The Places in Between (29 page)

Yakawlang

I climbed into this blaze of color, but underfoot the mountains faded into somber shades of gray, khaki, and rust. We reached the stream and valley of Yakawlang at sunset, and at the same moment the snow began to fall. On the valley floor the pale yellow of the corn stubble was dusted with white, the hills had turned the smoky pink of a Ching vase, and the mist gathered on the peaks in the thick waves of a classical Chinese painting. The air was alive with snowflakes.

Babur writes of his arrival:

The people of Yakawlang, who had heard of us as we descended, carried us to their warm houses, brought out fat sheep for us, a superfluity of hay and grain for our horse, with abundance of wood and dried dung to kindle our fires. To pass from cold and snow into such a village and its warm houses, on escaping from want and suffering, to find such plenty of good bread and fat sheep as we did, is an enjoyment that can be conceived only by such as have suffered similar hardships or endured such heavy distress.

I entered Yakawlang pacing fast, swathed in my blanket, with Babur behind me. It was now dark. I hammered on a number of gates but, although I could see lights within, no one opened their doors to me. At the fifth compound a man opened a shutter and when he heard I needed a bed, told me to go to the Médecins Sans Frontières office at the top of the hill. We did so. As soon as I knocked the gate of the MSF compound was opened by an Australian male nurse. He looked at me in surprise and then led me to a new clean room built into the side of the valley. There, I was welcomed. Lola, a Spanish doctor, gave me some pig fat for Babur. I was offered a hot shower and then Petr, a Czech from the People in Need Foundation, sat with me as I ate cornflakes, peanut butter, honey, and Marmite, and drank hot chocolate and coffee.

The next morning I walked through the bazaar to look at the "warm houses" that had welcomed Babur. I found only charred, empty shells. Yakawlang had been one of the largest towns in Hazarajat, with a literate and politically engaged population. The Taliban attacked the town in 1998 and executed four hundred men against the clinic wall. Since then 75 percent of the population had either died or fled.

In the shells of what had once been shops in the lower bazaar, men had set up trestle tables with small awnings. In one there were cracker boxes, in another the hanging carcass of a cow. But it was mostly rubble, filled with the fresh feces of men and dogs. I walked past shop after shop without ceiling or upper walls, black with soot. The smoke from the fire must have filled the narrow valley, and the rattle of the firing squad's automatic weapons would have echoed off the steep walls.

The MSF house into which I had been welcomed was probably the most remote and isolated Médecins Sans Frontières operation in Afghanistan. The staff had flown to Kabul in a giant Antonov plane a month earlier and had driven into Yakawlang when the passes were open. Before their arrival the district had no medical facilities. They had opened nine clinics, including one by the caves in Zarin. Replacement staff had arrived just before the passes were closed. Some of the staff due leave had been marooned for two weeks in Yakawlang, unable to get to Bamiyan.

Since it was only three or four days by foot to Bamiyan, I suggested they walk with me rather than waiting for the passes to clear, but they wanted me instead to travel by vehicle with them. The Australian nurse had seen a horse and its rider cut in half on the path ahead, and warned me that the path was heavily mined. The Spanish doctor, Lola, warned me that I would have to cross a very large snow plateau, in which I would not see a house for thirty kilometers. She had just amputated the frostbitten leg of an Afghan soldier who had tried to cross the pass, and she thought she would have to take off one of his comrades' legs that afternoon. She reminded me to take aspirin if I began to develop frostbite.

They were very generous hosts and I was sorry to leave them. So was Babur. MSF had adopted a puppy and it ran around him in circles, yapping at his heels, trying to make him play. He wandered ponderously around on the roof of the compound, pretending the puppy didn't exist and occasionally giving a gruff bark if it bit him too hard. Play for him, when it happened, was a solitary activity, in which he ran far ahead and rolled in the snow. But he had been very well fed. I hoped he had recovered his strength sufficiently to reach Bamiyan, because there the roads were open and he would be able to travel ahead by vehicle and wait for me in Kabul.

Part Six

I am the grave of Biton, traveler:
If from Torone to Amphipolis you go
Give Nicagoras this message: his one son
Died in a storm, in early winter, before sunrise.

—Nikainetos, third century
B.C.

Day 26—Yakawlang to Band-e-Amir

Day 27—Band-e-Amir to Ghorak

Day 28—Ghorak to Shaidan

Day 29—Shaidan to Bamiyan

THE INTERMEDIATE STAGES OF DEATH

From the ridge a mile beyond Yakawlang, I looked back. The charred houses were concealed by distance, absorbed into the hills and the lines of poplars and willow. After the rest and meat at Yakawlang, Babur started strongly, moving more quickly than me and pulling me up the first few slopes. But soon he was tired again. After two hours, on the final climb from the Firuzbabar plain to the long snow plateau, I saw my first men of the day. They were leading a donkey loaded with a man on a stretcher. I assumed they were taking a relative to the Yakawlang clinic. But as I drew level, I saw he was beyond hospitals.

A glistening piece of pink flesh still clung to one cheek, but his eyes were gone and only a thin tuft of gray hair was left on the back of his skull. Enough tendons remained to hold his gray jawbone in place. His knees were together, his arms stretched out stiff to either side, his head slightly raised. His hands were well preserved and the wrinkles on his fingers suggested he had been old. He was wearing a tattered brown homespun jacket and two transparent plastic bags, tied at his wrists, as gloves, to keep the cold away. They had not worked. The men had found him on the snow plateau, frozen to death.

They did not know who he was, only that he had been walking from Bamiyan to Yakawlang. Because he was traveling alone on foot they assumed he was a poor man from a remote area. He might have been on his way to visit his family for the Eid festival. It was Eid that day, and they had missed their own festival to take the man to the district headquarters.

I had not seen this intermediate stage of decay before, only the newly dead and the skeleton. I wished the two men luck, then continued on to the plateau the old man had been crossing. A cold wind rose. The footprints on the snow path were old. After two or three hours, very conscious of the plain stretching unbroken to the horizon on every side, I stopped for some crackers and water and began to shiver, aware of my wet feet and being alone. I was suddenly defeated and I felt instinctively that I did not have the energy to make it to Kabul. Yet I rose to my feet and began walking, slowly at first and then increasingly quickly, dragging Babur behind me, wondering when my muscles would stop moving.

At sunset, having seen no humans since the corpse, we reached three large terraces of snow so flat I realized they were a chain of frozen lakes. A waterfall had frozen into bloated stalactites streaked with intense copper oxide green and turquoise blue and sulfur yellow and creamy with snow where they struck the water. The sun sank into the straight cleft of the cliff behind me and the colored alchemy of the ice drained into twilight.

I saw a village across the lakes, but I didn't turn toward it. Instead I pressed on toward a wall dividing the upper lake from the lower. After wanting to stop three hours earlier, I now wanted to walk across the plain. I thought of the stars over the fresh snow and the size of the plain and the peace of it. I was entranced by my forward movement. But Babur lay down in the snow. I struggled with him and pleaded, but he would not move. Finally I gave up and followed him toward a house, which we reached just after dark.

This place was Band-e-Amir. The decayed mudroom in which we stayed had once been a guesthouse. Until the Soviet invasion, the lakes had been a tourist destination, and thereafter Russian soldiers had come here on leave. I was my host's first foreign paying guest in twelve years. My money bought five flat fishes he had caught through an ice hole in the lake. He fried them and served them with bread. He said I was lucky. The Taliban had fished by dynamiting the lake and few fish were left.

WINGED FOOTPRINTS

The next morning I walked across the frozen lake and, standing in the very center, looked back at a mosque carved into a cliff the color of elm wood. A smooth layer of powder covered the ice, broken only by a single set of footprints and a single set of paw prints.

Babur and I climbed up the facing cliff onto the snow plateau we had been crossing the previous day. After a few minutes, it seemed I had never been so alone or anywhere so silent. The only sounds were the creak of my staff and my steps. I could see nothing across the whole circle of the plateau except our tracks in the snow and, behind them, the mountain peaks. The snow was light and ruffled under my boots, and when I looked back a slender feather flared out from each heel mark. As we continued, the winged footprints and the oblong grooves of the staff changed shape, freezing and melting in the sun.

I stopped, sat down, got up, walked ten more minutes, and then, because I felt exhausted, sat down again, half buried in deep powder. My feet were wet, my hands were cold, and the wind moved in a fine white mist over the surface of the snow. I lifted my sunglasses and looked through sudden light at a landscape shrinking, contorting, corroding, dissolving. There was no winged footprint or horizon in the even glare. I could not remember why I was walking.

I was sick, my muscles were stiff. The snow formed a bright clean cushion, perfectly shaped to my back. Lying back, I felt warm and at ease. I closed my eyes and smiled. I had done enough. It occurred to me that no one could criticize me for staying here. I half opened my eyes and the sun seemed particularly brilliant; the unbroken powder stretched without end. It was a very private place and here, buried in the snow with only my head in the sun, my body would not be disturbed for days. I knew villages lay ahead, but there seemed no point in trying to reach them.

Beside me, Babur scuttled snow with his large paws. He buried his nose in the powder, emerged blinking with a white beard on his black muzzle, then lay down heavily, craning his head to the side to lick the ice. After a few minutes, he sat up on his haunches and then walked stiffly to where I was sitting. I could feel his warm breath on my neck as he sniffed carefully around my collar, and gently pushed his nose against my ear. When I did not respond, he backed away, watched me, approached again, and finally began to walk away across the snow plain, occasionally looking over his shoulder. When he was two hundred yards ahead he stopped, turned, and barked once. His matter-of-factness made me feel that I was being melodramatic. If he was going to continue, so would I. I stood and followed in his tracks.

After eight kilometers, we reached a small hamlet between Subzil and Kuh-I-Kinuti where we were given bread and tea in a house the villagers said was "poor." It was. Most houses had at least one colored rug on the floor, some acrylic blankets, and a brightly decorated box in which a bride brought her possessions. But this floor was covered in undyed goat's wool, the trunk was plain tin, and the blankets were home-walked felt.
⁵⁶

From the hamlet we had to climb again. Babur's foreleg was very stiff. Leading me off the plain seemed to have used up his strength. I walked on ahead, hoping that when he saw himself left behind in an empty waste of snow he would catch up. He didn't, however. He slowed almost to a halt—limping step by step toward me and hanging his head—and finally just lay down. I walked back and talked to him a little. At 140 pounds he was too heavy to carry, and at this pace we would take a month to reach Bamiyan. I tied him to the leash and set off pulling him behind me, faster than he wanted to go. I had to pull him at least as far as Bamiyan if I was to have a chance of getting him by vehicle to Kabul and a vet.

We were following a watercourse and I was keen to get Babur some water, but the ice must have been eighteen inches thick and however often I drove my steel-shod staff into it, I was not able to break through. Higher up, however, the ice was thinner. I called Babur. "Come on, sweet, come on, my darling ... come on—there's a good dog—water...," but Babur simply lay on the bank with his head between his paws, looking at the mountains. I tried to pull him down and he pulled back. He had refused to drink from the lake at Band-e-Amir, perhaps because of the chemicals in the water. We had a whole day without water ahead.

I squatted by the hole I had made in the ice and again splashed the water and dribbled some on his nose. He turned away, grimacing, but something penetrated and eventually he moved heavily down to the river and drank. After a couple of minutes, he straightened up, still dribbling, and looked around. I remained squatting. He lowered his head and drank again.