The shores were low and shelving, marking no change in the plain to north or south, where the river wound like an accident: a meandering, mud-coloured sea, glistening with sandbanks. I saw it with dreamlike excitement. This ancient Oxus, the immemorial divide between the Persian and Turkic worlds, had already plunged down half its length out of the Pamirs, and would wander another seven hundred miles north-west over the Turkmen desert to trickle at last into the dying Aral Sea. Over this branch of the Silk Road monks and merchants had travelled to the Afghan kingdom of Bactria, and piously on to India, while Buddhism, long before, had percolated north the other way.
As I neared the Afghan lines, I felt an odd lightness: a curiosity about what was going to happen, as if it would happen to someone else. On the shore just ahead, the village of Hairatan appeared to be in ruins. Then a barrier crossed my way, lounging with soldiers. They were swathed in cavalier headscarves and lambskin hats, and they were grinning. One cried in Russian: ‘Welcome Afghanistan!’ A courteous old man led me to a broken-down office, where he stamped my passport without looking at it, and logged me in under an unrecognisable name. A list of candidates for the past presidential election dangled on the crumbling wall. Outside, photographs of the Uzbek general Dostum, the region’s favourite warlord, were plastered on the customs-house gates. But Hairatan seemed a village of refugees. In the days of the Soviet occupation it had been a busy border crossing. Now leftover tin and wood were cobbled into makeshift dwellings, where patriarchs in loose-flowing trousers and careless turbans were striding through rubble.
The old man found a driver to take me the fifty miles south to Mazar-e-Sharif. It was nearly night. We entered a desert of yellow-grey dunes pricked with camel-thorn. We had no language between us. The man was swarthy and young, swathed stormily in cloaks and turban; but soon, as if unwrapping a monstrous parcel, he unwound his shawls and there emerged a delicate face with girlish skin and Tajik features. We drove in silence. The road was narrow and deserted. Often the dunes overlapped it in hillocks of ash-blond dust. We passed a lone satellite dish where a shepherd was lighting a campfire. The sand hardened under a glaze of grey stones. Once the rocks were daubed red in warning of mines, and a burnt-out personnel-carrier lay blown upside down. By now the sun was lowering in a blurred disc through dead seams of cloud, touching the horizon. At lonely checkpoints soldiers emerged from their beds in beached shipment containers to stare at us, wearing no uniform, muffled against the wind. It was blowing cold and hard in the darkness as we entered the outskirts of Mazar.
I found a hotel on the main square. In its gaunt five storeys I was the only guest. The locks of all its rooms were smashed, but there was water in the communal bathroom. The hotelier sent out his son to bring me shashlik from the bazaar: it was dangerous at night, he said. For a long time I stood looking down from my window on the still city, which seemed to be glimmering under water. I felt a light expectancy. This, I thought idly, was how people died: by mistake, imagining themselves bodiless. I took this uncomfortable notion to bed with me, after wedging my door shut with a chair, and lay awake a long time, the bedsprings raking my back. Outside, the few street-lamps flickered out, until only the twin domes of the Hazrat Ali shrine–legendary tomb of the caliph Ali–went on shining in a necklace of amber lights.
I woke to streaming sunlight. Beyond my balcony, around the square, Mazar-e-Sharif spread in multicoloured arcades and awnings dangled over splintered pavements. Already the bazaars were stirring, and hand-carts and horse-carts and old Russian taxis were about, with turbaned men on bicycles, who went very upright, as if riding horses. Beyond this reviving heart, the suburbs stretched in a lake of mud and whitewash, and the Hindu Kush hung a blurred curtain to the south.
I went out into the markets round the shrine gardens. They covered the paths with second-hand garments, cheap penknives, cigarettes. Cobblers, fortune-tellers and street masseurs were at work, with vendors of turquoise jewellery and overripe bananas. Chinese radios blared out the music once forbidden by the Taliban, and youths were peddling cassettes of Indian pop singers and pirated DVDs of a Sylvester Stallone movie.
Bargaining with abrupt courtesy, striding quick from stall to stall, the men went in shin-length chapans and baggy trousers, their heads heaped with turbans–one end flying free–and debonair shawls tossed about their shoulders. This lordly costume, familiar from years of mujahidin news footage, lend them a frisson of threat and glamour. They looked like starved hawks. Sometimes their bearded faces carried a shock of ginger hair or grey eyes. But the women, draped to their ankles under thin-pleated blue or white burkas, walked in fluttering voids.
Nobody stared at me. I might have been indistinguishable from others, or immaterial. There was no other foreigner here, yet men looked clean through me. I feared they thought me Russian. Only when I met their eyes did they flash back smiles–ferociously genial–or spoke something. If I made no overture, I returned to anonymity. Then I felt that lifting of the heart which early travellers recorded, of moving among a fiercely separate people. Despite a million dead and half the population displaced, despite the beggars lining the shrine gates–mine-victims thrusting their prosthetic legs in front of them–I sensed some heritage inviolate in these people, refusing pity. They seemed in sharper focus than their northern kin: faces more mercurial, angry, courteous, austere. It was as if some great lamp had been turned up. These were the natives of Samarkand and Bukhara writ large: Tajik and Uzbek mingled. To their south the Hindu Kush sealed them off from the peoples of the Afghan centre. But to the north their plains overlap the Amu Darya uninterrupted deep into Central Asia.
They survived from a time of fluid borders. Uzbeks had flooded over the great river early in the sixteenth century, mixing with Tajiks settled long before. Centuries later they had held up a wild mirror-image to the Soviet republics to their north. At the start of the 1979 invasion Moscow had sent in conscripts chosen for their kinship with the Afghans. But the affinities proved fatally strong. Almost half a million Uzbek and Tajik refugees had crossed the Amu in the 1920s, and soon the invaders were discovering relatives among the mujahidin. The Soviet divisions began to unravel.
Now the legacy of that war crowded the shrine entrance, calling for alms. I changed a few dollars for a wad of soiled afghanis, and went into a courtyard of empty peace. Over its grey marble the figures of women were drifting among clouds of white pigeons. Beyond them the sanctuary spread like a windowless palace, frothed with turrets and balustrades and sheathed in nineteenth-century tiles–aquamarine and hazy yellow–which shone unscathed in glassy, bland perfection. Inside, as I gazed down a gauntlet of seated elders to the tomb, Islam seemed natural and alive again. The grave was the city’s raison d’être. Mazar-e-Sharif, ‘Tomb of the Noble’, is built on the legend that the fourth caliph Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was interred here after his murder in 658. In tradition his followers, fearing that his enemies would desecrate his corpse, bound it to a white she-camel which wandered east, and he was buried at the place where she fell. The great Seljuk sultan Sanjar ordered the first shrine built in 1136, but Genghis Khan destroyed it, and for centuries the tomb survived as a lonely site of pilgrimage, overshadowed by the mighty metropolis of Balkh nearby. Only in the nineteenth century, after its rival lay in malarial ruins, did Mazar flower into a city.
I roamed its dusty rose gardens under the pines. Lesser graves sheltered in domed chambers around the walls, graves that belonged to Afghanistan’s infant nationhood: relatives of Dost Mohammad, the country’s long-lived nineteenth-century king, and his son Akbar Khan, whose forces annihilated a 16,500-strong British-Indian army on its retreat from Kabul in 1842. Their graves were piled with electrical fittings and old brooms. But the domes were white with pigeons. Pigeons misted the whole sanctuary like a snowdrift. Their ancestors, it is said, were brought here in the fifteenth century from the true grave of Ali near Baghdad, as if in acknowledgement that at the heart of Mazar’s tomb lies only a transposed de
sire. The birds are gentled in myth. In times of hardship they leave the shrine for havens of their own, and their return is a pledge of peace. Should a grey pigeon join them, it turns white within forty days. And every seventh bird is a spirit.
During the years of Soviet occupation, Mazar-e-Sharif never saw the devastation visited on other cities, and far into the 1990s the region’s brutal Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose posters still plastered the walls, maintained the independence of his six northern provinces, using and betraying every faction in the country. As refugees poured in from the south, Mazar became the last liberal outpost in Afghanistan, and centre of a brisk smuggling trade. Its bazaars were full of vodka and French perfumes. Women students walked its campus in high heels.
But in May 1997, with the Taliban closing in, Dostum was betrayed by one of his own generals, and fled north over the Amu to Uzbekistan, then on to Turkey. For two or three days the Taliban occupied the city alongside his renegade soldiers and their allied Hazara militia. Then fighting broke out. The Hazara especially–Shias distrustful of the fiercely Sunni Taliban–turned on the invaders in a wholesale massacre. The Taliban were mown down in streets they did not know. Some two thousand were taken west into the desert at Dasht-e-Laili, where they were thrown down wells, or asphyxiated in shipment containers. Even those sheltering in the Hazrat Ali shrine where I walked were taken out and shot.
But the next year, in August, the Taliban returned. They drove their jeeps into the city, machine-gunning shopkeepers, women, old men, children, even donkeys and dogs. Then they hunted down the Hazaras, house by house, killing the men with three shots, to the head, chest and testicles. Their leaders broadcast from the mosques that the Hazara were pagans, and so licensed their death. As refugees streamed from the city, Taliban aircraft strafed them at will. And soon the terrible truck containers were rolling again, some to Dasht-e-Laili in vengeful imitation of the year before. For five days the bodies lay in Mazar’s street, mauled by dogs.
A few miles to the north, the Hazara village of Qezelabad was visited by the Taliban even before they sacked Mazar. I could induce no car to take me there, but found a contact in the city, a young Tajik who had worked for the BBC. People shunned Qezelabad, Tahir said–it was rumoured a place of bandits, he’d never been–but soon our taxi was nosing between fields smoothing to dust. Beyond the mound of its crumbled fortress, a mud village crouched under the white sky. We drove into silence and ruined streets. They wound off one another past breached rooms, where sometimes the paint was still bright on the walls–green and blue–and courtyards spread derelict. We trod them gingerly, as if trespassing. The cone of a rusted mortar bomb lay in a crashed basement.
Yet people had returned. A rivulet snuffled between the walls, and women were washing clothes there, unveiled, squatted in the silt. The shell of a hovel was labelled ‘National Solidarity’ in Arabic, where a charity had come and gone. Only the mosque had been rebuilt, it seemed, where a group of men ushered us in with the harrowing grace of the poor.
They motioned me to a pile of cushions, and crouched or sat cross-legged around me, their beards twitching in their hands, their faces haggard, courteous, a little distrustful. Some showed high, polished cheekbones under crescent eyes–for the Hazara, it is thought, descend from the Mongols of Genghis Khan.
When the Taliban came, they said, they had escaped into the mountains, and at last to their fellow believers in Shia Iran. But their old people were left behind, with those who could not flee. They had been shot or stabbed to death. None were left.
‘People came from the outside to bury our dead,’ a man said. ‘They were lying in the streets, they told us, and in the houses. Old people, harmless. They were our elders. It was four years before we could return, after the Taliban left. And nobody knew their graves.’
‘There were once three hundred families living here,’ said another man. ‘Now there are barely a hundred. They killed thirteen people from my family.’
And another, a youth with a round, tight-skinned face: ‘My father stayed behind to protect our home. My mother took the children into the mountains. We did not see him again.’
There had been stories of infants slaughtered, of bodies defiled. But of these they knew nothing. ‘What they did was enough.’ It was the present that obsessed them now. The past lay unidentified beneath the dust. So they spoke of their rifled furniture in the same breath as their murdered families, breaking in and capping one another’s stories, while Tahir translated.
‘Now we have no school, no road, no clinic. We are surrounded by villages with electricity, but it hasn’t come here. Nobody favours us, because we’re Hazara. The government does nothing. We fought in the jihad against the Russians, but…’
‘We have only one stream. Animals and humans drink from the same canal…’
‘The Taliban killed my cows!’
‘Look!’ A fat, hirsute man yanked up his shirt. His stomach and chest were corrugated by a foot-long scar from belly to armpit. The fingers of his hand were stumps. ‘I stayed behind to fight.’
Another said darkly: ‘The government won’t help us. Only a revolution will help us.’
They were not pleading, but angry: angry at their exclusion, as if the Taliban’s branding of them as separate and inferior were being reiterated in calmer times. ‘Write about us,’ they said.
Tahir and I went out into the village, where only a watchful dog or a crying child betrayed a building’s habitation. But once the ruins fluttered with voices and we came upon an improvised school. Threadbare carpets covered the earth floor of a gutted house, where forty children sat. There was no furniture, no light. A blackboard stood in a crumbled alcove, where a young woman was teaching geography. In the sunlight falling through the fractured walls, the children turned to stare at us, clear-faced and smiling. Under the gaping roof next door a young man was holding an exam among older students, some of them adults, male and female mixed. A few of the women were miraculously beautiful. The teacher stood in a patch of broken sun. I stayed and listened for a while, wishing I spoke their Persian. His voice made a nervous music. But it was the women who burnt the eyes with tears. The Taliban had hated them. All schools were closed to them. Together with a ban on music, chess and the flying of kites, no woman’s voice was to be heard in public–on pain of whipping–nor her laughter, nor even her footsteps.
We went back to our car in the twilight. We had both gone silent. A shepherd was driving a pair of goats with mud-clogged fleeces up the street. In a tenantless courtyard, someone had planted winter wheat. And above the ruined walls a kite was sailing.
In the streets of Mazar, a few hours after sunset, nothing moves. The crescent moon of a new Ramadan rises over the domes of the Hazrat Ali, and the main roads become the haunt of dog-packs which shiver the night with their howls. But between the last sunlight and darkness, the call to prayer releases the faithful from their day’s fast, wavering and multiplying through the city in a long, melancholy clamour.
I turn into the side streets, no longer wary, to find a meal in the darkening bazaar. Underfoot the patchy tarmac turns to compacted rubble. Beyond the memorial portrait of Massoud, the mujahid hero against the Russians, past bicycle repair shops and sellers of tin, I go into markets cluttered with wares from China and Pakistan. Outside the wedding shops, the billboards of synthetically painted brides are being hustled away.
Less than a year ago these streets had been quartered by the militia of rival warlords–the Uzbek Dostum and the Tajik Mohammed Ata–but now, in a first, uneasy reaching beyond Kabul, the national police have moved in. By nightfall the streets are empty, as if by curfew. In their upper storeys no light shines. The windows are cracked or gone, where the sacred pigeons roost, and human life has shrunk to street level.
I stumble on a chaikhana and enter a glow of feasting. The host sits in a kiosk between the doors, wielding festive authority. On the platform opposite him a throng of villagers reclines, scooping rice and tearing bread
at low tables, swirled in robes which double as bedclothes–they are sleeping here–and focusing me with careless curiosity.
Then their stare returns to the black-and-white television suspended from the ceiling. They are watching the votes being counted for the first general election in their history. Their eyes are sharp and still. Their talk is a murmur. Outside, the walls still flutter with the posters of seventeen presidential candidates, one of them a woman. The election, so far, has passed without disruption. Three days before, in the early morning, queues of men and veiled women had snaked outside the polling stations.
A young man, cross-legged beside me, starts to talk in a goulash of Russian and English. He wears a waistcoat banked with pockets, like a travelling toolkit. His eyeballs are yellow with fever. ‘Dostum is winning. Dostum will be president.’ He sees me wince, and laughs. ‘Well, he may be a bad man, but he’s our bad man.’
I glance at the villagers who are standing up to pray now, their gaze against the wall, facing south. I ask: ‘And what are these people feeling?’
‘They are not from here.’
Later one of them lurches over and stands above me, stroking such an immense beard that he seems to be glowering from a bush. Then he shouts something, and pulls an imaginary trigger.
‘He is asking if you are not afraid of the Taliban al Qaeda?’
I am unsure how to answer. It is unmanly to admit fear, but complacent to deny it. I fall back on the will of God, and the bush grins and retires. His companions are preparing for the night, unfurling shawls and rewinding turbans, settling into the chrysalis of their robes. So long as they are in motion, their swank and glitter transforms them. But as they fall asleep, they look strangely undone. The nestled faces seem thinned, the beards a fallen disguise. Many are malnourished, scarred. Their ankles poke out like mahogany sticks. Looking down at their closed faces, I wonder what they have suffered, what inflicted.
Shadow of the Silk Road Page 25