The Places in Between (9 page)

"I'm never staying in this village. You are men without hospitality and without honor..."

"It's just the weapons," said the old man. "We were just a little afraid. Can't you understand? Many have been killed in this place."

Suddenly Qasim stepped in, grabbing the younger man's arm, talking calmly, restraining him, reasoning with him. Another villager offered his house and we moved toward his door. On the threshold, Abdul Haq pointed at me and shouted, "Look at this man. This man is a foreigner. Look how disgustingly you have behaved toward him."

***

Inside, we sat on the floor and put our legs under the low
kursi
table. There was a coal brazier beneath the
kursi
and over it a thick felt blanket, which we pressed down over our knees to keep the heat in. Abdul Haq took off his baseball cap, ruffled his hair, and, perhaps worried about revenge from the people he had bullied that afternoon, pulled out his hand grenades and ostentatiously screwed in the firing pins. Qasim stacked Kalashnikov magazines neatly beside him and removed two bullets he had hidden in his collar. Aziz curled up in the corner and fell asleep. Our host was silent and kept his eyes on the weapons. I was used to walking alone, observing subtle changes in the landscape and scraps of ancient history. Villagers usually took me into their houses willingly. I did not feel I understood these sudden happenings or such people.

On the wall a Technicolor poster depicted the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, Ali, who died in the seventh century. The poster made Ali look like a Hollywood sheikh with sparkling pale eyes. This part of Afghanistan had been conquered by the Arabs while Ali was still alive. But it took Islam another four hundred years to spread a week's walk east to Ghor. This was a Sunni area and the poster showed our host to be a Shia Muslim. Abdul Haq started to tease him about being a Shia and Qasim joined in, but when he didn't respond they gave up.

After dinner Qasim told us he had executed five Taliban in Herat but he seemed a little bored by the story, perhaps because he had told it too often, and he did not tell it well. Abdul Haq said he had been at Ismail Khan's shoulder when he attacked the city.

"Well, you are a big man," said Qasim, and they all laughed.

Then Abdul Haq looked at me, smiled, and put his arm around me. "You are my brother. You would be dead without me. You are, like me, a fighting man," he said. "Other people don't like you because you are not Muslim but I don't care. I can see it in your eyes. We are both men of honor. We have had the same lives. We are the same."

I moved to the corner of the room to prepare for bed. I had covered my pack with a plastic rice bag to make it look more like something a villager would carry and this made getting into the pockets difficult. From one side I took out a plastic bag containing a small, limp yellow towel and my toothbrush. In the main compartment were warm clothes, a sleeping bag, and a yellow MRE ration pack, marked "From the People of America Not for Resale." It had probably been dropped from the air as emergency food relief. My friend Peter Jouvenal had bought it in the Kabul bazaar and given it to me in case I got stuck out in the snow. Another pocket contained antibiotics for dysentery and infections, which I had collected from five Asian countries without prescriptions, and morphine tablets in case of a broken leg. I laid my sleeping bag in the corner and spread out my white cotton turban as a pillowcase.

Finally, I reached into the damp-proof container—a smaller rice sack wrapped in masking tape—that held my passport, a translation of the Koran, and an excerpt from Babur's diary. I took out four photographs to show my host. One showed a white-haired man sitting on a bench. Standing behind him were two women and a girl with Down syndrome, who was smiling more broadly than anyone. It was my father and my three sisters, although the Nepalis had assumed that one of my sisters was my mother. The Iranians had found the second picture of my father in his kilt particularly funny; Hindus had admired his lurcher dog in the third; and a family of Shahsevan Turks had assured me that the two-humped camel on which my mother sat in the fourth had been theirs—they would recognize it anywhere. The camel was photographed on the Great Wall of China.

My host glanced at the pictures and then pointed to the wall where a photograph of his son was hung, with a garland of plastic flowers around the frame. He had been killed by a tank shell seven years earlier.

TO A BLIND MAN'S EYE

I lay down reflecting on my first full day of walking—the gravel underfoot, Qasim's lies, our host's dead son, the old man who had scrutinized Abdul Haq, the terrified boy. The abrupt episodes and half-understood conversations already suggested a society that was an unpredictable composite of etiquette, humor, and extreme brutality. I dozed off, thinking of the stubby shadow of Abdul Haq's Kalashnikov: a weapon designed by Russians, made by Iranians, and now used by Afghans on the American side. In this room the weapons were, I thought, the only piece of machinery that could connect us to the modern age. Except for the radio. It woke me with a burst of static and the hint of a Hindi song. Two hours had passed and Abdul Haq was lying on one arm in the dark, smoking a cigarette. Aziz was coughing. For two weeks I had been away from villages and I had forgotten how little villagers slept, how early they woke, and how much noise they made. I went outside to relieve myself. Despite the money our host had spent on his neat mud buildings and clipped hedges, he had not invested in a latrine. I was usually locked in a village house before dark. This was my opportunity to see the night sky and to be away from my companions. There were a few stars and a three-quarter moon and I sensed the silent, invisible desert outside the high courtyard walls. I squatted in the corner.

At dawn we immediately rolled our bedding away for morning prayers, but only our host prayed. We were given sweet tea and bread. As we were eating, five village elders came to apologize for the night before and to escort us to Gawashik. They were led by the District Commander of Pashtun Zarghun, a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man with a thick black beard and a large nose. He told me he had visited Pakistan during the war to procure weapons and he repeated some phrases in Urdu to prove it. Qasim and Aziz hobbled beside him, coughing and pulling their checked scarves around their scraggly beards.
⁸
I had become used to the way they moved, but beside this large man with his fine silk turban they looked particularly fragile. The commander walked with his arms stiff by his side, so that the green prayer beads in his left hand swung back and forth like a pendulum.

We followed a footpath leading from the young boys' caravanserai toward Buriabaf. It was presumably the old road. The newer "vehicle" road was two kilometers to our north but, perhaps because its upper reaches were blocked by snow, we could see no vehicles on it. After two hours the black-bearded commander left us. On our right was the Hari Rud River and on either side a line of low rounded shale and lime hills. The gravel stretched flat in front of us for another hundred kilometers across the floodplains to Chist, the ancient base of the Chistiyah dervish and the edge of the Ghor province. There, I hoped, the others would leave me. I would continue alone into the hills of Ghor.

The route would take me up the Hari Rud River to its source, over high passes, and then down the Kabul River to the capital. It passed through four provinces: Herat, Ghor, Bamiyan, and Wardak. They represented, very roughly, four different landscapes and four different ethnic groups. I had asked an interpreter in Herat what the differences were and he replied, without hesitation:

First, you are with the Tajik of Herat, who are the ancient Persians. Their farms are on the flat plains of the Hari Rud. Second, you will reach the Aimaq, a tent-dwelling tribal people, who live in the hill country of Ghor. There was the center of the ancient Ghorids who invaded India. Two hundred kilometers farther east are the high mountains of Bamiyan. There the Hazara live who are descended from Genghis Khan. They look like Chinese, are dangerous, and are Shia Muslims. Finally, after weeks with the Hazara, you will descend again to the valleys and the desert, where you will meet the Pashtun tribe of Wardak. All the other peoples you will meet speak Dari [the Afghan dialect of Persian], but the Wardak do not speak Persian, they speak Pashto. They support the Taliban.
⁹

This central route was unpopular with travelers. Had it been popular, Herat would not have existed. But the caravans wanted to avoid the center, so they used Herat as a junction, turning either north onto the Silk Roads to China or south onto the Spice Roads to India. In the center the passes were fourteen thousand feet high and ancient travelers believed their camels would begin to bleed from the nose because of the altitude.
¹⁰
In the winter, temperatures could drop to minus forty, blizzards were frequent, navigation difficult, and the snow often nine feet deep. In 1976, Nancy Dupree's impressive guidebook was "reluctant to recommend this route without the gravest reservations" and the hippie buses continued to take the flatter, warmer route to Kandahar.

The central region, therefore, remained largely unknown. The ancient Persians excluded it from the provinces of their Empire. The medieval Arab geographers mocked it as a backwater and the last pagan region of the Persian-speaking world. Even in the twentieth century those who used this route did so in midsummer, prepared carefully, and rarely strayed from the track. As a result they did not see much of the interior. The first foreigner known to have followed the Hari Rud River 150 kilometers due east of Herat to the village of Jam was a Frenchman, André Maricq, who did it in 1957. He was rewarded by discovering on the riverbanks a magnificent minaret, sixty meters tall, and previously unknown in the West. The archaeologists who came later were unable to make much sense of it.

"Qasim, what do you do?" I asked. Abdul Haq and Aziz had fallen behind us—Abdul Haq because his radio was not working, Aziz because he could not walk fast. Qasim seemed to have recovered his energy.

"I am a commander in the Security Service of Ismail Khan."

"But what do you do?"

"
Amniat
" (Security).

"And why are you walking with me?"

"
Amniat.
"

"Perhaps we should leave each other at Darai-e-Takht. You don't need to go all the way to Chaghcharan. Darai-e-Takht is much closer."

"We were told to take you to Chaghcharan."

"Perhaps we can negotiate."

He said nothing. We walked on a little farther.

"I did not tell those people who walked with us that you were a writer," said Qasim.

"What did you tell them?"

"I told some of them that you were in the United Nations. I told the others that you were an American soldier."

"That's not a good idea."

"It's a great idea. Now they are frightened. I told them that your
dang
walking stick was a beacon for summoning helicopters."

Abdul Haq appeared beside us, laughed, raised his rifle to his shoulder, and fired a round next to my ear. I called a halt for a drink.

"We don't have time," said Qasim.

I ignored him, sat down, and, remembering my Persian manners, offered my bottle to the others first. Aziz drank gratefully and when he had finished unleashed a rattling consumptive cough that concluded with a thick gobbet of phlegm, green from his tobacco. I decided not to drink. A little later, Abdul Haq stopped by an irrigation ditch to drink from a brackish puddle. Qasim wouldn't drink and I asked him why.

"Because this is the spot where I was ambushed two years ago in the Taliban era."

"By the Taliban?"

"No, no, two men from Gawashik, looking for money," said Qasim. "I was in a jeep and they stepped out from behind that boulder so I shot them both through the windshield, dragged their corpses back behind the boulder. That's where I also found their motorcycle. I still have it."

"But I thought road security was good under the Taliban."

"Yes," he replied. "Road security was very good under the Taliban. The Taliban were very good people; al-Qaeda foreigners were bad but Taliban were good."

Five hundred yards farther we came to a large stretch of bare black gravel. Red-painted boulders lined the path. "That is a minefield," said Qasim. There was no building in sight. I had been told to expect minefields in strategic areas, near military posts and towns. I could not see any reason for a minefield here and I would not have stayed on the path without his warning. Qasim said it had been laid by the Russians to prevent the Mujahidin from coming onto the road from the hills. I noticed there were no sheep droppings on this patch, though droppings were scattered elsewhere across the plain.

That afternoon we stopped to rest near a dark green Russian armored personnel carrier and another caravanserai. We had completed one farsang, or day's stage for a caravan, from where we had spent the night. An old man watched us from the caravanserai doorway.