Shadow of the Silk Road (33 page)

Even in late October the memory of dusty heat lingers, and the sky is a colourless glass. Sometimes you glimpse the Paropamisus mountains that steer the Hari river west, sheltering Herat in a valley mouth which its people have irrigated for five thousand years. The castle that guards the city’s old confines stands on wreckage from the time of Alexander. It was rebuilt by Shah Rukh, the son of Tamerlane, and has been battered and restored ever since. The drums of huge, unequal towers roll from its hundred-foot-high walls, whose gashed foundations show a coagulated mass of bricks and debris. The only surviving decor is a band of imitation script, which says nothing. Anti-aircraft guns poke above the battlements, and I was barred at the entrance by soldiers. To its west, Russian carpet-bombing had left an ocean of rubble.

I slipped back into the Old City. Its streets burrowed through it in long arteries of brick and stucco, scooped with stores and workshops, and overarched by upper storeys of splintered tiles and shattered window-frames. Only rarely did the walls part on the
entrance to an arcaded caravanserai, where the merchants slept immemorially among their wares.

I walked at ease, forgetful. Children sang out broken greetings. Once an old man ran up and embraced me, crying like a clairvoyant, ‘English! English!’, and kissed my cheeks. In the bazaars, musky with spices and kebabs roasting as the Ramadan sun set, the air lilted with the songs of Iran and Kabul, and pictures of Mecca dangled alongside posters of the actress Anuhita Hemmati and defiant portraits of Ismail Khan. Jewellers–young men with quick hands–were setting in silver or iron their slips of turquoise and lapis lazuli; glass-makers were at work; and once I came upon a tiny atelier sunk in decaying walls. In its half-light men were labouring on looms at silks in russet and cream, using eggs imported from China.

Yet even in this most Persian of Afghan cities, the men (the women were airbrushed out) seemed to preserve some impalpable part of themselves untouched. Even the beggars–some stripped pitifully of half their limbs–repudiated sorrow. I never heard the arguments which rise and fall in the self-orchestrated fury of the Arab world, nor those tense disputes which mediating elders ritually dispel in China; such squabbles here would end in blood. Even without guns–they had been officially banned–men walked as if armed. Sometimes they held hands.

I wandered into side streets. Often the doors opened on near-ruin. The drains were clogged with refuse and a tangle of obsolete wires meandered overhead, snagged with children’s kites. Scarcely a car intruded. Sometimes a pony-trap clopped by, its halter sprouting claret bobbles, with women seated like ghosts behind; and once an old man tried to sell me caged partridges, loved for their fighting and their song.

I emerged by the Friday Mosque, the congested heart of the city: in its garden, inexplicably, a pair of stranded field-guns; above it, two sky-battering minarets. It was founded in 1175 by a ruler of the short-lived Ghorid dynasty, and became the pantheon of the sultans who followed. Alisher Navoi, minister to the sultan Husain Baiqara and champion of literary Turki, restored its falling sanctuary. But seventy years ago it was reported a skeleton of
shoddy brick and lost mosaic, and I entered it without expectation. Yet ever since 1943 a ceramic studio had been at work here, and now, across the six-hundred-yard sheen of its marble court, all the walls and minarets were misted in mosaic tiles whose apple green and amber, flooding among bands of inscribed lapis blue, returned it to a shining sanctity.

This stilled radiance restored me to the city I remembered. But I only once found it again. Three miles to the north-east, among the white marble tombs of Gazargah, shrine of the mystic poet Ansari, among the long-bearded Sufi guardians where Dost Mohammad sleeps, an epigraphic beauty wreathed every other stone.

A mile beyond, on a sun-burned plateau, the mass graves of the thousands killed by the Russian bombing fluttered in a forest of pennants.

‘Nobody knows what will happen now that Ismail Khan has gone.’ The young man, Jafar, spreads his arms to the park where we are sitting. He is keen to practise his English. ‘Ismail Khan created all this, got in electricity, paved the roads, even put free telephones in the streets.’

Six weeks before, the legendary mujahidin warlord had been deposed by the central government. With his army of over ten thousand and 120 tanks, he had capitulated peaceably.

Jafar looks bitter. He is a trainee doctor. His long, hooked nose descends to full lips where his beard smothers a falling chin. ‘For us Ismail Khan was a hero. Everybody loved him. When the news broke of his resignation, I was working in the hospital. We heard the crowds gathering almost at once, chanting for him, on and on. I looked out and saw them pouring down Walayat Street, and I ran out to join. They were burning United Nations offices and I was near the front when the police met us at the crossroads. At first the cordon fired into the air, over our heads. But the shouting went on. Then one of the police–it was just one man–opened fire on us, spraying his gun’–he swivelled an imaginary rifle–‘and we ran. I saw bodies falling. I got back to the hospital, and soon the
wounded started to come in. There were about thirty of them, I think, and seven dead. We dressed the wounds and gave blood transfusions, but one man was riddled with bullets, his head and abdomen. We couldn’t save him.’ A moment’s anger flares and he repeats: ‘Everybody here loves Ismail Khan. He got things done. But after his resignation he came on television and told us to stay at home and not to fight the government. I think the American ambassador told him to do that, that’s what I think. It’s the Americans behind this.’

Ismail Khan, I imagine, is waiting. The love affair between him and Herat has lasted twenty-five years, ever since he led a mutinous garrison against the Russians, and it might last a while longer. His city and provinces were the best-ordered in the country, financed by customs revenue from the Iranian border; but he was vain, it was said, and his regime was run by ex-mujahidin, who knew nothing beyond fighting; his Islamic rigour revived Taliban practices against women, and his security forces were mired in torture.

Jafar will have none of this. ‘It was not like under the Taliban. Women could go to school, work in government. Perhaps his police were harsh on them in the streets. It’s said they were. Anyone improperly dressed…But my fiancée, for instance, is in tenth grade, and she can go on to university, to study journalism. A doctor and a journalist! I like that. I told her she could do that.’

I ask uneasily: ‘What did she do in the Taliban years?’

‘Her family were refugees in Iran, and had money, so she was all right. Even in Herat women went on learning in secret classes, in their homes. But she went to proper school!’

Jafar has forgotten Ismail Khan now. He is in love. He is going to be married next year. ‘We talk on our mobile phones. She can even talk under her burka! Yesterday we talked together for
ten minutes.
’ The marvel of this turns him silent, then anxious. ‘Tell me, in your country, if a man and a woman are seen talking together, what happens? What happens if one of their parents finds out?…Nothing? There’s no dishonour?’

‘Just
talking
?’

‘The parents would go mad here. Only a husband and wife can sit and talk…’ He gets up and we start to walk in Ismail Khan’s park, which is a planted traffic-island fringed by gaudy balustrades. He says: ‘You mean, if I was in England, I could talk to any girl, and then maybe have sex with her?’

I glance at him, at his glossy black beard and black hair shelving over a narrow forehead. Our illusion of understanding is tearing apart. ‘Perhaps. If you became friends. If she wanted.’

‘You’ve had girlfriends without marriage?’

‘Yes.’ I see myself in his eyes, and don’t meet them.

He says: ‘If a man and girl were discovered like that here, they’d each get eighty lashes.’

‘And if one of them was married?’

‘Then they’d be stoned to death.’ His tone is matter-of-fact. He is remembering the Taliban. ‘But if a woman is unfaithful, her husband will kill her first. If not, her brothers will.’

‘You think this is okay?’

‘It is our law.’ He plucks a flower in passing. ‘You know, even the Taliban did good things, they kept things clean. Nobody loved them here, because they were stupid and illiterate. They left us no pleasures. But they dealt with the adulterers and homosexuals and thieves. I saw it myself.’

‘Saw what?’

‘In the stadium, I went about ten times. They shot murderers there, and once I saw a thief’s hand cut off. A doctor was nearby–no, not me–to sew up the stump. And people were happy because justice had been done. And I saw two homosexuals killed. The stadium was full that day–it usually was. A man of twenty-eight and a youth of sixteen. The Taliban had built a wall in the middle of the stadium, and the men were brought in on a truck with their hands bound. They were laid down beside the wall. Then a tractor toppled it over them and they were buried.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I was happy. Because they had done a monstrosity. Everyone was glad. People clapped and shouted
Yes, kill them! Kill them! Allah akbar!
Although others were silent.’

I too was silent, imagining something bitterly complex here. The
Taliban, raised in the Deobandi
madrasahs
of Pakistan, and separated as boys from all women, grew up to despise and fear them. In this hothouse of frustration, it has been cruelly supposed, sodomised boys grew into scarred men. Jafar says: ‘Of course there is homosexuality here, men and boys usually, but I don’t think much. And there are men who take prostitutes before they are married. But these women are not many.’ He lifts his finger. ‘Our brides should have the complete hymen. The hymen is very important. The man may have taken a prostitute, but such a woman…nobody will know her.’

He has never had a woman himself, he says. He is going to be married, and he does not know what to do. ‘We have satellite dishes so we get Western films. And there are sex videos smuggled in from Pakistan. They are the only way we know how to act.’ He kicks nervously at the earth. ‘Tell me, is it true that people can go on like that, making love for an hour? You see, as a doctor I know: our problem here is we cannot hold back. It is all too quick. One minute, maybe. Do you in the West have a way to delay? What do you call that? Yes, premature ejaculation. And the women feel nothing. They have no pleasure from sex, ninety per cent of them, I’d say.’ He examined women patients sometimes, he said–this was permitted now–and there would be nothing physically wrong. ‘And by the age of sixty our men are finished. They’re old.’

He had painted a miserable picture. His feet dragged to a halt on the path. Above all he was anxious about his bride, and his dignity. How could they move from the furtive foreplay of those phone calls into this ignorant nakedness of panic and delay?

Later I wondered at what he had said. Wandering the bazaars, I imagined the proud Afghan warriors lapsed into forlorn boys and premature dotards, while their cowled women took on a nun-like sadness. Then I remembered that a doctor hears only the casualties. And by evening the city had grown mysterious again, and the revellers in my hotel restaurant, roaring greetings and downing lamb kebabs and Mecca Cola, had returned to uncouth manhood.

Next day, down a pine-shaded alley, past a tented sentry, I go with Jafar to an immured iron gate concealing everything behind. It
seethes with armed men: a fierce, motley militia in black-and-white keffiyehs and cracked shoes. I am carrying a letter to Ismail Khan, sent by a friend in England.

We wait a long time after our message has been taken in. The gates are stuck with photographs of Ismail Khan’s son, gunned down in a confused fight with a government army commander last March. He looks like a playboy. Another poster shows one of the warlord’s lieutenants killed last month fighting the remnant of the Taliban.

Beyond the gate, as we are conducted in, the constricted din of Herat fades, and there opens up a prodigious rose garden where a house lies half invisible behind trees. Armed guards direct us forward and lurk among the rose bushes. Beneath a long, pink-stuccoed pergola, smothered in vines, some eighty men are seated down an aisle of chairs, facing one another over low tables draped in carpets. Down this gauntlet of robed and turbaned veterans we walk delicately–ushered to the centre–and I am motioned to sit opposite Ismail Khan.

He rises to greet me in soft broken English, and I merge in this timeless Eastern audience–the ruler open to his humblest subjects–and listen to its grave and (to me) incomprehensible exchanges. Ismail Khan sits on a chair embroidered with flowers, rather Victorian, a teenage bodyguard cradling a Kalashnikov behind. Under his white cap the black hair is fading to ash, and a white beard sprays beneath. His is not a typical Herati face, but broad, with a splayed nose and a look of brooding calm. His eyes are golden grey. In 1997 one of Dostum’s renegade generals had betrayed him to the Taliban, and for three years, before he escaped to Iran, he was chained in a tiny cell in near-darkness. People murmured that it had darkened his mind.

He speaks very calmly. His fingers dangle bronze-red beads. To either side the ranks of heads are turned like sunflowers towards him. The elder opposite–a village mullah–is complaining about electricity, Jafar whispers. Ismail Khan had negotiated electricity from Turkmenistan to Herat, but it has not reached the mullah’s village, and he wonders why not. For a long time Ismail Khan answers gently, rationally. At one point the mullah pipes up
unafraid, and they laugh at something. Ismail Khan is trying to explain that he no longer has the power to implement what the old man is seeking, or complete the work he has started. The mullah must apply to the new governor. Eventually the man seems to understand, and cups his hands in prayer–the whole aisle opens its hands with him–before his little delegation leaves.

I wonder what Ismail Khan is thinking. He looks contented, peaceful even, as if glad that responsibility has passed. In time, perhaps, realising he can do nothing, the delegations will dwindle. He will pay off his bodyguards, and enter old age in his rose garden. Perhaps he wants this. Perhaps he has had enough. His son is dead.