The Places in Between (26 page)

Mohammed Amir of Sang-i-zard

I woke later feeling a little better to find a girl by the fire. She looked about seventeen. Her beautiful pale face was scrunched in concentration as she crumbled dry animal dung into the hearth. Both her hair and eyebrows were very black, as though she had dyed them. She wore a gold cap wrapped in a blue embroidered turban and, over her dress of blue chintz, a purple waistcoat and a green embroidered wool cardigan. A pair of blue corduroy trousers showed beneath the skirt. She raised her head and met my eyes. I smiled. She looked at me expressionlessly and then turned and left the room.

The next day, a different girl with dark eyes watched me talk to her father. She wore a long necklace of artificial pearls over a purple waistcoat embroidered with gold and silver thread. She held the pearls in her hand and swung them slowly from side to side, staring at me all the time. I looked back as I left the room and said good-bye to her but she turned away, smiling, and did not reply.

FLAMES

That night Bushire's old uncle slept in the room with me and snored throughout the night. I woke feeling rested and more cheerful. I walked outside into bright sunshine to find the children had let Babur out of the stable and he was prancing on the roof of the castle. He did not usually respond when I called, but he came running when he saw me.

In the dusty guest room the flames were bright beneath the blackened kettle. The old uncle was warming his socks by the fire and stroking the few wispy tufts of hair that grew on his jaw and upper lip. Other Afghans mock the Hazara for being unable to grow proper beards. When we sat down to our bread and tea, I asked him about the chiefs of the area.

"I am sorry," he said, "do not judge this castle and this family by its current position. The owners are Begs, chiefs of the Blackfoot tribe of Hazara, descended from Muhammad Ali Beg Tehsildar of Sang-i-zard, Tehsildar for King Abdul Rahman, and hereditary chiefs of two thousand households. One of four great families in this valley with Daulatyar, Mir Ali Hussein Beg at Taras, and my own family at Mukhtar."

"And now?"

"They cannot afford the firewood for one stove to heat the castle guest room."

"Why?"

"Because they did not fight well in the wars."

"Were the Russians here?"

Hussein, son of Bushire Khan of Sang-i-zard

"No. The fighting was between and within villages. The Iranians gave arms to mullahs and paid them to take land away from the feudal Begs and give it to the people. This family has lost everything in the last ten years, all their flocks and all their land. This castle is all that remains."

"And who has their land now?"

"Our new commander. He lives in a house down in the bottom of the village and no one can touch him."

My host asked a man called Nadir to guide me from Sang-i-zard. When we set out from the castle, Babur blinked and turned away from the wind and I pulled my blanket up around my face. It was difficult to judge the temperature, but I guessed it was minus twenty.

Perhaps because I was rested, I was unusually aware of the landscape. A dark blue sky stretched over the snow, and where the sun fell the furrows in the earth showed like shadows on white velvet. We walked in the very center of the frozen Hari Rud for about an hour, the snow being so thick we could only guess where the banks lay. Babur the Emperor described such conditions in his first attack on the Hazara:

That winter the snow lay very deep, which rendered it dangerous to leave the common road. The banks of the stream about the ford were all covered with ice and it was impossible to pass the river at any place off the road, on account of the ice and the snow...

Tall bushes resembling dogwood stood along the Hari Rud. Their branches were orange and yellow, and they rose out of the river ice like stands of flame. There were silver-trunked willows, too, with dark brown buds and a few pale gold leaves that clattered like cicada wings in the freezing wind. As the snow melted in the sun, the Hari Rud became at first a clean turquoise ice sheet and then a torrent of black-blue water. We climbed onto the bank.

The snow crust held us for our first hours on land, but after a while we were plunging up to our knees. We began to step in the compacted footprints of people who had used the path that morning. Sometimes we passed a pair of bright nylon flags marking a martyr's grave on the hill.

Despite my protests, Nadir carried my pack for the first three hours. I had always carried my own pack in Afghanistan, but I was grateful for the rest. I took it back for the next five hours, and then we saw the coffee-colored walls of Taras castle, dwarfed by mountain slopes piled with smooth scoops of snow like ice cream.

The castle guards were keen for me to stay with them, but when I heard none of the Beg's family were at Taras, I decided to press on to Mir Ali Hussein's other castle at Katlish. I thought it would offer better food and conversation than the guard room, and I wanted to try to get a letter of recommendation from the Begs since they were the most important rulers in the valley. Nadir and the villagers tried to dissuade me, saying it was an hour till dark and four hours' walk to Katlish. But something about their tone suggested this was not true.

Babur, however, was less keen on continuing. He lay down in the snow and refused to move. I tried to pull his leash, but he remained immobile. I half lifted him and, finally, in an effort to get some movement into his exhausted limbs, dragged him stumbling down a snow slope to what I thought was a snowfield—where, to the delighted screams of the village, he and I fell through the ice into the Hari Rud.

We pressed on for the next hour, very wet. The sun had left our bank of the Hari Rud and the wind was strong. A strong mauve light played on the peaks above us. We reached Katlish just after dark. People were reluctant to find shelter for Babur but I insisted. The argument went on for some time and he must have been very cold by the time it was resolved. I was relieved to finally dry him, get him some food, put him to bed, and go inside myself.

ZIA OF KATLISH

That night I was again asked to sleep in the mosque. Zia, the twenty-year-old nephew of the feudal lord Mir Ali Hussein Beg, apologized and said it was only because his castle was unheated, but it seemed to me that visitors usually slept in the mosque. The mosque functioned not only as a chapel and a guesthouse but also as a dining hall, a conference room, and a school. The walls were of scratched mud, stained with grease, dimpled with worm casts and moth holes, and hung with a blackboard and a small embroidery of the Kabaa at Mecca. In Iran there would have been posters of Ayatollah Khomeini, but here there was no government figure to idolize, no father of the nation, no king. Nevertheless, the Beg had clearly spent money on the mosque—it had a felt carpet, three full-length windows, and plaster flowers on the ceiling.

As if to confirm the building's secular aspect, three ibex heads with curling three-foot horns hung in the atrium. The ibex, a very large mountain goat, is with the snow leopard the most revered of the Asian mountain animals. It once lived along Asia's bird-shaped mountain massif from Afghanistan to the Hazara's original homeland in Mongolia. Like the snow leopard, however, it is now almost extinct. There were certainly none left in this area.
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About forty men gathered in the mosque that evening. Zia sat at the head of the room with me on his right and the mullah on his left. The villagers were well wrapped for the winter. The older men wore hemp trousers and thick socks knitted by their wives and tied with wool at the calf. Many of the younger men wore camouflage trousers. All had put on shirts, vests, cardigans, waistcoats, and jackets, one on top of the other, and they may have had more layers underneath. They had wound their black turbans under their chins and over their ears, framing lined, tanned, and bearded faces. Villagers don't wash in the winter and there was a strong smell.

Zia wore a neat embroidered prayer hat and a fancy acrylic cardigan that looked as though it had come from a Tehran shopping arcade. His face was pale and the first clean-shaven Afghan's I had seen since Abdul Haq's. He opened the conversation. I had listened again and again to ponderous old men delivering speeches—about the goodness of Islam, the glory of the jihad, the need for medicines and development aid, and the fact that Afghanistan was destroyed—while their listeners chimed in, in chorus, on the more familiar phrases. Zia, however, seemed to think as he spoke.

"We have, I think, to be grateful for the American intervention," he said slowly, "because for a moment at least there is peace."

"There is peace because the Taliban have gone?" I asked.

"No ... The Taliban were not a trouble here. They came twice on operations to collect weapons as part of their disarmament program ... but after that they never visited the valley."

"Then who caused the violence?"

"We did ourselves."

"And the Russians," interrupted a young man.

"Yes, during the 1980s this mosque and the castle were hit by rockets from Russian attack helicopters, but we were not fighting each other. Things began to collapse after that time—people rebelled against their tribal chiefs..."

"Sang-i-zard," said the man on my right.

"Yes, in Sang-i-zard, where you stayed last night ... the Begs have lost all their land and power..."

"But the Begs haven't lost out here," chimed in the young man, and they all laughed.

Zia the Beg continued, "But there were fights also between different villages in this valley. We have killed thirty men from Sang-i-zard and they have killed ten of us, so we still have a blood vendetta with them. For twenty-five years we have not been able to walk from end to end of the road that you are walking because it has been too dangerous for us. It is only safe for you because you are a stranger. We could be killed if we went to Sang-i-zard. And the same if we walked east. But ... there has been no killing in two months. People are too scared of the Americans."

"What next?" I asked.

"We don't know," said a villager.

"We are waiting to see whether the government will force us to return the land and the flocks that we have stolen from each other over the last twenty-five years," said Zia. "That will be difficult. And yet without it the vendettas will continue."

"I disagree," said a villager. "Are you a Muslim?"

No one was afraid to interrupt, tease, or contradict Zia, though he was their feudal lord. Everyone felt free to start their own conversations or ask me a question. It seemed even a decision to rob another village, or kill, would happen after discussion, reasoning, and disagreement. But when dinner was announced, everyone fell silent.

Zia asked four men to go to the castle kitchen and another to spread a cloth and bread in front of the two of us. They moved immediately. Despite the chatter, Zia was clearly respected. One man entered with a silver ewer and platter, poured warm water over our hands, and dried them with a clean white towel. Others carried in rice, a large bowl heaped with the best cuts of mutton selected for me, a plate with ribs and kidneys, a mound of fresh cold yogurt, and Cadbury's Eclair sweets from Iran. When I finished the yogurt, more yogurt was brought.

In the last six days and nights in Afghan houses, Babur and I had been fed only bread for breakfast and lunch. We had occasionally had plain rice at supper, but we had eaten no meat, vegetables, or fruit. Now I was tasting the food of a great feudal chief. It was far beyond the means of the men who sat watching. I was very grateful for the generosity and for the protein. I wanted to take some meat to Babur, but meat was very precious and the villagers would have been angry to see it fed to a dog.

At dawn, the young men remained on their mattresses for an extra half hour while the older men prayed. I stepped outside. The light, in a curving blaze of orange and lurid yellow, reached from the eastern ridge, strong and high, into a mass of gray cloud. A descending magpie swept his wings forward so that he hovered above the snow crust before touching the ground. Everyone was hungry and carried a gun, and I had not seen a bird since Kamenj. For breakfast, because I had mentioned that we ate eggs in Britain, fried eggs were presented on a bed of onions, and two men sat beside me ensuring my teacup was filled and each cup stirred with generous helpings of sugar.