The Places in Between (22 page)

Then they sat leaning against the walls with their blankets draped over their knees against the cold, looking at me with solemn, half-awake eyes. Like Habibullah, they asked me questions that sounded anthropological but were based on Islamic practice: "In Scotland, can a widow remarry? How much of her husband's wealth can she keep? Can she marry her husband's brother?"

The mullah told me he had recited the
mariam sura
about Mary, the mother of Jesus, to show how much Muslims loved Jesus. It was the sura inscribed on the minaret of Jam.

I went outside. A thin band of yellow light had appeared on the eastern ridge and the snow glowed under a dark sky. I gave Babur a scratch and he stretched elaborately, groaned, rolled, and stood. Facing south, he greeted the morning with four gruff barks. This was the village where Dr. Paende's brother had been shot. There were signs that the graveyard on the hill had been recently excavated. Almost every village I passed was digging for antiques, often in old graves. Villagers showed me corroded spearheads, incised terra-cotta pots, and bronze bangles they had removed from the wrists of skeletons.

Dr. Amruddin, my host in Ghar three days earlier, had been the first man to take me into the private quarters of an Afghan house. As we entered the dark room lit by a single oil lamp, women scattered into the shadows. But I saw that they wore pillbox caps and bright scarves, and had thickened their eyebrows with black dye. Later Amruddin brought out highly stylized female heads that formed the tops of clay beakers he had excavated on the hill. They were decorated with white slip on a dark brown background or with bright yellow on a red background. Their eyebrows were exaggerated bands of black glaze. I was shown the same beaker heads, with the same eyebrows and the same sharp chins, in many villages along the route.

West of Dr. Paende's house, we passed the "snake stone" at Dahan-e-Choqur, a four-meter-high pillar of coarse mud and gravel with a flat head arched forward like a python's. Villagers had found a pre-Islamic burial site beside it. Snake cults are the earliest surviving religions in the Indian Himalayas,
⁴¹
and I wondered if one had been here too.

But again the villagers were not interested in recording or preserving historical evidence. They were digging up things from very different periods. They had found people buried eight or nine to a grave with wooden bowls and they had found tiny mud houses with pottery. But were these sites related? Who made the bowls that depicted men on horseback carrying lances? Were they the same men whose lances and helmets and shields villagers had found?

I spent half an hour handling a fragment from a vase that must once have been two feet in diameter. It was decorated in black, cream, red, and brown. In the center of a circle neatly drawn in black on white were two isosceles triangles, one equilateral triangle with a ribbed edge, a spiral, an oblong, and a human eye. The geometric forms were elegantly balanced by the surreal eye. The design was presumably pre-Islamic, but again there was no clue as to which Afghan culture had been responsible for its strange and confident symbolic composition.

Bismillah's son

LITTLE LORD

The only feudal lord to whom I spoke at length between Jam and Chaghcharan was a twelve-year-old.
⁴²
He had been riding for a month with a small group of retainers, having been summoned from Pakistan to meet his father, Rais Salam Khan. I met him in the village of Beidon, where I was shown the Mongol arrowheads. His father, a brother-in-law of Commandant Haji Mohsin Khan of Kamenj, was not a popular man. A number of villagers told me he had stolen land and collaborated with the Taliban, and was now in hiding because he had killed some of Ismail Khan's men. But his twelve-year-old boy was riding toward Chaghcharan like a young prince.

Six bodyguards followed the boy into the room in which I was sitting. I stood to greet him, and he acknowledged this by putting his small hand in mine before taking the senior position in the room. His long fawn coat—identical to the one worn by his uncle Haji Mohsin—emphasized how small he was. I felt very large and unwashed. He introduced himself in an unbroken singsong voice, then added in English, "It is rather dirty here. Are you not displeased?"

"I like it very much. Do you not?"

"I am not really familiar with this. I study at a boarding school in Pakistan. A madrassah for Koran and English." He stroked the black down on his cheeks. I had not heard English for a fortnight. "A most excellent school. I like Pakistan very much. We have a big house in Peshawar. But I fear these people are only village people. They are not educated or civilized people. Yes," he concluded, "I prefer Pakistan."

"Well, you mustn't say so. They would be disappointed."

"I'm afraid they would," he said, frowning, "but then they cannot speak English and you would not tell them what I said? Please."

"Of course not."

"Good. I like you."

"Why are you here?"

"Because my father summoned me. I have not been in Afghanistan for four years. This is all quite unfamiliar to me. I have had to come in from Quetta to Herat. I think my father is in trouble. He wanted me to return to help. I would rather remain in school. But I am already twelve and I am the eldest son. What can I do?"

"Where are your brothers?"

"In Pakistan. Tell me, please—where are you going?"

"To Chaghcharan."

"Then you should travel with me. I am going to Chaghcharan. You can keep me company."

"When are you going?"

"I will arrive there in about a fortnight. It is not safe at the moment. We are going to visit some of my father's estates before I join him there. You will come with me. I can practice my English and you will stay with my father and me in Chaghcharan."

"I am afraid I would like to be in Chaghcharan sooner than that."

"How soon?"

"Three days."

"But how can you go so fast? You don't have a horse. I will give you my horse."

"Thank you, but really I must walk."

"I had hoped you would be my friend. I have no friends here. They are all very old."

An old man appeared at the door and whispered "Your Excellency" to the boy.

"This is my retainer," said the boy. "He is a fine man who knows many things. You must meet him. Abdul, this is Rory, a Scotsman, who is walking across Asia."

"Peace be with you," said Abdul. "But your Excellency, it is time for us to go. It is getting dark and the path will be dangerous for us."

"Yes. Yes. Well then I hope to see you in Chaghcharan."

I never saw him again, and when I last heard, his father was still on the run from the coalition and from Ismail Khan.

Perhaps because I was sick, I was often irritated by villagers and village hospitality. On the fourteenth day, when I came off the snow plains after five hours' walking and turned into a village hoping to get lunch, I was left standing in the snow with my pack on my back for half an hour while the headman decided whether to speak to me and another villager told me I would never make it to Barra Khana by dark. Finally I shouted, "Right, that's it. If there's no welcome here, I'm off to Barra Khana now," and began to walk away. Only then did the headman invite me in and give me some dry bread. After the meal I found a gully, a necessity with diarrhea, and half the village followed to watch me defecate. Back in the village, the headman's son asked if he could try my camera and proceeded to finish the roll of film by pointing the lens at the ground and clicking again and again. I now had only one roll to see me to Kabul. I was angry for the rest of the day. That night I dreamed I was buying a plane ticket to Venice.

During the day, before reaching Chaghcharan, Babur and I were alone again, following a track into a snow plain and squinting into the morning sun. Babur paused frequently to chase smells in the cold wind or to relieve himself. I turned around a number of times to take in the rich light on the low hills, to look at our footsteps in the snow, or to readjust my pack. Twenty minutes passed before we found our stride and settled into the silence and the space. There was no birdsong and the high, dark blue sky was empty. The only sound was the regular groan of my pack and the creak of firm snow beneath our feet.

We reached a village. The next village was fifteen kilometers away and I wanted to let Babur drink. Off the path, the snow was knee-deep and Babur walked carefully in my footprints. I wondered if he was worried about mines. The Hari Rud was frozen, and it took a number of blows to break the ice with the stump of my staff. Babur simply stood, head up, staring at the mountains. I tried to pull him down but he pulled back. We had found no water the afternoon before, and I knew we had a day without water ahead. I squatted by the ice hole, splashed the water, and dripped some on his nose. Eventually, he spread his front legs in the snow, cautiously stretched his neck forward, and began to drink. He drank for three minutes.

When we reemerged from the snowfields onto the track, we were stopped by a man carrying a Kalashnikov and leading a group of young men. "Hey, boy! Where are you taking that dog?"

"To Kabul," I said.

He came closer and stared at me. But not too close, because he was wary of Babur.

"You're a foreigner, aren't you?" the man said.

"Yes, I'm from Inglistan [Britain]."

"From Hindustan [India]...," he said thoughtfully.

"No, Inglistan."

"Yes." Most people in this area had not heard of Britain, though they had heard of America. Some had even heard of the World Trade Center, but they had no real concept of what it had been or why the coalition had bombed Afghanistan. The man paused for a moment and then suddenly shouted, "Give me your dog."

"No, this is my dog. He goes with me. I'm taking him to Inglistan."

"Give me your dog, and you can go free," he said again. Babur and the crowd watched us impassively.

"What is this?" I shouted back. "Who do you think you are? This dog was given to me by Bismillah of Barra Khana. I was a guest in his house last night. He is my close friend. If you have any questions, you talk to Bismillah." I barely knew Bismillah and Babur was not Bismillah's dog, but the man seemed suddenly uncertain, perhaps because a man with an unclean animal was speaking with the confidence of a village headman.

"What is this? Who is this?" he said to the young men.

"We heard a foreigner was in Barra Khana at Bismillah's last night."

"And this is Bismillah's dog."

"Perhaps..."

"It is, indeed," I said coldly. "Now if you'll excuse me...," and I stepped past him. Babur was lying down but I was in too much of a hurry to plead with the dog. I yanked at his collar, dragging him through the snow until he found his feet and we strode off. Shouting at people could be dangerous. For ten minutes, I waited to hear a voice or a shot from behind me, but neither came.

FROGS

I reached Chaghcharan, the capital of Ghor, just before dusk, after a lonely walk down a series of gorges. The town consisted of a scattering of mud and brick compounds alongside the river. I walked toward the airfield to the east of town. Fair-haired men in jeans carrying large automatic weapons were feeding an Afghan dog corned beef hash from a British army ration pack.

They watched me walking in with Babur, stinking in Afghan clothes, and one of them said, "Who the fuck is this?" in a cockney accent.

I replied in English, and, when they had stopped laughing, one of them asked if I was working for the British government. I said I wasn't. I was on holiday.

"Like fuck you're on holiday," he said, and they laughed some more.

I had heard about the men at the Chaghcharan airfield in many of the villages along the way. The villagers liked them. The headman of Barra Khana, Bismillah, had said, "British soldiers have chests as broad as horses. We wish there were more of them to keep the peace. Every morning they hook their feet over the bumper of their jeep, put their hands on the ground, and push themselves up and down on their hands two hundred times without stopping. I don't know why."

These men were not in a position to discuss what they were doing, so I didn't ask questions and didn't hang around. They were in a difficult situation—dropped by helicopter and left for months in the middle of Afghanistan with the nearest backup two hundred kilometers away—but they didn't show it. They brewed me a cup of Tetley's tea with milk and gave me a giant bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and I told them a little about my journey. They seemed to enjoy the story. They were funny and relaxed. I liked them and it was refreshing to talk English. When I left, they gave me an airport thriller, some rations, some Wagon Wheels in a Marks & Spencer bag, and some meat for Babur. It was a fine welcome to Chaghcharan.

The Taliban captured Chaghcharan in 1995 and immediately executed sixty-four Northern Alliance soldiers who had surrendered their weapons. On October 20, 2001, three months before my arrival, the Taliban retreated. Some of the people of Chaghcharan came out to celebrate prematurely. A returning Taliban column saw them in the main bazaar and killed forty-four between midday and two in the afternoon.