XX
I like to eavesdrop. I think it’s part of being a curious reporter, but I’m probably just a very nosy person. I remember as a kid trying to listen in on my parents’ conversations, whether they were talking between themselves, or to their friends at family gatherings. We used to have big get-togethers, with our family of six, including my grandparents, and two or three other families, friends of my parents’ from Hong Kong who had also made the move to Canada. Six or seven of us kids would play hide-and-seek through the house, while our parents drank and smoked and yakked until the wee hours of the morning.
I remember hiding in the pantry once, waiting to be found; but more to the point, I could hear the grown-ups sitting around the table in the kitchen—with drinks, of course—saying lots of things that seemed amazing to a seven-year-old. I learned a lot about what their lives were like before they moved to Canada, before they had children. They talked about the places they used to frequent as young adults in Hong Kong, their travels throughout Asia, the great adventures they had before kids came along. It was fascinating to think that my parents had a whole other life, one I couldn’t possibly imagine, before I was born and before we moved to Vancouver.
As a journalist, I rather perfected the art of eavesdropping when I was assigned as the provincial political reporter for my former network, Global Television. Our office was just below the premier’s at the legislature in Victoria, hidden behind the press theatre. I headed up the stairs one day and overheard a conversation, loud and clear, between the premier and his press secretary about how they planned to handle a scandal that was about to hit the front pages. They had no idea I was listening.
I also learned how to stand behind politicians and their aides, just far away enough so as not to attract attention, while they were talking on their cell phones. I listened as I tapped away on my own phone to make myself look busy.
Now, I could hear voices outside the hole. The entrance to the tunnel was still unblocked. I crawled into the tunnel and strained to listen. Shafirgullah was speaking with one, maybe two other people. I think I heard three male voices in total. I knew they were smoking. I could hear the click of a lighter and then the sound of puffing on cigarettes. I heard the tones of dialing on a cell phone, and then the familiar greeting, “As-Salaam Alaikum.”
I couldn’t understand any of the conversation, since it was all in Pashto, but I assumed it was about me. What else could they all be talking about as they stood over a hole where they were holding me? I suppose they could just have been shooting the breeze about the weather, or what they had for dinner, but the conversation sounded serious and was not punctuated by laughter. So, I had to believe it was about me, and what they were going to do with me, and maybe what, if any, conversations they’d had with Paul, or the AKE person I assumed was by this time en route to Kabul.
Or maybe they were talking about my release, having realized they’d made a mistake, since I wasn’t a European who worked for a company willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for my freedom, or better still, an American whom they could keep out of a sense of moral and religious righteousness. I was a mistake, damn it! A Canadian working for a public broadcaster that had no money! And now they were wondering how they’d get me back to Kabul before morning. Or at least that’s what I desperately hoped they were talking about.
The crinkle of a plastic bag brought me back to the harsh reality of where I was. I knew instinctively that it held more supplies for the night—and the next day. There would be no freedom tonight.
I crawled back into the room and tried to brush myself off, but looking around, I wasn’t sure why I bothered. Everything was coated in a thick film of dust. My knapsack and camera bag, my red velvet pillow, my notepad. I noticed that Shafirgullah had put his skullcap over the watering can, so at least we didn’t have to worry that our water was getting contaminated, although I wasn’t drinking water from that can anyway. I was at least glad for the fresh air coming through the opening of the shaft and down the tunnel. It also gave the black smoke from the lamp a place to escape.
I picked up the package of cigarettes from where Shafirgullah had left them, took one out, and lit it with the flame of the lamp. Then I heard footsteps, and a loud thud. Probably Shafirgullah making his way back to the hole with new supplies. But when I looked up, it was someone I didn’t recognize.
“Hello, Mellissa, I am Abdullah.”
Abdullah looked almost exactly like Shafirgullah, but he was a little bigger.
“I am brother Shafirgullah.” Of course he was. He stuck his hand out.
“Hello, Abdullah,” I said, and we shook hands, something not common between men and women in Muslim culture. I had never shook the hand of an Afghan man—except for Shokoor, who is more familiar with my Western customs.
“How are you, Mellissa?” Abdullah’s English seemed to be a little better than his brother’s.
“I am okay. I want to go to Kabul. I want to go home.”
He laughed. “Yes, yes, you go Kabul.”
When, I wanted to know.
“Soon, inshallah, soon.”
I heard another thud and then Shafirgullah’s voice in the tunnel, calling out to his brother. Abdullah turned away from me and handed him the plastic water bottle that was now full of urine, and the black garbage can. Soon, they were both returned, emptied. Then Abdullah gathered up the empty juice boxes and cookie packages, and a hunk of now-hardened Afghan bread. He put them into a plastic bag and handed it to Shafirgullah, who handed it to someone else, then crawled into the room with a fresh can of water and a bulging plastic bag.
“You, cigarette?” he asked. I had just had one, so I shook my head. He reached into the bag and pulled out a new pack of cigarettes. The brothers each lit one and puffed away, speaking in Pashto to each other. Now and then Abdullah would look over at me and smile. He was a nice-looking young man with a wide smile and good white teeth. He had dark eyes, set wider than Shafirgullah’s, which made him seem friendlier, whereas his brother’s smile could easily be seen as slightly menacing.
They spoke for a while, and then Abdullah turned to me. “Goodbye, Mellissa.” He waved. “I see you again.” He crawled up the tunnel and disappeared. Shafirgullah put the wooden door over the entrance, covered it with his blanket, and we braced ourselves for the avalanche of dirt. When it was over, we once again dusted ourselves off.
“You, biscuit?” he asked. I shook my head. He reached into the dust-covered plastic bag and pulled out a new sheet of Afghan bread and a silver pouch of juice, not in boxes this time. I peered into the bag and saw that the chocolate cookies had been replaced mainly with the cheaper fruit-flavoured creme-filled kind. There were six pouches of juice: cherry, apple, pomegranate. I took out a pomegranate pouch. It was tart yet sweet, and cold. Shafirgullah offered me some nan-i-Afghani. I tore a corner off and chewed. I wished I had something to dip it in—some dal, or hummus, or curry, anything with a little protein and a little more flavour. I loved Afghan bread, but eating it cold and plain, I realized it was because I loved everything else that usually came with it.
A few days before I left the base, a group of us had gone into Kandahar City to arrange my flight to Kabul. Paul was there, with his wonderful cameraman, Al; and their fixer, Jojo; and Sameem, who was the CBC’s local driver and cameraman. I liked these trips to the city, since it was a chance to get off the base and talk to ordinary Afghans. And a chance to eat real food, which was always preferable to the bland stuff served in the cafeterias at the base, where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner almost every day. I suppose it was risky, but Jojo had arranged lunch in a local restaurant where he knew we’d be safe.
The restaurant was on a main road in the centre of Kandahar City. The facade of the building looked too rundown for me to imagine that it was a place that served food. I was wearing my headscarf, as I always did on these trips, and we hustled in, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. Our Afghan fixers spoke to the managers and we were le
d into a small room at the back of the restaurant, empty except for pillows scattered throughout. Two waiters spread a tablecloth on the floor, and we sat down against the pillows. They brought us yogurt drinks and distributed a flat of bread for each of us, along with many dishes: radishes and peppers, a spicy and saucy meat stew, and rice. The stew was served on the bread. It was so delicious—the sauce subtly flavoured and the meat tender. Any concerns I had about cleanliness or getting sick soon disappeared.
Then the lights went out and my heart stopped. What the hell was going on? Nobody said a word, but we were all thinking the same thing, conscious—as always—that we were foreigners out in a city that wasn’t safe. Just as suddenly as the lights had gone out, they came back on. I looked at Paul. He looked at me. Al continued to eat. It was just a brownout, typical in this part of the world, and especially this country, but for a few seconds, my heart had skipped a few beats.
Now, I was eating bread in virtual darkness again, except this time I had no stew to dip it in, and no friends to share it with. I felt trapped. This was not a restaurant in Kandahar. It was a cell. A hole in the ground. And I was a hostage.
I took a sip of juice and chewed on the bread. The arms of the alarm clock showed that it was just after seven. It would be another long night, and I wasn’t sure—again—how we’d pass the time.
Shafirgullah had a solution. He reached into the bottom of the plastic bag and pulled out a book. He handed it to me. It was a school textbook, probably used to teach English to young Afghans in school.
I flipped through the pages and saw they were filled with short stories, followed by questions about the stories. An example: Salim and Abdul went to the store together on a sunny morning. They wanted to buy some ice cream. Salim wanted to have chocolate and Abdul decided on strawberry. They paid the store clerk ten afghanis and left to go home.
The questions that followed were along the lines of “What did Salim and Abdul want to buy?” “What kind of ice cream did Salim buy?” “What kind of ice cream did Abdul have?” “How much did they pay the clerk?”
There were about two dozen of these exercises in the book, and I read through them all in half an hour and handed it back to Shafirgullah. He opened it and started reading out loud, pointing at words he didn’t know how to pronounce. I was pretty sure he didn’t know most of the words, or had no idea at all what they meant. After several words, he grew frustrated and pulled another book out of the bag. It was an English–Farsi phrase book.
“This is not Pashto,” I said to Shafirgullah.
“No, Farsi,” he replied. “Me, Pashto.” I took that to mean that Pashto was his first language and that he had a limited knowledge of the other.
I was right. As he started reading phrases, he stumbled on many of the Farsi phrases, almost as much as he had stumbled on the English ones. But this was good. This was a way we could communicate.
“You are my friend,” he read from the book. I pointed to the Farsi translation, and he read it out to me. I repeated the phrase.
We went on for a while longer, reading phrases out of the book—”I am hungry.” “What is the time?” “I am angry.” “Where do you live?”
We barely noticed that the flame in the kerosene lamp was fading until Shafirgullah started to cough. The smoke from the lamp was bothering him, and he removed the wooden door to allow the fumes to escape up the shaft.
“You sleep?” he asked. I looked at the clock and saw that it was close to nine. We had whiled away three hours with the books. That was good. But I wasn’t sleepy yet, so I shook my head no.
“Cigarette?” he offered as he lit one for himself.
“Tashakor,” I said, thanking him in Pashto. I don’t know where I got the idea that smoking would help pass the time. A cigarette takes about five or ten minutes to smoke, depending on how many drags you take of it, so it’s not as though it helps pass that much time. We finished and flicked our cigarette butts out to the tunnel.
“Me sleep,” Shafirgullah announced.
“Good night,” I said to him, glad to be left alone again. I picked up my notepad.
Hi darling,
I was thinking about our last meal in Kandahar City today. Do you remember the little room and the lights going out? I wish we were back there again. I almost wished today I hadn’t come to Kabul, that I had just stayed at KAF and done some stories out of the PRT and the city. But we both know why I wanted to come. This was an important story I was working on, the refugees. And it’s one I haven’t seen in the media back home. My captors are treating me well, for the most part. I’m just so tired of being here, and I feel horrible about the pain and suffering I’m causing you and everyone at home.
Shafirgullah is spending a second night in the hole alone. We passed the time by reading phrases out of an English–Farsi phrase book and smoking cigarettes. I’ve been so good about the smoking since last summer, but there’s not much else to do in here. I shudder at the thought of what all the smoke and dust, and kerosene fumes—is doing to my system, but I have no options.
I just hope you know that I’m okay. I know you must be so afraid for me, but I need you to know that I’m not afraid. I don’t think these guys want to hurt me at all. I just think they’re a bunch of young thugs with guns and a messed-up idea of Islam and the West. I’m not afraid of them, and you shouldn’t be either. They’re not bad people. They just don’t understand tolerance, and probably never had a chance to learn when they were young.
I looked over at the sleeping Shafirgullah and tried to imagine him as a little boy. Did he grow up poor? Did he and Abdullah go to school? I imagined they were like the orphans I had met the year before in Kabul at a state orphanage for boys; girls were housed in a separate orphanage, which I visited later. Many of them had lost their parents in the war, and their prospects for the future were seriously limited. They slept in bunk beds in a dark and dirty building, twelve or more to a room. During the day they went to classes. The younger ones learned how to read and write, and the older ones learned a trade. The government official in charge of orphans told me they had to make sure children were given as many opportunities as possible because it was too easy for the Taliban to recruit young men, especially those who felt they didn’t fit into society. I saw a young boy, maybe six or seven years old, his face scarred with burns that he’d suffered as a baby. I watched as he hung around the playground alone and tried to ignore the taunts of the older boys. I asked him his name. Sediq. He told me that his parents died because of warlords and that he missed them so much. He was happy to be in the orphanage because he was fed and given clothes, but he had no friends and he was lonely.
I couldn’t forget the emptiness and despair I saw in his eyes. I could still see his sad, scarred face even now. He was exactly the kind of boy the Taliban would try to recruit. The director of the orphanage said as much. And he was one of so many in Afghanistan. I’d left the orphanage that day feeling utterly helpless. I could tell Sediq’s story to the world, but who was listening? And even if people listened, what could they do to help him?
Maybe Shafirgullah and his brother grew up like Sediq. Maybe they grew up in an orphanage; maybe they were abandoned by their parents. They probably had a little schooling, since they could speak a bit of English, but I imagined they were probably young boys without a stable family life and without much to keep them occupied, trying to navigate their way in a country torn apart by decades of war. Why wouldn’t they fall prey to criminal gangs and terrorist groups like the Taliban? That’s where they could find a sense of community, a sense of belonging. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but it also left me feeling quite depressed to think that my kidnappers really had no choice. Why go to school when you can make hundreds of thousands of American dollars kidnapping foreigners? For young men who don’t have much of an opportunity to succeed in the way we Westerners typically think of success—a steady job, good income, roof over your head, food on the table—criminal activity is often the only viab
le option.
It’s like asking the Afghan farmer to plant pomegranate trees instead of poppies because stopping the heroin trade is how we in the West believe we can win against the Taliban. But for that poppy farmer, harvesting a pomegranate crop might yield only a fraction of the money he could get for a poppy crop. It might be wrong, and the farmer might even know that drug money is being used to fund the Taliban’s activities, but at the end of the day, he’s got a family to feed.
There are no excuses, P, for what the kidnappers have taken from me. My freedom. But all I can do is try to understand why they do this. It’s not right, but it’s their world, and all we can do is try to understand.
Night, night, darling. I hope that wherever you are, you’re getting more sleep than I am. Love you. xox
I put the pen down and tucked myself back inside my blanket. It was so uncomfortable, and I could feel now that the ground was quite cold. I reached inside my pocket for my rosary and prayed.
Shafirgullah kicked me in the leg as he turned in his sleep. It was a hard jab, and it startled me. I sat up and looked at the clock. Six in the morning. Damn, I thought, why couldn’t you give me another hour of sleep? Another hour of unconsciousness, another hour of escape from this hole.
The morning passed as it had the day before. The young Afghan woke up and did his ablutions and prayed for half an hour, then ate an entire package of cookies, washed down with two pouches of juice. I noticed there were only two left.
My stomach was hurting a bit, and I huddled myself into a fetal position, turning my back to Shafirgullah. I stared at the wall, hoping the feeling would pass. It did, but came back in waves throughout the morning.
Under an Afghan Sky Page 11