was going on? we asked Ali. It turned out that he had been transferred to Bagram Air Base, the massive American military base a couple hours’ drive from the capital. “My wife called me and complained about my aunt and her daughter-in-law, who are mistreating her. She was upset and asked me to send her back to Bamiyan. I thought my aunt was someone I could trust and expected she would give us refuge, but now it seems she has slapped me in the face and my wife cannot stay with her. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think I should commit suicide.”

  The country was in a state of suspense over the bitterly disputed results of the April presidential election, and it was clear there would have to be a second, runoff election in June. As a result, Ali’s unit had been activated in preparation for deployment somewhere in the provinces to protect polling places, hence the transfer to Bagram. There was no longer any question of leave days every weekend; now he and Zakia were reduced to talking by phone again, and his next leave would not be until after elections, many weeks away.