The Lovers (23 page)
Authors: Rod Nordland
An Afghan woman alone is easily run to ground, and suddenly, one day in June, Zakia became that woman, her husband ripped away from her, his aunt ready to disown her, and the police actively searching the Chindawul area for her. Her family had finally caught up to the couple, capturing Ali and turning him over to the police. This all happened just days after Zakia had learned what everyone had begun to suspect: she was pregnant.
Gentle-spirited Jawad would later describe that day as the most stressful of his life. I’m not sure what was worse, being there in the middle of it, as Jawad was, or not being there at all, as I was. When the call came that Ali had been arrested, Jawad was enjoying his Friday off out of town, an hour away from Kabul, while I was in Doha, Qatar, working on a Taliban story. Jawad got the news in a call from Shah Hussein, Ali’s cousin and the son of the aunt who took the couple in and then kicked them out; both Shah Hussein and Ali had been picked up by the police. It was about 1:00
P
.
M
. when Jawad heard, and he raced back to Kabul, spending most of the next eight hours continuously on the telephone; all I could do was check in from time to time and nudge matters along. “I
must have made fifty phone calls that day and gotten another fifty,” Jawad said; he had phones on two of the country’s cell-phone networks, and he kept them both going, along with the bureau landline. The first call he made was to Anwar, who was with Zakia at their new home when the arrest happened. Shah Hussein had already called them with the news, and both of them were in tears. “Can you solve this for us, please?” Zakia asked Jawad.
Jawad called me in Qatar, and said, “What should I tell them?” I asked him where Ali had been taken. It was to the headquarters of Police District 1, and he had been arrested not far from where Zakia, Anwar, and he were staying in Chindawul, among the squatter dwellings that every year creep farther up the side of the steep little mountain above the Pamir Cinema. Surely if the police caught him near the Pamir, it would only be a matter of time before they canvassed the hillside neighborhood and found Zakia as well. For Ali it was just an arrest and possibly some jail time; for Zakia it was quite possibly the end of life as she knew it, with disgrace and defilement waiting for her in a police cell and the real possibility that the police would then hand her over to her family, which would be the end of her life, full stop.
“There’s only one thing to do. Tell them they both need to get as far away from there as possible, and they should split up and go different ways.” Jawad relayed the message.
Ali had thought his cousin Shah Hussein would be his guarantee of safety, and they stayed friendly after he and Zakia moved to the new house and away from the aunt. Shah Hussein often visited them, partly out of friendship, partly as protection. He was a senior noncom in the Afghan National Army and very much the older brother to his cousin, seven years his junior, and he tried to rein him in. Ali had started going out frequently, to visit friends or just to get air, and it was driving everyone in the family crazy, most of all Zakia. Shah Hussein had taken her side and tried to lay down the law.
“Don’t leave the house,” Shah Hussein told Ali. “If I come back
and find you are out, I’m going to shackle you to the furniture.” He was in the military police and produced a set of handcuffs to back up the threat.
But that day, June 6, 2014, Shah Hussein was on leave and suggested that he and Ali go together to a wedding. Zakia said she was okay with that, that as a man he could not be cooped up indoors all the time. She had a house to keep, food to cook, laundry to do—the men had no work to do inside. Shah Hussein was tall and well built, an imposing man. “He thought if he was along, then I would be okay if we ran into her family,” Ali said. They set out in civvies and had only just walked down the hill and turned in to the road along the Kabul River (more an open-air sewer than a river, where heroin addicts hang out under the bridges) in front of the Pamir Cinema. Suddenly Ali heard someone shouting at him and turned as Zakia’s little brother, Razak, the nine-year-old, flung himself at him, grabbing his lapels and screaming, “You kidnapper! You eloper! Now you’re finding out it’s not so easy!” Ali pushed the boy away only to see a policeman come up right behind him, leveling an AK-47 assault rifle at him.
“Don’t move. If you do, I’ll kill you,” the policeman said, adding, as if to establish his credentials for violence, “I’m already answering one charge for killing someone, so another one won’t matter much.”
Right behind him was Gula Khan. They had all been lying in wait, probably staking out the neighborhood. The policeman ordered his two prisoners to a guard shack nearby, and by then six of Ali’s male in-laws were all over Shah Hussein and Ali, manhandling them and demanding to know Zakia’s whereabouts, until more police arrived and restored order. They were soon transferred to the Police District 1 station house, where there was a lockup.
“The police wanted to know where she was, and I said in Bamiyan,” Ali told me. “I didn’t care how much they beat me. I wasn’t going to confess and betray her.” Her hiding place, as he well knew, was only a couple hundred yards up the steep hill nearby. The police said his father-in-law had accused him of kidnapping and murdering Zakia, and they wanted to know where he’d dumped her body. Believing the worst, they beat him with
the butts of their rifles, then threw him into a cell and beat him some more in an effort to make him talk.
At some point Ali managed to pass his phone to his cousin, so that he would be able to call Anwar, Zakia, and Jawad, since Shah Hussein didn’t have their numbers himself. After Zakia’s relatives confirmed that Shah Hussein was not involved in the case, police freed him, but when he went outside the PD1 station, a gang of Zakia’s relatives jumped him, beating him with bricks until he managed to run off. He regretted not having worn his uniform—they could never have treated him in public that way if he had. Once he was sure no one was following him, Shah Hussein climbed the hill to Ali’s new house, but by the time he got there, Zakia and Anwar had fled; at Ali’s aunt’s house, his cousin changed into his uniform and went looking for them.
No one ever found out for sure how Zakia’s family tracked them down, but some theories emerged. The extended family in Afghanistan is a powerful organization in its way and is normally so large, with relationships maintained over such a distant degree, that even the poorest family will have relatives far and wide, high and low. One of their distant relatives was a taxi driver, and before this whole affair he had driven Shah Hussein from Bamiyan to a house where Ali’s aunt had previously lived. Although the aunt moved later, it was not far away from her previous home. That was Ali’s theory anyway. Another possibility was that Shah Hussein, who had been meeting with Gula Khan and some of Zakia’s cousins in an effort at reconciliation, might have been followed home. Anwar’s theory was that someone had followed him down from the mountains when he came to town the week before. He’d had that creepy feeling that someone was following him, he said, though he could never spot anyone. My own theory? The aunt gave them up. Their relationship had soured, she was tired of being responsible for them, and she did not get along with her new niece. They had fortunately moved out of her house just before the capture, but it was to a place not far away, which would explain why the family had the neighborhood staked out, but not the actual house. Whatever the real explanation, it was a lesson in how hard it
is to hide in Afghanistan, even in a city of 5 million people, many of them stuffed into dense slums. With its strong family networks, Afghan society is just not anonymous enough.
Zakia and Anwar’s first stop was to the aunt’s house, where Zakia borrowed a full-length
hejab,
1
something she almost never wore. As a getaway costume, it was hard to beat; all that anyone could see were her eyes and her high-heeled shoes. The blue burqa would have been even better, but as Zakia often said, she wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing. Anwar told his sister to take Zakia down into the city, and the two women wended their way between the mud masonry houses parallel to the river, high up on the hill. Zakia had no idea where anything was in Kabul and could not move around alone without arousing suspicion, so the sister agreed to help guide her, but she made it clear she was not happy about it. Anwar went straight down the steep path to the river.
“It was a difficult day for all of us,” Jawad later said. “They kept calling me, calling me. ‘What can you do for us?’ Shah Hussein called me, Zakia called me. Anwar called me, and you could feel the pain and helplessness in his voice, and then he started crying, ‘What should I do, what can I do?’”
Jawad called me again in Doha. “What should I tell them?”
“There’s only one solution. You have to persuade them to take her to the shelter before the police find her. Have they left the house?”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you meet them in your car, get them off the street, and drive around until they can decide what to do?”
Jawad agreed, and thus began a scramble in which the three of them tried for hours to find one another. Jawad still doesn’t know if that was by accident, because they had such a poor knowledge of the city, or because Zakia and Anwar feared that he would somehow force them to put her in the shelter and therefore were avoiding him.
Zakia and Ali’s aunt soon managed to meet up with Shah Hussein, who did know the city, and the aunt gratefully went home, leaving Zakia with Ali’s cousin. “See what you have brought to us?” the aunt said on parting. Stepping out with Shah Hussein,
however, was perilous enough in itself, because he was not proper
mahram
to Zakia—not a close enough male blood relative, or husband, to be allowed to escort her, although Ali had asked him to do that for them. Should they be arrested, those would be additional charges the police could bring: attempted
zina,
that novel Afghan offense of attempted adultery, in which a non-
mahram
couple are assumed to be on their way to have sex simply on the basis of their being alone in each other’s company, even on a public street.
Complicating matters, Shah Hussein was under strict instructions from Ali, who had whispered them to him as his cousin left PD1: Take her back to the mountains and under no circumstances let her go to the WAW shelter. Zakia had relayed that message to Jawad, and for much of the day her only purpose in talking to him was to implore him to somehow use our supposed powers to get Ali out of prison. She refused to let Jawad come and pick her up, again because of the impropriety of being with an unrelated man. So Jawad concentrated on finding Anwar, thinking he could talk sense to Zakia, and also so she would have an acceptable
mahram
along. “He’s an idiot. My son is stupid,” Anwar said angrily in one of his many phone calls to Jawad. “Why was he going to a wedding? He never listens. How can I take her now? I don’t have anyplace to go.”
Jawad let the folks at WAW know what had happened, and the lawyer Shukria also called Zakia, trying to persuade her that going into the shelter was her only safe option as a woman alone and that it would not be the sort of prisonlike situation she had endured in Bamiyan.
At last Anwar told Jawad he was near a bridge across the Kabul River and there was a hospital nearby—that could only be the Ibn-Seena Hospital, so Jawad went there, parked in front of an abandoned police traffic kiosk on the bridge, and told Anwar where he could find him. Several calls later the old man climbed into his car. With Anwar along there was someone present who could be Zakia’s
mahram,
so Jawad was able to persuade Zakia to let him pick her up, and she would be safely off the streets. He found her not far from the Allauddin Crossroads, in a Hazara neighborhood in
western Kabul, standing beside the road with Shah Hussein, who was now in his full army uniform.
Zakia still wanted no part of the shelter. She removed her veil in the car, and her face was streaked with tears, slashing paths through her ruined makeup, mascara smeared to make raccoon eyes. “Let us go into the mountains, Uncle,” she said to Anwar. She had taken to calling her father-in-law “uncle” as a token of affection and respect. He called her “daughter,” as he had that first night she came into his home. He said okay, and they asked Jawad if he would take them to the edge of town. There was a minibus station there where they might find a late ride past the Paghman Mountain, which hems in the Kabul plateau from the west, and then into Bamiyan. That road was risky at night; the danger of the Taliban was compounded by the danger from Zakia’s family, who might be lying in wait for them, knowing it was the most likely way for her to flee. Shah Hussein could not go with them; the next morning he had to report to duty, which he, unlike his cousin, took seriously, so it would just be Zakia and the old man. They would not be able to stay in Bamiyan city or their own village with the police looking for her; the authorities were no doubt alerted in Bamiyan as well that Ali had been arrested, and they would expect Zakia to go back to the valley.
Jawad was distressed at how upset Anwar seemed. “He looked so tired and beaten down.” He realized that escaping into the mountains would mean they would have to leave cars and roads and climb, and he just felt too tired to do that. Their escape on the Shah Foladi mountain had nearly killed him, he felt, and he could not face it again. Still, he held his tongue and did not object overtly to Zakia’s escape plan, except to say that he was worried about his high blood pressure. And, he added to Jawad, “Zakia is pregnant. She shouldn’t be running in the mountains.”
Zakia got the message that Anwar couldn’t handle it; perhaps she felt the same way. She turned in her seat to face Anwar and spoke to him. She seemed quite calm and determined to be strong. “Uncle, don’t worry about me. I’ll be safe, and I’ll stand by your side, and we will get the boy out. I will go to the shelter.” Jawad
could see that she was doing it for Anwar more than anything else; she knew that her husband wanted her to keep running, but she couldn’t do that if it meant doing it without the old man or leaving him behind somewhere along the way.