The Places in Between (25 page)

I recited and followed this song-of-the-places-in-between as a map. I chanted it even after I had left the villages, using the list as a credential. Almost everyone recognized the names, even from a hundred kilometers away. Being able to chant them made me half belong—reassuring hosts who were not sure whether to take me in and suggesting to anyone who thought of attacking me that I was linked to powerful names. But they were the names of living men and different names provoked different reactions. "How do you know Mir Ali Hussein Beg? Who told you to call Haji Nasir 'Beg'?"

All the men on the list lived in mud forts, mostly on the valley floor by the Hari Rud River but occasionally high on the slopes above their villages. They were the old tribal chieftains of the Hazara people and the most senior of them were called "Begs" like Babur's ancient chancellor Qasim Beg, a Turkic word for a leader.

THE GREETING OF STRANGERS

The Aimaq had frequently complained about Hazara hospitality, but I had been very impressed by the welcome in the mosque at Daulatyar. That afternoon I met a group of ten-year-old boys on the outskirts of a village and asked one where Sang-i-zard was. He said he didn't know, which surprised me. It was supposed to be close. As soon as I turned he flung a stone, which hit me on the back of the head.

I shouted, "How dare you? Where is your father?"

"I don't have one."

I tried to catch him, but he ran up the hill followed by his friends. When I turned again, they all threw stones at me and howled the Aabag wolf cry to make their dogs attack Babur, sending a pack in full tongue streaming down the slope toward us. And while Babur raged and I lashed out with my stick, an old man from the village sat calmly watching.

This was the first time in eighteen months of walking anyone had thrown a stone at me and it was only my second Hazara village. I ran up the hill toward the grandfather, with the children sprinting away in front of me. "Why don't you stop your children," I shouted. "Is this how Hazara treat a traveler?"

The old man shrugged. Various adults emerged from their houses to watch. Another village dog leaped onto Babur's back, and I hit him hard with my stick so that he limped away. The men said, "Kids will be kids. Why did you bring a dog? It's your fault. That's what encouraged them." I wondered if they would have reacted any differently if one of the stones had cut open my head.

***

Half an hour farther along the road, I reached a small bazaar where three young Hazara men were standing. One came straight up to me and smiled a little too easily and asked whether I was tired and where I was going. Usually people were wary of me and the dog, but he was very confident. I answered and walked on.

After a few minutes, the path turned into a narrow gorge beside the Hari Rud. The sun was about to set. There were no houses, just a scree slope and the cliff falling on my left toward the water. I looked back and noticed the three men were following me. I continued. There was a sudden crash behind me. I started, turned, and saw they had dropped a boulder into the river. I stopped and waited for them.

"What is your name?" I asked the one who had spoken to me.

"My name?" said the man, smiling more broadly.

"Yes. What is your name?"

"My name is ... Muhammad."

"And yours?" I asked the second.

"Aziz," he said just as the first man said, "No, his name is Hussein."

"What village are you from?"

"One of the villages ahead."

"What is its name?"

"Its name?"

"Yes. What is the name of your village?"

"Emir Beg."

"Where is Sang-i-zard?"

"Two days' walk away."

I slowed my pace and so did they, and when I stopped to tie my shoelace they gathered around. One of them was whispering to the others. I turned and saw a man coming along the path, three hundred yards behind us. I started walking back toward him.

The three men sauntered on a little way and then stopped, waiting to see what I would do. The man coming toward me was an old Hazara with a wispy white beard.

"Peace be with you," I said to the man. He was quite old.

"And with you," he muttered, and tried to step past me as though he did not like being stopped on this path at dusk.

"I am from Scotland," I said. "I am a traveler, a guest in your country. Can I walk with you?"

He took a couple of steps as though he was going to ignore me and then stopped and looked at me and Babur. "Yes. Walk with me."

I walked on beside the old man and the three men began walking again ahead of us.

"Those three," I said, "are they from one of the villages ahead?"

"No, they are from the village behind us. They are bad men."

"And what is the village's name?"

"Mukhtar."

It began snowing. We walked together in silence. After a few minutes we reached a group of houses. The three men turned around and saw I was still walking with the old man. They were not wearing coats and could not have been comfortable standing in the snowstorm.

After a moment, they shuffled toward a house, went inside, and closed the door.

"Where is Sang-i-zard?" I asked.

"About half an hour's walk away. Would you like to stay with me in this village?" asked the old man. "This snowstorm will not stop for a couple of days."

"Thank you, but I should keep going."

"God be with you."

The snow kept falling and the three men did not follow me.

It was twilight when I saw a village on a slope on the far bank of the Hari Rud River. The valley was narrow and its sides were steep. Dark, troubled patches of quickly moving water showed through the broken river ice. There was no bridge. Babur and I crossed thirty feet on a narrow, snow-dusted causeway of ice, then climbed through the snow to the edge of the village. The houses were low mud huts, cut into the hill. Snow lay in drifts up the walls and over the flat roofs, covering the twigs and the dried dung that had been stored for fuel. The snow on the path had melted, revealing a mixture of mud and human excrement. Perhaps because it was so cold, there was no smell.

This was Sang-i-zard. It had no canals, gardens, or avenues of trees such as those near Obey. The fields were narrow. Qasim had called the irrigated flatlands "poor." This was a much poorer place. We walked up the steep path to the castle gate, followed by a crowd of children.

The castle walls were forty feet high. At each corner stood a round tower topped with battlements. Through the gate, which was twice the height of a man, a group of women with pale Chinese faces came running at the children and hit them with thorn switches. The children scattered. I stepped into the courtyard, which seemed very small for such a large castle.

I showed the eldest woman my introduction letters from Abdul Rauf Ghafuri, the wealthy commander of Daulatyar. "You can leave your dog here but you cannot stay here," she said. "My husband is away. You will have to sleep in the mosque."

I settled Babur in a stable and returned to the mosque at the bottom of the hill, where I took off my wet socks. I was drenched and the mosque was cold. As soon as I sat down on a prayer rug I began to feel ill. I wondered when I could change out of my wet clothes. For an hour I watched the prayers and answered questions about my journey until a man called Akbar asked me to stay in his house.

He lived at the edge of the village in a two-story house with a pair of rooms above and a large sheep pen below. Only one sheep was in the pen.

I took off my
shalwar kemis,
put on my extra clothes, and hung the wet set near the stove. Then Akbar fed me a rich bean soup. As I ate, his women gathered along the walls to watch me. One of them was breast-feeding her baby. Akbar's grandmother asked me where I came from. The Aimaq had told me, "The Hazara have a quite uncivilized attitude to women." Perhaps they were referring to the old myth that the Hazara lent their wives to their guests. Perhaps they merely meant that Hazara women talk to guests.

This was the first time I had been allowed in the same room as a woman in an Afghan village. I wondered if this was not one of the few legacies of Mongol customs among the Hazara. In a Mongol tent, women play a prominent, respected, and noisy part in conversation.

On his guest room wall, Akbar had a photograph of himself taken five years earlier. It had been hand-tinted in the studio so that his pink cheeks and lime green jacket were highlighted by the backdrop of a vivid tropical sunset sky.

One of the sons of Bushire Khan of Sang-i-zard

LEAVES ON THE CEILING

Nine times during the night I had to clamber over Akbar, who was sleeping by the door. I groped my way down the unlit stairs and past the sheep pen, opened the heavy wooden doors, and stumbled into the continuing snowstorm. The candles in the village had been extinguished shortly after dusk and there was no light anywhere. My dysentery was so bad I twice soiled my trousers before I could get to the door. I was losing a lot of fluid and none of the antibiotics or antispasmodics I was taking seemed to be curing me. The nearest primary medical care was three days' walk in the wrong direction and they would not have the appropriate drugs. I had to hope I could recover by myself. I wondered whether this was going to be the way I died.

It had now been snowing for most of three days and it was still snowing hard the next morning. The villagers insisted I not try to walk through the storm and, for once, I was pleased to take their advice. I was invited to rest in the castle guest room and spent most of the day on my back on the floor. The castle could not afford much fuel and therefore did not light the stove although I was allowed to light a small fire. It was as cold as any Scottish castle. I wore my coat but I kept shivering.

The castle ceiling, which I stared at for hours, was made from a frame of poplar branches, their brown, curled leaves still attached. The mud floor was partly covered by a shabby striped blanket, two pieces of dark felt, and a small cheap rug in the Bokhara style. Mattresses were stacked in the corner under a grimy white sheet. The walls were undecorated except for a photograph of my absent host, the feudal lord Bushire Khan, with a pencil-thin mustache and trilby hat. He looked like a 1930s Shanghai gangster.

My fever made everything slow and indistinct. I could not follow a train of thought for more than a moment without it collapsing into surreal and disconnected events. I kept seeing myself stumbling through snow with occasional interruptions by angry dogs. I wondered if it was going to be the same all the way to Kabul.

That afternoon a young man shook me awake. "I am sick, what can you give me?" he asked.

"I am not a doctor," I said.

"You have medicines. We have seen you take them."

"What is wrong with you?" I asked.

"My whole body is aching," he replied.

I gave him two of my eight Ibuprofen tablets and closed my eyes. I was woken again by an ancient lady dressed in what seemed to be seven layers of printed cotton cloth. She was seated on the ground with her thin legs stuck out in front of her. "I am sick," she said.

"What is wrong with you?"

"My whole body is aching."

I took out my six remaining Ibuprofen and gave her two. She snatched the other four as well. I took them back.

She moaned at me about her pain and the unkindness of the world, so I found a Panadol at the bottom of my bag and gave her that.

A man with a scarred face entered, stooping under the low lintel. He was called Mohammed Amir and he was wearing faded camouflage trousers and a black bomber jacket. He lectured me on the drought, the wrecked fields, and the empty wells, and made me write down statistics about the harvest: "eight thousand tokm-roi-Zamin," I wrote in my diary. I didn't understand what the words meant except they had something to do with land yields. Then he asked me to get help from international organizations in Kabul and requested some pills for the wife of a friend. He said she had very bad diarrhea and I handed over my last course of antibiotics—gloomily because I felt I needed them myself. He asked me to draw him and I did, although I found it difficult to concentrate on the page.