Under an Afghan Sky

by Mellissa Fung

  Shafirgullah was still snoring when I heard the sound of footsteps above us. Could they be coming to release me? It made sense. Khalid had said it would either be after dark or before daylight. I heard someone calling out in Pashto, so I shook Shafirgullah’s leg. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Whoever was outside kept speaking. Shafirgullah stood up and leaned toward the opening of one of the pipes.

  “Salaam,” he said. A brief conversation followed, and then the sound of something sliding in through the pipes. A box of cigarettes, followed by matches, a lighter. Then batteries and several boxes of juice—and two sleeves of cookies. Supplies, since no one had come the night before.

  “Abdullah,” Shafirgullah told me, pointing up to the ceiling. I nodded, and put the juice and cookies into one of the white plastic bags, after taking an apple juice. I was thirsty and hadn’t had anything to drink since the previous afternoon. The juice was cold and tasted good.

  “You, biscuit?” Shafirgullah was holding out half a box of chocolate sandwich cookies. I shook my head. He shrugged and stuffed the remaining cookies down his mouth, one at a time. It amazed me how much he ate. At least three packages of cookies a day, and several boxes of juice. I felt sick just thinking about it. I was really only eating to pass time, and to make sure I at least had a few calories to burn in case I ever needed to walk—or run—out of here. I could feel already that my hiking pants were a little loose. I’d been wanting to lose a few pounds, but this was not the weight-loss program I’d had in mind.

  I stood up and stretched again, pointing my toe to the opening of the pipe overhead, and almost falling over. I steadied myself by putting a hand on the dirt wall.

  Shafirgullah looked at me quizzically. I tried to explain that I was trying to get a little exercise, but that wasn’t a concept he understood at all. He pulled out his cell phone and played Snake Xenzia for the next half an hour or so, while I continued to do my stretches for the second time that morning.

  Shafirgullah was on and off the phone almost all day, and I assumed he was talking to his brother or Khalid, until I heard what sounded like a woman’s voice coming through the receiver.

  “Who was that?” I asked, curious. “Your mother?”

  “Girlfriend,” he said with a grin, flashing his teeth at me.

  “You have girlfriend?” I replied.

  He laughed and nodded. “Like Khalid,” he said. Again, the language barrier stopped me from finding out anything more about her, so I left it at that and instead asked whether Khalid was coming back that night.

  “No Khalid.”

  I despaired at the thought of spending another twenty-four hours in this place with Shafirgullah. He wasn’t disgusting like Abdulrahman, but it was very difficult having nothing to say to each other, and a language barrier that prevented any semblance of a normal conversation.

  More than anything, that’s what I was missing. A normal conversation. As a journalist, I spend my entire days in conversations with people, whether it’s my editors and producers, or the people I’m interviewing for a story, or the cameraperson, with whom I might spend hours and hours driving from one location to another. Or I’d be chatting with my friends on our BlackBerrys, which had become an essential in our lives. We were all single, and it was a way of keeping tabs on each other—to bitch and gossip or organize a drink and dinner on the way home from work. I spend my life talking to people and to have that suddenly taken away made me feel completely lost.

  I missed the voices of my friends, those quick electronic notes with updates and questions, and plans to meet up. I missed the connections. I pulled out my notebook and flipped it to an empty page. I could see there weren’t many more blank pages left, and I said a silent prayer to God that I would see freedom before the back cover of the notebook.

  Hey dude,

  I know you’re probably really worried about me back home and I’m just writing to tell you that I’m okay. My kidnappers are not hurting me, and they’re treating me well. Please tell everyone not to worry. I miss you guys a lot. I would give an arm and a leg to be having a beer with you right now, at Gretzky’s, watching a hockey game, and eating sliders until our guts are spilling over our jeans. How are the Canucks doing? I know it’s early in the season, but I’m not hopeful that it’s going to be so great. They’ll make the playoffs, but they’re definitely not a Presidents’ Trophy or Stanley Cup contender this year.

  I don’t know if you’ll ever get this note, and I sure hope that if you do, I’m the one who gives it to you when this is all over, but I just wanted to say I miss you a lot.

  I’ve been thinking a lot about our vacation this summer and what a great time we had in Italy, and how lucky we were to have that time together. I wish I could turn back the calendar and relive those two weeks.

  I’m not trying to sound fatalistic or anything, but I’m just doing a lot of thinking since there’s nothing else to do in here. Except smoke. Yes, I’m off the wagon. Or back on, or however you choose to look at it. Like a chimney, so the next time we go running, I’ll be the one huffing and puffing behind you.

  And we’re going running again. There’s not a doubt in my mind I’m getting out of here and we’ll get back to our lives.

  Love you lots, dude, and I hope to see you soon. Tell everyone I said hi. I’ll write to them too. Have lots of drinks for me, because I haven’t had anything in weeks.

  “Give me,” Shafirgullah interrupted, obviously curious about what I’d been scribbling in my notepad. I handed it over, knowing he would not be able to understand any of my letters. He scanned the pages several times, then ripped the letter to Jen out, folded it, and stuffed it in his pocket.

  “Hey!” I said angrily. “Give that back. It’s not meant for you.”

  Shafirgullah cackled.

  “Give it back to me. It’s not yours, and you don’t understand a word, you fuckhead!” I knew he wouldn’t understand, so I kept swearing. “Diu nay ma, you fucker,” I spat out in Chinese—the worst Chinese swear words you could say to someone. I’d heard my dad say it a few times when he was really angry. When my mother first translated the phrase, I was at first horrified, then delighted. It was a phrase I could use and which most people wouldn’t understand. Translation: Go fuck your mother.

  Shafirgullah kept cackling. And he shook his head repeatedly. The letter was his now, and in case I’d forgotten my position, he was my captor and I was his prisoner. I had no privacy, no right to anything, no freedom to even write a letter.

  I told him several times again to fuck his mother, but it didn’t change a thing.

  It didn’t matter, I told myself. I was not getting Jen’s letter back. But I’d soon be able to say all that I wrote to her in person. At least that was my hope.

  I could hear the pitter-patter of what sounded like big raindrops hitting the ground outside. Rain at the end of October was not unusual in Afghanistan. It had rained several weeks before in Kandahar, and we had been worried about our sleep tents flooding. The rain turned everything to sloppy, brown mud and made a mess everywhere around Kandahar Airfield.

  Rain never bothered me. Growing up in Vancouver, in the Pacific Northwest, you couldn’t hate rain because then you’d hate the weather half of the year. As a kid, I used to love playing in puddles, jumping in with galoshes and stirring the mud with my boots. When I got older, I got used to running in the rain. I didn’t mind—as long as I was dressed properly. The rain just made me run faster. I would pretend that I was running from the storm, between the drops, which had the added benefit of washing all the sweat off my face.

  Rain was Mother Nature’s way of washing away everything that was dirty, of giving us a clean slate to start over with. So I took the rain outside as a sign that maybe my time in the hole was coming to an end.

  Crack! There was a loud noise over our heads, and then another, and a rumble that sounded a little farther away. I assumed it was a mortar, or a rocket-propelled grenade, and listened for the crackle of gunfire that was sure
to follow. Nothing. But then another crack! And that’s when I realized it was thunder. Shafirgullah pointed above and nodded. It was the sky.

  I love thunderstorms. Well, let’s put it this way: I love the idea of watching them from the comfort of a cozy couch, tucked under a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book. When I was posted to the Prairies as a correspondent, I drove through a series of thunderstorms with my cameraman, Mike, as we made our way from Regina to Grasslands National Park in southwestern Saskatchewan. The rain came down in buckets, and our windshield wipers were futile. Lightning flashed in broken, jagged streaks across the dark, endless sky in front of us, almost daring us to continue on.

  The payoff was the most beautiful rainbow I’d ever seen in my life: a perfect arch, with all the colours at their most vivid, perfect enough to make you believe there really could be a pot of gold at the end.

  So I took the thunder outside as a good omen too—that perhaps my pot of gold, my freedom, was just around the corner.

  I had been in the hole for ten days now, not counting the day I was kidnapped. I knew it was the middle of the week, but I was again starting to get the dates mixed up. So I opened my notebook and drew up a little calendar. I felt like a prisoner who scratches off the days on the cell wall.

  I stopped at December 25—the thought of being there past Christmas was unbearable. It was now October 22, the day we were supposed to leave Kandahar. Paul and Al and I should have been on the plane to Dubai at that very moment, looking forward to sipping cocktails at the swim-up bar in our hotel, followed by dinner in a real restaurant. We always stopped for a night on the way in and out of Afghanistan and a couple of nights on the way out, a reward of sorts after a few weeks of sleeping on a lumpy cot in a dusty tent on a base where there was no booze—but regular rocket attacks in the middle of the night. My heart sank thinking of what Paul and Al were doing right then. Especially Paul. I knew he probably wouldn’t leave Afghanistan until this mess was over. A rumbling wave of guilt washed over me just thinking about what he might be going through.

  It was all in front of me now, my life, on this piece of paper. I had been kidnapped on the twelfth of October. Thanksgiving was the thirteenth. The Canadian election was on the fourteenth. (I was still wondering who had won.) The Terry Fox Run was on the fifteenth. Paul and Al and I had been registered for it, and we’d been ready. The US Army ten-miler a few weeks before had been a warm-up. We had all finished it in an hour and twenty minutes, leaving us in great shape for the shorter Terry Fox Run. I wondered if they had run it without me. Somehow, I didn’t think so.

  I looked at the calendar again. My grandmother would have turned ninety-two that week, on October 20. I never forgot her birthday, and every year on that day I said a prayer that she and my grandfather were doing okay in heaven. This year, I asked her to intercede on my behalf, to use her connections up there to help me get out of the hole I was in. And for the first time since she passed away eight years ago, I was glad she wasn’t alive. I know how much she would have worried and suffered. It was bad enough to imagine what my parents and my sister were feeling.

  The calendar fuelled a sense of urgency I’d been trying to quash. The dates were calling out to me, reminders of things I had to do, plans that had already been made, events that were happening. November 4, the US election, and I’d been planning on having friends over to watch what was going to be a historic vote. November 27 was American Thanksgiving, and I’d been planning to visit my sister in Los Angeles. And on top of all that, I was supposed to move from Regina back to Toronto for a new job at the network as a national radio/TV reporter. I still had to find a place to live, and the move had to be done before Christmas so that I could start work in the new year.

  I suddenly felt like I was running out of time, that everything was happening too fast, but my freedom wasn’t coming fast enough.

  “Shafirgullah,” I called out to my captor. “Where Khalid? Khalid coming tonight?”

  He shrugged. “No Khalid. Khalid Kabul.” He reached over me to grab the plastic bag that was behind my pillow. The night before, Shafirgullah had brought down a bowl of warm rice pilau in a metal dish with a metal covering. I had eaten several spoonfuls, savouring the saltiness of the rice, a welcome relief from all the sugar I’d been ingesting with the cookies and juice. Now the rice was cold, and Shafirgullah was shoving it down his throat by the spoonful. I’d never seen anyone eat that fast before. Within seconds, the entire bowl of rice was gone.

  I tucked myself under the dirty blue duvet. My feet were cold and clammy, and I couldn’t warm them up, no matter how hard I rubbed them. A shock of cold air was blowing into the hole from the openings at the pipes. It was almost November, and the weather was definitely changing. I’d been told that there was no such thing as an Afghan autumn. The weather went from being very hot in August and September to rainy in October and cold by November.

  It sounded like the rain was coming down in sheets, like one of those great Prairie storms back home. I closed my eyes and imagined I was outside, letting the rain wash all the dirt, dust, and smells off my body and my clothes. I must have dozed because I jumped when I heard the clomping of footsteps overhead. Shafirgullah heard them too, and put his finger over his lips, indicating for me to stay quiet. It must have been someone outside the gang. Clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp, clomp. Then voices. Shafirgullah sat up, his finger still over his lips. I didn’t move. The footsteps faded after a while, and when he was sure they were gone, Shafirgullah put the SIM card into his cell phone and dialed. I thought I heard Khalid’s voice coming over the receiver, but I couldn’t be sure. The men spoke in urgent tones, and then Shafirgullah hung up.

  “What was that?” I asked, pointing to the ceiling. “Who was there?”

  Shafirgullah looked a little worried. He dialed another number and spoke quickly in Pashto.

  “Taliban,” he answered after hanging up the phone.

  “Taliban?” I repeated. “I thought you were Taliban.” I pointed at him. “You. Taliban.”

  “All Taliban!” he replied.

  I thought this was all very strange. Perhaps they wanted to find out where my kidnappers were holding me. My mind started to run away from me again. I knew that hostages were often taken by one group and then traded to another, and then another. Gangs of kidnappers would sell their prizes to other gangs, and, eventually, the poor unsuspecting hostage would end up in the hands of some senior Al Qaeda person. I prayed that this wasn’t going to happen to me. It would mean that all the negotiating that had been done thus far would have to be started all over again with another group. More money, further demands, and it could be months before I was freed.

  The rain had stopped, and the storm had passed, but my state of mind was frantic. Whose footsteps were those that had so worried my kidnappers? Could they really belong to the Taliban? Maybe it was the police. Maybe they had come looking for me. This was a possibility I could allow myself to consider further.

  Maybe someone in the village had seen my kidnappers bring me here, as hard as they had worked to hide me. Maybe the farmer we had passed along the way noticed me on the back of the motorcycle. Perhaps it was one of those women wearing a burka who we had passed riding through town. Maybe she called the police after suspecting something was wrong. Maybe someone had seen them move me to the abandoned house that afternoon.

  The next time there were unknown footsteps, maybe I should yell. There would be nothing Shafirgullah could do. The police would hear me, and then they would dig me out of the hole. They’d arrest him, or Khalid, or whoever was with me. It might be my best option for getting out. My mind was racing.

  And then, like a voice on my other shoulder, the thought came to me—what if it was the Taliban? They would kill Shafirgullah or Khalid, and I’d be moved somewhere new, and the whole process would have to begin again.

  There was no way to know. I was either going to have to take a chance or play it safe and let whatever was already in progress run its cou
rse.

  The next time I heard footsteps was later that same evening. This time, voices called down to Shafirgullah before they started to dig. We wrapped ourselves in our blankets and waited for the shower of dust to settle. As soon as the covering to the shaft was removed, Shafirgullah moved the wooden door to the side, put on his shoes, and scrambled up the tunnel. I took the opportunity to go to the bathroom and light a cigarette. The air coming into the hole was cold, and I shivered as I covered myself with the duvet.

  Thump. A figure was crawling toward me. I assumed it was Khalid, but when he appeared in the entrance, I realized it wasn’t.

  “Hello, Mellissa!” It was Abdullah, Shafirgullah’s brother.

  “Hello, Abdullah.” I tried a smile.

  He was all smiles.

  “I stay tonight. Okay, Mellissa?”

  “Okay, Abdullah.” I didn’t have much of a choice, and at least it wasn’t Shafirgullah for another night.

  The digging started above, and soon the hole was sealed again, leaving me with yet another young Afghan. At least they had kept their promise of not sending Abdulrahman back.

  Abdullah’s English was better than his brother’s, and because he hadn’t spent much time down in the cave, he seemed eager to talk.

  “How are you, Mellissa?”

  “I am fine, Abdullah. I want to go back to Kabul.”

  “Yes, you go. You go. Maybe in two days.” Two days? I couldn’t believe that he would be privy to the negotiations between Khalid’s father and whoever was negotiating for me. But I did wonder whether he might have picked something up from his brother, who seemed to be constantly on the phone to Khalid and Zahir in Pakistan. I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but he was adamant.