The Lunatic Express (20 page)

We walked through teeming Mazar. “Indeed, the whole town has been smartened up lately,” wrote Robert Byron. “The bazaars are new and whitewashed, and their roofs are supported on piles which let in light and air underneath. In the new town, where the hotel and Government offices stand, the roads are edged with neat brick gutters.” Things had changed. Mud and dust, the curbs broken and crumbling, the city as raw and broken by decades of war as the rest of the country. Cars shared the roads with pushcarts and donkeys. Nut sellers fanned charcoal braziers, the storefronts open in the chill; everyone cold and underdressed. “Come,” said Khalid. “I will show you something,” as we came upon a fantasy of minarets and tiles in blue and yellow and purple set within a courtyard—the shrine of Hazrat Ali, the tomb of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph and the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, which Byron described as “a cross between St Mark’s at Venice and an Elizabethan country-house translated into blue faience.”

It was why Mazar existed in the first place and why Byron had come here seventy-two years before. Although most Shiites believed the caliph’s grave lay in Saudi Arabia, Ali himself was said to have appeared in a dream to the mullah of nearby Balkh in the first half of the twelfth century, and confirmed that his grave lay in what became Mazar, and a shrine was built there in 1136. Genghis Khan had been here, destroying the shrine, and it had been rebuilt in 1481, making Mazar a place of pilgrimage. We strolled into its outer gardens, amid pools of water and swans and thousands of white pigeons that alighted on the hands of delighted children with crusts of bread, a place full of men and women that felt, for the first time in Afghanistan, still. Peaceful and calm. Outside the gates was struggle, a constant struggle with cold and heat and between men and women and Afghanistan’s ethnic identities and for survival. “Shall we go inside?” Khalid asked.

“Is it okay?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not. But don’t say anything to anyone; don’t talk, and just follow me and stay close. No one is staring at you. It is the way you walk; you don’t walk like a foreigner.”

We passed through a low wrought-iron fence. An old man with a beard and deep lines in his face stood guarding hundreds of pairs of shoes. We slipped ours off, and padded down a red carpet leading to the mosque. Inside, it was hushed, filled with soft murmur. Rays of light streamed in, a world of carpets and huge wooden doors, and a low table behind which sat a row of mujawers—the men who clean and care for the shrine. Khalid approached. Knelt before them. I followed, imitated, feeling completely exposed, my heart beating. He passed his hands over his face, as if wiping away dust from his eyes and cheeks, made a quick motion with his hands over his chest. I didn’t have a clue. The mujawers watched me. An American in the holiest shrine in Afghanistan in a mutton-stained salwar kameez, wearing a North Face ski hat. I vaguely imitated Khalid as best I could. They held their hands out. Khalid passed some money their way, and I did the same. We stood up and he whispered, “We have asked for forgiveness.” No one seemed to see through me. In the center of the mosque stood a glass cube the size of a garage, surrounded in wood filigree—the tomb. Men and women pressed fingers, faces, bodies against it, circling it, and we made a circumnavigation and then left. I felt like Richard Burton in Mecca, and guilty and exhilarated and a little mystified, and ashamed that I knew so little, understood so little about someplace and something that was so important to so many people.

We ambled through the growing fog of Mazar. Sat on a corner and drank pomegranate juice while Khalid had his shoes shined by a freezing, shivering boy with no socks and a runny nose. Beggars, old men and women, held their hands open to Khalid, who always gave, and they gave back. “I will pray for you so there will never be restrictions on your way of life,” said one man. We entered a candy store. Walls and aisles filled with homemade sweets of sesame and cardamom, carrots and cashews. We ate samples, sweet and nutty and milky, and Khalid filled two shopping bags. “I have a big family!” he said, eyeing the cold white sky outside. “I hope it doesn’t snow, because we will be stuck in Mazar.” Even without snow falling, Ariana remained opaque. We called five times between ten thirty and three, and each time were told to call in an hour. The plane hadn’t even taken off from wherever it was, still had to get to Mazar. If it got here, Ariana said, it would turn around fast and leave. Tickets could only be bought at the airport; we’d have to go and wait and hope. “This is Ariana!” said Khalid. “It is the most unreliable airline in the world, and so badly managed!” I thought of Ariana president Moin Wardak, sitting at his warm desk in Kabul. We hunkered down by the propane heater back at the lodge in Khalid’s room, watched American wrestling on the tube, and considered the problem. We could go to the airport and wait. The plane might come, but it might not. If it didn’t, it might not come the next day, either. And if it did arrive, it might not leave—it was already getting dark, the cloud ceiling was low and getting lower. It was an easy choice: in Afghanistan the bus was more reliable than flying. And probably safer.

W
E ARRIVED IN KABUL
and flagged a regular yellow taxi. By now my beard was five days old and my clothes stained with mud and mutton grease. On the Salang Pass we’d been stopped in a massive traffic jam of buses and trucks and cars, skidding and sliding and putting chains on, and a man had walked up to me and started barking in Dari. Khalid exploded with laughter. “He thought you were the bus driver!” Which made him feel safer now that we were back in Kabul. And after hugging goodbye, I changed hotels to a smaller, cheaper one with less security, run by an Afghan family, my room heated by a woodstove, all of which made me feel more secure, less of a target in a much less obvious place than in the well-known hotels that stood out like big red bull’s-eyes.

A
ND
I
WALKED
, my initial fear of the place not wholly gone but considerably lessened, getting my hair cut in a barbershop, and entering an open-fronted kabob restaurant with a ceiling hung with salted haunches of beef, its walls sporting a wolfskin and the head of a deer. There I met Ali Musabah, a bull of a man with the worst cauliflower ears I’d ever seen, wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket. “I am a wrestler,” he growled in husky English. Afraid of saying I was an American, I stupidly told him I was Canadian, a lie that I regretted instantly and couldn’t pull out of. “I am moving to Canada!” he said. “With all of my family. I hate Afghanistan. It is violent. Full of guns and kidnapping and bombings and bad men. Afghans are mean like Americans, who are not good people. When I get to Canada, God willing, I will call you.” He brought me a heaping plate of fatty, gristly mutton and bread. “The fat is good!” he growled. “Eat it; this is my gift, my hospitality.” I asked him who he’d vote for in the coming election.

“Nobody. There is nothing good here. I will not miss it at all. I will never marry here.” He sat with me, guarded me, peppered me with questions about Toronto, which I tried my best to answer, having been there once, desperately wanting to confess my lie. Ali refused to let me pay a cent for my meal, or for the meals I ate there over the next three days.

The Kabul Lodge was nearly empty, and I woke up to falling snow and my bed shaking—a small earthquake. At breakfast I met the lodge’s only other guest, a tiny French woman with jet black hair and a sharp, exotic face named Marie-Elise Palmier-Chatelain. She taught nineteenth-century history at a university near Paris, and had been traveling throughout Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen on and off for three years. Alone. She made me feel like a rookie. We compared knives; she had a six-inch switchblade and confessed to having carried a small automatic pistol in Yemen. She’d taken the bus all over Afghanistan, was headed straight into Taliban country in a few days. Had ridden on horseback from Pakistan into Afghanistan. She had balls of steel. “Come,” she said. “You will like this.” We donned our costumes—she in a long black abaya with a black headscarf—and set off through muddy streets, the sun now out and melting the inch of snow on the ground. Hailed a taxi and jumped out in a throng of thousands thick in the streets which led to narrow passageways of mud and ageless wooden shops selling brown-speckled white pigeons with thin gold bands on their legs, and parakeets and red-legged fighting partridges. Smelling of spices and smoke, the bird market was supposedly a no-go area for foreigners, but it was rich and ancient feeling and alive, and I wished times were different and I could spend days there getting to know it without worrying about being blown up or kidnapped.

Marie-Elise said no one noticed her—and she sure didn’t look Western—but she was wrong. Everyone noticed her, stared; it was the way she walked. Sure-footed. Fast. Head up. Pushing through throngs of men, a sense of power no Afghan woman would ever dare display in a public market.

I was out of time, though, and I had a flight to China to catch. I was searched and searched and searched again, working my way through layers of security to the airport, the gate packed with Afghan and Chinese traders, who elbowed and fought their way to the bus that took us to the plane. At the stairs to the jet, the same aged Ariana Airlines 727 that had brought me to Kabul from New Delhi, I was frisked again.

My seatmate was a Singapore Chinese living in Beijing who owned a company working for the American military at Kabul’s Bagram Air Base. “War, insecurity, unease,” he said, “wherever those are, the army spends more and that is good for me. And your new president is sending more troops! Business will be even better!” For so long, he said, everyone had been leaving China for someplace better. “Now,” he said, “it’s the other way around. Everyone wants to get to China!”

Three hours later we slipped and slid down the steps into the zero-degree cold of Urumqi, China. I had turned twenty-four in China, in 1984, and I hadn’t been back since. Then, the wide avenues of Beijing had no cars. No signs. Just people walking and riding bikes in green and blue Mao suits. Five hours before, I’d been walking in a collapsed city with intermittent electricity and half the population hidden inside burqas. Airplanes were like traveling capsules, cans of preserved culture. The plane was mostly Afghan, and suddenly I was disgorged into a taxi blaring hip-hop—“I want your body” thumped the music—and we were rushing along freeways bathed in neon, and twisting through streets lined with modern glass high-rises and I was blinking my eyes at the affluence and style of once-provincial Urumqi—women in knee-high leather boots with four-inch heels and tight blue jeans and twenty-four-hour ATMs and hipster dudes in black Chuck Taylors and earrings. The cold, the sudden affluence and style—I had been in India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan for almost seven weeks—and the blatant sexuality made me reel, and again that dislocation in the world swept over me. I felt totally displaced. It was New Year’s Eve and the texts rolling in from family and friends could barely assuage my loneliness, as I sat at the hotel bar drinking a scotch amid glitter and Christmas trees and a few waiters singing to a karaoke machine. I was heading home, I realized. I had thousands of miles to go, still, but from now on I’d be traveling east toward the western United States, and there was still so much I hadn’t seen, so much I didn’t know. For the first time since I’d rolled away on the bus out of D.C., I was going toward something, not away. But what was home anymore? Did I even have a home to return to? I thought of Moolchand. What to do? I took another sip of scotch and went to bed.

A speeding passenger train en route to a Chinese coastal resort jumped the tracks and slammed into another, killing at least 70 people and injuring hundreds in the worst rail accident in the country in a decade. In January a high-speed train ran through a group of maintenance workers, killing 18. China … is expanding the system to accommodate what is the world’s most dense passenger and freight network
.

—Sunday Times,
April 29, 2008

ELEVEN
Hope and Wait

E
VEN AT EIGHT
in the morning it was as dark as a cave in Urumqi. And freezing, the streets slick with ice, frozen gobs of spit dotting the sidewalks and streets like gross polka dots. When I left Delhi I’d inadvertently tossed my guide to China. Chinese were like Americans—they thought they were the center of the universe (the Chinese name for the country, Middle Kingdom, said it all)—and few Chinese, at least in Urumqi, spoke English. “Few” being an understatement. No one spoke English. At all. And I had two things I could say in Chinese: thank you and hello. My hotel was twenty-four stories of glass; for the first time in months I was in an affluent, totally modern world, yet I felt cut off. I had to improvise the moment I tried to take a taxi to the train station. I drew a picture of a train. Said “choo, choo, tchka, tchka,” and somehow ended up at the train station, a massive square Stalinist building that was packed—a line of shaking, freezing people jumping up and down like engine pistons, running out its doors and snaking down the stairs. I pushed on through and found eighteen ticket windows, each with a line hundreds, maybe thousands deep. Melted snow and spit covered the slippery floors. Which was the right window? I couldn’t tell. Was I to wait for hours and then get to the wrong window?

I needed help. Maybe my hotel? I tried to get a taxi. Drivers shook their heads when I tried to get in. Men and women aggressively pushed me away and jumped in. Finally I pushed back, and jumped into a front seat. Handed the driver the card with the hotel’s name and address. “Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head, grunting, spitting out something. I got out. Tried again. Finally found a driver who took me. The desk clerk summoned a woman who spoke some English. There was another ticket office, she said. Nearby. I wanted to get to Hohhot and she wrote the name in my notebook. In the end it took me four trips to two stations to get a ticket to Hohhot, there to catch a train toward Mongolia. The language wall was total; it was like trying to communicate with fish in the sea.

An hour after boarding, a woman in a blue conductor’s uniform came to me and unleashed a torrent of indecipherable words. Thank you, I said. How are you? It was all I could say. She stomped off, returning with another conductor. He unleashed the same torrent. Thank you, I said. How are you?

He tried harder. She tried harder. Thank you, I said. How are you?

They left, returning a few minutes later with two passengers who spoke some English. “Where are you going?” they said.

“To Hohhot,” I said, showing them my ticket.

“Yes,” the men said in harmony, “but where are you changing trains?”

“Changing trains?”

“This train does not go to Hohhot. You must change trains.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You tell me where!”

They conferred. “Wu Wei,” the men said, the conductors nodding. “You must get off in Wu Wei.”

“When do we get to Wu Wei?” I asked.

By then I had my trusty pad and pen. The woman grabbed it, wrote “13:10,” and presented it to me.

I had, somehow, ended up not in the lowest class, hard seat, but in hard berth—six platforms in a spotless train with down comforters and down pillows. There was nothing I could do, no conversation. Every once in a while the people near me jabbered at me. I nodded. “Thank you, thank you,” I said. “How are you?”

I got off the train in Wu Wei and I didn’t even know where Wu Wei was. It was freezing, maybe ten degrees. The train station stood elevated overlooking a square with a tall pole on which galloped three black horses. It was still. A few shops lined the square and one six-story, modern cube of a building. Wu Wei was deserted. I showed my ticket to a line of policemen in blue uniforms in the unheated station. I had no idea what they said. I unleashed a torrent of English.

A policeman grabbed me by the arm, led me outside, into another room, the ticket room. He marched to the front of the line, much was spoken, a ticket spat out. I drew a clock, pointed to my watch. “17:48,” he wrote.

I followed him back to the station. He shook his head, pointed … out. To the square. I shook my head. Showed him my bag, asked if I could store it. He shook his head, said words I couldn’t understand, pushed me toward the square. No, I didn’t feel like taking a stroll with my bags, so I went back into the station. Where I sat for four hours freezing, amid peasants with ruddy cheeks and silver teeth. I made friends with some. I showed them photos of my children stored on my cell phone. A woman gave me an orange so cold it was hard to hold and partly frozen. I paced. I read. The time drew near. I had two scarves around my neck, gloves, long underwear, a ski hat, and I shook. But there was no train. I took my ticket back to the police. One of them, a woman, suddenly spoke: “Tomorrow,” she said.

“You speak English?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “And your train is tomorrow evening.”

Four hours freezing for nothing! The modern building was a hotel, and not a bad one. I squawked like a chicken. I drew a picture of a steaming cup of coffee. They nodded. I felt my communication skills were improving. Soon after, I got a glass of warm milk and spareribs.

That night I called home for help. My youngest daughter was in her second year of Chinese; Lindsey bought a guidebook and they sent me a few words and phrases, which I copied into my notes and I thought I might be able to take a bit of control again.

I
SPENT THE NEXT NIGHT
on the train in a hard seat. Every seat was taken, and some people had to stand. Frost and ribbons of ice an inch thick coated the window. I sat as upright as if on a pew in church. My fellow passengers snored, stared, and ate enormous quantities of sunflower seeds. My neck ached; my knees cried; my back throbbed. I had no idea where I was; I could talk to no one, decipher nothing. This was my moment of triumph: I had come three quarters of the way around the world. I had braved the rivers and mud roads of the Amazon and the desert trains of Mali and the ferries of Indonesia and Bangladesh. I had walked through the markets of Kabul. For the first time I felt helpless. As lost as lost could be. If I pushed aside the purple curtain and wiped the ice rime off the glass I saw nothing but blackness and snow. A baby wailed and I could not sleep. I felt totally cut off; connecting to the world, the thing I wanted most of all and that I’d been getting better and better at as the months passed, was impossible. My fellow passengers showed no interest in me. I thought of the scene in Tobias Schneebaum’s
Keep the River on Your Right
in which, after four days of walking alone in the jungle, he came upon a band of naked Akarama Indians, a warrior tribe so fierce and feared that he’d been warned that they’d probably kill him on sight. Instead, though, the Akarama, after silently watching his approach, leapt up. “All weapons had been left lying on stones and we were jumping up and down and my arms went around body after body and I felt myself getting hysterical, wildly ecstatic with love for all humanity, and I returned slaps on backs and bites on hard flesh, and small as they were, I twirled some round like children and wept away the world of my past.” I had been feeling that more and more, in Indonesia and Bangladesh and sitting on the moist grass of Palika Park with Moolchand; that love for humanity which sometimes made me, yes, ecstatic and both liberated and connected. It was a feeling I seldom got at home, where I was known as a bit of a curmudgeon, but out in the world I so often felt new, fresh, like I could see each blade of grass and stone on the sidewalk, and feel open to whoever crossed my path. Out in the world I saw every human being as good and fascinating. As worth knowing. At home I too often ignored people and felt apart from everyone. Out on the road I had this driving desire to connect, and often I did, in part because people could read that openness I so rarely had at home. In China that seemed gone entirely, like a dream. Was it simply the language barrier? Or something else, something within me? Probably a bit of both. Here in western China the language and culture gap was huge, but I also realized that with every mile I was inching closer to my starting point, away from the new and back to the past. I felt scared; what if everything I had learned—evaporated upon my return? How could I find the courage to make that life real again?

An hour out of Hohhot we stopped and a young couple slid in next to me. He wore tight black jeans and a cool black sweater with a silver zipper. I was in a daze. “What’s your favorite number?” he said, apropos of nothing, in excellent English.

I perked up. “My number?”

“Yes, you know, like one, two, three, four …”

“Six,” I said.

“Dude, it’s good!” he said, holding up his hand with the pinky and thumb sticking out. “Six and eight are lucky! We are students. I am a counter! I work with numbers.”

“An accountant?”

“Yes! That’s it! An accountant.”

“What’s your favorite sport? Do you like the NBA?”

I nodded. “Can you watch the NBA in China?” I said.

“CCTV 5!” he said. “Dude, it’s the all-sports channel!”

That was an hour out of Hohhot, though, and soon I was off the train, walking through the streets until I found a hotel. Then back to the train station to puzzle out my next leg, toward Mongolia. The lines were epic. Which window? I couldn’t tell. I waited in one. I drew two clocks, with one through twenty-four. I wrote the word for
tomorrow
next to the word for
Erlian. “Erlian, ming tian,”
I said boldly when I got to the window, courtesy of Charlotte—Erlian tomorrow.

“Mayo,”
said the woman, don’t have. I drew a calendar. I pointed to the day.
“Mayo.”
I shrugged, pointed to the date again. Out spat a ticket. For Sunday, five days later, too long to stay in Hohhot.

Somehow I found the bus station. Somehow I bought a ticket to the Chinese-Mongolian border town of Erlian, leaving the next morning at eight. Most of the phrases my daughter Charlotte had given me I couldn’t make work—intonation was so important in Mandarin, nothing but gibberish came out of my mouth. I trooped back through the cold to my hotel. I went to the restaurant. “How are you?” I said. “Thank you.” I ordered, pointing to a photo in the menu of what looked like rectangular strips of meat and green string beans. My dinner came: strips of pure fat in hot peppers and garlic. Like bacon without the meat. The texture was hideous but it tasted really good.

I fled to my room, through a phalanx of waitresses and desk clerks who said, as I passed, “How are you? Thank you!” And then they giggled.

In the morning I shouldered my bags and strolled into the frigid streets of Hohhot toward the bus station. I had no idea where I was going, except toward Mongolia. I had no idea when I’d get there. There was some question about whether I needed a visa or not. The Mongolia guidebook said I did; various websites said I didn’t. But I was buoyed by thoughts of Moolchand and Fardus, their eternal optimism, and I’d just finished all 1,886 pages of the Chinese English-language edition of Alexandre Dumas’
Count of Monte Cristo
, whose ending words were “Wait and hope.”

I skated onto the bus and off we went. My seatmate wore silvery shining satin slacks and had long sideburns. “How are you?” I said. He looked at me like I was from the Stone Age and said nothing.

We climbed and swirled up into brown mountains covered in snow, and an hour later emerged on high rolling plains. Sun. Big sky with a boundless horizon. Strange motel-looking places in the middle of nowhere with yurts instead of cabins. Acres of twenty-foot-tall imitation dinosaurs striding across the steppe.

We made a bathroom stop. The men’s room was a work of art. An outdoor trough encased in frozen piss five inches thick gleamed a faint yellow. Five holes in the floor five feet above the ground revealed amazing free-standing sculptures of frozen shit that rose two inches above the holes themselves. It was so cold it didn’t even smell.

In the early afternoon we left the highway and headed into a town, stopped by a restaurant. Everyone piled out. A lunch stop! I stood around. I went into the restaurant, but no passengers were inside. Maybe it was just a bathroom break. I waited. I got cold. It was freezing. I got back on the bus. I sat. After twenty minutes the driver came up to me and erupted in Chinese. I heard the word Erlian. “Erlian!” I said. “Yes, I’m going to Erlian.”

“Erlian!” he said. “Erlian!” Then I understood. We had, in fact, arrived. Mongolia was here, somewhere.

I saw a hotel. It wasn’t a hotel, but the bus station. “Mongolia!” I said at a ticket window. A ticket spat out. An hour later I sat on a small, ramshackle bus with no heat. Women piled in with duffel bags and more duffel bags, five to a woman; they were traders. They filled the seats. Frost covered the windows. A man boarded with a truck tire. Another man thrust a car bench seat covered in faux leopard into the aisle. We took off. Hit the border, as imperial as any I’d ever seen. Sky, snow, steppe, and a massive marble building with mirrored glass shining in the sun. I went in one side, came out the other. Another hundred yards and we hit Mongolia. The affluence, the sparkle and shimmer of China, evaporated.

The border checkpoint was dim, old, dusty. I filled out a form. Visa number: I had no visa. Hotel: I had no hotel. Flight number: I was on a bus, so I left that blank, too.

I waited and hoped in a very long line.

My border agent was beautiful, with eyebrows finely arched and plucked. Pink lipstick. Long black hair in a ponytail. Green camo fatigues. A huge gold badge. “What bus number?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The bus from Erlian.” How many buses could there be?

“What bus number?”

“I don’t know.”

She unleashed a string of words to the people behind me in line. They shrugged; none of them were fellow passengers.

Five times she asked me and five times I just said I don’t know. She looked at me. “What hotel?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Zamyn Uud.” That was the city we were going to.

“Zamyn Uud Hotel?” she said.

“Yes!” I said. “That’s it. The Zamyn Uud Hotel!”