The second day of Eid dawned drab and grey. I got up determined that we would find Marri and after picking up Toryali, emphasising the bonus he would get if we found her, we drove back to the apartment of Mohammed Hamid. In the doorway there was a pair of woman’s high-heeled white sandals and inside the room seemed to be laid out in celebratory fashion with a crystal platter of nuts, biscuits and brown popcorn, and plates of the dry yellow cake.
I sat down excited, expecting Marri to appear at any moment. In the next room I could hear hushed voices conferring urgently. Eventually Mohammed Hamid appeared, still clutching the baby which never seemed to make any noise and plonked it down on the carpet where it lay stiff in its swaddling. A long conversation in Dari ensued between him and Toryali, which I found impossible to follow, and sat there growing increasingly impatient. Finally Toryali translated.
‘Bad news,’ he said. ‘Everyone has gone away for Eid so he hasn’t been able to find her. But he says maybe the family left during the bombing. Lots of people did. Someone told him they had gone to Herat. Or Wardak.’
Herat. I had just come from Herat. But I remembered Marri’s last letter saying how scared they were of the bombing. Maybe they had left. Still it seemed to me that we hadn’t really tried many people so I refused Mohammed Hamid’s invitation for lunch and dragged the reluctant Toryali off to knock on more doors.
I thought we should concentrate on clandestine teachers but soon discovered this did not narrow things down. Every other block seemed to have one. How could there have been so many secret schools? The Taliban had obviously turned a blind eye. One woman even told me that she had the children of a Taliban minister in her class.
Sonita, the budding television presenter, had given a convincing explanation about all the movement in and out of Microrayon which meant people did not even know their neighbours but I wondered if people were lying to me about not knowing Fatema. Perhaps they were scared of giving information to a firangi.
‘Don’t worry Mrs Christina. God is Great. God is Merciful,’ Toryali intoned as a kind of mantra, his long face growing glummer. Whenever a group of women passed by, hidden in their pale-blue burqas, I would speak loudly in English in the hope they would hear me and that one of them might be Marri. Once a lone woman in a burqa, wearing high-heeled shoes and somehow managing to look elegant, stopped and swivelled round. Slowly a long-fingered hand emerged from the many folds and she lifted up a palm etched with henna in greeting.
‘Marri?’ I asked. But she turned and was gone.
I was convinced that Marri was in Kabul. In her first letter she had mentioned working for the Women’s League so I decided to visit General Soraya, one of the city’s most prominent female activists, a stout middle-aged woman with a strong kind face and uncovered hair. She also lived in Microrayon and we sat in the gloom of the late afternoon talking in her flat until I couldn’t make out her features anymore and she fetched an oil lamp. I asked her how she got the title general, imagining that she had fought in some heroic battles and she laughed. ‘I used to be secretary to the Secretary General of the Red Cross here in Kabul so everyone called me general.’
General Soraya claimed to have come up with the idea of the secret schools back in 1992. ‘It was too dangerous for the children here in Microrayon to go to school because they had to cross the front-line with all the rocketing and also if the mujaheddin saw a beautiful girl they would take her. Kabul was divided between five warlords and they would stop women and seize their jewellery. I had a codename, Perlikon, so the mujaheddin wouldn’t know who I was and I kept moving home. I chose an unusual name that no one had – if I’d chosen a common name like Fatema they would have been constantly picking up and beating Fatemas.
‘We spread the word about the courses by going to every wedding party and anywhere women were gathered. I told them this is a short-term situation and if you stand with me your children will be able to go to school and graduate. If you or your husband is a doctor or an engineer or a journalist it will be a humiliation for you if your children are uneducated. I also told them if you can teach this is your chance to bring the moon inside your house and a way to get a little money.
‘When the Taliban came it was even more dangerous, they burnt our books, arrested our teachers and beat the families of our pupils. So they wouldn’t catch us I would teach courses at 5 a.m.’
In her brave words I recognised the same spirit as Marri’s letters but she told me that she had never heard of Marri. Seeing my disappointment, she pointed out, ‘We have thousands of teachers all over the city and country.’ She had been through so much that she had long ago dispensed with the usual Afghan formalities in address and she was bitter that for all her work she had not been named as part of the new government so I was surprised when she pressed my hand, saying, ‘If Marri is out there I will find her for you.’
In another letter Marri had mentioned being a graduate of Hishai Durrani School, the big school on the Kabul River next to the mausoleum of Afghanistan’s second king Timur Shah, that had never been finished because his sons had been too busy fighting each other.
The city’s largest girls’ school until the Taliban closed it, the two-storey building had obviously once been an impressive place with arched windows all along but years of war had left it a shell of its former self, the windows devoid of glass and the roof of the west wing in ruins with pigeons flying in and out of a large jagged hole made by a rocket. But inside there was a buzz of activity as the school was about to reopen for refresher courses and mothers with young girls were coming in and out to register.
I was shown into the principal’s office where a group of women were gathered, former teachers, their burqas thrown back over their heads, cheeks stained with tears as they greeted each other. ‘I feel like we’ve been let out of jail,’ said Marzia, a former science teacher. ‘These last years our homes were our jails and however small we tried to make ourselves, the rooms did not grow bigger.’
I explained my quest but the principal shook her head. ‘We had records dating back to 1964 when the school opened,’ she said, ‘but the Taliban took them all. You could try the Ministry of Education but I don’t know.’
Marzia offered to take me on a tour. The classrooms were bare, bereft even of benches, desks, or blackboards, and the winter wind whipped through glassless windows. The banisters had been removed from the stairs, probably for firewood, and the floor above was open to the air, an enormous hole in it where a mujaheddin rocket had come through, and there were pigeon droppings all over the upstairs classrooms. In the courtyard outside the ground was strewn with rubbish and thin plastic bags and there was an unbearable odour coming from the block of cubicles in which holes in the ground served as toilets.
‘Our leaders have eaten many cows and sheep in their lives and still they are hungry,’ complained Marzia. ‘Yet we have no heating, no glass in the windows, no water, no books, let alone luxuries like a ball. Many children will not come to school because they cannot afford shoes or winter clothes let alone notebooks and pencils.’
The library was almost empty, most of the books having been burned by the Taliban. An old man was opening a box of textbooks, which he had just picked up from the ministry. They were thin books printed on cheap paper and instead of the colourful ducks and bunny rabbits that children in Britain use to learn counting, the primary school textbook opened with the following illustrated lesson: One Kalashnikov, Two Grenades, Three Rifles, Four Armour-piercing bullets, Five 9mm bullets …
In the Learning-to-Read book, a picture of a carrot with a caption that read ‘I like vegetables, vegetables are good for you’, was followed by a page to ‘Colour in a Kalashnikov’. Underneath it said, ‘the bullets of the mujaheddin will fall like rain on the enemy’. A book of sums for older children asked; ‘if there are 40 mujaheddin and 20 kalashnikovs, how many mujaheddin will have a gun?’.
As the days went by, I became more entangled with the lives of people of New Microrayon. Sonita h
ad decided I was going to take her back to England and find her a job in the BBC. General Soraya thought I was going to tell the world why she should be Afghanistan’s Minister for Women, perhaps even Prime Minister. The Ariana flight engineer wanted me to take a letter to the head of American Airlines to ask for new planes to replace those destroyed in the American bombing. The high court judge wanted me to explain the British legal system and why we stopped hanging people. I had even been asked to play Cupid by Manija, a lovelorn Tajik kitemaker in block 136 who had fallen in love with a Pashtun girl, the cousin of a friend of his, after he had accidentally seen without her veil and been immediately smitten. ‘Such eyes like mountain streams, lips like petals of a summer rose,’ he sighed. The feeling had been mutual and he would hang around outside her apartment waiting for her mother to go to market so they could see each other secretly. ‘If her mother finds out she will beat her and have me killed,’ he said. ‘Loving is not in our culture.’
I was following unlikelier and unlikelier leads. One morning Mohammed Hamid came to my hotel saying he had found someone taught by Marri. We drove to Gullai Park, a pleasant suburb of small villas only to find that the girl we were looking for had gone to stay with family outside town, about an hour’s drive away. Toryali, who by then had learnt the futility of argument, looked at me, then in a resigned voice instructed the driver to head that way.
There are four roads out of Kabul, like four points of a compass, and we drove east past what had once been factories, including a tannery the driver said had been set up by an Englishman, a wool mill and a large estate of housing for the military, all in ruins. The road passed through an enormous mujaheddin graveyard, piles of stones marked with fluttering scraps of white, green or black fabric tied to sticks, then snaked high into deserted mountains. Down below on wide plains near the river I could see the vast Pul-i-Charki prison where the KHAD secret police of the Afghan Communists threw intellectuals and political prisoners, as many as fifteen thousand at one time, and where thousands of people sought refuge when Hekmatyar’s forces first besieged the city in August 1992.
I hadn’t realised how oppressive Kabul felt in its mountain fastness and it was good to be out of the city breathing the crisp air. Not far out of the city we were stopped at a checkpoint manned by menacing figures, sitting around an anti-aircraft gun from the barrel of which hung a bunch of ostrich feathers and some pink plastic flowers. There were lots of stories of murders and robberies on the road and some journalists had been killed and I drew my shawl further over my head and face as they swaggered up to the taxi.
‘This is bad,’ muttered Toryali.
One of the men rapped on my window. His hand was ingrained with dirt and his little finger bore a large silver ring with a red stone. I wound down the window, trying to look calm.
‘Cigarettes?’ he asked.
‘Sorry,’ I shook my head, inwardly cursing my idiocy in not buying some, always useful currency on the roads. I searched my rucksack. All I could find was a roll of wine gums.
‘Sweets,’ he said, smiling as he took the packet and waved us on.
What Mohammed Hamid had neglected to tell us was that the girl was staying in Udikhel, known as the Thieves’ Village. He had said she was in the country in a place known for its yoghurt. But as we drove in, the driver said, ‘This village is famous all over Afghanistan for thieves. If they see you are a foreigner they will bring a donkey out in the road so the car hits it and we will have to stop and then they will demand money for the donkey, saying it was a very new special beautiful donkey, and rob us of everything. It is their special trick.’
The sun had disappeared behind the mountains leaving the village in shadow and as we hurtled through alleyways of mud-walled compounds, I looked out for donkeys. Outside one wall, Mohammed Hamid signalled the driver to pull up. The door opened a crack and some words were exchanged.
‘They are inviting us in for yoghurt,’ said Mohammed Hamid.
‘We can’t,’ I replied firmly, ‘just ask the girl about Marri.’
Not having planned to go outside the city, I had all my money on me, a thick wad of dollars in a belt around my waist, and was anxious to get out of this place before it was completely dark. Mohammed Hamid disappeared into the compound and came back dragging a young girl with the unfocused black eyes of a frightened deer and pushed her into the back seat.
‘We are taking her back to Kabul,’ he said. ‘She does not know Marri but can take us to a lady who does.’
I could feel the girl quivering next to me.
‘We can’t just abduct her from her holiday,’ I protested, ‘what about all her things?’
‘We are taking her,’ said Mohammed Hamid. ‘It is the will of Allah.’
I was not surprised when we got back to Kabul and found that the lady the girl knew had emigrated to Canada with no forwarding address. I began to wonder if Marri even existed. Could the letters have been some kind of elaborate hoax? Yet I trusted Jamil who had arranged them and we had met people who said they had known her; a man who had once taught at the same English school with her but had lost contact and a teenage boy who had been her pupil a few years ago and kept repeating ‘How are you? Fine?’ in English but only had a very old address. We went there anyway and it turned out to be one of the most damaged blocks with the floors concertinaed together on one side of the stairwell and a group of prostitutes at a second-floor window. Dressed in laced basques and floaty scarves, faces powdered white and adorned with spidery eyelashes and pouting crimson lips, they called down to us as they stood there slowly brushing out fluffy brown hair.
It was time to leave Kabul. I could think of no other leads. I had broadcast a message on Radio Afghanistan and put up posters in more than two hundred blocks. Like so many people, Marri’s family must have fled the city during the bombing. They could be anywhere.
In Kandahar a few weeks later, I met Jamil who had arranged the letters for me and he put me in touch with Tawfiq, the student who had actually smuggled them out of Kabul and into Pakistan. To my delight Tawfiq told me he had Marri’s correct address and promised to meet me in Kabul and take me there.
Back in Kabul in January, snow was falling thickly, carpeting the mountains and turning the streets to muddy slush. There were far more cars on the road and many more people, giving the city an air of some purposefulness, almost bustling for the first time since I had known it. At the Hotel Mustafa, the ogre-like guard on the door had been joined by some others. Wais greeted me looking woeful with a bruised swollen face and his arm in a sling. ‘Got beaten up,’ he said in response to my unasked question. ‘When you go mano a mano with the police you lose.’
‘The police did this?’
‘Hey, when you’re a big player, you get big enemies.’
As with everything in Afghanistan it was hard to get to the truth of what had happened. The most common version was that Wais had decided to up the rent of the shopkeepers underneath the hotel and when they did not pay it had their windows smashed. They then called in the heavy mob from the Interior Ministry who swarmed into the hotel, beat up Wais in full view of all the journalists and took him off to a cell where they beat him up some more.
Whatever the truth of the story, the battle had left an uneasy atmosphere in the hotel with dark mutterings of retaliation against its guests, even rumours that Wais’s enemies might try to burn it down, so I was relieved when Tawfiq appeared. It was hard to believe I was finally about to meet Marri.
Tawfiq directed the driver to New Microrayon 3 Block 187, a different sector from where my search had concentrated, though a block I had passed many times. We climbed the steps to the second floor, apartment 15, which was on the right-hand side of the landing, and Tawfiq knocked, his knuckles echoing on the iron door. I could hardly contain my excitement. In my rucksack were a pen and a hand-made diary for Marri, as well as some English magazines, and a jar of coffee and some sweets for the family. I thought I could hear noises inside but no one came. He kn
ocked again.
Eventually two boys ran down from the floor above.
‘Who are you looking for?’ asked one. ‘That family left.’
‘We’re looking for Marri or Fatema Siddiqui. She was an English teacher. She lived here with her mother, father and brothers and sister.’
‘Yes, that’s them. They left during the bombing,’ repeated the boy, clicking his tongue against his teeth. ‘They were working for the resistance and one night the Taliban came and raided the flat.’
They had left no forwarding address, no one knew where they had gone, who Marri’s friends were, or anything, but everyone assumed they had gone to Peshawar like most refugees.
My search was at an end. There were more than two million refugees in and around Peshawar – I couldn’t imagine how one would even to start to find someone there, particularly a woman.
In some ways not feeling compelled to go to Microrayon every day enabled me to enjoy the city better and I wandered around, seeing it come to life more with each passing day. One morning a man even walked past the hotel dwarfed by a huge bunch of colourful balloons for sale. Whenever I could face the mauling by beggars, I walked the Chicken Street gauntlet, refusing the boys selling silver armlets that I knew from experience would turn black within a month, and the wizened Uzbek man with a long wispy white beard whose eyes barely opened but were of deepest sapphire blue and who was determined to sell me the pelt of a snow leopard.
‘Madam, you buy tiger, I make you beautiful tiger coat,’ he said every day.
‘It’s not a tiger,’ I replied, ‘it’s a snow leopard and they are very rare. You shouldn’t have killed it.’
The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 28