The Lunatic Express (19 page)

I
MET
K
HALID
at 5:00 a.m. wearing a gray salwar kameez, a ratty ski cap, a keffiyeh wrapped around my neck, and I hadn’t shaved in three days. I felt like a clown, but Khalid was encouraging. “You don’t look like a foreigner,” he said. “You look like an Afghan!” The morning was still pitch black, freezing, stars sharp like strings of Christmas lights overhead. Most of Kabul had no power, nothing but dim shapes of mud and brick piled on top of each other, a world of shadows and darkness and, I imagined, huddled bodies inside. Three buses were waiting at a muddy parking lot in the darkness on the edge of the city, a vendor selling tea and bread in the glow of a kerosene lamp. Formless women in burqas. Men in flowing green robes and lamb’s-wool caps, and in leather jackets. For the first time in Afghanistan I felt hidden, safe. No one noticed me in the dark and in my clothing. And, I realized, out here, away from hotels and ministries, there were no gunmen, no barricades, and their absence felt safer.

“One year ago,” Khalid said, as we stood drinking tea in the dark, “there were many women walking through town. Now, almost none. The security has gotten much worse.” The latest security bulletin, in fact, posted in my hotel was twenty pages long. Taliban were encircling the city from the south, east, and west, were infiltrating it, and had been spotted at the gates. The north, we both hoped, would be safe. But Khalid’s life was on the line here as much as mine, or more. When I asked him if he was nervous about his safety he said, “Only when I’m with you.” If we ran into trouble, after all, I’d probably be kidnapped. But he would be killed.

We boarded and pulled away a few minutes after six, rolling and bumping through the dark, silent, and sleeping city. Paused at a checkpoint—big speed bumps, soldiers, guns—then picked up speed, the driver hurtling into the countryside, careening around corners, through a world of brown fields, brown mud walls, brown mud houses, toward the sharply rising wall of the jagged and snow-covered peaks of the Hindu Kush. A man walked up the aisle, handing out plastic vomit bags. The sun poked over the horizon, and the murmur of prayers echoed through the bus. Khalid passed his hands over his face. “I’ve prayed for a safe trip.”

We hurtled around curves, hit the mountains, and started climbing. Up, up, and up again, the two-lane blacktop running alongside a river, as we headed toward the Salang Pass, a tunnel built by the Soviet Union in the 1960s at nearly 13,000 feet. Brown and barren, houses turned from mud to stone. Cubes of rock clinging to steep scree, a hard, cold, barren landscape that turned to snow quickly. At places, muddy, icy shoulders and vendors selling tire chains out of rusted shipping containers. Men and women coughed—the coal and wood stoves, the generators, the cold—everybody, it seemed, had a hacking cough. Then just snow—we could have been winding through the Rockies. And Khalid told me about surviving through the Taliban, his three arrests. Once he’d been with his mother and thirteen-year-old sister, who was not wearing a burqa. The Taliban stopped them, his sister must be properly dressed. “She is too young,” said his mother. “There are none her size.” The men didn’t care; they beat her with a flagpole on the street. Once Khalid was picked up on the street for not having a beard—he was still a teenager—and taken to prison. “I was scared,” he said, “because they had no record of who was who, and I didn’t want to be lost and forgotten with the political prisoners.” He was just plucked off the street; no one called his family. After five days the guards asked if any of the prisoners knew how to cook. Khalid raised his hand, said, “‘I am a good cook!’ But I didn’t even know how to cook an egg!”

He cooked potatoes for his jailers the first day, beans the next. At least he was out of the cell, had some freedom of movement. The fifth day a bus brought a load of prisoners from the north. Khalid went to the bus driver. “I am here just for shaving my beard,” he told the driver, “and now I am free, so please take me with you when you leave.” Okay, the driver said, but I can’t guarantee what will happen at the gate.

“Don’t worry,” Khalid said.

Before they got to the gate, some Taliban jumped on the bus. “Give us money,” they said. Khalid can’t remember how much he had, but he gave them all of it, and an hour later walked into his house, almost a week after being taken.

We hit the tunnel, which had seen violence for years, as the principal route between northern and southern Afghanistan. Mujahideen had ambushed the Soviets in the area repeatedly; even now the hulks of tanks and APCs littered the sides of the road. The Northern Alliance had blown up both ends to keep the Taliban from heading north. Minefields lay everywhere. “Almost died here once in a car accident,” said Khalid, as we entered a dim, dark, dripping world, the road covered with hard ice, the air thick with exhaust from cars and trucks inching through, bumper to bumper.

On the other side we emerged into intense sun and started descending on switchbacks, swerving around slow-moving trucks and into an ancient and untouched land. We stopped at around 9:00 a.m. at a long, low, concrete building, a restaurant. It was cold inside, unheated, a knee-high platform covered in dark red and brown Afghan carpeting running along the walls and in the center of the room. We sat cross-legged on the platforms, and boys ran back and forth, bringing us aluminum trays of lamb kabobs and tea and flat, warm Afghan bread. The meat was salty and tender. Nobody seemed to notice me. No one had guns. No women—I wondered where the women on the bus were supposed to eat. I was just here, deep inside Afghanistan. A fly on the wall.

We drove on. The land flattened; we sped through broad valleys of brown, a place called Disho, the fields dusted with the barest green lace. Mud brick compounds. Round cow patties drying on the walls like hubcaps on the junkyards of D.C.’s New York Avenue. Donkeys and children playing, and scarlet blankets drying on dusty shrubs. Huge piles of hay. It struck me there was no trash on the ground. None. No plastic water bottles, now ubiquitous throughout the world. Which meant that here there were few manufactured things, few things bought in stores. Bumped through Baghlan Province and the city of Pul-i-Khumri, where the bus suddenly ground to a halt and couldn’t be restarted. I started to get up when Khalid warned me about Hekmatyar and that I should stay still and quiet. Then he started praying, and I broke into a cold sweat.

We were on a slight incline. A crowd of men pushed the bus backwards and the driver popped the clutch. It roared to life. Sputtered. My heart spasmed. Started again, and stayed rumbling. Everyone poured back on, and off we went.

It had been ten minutes. It seemed like a lifetime, and a few minutes and miles later the fear was a memory. Gone. Didn’t seem so bad. Which is the way it always seemed afterwards, despite how close I’d been playing it. The ferries, the planes, the buses on cliffs, it all seemed like nothing. The more I did it, the more natural it seemed. But I was riding a narrow line, especially here in Afghanistan. What if I was kidnapped? Disappeared. Poof, off the radar I’d go. Would I think it had all been worth it? Would my children ever forgive me, or would they think I’d died doing something I loved? Would anyone even tell Nisa? Death was so banal, so unromantic. Walking to the edge of the cliff could feel glorious, but when was the last step? The step into the abyss? You couldn’t tell until you got there, and that was the problem; I never knew if I was standing right on the edge or miles from it. It made me feel alive; that edge was a powerful aphrodisiac, and weeks without it at home made home seem quiet and boring. But its pursuit always came with a price. It separated me from everyone else in the normal world; no one could understand what I’d been through, done, unless they’d done it too. Unless it was a regular part of their life. And not just my friends, but the people I loved. My family. It was selfish. A selfish secret that I carried around, that I couldn’t share even when I tried to. I remembered once coming home from southern Sudan, and Lindsey was angry that I hadn’t called her. And just plain angry, which I couldn’t fathom. “I’m home!” I said. “Why are you mad at me? And how could I call?” I’d stammered. “I was in a war zone with drums in the night and men dying of gunshot wounds and starving children and there wasn’t a phone for hundreds of miles!”

“How can I love you when you’re there?” she finally said. “How can you love someone who might be killed or kidnapped or die in a plane crash and puts his family through that pain and worrying?”

But how could you not live that life, taste that taste, after you’d had it? The bus rolled on and my fear was a memory already, mitigated and rounded, its sharp edges sanded off. That moment was there, though. That moment of fear. Of intensity. Of feeling so afraid that I knew I was alive and didn’t want to be dead, and that I loved my family and missed them, even as I knew I had to straighten everything out and change my life. And that that was what travel was all about, showing you things in a starker way than you could ever see them at home.

Past Pul-i-Khumri, the landscape became desert. Just sand and brown and flat. No bushes. No trees. No rivers. Whole villages of brown sand castles and, nearby, mass graves where the Northern Alliance had killed thousands of Taliban and buried them where they lay. And poor Khalid, he had girlfriend troubles, like everyone everywhere, but it was worse in places like Afghanistan and Bangladesh. “I am in love, but no one can know,” he said. She went to school with him. Somehow he got her cell phone number. Called her. Don’t call me, she’d said, when she answered. But then she’d called him back. “We see each other at University and we go to a park, but sometimes the police stop us and ask if we’re related. We can kiss and touch a little, but nothing below the waist. Our parents cannot know, hers especially. She would be beaten and forbidden to leave the house. And they might come and hurt me.” It wasn’t hopeless, though. If he told his parents he had seen her and wanted to marry her, he said, they would go to her parents and suggest it, say that she was suitable. “And then she’ll put pressure on her family, indirectly, to agree.”

Khalid, too, was mystified by Western women. Once he’d worked with an American journalist and invited her back to his house for dinner. His parents, of course, were there; they were always there. In a strange reversal of Moolchand’s unsuccessful assumption that Western women were available for easy sex, she’d told him she had been shocked, that she thought he lived alone and would never have come to his house if she’d known his parents were there. “I didn’t understand that at all!”

T
HE BUS DRIVER
had been screaming along for hours, and we arrived at the gates to Mazar-i-Sharif an hour early. We stopped, the driver laughing and talking. “He says,” said Khalid, “that he’s driven too fast, that he’ll be fined if he arrives too early, so we have to wait.” Husks of Soviet APCs lay around; a few soldiers with AKs got on the bus and looked us all over. No one noticed me, and finally we started again and a few blocks later Khalid and I jumped off the bus at a dusty crossroads in a gauzy afternoon, the sky white. We walked down a cobblestone street, turned a corner, stumbled down rutted dirt roads, until we found an unheated concrete house behind high walls—the hotel.

An hour later we were in a dusty brown field among two hundred horsemen—known as
chapandaz
—in knee-high leather boots and fur caps (and a smattering of old Soviet padded tank helmets) with high-pommeled saddles, surrounded by thousands of spectators for Mazar’s weekly Buzkashi spectacle. It was a wild free-for-all of macho horsemanship and brute strength and power, as each man tried to drag a hundred-pound calf carcass into the
daira halal
—a circle chalked in the dirt. The horses reared and pawed the ground and sweated and foamed at the bit, big, powerfully muscled beasts bred for the task. The men whipped them and fought them and fought each other and whipped each other in clouds of dust under a warm winter sun, as men and children—there were no women—crowded the field and ran for their lives when galloping horse muscle swept through them. There were no boundaries; imagine a football game in which the spectators littered the field and stood around the huddle. Live music throbbed amid the smell of hashish and horse, and the announcer proclaimed the proceeds for each round in dollars—$50 or $30 or $130—and the great, threatening Afghans pulled me out of harm’s way and tucked me behind them whenever the mass of hooves and whips and yells swept over us.

It was serious business, said Aqamurad, thirty years old, astride his $20,000 mount, after the matches. “The best horses here,” he said, sweeping his hand over the field, “are worth $200,000. They surge for the circle; they know it, they go right there. They do not need to be pushed.” He was a horse breeder and trainer, and he drove his horses hard every day except Saturday, and made sure they were warm twice a night. Some of the chapandaz rode their own horses, like Aqamurad, and some were paid to ride the horses of rich businessmen.

It was getting dark, a dusky world of white sky and heavy dust. There were no horse trailers here. For blocks in every direction the streets were scattered with booted horsemen and sweating horses clip-clopping home, a world where everyone looked like they’d been grafted from the gnarled roots of the very first tree. And I felt safe and free for the first time in Afghanistan, as Khalid and I settled down over an enormous pile of mutton in a chilly restaurant open to the street.

.    .    .

E
VERYTHING ABOUT
M
AZAR
was different from Kabul. The edge was gone, the fear and pathos of a city under siege. Mazar felt normal. Few roadblocks, gunners, sandbagged emplacements, blast walls, and razor wire. And yet the handful of expatriates living in the lodge who worked for the United Nations were forbidden to walk the streets, had to be driven from lodge to work and back every day. They were prisoners of their office and hotel, which seemed awful as Khalid and I ventured out the next morning. A cold wind blew, and fog lay heavy. It was all white; white sky, white haze—I couldn’t make out a horizon. We wanted to fly back on Ariana to Kabul but needed tickets and found a faded blue painted concrete building on an unpaved street, a row of muddy shoes outside the door. We shed ours, walked into the frigid unheated building, nothing but empty passages and a row of men sitting on a sofa in the hall. Upstairs, down a dark hall, lay the scheduling office. “We don’t know,” the man said. “Maybe there will be a flight tomorrow, maybe not, and the time is not exact.” Khalid persisted, asked more questions, was directed up another flight of stairs to an office where we found Ariana’s communications manager huddled around a kerosene stove. “There is only one scheduled flight a week, on Fridays,” he said. “The rest are Hajj flights and if there’s room, they’ll take you. But no one knows anything; call me after eleven.”