“Do you know why they were executed?” We remained silent. I felt his eyes penetrating my veil, trying to remember the face he could not see. He angrily answered his own question. “They were traitors to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. They were committing adultery, which is against our laws, and they deserved to die. We will not tolerate such vices. The press too”—he paused and surveyed us, noting each one present, focusing again on me—“are responsible for projecting in the foreign media a very bad image of our legitimate government.” He paced in front of us and shouted, his face snarling in fury. “From here on out, you will write exactly what I tell you.” The men took out their notebooks like obedient schoolboys. I hadn’t brought one.
“The ruling council of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and I, have decided to show the world that we’re a fair and just people. To that end, our government has decided to promote cricket in Afghanistan. We have applied to the International Cricket Council for membership.”
Like the others, I raised my head in surprise.
“We wait to hear from them on this. The Pakistan Cricket Board will support our application. Cricket will show all those against us that we too can be sportsmen. As our young men have much time to spare, we wish to occupy them to prevent any vices. We banned cricket because it was a legacy of the evil British. But we studied all sports and cricket is modest in its clothing. The uniform covers the player from his neck to his feet and covers his head as well. Therefore, we will encourage the sport, strictly according to Islamic rules of dress, and we will hold a tournament in three weeks. We will welcome an official from the International Cricket Council to observe the matches and know that we are genuine in our interest in promoting the sport, openly and fairly. The tournament is open to all Afghans and we will send the winning team to Pakistan to perfect their playing skills. They will return to teach other young men to play this sport. Women, of course, will not be permitted to play.” He ended the announcement and dismissed us.
“What do you think?” I asked Yasir.
“I write what they tell me, and I do not think. But let’s see how many Afghans turn up for the matches when they read about this. A free pass to leave the country—I wonder how many will return. Are you going to write this up?”
“Yasir—I don’t write anymore.”
When I moved to leave with the others, the two policemen grabbed me. Jahan tried to stop them, but one Talib hit him in the stomach with his gun butt. Yasir moved to help, but the second Talib pointed his gun at Yasir’s chest. I struggled, trying to get a last glimpse of Jahan, but the men dragged me out of the courtyard and into a small, bare room and forced me to kneel. They pressed their gun barrels down on my shoulders so I could not move. We waited in oppressive silence. Finally, I sensed someone entering the room. I couldn’t see through the mesh and tried to lift my head, but a hand pressed it back down to supplication. I smelled perfume, a cloying, sweet odor. I glimpsed dusty feet slyly circling me, and then he and his cologne walked out the door. Minutes later, Wahidi walked into the room in his black sandals. I heard the rustle of a paper, and he held a newspaper before my eyes. The English headline read “Taliban Execute Mother of Five Children.” It was my story and I felt my heart miss a beat, then another. This was why I had been summoned here and he was about to kill me. But I also knew he had no proof I had written it—it was filed under my pseudonym. He is only trying to frighten you, I told myself, and tried to stay calm. I did not speak; thankfully I wasn’t expected to. He crushed the paper deliberately into a small ball and dropped it on the floor. Then he lowered a pistol to my line of vision, and I smelled cigarette smoke. Through the mesh, I saw his finger around the trigger, the gun like a natural extension of his hand. Its black barrel was worn gray, the butt chipped along the edges. His finger curled and uncurled as if it had a mind of its own and was thinking over the decision. The finger was surprisingly long, almost delicate, and manicured. Then the hand lifted the gun out of my small window of vision; it was somewhere above my head. I shut my eyes and waited. I tried prayers, but I couldn’t form the words or sentences that would accompany me into the next life. I opened my eyes when the cigarette’s smoke stung my nostrils. The cigarette lay on the floor, a serpent of smoke curling up. The ball of paper began to burn. He let it come to a small flame then crushed it with his sandal. He lowered to squat in front of me, his eyes almost level with mine. I shut mine tight and yet I felt his eyes piercing the mesh, as if searching the contours of my face. Then, with a decisive grunt, he stood up. The police lifted the gun barrels off my shoulders and followed him out.
I remained kneeling, waiting to open my eyes until I heard no further movement. The door was partially open and I was free to leave. Involuntarily, I laughed in relief. I struggled to stand, my foot caught in the edge of the burka, and I fell. I stood up, swaying, and moved to the door. I stepped out into an empty corridor. To my left, men were loading the executed couple into the back of an old Land Cruiser. For once, I was thankful for the burka. I had wet myself. My legs were rubbery and I leaned against the wall for strength. I moved cautiously out of the building, back into sunlight. Yasir was waiting by the entrance, while Jahan, Parwaaze, and Qubad were sitting on the low wall across the street, along the river. They jumped up and hurried over when they saw me. I was more concerned for the abuse Jahan had suffered, and though he walked carefully, he appeared to be all right. He lifted his arms to embrace me but dropped them quickly in embarrassment, looking around to see if such an intimate gesture was noticed by the religious police. When Yasir saw my companions, he said, “Be careful,” and hurried away.
“Are you okay?” they chorused.
“Yes. Jahan, are you all right?”
“Just a stomachache. It’ll pass.”
“We didn’t think we’d see you again,” Parwaaze said, leading us away, our feet leaden on the broken pavement. “Did they hurt you?” he asked me, checking back over his shoulder.
“No, and they didn’t say a word.”
“Then why did they take you inside? What did they want?”
“I don’t know. Wahidi came into the room, smoked a cigarette, and left.” I didn’t mention the gun barrels on my shoulders, the article, or the pistol. I was frightened and I didn’t want to frighten them more.
“I didn’t want you to see . . . that,” I said to Jahan.
He was almost in tears, as he was remembering the impact of the bullets. “I didn’t want to watch, but it was so sudden and I couldn’t move my eyes, I couldn’t even shut them.”
“It’s better to cry for them than just look away.” I looked at the other two. They too had moist eyes, flickering with horror at what they had witnessed, and their faces were a shade paler. “Are you both okay?” I asked them, wishing I could take back everything they had seen.
“Another execution. How many more will I see before I can get out of this country?” Parwaaze asked aloud.
“Rukhsana, next time we’ll be carrying out your c-corpse,” Qubad said. “You must leave Kabul. Go to Shaheen, he’s waiting for you in America. He was lucky to get out.”
“I can’t—there’s just no way. I’m not going to leave Maadar while . . .” I didn’t want Mother to die. Somehow, I had to survive and see my mother through her illness, and then escape. I prayed hard. Please let me make it safely through Maadar’s death and I will leave an instant later. Please protect me until then—just a little more time before I join my betrothed.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jahan said.
We hurried toward home. My shoulders still burned from the gun barrels and I felt Wahidi’s breath on my face. Why had he called me? Was he setting a trap to see if I’d report today’s executions and write about the cricket announcement? If he was certain I’d written those other stories, I wouldn’t be walking home. I’d be in prison.
In my preocupation, I wasn’t listening to the boys until Parwaaze’s excited voice broke through my thoughts.
“ . . . in three weeks an
d the winning team will go to Pakistan,” he said. “We get out if we win that match . . . go to Australia . . . America . . . to university . . . finish our studies . . . work . . . wasting our lives here . . .”
“Then we’ll have to come back here to teach the others,” Jahan said.
“I’ll keep going and going,” Parwaaze said.
“But we have one small p-problem with that brilliant idea,” Qubad said.
“We don’t know how to play cricket,” Parwaaze admitted, crestfallen.
“We don’t,” Jahan said. “But Rukhsana does.”
The Confrontation
IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO, WHEN WINTER HOVERED beyond the Hindu Kush and sent a warning chill through the streets, that I first saw Zorak Wahidi.
A rumor had been spreading along the streets, slipping through keyholes, sliding under doors, over windows, and into bedrooms. It woke me while it was still dark. It told me about a crime, one that we had long expected to happen, and which none of us could prevent.
I dressed quickly in jeans and a blouse and shrugged into a jacket. I wrapped my head in a checkered hijab that only partially covered my head and fell around my shoulders. I left home, as quiet as the dawn, through the back door and out the side gate while the others slept. There were no taxis waiting. I thought briefly of taking the silver gray Nissan parked in our garage but opening the main gate would wake up the whole household. So I caught the small white-and-blue tram at Karte Seh Square. A few men sat in the front, four of us women in the back. Two were nurses on their way to work; the third was a teacher with her bundle of books. I sat beside her and, after exchanging glances, we ignored each other and she sat silently as the tram swayed and tilted on its rubber wheels along Asamayi Wat toward the city center. The tram stopped frequently, either to pick up and drop off passengers or when it lost contact with the overhead cable. At Pastunistan Square, it hesitated a long time and then the driver, instead of moving north along the road like he was supposed to, continued straight on along Awali May.
“Why are you going straight?” I demanded. “What’s happened? Is it true about ex-President Najibullah. Tell me . . .”
The driver looked back, and I saw the fear in his glance. The guns and rockets had fallen silent, and we sensed the eerie stillness of the city. I jumped off the tram at the next stop and walked toward Ariana Square, on my way to the office, keeping close to the high palace wall that was pockmarked with bullet holes. The mist spun a ghostly cobweb over the city, and muffled figures materialized out of the wispy net, looking back fearfully, as if pursued by demons. They vanished in an instant, leaving me alone. I wished I had ignored the rumor, pulled up the covers, and remained in bed.
Then the mist dispersed, and I saw what I thought I had only dreamed. A handful of people crossed the road to hurry past the palace gates, and turned their faces away from the mutilated corpses of ex-President Mohammad Najibullah and his brother, Shalpur Ahmadzi, hanging from the traffic-signal posts at Ariana Square. I crossed the road too, though I didn’t avert my head. They wore clothes, their mouths and ears were stuffed with money, and there were unlit cigarettes stuck between their fingers. Najibullah had been a heavyset, imposing man, but death had shrunk him. I felt a sense of dread now. I had believed, like many others, that the Taliban, with their religious beliefs, would bring compassion, justice, stability, and good governance to our poor nation, but the lynching of Najibullah revealed their murderous intentions. What would they do next? I wondered in fear. I had a Nikon in my bag, and thought briefly of taking a photograph, but I couldn’t film such terrible humiliation of human beings. Instead, I wept. Five Talibs with AK-47s and canes lounged by the wall, as proud of their craft as children would be of their paper puppets dangling from strings. They stopped those who didn’t have the presence of mind to cross the road, and forced them to stare at the corpses. A whack from a cane moved them on.
When I turned the corner, I looked back. A fighter climbed out of a pickup and began to walk in my direction. Two of his men trailed him. I looked around. Apart from me no one else was in sight at this hour. I hurried now and caught a bus toward Sherpur Square, where the blackened walls on either side of the road reached up to the sky like burnt fence posts. The bus moved slowly, avoiding the potholes, and when I looked back, the three men were still following. I jumped off nimbly at my stop and ran into the office of the Kabul Daily on the corner of Flower Street. I was sure the men wouldn’t follow me inside.
I hurried into the office, devastated by what I had seen, but aware of the responsibility I had to report breaking news. Yasir, the editor-in-chief of the Kabul Daily, had been a friend of my father’s and granted me a small desk from which I reported on nonpolitical features: profiles of musicians, women’s issues, education, civic problems, and movie reviews. But last September after I had nagged him insistently, he had permitted me to accompany him to Jalalabad to report on the fighting. We had crouched and scurried through the ruins together, talking to the wounded, tripping over the dead, being afraid and trying to stay alive. I learned that war was chaos and no one knew who was winning and who was losing.
Even at this hour, the room stank of cigarette smoke and my eyes watered. The other reporters were speaking in low whispers.
“Have you heard . . . ?” Yasir asked me.
I nodded. “I saw. It was terrible.”
“Write eight hundred words to start with,” Yasir said. “Then you can do a longer piece. Every detail of how they looked, readers want that.” He retreated to his office, stopped at his door, and added, “Let’s see what this new government will allow us to report.”
“It’s going to get worse, much worse, I know that. Poor Najibullah, he didn’t deserve such a death,” another reporter said, and they all hurried to their desks.
They pecked at their machines between puffs. The only other women employed by the paper were Fatima and Banu. They had yet to come in, and I wondered whether they would. I slipped off my jacket, dumped the hijab on my desk, and removed the plastic cover from my ancient Underwood typewriter. I wished I could use my laptop, on which I could cut and paste easily . . . I prayed the telephone line was working—I would need it later to fax my story to the HT. I reread old files, jotted down some notes, rolled paper into the Underwood, and stared at the blank space, wondering if my thoughts would flow better if I smoked.
Finally, I typed.
TALIBAN EXECUTE
EX-PRESIDENT NAJIBULLAH
The president of Afghanistan is dead. The Taliban, supported by Pakistani intelligence, captured the president, Mohammad Najibullah, and his brother, Shalpur Ahmadzi, from the UN compound and executed them. Their bodies hang from the traffic-signal posts outside the presidential palace. Fortunately, his wife and three daughters fled to New Delhi in 1992 and remain there to this day. Mr. Najibullah had been president of the Republic of Afghanistan from November 1986 to April 1992 and was supported by the Soviet Union. Prior to that, he had been chief of Afghan Intelligence (KHAD). He joined the Communist Party (PDPA) on the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets in 1979. On becoming president, Mr. Najibullah introduced a new constitution that embraced a multiparty assembly, freedom of expression, and Islamic law with an independent judiciary.
“I heard you actually saw them,” Banu said, interrupting me.
“Hello, Banu,” I said without looking away from the typewriter. She didn’t go away.
“Well?”
“Yes. I did,” I said.
“We heard their heads were chopped off,” Fatima added.
“No, no. It was their . . . private parts,” Banu corrected and looked to me for confirmation.
“They had their heads, and they were wearing clothes.”
Fatima was my age, a friend from our school days. She had studied English literature at Kabul University and was a very good subeditor for the Daily. Banu was a year younger than us, a business graduate from Kabul University who worked in accounts. Fatima was married to an engineer, but Banu—lik
e me—was single.
“Let me finish and I’ll tell you everything,” I said. They didn’t return to their desks but went into a huddle at the far end of the room in the accounts section.
I reread what I had written and then continued.
In the war against the Soviet army, an estimated 1,000,000 Afghans were killed; 5,000,000 fled to Pakistan, Iran, and other countries; 1,200,000 Afghans were wounded or maimed. Land mines alone killed approximately 25,000 people, and maimed 4 percent of the population, many of them children. Over half the farmers’ irrigation systems were destroyed by Soviet aerial bombings, and their livestock killed by Soviet troops. Afghanistan lay in ruins once the Soviet forces withdrew. The United States lost interest in the country and would not help in the reconstruction. This was left to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, who formed alliances with the warlords who rose from the ashes.
I stopped writing when I sensed the silence, and looked up. Three men stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the morning light, black as shadows. They carried AK-47s and the leader scanned the room until his eyes settled on me. Buried in my writing, I had forgotten about them and never expected to see them here. The leader did not smile as he approached my desk. I remained seated, frozen, fingers poised over the typewriter’s keys like a pianist waiting for the conductor’s baton. The man wore black from head to toe; his turban coiled like a snake on his head. He was a fierce man, over fifty, I guessed, with unusually thick lips and dark brown eyes. A scar slashed down the right side of his face, and part of his right ear was missing.
He stopped at my desk and looked down at me with impassive eyes. I smelled the dust of war and blood on his clothes, mingled with sweat. Two fingers of his left hand, the small one and the fourth, were missing. He carried these badges of a warrior with arrogance.
“Your father must be ashamed of you, letting strangers look you in the face,” he said finally in a smoke-ravaged voice.
The Taliban Cricket Club Page 3