Walking the Precipice
Page 13
Nasrine translates the shopkeeper’s words and I feel a shiver run down my spine. We are both worried that Zubair has not returned. I restlessly wander over to the door and see smoke billowing from the direction of the compound. I do not say anything because once before when I had worried about smoke and told the others, it turned out to be from a brick factory. My kameez is brought in. The shopkeeper gets up, then says he has to leave. We follow and he closes the shop, locks the door, and walks off. The square is totally empty. Wind swirls the dust. Suddenly a dilapidated car pulls up, and the driver leans out and speaks to Nasrine, who pulls me into the vehicle. “Don’t panic,” she says, “but it looks like there has been an explosion at the compound.” She looks more panicked than I feel, but we both become increasingly tense as the hunched driver jams down on the accelerator, forcing the car to careen over the rocky, deserted road.
There is a great silence. The sun burns down; it seems as though we are driving through a lifeless zone. The normally bustling road in front of the compound is empty. The farm women who drive their cattle to the river below, the children who sit astride animals laden with water cans, the construction workers across the bluff—all have vanished. At the open gate we jump out of the car. Then, we stand rigid with shock and horror.
The stink of doused fire fills my lungs and makes my stomach heave. Over the wall that divides the compound, we can see the villa. Smoke has blackened its walls, and its windows have been blown out. Black cinders float in the air and drift down onto our heads. Jaheen and the other young men walk back and forth aimlessly, in a daze. Roland is slumped even deeper than usual in one of the chairs.
Slowly, disjointedly, we learn what has happened.
The two Arab journalists staying at the guesthouse were taken to the villa by Assim and Dashti. As Nasrine surmised, Massoud had indeed been staying there, with his comrade Massoud Khalili, the Afghan ambassador to India. Before taking off on a reconnaissance flight, Massoud had finally agreed to be interviewed. They all assembled in the villa’s reception room. The Arabs began the interview with questions about bin Laden, which made the Afghans uneasy. Then one of the Arabs focused his camera on Massoud and, as he clicked the shutter, the camera fired a bullet at Massoud. The other Arab leaned over and detonated explosives packed in his belt. He was blown apart, and most of the others in the room were severely burned in the blazing explosion except for the other assassin who ran out of the house. Bewildered guards rushed in the direction of the villa, while he ran right past them and out of the compound. A few guards pulled themselves together and gave chase. They caught the man and locked him in one of the compound rooms, identical to ours; but, dazed by the day’s events, they left him unguarded and he got away again, jumping out the back window into the open field and fleeing down to the river.
Zubair had received the news on his cell phone, which was why he left us stranded in town while he raced back to the compound. As he drove up, he saw the assassin running toward the river. He joined in the chase, shouting, “Capture him, capture him, don’t shoot. Don’t kill him. We have to interrogate the devil.” The Arab, at the edge of the river, turned to face the guards and one of them fired and killed him.
The shopkeeper’s dire prophesy, “If Massoud is killed, we are all dead!” echoes in my head as Nasrine and I ask over and over, “Was Massoud killed? Was Massoud wounded? How is Assim? Where are they?”
Jaheen, white-faced, keeps repeating in a choking voice, “No one was killed. They will all be all right.” Finally he breaks down sobbing and admits that Assim was killed instantly when he threw himself in front of Massoud as the bomb was set off. The terrorists’ attempt to assassinate the legendary Amer Saheb—“Dear Boss”—is too shocking, too catastrophic, for me to absorb, or even cry over; even when I finally comprehend the fact that Assim, a human being I have known and tremendously admired, has been murdered, I am devastated but still cannot cry. I am locked into a state from which there is no easy relief.
As the rest of the garbled story slowly emerges, Nasrine and I listen with growing disbelief. While Massoud was flown out by helicopter, the wounded men in the villa were carried to cars and driven to a nearby hospital. But, horror heaped on horror, in the confusion, Assim was left behind. Only when the hospital reported him missing did they go back to find his body still in the burning embers. Zubair is now tending the body and has taken charge of the compound.
Nasrine and I sit, we stand, we walk around. Our grief is subsumed by rage. We are furious with everyone. “What kind of stupidity,” we ask each other incredulously, “can have possessed their security to allow terrorists to walk into a meeting with Massoud with explosives in their belt?”
All afternoon, Nasrine intercepts everyone who walks over from the other side. She asks each one if she can be taken to the villa to photograph the dead assassin. She says that she can get his picture to our FBI or CIA for tracing. She pleads with them. But security has been taken over by an elite group of soldiers, unlike any I have seen in Afghanistan before, even in photographs. These men are more in the image of American Special Forces. They wear high, lace-up boots and camouflage uniforms, quite unlike the typical mujahidin in his baggy uniform, part kameez and part army, always topped with the soft felt pakol hat that is the traditional head covering in the region. The grim-faced troops shake off questions, ignore us as irrelevant. They stride back and forth between the two sections of the compound. I find out later that they are part of Massoud’s regular troops and had come with him to the villa. Our compound is not a military base, but part of the foreign ministry, and we had never seen Massoud’s military base, called the Garden, which is not far from the compound.
Around four o’clock, Zubair and the other young men of Assim’s staff, his comrades, carry a rough wooden coffin, still open, into our part of the compound. It holds Assim’s body, bathed and bound in burial wrappings. They fetch a bed frame from one of the rooms and put the coffin on it so that it will not rest on the dirt. They scrounge through the emptied rooms, searching for a cloth large enough to cover the coffin to keep away the dust and insects. It is brutally hot. An electric fan from the villa is put on a table at the head of the coffin, a line of electric extension cords is rigged together, the generator is turned on, and the fan slowly stirs the scorching air to protect Assim’s body from the last heat of the day.
Men begin to arrive, gathering to pray. Zubair, gently, apologetically tells us that they are expecting many guests for the all-night vigil of Koran recitations and that we and Roland will have to leave. We are driven a few miles away to an enclosed group of buildings, and Nasrine and I are led into a small one-room mud-brick and woven-reed hut.
We sit on opposite sides of the room, on thin pallets on the dirt floor. From two small slits of windows, too high on the wall to see out of, the red glow from the setting sun fades until the room is only dimly lit by a kerosene lamp on the floor. We are exhausted, too drained to speak. I lie down on the hard floor. I feel as though my bones will break. Nasrine sits up and smokes one cigarette after another.
The owner of this house, a burly, bearded man, comes in with a young servant, whom he brusquely instructs to bring us supper. The frail boy brings in a basin of water for us to wash our hands before we eat. He returns, his arms quivering under the weight of a large tray of food.
The owner’s manner changes when he speaks to Nasrine. To her he is warm and sociable, pointing out the amenities, which include a latrine just outside our door. We must not be frightened, he tells us, the servant boy will sleep outside our door and be on call to serve our needs. Nasrine and our host sit cross-legged and eat. I sit up to drink some tea but I cannot eat. I lie down again and shift my body awkwardly on the hard ground, then roll over and groan, hoping to sleep but instead listening to the drone of unintelligible voices as Nasrine and the man eat and converse in Dari. I glimpse Zubair coming in to inquire about us, but I just lie there, trying to fit my arthritic body into the hollows of the dirt floor.
“Later, later,” she says impatiently.
Awkwardly, painfully, I get to my feet and totter over to her with the camera. “Please, Nasrine, take my picture.”
Back on my pallet, I slump exhausted against the wall. The flash brightens the room momentarily. I sink back down.
Nasrine tells me that it was the worst night of her life. She was terrified that the assassination was just the begining, that the Taliban was on the threshold of attack. She was too afraid to sleep. I guess I was too numb to be afraid and fell into a deep sleep, blanking out mind and body.
The next morning Nasrine recounts her long conversation with our host, who told her Assim had been “like a brother” to him for some fifteen years. Assim, he said, had been born in Kabul to a Panjshir family and studied economics at the university. After graduation, he founded a mixed-gender “cultural center” for computer studies, which, according to his friend, had over a thousand students and fifty-four teachers, some of whom were women. Assim’s wife was a Kabul high school graduate; in traditional fashion, they were cousins on his mother’s side. When Kabul fell to the Taliban, Assim and his wife moved to Panjshir where he worked as a translator. Later, he joined the mujahidin government’s Foreign Ministry and moved to Taliqon. Our host worried about Assim’s wife, repeating what we had heard earlier, that she was not well, and that she and their three young children live in Dushanbe, where she is receiving medical care.
During the years in Taloqan, Assim helped organize a working women’s political group, a project he loved. We had met three of those women in Faizabad when they visited Nasrine in my room. Assim also worked with human rights groups. When the Taliban captured Taloqan, he was sent to Khoja Bahauddin to build the compound that would serve as a base for Massoud and a guesthouse for the ministry.
Assim had once told Nasrine that he had moved five times since the Taliban overran Kabul. “I sometimes find it hard to get up and get clean and start the day,” he admitted to her. “I’ve given up caring about my surroundings.” But he did get up each day and, as director of the compound, took care of all the visitors, the journalists, the aid workers, mullahs, the commanders, everyone who could contribute to the demise of the Taliban.
Although few Afghan men whom I met were feminists, Assim appeared to be one. “The work I most care about is with the women,” he told Nasrine. “They must be there to rebuild Afghanistan when we recover our country.” Shoukria had helped arrange our stay with the Northern Alliance, thanks to her friendship with Assim. They had met when Shoukria first began to organize among the women in areas occupied by the Taliban and in internal-refugee camps, after the Taliban overran the Shomali Plain, just north of Kabul, in the summer of 1999. The Taliban militia had killed civilians, torched their homes, machine-gunned their livestock, destroyed fields of crops, and blasted irrigation canals. Thousands of fruit trees—mulberry, apple, walnut—were cut down, and vineyards burned. The desperate population fled the Plain. Assim was with Shoukria as she filmed the flight of some fifty to sixty thousand men, women, and children struggling through the narrow Salang tunnel to the Panjshir Valley. I watched that film in Nasrine’s house, what seems eons ago.
Assim spent his last night in the one-room hut where we now are, talking with our host into the late hours. According to his friend, Assim said he did not like “the smell” of the Arab journalists. Assim always wanted to be “of service to the people,” his friend said. “He had a soft heart.”
At about 10:30 one of the ministry men comes and takes us back to the Northern Alliance compound. I climb in and out of the jeep with difficulty; I seem to have aged overnight and feel suspended in time. Roland has been brought back also. He, Nasrine, and I are the only guests. The sun beats down relentlessly and becomes part of the burden of sadness with which the entire community is consumed. One day passes into the next without news about my leaving. Our meals are minimal—rice, nan, tea, an occasional vegetable. We have neither heart nor energy to undertake much personal care. Dipping into the container of polluted river water in the “bath” room next to the latrine to wipe the encrusted sand off my face and arms seems almost pointless. Nasrine and I are so overcome by the horror of the assassination plot and by the unyielding heat that we spend many hours stretched out in a stupor, me on the bed, she on the floor mat. Nasrine digs out a new book on Afghanistan for me and gives me photocopies of political analyses. There is nothing else to read.
Nasrine, at least, is able to spend a lot of time with Zubair. She meets other men who come to the compound and in the evening joins the staff as they start the generator and listen to international news. She urges me to go to Zubair and plead for him to contact someone to get me a helicopter. But I hesitate, knowing how desolate he feels at the death of his beloved friend Assim. As the days stretch on, the sound of a helicopter flying overhead is like a jolt of electricity, but they always pass by and disappear.
Each time we ask about Massoud, we are told that he is alive, seriously burned but alive. Actually, we later learn that Massoud was immediately killed, along with Assim. Massoud’s body had been flown to a hospital in Tajikistan and General Mohammed Qasim Fahim, the second in command of Massoud’s military forces, arrived soon after. He, along with other Northern Alliance officials, agreed that the death should be kept secret for the time being. So the troops knew only that their commander was badly wounded.
The assassins were Tunisian, identified by photographs that Shoukria’s journalist friend, Francoise Causse, had taken earlier. They had entered Afghanistan via Pakistan, traveling with stolen Belgian passports and with visas forged by an Arab group in Belgium that provided many forged travel documents for young militants going to Al Qaeda training camps.
One day, in desperation, I do go in to see Zubair. Nasrine and I have agreed that I should lay on a heavy “poor sick old woman” act, which is not far from the truth. As I tell him how desperate I feel, how my medication is almost gone, my tears begin to flow uncontrollably—as it turns out, no acting is necessary. I sense his deep sympathy and feel even more inconsolable and lost in the mire of Afghanistan’s troubles. I know he has no control over the allocation of available helicopters. I tell Zubair how great is my sorrow over Assim’s death and his eyes fill with tears. He excuses himself and I watch him outside, head bent, shoulders shaking. I cannot continue to complain when I know the desperation of these men. So many of them have been kind and gracious to me, treating me like a grandmother. Most have not seen their own grandmothers—or mothers, or wives, or children—for years.
Nasrine and I go over and over different scenarios for my departure. Of course, our original plan assumed that we would fly from Dushanbe directly into Afghanistan, that I would spend a week there and return by plane to Dushanbe while Nasrine and Sara spent another week or two in Panjshir. How innocent we were! Now we need to know the name of the Afghan official in Kalab who can arrange transportation. We need to know who I should contact in Dushanbe to translate and to help with potential ticket or visa problems. We don’t have many answers. One afternoon a man named Habidulah Allahyar comes to see me. He is stationed in Nimroz, an Iranian border town. With Nasrine translating, he assures me that the Afghan Embassy knows about me and they are trying to get me out, but that Tajikistan’s border remains closed. He does not explain why he has come and I wonder if, for some reason, they are thinking of getting me out through Iran. I am incredibly appreciative that there are people concerned about me.
I intend to leave my sleeping bag and other superfluous items behind, so I repack, distributing my money inside different pockets, assuming that I will still go via the Tajik airfield and may have to face the customs officials there. Time drags on.
“Barbara,” Nasrine murmurs to me one day as we lay spread out on the beds, rendered half unconscious by the heat. “I am so happy that you were the one to take this trip with
me.”
I look over at her. “What do you mean, Nasrine?”
“You have coped so well. Oh, my God, the tragedy, the horror! If someone else had come, she might have become hysterical. Or a group! How could I have taken care of a bunch of hysterical, wailing women?”
I laugh. “Wouldn’t it have been horrible if we had been successful and had brought a big delegation of unknown women?”
But the waiting, the uncertainty of when and how we will be able to leave, is wearing us both down. Although only four days have passed, each hour stretches endlessly and I feel suffocated within an impermeable curtain of time. My constant concern is how to apportion the few remaining precious pain and anti-inflammatory tablets. Without medication, I fear the weakness of my legs if we have to leave on foot. I do not want to panic so I clamp down hard on my imagination and refuse to speculate.
And then, on the morning of September 13, the call comes. We have performed our perfunctory ablutions and have had our tea and nan on the floor in our room, carried in by the sweet porter. Nasrine has gone out and I am fussing around with my bag when I hear their cries: “Barbara, Barbara, Come quick! Come quick!” All the men in the compound are shouting, copying the English words from Nasrine.
She bursts into the room, shouting “Barbara, a helicopter is here! Hurry, grab your bag. There isn’t much time. They are waiting for you right now. But you must hurry!”
She zips up my largest bag. I am panic-stricken. I struggle to tie my clumsy boots. “My passport!” I cry. “My passport is in the suitcase you’re closing,” I yell to Nasrine.
Hysterically, we push through the garments in the bag, looking for the passport. “I’ve got it!” I yell, and Nasrine zips the bag and runs with it. I grab everything else and, stumbling over my half-tied boots, run out of the room. All the guys are jumping up and down. Zubair is gunning the jeep so hard that I am terrified it will stall.