“You okay?” Even my kidnapper knew something was wrong. I shook my head and rubbed my stomach in an attempt to tell him I wasn’t feeling so good. “Ah,” he said, looking concerned. He offered me juice, which I refused, and some cookies, which were the last thing I wanted. He also asked if I wanted to play the snake game again. I took his phone and distracted myself for a few minutes, until even the game got too boring. As soon as I gave it back to him, he put the SIM card in and made a call. The conversation was in Pashto, but I didn’t even have to guess whom he was speaking with.
“Khalid still in Kabul?” I asked.
“Khalid no Kabul,” he answered. He pointed his finger down. “Khalid come.”
I was about to ask when, but my tummy rumbled with another wave of discomfort. I wondered what I would do if it got worse, and reached for my knapsack. I always carried pain medication because I’m plagued with migraines, so I have a constant supply of Tylenol, Advil, and beta blockers. I fished around. Fuck. They were all sitting in my toiletries bag back at the Serena Hotel. I looked into the side pockets, hoping to find something. My hand wrapped itself around a pill bottle. Cipro. Yes! It was supposedly the cure-all for anything that might come along, including a poison gas attack. I had brought it to Afghanistan the year before, thinking that I would need it if I drank bad water or ate bad food. And I’d been warned by my colleagues that the bad food would more likely come from inside the military base than out in the cities. I hadn’t needed it, but I remembered doling out a few pills to my friend Don Martin, who was there for the National Post before he left on what would end up being a very long trip off the base.
I opened the bottle and saw that there were five big white pills left. I bit one in two, then swallowed a half with a chug of cherry juice. The syrupy sweetness of the juice didn’t stand a chance against the bitter pill. I gagged but got it down, the horrible taste spreading through my mouth and down my throat. I took another swig of juice and swished it around my mouth to wash out the bitterness. And then I waited for the ciprofloxacin to do its thing.
I must have dozed off again because I woke up to Shafirgullah poking my leg and pointing to the ceiling. It was about two in the afternoon, and I could hear footsteps and digging overhead.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“Khalid,” he replied.
“Why is Khalid coming now?”
Shafirgullah covered his head with his kaffiyeh and I did the same, as again the dirt came down all around us. Soon, the sound of digging faded and I could hear the sound of a board being dragged away. Then a thump, and a figure dressed in black crawled down the tunnel.
“Hello, Me-llis-si-a.” He was back to pronouncing my name with four syllables.
“Khalid, salaam,” I replied. “Why are you here now?”
“I say I come today. I bring you blanket,” he said. I noticed he was dragging behind him a thick baby blue duvet. It was big and fluffy and warm and I thanked him. Shafirgullah lifted my other blanket and my red pillow and shook off the dust. I folded the new blue blanket in half and set it down on my half of the hole, like a sleeping bag.
“It is good, yes?” Khalid asked.
“Yes, thank you.”
“How are you, Me-llis-si-a?”
“I am okay. I would be better if I could go back to Kabul.”
“Yes, inshallah, you will go.”
“When?”
“It take… time. Three, maybe four days.”
My heart sank at the thought of spending even another hour in the hole.
Khalid looked around the hole, then peered into the plastic bag. “You not eating, they tell me.”
I shook my head and argued that I had actually eaten lots of cookies and drunk lots of juice.
“Shafirgullah say you sick,” he said accusingly. I admitted that I’d had a little bit of a stomach upset but assured him I was okay.
He nodded. “If you not sick, we go out.”
“Out?” I asked, pointing up to the ceiling. Khalid nodded again, and I looked over at Shafirgullah, who was nodding and smiling. I wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe I was being moved to another location. Maybe they had fixed up the other house—the one from the first night—and that would be my new cell. It was a lot bigger and a lot more comfortable, and at least I wouldn’t be in semi-darkness all the time. I looked up the tunnel and could tell from the light cast at the end of the shaft that the sun was shining outside. Khalid told me to take off my scarf, which was loosely draped over my shoulders. I removed it and handed it to him.
“I am cover your eyes,” he told me, folding the scarf in half lengthwise and wrapping it around my head like a blindfold. Instinctively, I reached to pull the scarf from my eyes, but Khalid held my hand.
“No,” he said. “You take off later. Come now.” He led me by the arm to the entrance of the hole and gave me a gentle push. I heard the rustle of feet scampering ahead of me. I assumed it was Shafirgullah.
“Go up,” Khalid said. I blindly crawled up the tunnel until the top of my head no longer hit the ceiling and I knew I was in the shaft.
“Stand up,” Khalid ordered from behind me. I stood and was wondering how I was going to climb to the top when I felt the Afghan lift me up from the bottom of my legs. Two sets of hands reached down and grabbed me under my arms. I was lifted out and set down on the ground.
“Wait,” came Khalid’s voice from below. I heard him drag himself out of the shaft and felt him take me by the elbow. “Come, quickly.”
We were walking forward, not off to the side, as I thought we would if we were going back to the abandoned house. I guessed that we were going to the other house that I’d seen, the one about fifty feet from the hole. I tripped as we went down some stairs, and Khalid steadied me, whisking me through what I assumed was the door to a house, around a corner, and through a hallway, until we stopped and he sat me down on what must have been a ledge.
“Turn around,” he said. I followed his instructions, turning my head to face him so he could remove the scarf. We were in a large room with a window. My back was to the window and I was staring at a wall covered with peeling yellow paint and riddled with bullet holes. The cement floor was covered in dirt. A piece of scrap metal lay in the corner.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Shafirgullah house,” Khalid answered. He was sitting next to me on the ledge. I turned around to look out the window.
“Do not look,” he ordered. I realized he didn’t want me to see anything about where we were, which I hoped was a sign that I might be released soon. My kidnappers wouldn’t want me to tell the authorities about any landmarks, whether they were mountains or a house or some trees, that would allow them to find this location.
“This is a nice room,” I told him. “Why can’t I stay here?”
“It is not safe,” he said.
“It looks very safe to me.” I could hear the roar of jets overhead, and I wondered where the closest military base was. I assumed it was Bagram, as we couldn’t be too far from Kabul.
“Americans,” Khalid said, referring to the sound of the jet engines. “Police come here. They have guns. You see?” He pointed to the bullet holes in the wall. “Not safe for us.”
Shafirgullah appeared in the doorway and said something to Khalid in Pashto. He was followed by another man dressed in a white kameez and matching pants, and wearing a white skullcap. Looking closely, I realized he was the one with the lazy eye who had come down to the hole with the others on the second night.
“Stay here, don’t look out,” Khalid ordered and followed the others out, leaving me sitting alone in the empty room.
As soon as he left, I turned around and looked out the window. I could see two large hills, or mountains, on either side of the house. The sky was cobalt blue and cloudless, and I could feel the heat of the sun. Khalid was outside having a cigarette and speaking on the phone. I walked to the doorway and saw that there was a hall leading into another room in the obviously abandon
ed house.
Shafirgullah must have seen me, for he came back in, his eyes flashing.
“No!” he said angrily, and I took that to mean that he wanted me to sit back down on the ledge. I obliged, and he left the room again. I sat in the room alone for what felt like the better part of an hour. Shafirgullah was praying out in the hallway, and I could hear other voices coming both from within the house and outside. I walked around the room a bit, glad for the chance to exercise my legs.
Khalid came back and told me it was time to go.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Back,” he replied, taking my scarf and blindfolding me again. He led me out of the house the same way he had led me in. I could hear voices. We had walked a few steps when suddenly Khalid pushed my shoulder down. “Sit down,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Sit down! Do not move!”
I dropped to my knees and sat quietly. I couldn’t sense anyone next to me, so I wasn’t sure what was going on. I heard the sound of a jet engine in the distance. Perhaps they didn’t want to be spotted and that’s why we had stopped moving. A few minutes later, I felt a hand on my elbow.
“Stand up,” Khalid ordered. I did, and he led me back—I assumed—to the entrance of the hole. I could hear digging and then felt myself being lifted and dropped. I tried to brace myself, but I landed on my ankles. A sharp pain shot through both of them. I shoved my headscarf off my eyes and looked up.
“Go!” Khalid shouted from above. “Go!” I crawled back through the tunnel and into the room. I shook off the dust from my clothes and sat back down on my new duvet. I looked at the clock—it was just after four in the afternoon. I could hear the Afghans speaking to each other above me, and I lit another cigarette as I waited.
Thump.
The shuffle of shoes, and soon Khalid’s black kameez appeared in the doorway. He took off his faded black leather shoes and placed them carefully by the entrance, then brushed the dust from his clothes. I realized they had all been fastidious about removing their shoes. He rearranged his black skullcap on his head and sat down, staring at me with his wide-set eyes.
“You stay tonight?” I asked.
“I stay.”
“Good.”
Another thump, more shuffling, and Shafirgullah appeared with two white plastic bags: cookies, juice, cigarettes. He ripped open the package of smokes and offered them to me and Khalid. We each took one, and Khalid lit them with a lighter he fished out of his breast pocket. Inhale, exhale. Blue smoke filled the small cave, and I felt a head rush with each puff.
We finished our cigarettes, and Shafirgullah scampered up the tunnel and out of the shaft. The digging started again and dust rained down over everything.
Shafirgullah shouted down to Khalid, and then he—and the others—were gone. Khalid reached over and dusted off the duvet. Then he took my hand and placed it between his big palms.
“How are you, Me-liss-si-a?”
“How do you think I am?”
“You not happy.”
“Of course not. You’ve taken me away from everything. My family, my friends, my life. You have taken everything from me. How can I be happy?” My voice was cracking. I didn’t want him to see me cry, so I pulled my hand away from his and turned to face the wall. He didn’t seem to know what to do. He put his hand on my shoulder and tried to tell me it would be okay, but I wasn’t listening. He patted my back and kept telling me I would soon go back to Kabul.
“But I need to go back now!” I could hear myself almost yelling, but I felt almost as though I was out of my body, a spectator to this drama. “I have a family! I have a job! I need to go back to them! You don’t know what you’re doing to me!”
He turned my head to face him and stared me directly in the eye. “Don’t cry, Me-liss-si-a,” he said.
“Mellissa,” I finally corrected him.
“Don’t cry.”
“I want to go back to Kabul. Khalid. Please. You have to help me. You said I am your sister. You have to help me get back to Kabul. You’re the only one who can help me. You have to talk to your father and tell him I need to go back.” I was pleading with him, but I didn’t care. He might be the only chance I had to make this nightmare end sooner than later. And he seemed sympathetic. He looked into my eyes and wiped away a tear I didn’t even know was there.
“I am sorry for you, Mellissa. I am sorry you are not happy.”
“Then please help me. Please, Khalid. You’re the only person who can help me. You took me; you must help me get out. Please.”
He nodded and readjusted his skullcap. “I will talk to my father.”
“Talk to him now. Please call him. Now. I can’t stay here any longer. Please.”
Khalid shook his head. “I call tomorrow.”
“Call him now. Please. Call him now.”
“Tomorrow,” he replied as he reached into his breast pocket for his cell phone.
I sat back dejected, as if all the energy had suddenly been sucked out of me. I picked up my notebook and began to write, seeing out of the corner of my eye that Khalid was punching in numbers on his phone. A loud voice, which I thought I recognized as his father’s, came through the receiver. Khalid’s voice dropped, sounding more apologetic, with none of the authority I’d come to expect from him as the leader of my motley gang of kidnappers. They spoke for a few minutes, and then Khalid hung up the phone.
“Was that your father?” I asked. “What did he say?”
“He say your friend must call him. They fix money and then you go.”
“Give me his phone number and let me call my friend,” I asked.
“No, I call.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. I not call from here. I call tomorrow, when I will go to Kabul.”
“You’re going to Kabul tomorrow?”
He nodded.
“For how long?”
“One day maybe. Maybe I come back Friday.”
I had more questions. He told me he would take his motorcycle there and that he always stayed with his sister’s husband, who had a small room somewhere in the city. His sister was in Pakistan with the rest of the family.
“What does her husband do?” I asked.
“He is Taliban.”
“Is he really Taliban or like your type of Taliban?” I asked. I was curious how he saw himself.
“He is Taliban.” Khalid made a gun with his hands. “He kill people for Taliban.”
I must have looked a bit skeptical, so he went on to tell me about the time his brother-in-law got into a gunfight with some American soldiers and killed three of them, even though he was shot in the shoulder himself.
“He killed three soldiers?” I didn’t believe him. “Where did this happen?”
“Ghazni. You know Ghazni.” I nodded. Ghazni was just southwest of Kabul, a province away from the country’s capital. But I still didn’t believe him. It seemed highly unlikely that a Taliban fighter, even a true Taliban, could get away alive after shooting and killing three American soldiers.
“Why you going to Kabul?” I asked.
“I have work.”
“What kind of work?” I imagined that he might be heading back to the refugee camp he had taken me from, trolling for someone else to steal. Khalid smiled at me as if trying to tell me that I didn’t want to, or need to, know. It felt a little sinister to me, but it stirred my curiosity.
“You want to take someone else.” It was more of an accusation than a question. He kept smiling, and I knew he wasn’t going to tell me. I gave up and reached for the package of cigarettes.
We spent the night talking, not turning out the lamp until well after midnight, according to the alarm clock.
Khalid seemed especially happy to be able to speak openly about his girlfriend of six months, Shogufa, who was in fact his first cousin on his mother’s side. He talked about going to her house all the time, and how she made the best bread and fried potatoes. She had long dark hair and b
rown eyes. She lived with her parents, and her mother was Khalid’s aunt. His mother’s younger sister, he told me. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, but he wasn’t sure.
“She is very shayesta,” he told me. “Like you.”
“Shayesta?” I repeated. Again, my Pashto was failing me.
“Shayesta—very pretty,” he said again.
I asked if he had a picture of the very shayesta Shogufa, and he promised to bring me one.
“Does she know what you do?” I asked.
He looked at me and seemed to be thinking. “She know little, little,” he said after a long pause.
“She knows you take people and keep them in places like this?”
He nodded. “A little.”
“And what does she think? Does she know about me?”
Khalid looked down and cracked his knuckles. All ten of them, and then he cracked his toes. And then his neck.
“Did you tell her you took me?”
He nodded.
“And? What does she say?”
“She no happy.” He lit a cigarette and offered me one. I took it and he held the lighter out. I took a long drag and we finished our smokes in silence.
Khalid blew out the lamp. “Sleep coming to me,” he told me and he stretched his long body out next to me. His dirty feet were too close to my pillow for my liking.
I turned to face the wall and took out my rosary, fingering each bead and praying silently until I fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning with a kink in my neck. I reached for the lighter and lit the lamp. I glanced at the clock. It was way too early, and I was angry at myself for not being able to sleep more. Even another hour would have helped me get through the day faster. Another hour of escape. I lit a cigarette and inhaled it in a few long puffs before opening my notebook.
Dearest P,
Another morning, and another day in this hole. I’m holding up fine, but smoking a lot. Between the cigarettes and the dust, I’ll be lucky if I can get out of here without some horrible respiratory disease.
Khalid stayed last night. He’s interesting. I think he feels responsible for taking me, and responsible that this isn’t being resolved as quickly as he told me. He’s really not a bad person. We talked about his girlfriend all night—he’s really in love! I mean, as in love as an eighteen-year-old kid can be, but it made the time go by. More than anything, I just miss talking to people. You, and my friends, and not having my BlackBerry or my phone is a really odd feeling. To be so disconnected from the world, from you, and from everyone I love. I’ll feel even more cut off when Shafirgullah comes back tonight. At least with Khalid here, there’s someone to talk to.
Under an Afghan Sky Page 12