by Sally Cooper
The men continued chatting among themselves. Afghan conversations can be very circular and this one hadn’t moved much further than a discussion about Cole’s recent road trip to Tajikistan. Tajikistan is north of Afghanistan, on the other side of the Hindu Kush, but for Hossein and Irshad it might as well have been on the moon.
‘And Dushanbe? What was it like?’
‘It was quite a smart town, but a little Soviet for my liking. Lots of concrete,’ replied Cole.
‘And the people, they were unfriendly?’ It was a typical Afghan question. Cole, who had been in the Ghan long enough to see it coming, replied on cue.
‘Not nearly as friendly as the Afghans.’
And so it went on, back and forth, Afghanistan was better than Tajikistan, the people were friendlier, the food was better, the snow was whiter, the mountains were higher.
It was hard to determine when we were supposed to leave. As guests, we could probably have stayed as long as we liked, though I doubt Mohammed’s family really wanted a bunch of foreigners moving in. Polishing off the last of our tea, the ceremony marking our departure began. It was as formal as our welcome. We stood as Mohammed’s father thanked us for coming.
‘He says he is honoured to meet Mr Peter and Mr Cole and that you are welcome in our home anytime,’ translated Mohammed. ‘Oh … and Miss Sally too.’
‘We were honoured to share your Eid celebration with you,’ said Cole.
‘He says he wishes good health to your families,’ said Mohammed.
‘And good health to yours,’ replied Cole.
The same farewell was repeated by Hossein and then by Irshad, with Cole and Peter taking turns to reply. I remained in the silence prescribed by gender, wondering if it was too late to sneak out the back and thank Mohammed’s mother. Edging slowly out the door, we recovered our shoes from the pile beside the door and walked out into the snow. Behind us, the curtain rippled.
27
The Long Cold Winter
It was four o’clock on Friday afternoon and a thick fog had once again descended over Kabul. As snow started to fall, the city was waiting. Somewhere, not far from here, lay the shattered remains of a Boeing 737 that took off from Herat twenty-four hours earlier and hadn’t been seen since. Reports said the plane was diverted to Peshawar, rumour said it was turned away from a snowbound Kabul airport. It was possible some of the passengers were colleagues of a friend but no-one was really sure who was on board. In this most mountainous of countries, in this most ferocious weather, a plane could simply disappear. Where did you start to look?
Kam Air is a private Afghan airline. A recent start-up, it had been heralded as one of the leaders of Afghanistan’s new business development. A few weeks earlier, on a snowy December morning three days before Christmas, the grounding of the UN plane had left me waiting eight hours for my flight to Dubai. I stood in the frosty departure lounge, watching with envy as the Kam Air flight took off for that same destination … and returned six hours later, its mission accomplished while I still sat there waiting. It was that same 737 that was now missing.
Every time – every time – I took off from the airport here, or any airport in the Ghan, I shuddered at how close the wing tips came to the tops of the rocky peaks. One bad pocket of air was all it would take …
The following morning, the wreckage of the Kam Air 737 was found at the top of a mountain, deep in snow, thirty kilometres east of Kabul. Of the ninety-six passengers and eight crew, there were no survivors.
Snow seems so innocuous, it falls silently and leaves such beauty in its wake, but it wreaked havoc on a city that couldn’t cope – or so it appeared to an outsider. Kabulis, on the other hand, seemed much better at adapting to their city grinding to a halt every second day.
One Saturday morning in the middle of January, I opened the door to the verandah outside my room at the Karwan Sara and gingerly stepped out into six inches of snow. The sky was a deep penetrating blue, without a cloud in sight. The glare of the sun bounced off the snow drifts and the only way I could see anything was to squint. Movement at the bottom of the stairs caught my eye. Mahmood had dropped by for some weekend maintenance. Like me, the car had been struggling with the heavy winter snows and Mahmood, who came from a family of mechanics, was determined to solve the problem. His first step was to light a small fire under our Big Green Car. I wasn’t immediately startled, having seen ‘Afghan Anti-Freeze’ in action many times over the previous few weeks. Cars, taxis, trucks and, most worrying of all, petrol tankers dotted the roadsides while drivers patiently squatted nearby and waited for fires to thaw their engines. Afghans had no fear and I was unsure where to begin.
‘What are you doing?’ I cut to the chase.
Pause. Clearing of throat. ‘I am warming the engine. It’s frozen.’
‘Perhaps we can get some anti-freeze to do that. I’d hate the car to catch fire.’
He laughed at my preposterousness.
‘Seriously.’
I’ve never owned a car nor had a licence to drive one, but fortunately Mahmood thought better than to question my authority and clambered under the car to put out the fire.
There’s not a lot of entertainment to be had in the Ghan and even turning a car around can attract a large crowd. I came outside later in the morning to find four shalwar kameezed bottoms protruding from the bonnet of the IRIN car. The electricity had gone off and, in the absence of their television, the Karwan Sara’s guards had joined Mahmood for a group maintenance session. Voices argued and fingers pointed. Everyone was an instant expert as Mahmood and the guards animatedly discussed every component and every tool, though in reality little seemed to be achieved.
‘How are you with the weather?’ Ismail asked me every morning.
I loathe winter, wherever I happen to be. ‘It’s cold’ was my daily response which, without variation, elicited a series of dramatic tales of previous winters that were invariably colder and icier than the one we were currently embracing. Ismail liked to tell a good story but may have been in need of some IRIN training on relevance and, most of all, brevity.
Most nights the wind howled straight off the mountains. This was barely the same city that, at the height of summer, had been so oppressively hot that to walk anywhere required maximum effort. The Karwan Sara shook with the force of the gusts. The building’s flimsy windows rattled and I patched the gaps with black electrical tape.
Each night, as I burrowed down into my comfortable bed, wrapped myself around my hot-water bottle and tunnelled into the layers of doona and sleeping bag, I thought of the people who lived on TV Mountain, a few hundred metres from where I slept. There was no electricity, and fuel and water were carried up by hand or, for those who could afford it, on the back of a donkey. When I first arrived at the Karwan Sara, the side of the mountain was a bare expanse of rock and sand, small houses ebbing at its base. As more and more Afghans came to Kabul in search of work and better fortune, the wave of houses had grown and the small box-like structures of mud brick with a few flimsy plastic sheets for windows had crept halfway up its flank.
There was only so much that could be blamed on the weather. I discovered this when the car I was driving slowly came to a grinding halt in the outer suburbs of Kabul. I had changed gears to manoeuvre around a large, deserted roundabout and that was the end of that. The four-wheel drive glided a few metres forward, gave a short sputter and promptly died in the middle of the road. It was late at night and the streets were empty. I was out with a friend, Steven, who worked for a large American media NGO and had graciously allowed me to practise my driving skills and take the wheel for the drive home. Now, halfway to the Karwan Sara, we were stuck. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was one-thirty on a permafrost night. Things weren’t looking good.
‘What do we do now?’ I asked lamely.
‘Umm … I don’t know,’ replied Steven, surveying the darkened street. Steven, a New Yorker, had blue eyes and the same short beard that was now endemic among Kabul�
��s male population, expat and Afghan alike. Like me, he had been in the Ghan for a while, so the idea of a dead car on a darkened Kabul street didn’t have him reaching for his security manual.
At the very best, a petrol station in the Ghan is nothing more than a pre-1979 fuel pump standing forlornly by the side of a dusty road. At worst, it’s a ten-year-old boy waving a Coke bottle full of fuel at passersby. Neither were open twenty-four hours because few Afghans would consider driving anywhere after nine o’clock at night.
‘Is there anyone we can call?’ I asked. And say what? I wondered as I sat behind the wheel of a car I wasn’t supposed to be driving at a time I should have been safely tucked up at home.
‘We could walk. I don’t think my house is that far from here,’ said Steven.
I wasn’t warming to the idea. I’d seen packs of dogs wandering the streets of the city at night and they weren’t exactly the Lassie variety. But our car had no heating, giving us little choice. I took a deep breath of what was still relatively warm air and lifted up the hood of my coat. Just as I was about to open the door, headlights appeared in the rear-view mirror and a brand-new four-wheel drive screeched to a halt by our side.
We leaned forward and peered into the car as its occupants leaned forward and peered into ours. I saw two bearded Afghans staring at what must have been an incomprehensible sight: a bearded man sitting beside a foreign woman who was driving a car. Needless to say, they ignored me and addressed their questions to my male companion, whose weekly Dari lessons seemed to have covered minor vehicle emergencies.
From what I could gather, they were chastising Steven for his foolishness, though I couldn’t determine if it was because we’d run out of petrol or because he was allowing himself to be driven by a woman. Steven nodded and shrugged. The Afghans kept shaking their heads. They told him, with vast sweeps of wool-clad arms, that, as there was nowhere to buy petrol this side of the Hindu Kush at this time of night, we were to be their guests and they would drive us wherever we needed to go. With that, they jumped out, opened the back door of their car, produced two ancient dustcloths, and set to work polishing up the back seat of their car.
Holding the doors open and carefully bundling us inside, I briefly entertained the thought that we might be headed somewhere else, but my gut feeling, which outweighed UN security any day, was that our new friends were far from lethal. Besides, we had no choice. I climbed into the back of the car and, still ignoring my presence, our new-found friends hit the accelerator. They drove at an alarming speed, perhaps making the most of the empty streets. I sat silently in the back, glancing occasionally at Steven who was unperturbed enough to continue his conversation. One last screech of the tyres and we were at Steven’s front gate. We weren’t at my front gate, but given the circumstances it didn’t seem wise to ask for any more. I watched the Afghans speed off into the night, no doubt with a great story to tell when they got home.
The Ghan was halfway through what turned out be one of the coldest winters on record. A Kabul winter is an endurance test and one I seemed to be failing – badly. Between the icy roads, the unrelenting snow, the howling gales and Ismail’s tales of winters past, I feared spring may be a long way off.
During a brief and sludgy respite from the winter snows, IRIN finally moved out of its trailers and into its office in the new UN building. I’d grown very fond of our temporary accommodation but with the studio equipment in storage and the lads working separately in the trailer next door, I wasn’t entirely sure what, if any, work was being done – although I did notice that the office tea supply was in need of regular replenishment.
To assist with the lifting, Ismail gathered together a band of ‘helpers’ from the UNOCA maintenance staff. I was a little alarmed when he introduced them to me – the three bearded old men looked like they couldn’t lift a single chair. I was partly right and watched Faheem, Mirwais and Mahmood shepherd our gear into the new office with all the patience of a culture that has great respect for its elders. Chair by chair, file by file, desk by desk, it was an office move on Valium. All part of the Ghan’s rich tapestry, I said to myself while my desk sat idly in a puddle of recently melted snow on the wrong side of the trailer door.
For reasons best known to themselves, once Ismail and the lads had moved our furniture into the new office, it took an inordinate amount of time to set up the computers, cables, hard disks and wires, so the following afternoon I took up an invitation to visit a radio station on the Shomali Plain. The gateway to the capital, the Shomali Plain is one of the Ghan’s most scarred battlegrounds. For the Russians, the mujahideen, the Taliban and the Americans, to take Shomali was to take Kabul. Once a showcase of Afghan agriculture, its famous orchards and vineyards now stood barren, riddled with landmines and pockmarked with the shells of bombed-out houses and farms.
I was the only foreigner at the first anniversary celebration of Radio Qarabagh, which, like the station in Bamyan, had been set up by Internews. I was also the only woman, a combination that provided endless hours of entertainment for the invited guests and dignitaries – and at the Radio Qarabagh birthday party, endless hours existed in spades.
We sat outside in a small garden surrounded by a large grey brick wall. The guests were a mixture of turbaned dignitaries, station staff and miscellaneous onlookers. The trees were bare but the winter sun sparkled. At one end of the compound stood the small mud-brick building that housed the station. Inside was the usual layout of tiny rooms, foam mattresses and garish fabric. The narrow garden was filled with wooden benches arranged in neat rows facing a dais decorated with pink plastic roses.
I did my best to look engaged while I sat and listened to two and a half hours of speeches in Dari. According to my Afghan escorts, the speeches all said pretty much the same thing: they congratulated Radio Qarabagh on the work it had done, looked forward to the work it would do in the future and thanked anyone who had – and anyone who said they had – played a part in Radio Qarabagh’s creation. Like so much else in this country, it wasn’t what you said, it was that you were seen to be saying it.
There were no speechwriters in the Ghan. What Qarabagh did have, however, was the town scribe. Some taking the dais were able to wax lyrical without prompting, but those less accustomed to public speaking called on the services of the young bearded man who sat at the rear of the crowd with a pen and notepad. Many believe that it was the Taliban who made the Ghan medieval, but rural life was doggedly clinging to the past long before Mullah Omar lost his eye. With so many people unable to write, every town had its own scribe, an ‘educated’ man who, for a small fee, would pen the letter, speech, death notice or birthday greeting of the client’s choice. If the speeches we were listening to were anything to go by, Qarabagh’s scribe was stuck in a creative rut.
For some speakers, it made no difference. Qarabagh is not far from the US base at Bagram and at least two dignitaries were rendered silent by the sound of Chinooks thundering overhead. The turbans stood at the dais, moving their mouths while rotors thundered above. Windows rattled and seats shook with the sound of practice artillery pounding across the valley. I studied the faces around me but no-one flinched. Afghans had a far greater tolerance of noise than I did but I had to wonder how much American muscle flexing they were prepared to tolerate.
I returned from Qarabagh to find Ismail and the lads had finally unravelled the seemingly endless webs of computer wiring, had hooked up the studio and, best of all, had borrowed two extra heaters from the warehouse. I didn’t know how many group discussions it had taken to get the tasks done, but the office was clean, warm and functioning, and the lads were smiling. Outside the window, the banks of snow and ice suggested spring would be a long time coming.
28
We Come in Pizza
Sometimes, at the end of a long and difficult day, all I really wanted to do was relax, grab a pizza and go to a movie. Do something, anything, that my Western sensibilities would classify as normal. So, in an attempt to re-create w
hat normality we could, Steven was coming around for pizza and a movie. Adapting to our Kabul surroundings, the pizza would be anything but ham and the movie would be watched on the screen of my ageing laptop.
As the sun began to set outside, I emerged onto the verandah to a car park buzzing with security guys. They strutted around in khakis and goatees, weapons slung over their shoulders and, despite the twilight, dark sunglasses. I took one look, turned around and went back inside.
This wasn’t the first time that the peace of my guesthouse had been invaded by thugs masquerading as security guys. The Karwan Sara’s colonial architecture and traditional Afghan dining room made it a popular venue for visiting dignitaries and, unfortunately, the US ambassador. I could only assume someone important was coming for dinner when I looked out the window and spotted a young man that may once have been Sameem. He was barely recognisable. His DiCaprio mane had gone. He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, neat black trousers and a fabulously embroidered black and gold vest. With so few guests, the Karwan Sara was yet to replace Mohammed so tonight Sameem was being assisted by one of the guards, also dressed in a crisp white shirt, black trousers and embroidered black and gold vest.
My phone rang.
‘They won’t let me in,’ Steven said. ‘I’m at the front gate. Do you think you can come out?’
I grabbed my bag and my headscarf and walked hastily to the gate, past a gauntlet of darkened eyes. I told one of the more benign-looking goatees that I lived here and I was just going out to collect a pizza. I was hoping the information would facilitate an easy re-entry, but from the angle of his shaved head I could tell that the goatee’s eyes were focused on my chest, so I couldn’t be sure the message has gotten through.