Under an Afghan Sky (16 page)

Now a third woman came up to me. I could see through the screen of her burka that she was crying. She grabbed my arm and said something in Pashto.

Zhalil translated. “My son is sick and he is dying in the hospital. Please can you help me get through the gate?”

I felt helpless. “Tell her I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.” Zhalil translated, but she only tightened her grip on my arm and continued talking. Her husband was dead, she said, and there were no other men at home. She wanted me to help her.

“We have to go!” It was an Afghan soldier posted at the gate. “Now!”

We’d been out there for only about half an hour. I could see Paul and his cameraman, Al, a few feet away—Paul was shooting an on-camera. But we all knew that it was not safe to be outside like that for any length of time. We were an easy target for a suicide bomber, or kidnappers.

“We have to go!” the soldier repeated. The little girl was still clinging to my side, her grip on my shirt sleeve tightening. I asked Zhalil to explain to her that I had to go.

She looked up at me with pleading eyes and clung to me with both hands. Zhalil had to peel her off. She started to cry. I wanted so much to pick her up and take her with me. But I knew I couldn’t. And before I knew it, I was being ushered through the gate, and she was lost in the crowd.

“You can’t save them all,” Paul told me later that day when we were back at the base. “She’ll be married off in a few years, and put in a burka.”

“I don’t want to save them all,” I said. “Just her.”

I asked Khalid if Shogufa wore a burka. He said no, because she was still a girl. She would start wearing a burka, he told me, after they got married.

“When is that?” I asked. He shrugged. Maybe in a year. Or two.

“Are you sure she wants to marry you?” I raised my eyebrow at him and he laughed.

“Yes! We are in love!”

It was so unusual to hear an Afghan man speak openly about love and feelings, and I realized quickly that it was because these subjects are so often taboo among Afghans themselves. Islam, at least in this part of the world, dictates a kind of discretion when it comes to talking about men and women and relationships. With me, Khalid
probably felt safe talking about affairs of the heart, so I found myself in the odd position of being a new-found confidante to my captor.

He was full of questions. Was it okay to kiss her when other people were around? How was he going to tell his father about this relationship? Should he just let his mother speak to him? What if his father didn’t approve?

“It’s your life,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t approve. You have to do what’s right for you.”

“But I am afraid from him,” he kept saying.

“You’re afraid
of
him,” I corrected. “He’s running your life. You do everything he tells you to do. He can’t tell you not to fall in love with someone. Love is something you can’t control.”

Khalid nodded. Yes, he told me, it was something he couldn’t control. He loved Shogufa and he wanted to marry her, and it was as simple as that. His mother was supportive, he told me, so maybe she could speak to his father. His father liked Shogufa, he was certain, but he just wasn’t sure if he’d approve of them getting married so soon.

“It
is
soon,” I told him. “You’re young to get married.” But I knew that in developing countries like Afghanistan, people get married very young, and have their children very young; indeed, the average life expectancy in this cruel and underdeveloped part of the world is about thirty years shorter than in North America. Even though they were much younger than me, I would outlive Khalid and his young bride by many years.

But then he surprised me.

“We get married; then I will die.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I die. I bomb.” He made a motion of putting something around his waist, and I knew instantly what he was talking about.

“You want to be a suicide bomber.”

“Yes. My father say.”

I wanted to understand why he would want to get married, then blow himself up, so I pressed for answers. Why would you do that to Shogufa? Don’t you know there are many innocent Afghans who would die in a suicide bombing? What do you think you might accomplish?

“I die. I go
jannat.
”

“What do you think is in
jannat
?”

“There, I have girlfriends.”

“But what about Shogufa?”

“Shogufa my wife, but I will have girlfriends in
jannat.
”

“I’m not sure Shogufa would like that very much. I don’t know of any woman who thinks it’s okay for her husband to have girlfriends.”

My arguments fell on deaf ears. Khalid said she would understand and that, in fact, she also wanted to be a suicide bomber because then they could die together. Their parents would look after their children if they had any. They planned to do this in a year or two. They’d be martyrs and go to
jannat
together.

I wasn’t really surprised that Shogufa would say that, make that kind of marriage vow. The majority of suicide bombers are still male, but an increasing number of women have been willing to suit up to kill—in Chechnya, Lebanon, Iraq, and recently Afghanistan. Many follow their husbands, who espouse fundamentalist ideologies; others seek revenge and are ripe targets for extremists. I’d always thought that was an interesting subject—the mentality of the female suicide bomber.

Shogufa isn’t going to blow herself up, I told Khalid, just so she can go to
jannat
and watch you parade around with a bevy of girlfriends.

He laughed. “She love me. She is my wife.”

“So you die together,” I said, “and what have you accomplished? You might kill a lot of people, but what good is that if you’re killing other Afghans and not foreigners?”

He told me that his father wanted to have a son who was a martyr. “He would be proud if I die as a suicide bomber. You watch. You will hear of something… big… you know it is me, going to
jannat.”

I wasn’t sure if any father could accept his child dying like that, for no reason. I thought about my own father and imagined he might be thinking the same thing right about now. He would be angry that I had put myself in this situation, causing so much trouble to so many people, when he had spent most of his life being very cautious, after having risked everything to move his young family to a foreign country where he barely knew the language.

My father is the most risk-averse person I know. Don’t run before you can walk; take everything slowly and safely—that was his constant advice to me. I was, of course, the opposite, always in a hurry to do everything, with no patience to wait. The first time I told my parents I was going to Afghanistan, the summer before, I could sense over the phone my dad’s unease. He wouldn’t tell me not to, but I could tell it was the last place on earth he wanted his daughter to go. It’s an important story, I told him. Canadian soldiers are dying there, and Afghans are suffering, and that’s why reporters need to be there. To tell those stories and help people at home understand why it’s happening.

I think my parents, like those in most immigrant Asian families I knew, still wished I had been a doctor or a lawyer. Journalists, in their culture, are considered bottom-feeders, a step above used-car salespeople. Yet, I had grown up watching the news because it was all my parents watched when I was little. They were news junkies, and we grew up extremely well informed about the
world around us. As new Canadians, it was important for them to make sure we knew what was happening in our community, our country, and around the world. I remember the federal election in 1980, when Pierre Trudeau regained office. There was an all-candidates meeting at my elementary school, and after the debate, the local candidates for our riding took questions from the audience, and I was the first one to stick up my hand. My question was about immigration policy, and I wanted to know where each of the parties stood and what they would change. I think I was seven years old at the time.

In recent years, I think my dad had finally come around to understanding that journalism was like a calling for me. They’ve followed my career closely, from the early days when I was doing godawful live reports for a local station in Vancouver to covering the Olympic Games in Beijing for my network. It took a while, but I think he was finally proud to be able to tell people I was a journalist.

I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking now. Khalid seemed to read my mind.

“Your father,” he asked, “where he is?”

“In Canada, and probably worried sick about me. You have to let me go, Khalid. It’s not fair to my parents. They will be sick wondering where I am. Imagine if Shogufa was taken, how would your aunt and uncle feel? How would you feel?”

He calmly told me that if Shogufa was kidnapped, he would find her captors and break each of their necks with his bare hands. He cracked his knuckles as if to underline the point.

“Why do you do that?” I asked.

Khalid answered by taking my left hand and pulling on each finger until the knuckle cracked.

“Ow,” I protested. He ignored me and reached for my other
hand. Pull,
crack,
pull,
crack.
My scab cracked open a bit and pus oozed out. I instinctively reached to touch the scab on my shoulder. I could still feel the toilet paper used to staunch the blood. I craned my neck to look at the wound. It had turned black and was about the size of a golf ball.

“You like?” Khalid asked after he had cracked all ten of my knuckles.

I shrugged, and he pointed at my feet.

“No,” I said, shaking my head to underline
my
point. I hadn’t taken off my socks since I was dropped in the hole—though I had finally taken off my shoes—and I had no intention of finding out what condition my feet were in. My white socks were now a light shade of brown. It had been three, four days without a shower and I knew I was really starting to smell. Especially after having to wear the filthy clothes they gave me on the first day. My stomach began to turn at the memory of the smell. I lit a cigarette and puffed away, blowing the smoke into a stream toward the entrance.

“You smoke too much,” Khalid told me. “It is bad. You shouldn’t smoke so much.”

“You’re the one who’s giving them to me, and what else is there to do in here?”

“You writing. Give me the book.” He reached for my notebook. I handed it over, certain he wouldn’t be able to read much of what I’d written. He flipped through the pages, stopping at my notes from the stories I’d done in the previous weeks.

“What is this?” He pointed at a name and a number. It was Isabelle, my contact at the Canadian embassy in Kabul. I told him it was a friend and watched as he copied the number onto his palm. I hoped to God he wouldn’t call it. I couldn’t imagine poor Isabelle, who was probably already worried sick about me after I didn’t show
up at the embassy for Thanksgiving dinner, having to answer a call from Khalid or his father. He flipped through a few more pages, pointing and asking what things were. His finger fell on the name of the last refugee I had interviewed at the camp.

“What is this?”

“Some man at the refugee camp. He has nothing to do with anything, just a poor man from Helmand province who had to move his family to Kabul to escape the fighting.”

I had spent my last few minutes at the camp with him and his family. He had eight children, three daughters who were about the age of the little girl in the pink scarf, four sons who were older, and a baby boy who might have been about a year old. They had left Helmand after a rocket destroyed their home. The man said he had a business there, but he was afraid it had been taken over by the Taliban. They lived in two small mud houses in the camp, lots of room compared to other refugees there but hardly enough for such a big family. The children were laughing and chasing each other outside, and I had taken lots of pictures of the family, with the intention of writing a story on them for the network’s website.

Just before we left, the man, like the cobbler we’d met earlier, insisted on making us tea, a traditional Afghan symbol of hospitality, even in a refugee camp where people have nothing. I was loath to drink his tea, since the family could barely afford to feed itself, but he insisted, pushing a glass of the hot, sweet liquid into my hands. He had a cell phone, which astonished me. We exchanged numbers, and Shokoor and I made our way back to the car.

I didn’t think of it until then, but suddenly it dawned on me that perhaps this man was connected to my kidnappers. Maybe he called Khalid and told him where I was. Maybe he was a Taliban sympathizer. Maybe he was the one who had given me away.

“Do you know this man?” I asked my captor. “Khalid, you know him, don’t you?”

The tall Afghan turned to me and stared directly into my eyes. He stroked his goatee and shook his head. “I do not know.”

“You’re lying,” I said in a stroke of anger. “This man told you I was at the refugee camp. He called you and then you drove in to take me. That’s the truth, isn’t it?”

Khalid shook his head emphatically. “It is not, Mellissa.”

“Then how did you know I was there? Why did you take me? Someone told you I was at the camp, didn’t they?”

Khalid sighed and shook his head again. He and his friends knew that the camp was a place where foreigners often visited, he told me. This was not a surprise to me. There were always UN staff going in and out, just like the group we had encountered when we first arrived there. The gang of kidnappers was out looking for someone to take. The men didn’t know who would be there, just that it was a good place to kidnap a foreigner, because the refugees are powerless to help and there are few police nearby. It was also on the outskirts of Kabul, making a getaway much easier.

“We see you. We think first you Hazara. But then we think police coming. So we take you.”

The Hazaras are an ethnic minority in Afghanistan, and it wasn’t the first time someone mistook me for one. Their origins aren’t clear, but it’s generally believed that they are related to the Mongolians. Their features are Eurasian, and they look almost like the Tibetans or Uighurs of central and western China. The Hazaras suffered extreme oppression under the Taliban and, in fact, were targeted for ethnic cleansing. Their position improved greatly after the Taliban were forced from power. I’d seen Hazaras working on the base in Kandahar and, because of my own small stature, some
of the soldiers with whom I’d gone out on missions used to joke that they were taking along their “little Hazara.”