“Mellissa,” the voice said again. I could tell now that it was the fat Afghan. I hoped he wasn’t coming back down to the cave. But my heart was racing. It was Sunday. A full week had passed. Maybe this was it. Maybe he and Khalid were coming to dig me out of the hole and take me back to Kabul.
“Yes?” I answered.
“Where are you from?” Abdulrahman asked.
“I’m from Vancouver,” I answered. I thought we had had this conversation before.
He asked me another question, but I couldn’t understand it.
“What? I can’t hear you,” I said loudly into the pipe, tiptoeing to get as close to it as I could.
“What elementary school you go?” he repeated.
Elementary school? I was confused for a second. Why did he want to know what elementary school I had gone to?
And then it dawned on me. Proof of life. These were the proof-of-life questions the negotiators needed the answers to as proof to everyone back home—and here in Afghanistan—that I was alive.
“Captain Cook,” I said.
“What?”
“Cap-tin Cook,” I tried to enunciate. I normally do enunciate my words, a habit developed from reading scripts every day, but in this case, I was afraid that the language barrier might confuse the answers, and I didn’t want that to happen.
“What? Cap-tin Cup?” Abdulrahman repeated.
“CAP-TIN COOK!”
“Spell for me.”
“C-A-P-T-A-I…” I started.
“C-A-E-P,” he said back to me.
“C-A-P! P like Paul!” I yelled.
“C-A-P…” he repeated.
“Yes, C-A-P-T-A-I-N.”
“C-A-P-E—”
“No! Listen to me, Abdulrahman!”
It took at least another ten minutes before I was satisfied with his spelling of “Captain Cook.”
“Okay, Mellissa,” he yelled down the pipe. “Now—what is your father name?”
“Kellog,” I answered.
“What?” He clearly didn’t hear or understand.
I know my dad’s name is unusual—I used to tell people it was “Kellogg, like the cereal, but with only one ‘g.’” It was a made-up English translation of his Chinese name, which is pronounced Kay-luk. But it wasn’t like Abdulrahman knew of the cereal, so that translation would be lost on him.
“Spell for me,” he called down.
“K-E-L-L-O-G,” I yelled.
“K-I-L-U-J,” he repeated.
“No, no, K-E. Eeeee!”
“E,” came the answer.
It took another ten minutes before I thought he had it right.
“Okay, thank you,” he yelled. “We go now.”
“Wait, wait! Abdulrahman, what is happening? Has the money been fixed?” I had so many questions. “Who are you talking to? Who is asking these questions?”
There was scuffling around. “We go now. Goodbye!” He said something to Shafirgullah, and then I could hear the pounding of footsteps loud over my head, before they faded into the distance.
Shafirgullah looked at me and shrugged.
“What was that about?” I asked him. “I’m going to Kabul, yes?”
He nodded. “Yes. Kabul. You.” He pointed at me. “I go Kabul. You Kabul.”
My mind started to race. They would relay the answers later this morning, if they weren’t already on the phone right now. The negotiators would be satisfied of my well-being. Then I would be released. Maybe as soon as this afternoon. Or tonight. I wondered how they would hand me over. Would it be the same way we came to this spot? I imagined myself riding on Khalid’s motorcycle, holding onto the sides, through the winding roads of the village, before getting onto a main road. Then his friend with the car would meet us, and we’d get in the back. It would be dark, and the lights would flash by occasionally as we made our way into the city.
They would be waiting for me at the refugee camp. Black SUVs, security people with guns. Maybe Paul would be in one of the vehicles. Or maybe they wouldn’t let him come out. I wouldn’t want him there anyway. It might be dangerous, some sort of standoff. Both sides would have guns, waiting for the other to make the first, perhaps fatal, move, hedging their bets in a game of cat and mouse that could end with both parties getting what they came for, or leaving with less than they started with.
But I could see Paul as soon as tonight! This thought kept me going for a while. I was excited, looking forward to being reunited. I’d show him my scars, and tell him I was okay, and we’d go back to the Serena, where I could have a hot shower, and then we’d go to the Asian restaurant at the hotel and talk about everything over dinner.
“Mellissa. Kabul.” Shafirgullah was almost taunting me.
He sat up, as though he had just realized he’d been awakened from his sleep, and motioned for me to turn around.
“Bathroom,” he said.
I turned around and let him finish with his ablutions. The routine was the same every day: He washed with some of the water from the watering can, then brushed his teeth with the stick-and-string contraption. Then he opened a package of chocolate sandwich cookies, washing them down with two pouches of juice. My juice package was still half full. I’d been trying not to eat or drink too much, to limit the number of times I needed to use the trash-can toilet. That was something I could never get used to: the lack of privacy in such a small space. It was suffocating. I’ve always guarded my privacy carefully, and as a woman, I was agonizingly aware that I was sharing the space with a man. How ironic, I thought, that in a Muslim country I’d be stuck in close quarters with a man monitoring my most private moments, and watching over my every move. It felt wrong and strange, like the world was upside down.
I took a sip of juice. It was still cool, and an indication that the temperature was dropping a little more every day. It was late October, and things cooled down considerably in the evenings. If I were back at the base, I would be putting on my Vancouver Canucks fleece sweater to walk from the work tent to the sleep tent at night. It wouldn’t be long, I thought, before this hole would become a cooler, buried deep down somewhere in northern Afghanistan.
A chill ran through my body, even though it was still relatively warm in the hole. Abdulrahman must have kicked over one of the rocks that covered the opening to the pipe outside because a big beam of daylight was streaming into the cave, hitting the wall above Shafirgullah’s pillow. I held my hand up to the light and made hand shadows—a duck’s head, a bat—like my sister and I used to do when we were little, in the light that came into our bedroom from the hallway, when the grown-ups were still up but it was past our bedtime.
Shafirgullah laughed at my hand shadows and held his hand in front of the light as well. He turned his thumb and index finger into the shape of a handgun, which was pointed at the shadow my head made on the wall. He laughed again.
“That is not funny, Shafirgullah,” I said, shaking my head at him. He threw his head back and laughed some more. I turned my back to him and closed my eyes, trying to drown out his laugh by reciting the rosary in my head.
Then I heard a chanting. Shafirgullah’s eyes were closed and he was kneeling, his head bowed. He was praying again, reciting passages from the Koran. I was starting to feel assaulted by the prayers. Every morning before dawn, I could hear the call to prayer somewhere in the distance. And then again around noon and again in the evening. This must be what non-Christians feel in North America, I thought, when they hear church bells ringing. Still, I heeded the imam’s calls, praying instead in my own way, eyes closed, head down, to my own God, hoping that He would hear me.
Shafirgullah’s chanting was getting louder, though, and I was starting to get annoyed that I couldn’t even pray in peace. So I started singing my Hail Marys out loud.
Hail Mary, fu-ll of graaace. The Looord is with yoooou. Blessed are you among wo-men, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jeee-eee-sus.
Shafirgullah looked up at me. He smiled, and waved for me to continue.
Holy Mar-ee, mother of God, pray for us si-i-in-ners, now and at the hour of death. A-men.
He clapped and smiled. “Very nice.”
I motioned for him to keep chanting. He did, and although I didn’t understand a word, I thought he carried a note quite well, and I started to get lulled into the rhythm of the prayer. I thought I could hear the words “Afghanistan” and “Allah,” but I wasn’t entirely sure.
He stopped and nodded his head my way. “You.”
I shrugged and said I wasn’t sure what to sing now, even though I knew he couldn’t understand what I was saying.
“You,” he insisted.
I wasn’t sure what to sing, so I reverted back to the hymns from church, the ones that had been drummed into my head as a girl in Catholic school.
You who dwell in the shelter of the Lord,
Who abide in His shadow for life,
Say to the Lord, “My Refuge, my Rock in Whom I trust.”
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
The snare of the fowler will never capture you,
And famine will bring you no fear;
Under His wings your refuge,
His faithfulness your shield.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
You need not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day,
Though thousands fall about you,
Near you it shall not come.
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
Shafirgullah seemed to like that and clapped loudly after I finished.
“You,” I said to him, but he really didn’t need much prompting, launching into another passage of the Koran. His voice was soft and lyrical and almost sweet, and for a moment I forgot where I was. I imagined I was at a mosque back in Canada, where I’d attended several prayers with the imam who was helping me with a story on fundamentalism and how it can take root in young people. I’d always thought the Koran sounded best when its passages were sung—unlike those of the Bible. My sister and I used to have a hard time stifling our giggles whenever our parish priest sang a prayer during Mass. Father O’Brien was the nicest man, but he could not carry a tune to save his soul, or anyone else’s.
On the other hand, I’d never heard someone sing the Koran out of tune—or at least, it never sounded out of tune to me. Maybe it was just the way it was written, and was more conducive to being put to music than the Bible. Or maybe Muslims were just better singers.
Shafirgullah was a pretty good singer, and he continued on for another half hour. Now, not many Catholics, no matter how devout, know the Bible well enough to quote directly from it at any length. One might have a favourite passage or two, but that was nothing compared with the way Muslims could quote the Koran. I wondered why that was. Maybe the Koran was written in a way that made it easier to memorize, and chant.
As for me, there were only a couple of passages from the Bible I knew by heart, and I knew them because they were the ones I had loved as a child, the ones I would say to myself over and over whenever I needed divine intervention. The one I knew best was a passage from the Gospel according to Mark, in which Jesus spoke to the people who had turned his house of prayer into a market:
Put your trust in God. I solemnly assure you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,” and has no inner doubts but believes that what he says will happen, shall have it done for him. I give you my word, if you are ready to believe you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer, it shall be done for you.
This passage for me always summons up an image of a mountain literally being lifted up and thrown into the sea, even though I know it is meant metaphorically—it speaks to one’s need to believe in the power of prayer. This hole I am in is a mountain, I thought, and I had said those lines to myself many times over the last week.
Now, as I sat listening to my captor recite the Koran, I began to wonder if it was actually true. Was it possible that we were both praying to the same God? I began to wonder if God was hearing me, or listening to me at all.
What if I called you Allah instead of God? I asked silently. Do you respond better to “Allah”? Because you can’t possibly be listening to him and me at the same time. Maybe if I called you Allah, you’d help me out of this horrible place and let me go home to the people I love. Why are you answering his prayers and not mine?
“You!” Shafirgullah’s voice interrupted my argument with God in the same way the sound of a glass breaking interrupts conversation at a cocktail party.
“Me what?” Then I realized he wanted me to sing. It was my turn, and I was running out of hymns I knew by heart.
You shall cross the barren desert, but you shall not die of thirst.
You shall wander far in safety though you do not know the way.
You shall speak your words in foreign lands and all will understand.
You shall see the face of God and live.
Be not afraid.
I go before you always.
Come follow me,
and I will give you rest.
If you pass through raging waters in the sea, you shall not drown.
If you walk amid the burning flames, you shall not be harmed.
If you stand before the pow’r of hell and death is at your side,
Know that I am with you through it all.
Be not afraid.
I go before you always.
Come follow me,
and I will give you rest.
Shafirgullah laughed and clapped when I had finished. I wasn’t sure what he would have done if he actually knew I was singing a Christian hymn. After all, he hadn’t given up trying to convince me that I needed to convert to Islam. We had the same argument each night he came back to the hole.
“Why you no Muslim? You must be Muslim.”
“I am Christian, but we believe in the same God,” I would argue back. “It’s the same God. I just pray differently from you.”
His English wasn’t good enough to sustain a full argument, so the conversation basically ended there, with him reiterating that I “must” be Muslim.
We went back and forth almost all afternoon, chanting and singing, until the point of light behind his head faded and night started to cast its shadow. I waited for the sound of digging; this was going to be my hour of freedom. They had the proof of life they needed, and now they were going to come and take me back to Kabul in exchange for some sum of money. I knew they would not come to take me out during the day—such activities needed the cloak of darkness, in case someone was watching. And my kidnappers were paranoid of airplanes and drones, of being spotted by Americans or the Afghan police.
Minutes passed into hours and there was no sound. Not even footsteps. Soon, it was after nine o’clock.
“Where Khalid?” I asked. Shafirgullah was again working the makeshift toothbrush around his mouth. He shrugged.
“They’re not coming tonight?”
“I don’t know,” the young Afghan said, looking at his cell phone. He punched a few numbers in it and I could hear an automated operator’s voice. Shafirgullah hung up and stood up, dialing again and holding his phone to the ceiling to try to get better reception. Unable to get through, he tried a different number.
“As-Salaam Alaikum,” he said. A brief phone conversation ensued before he hung up and turned back to me. “Khalid Kabul.”
My heart sank. If Khalid was in Kabul, there was no way I was getting out that night.
“Why Khalid in Kabul?” I asked.
Shafirgullah shrugged. He reached for the last box of juice, unwrapped the straw, and plunged it into the hole at the top.
“They no come tonight,” he told me.
I knew there was no point in asking why not, because he wouldn’t know, and even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to tell me in English.
“Cigarette?” he asked instead, waving a fresh box of smokes in my face. I nodded, and he handed me the package. I took the box of matches and tried to light one, but they were damp. Shafirgullah also tried, and we went through about a dozen matches until we were able to finally get one going. We smoked three cigarettes in a row, using the embers from one to light another, knowing that there were only a few dry matches left. And then we sat there in a nicotine-induced haze. My head was beginning to hurt, and I didn’t even notice the lamp was dimming until he pointed at it.
“Tsiragh,” he said, the Pashto word for lamp. Khalid had brought a battery-operated hand-held lamp a couple of days before, replacing the kerosene lamp that had been polluting the air and our lungs for the last few days. I handed it over and watched as Shafirgullah took the batteries out one by one, pitching us into complete darkness. He put the batteries back in and shook the lamp. The light was still very dim, but I didn’t mind, since my headache was beginning to worsen. I wondered if it was from the nicotine or the smoke or the dust.
“Tsiragh. Bad.” Shafirgullah put the lamp back down.
“Battery,” I said.
“Yes, battery,” he repeated. The word sounded the same in both languages for once.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“And matches,” I said, shaking the almost empty matchbox.
My head was now pounding, and I lay down and closed my eyes, praying that sleep would come more easily that night. The refrain from the last hymn I had sung echoed in my head.
Be not afraid, I go before you always.
Come follow me, and I will give you rest.
Mercifully, I had fallen soundly asleep—the alarm clock now said six o’clock. It had to be morning. I’d missed the pre-dawn call to prayer. It was the longest I’d slept in a week. I went to the bathroom in the trash can—as I’d been doing most mornings, taking advantage of the fact that my captor was still snoring—and washed my hands with water from the watering can. Then I stood up and stretched and did kicks with my legs, just to keep them active. A routine, of sorts, although I didn’t want to admit even to myself that I was falling into one. It would mean that I was getting used to being a prisoner, and I wasn’t about to let myself go there.
Under an Afghan Sky Page 16