Walking the Precipice

by Barbara Bick

  I am gleeful on boarding the helicopter, until I see the interior: totally bare, no lining on the rusted metal body, no seat other than a single narrow metal bench along each side. The helicopter rises from the ground before I can catch my breath, however, and I sink down on the bench. There is nothing to hold on to as I twist around to look out of the round window.

  It is wonderful, sensational. We float over ripe fields of green rice and golden wheat. We are flying so low that we can see everything beneath us in precise detail. Stands of trees, serving as windbreakers and demarcators, surround compounds of flat-roofed mud-brick houses, small orchards, and fields. We fly over a river with sandy shallow islets. It looks so peaceful, I am totally relaxed. I savor the view and the unworldly sensation of being above and yet so near. And then the helicopter sinks down and we land in a grassy field.

  It is a scene I shall long remember. Nasrine, Sara, and I jump out of the helicopter. I watch my friend—cerebral, poised Nasrine—fling her arms wide to the sky, face shining, glowing with joy as she screams, “I am home, I am home!” She falls to her knees and kisses the ground.

  We scarcely have time to look around—at the river on one side, at the sand-colored cliff, studded with mud dwellings, on the other—before a jeep hurtles down the cliff toward us, filled with young men, all dressed in clean, pressed, white shalwar kameez, the traditional male attire of baggy pants and long shirt. The driver is a handsome, slender, bearded young man who greets us formally. Another jeep drives down the embankment, and most of the men pile into it along with our bags, while we get into the first jeep and we all drive off.

  We climb the cliff onto a dirt road, and then we seem to go back in time three thousand years, as we come upon a village, its sun-bleached white undulating walls winding down footpaths that shelter and hide family compounds, enclosing the empty road until it suddenly opens onto a large square with a single well in the center. Then the walls close in again, and the road leaves the village.

  I am stunned, literally, by my reaction. Rising, inexplicably, out of some ancient Hebraic tribal archetype within my being, the image of this village resonates in my brain and in my soul. As in a dream, I feel as though a piece of me has always been a part of this place. I am spellbound as the jeep rushes on to the Northern Alliance compound.

  Massoud’s rearguard base in Khoja Bahauddin was built after the Taliban overran his former base in the town of Talaqon. Built on a bluff, the compound overlooks the Amu Dar’ya, the longest river in Central Asia, known in ancient times as the Oxus. The compound is divided into two sections. On the large side, the original simple concrete building consists of guest rooms and an office. There is also a small house further down the hill. In the other section there is a newly built residence for Massoud.

  We are taken to the new section, and to our surprise we see, in this remote location, a white-plastered villa that looks like a small Mount Vernon. A wide, columned verandah surrounds the dwelling, which we enter through large French doors. Bisecting the one-story house is a hall through which I can see another set of French doors opening to a rear verandah. I catch a quick glimpse of a large dining room and formal living room before we are led to a corner suite of two sitting rooms, each with two beds, and a large tiled bathroom.

  Shoukria, the founder of NEGAR, is waiting for us, worried over our delay, and we all embrace with affection and relief. She is winding up a trip escorting a group of French journalists and has delayed her return to Paris to wait for us. It is an honor, and a tribute to Shoukria, that we will be the first guests to stay in the new house.

  During her years of traveling in and out of the northern provinces to organize among women, Shoukria has met many of the Northern Alliance men, including the young foreign ministry official, Assim Suhail, who is head of the Khoja Bahauddin compound. Assim is an ardent supporter of women’s rights and provided support for NEGAR’s meeting in Dushanbe the previous year. He is the one who has agreed to provide us with these relatively luxurious accommodations.

  We have no time to unpack before we are called for our formal welcome. We pass through the gate in the wall that divides the new section from the rest of the compound and enter the stark, one-story, L-shaped building. There are five guest rooms, which are also used for meals, meetings, and socialization. The office is the only room that has more than the most basic furnishings; it even has a rug over the concrete floor. At one end of the room is a large mahogany desk and a tall cabinet that holds electronic equipment, although the only electricity in the compound, I learn, comes from a small generator used for a few hours each evening.

  Six or eight young men, Assim’s staff, are sitting in a circle on plastic chairs.

  Assim and Nasrine exchange formal greetings, using English, of which Assim knows a little, and Sara and I are introduced. I give the usual spiel about women’s rights and the Taliban and then I blurt out, “But you are all so young!” Assim, the oldest, is in his thirties. After twenty-three years of war, many of the original mujahidin have been killed, and Massoud is “the Old Man” at forty-eight. Assim laughs and answers, “It is good that we are young; we will be there to make the changes.”

  Like the others, Assim is of Tajik ethnicity, slender, of medium height, with thick curly hair, a short clipped beard, and a mustache. He is not exactly handsome but has a keen, intelligent face. The oldest son of a Kabul beekeeper, with four sisters and a brother, Assim finished university and then established an educational center for both men and women in Kabul, with an emphasis on computer technology. He left Kabul to join Massoud after the Taliban entered the city. He has not seen his family for five years, but his wife, who is not well, and their three children are located nearby in Tajikistan. Over the next few days, as a dust storm keeps us in Khoja Bahauddin, we spend a lot of time with Assim, and my affection for this intelligent, good man continues to grow.

  The guest rooms are crammed with roughly constructed wooden beds and piled high with luggage and paraphernalia belonging to the visitors who are in this section of the compound. The two French journalists who came with Shoukria share a room. There is also a Russian journalist and his interpreter, as well as a few others we do not meet. These rooms will also serve as our dining room most days, with a space cleared in the middle of one while everyone sits on the floor. For our meals, the cook rolls out a plastic sheet and sets down platters piled with rice and bowls of stewed tomatoes, onion, okra, and sometimes eggplant. Platters of nan are passed around to be used as both plates and implements. Since I cannot easily get down on the floor because of spinal stenosis and arthritis, I usually sit on several mattresses or someone’s bag. The kitchen is an open area, in the corner of the high wall that surrounds the compound. Its semblance of a roof is made of woven grass supported by stripped sapling poles. Cooking is done over a fire pit. The only other building in the compound is a concrete latrine and bathhouse.

  That first evening, however, we eat in the villa, joined by Assim. Shoukria and Nasrine talk about the petition for the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women, and Assim agrees to help with distribution in the region and to arrange clandestine distribution in Taliban-occupied territory.

  Before bed, I shower with cold water in the tiled bathroom. I am no fan of cold showers, but that is all there is, and that night it feels wonderful as I luxuriously soap myself and stand for long moments, letting the water flow over my head and body. Back in the room I share with Sara, I pull the sheet over my head, and as I doze off, the pleasant drone of Dari from the adjoining room fills me with contentment. I am back in Afghanistan. A different Afghanistan, but still, Afghanistan.

  Zahera and her daughter, Leila (1990)

  Shakira, President Mohammad Najibullah, and Director, All-Afghan Women’s Council (1990)

  Babies’ orphanage, Kabul (1990)

  Khoja Bahauddin Guest House. Back row: Daood, Shoukria, Assim, Massoum; front row: Sara and Nasrine (2001)

  Girls’ primary school at Khoja Bahauddin (2001)<
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  Bick at the Qum Queshiaq internal refugee camp (2001)

  Shoukria at camp mosque, with Nasrine on left (2001)

  On the road from Khoja Bahauddin to Faizabad with Mohammad Shreib (2001)

  Road from Khoja Bahauddin to Faizabad (2001)

  Rozstark market (2001)

  Star Guest House, Nasrine getting petition signatures from mujahidin, Faizabad (2001)

  Mary MacMakin talking to beggar, Faizabad (2001)

  Bick with Mme Rabbani in courtyard of Rabbani residence, Faizabad (2001)

  Bringing Assim Suhail’s coffin into Khoja Bahauddin compound, Zubair leading (2001)

  Bick, evening of September 9, 2001, Khoja Bahauddin

  Afghan children gathering garbage during NEGAR’s Kabul conference (2003)

  End of NEGAR conference; Zubair, center, conferring with delegates (2003)

  Chapter 4

  Khoja Bahauddin

  The next morning I awake with the dawn, too excited to remain in bed. While the others sleep, I go through the gate to the other side of the compound and stroll around, entranced by the sight of a wildly flourishing circular garden, an entangled medley of bright colors. I learn that it is the creation of an elderly mujahidin who lives nearby, and that once a week, a water truck lumbers into the compound to unload a stream of water into the garden.

  The wall that surrounds the compound has two gates, one small, an entry to the villa and always locked, the other large enough for trucks, open all day, and guarded by a lone soldier on a rough wooden bench. I stand at the open gate and watch the traffic. The dirt road that runs past the compound is a major thoroughfare, busy throughout the day. First come a group of women, driving cattle to the river below us. A few of them wear burqas, but with the tops and front of the garment tossed back, leaving their faces uncovered and their hands free to work the cattle. Others wear long skirts and long-sleeved tops, and drape large scarves or shawls over their hair. Seeing a foreign woman visitor, they slow their pace to examine me curiously and I smile and wave. Their freedom to move about openly, to decide whether or not to cover themselves, makes a big impression on me, after everything that I have learned about life under the Taliban.

  Next, several boys and girls ride by astride mules, with large water cans dangling against the animals’ sides. The girls all seem beautiful to me, tanned and rosy, their long dark hair hanging loose and uncovered. Trucks also roar past, some farm, some military. Occasionally, a boy rides by on a battered bicycle; even more rarely, a motorcycle raises a whirl of dust.

  When I go back to our rooms, Nasrine and Sara are awake. We soon learn that there are no helicopters available to take us to Faizabad right away. By this time, delays are nothing new to us. We are bordering a war zone in a part of the world where the rigid timetables of the industrialized world have no meaning. I tell Nasrine that I want to walk to the old village we passed on our way to the compound. “No, impossible! You can’t leave this base!” she insists. This will be Nasrine’s first reaction to all such requests, as her keen sense of responsibility for our welfare clashes with our desire for independence. But Sara also wants to see the area around the compound and has befriended a young man, Jaheen, who lives on the base and who will act as our escort and interpreter. He speaks rudimentary English and French, picked up from visiting guests, and has a quirky, happy-go-lucky personality. Nasrine reluctantly consents, and Sara, Jaheen, and I head off.

  It is around eleven o’clock and the sun is high in the sky. The temperature is already in the upper nineties, but while intense, it is a dry heat, and not too uncomfortable.

  We walk down to a bridge over the Amu Dar’ya, past laborers working on a new hospital on the bluff opposite the compound. Our side of the river is almost totally bare, hard-packed dirt with a few random, spindly trees; but, strangely, the other side is lush, with trees lining the bank and fertile green fields of rice. We stop to watch shirtless boys splashing and playing in the river alongside the mules and horses that stand passively in the cool water. The girls sit on their mules, watching the boys play. A group of women are in the shallow water near the bank, washing clothes while their children slosh and splatter around them. They stop their work when we pause to watch, and we all stare at each other for a few minutes before our group moves on.

  We start to climb again as the sun blazes higher overhead. The air is getting hotter, and the hill steeper. “My friends and grandchildren should see me now,” I think as I keep up with the pace.

  We approach the mud walls of the old village I had been so moved by the day before. A young boy rides by on a donkey, long stalks of a plant wrapped in burlap hanging from both sides of the animal. A group of women suddenly stand before us, children clinging to their long, full, multicolored skirts. Most of the women have deep red-and-white patterned shawls covering their hair; several of them use the shawls to cover the lower parts of their faces, some seemingly out of shyness, others, possibly to hide their toothless mouths.

  A few old men hobble over, and since the women hang back once the men approach, I ask Jaheen if he will ask the men some questions. We find out that they are displaced people who fled their villages as the Taliban militias advanced. The permanent residents of this village traditionally leave in the summer to work as itinerant farm laborers, so these people have moved into the empty houses and will have to go into a camp when the owners return.

  We continue through the village, up one of the narrow lanes. More women begin to emerge from behind the walls. They stand at the openings of compounds to stare at us silently. Then some of them smile and beckon. We enter several homes, finding ourselves inside small compounds with tiny mud dwellings often built into one corner of the enclosing walls.

  The village is still starkly beautiful, but it no longer moves me; instead I feel overwhelmed by the sparseness of the lives these women lead. Now, it seems one of the saddest places I have ever encountered. I have visited communities made up of boxcar or container dwellings, seen homes built of cast-off cardboard, lumber, and tin; yet they did not fill me with such a sense of desolation. Perhaps it is the silence, so heavy it seems to bear down on me, merging with the searing heat. Most villages, no matter how poor, carry the sounds of laughter, the tumult of children, radios blaring, whistles and horns, the drone of voices and sounds of labor. What was the silence of the ages yesterday, now seems the quiet desperation of war and upheaval.

  Since these women have left villages where the Taliban has banned all music, I wonder if silence has become the norm for them, in this village of parched earth desiccated by the long drought of the past five years. Or is the silence a reflection of their exhaustion and the terrible circumstances of their lives? I truly have no comparable life experience with which to understand these women, and my sadness at their apparent blight leaves me emotionally and physically drained.

  We enter the large center square that had been so mesmerizing the previous day. I slowly pace through the empty space, circle the center well, absorb the silence. Like the rest of the village, it simply feels sad. I am happy to have had that previous bewitching sensation, but I realize now that it was an ephemeral moment, perhaps emerging from the knowledge that in ancient times the Jewish people had lived in similar housing and environments. Indeed, an old legend has it that the Pashtun forebears were one of the lost tribes of Israel.

  By now, my sadness, the sun, and the climb have exhausted me. I tell Sara and Jaheen that I am going back, and head off, taking a different path in the direction of our compound. I walk and walk through more of the village until finally I come to a new road and a group of buildings. A large sign reads: “ACTED—Agency for Technical Cooperation & Development. Emergency Assistance & Winter Emergency Shelter Operation for IDPs [internally displaced persons] North Afghanistan, Khoja Bahauddin. Financed by the Turkish People.” I pause to study the sign, wishing that I might find one that reads: “Financed by the American People.” But we Americans are too far removed physically and, for the most part, i
ntellectually, from life in this tiny village. We lack information about the people, much less understand how our country has contributed to displacing the people I have just met.

  I am now really tired. I can feel that my face is flushed with the heat and sun. I walk on until I hear a truck, at the sound of which I stick out my thumb, hoping it’s a universal symbol. It works, or maybe it’s just the sight of an elderly foreign woman standing by the side of the road, but the truck, filled with Afghan workers standing in the open back, stops and one of the men in the cab opens his door and helps me squeeze into the front seat. The truck drops me off at the compound entrance and, with all the workers waving and smiling, roars off. I cross over to the new villa, blissfully stand under the cold shower again, then fling myself naked onto the bed and sleep for hours.

  We are tremendously privileged to be in the new villa, where we have privacy and a glamorous, modern bathroom. However, whenever we return to the compound from visits, we most often go over to the old side to meet other guests, whom we join for meals. The Northern Alliance puts up many visitors here, whom they hope will report to the outside world on the desperate conditions under which they battle Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Favorable reports will help bring forth critically needed funds and weapons.

  Rabbani’s government in Faizabad is recognized as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, rather than the Taliban in Kabul, by most of the international community including the UN. However, Massoud, the all-important defense minister, has transferred many of the ministries to Khodja Bahauddin, because he has long been unhappy with Rabbani’s conduct as president during the 1992-94 civil unrest.

  The compound has hosted warlords allied with Massoud; mullahs who oppose the extreme interpretation of sharia by the Taliban; representatives from the UN, the World Bank, and the European Union; and international aid and health care agencies. During the few days that we are there, several journalists, representatives of various service agencies, and “goodwill” visitors such as us arrive. I meet one guest who speaks English. Everyone simply calls him “the Engineer,” and he is ardently pro-Massoud. The only other women in the compound are two French journalists who have been traveling with Shoukria.