The Lovers (11 page)

Shmuley’s assistant put me straight through, and the rabbi got right to the point, addressing me, as he always had in our many previous calls, as if we were old friends. “Rod, she escaped.”

“Who?”

“Zina, Zophia, what was her name?”

“Zakia?”

“Yes, she escaped, a couple nights ago. I just heard about it.”

“Who from?”

“Fatima told me.”

“Really?”

I didn’t know that Fatima Kazimi, the women’s director from Bamiyan, was in touch with Rabbi Shmuley; he was full of surprises and, as I would see, quite determined. Fatima was the reason I knew about Zakia and Ali—and by many accounts, in particular her own, the only reason Zakia was not already dead.

The whole affair of Zakia and Ali had come to my attention only a couple of months earlier, when, on February 9, Fatima Kazimi had e-mailed every journalist working in Afghanistan for major American publications. She dictated the e-mail through her English-speaking son and sent it to me by clicking on my byline on NYTimes.com:

Dear Mr. Nordland:
³

I’m Fatima Kazimi, Bamyan Director of Department of Women’s Affairs (DoWA), the provincial branch of Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA.) We are the lead protector/defender of women’s rights in Bamyan province, Afghanistan.

I just go straightly to the point which is the case of a girl
(Tajik ethnicity) and a boy (Hazara ethnicity) that fled from their houses and came to Bamyan Department of Women’s Rights (DoWA) and Bamyan Independent Human Rights Commission for the sake of safety, protection and to finally make their dream a reality, marriage. We follow up this case from its inception about three months ago, and videotaped the confession and speeches of the lovers.

As the marriage of different ethnicity in Afghanistan and especially in Bamyan is counted as a taboo, the girl’s family insisting in their daughter’s return as well as so many other hands that get involved in this case.

As the girl doesn’t want to return to her family, and the fact that it is involved a high risk of girl’s murder if she gets back (as we saw in previous cases), the DoWA and other women’s rights protector including the Governor Office, Independent Human Rights Commission and Civil Society Forum continues their advocacy for this lovers.

However, instead of supporting and protecting women’s rights in Bamyan, the Provincial Court has ordered my suspension and two others from our job and prosecution just because we are following this case so closely and the FACT THAT MOST OF THE JUDGES in provincial court are from Tajik ethnicity.

You can contact Bamyan Governor Office, and the Independent Human Rights Commission to verify this information and plenty of other information that we have. I was wondering if you broadcast this news as you will protect the life of this couple and the fact that we are being threatened to death.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you,

Best regards.

Fatima Kazimi

I called her right away and asked a few exploratory questions—chiefly, would the couple talk and could we take pictures? Fatima said yes and maybe. That was good enough for me. We were on the
next flight to Bamiyan, aboard East Horizon Airlines, which flies to Bamiyan, sometimes twice weekly, sometimes not for months on end. I took with me photojournalist Mauricio Lima and our Afghan colleague Jawad Sukhanyar. A year or two earlier, we could have driven the six to eight hours over one of the two passes through the Hindu Kush into Bamiyan, but both have now been effectively cut off, at least for foreigners, by intermittent Taliban ambushes.

I was already primed to jump on such a story and had long been looking for this sort of opportunity. Honor killings are more often than not one of Afghanistan’s dirty little secrets; instances where they come into the open are rare, and it is even more rare to have a chance to write about stopping a threatened honor killing, especially when the parties were willing to talk and perhaps even be photographed. We were en route before Fatima had a chance to change her mind; I didn’t even call her again, for fear she would reconsider, and the next time she heard from us, we were knocking on her office door in the Bamiyan government office building not far from the airstrip.

Fatima received us from behind an expansive glass-topped desk, framed by windows and the glare from sunlit snow, in a room with walls lined with chairs for supplicants. After summarizing what had happened to Zakia and Ali, Fatima went to fetch Zakia from the women’s shelter, bringing her back to the office under a heavy guard, two green Ford Ranger pickup trucks full of policemen. Zakia had her shawl on but was dressed in loud, bright colors, as I would come to learn she usually was, a pink head scarf and an orange sweater. She caused a stir among the policemen and the government officials who lined the hallways as she was brought in; Afghans find her beautiful, with startlingly large, amber eyes.

She was tongue-tied at first. It was not only the first time she’d ever seen a journalist, it was the first time she’d ever seen a foreigner and the first time in her life that she’d ever talked to a male stranger—moreover, the first time she’d ever talked to a man other than Ali, and Anwar, and her brothers and father. “I knew, because of my case, I had to have that courage to speak. I realized that,” she said much later, recalling how terrified she’d been that day.
Expressing herself seemed painful, but with Fatima gently nudging her along, her story poured out through Jawad, who translated. “My whole family is against my marriage,” she said. “I want to go ahead anyway. I request of you, I don’t want to stay in Bamiyan. I can live anywhere but in Bamiyan. All I want is my love.

“The judges told me, ‘We are Tajik and it’s dishonoring us if you decide to marry a Hazara.’ The judges, my mother, and father were all saying this to me, but I told them whatever he might be, he’s still a Muslim. I’m very worried about him and his safety. My father and relations threatened him, and I’m afraid they might do something. I get death threats from my family. They say if I go marry him, they will not let us live, and if I go home, my mother and father will not let me live.”

Even her sister turned against her, she said. During a visit with her at the shelter, “she started screaming at me, using abusive words. You could hear her all over the building.”

Zakia continued, “I love him, and now even if I don’t get to marry him, I couldn’t live here, I can’t go back and stay here, I have to leave forever. I have confidence in him. I know his attitudes and his good moral character. I want to live with him.”

In the court proceeding, Zaman could not argue that his daughter had run away or chosen an improper mate, since neither of those acts is a crime. But breaking an engagement
is
a matter for the Afghan courts, and so her father began his suit by claiming that she had been formally engaged to her nephew, which Zakia said was the first she had heard of it.

“They kept getting it mixed up, though,” Fatima said with a laugh. “One minute they claimed she was engaged to her father’s sister’s son, the next it was her mother’s sister’s son. They should make up their minds before lying like that.”

Zakia’s account came out fitfully and slowly at first, with long, awkward silences and monosyllabic replies. The most extraordinary thing about her was the way her rare smile could suddenly illuminate her face, enlivening everything—eyes, lips, nose. It would flicker on like sunlight from a gap in a fast-moving cloud and be just as quickly gone. Her smile would transform her so
thoroughly and so engagingly that you wanted to find some way to summon it back again.

I explained to her the probable consequences of an article quoting her openly. People in Bamiyan would see it through local Internet connections, however rickety. All news is global, especially if it appears in the
New York Times.
Local news organizations might well pick it up, too. Everything she said to us would likely be heard or read by everyone she knows; if her relatives could not read, someone who
could
read would relate it to them.

Zakia’s only response was that she had already been in the shelter in Bamiyan for nearly five months. She had a point. In all that time, the closest she came to resolving her status had been the abortive February 3 court hearing.

At Fatima’s suggestion we talked a bit about the shelter and the other girls and young women who were there. Some had been there for years already, unable to get legal resolution such as protection from an abusive spouse and unable to leave for fear of the vengeance of their menfolk—often on both sides of their families. The worst case at the shelter at the time was that of the fourteen-year-old girl Safoora, the Hazara girl who would later help Zakia escape from the shelter. Waylaid in the shabby Bamiyan courthouse while her family disputed details of their daughter’s arranged marriage, Safoora was taken into a supply room and gang-raped by four Tajik courthouse employees. The police, Hazaras, arrested the culprits; the Tajik judges vacated the cases against all but one of them—and then charged him with adultery, a criminal offense in Afghanistan, rather than rape. Then the judges lodged a similar charge of adultery against Safoora. It was absurd, because even in Afghanistan a child can never give legal consent, even if the sex had been on some physical level “consensual”—however implausible that would be in a courthouse gang rape. While the women’s advocates tried to get the criminal charges against her dismissed, Safoora was kept in the shelter—primarily to ensure that her family did not honor-kill her to erase their shame.

Fatima returned to Zakia’s predicament, her point clear. “What do you think I should do?” Zakia asked her.

“You have to decide that for yourself.” Fatima seemed the concerned, kindly auntie.

“Will it help us reach each other?” Zakia asked me.

“Possibly,” I said, not convinced. “Possibly someone like your president would read about what happened and intervene, but honestly, probably not. On the other hand, what alternatives do you have now?”

This was a girl who had never been to school, who could neither read nor write, and whose knowledge of alphanumeric characters extended to just ten digits, 1 through 0 on the telephone keypad. Only one of the eleven children in Zakia’s family, nine-year-old Razak, had ever been to school. Zakia sat with her back straight against the wall, her nose still bruised from the courtroom tussle. Her colorful layers of artificial silks, tunics, and pantaloons, in the brilliance of the glare, seemed cheap and tawdry when looked at individually, little holes and rips and tears showing here and there, but their overall effect was to enhance her attractiveness. She stared at the floor for most of our conversation, and I felt that she must be wondering, “Why are these foreigners interested in me?”

She thought about it for a spell. Then she raised her head and for the first time looked me right in the eye and said, “I don’t mind,” and smiled briefly.

Mauricio, the photographer, had been dozing, as photographers often do during interviews when there’s nothing to shoot; now it was his turn to ask for permission to photograph her. This was even touchier than the interview. Photography of Afghan women is widely forbidden, notwithstanding some famous images—the iconic green-eyed refugee girl, Sharbat Gula, photographed by Steve Mc-Curry for
National Geographic,
⁴
for instance. Because Sharbat was a child, just twelve years old at the time, it was allowed, as it would have been for older women, usually widowed and desperate and therefore excused from the strictures that normally apply. Otherwise even shooting a woman in a head-to-toe burqa can provoke men in the vicinity, whether they’re related to the woman or not, to attack a photographer. Asked for permission to be photographed, most young women in Afghanistan will understandably say no.
⁵

This time, however, Zakia did not think about it long at all. “I don’t mind,” she said, and Mauricio got right to work. The mysteries of the camera’s unblinking eye; I had fully expected that Mauricio would be returning to Kabul disappointed. Every interaction between photographer and subject is a kind of seduction, in one direction or the other, and that was true even between Zakia and Mauricio, a talented photographer who looks more like a nightclub bouncer and who firmly believes in the dictum that the best picture is taken up close. In this case he got six inches or so from her face, in an effort to compensate for the bright sunlight; he is a master of the awkward portrait. Zakia accepted it with equanimity; after a while she even seemed in some odd way empowered by the attention. She was a beautiful woman who it is safe to say had never been properly, if ever, photographed.
⁶
Here she was being shot by a pro, and she seemed to like it.

It was true that she had little to lose. Earlier she had talked about how large and close the members of her extended family were; in addition to her four brothers, there were many cousins, who in Afghanistan are often as close as siblings. In all, her family’s tribe had thirty-five homes in the area. They would all be after Ali now, since they could not get to her in the shelter. “I would wait until I reach my love, no matter how long. But I’m very worried that my family is trying to harm his family, and I’m very worried about that. If he should die, I should also die.”

“Are you sure about that?” Fatima cut in and asked her, a little startled by her declaration.

Zakia looked straight at her. “Of course.”

Fatima frowned. She might have approved of romantic love, or at least the legal right to pursue it, but she had a low opinion of men, honed no doubt during two years of advocating in cases of violence against women brought under the EVAW law, and she didn’t think any of them were worth dying for. She reminded Mauricio to take her own picture as well, which he dutifully did.