The Lovers

by Rod Nordland

  Ali and Anwar returned, and I asked them if they really wanted to flee now, rather than wait in the hopes that something could be worked out for them in Afghanistan, perhaps through the Canadian embassy or by persuading the Americans to let them go directly from Kabul. They had made up their minds to leave, they said, and were not about to change them. “Do you know,” I asked, “how hard it will be for you in another country, another culture, for many months, possibly years before you could see your other family members again?”

  Ali had a ready answer and began reciting these lines in Dari:

  Traveling away from home

  Is so depressing and hard,

  Even if you are a prince,

  It is demeaning and harsh.

  Then, surprisingly, Anwar joined him, smiling his elfin smile, and they continued to recite in unison:

  Even if you are a prince,

  It is a hardship to bear.

  However many carpets may

  Lie beneath your tender feet,

  Yet they will feel like a bed of thorns.9

  Neither of them was sure of the name of the poem, or the author, but they well knew where it came from: the story of Mullah Mohammad Jan and his beloved Aisha. Those verses are part of a longer folk poem that tells their story, set in nineteenth-century Herat. Mohammad Jan was a young teacher from a countryside village who took his class to an annual festival in Herat where poets and scholars held recitations on the grounds of the palace. The sultan noticed him and remarked jokingly on his long beard and his erudition, and asked his name. When he said Mohammad Jan, the sultan corrected him and said, “Henceforth, it shall be Mullah Mohammad Jan.”

  Flush with the sultan’s recognition, he set off for home and on the way saw an unveiled young girl running toward him, as if someone were chasing her. She stopped nearly face-to-face with him. He was smitten, and as her brothers called her to rejoin them in the orchard where they had been playing nearby, he asked her name.

  “Aisha,” she said.

  “I am Mullah Mohammad Jan,” he replied as she ran off.

  He began frequenting the orchard in the hope of seeing her again. He soon did, and they began meeting secretly, talking for hours. They remained chaste but agreed to marry. Mullah Mohammad Jan asked his father to approach her father, Issaq, who was a general in the sultan’s army. Issaq rejected the suit, confined his daughter to home so the pair could not meet again, and then arranged for her marriage to one of the officers under his command.

  Aisha was inconsolable, writing verses for her beloved by night and weeping by day. Mullah Mohammad Jan stopped going to his classes and similarly spent his time writing poetry about Aisha.

  In an effort to console Aisha, her mother arranged a picnic among the girls of the village, where they could sing and dance. At first Aisha refused to take part, until the other girls and her mother gathered around her and demanded that she sing as well. Taking up a drum, she began to sing one of the verses she had written, a poem called “Where Are You Going, Mullah Mohammad Jan?” She sang in a high, clear voice that carried through the forest:

  Let us go to Mazar, Mullah Mohammad Jan,

  And see the fields of tulips, O my Beloved.

  Go tell my beloved that his lover has come,

  His narcissus flower has come,

  His flower has come to take him.

  On the high mountains I wailed

  And called upon Ali, the lion of God,

  Ali, Lion of God, cure my pain,

  Tell the lord of my prayers.

  Let us go to Mazar, Mullah Mohammad Jan,

  And see the fields of tulips, O my Beloved.10

  The sultan’s grand vizier happened upon the wood and, hearing her singing, pulled up on his horse as the girls hurried to put on their veils. “Who is this Mullah Mohammad Jan?” he asked Aisha, and she told the grand vizier her love story. He relayed it to the sultan, who summoned the scholar before him and heard his story as well. The sultan gathered his guard, and they marched on General Issaq’s compound, where the sultan ordered Aisha’s father to sanction the marriage.

  Mazar-i-Sharif is a northern Afghan city famous not only for its spring fields of tulips but also for its shrine to the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali, and annually the newlyweds of the previous year make a pilgrimage to Mazar’s great Blue Mosque in Ali’s honor, a custom still followed today. That year Aisha and Mullah Mohammad Jan went, accompanied by court musicians reciting Aisha’s song, “Where Are You Going, Mullah Mohammad Jan?”

  I had been hoping that someone like the sultan would arrive and give Zakia and Ali the happy ending their love affair deserved, and so I had not said much when they appealed to me personally to save them, to find their solution for them, to tell them what to do and how and even when to do it. It was true, though, as Zakia had said, that every day that passed, the risk of their being found increased. Ali called to say they had run out of money, so we agreed to ferry Anwar and him to the Women for Afghan Women offices. We met him on the rutted little backstreet in the Saray Ghazni neighborhood, at a street corner that had become our standard meeting place. It was close to where they were hiding, but not too close; they could walk there without crossing main roads and risking detection. We did not want to take any chances that one of our drivers might see exactly where they lived and, intentionally or otherwise, spread the word. As we drove past the Zarnegar Park, near the city’s central Abdul Rahman Mosque, Ali squeezed himself behind the car’s door post, to hide. He said he thought he had just spotted Gula Khan, Zakia’s brother, on the roadside, selling small bottles of water. I looked that way, and it was Gula Khan all right. He did not look like a happy man.

  It was around that time we found out how Ali and Zakia’s case had really been resolved. I’d bumped into Hussain Hasrat, a women’s-rights activist and a former official of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), who was one of those who had started Facebook pages to campaign for the couple. Mr. Hasrat was discouraged about the outcome, much as he was relieved to see them released, because, he said, it was not any sort of legal victory. Due process, such as it was, had been circumvented, and on a secret order from President Karzai the attorney general had issued the decree resolving the entire matter. Sima Samar, the chairperson of the AIHRC, had personally visited Mr. Karzai and asked him to order Ali’s release from prison and allow the couple’s marriage to be confirmed. “Three hours later they were freed.”

  I went to Ms. Samar, and she confirmed that account.

  “Yes, I did take this case to President Karzai, and he immediately took action. He asked his staff to call [Minister of Interior Mohammad Umer] Daudzai and have [Ali] released. I told him it’s just a Tajik girl and a Hazara boy. The only so-called crime was their different ethnic grouping, and also it’s illegal [to try to prevent their marriage]—they’re an officially married couple.”

  Her human-rights commission, so outspoken on other matters, remained silent on the case in public, perhaps out of concern over the ethnic issue. Ms. Samar is Hazara herself, and enemies of the commission have sometimes derided it as a Hazara institution, although other ethnic groups are well represented there. Similarly, Mr. Karzai never publicly acknowledged his role in their release, so it was hardly any sort of legal precedent, which is no doubt just the way Mr. Karzai wanted it. At the pleasure of the sultan.

  As the long Afghan summer approached its end, I began to realize there was not going to be any deus ex machina resolution, not anytime soon anyway—no rescue by any embassy or grand vizier. Nor was the couple going to wait much longer, hanging around in Kabul until someone in Zakia’s family ran them down. Either they would give up and flee to Iran or, since they refused to consider Pakistan, we would have to get them visas to Tajikistan.

  Jawad and I did a quick reconnaissance of the Tajik embassy, on Street 15 in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood. The stench of corruption there was notable, even in a country like Afghanistan that consistently ranks among the most corrupt countr
ies in the world.11 At the Tajik embassy, just getting past the guard at the gate required a bribe, as did getting past the guard at the door to the consulate. All just to go inside and get a visa-application form. This turned out to be money wasted, because Afghans with visa-application forms stood waiting for days outside the gates for the opportunity to submit those forms.

  “You will never get a visa unless you pay,” one of the supplicants outside told us. He was a burly Afghan Border Police patrol commander, in charge of a remote outpost in northern Badakhshan Province, an area where the only road passed through a patch of Tajikistan. This overlap required him to apply for a visa, which even he was having trouble obtaining. He had letters from the border police command, the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and he had already been waiting for a week. Every day they told him to go and fetch yet another letter. “All they want is money,” he said. “It’s the only thing they care about in that country.” We waited a few hours, nervously aware that a few hundred yards away on Street 15, earlier that year, a Swedish radio journalist named Nils Horner12 had been standing outside on this street, interviewing Afghans about the attack on the Taverna du Liban, when two men ran up and shot him in the head with a handgun. It is a street full of news organizations, aid groups, and embassies and thus replete with police and guards, but the killers were never caught. At the end of the day, the Tajik consular office closed without our having had the chance to speak to any visa officer. As we were unwilling to bribe them, we had been rendered nonexistent. Waiting outside on that street for so long had been pointlessly risky, and we were not going to do it twice.

  The Consultant was a young man in his late twenties, soft-spoken and cautious, self-possessed and swaggeringly unctuous, a man used to doing things for other people that desperately needed to be done. He was heavyset, clean-shaven, hair-creamed, dressed in a freshly starched white shalwar kameez and a long black herringbone waistcoat—the picture of Kabuli prosperity.

  Getting visas for four people to Tajikistan? No problem at all, he said. He understood how much trouble it was, going through normal channels, how difficult it is to spend all day waiting in the sun, sometimes days and days, and after all, it’s a simple thing. Afghans were welcome in Tajikistan, as Tajiks were welcome in Afghanistan. He would not only take care of it, he would do it possibly the same day, no more than a day or two, in extraordinary circumstances possibly three days. He did not want anything for himself, not at all. He merely wanted to make sure everything went smoothly. He would ask only the fees that he himself had to pay; there would be no profit in it for him at all. He was being charitable. He would not take one afghani more than the matter required.

  Jawad handed over the passports the next morning, but three days later they were still waiting. There had been unexpected problems, issues, the Consultant said; a national holiday connected with the presidential inauguration, and then unspecified complications. Finally, a week later, Jawad went to the man’s office, a shabby little storefront right on the sidewalk, a single room with a desk facing the plate-glass window, the lower two-thirds painted over for privacy, a smelly latrine out the back door, accumulated dust on every surface. The filth of the place was in sharp contrast to the Consultant’s exquisite grooming.

  “Our passports?” Jawad asked in his carefully polite way, never confrontational, even though they were by then ten days overdue.

  The Consultant shrugged toward the unkempt pile on his desk, hundreds of passports, most of them the maroon-covered Afghan ones, with a smattering of other nationalities. “Come back tomorrow.”

  The next day the Consultant picked Jawad up in what he called his mobile office, a bright red, brand-new Toyota Corolla, decked out with flashing blue-white LED lights below the front and rear fenders and along the running boards—pimp lights, people called them. They drove around for a while until the Consultant indicated the center console box. Jawad lifted the lid, where there was a pile of forty or fifty Afghan passports. The Consultant had no idea where their specific passports were but invited Jawad to root through the pile until he found them, which he soon did.

  A couple of weeks later, Jawad brought the couple and Anwar to see the Consultant. He’d been suspicious when Jawad had called him and asked him to meet with what Jawad referred to as “my friends,” just to give them some advice about going to Tajikistan. It was not normally part of his services, he said, and he was about to hang up when Jawad mentioned he was willing to pay a fifty-dollar fee. The Consultant insisted he did not need to be paid, that it was not about money, but he was busy and would have to skip other work, so he agreed to take the fifty dollars anyway. He set a meeting place for them in front of the bakery on Lane 6, off Street 15, and when Jawad and the three of them arrived, the Consultant gripped the old man, Anwar, by the arm and led them all off to the shade of a big tree on the corner; he had no intention of taking them to his place.

  Under the tree he rather rudely looked them all up and down. True, that was part of his assignment, but no one ever looks at women like that in Afghanistan, not openly anyway. Zakia was in her electric blue long dress, its numerous little bone clasps up the front cinched tight almost to popping with her pregnancy, which was still not evident except to those who knew her well; on her head was a stylish matching blue scarf. The white leather high heels—those would have to go, he said right away. Something plain. As for her dress, that was no problem; she would have to wear a full black hejab and keep her face veiled, so the dress would not show anyway. Ali had on a T-shirt and nondescript trousers—they would do, but his pointy white leather shoes would have to go. Then there was Anwar, who in his attempt to look less conspicuous had changed his old silk turban for a white skullcap, but the rest of his clean but well-worn clothes said “farmer,” and where they were going, that meant “refugee.” With Anwar, he said, it all had to go, everything new. “Look at Jawad,” he told them. Jawad was wearing Western clothes and nothing flashy. “That is how you should all dress.”

  “Listen, Uncle,” the Consultant said—focusing on Anwar as the weak link—“you speak the language, so you won’t have any problem. Be brave, don’t be shy. If you’re shy, they will suspect you and there will be problems for you. Tell them you’re just coming to see Tajikistan and you might come again and do some business. Say you have a business in Afghanistan—whatever comes in your mind as a business, tell them that. But be sure to change your clothes. And don’t be afraid of them. If they ask you for a bribe at the airport, just leave some small notes in your passport and let them take them. They’re very greedy. That’s their nature, this is how they are. The police especially are very greedy, but don’t worry, it won’t be a problem.”

  The next flight to Dushanbe was on Wednesday, three days away; they aimed to be on it, the three of them and Jawad. As an American I didn’t need a visa but had decided against going along, because it would only draw more attention to them, even if I pretended to be traveling separately. Few foreigners fly from Afghanistan to Tajikistan.

  There was some good news before they left. Zakia had had another bout of morning sickness, and her doting men rushed her down to the hospital, a well-worn routine now; usually the doctors sent them to the pharmacy with a prescription, and since they could not read, they had no idea it was merely vitamins, just a placebo. This time, though, the doctor at the hospital was concerned enough to order an ultrasound. Fortunately, the baby was okay, the doctor said, but, he regretted to tell them, it was a girl.

  How did Ali feel about that? “A girl? Why not? We are happy to have a baby girl. When I heard it, I was happy. We want the child to be a good child, is all. Obviously, men as fathers prefer to have sons, and women as mothers prefer girls, because daughters will help their mothers when they grow up, and sons will help the father. But I was very happy.” He sounded a little as if he were trying to convince himself. “At least she will choose her own husband, because she will be the one who has to live with him, not us.” He had no intention of
reproducing the large families of his father’s generation, he said. “The most I would prefer is one daughter and one son. More is so difficult to provide for economically. In the past, people did not have much awareness and they were not educated, they did not know much, so that’s why they would have so many. Of course it’s God who will care for and protect the children, but it’s better to be careful yourself, too.” The couple agreed that it would be Zakia who chose their daughter’s name, but what that might be, she refused to say.

  Zakia was more introspective, contemplating a daughter. “Of course we don’t mind whether it’s a boy or a girl—it’s all God’s property, boy or girl—but what is important, I don’t want her to be like us. Now we’re going to Tajikistan, and we can’t even read and write. I’ve never been anywhere but Bamiyan and Kabul and the mountains. I don’t even know where Tajikistan is. I want her to be educated, to be good, and someday, after all this bad experience we have had, these bad times, I want her to do what she wants to do.”

  It was one thing to be illiterate down on the farm; the need to read was never all that pressing there. Their months on the run, though, especially hiding in a big city, had made them keenly feel their handicap. “If you can’t read and write, it’s just as if you’re blind,” she said. Street signs are mysterious. The numbers on currency, meaningless. Instructions on packets of medicine, labels in the supermarket, a sign on a shop door saying “Back in an hour,” a note from the doctor—all indecipherable. Typically, half the packaged food on sale in Kabul supermarkets is long past its expiration date; they would never know. “Someday I hope we can learn to read and write,” Zakia said, “It should be possible, since we’re still very young and will have a long life—although it’s never really known how long we have to live.”