Hekmatullah had taken a huge risk and some of his family were to pay the price. Several of his uncles were arrested. The fingernails of one were ripped out and the eye of another.
After a year of planning, Ismael returned to Afghanistan to launch a new offensive on the Taliban but it had made little progress, partly because of the difficulties of obtaining supplies. ‘No one was interested in helping us,’ he claimed. ‘We had to get our bullets one by one.’ Everything changed after the attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent American bombing campaign which wiped out the Taliban military encampment in Herat and many of their tanks and vehicles. In the end the Taliban fled with barely a shot fired and Ismael and his men were able to ride into the city the next day and claim it as their own. It was clear that he would have preferred a battle to wipe them out once and for all. ‘The Taliban have not been defeated,’ he pointed out. ‘They have just gone back to their tribes as mujaheddin but they are Talibs in their hearts and will come back again under a different name.’
Ismael had had six years in jail and exile or on the run to think about what he would do if he were ever governor again and I asked about his plans.
‘My city is in ruins,’ he replied. ‘But it is not just physical problems we must deal with. Our young have known only war, a man of thirty in my city is illiterate after twenty-three years’ war and knows nothing but how to fight. Both with the Russians and the Taliban, hatred and violence became the language and we must reinstil the value of words.’
It sounded impressive spoken in his soft, wise voice. But he made no secret of his dislike of the new government and a few days later held a meeting in the Big Mosque where his supporters all declared him Amir of the West. Back in the nineteenth century, Herat and Kabul had been ruled by bitterly opposed members of the same dynasty and I wondered if the same thing was happening again. He had already named his son Mirwais as intelligence chief and at the Mowafaq, the bearded men were complaining that a potato-seller had been put in charge of a police station and a man with no experience made head of the hospital just because they had been good mujahids.
By the tomb of a Sufi saint called Khwaja Altan, the Rolling Mullah, because he rolled all over Herat, a blind old man was sitting chanting and I met two small boys looking for snakes. I could not help thinking of Ismael’s men skinning them alive with their teeth.
A few nights later, I was in the Mowafaq restaurant when there was a sudden crack of gunfire outside followed by burst after burst of artillery. The lights went off and everyone ran to the roof. The sky was lit up with red and green tracer bullets, exploding rockets and white streaks of anti-aircraft fire, and spent cartridges were cascading down around us. ‘Get inside, get inside!’ shouted the old sweeper man. The peace had always seemed rather fragile in Herat and at first we thought it was a battle and maybe the Taliban had come back. Eventually it became clear it was a celebration though no one seemed to know for what. The rumours were endless – Ismael had captured Mullah Omar and brought him to Herat, Osama bin Laden had been killed in a cave at Tora Bora, Ismael had captured Kandahar. The firing went on for more than an hour.
The next morning Ayubi came to see us and explained that the Taliban had surrendered and the firing was to greet the return of prisoners from Kandahar. He looked more serious than usual and after the long exchange of greetings, he took me aside.
‘Miss Christina, I would like to use your satellite telephone to call Mashad to find out if my wife has had her baby,’ he said. I looked at him in astonishment. He had never mentioned that his wife was expecting.
‘When is it due?’
‘It was due the day we left Mashad.’
That was about twelve days earlier. ‘Why didn’t you tell us? We would never have brought you to Herat if we had known.’
‘No, it was my service to Tora Ismael to bring you.’
It turned out he already had seven children and two wives which explained why he could be casual about another arrival but when he got through to Mashad and discovered that his wife had given birth to a little girl the previous week, he could not stop smiling.
‘Now, I will never forget you,’ he said, ‘because you have been the messenger of this good news.’
‘We must celebrate,’ I said, wondering how. I couldn’t even order him a cup of tea because of the Ramadan fast.
‘I will give her your name,’ said Ayubi. ‘But it will not be her first name because it is too strange.’
The good news seemed to have broken down the courtly formality with which Ayubi always spoke to me and he suddenly confessed that he was thinking of leaving the mujaheddin and had asked Ismael to release him so that he could go into business.
‘I love my commander and he is a good friend and a good man but six lakh a year [600,000 afghani – about $120] is not enough to support two wives and eight children,’ he explained. ‘I went to Tora Ismael and greeted him and said, ‘‘You have all these cars confiscated from the Taliban, please give me one.’’ But he said, “Don’t even think about it for if I give you a car then I must give to all.’’ Yet many mujaheddin have just taken them.
‘I am no longer a young man but after all these years I have nothing. My family were not poor and some years ago my father, a mullah but a learned man, saved money to buy me a motorbike, a very nice one. But when Ismael heard he called me and said that motorcycle will feed two thousand of my men and he took it from me. That was the only thing I ever had.’
With his fine clothes and silver ring, I had imagined him to be a wealthy man but I realised that I did not even know how he had become a mujaheddin. He told me that he had become a ‘rebel’ as he put it at the age of sixteen in the mid-1970s when he was studying for a law degree at Kabul University and joined Rabbani’s party Jamiat Islami to fight against Daoud.
‘We caused trouble for the government, we published leaflets and wrote slogans and organised strikes and were very excited and very young and wanted to bring down the regime. Then in 1978 the Communists came and we wanted to fight. We had our own group of guerrillas in a village called Mullasia about twenty kilometres west of Herat. Our commander was friends with Ismael Khan so when he went to the hills we joined him. That was almost twenty-three years ago.’
‘I know compared to many mujaheddin I have a comfortable life. My family has a little money which they give me and I do get paid something by Ismael whereas many fighters have not received anything for years. But Ismael is a very tight person. We say water doesn’t stop in his hand.
Boarding the first Ariana flight from Herat. The airline’s slogan is: Be a Second Marco Polo, Fly ARIANA.
‘If I hadn’t been a mujahid, I would have had a better life. Because we were ideological people, believers, we had to fight. But now I am tired. We have fought so much and for what? I am not sure that at the end of all this anyone but a few warlords has a better life. The tribes are weakened. Our children are illiterate. Our cities are in rubble. Even now the Taliban is gone people are scrapping for power like vultures after meat.’
It seemed wrong that such a noble figure should be disappointed and I was touched when he invited us to dinner at his family home that evening, though as usual no time was mentioned. After Ayubi had taken his leave, the interpreter said, ‘He doesn’t want you to go to dinner. The language he used means he is ashamed. There will be no dinner.’
That evening Ayubi did not show up. When he appeared again the next morning he mentioned nothing about the dinner, only that he had slaughtered a goat and cooked it then distributed the meat to poor people to celebrate his new daughter.
There was a rumour that Ariana Airlines were to run a flight to Kabul the next day on their only remaining plane and while we were talking a man came with tickets. On the back there were photographs of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas that had been scribbled out with black felt-tip by the Taliban after they blew them up. I told Ayubi that we were planning to leave and he seemed sad. From his pocket he took an inkpen and pad of pink pap
er then wrote me a letter in turquoise-inked script of curves and dots like tiny long-tailed birds flying across the page.
My dear intuitive co-traveller Miss Christina
I hope you will be healthy and successful
And for you and your family to always enjoy the sweetest taste in your mouth
And to be sheltered by the Almighty’s grace along with your friends
And any time you remember me write to residence of Al-Haj Sheikh Mohammad Ayub Sharif near Ice Factory, Mashad
I am always ready for your service
Your friend Zahir Ayubi
I’ll never forget you and you will forget me
Though I will ask God to remind you
If you don’t think of me in a thousand years
I’ll think of you a thousand times in an hour
When the Persian was translated, there were tears in my eyes. I would never forget Ayubi’s big gentle smile and sad expression.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
I followed him to a taxi and we drove east of the city on a rutted road, past the walled tomb of Khwaja Abdullah Ansari, an eleventh-century Sufi poet and philosopher, the city’s most famous shrine. Inside the garden of calligraphed white and black headstones, work was underway on the roof of the latticed pavilion guarding the saint, which had been destroyed by an American food drop. We did not stop but continued past a dusty grove of trees and along a track up towards the hills. The driver looked uncomfortable and said something to Ayubi which I didn’t catch and then suddenly before us I could see thousands of tiny flags fluttering in the wind stretching along the bluff as far as the eye could seen. I realised what we were looking at. This was the mass grave of the thousands of Heratis killed in those three days of furious bombing by the Soviets in 1979. Ten thousand according to some, twenty-four thousand Ismael had told me.
There was nothing to say.
MARRI’S DIARY
Kabul, December 16
Eid Mubarak! Last night rockets and guns were going off all over town to announce Eid-ul Fitr, the end of Ramazan, and for once it was a sound to celebrate. Today father brought in a box of Eid biscuits and sweets and some many-coloured bangles. No new clothes this year but we dressed up in our best to go visiting friends and neighbours. Latifa and I put on make-up, lipstick and eye shadow and painted our nails in bright red, and it was so strange not to have to hide. There were lots of people on the streets and everyone happy, the children with toys.
The new government is to be sworn in on Saturday. How we pray this will bring peace. Father says it is a cabinet of Old Enemies and maybe they will all shoot each other. He says he will not believe in peace until the old cannon that used to fire to announce Eid and at noon every day is back on the hill above Babur’s tomb. He told me it was so famous that a Swiss watch company used its picture for their calendars. The cannon was destroyed by Hekmatyar’s men who took the hill and no one knows where the old man is who used to fire it – it was always the same family who lived on the hill and looked after the cannon.
I so hope that Karzai quickly opens the schools again and I can go back to teaching. I long to be useful and we have so little money, it is many weeks since we afforded meat. I know we are luckier than most people but I long to have nice things again and to go to bed with a full belly instead of always this emptiness.
But sometimes I fear, how can I teach children whose eyes have seen so many terrible things? I have read foreign books like Shakespeare with all his kings and treachery but anything we read in books will seem tame compared to what has happened here. Father says we are a country which started off with murder and looting so what can we expect.
7
Unpainting the Peacocks
O, but everyone was a bird And the song was wordless;
The singing will never be done.
Everyone Sang, SIEGFRIED SASSOON
IT WAS TOO ABRUPT arriving in Kabul by plane, even on Ariana’s labouring Antonov, which had to be jumpstarted at Herat airport. The city felt drained of colour, everywhere small flat-roofed houses made of sundried mud clinging like swallows’ nests to the mountains, the trees long ago stripped for firewood, and the December sky was pigeon-grey and heavy as if waiting for snow. Had one reached there exhausted after a long journey over mountains by mule and foot or a bone-shattering ride along unmade roads, I suppose the city would have come as a relief and its washed-out Cubist landscape might appear attractive. But skittering to a halt on the taxi-way of Kabul airport (the main runway was full of craters from bombing) amid the wreckage of helicopters and war-planes, it was like arriving at the denouement of a tragedy without having witnessed the preceding acts.
Too many people had moved in from the countryside during the last twenty-three years of war, swelling Kabul’s population from half a million to two or even three million, no one knew, and bringing bleakness with their broken families and baked-brick houses. It was hard to find any trace of the charmed city so beloved of the Moghul Emperor Babur who had counted sixteen kinds of wild tulips on its hillsides and asked to be buried there in a tomb describing Kabul as ‘the light garden of the god-forgiven angel king’.
The hotel was bleak too. The Kabul Hotel, where I had stayed back in 1989 in a room on the same corridor where the US ambassador Adolph Dubs1 had been murdered ten years earlier, had a large hole in the side from a rocket attack and looked darker and gloomier than I remembered. I still shivered at the recollection of the sinister one-armed telephone operator who doubled as the hotel’s taxi-driver, his one hand cased in a black leather glove switching back and forth between the wheel and the gear-stick. Instead I found myself at the Mustafa, whose owner Wais (pronounced ‘wise’), had moved back to Kabul after twenty-one years of exile in America, and presuming that with the Taliban in power there would be no tourists or foreigners in the capital for years, had decided to convert his family’s old hotel into a moneychangers’ and gem-dealers’ bazaar. After repairing the holes made by mujaheddin rockets, he knocked out all the walls between rooms, replaced them with glass, and put bars on the doors. He was just finishing when the attack on the World Trade Center occurred, prompting the American bombing of Afghanistan. Within two months the Taliban were gone and journalists and aidworkers from all over the world were pouring into the city so he had quickly painted over the glass partitions in white, put back the beds and the hotel sign, and reopened it to cash in on media dollars.
Even Wais would admit it was not a luxury establishment. At 6000 feet above sea level, Kabul is a high city with harsh winters and inside the glass cubicles it was bitter. On the sporadic occasions that the capital had electricity, the one-bar heaters did little more than partially thaw a foot or hand placed on top. The glass was so thin that you could hear the person next door scratching. I had a snoring Australian one side and a Japanese who got up in the middle of the night for a high-pitched chatter with his office on the other.
However compared to most people in Kabul with their medieval lifestyles collecting water from wells and foraging for firewood, or kerosene if they could afford it, we lived like kings. It was close to Chicken Street, the hippie mecca of the 1960s, and a narrow road of shops hung with old carpets, pelts of snow-leopards and mountain foxes, or displaying trays of pebbles of lapis lazuli from Badakshan which the artists of Herat used to grind to produce deep blue pigment. At the end was the Chelsea Supermarket, where Osama bin Laden and his Arabs used to shop, in which one could buy tins of John West tuna and Cadbury’s chocolate, although to get there involved battling through a forest of hands of women in tattered burqas and thin-faced orphans carrying small cans of coal to keep warm and demanding ‘dollari, dollari’.
But the Mustafa had one enormous advantage and that was Wais, ‘the Fonz of Kabul’ as we quickly nicknamed him for his New Jersey accent and fast-talking ‘tell me whaddya want, Wais can geddit’ manner. A short but powerful-shouldered man of thirty-one with a jutting chin and passion for Al Pacino movies, he was a former body-building ch
ampion and knew everyone in town. He was bursting with plans for the hotel, building a restaurant, hot showers, installing a gym, and dreamed of reopening the bar and nightclub it had once featured. From morning to night a stream of men came to his office to take tea with his white-bearded father who always looked as though he was about to go somewhere in his dark overcoat and astrakhan hat but never stirred from his armchair, and was as silent as Wais was talkative.
Wais had been born in a sprawling white house with its own cinema not far from the hotel, and his family, he told me rather nebulously, had been ‘in the import-export business’ and owned five or six properties. They had left Kabul for the United States in 1979 when the Communists came. ‘They killed a whole bunch of my family, my grandfather on my mother’s side, some uncles who were Governors and one who was a general,’ he said. But in 1991 his father had returned, met President Najibullah and managed to get the family property back including the old hotel. ‘Then the mujaheddin came and it was a mess so he left again.’ Finally, in the summer of 2001, Wais had decided to sell up the Nissan dealership he ran with his brothers in Ridgefield, New Jersey and ‘give Kabul a go’ as he put it. The clash of cultures was so great that neither side seemed to know what had hit them.
The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 19