The Places in Between (3 page)

As I walked out an old man with a bushy white beard looked at the stick.

"You're carrying it for the wolves, I presume," he said.

"And the humans."

He nodded.

"What do you call this type of stick?" I asked.

"A
dang,
" he said.

An old man

WHETHER ON THE SHORES OF ASIA

I had told the Security Service I was crossing Afghanistan in the footsteps of Babur, the first Emperor of Mughal India, but this was misleading. Initially I had decided to walk the central route from Herat to Kabul because it was shorter and because the Taliban were still fighting on the main southern route. I was starting in January because I did not want to wait five months for the snow to clear. It was only after I had made my decision that I discovered Babur had also traveled the central route on foot in January and recorded the journey in his diary.

I wasn't keen to read Babur's diary. I did not like medieval texts, with their references to faded theologies and forgotten viziers. I wanted to focus on modern Afghanistan, not its history, and I couldn't see the relevance of a man who was a contemporary of the Aztecs.

The beginning of Babur's diary was as bad as I had anticipated:

Ush is situated to the South-East of Andejan, but more to the east and distant from Andejan four farsangs by the road ... The mother of Yunus Khan was either the daughter or the granddaughter of Sheikh Nur-ed-din Beg, who was one of the Amirs of Kipchak and had been brought forward by Taimur Beg.

As I read, however, the geography and the genealogy receded and a narrative emerged. Babur was born in 1483 as the prince of a poor, remote kingdom in Uzbekistan. By the time he was twenty, he had lost all his land in Central Asia and was hiding in the mountains with a few followers, most of whom were on foot and armed only with clubs, but at twenty-two he had recovered and conquered Kabul. That year he visited Herat, then the most civilized city in the Islamic world. He returned from Herat to Kabul on the central route, almost dying in the snow on the way. Then he pressed east to conquer Delhi and found the Mughal dynasty. He died the ruler of one of the largest and wealthiest empires in the world.

He tells this adventure story with impressive modesty. What he did was very dangerous, but he never draws attention to this. Instead, he focuses on the people he meets and uses portraits of individuals to suggest a whole society. He pays more attention to his contemporary world than to legends or ancient history and he is a careful observer. He mentions hangovers and agricultural techniques, poetry and economics, pederasty and garden design with the sense of humor and experience of a man who has fought, traveled, and governed. He does not embroider anecdotes to make them neater, funnier, more personal, or more symbolic. Unlike most travel writers, he is honest.

At times it seems the only thing missing from his story is himself. He never explains what drives him to live this extraordinary life and take these kinds of risks. He does not describe his emotions, and as a result he can seem distant and the episodes of his life, repetitive. Confronted by dead bodies or people trying to kill him, he writes in increasingly dispassionate and impersonal prose. But this restraint only emphasizes the extraordinary nature of his experiences. This is his attempt to defend Akhsi at the age of twenty-one:

My horse was wounded by an arrow. He bolted and sprung aside, throwing me on the ground in the middle of the enemy. I got to my feet and fired a single shot and my attendant Kahil, who was on a bad horse, dismounted and handed it to me.... I said to Ibrahim Beg, "What is to be done now?" Perhaps because he was slightly wounded or because he was frightened he didn't give me a very distinct answer.... A man shot an arrow at me, which struck me under the arm, piercing and breaking two plates of my Kalmuk armor. I shot an arrow back at him and then struck a passing horseman on his temples with the point of my sword.... I had about twenty arrows left. I wondered whether to dismount and keep my ground as long as my arrows lasted but I decided to head for the hill.

Babur is tolerant and kind to his friends, but tough, ambitious, and hard on himself. His admiration for courage, religiosity, and intelligence is implicit in even the shortest passage of his diaries. This is his description of his older companion called Qasim, "the Divider," with whom he crossed Afghanistan:

He had distinguished himself by his gallant use of his scimitar. He was a pious, religious, faithful Muslim and carefully abstained from all doubtful meats. His judgments and talents were uncommonly good. He was facetious. He could neither read nor write but he had an ingenious and elegant turn of wit.

Babur does not conceal his own impoverished origins, his defeats, embarrassments, and unrequited love. He is aware of his absurdities, his self-delusion, and his weaknesses without entirely forgiving himself. He boasts of his poetry, but not of his courage or resourcefulness. He is skeptical of authority and religion, and takes little for granted about the world or himself.

Nevertheless, although the diaries changed my view of fifteenth-century Asia, they had little relevance to modern Afghanistan. Babur was a medieval man. His worldview was formed by his being a direct royal descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, by his contact with fifteenth-century Persian culture and Islam, and by his never having traveled west of Herat. The flamboyant culture he describes in Herat in 1504 has no equivalent in the modern city, with its shabby cement walls, illegal DVDs, and atmosphere of provincial convention:

Herat was a refined city, in which every means of heightening pleasure and gaiety was possessed in perfection; in which all the incentives and apparatus of enjoyment were combined with an invitation to indulgence ... Hussein Mirza [the ruler] dressed in gay-colored red and green wool. On festival days he put on a small turban tied in three folds, broad and showy and having placed a plume nodding over it went in this style to prayers ... He had a turn for poetry ... He was fond as a child of keeping butting rams and of amusing himself with flying pigeons and cock-fighting ... He was addicted to wine and debauchery. He created a court, which abounded with eminent men of unrivaled accomplishments, each of whom made it his aim and ambition to carry to the highest perfection the art to which he devoted himself.

There were kebabs of fowl, and of goose, and indeed dishes of every kind ... When the wine began to take effect, a man began to dance, and he danced excessively well ... then another sang but in a dreadfully loud, rough, disagreeable tone ... the cup-bearers in waiting began to supply all who were of the party with pure wine, which they quaffed as if it had been the water of life.
¹

Almost every activity that Babur describes—gambling, dancing, colorful clothing, debauchery, singing, and alcohol—was illegal under the Taliban and remained illegal or discouraged under Ismail Khan's new government.

Babur decided to leave Herat after only twenty days in the city, despite his cousins' pleas that he defend them against an Uzbek warlord. Babur claims that he left because his winter quarters were inadequate, but since he was staying in the palace of the wealthiest and most cultivated man in the city, this is unlikely. It is more likely that he and his illiterate chancellor Qasim, with their provincial origins, were intimidated by the sophisticated court society. Qasim had only narrowly prevented Babur from committing a dangerous faux pas in the audience chamber, and from drinking alcohol for the first time. Qasim may have wanted to take his protégé away before he was further corrupted or humiliated. Their new kingdom of Kabul was, moreover, also under threat, and Babur was often restless. Whatever the determining factor, Babur must have felt strongly about leaving the city. He left in the middle of winter, and that is a very bad time to travel along the central route.

Part One

Herat ... The policeman at the cross-roads with a whistling fit to scare the Chicago underworld

—Robert Byron,
The Road to Oxiana,
1933

Herat ... The police directing a thin trickle of automobiles with whistles and ill-tempered gestures like referees

—Eric Newby,
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush,
1952

Herat ... A small lonely policeman in the center of a vast deserted square, directing two donkeys and a bicycle with a majesty and ferocity more appropriate to the Champs Elysées

—Peter Levi,
The Light Garden of the Angel King,
1970

CHICAGO AND PARIS

On my last morning in Herat, I was reluctant to get out of bed. It was cold despite my Nepali sleeping bag, and I knew it would be colder in the mountains ahead. I put on my walking clothes: a long
shalwar kemis
shirt, baggy trousers, and a Chitrali cap, with a brown
patu
blanket wrapped around my shoulders. I went into the dining room for breakfast. Foreigners were forbidden to stay in any hotel other than the Mowafaq—perhaps, I now thought, to make it easier for the Security Service to monitor us. War reporters had occupied most of the tables in the previous week, and I had spent a lot of time with them. I noticed that Matt McAllester and Moises Saman, whom I liked, had not yet appeared. They had been drinking Turkmen champagne the night before in the UN bar to celebrate Moises's birthday.

Television France 2 had brought their own
cafetière
and a packet of Lavazza coffee and sent to the bazaar for fresh juice. The day before, I had heard them talking about Chinese motifs on a shrine, the similarity between the minarets and factory chimneys, and the soldiers that chased them from the Bala Hissar fort. Now they were discussing whether to visit the handblown-glass shop or the refugee camp. One of them was pointing out the window at the traffic policeman. These things had attracted the attention of foreigners in Herat for seventy years. I had read five different travel writers on the traffic policemen. Their peaked hats and whistles struck visitors as particularly incongruous among the tumult of the Afghan bazaar. I wanted to write about them myself.

I sat beside Alex, the
Telegraph
correspondent, whom I had met in Jakarta, and Vaughan Smith, who had been a Grenadier Guards' officer before he became a freelance cameraman. He had been filming in Afghanistan for a decade.

"Are you leaving this morning?" asked Vaughan.

"I hope so."

"And you are really going to walk to Kabul through Ghor?"

"Yes."

Vaughan smiled. "Good luck," he said, and gave me his fried eggs. I ate six eggs to stock up on protein. Then I took up my stick and pack, said good-bye, and walked into the street. A strong, cold wind was blowing the sand into the air and I had to squint.

On the street corner, I watched men unloading tablecloths from China and Iranian flip-flops marked "Nike by Ralph Lauren." From Tabriz a truck had brought the goods through a fog of diesel fumes down the multilane highway that the Iranian government still called the Silk Road. This was the route that Alexander the Great took in pursuit of a Persian rival. The Persian had fled up the central route into the mountains, and Alexander, instead of following him, had taken the safer Kandahar route to Kabul. I watched a fruit wrapper from Isfahan flying in Alexander's footsteps. I followed the Persian, and came upon a man with a prosthetic leg, whom I had met before.

"
Shoma Ghor miravid?
" (Are you going to the province of Ghor?) he shouted.

"Yes."

"
Shoma be ghabr miravid
" (You are going to your grave), he replied. I shook his hand and walked on as he repeated the pun "
Ghor miyayid ... ghabr miyayid
" and laughed.

HUMA

When I reached his office, Yuzufi stood, smiled, fastened his double-breasted jacket very slowly, and came round his large desk to embrace me. As I sat down, a dozen people barged through the door. I recognized them from the hotel—
Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Deutsche Allgemeine Zjeitung
—but none of them acknowledged me. Young Kabuli translators in pleated leather jackets and baggy trousers formed their train. As they approached Yuzufi's desk, they spoke over the top of each other in English: "Can we see him?" "Can we make an appointment to see him?" "But His Excellency said...," "There is no higher authority," "With no letter?" "What happens if?" And as though it were a comic opera, Yuzufi's deep bass voice broke in, in harmony: "It is not known ... Worry not ... All will be fine..."

The journalists were demanding access to a Taliban prisoner. Yuzufi was promising to look into it. This overture had been rehearsed many times. Some of the journalists had been in town for a fortnight without getting inside the jail. Now, confronted by Yuzufi's patient obfuscation, they snapped at their translators who, being far from Kabul, were almost as confused as the journalists. Finally, Yuzufi still talking, they all wheeled around and flowed out without saying good-bye, leaving only me and the row of peasants by the door.