One of the men came up to me. “Hello, Mellissa. I am Zahir,” he said.
This was strange. It was as if I were being introduced to someone I was interviewing—in Afghanistan or anywhere else. “Hi, Amir (or Mike or Don or anyone else), I’m Mellissa, and it’s nice to meet you.” Except it wasn’t so nice. I was meeting my kidnappers, the men who had just taken me from everything I’d known, who had taken away my freedom. “Hello, Zahir,” I replied.
“Come with me,” he said, taking my hand.
He led me across the road where the motorcycle was parked and into the house, the three other men following. Zahir had to guide me over the threshold in the darkness. We entered an empty room with a dusty dirt floor. There were windows facing the road, and windows on the side. It wasn’t quite the “house” I’d imagined when Khalid said he was taking me “home.” I sat down cross-legged on the wide ledge of the window facing the road. Out of the window, I could see the crescent moon, which was casting an iridescent glow over everything beneath it: the trees, the tall grass, the dirt road, and the red motorcycle. It seemed impossible that a bit of light could illuminate so much. I tried to take in as much as I could through the window. We were definitely on the outskirts of whatever town we had just driven through.
“Cigarette?” Shafirgullah offered his package and a lighter. I accepted and watched as he licked the end of his and lit it. As the flame illuminated the room for a brief second, I noticed the walls were riddled with bullet holes. I inhaled and watched as the four Afghans checked their rifles and conversed in Pashto. Khalid came over to me with the fourth man, whom I hadn’t yet been introduced to. He was a shortish, fat man, and all I could make out from the light coming through the window was that he had curly hair and a beard.
“This my uncle, Abdulrahman,” Khalid said.
“Hello,” I replied.
“We are not going to hurt you,” Abdulrahman said, as if to assure me. His English was better than Khalid’s. His breath reeked of garlic and onions.
“You want money,” I replied, “just tell my friends how much.”
“Once the money comes,” he said, “you go. Back to Kabul.”
“How soon?” I asked.
“If the money comes tomorrow, you go tomorrow.”
“I can’t stay here,” I said. “I have to go home.”
“Where are you from, Canada?” he asked me. “I have been to Canada.”
“You have? Where in Canada?” This was a surprise to me. How was it possible that this Afghan, dressed in man jams and armed with a Kalashnikov, could ever have been to Canada? As what? A tourist?
“I was there a long time ago. Before I was in New York. You know New York? I have friends there. I was with them.”
Did I know New York? Of course I did. I’d gone to graduate school there and had returned at least once a year since graduating. It was only my favourite city in the world. I felt a pang in my stomach. New York was as far away from where I was now as you could possibly get.
“I’ve been to New York,” I told the fat Afghan.
“I learn English there,” he said proudly. “My English better than Khalid. I learn in America. Khalid learn from here.”
I leaned back toward the window as I caught another whiff of rancid garlic. “Where are you from?” I asked.
“Here, Afghanistan,” Abdulrahman answered.
“Where in Afghanistan?”
“Close to here.”
“Where? Kabul?”
“Close by.”
I figured he wasn’t going to give me anything more, so I changed the subject and asked him if this was where we were spending the night.
“No, somewhere else,” he answered. “A better place. You will like it.”
“What’s wrong with being here?” I asked.
“It is not safe here. The windows, people will see you. There are a lot of Taliban in this area,” Abdulrahman said. I’d thought these men were Taliban, and showed my surprise.
“We are Taliban, but we not all together. You don’t want other Taliban find us. We waiting here while other place getting ready,” he said. “Very close to here.” He then walked off to speak with Khalid. I noticed two other men were now in the room, but no one bothered to introduce them to me.
“Cigarette,” I said out loud to the room. Khalid came over with his package.
“You should not smoke much,” he told me. “Cigarette bad.” I pointed out that both he and Shafirgullah were also smoking.
“It is bad—smoking,” he said as he took out a cigarette and lit it. He handed it to me and lit one for himself after licking the end.
Abdulrahman came over. “The house is ready. Come.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Don’t worry, Mellissa,” Khalid said. “I will stay with you tonight.”
“I have to go to bathroom,” I said.
“You go bathroom first. I take you.” He took my hand and led me out of the house and around a corner to what looked like a large open room with mud walls and some kind of corrugated roof over it. “In there,” Abdulrahman motioned. “Go there.” I went into the corner of the room. The hard ground smelled like dung. I undid the drawstring of my pants and squatted in the dark.
“You finished?” Abdulrahman asked from outside.
“Yes.”
“Come. Hurry.”
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“I am not going to hurt you,” he said, not answering my question. “We are friends now.”
“Friends?” I said, the anger rising like bile in my throat. “Friends don’t kidnap each other.”
He laughed. “We are not going to hurt you. We are all friends. Mellissa and Abdulrahman are friends.” He took my arm and led me around the back of the house, up a small hill, and around a mud wall.
“Sit here,” he ordered. We sat in a corner, with mud walls on either side. I could make out what looked like another abandoned house to the left of us, a few metres away. Was that where we were headed? I heard a noise coming from the ground. It was Zahir. His head popped out of a hole next to where we were sitting. The opening was about the size of a manhole cover, maybe slightly smaller. He had a flashlight and he spoke briefly to Abdulrahman in Pashto before disappearing back into the hole.
“Okay, it is ready,” Abdulrahman said to me. He pointed into the ground from where Zahir had appeared. “That is your room.”
I looked down at the hole. It was dark, except for a little glow from Zahir’s flashlight. My heart stopped for a moment, and for only the second time that day, I felt afraid. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that was quickly making its way up to my throat.
“Go,” Abdulrahman ordered, taking my arm and pushing me toward the hole.
I looked down into the darkness again. “No,” I said, “I am not going down there.”
I have never been afraid of the dark. When I was a little girl and played hide and seek with my sister, Vanessa, and our friends, my favourite hiding place was the crawlspace in the basement of our house, in East Vancouver. It was a pretty large storage space, about four feet high, with my mother’s shoes scattered on the floor. My father stored boxes of oranges in the crawlspace because the temperature was much cooler there than anywhere else in the house.
I would always crawl through the shoes and into the darkest corner of that dark little room, underneath the stairs. It was the best place to hide because everyone else was scared to go there. I was almost inevitably the last one to be “found.”
Now, looking into this crude opening in the rocky ground, I realized that my kidnappers wanted to hide me in this hole. And I wanted to be found.
“Go,” Abdulrahman ordered again, “it is a good room for you there.”
“No,” I said. I sat down again with my back against the mud wall. “I am not going there. I will stay up here tonight. I’ve slept on the ground before. I’ll be more comfortable here.”
“You must go,” he said. “You wil
l not stay here.”
“Mellissa.” I hadn’t heard Khalid’s footsteps, but he’d joined Abdulrahman and was now sitting next to me. He said my name with four syllables instead of three—it sounded like he was saying Me-llis-si-a.
“Khalid, please don’t make me go in there,” I pleaded. “I am afraid of the dark.”
“Zahir stay with you,” he told me. “I come tomorrow to see you.”
“Can’t we stay back in that house? It was better there.”
“No,” Abdulrahman said, “it is not safe there. Taliban are in this area.”
“I thought you were Taliban.”
“Other Taliban.”
The two of them spoke in Pashto and then Khalid got up.
“I go now, see you tomorrow,” he said.
“Wait, Khalid, you said you would stay with me.” I looked hard at him.
“I see you tomorrow. Zahir stay with you tonight.”
“No, you promised you would stay with me,” I argued.
“Zahir my brother. He stay. I come tomorrow. I promise.”
And he was gone.
Abdulrahman stood up and pushed me roughly toward the hole. He was fat and strong; I tried to resist, but there was no way to struggle, even though I really did not want to find out what was down there.
“Go,” he said.
He grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet and over to the hole. I looked down and saw the faint glow from Zahir’s flashlight.
“I don’t want to go in there,” I repeated. Abdulrahman was getting impatient. He reached and grabbed me underneath my armpits and threw me down the shaft—which was maybe eight feet deep and two feet wide—and into the hole, feet first. I landed on my butt.
“Go through!” Abdulrahman ordered from above.
I felt Zahir’s hand on my running shoe. “Come, this way,” he told me, and I saw that there was a tunnel running off one side of the hole. I inched my way forward, but the tunnel was no more than about two feet high. My head hit the hard mud ceiling. I crouched down lower, slowing moving forward, following Zahir, who was crawling backward. The tunnel, about twelve feet long, opened up into a small space.
I looked around at the mud walls. The ceiling was made of old pieces of dark grey ceramic tiles and held up by two vertical wooden beams painted a bluish grey. There were hooks on the beams. The entire space was no more than six feet long, three feet wide, and just over five feet high. Two blankets were spread out, covering the dirt floor. The blankets, beige with coloured stripes, were woven from a thick canvas-like material. Two pillows bookended the hole on either side—one was a dark red velvet, the other a dirty white. A black metal bucket stood close to the entrance. In the middle was an old car battery, jerry-rigged to a light bulb attached to one of the hooks near the ceiling. A small plastic alarm clock sat on the battery. I noticed a white grocery bag to the side, a red plastic watering can, and my camera bag and knapsack in a corner. There was also a wooden door-like panel leaning against the wall next to the entrance.
Zahir sat cross-legged in the far corner.
“Sit,” he said. Abdulrahman was shouting down to us in Pashto, so Zahir crawled back over to the shaft and spoke to him for a few minutes. Soon he was back. He wrapped his kaffiyeh around his head and face, motioning for me to do the same with my scarf. He then covered the entrance with the wooden door. “Cover your mouth,” he told me. I was about to ask him why when I heard a noise at the top of the shaft. Someone was covering the opening with a board or some other object. I could hear digging. A cloud of dust came rushing through the entrance, filling the room. I tried to hold my scarf over my mouth but it was too late. I started coughing and looked up. That’s when it dawned on me that they were covering the hole with dirt. No one outside would ever suspect there was a room underneath. After a few minutes, I heard footsteps above us, then there was silence.
I looked around. Everything was covered in a layer of dust. I tried brushing some of it off with my scarf but succeeded only in turning off the light bulb when I knocked the wires off the battery. Zahir turned on his flashlight and reattached the wires. The light came back on.
I sat with my back to the wall facing the entrance. I took off the coat Khalid had given me on the mountain. The inside was covered in blood. Zahir crawled over to me and pointed to my wound.
“Let me see,” he said. His English was as good as Abdulrahman’s and better than Khalid’s. I took off the smelly kameez, but the odour of stinky Afghan man stayed with me. I took a deep breath through my mouth. Zahir unwrapped the scarf that was tied around my shoulder. The sleeve of my own shirt was caked with blood. The blue-and-yellow flowered cloth was ripped, and I watched as Zahir lifted it from my shoulder. It was stuck to the wound, glued on with blood. I winced as he pulled it off. He reached for the white plastic bag and pulled out a roll of dark pink toilet paper. Ripping off a few sections, he wetted the paper with water from the red can and held it to my shoulder.
“Does it hurt?” he asked. I hadn’t felt pain from the wound until that moment. I nodded, watching from the corner of my eye as he wiped the wound. I didn’t realize until now how deep the cut actually was. It was still oozing dark red blood. Zahir shook his head and continued to wipe the bloodstains off my shoulder. After he was satisfied it was clean, he ripped a few more pieces of toilet paper from the roll and pressed them into the wound to staunch the blood.
“Let me see your hand,” he said next. I held out my right hand and he examined the small stab wound. The blood had caked over, but the wound hurt when he touched it. My index and middle fingers were numb. Again, Zahir bandaged me with the pink toilet paper. Finished, he sat back.
“It is better?” he asked.
I stared at him and nodded. I was feeling a little dizzy, and realized I was still wearing just one contact lens, so everything looked blurry to me. Then I remembered that I always pack an extra set of disposable lenses when I travel, so I reached for my knapsack and opened the side pocket. I took out the package and peeled back the cover to take out the lens.
“What is that?” Zahir asked.
“It’s like glasses, in my eyes, to help me see.”
He watched as I poked the lens into my left eye with my dirty index finger. Finally, I could see properly again. I looked at my captor and blinked.
Zahir had dark eyes, set apart by a thin nose. He wore a beaded skullcap on the back of his head, like many Afghan men I’d met before. His kameez was a light green, with matching baggy pants. He’d left his brown leather sandals by the door.
“Where is Khalid? Where did they go?” I asked. I wondered if they had homes in the village. If they had beds, bathrooms, electricity, lights.
“They go home,” Zahir answered.
“A house?”
“Yes, a house.”
“Do you live there too?” I asked.
“I live there sometime,” he said. “I live in Pakistan. You know Peshawar?”
I’d never been across the border. I had been close to it with the Canadian troops, and I knew that Peshawar was just the other side of the Khyber Pass. At one time it was a major supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan. Over the last year, it had become more of a haven for insurgents. I remembered hearing that there had been a suicide bombing there just a few weeks before. I asked Zahir if his family was from there, and he told me they had a house in Peshawar.
“How many of you are there? You, Khalid, do you have other brothers?” He told me he had three brothers and one sister.
“And you travel back and forth between here and there?”
“I go back there tomorrow,” he said. “We come to Afghanistan in summer. Peshawar in winter.”
“What do you do there?” I asked.
“I go to school,” he answered.
“School? How old are you?”
“I maybe nineteen or twenty.”
“How old is Khalid?” I thought Zahir had to be younger, since Khalid seemed to be the one in charge.
“He
is maybe nineteen. Maybe eighteen. He is youngest.”
“Do your other brothers and sister come to Afghanistan too?”
“No,” Zahir said, “Khalid and I come with our father. Our work is here.” I asked him what he meant by “work.”
Zahir gestured with his hand. “This work.”
That’s nice, I thought. A kidnapping family! Why would he even bother to go to school when you can make a good living robbing people of their freedom?
“Your father is here now?” I asked.
“No, he back in Peshawar. I go tomorrow.”
“How do you get there?”
“My friend, have a car. We drive. It takes about six hours,” he said. Then he stared at me. “You are okay?”
Was I okay? I’d been kidnapped, stabbed, thrown into a hole, covered in dirt, and he wanted to know if I was okay?
“I’m thirsty,” I said. “Do you have water?”
Zahir reached for the red plastic can. “We drink this water,” he told me. I looked inside. The water was murky, and brown sediment had settled on the bottom of the can. I looked at him, unsure of what to do. He picked up the can and told me to open my mouth. I was skeptical but thirsty, so allowed him to pour a small stream of water into my mouth.
“More?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Enough, thank you.”
“Now we sleep,” he told me.
Zahir laid his head on the dirty white pillow and stretched his bare feet out so they were next to my pillow. He sat up and detached the wires from the battery. Before the light went out, I noticed on the small clock that it was only eight-thirty. It was pitch black without the light on. I covered myself with the coat I’d taken off and put my head down on the red pillow. The ground was very uncomfortable. Even through the blanket, I could feel the bumps and sharp edges of the hard ground. I shifted to my side, only to have a rock dig into my hip. I shifted again. I just couldn’t get comfortable. I sat up and leaned my head against the wall, but that was even worse. I folded up the coat to sit on top of like a cushion. That was a little better, but then there was nowhere to put my head. I lifted the red pillow and propped it against the dirt wall.
Under an Afghan Sky Page 3