The Lovers (27 page)

It turned out that Ali was keeping his distance from us because he was angry that Zakia had been kept in the shelter. He felt she never should have gone there and instead should have fled with
his father and his cousin. It was an unreasonable attitude, but then he had waited for her for more than six months outside another shelter, and his attitude was as understandable as it was foolish. He didn’t seem to appreciate that in the less than a week they both spent in custody they’d had all their legal problems resolved.

Herat in some ways seemed like a good place to hide; the western city was much more relaxed than many places in Afghanistan, big enough to get lost in easily, ethnically diverse. But Herat was close to Iran, and the jumping-off point for many Afghans fleeing there, and we all worried that the couple now intended to go that route. When we refused to act for him, Ali called WAW’s Manizha Naderi himself and persuaded her to give him another thousand-dollar installment from the donors’ money. He wanted more, but out of concern that he might use it to go to Iran, Manizha decided to limit the amount the organization would give him at any one time. The result was the couple did not have enough to afford air tickets to Herat.

Three days later, June 22, we got another call from Ismatullah. “Ali and his wife are now in Bamiyan, hiding. They came back because they couldn’t go to Herat by ground,” he said. The roads were too unsafe; it is a telling fact that fourteen years after the American intervention in Afghanistan began, many of the country’s major cities and provincial capitals are connected by roads that are not safe to travel, even for Afghans. The brother said he would try to persuade Ali to call and talk to us. “I want you to help them leave the country,” he said. “We really need your help. They can’t stay here long. Already Zakia’s relatives held a meeting because it seems they knew they came to Bamiyan. They’ll do something for sure.”

The next day Ali called and missed us, but Jawad called him back. His ringtone was a song by Jamshid Parwani, an Afghan crooner, called “Gonjeshkak Telayee”:

Little goldfinch, who lives at my girl’s,

I am waiting for you.

Tell me, when will you come?

Come to me, come from my ravishing girl,

Come sing to me how she is,

And go tell her how am I,

My naive little messenger.
¹

Ali asked us, as he’d asked the American embassy, whether, if they were able to get to a third country, the whole family could go along. We told him that was doubtful. There are Afghans who have gotten entire families out like that, on grounds of family reunification, but it takes many years, sometimes decades. They might be allowed to take close relatives, like father, mother, and of course their own children, but that was all. That was the last we heard from him for nearly a month.

When they resurfaced, we learned that the couple had gone back with Anwar to the family home in Surkh Dar late that June, when Zakia’s father and brothers were still away. Having given up their fields and moved to Kabul to hunt for the couple, it was too late for Zakia’s family to resume farming that season, and they continued to stay in Kabul as day laborers, street vendors, and the like. More distant relatives—cousins and in-laws—and some of Zakia’s younger siblings were living in Zaman’s house, but they had less of a personal stake in hunting the couple down. The fields were rich and green, on their way to a bumper potato crop, and the young lovers were happy to be in the midst of Ali’s family again, living an almost-normal life. At night Ali and his brothers took turns standing guard outside their house, but they were not very worried.

Ali and Zakia were, relatively speaking, flush with cash; the thousand dollars from Women for Afghan Women was more than they needed for necessities, so Ali and Anwar decided to spend much of it on gold jewelry, bracelets, and chains for Zakia. That is, in some ways, a method of storing money, by putting it into gold—although the gold dealers sell dear and buy cheap—and stashing it in the relative safety of adorning a woman’s untouchable person. It
is also a way of showing how much they valued her. “We bought gold for her even though we were in debt and couldn’t afford it,” Anwar later said. “Because we are happy with her and wanted to show it to her, that we love her and we know she abandoned her family for our family, so we bought her gold and would be willing to buy her more if we could.”

Zakia had given up a lot to be married to Ali, and that point was driven home when he encountered her little brother, Razak, while walking toward the bazaar in the town. Razak blocked Ali’s way, brandishing a penknife. “I’m going to stab you, and then you’ll see whether it’s so easy to elope with girls,” he said. Ali laughed him off and brushed him aside, but it was a reminder of the way the anger had hung on and spread throughout her entire family.

Zakia was heartbroken about her little brother’s stubborn hatred. “I love him so much, more than anyone in my family,” she said. “He was so upset by this. He had more anger than my older brothers, even. It’s very sad. I really love him.” Mightn’t there one day be a chance of reconciliation with him, a chance to explain what had happened once he was old enough to understand? “He wouldn’t listen, he wouldn’t accept it, even if I explained it to him. Maybe when he grows up, he’ll change, he’ll understand. Maybe if he falls in love with someone, then he might understand. I hope so.”

Despite the bad tidings of the encounter with Razak, those first few days home were happy ones. The couple threw a party for close family and a few of the Surkh Dar village elders, who after all the publicity had become far more supportive of the couple—at least on the Hazara side of the road. While Ali’s family and friends do not boast of this, support among the Hazaras, who are more numerous in Bamiyan than Tajiks, was a factor, in addition to their shame and embarrassment, in driving Zakia’s male family members away. The Hazara elders wanted Anwar’s family to throw a wedding party for the entire village—insisted on it, in fact—so they would have to do that soon, before the beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting, which would begin in July 2014.

Ali’s mother was thrilled to see her son back; he had been
close to her, he said, and he knew that she was unhappy that he and Zakia had gone away and were thinking of trying to leave the country. Now he was under the same roof with the two women in his life.

Chaman had once said to Ali, “You are the son of a poor person, so try to do good things and try to make your life better.”

“I never forgot that,” Ali said. Chaman hated when she saw him smoking, for example, and told him to stop. “And I did stop,” he said, and laughed. “For a day.” But he took care not to let her see him smoking after that.

During his long courtship of Zakia, Ali had made friends with a young Tajik man about his age who lived in her village. He had become Ali’s confidant—a fellow conspirator who also believed in love. They’d been in the army together, and after the love affair became infamous, he called Ali to rekindle their friendship—secretly, for fear of being seen as a traitor by other Tajiks. It proved to be a fortunate alliance. One day in early July, Ali was working in the fields, watering vegetables by hand after a dry spell, when his Tajik friend called him. “Gula Khan is back,” the man told him. “They’re planning to catch you in the fields, and they’re on their way now. He has a pistol and a knife.” Running atop the berms between irrigation ditches, Ali made his way across the fields and, by a roundabout route, back to Surkh Dar and the family’s home. He could see Gula Khan running after him, but he’d had enough of a head start to reach safety. After a hurried family council, Zakia and Ali decided to return to hiding in the mountains. Their wedding party would have to wait until after Ramadan.

They headed back to Yakawlang again but this time found a lukewarm reception at the home of Zahra and Haji Abdul Hamid in Kham-e Bazargan. “We offered to pay them for our food and everything, but they said they couldn’t afford to keep us, and we only stayed there for four days,” Ali said. Notoriety, it seems, had made Zakia and Ali toxic, despite the older couple’s earlier sympathies. Or perhaps Haji was still angry at Ali’s disappearing trick the last time, leaving Zakia with them against his wishes.

From there they went farther into the mountains, almost to the province of Ghor, staying as paying guests with families in areas so remote they hadn’t heard the story of Zakia and Ali. “We went on up to Dara-i-Chasht, where we had no relatives to stay with,” Ali recalled later. “We did not know anyone there. It was a hard time for us. We had a little money to spend, we ate little, and tried to survive. The weather was still cold at night, and we didn’t have enough clothes and other necessities. There was no electricity, and we just had an oil lantern. No one from my family could come to visit us. It was a long way and very difficult to get there, and there was no telephone coverage. There wasn’t even a road for vehicles to go on, and you had to walk for three hours to get there. It was so hard for us.”

They spent Ramadan in that remote place, through most of July 2014, and felt the absence of family all the more keenly. The shared hardships of the daily Ramadan fast, with no food or drink between dawn and sunset, and the nightly breaking of that fast with the Iftar meal, are an intensely communal experience, and it was the first time they had experienced it alone, in the company of strangers or just each other.

Through it all, Zakia was pregnant. Without older women around, she had no way to gauge whether her morning sickness and other pregnancy complaints were cause for alarm. The nearest medical care was in Nayak Bazaar, a three-hour hike followed by a long wait and then a three-hour ride in a bus—an entire, exhausting day’s travel round-trip. They made the trip twice, for checkups, but the clinic had only maternal-care nurses, not doctors or midwives. Should anything go wrong, it would be a still-longer trip to find real medical care. “Everything was difficult up there. There was only shelter for us,” Zakia said. “It was worth it that we were together, but we wanted to have a life, and after a while it was hard to bear.”

One day Ali’s brother Bismillah made the trek up to their hiding place and begged them to come back to Bamiyan. The Bamiyan police chief had vouched for their safety if they did, and the local elders still wanted their wedding party to take place. “I just wished that my father-in-law and my brothers-in-law would
give up and leave us in peace,” Ali said. “Whatever happened has happened. They should forget it and pardon us.”

So they went home. The wedding party was held in Anwar’s house, and it was a relatively large affair, with two hundred fifty guests; Anwar spent fifty-one thousand afghanis on food and preparations—putting him another thousand dollars or so deeper in debt. Ultimately it was a gloomy occasion for the family, with everyone aware of a threat no one thought would go away; at such a big event, there was safety in numbers, but when the guests had all gone, the threat remained.

While Ali and Zakia had been in the mountains, Ali’s family had come to a joint decision, and now they wanted to make him accept it: There would be no peace for either of their families if the couple stayed in Afghanistan. They had decided he and Zakia should leave the country as the pair had earlier planned. It was time to get serious, return to Kabul, and obtain passports. They had to reestablish contact with the journalists, the embassy, and even the people from Africa. Taking the entire family, there was no hope of that, but Anwar would go along. That way Ali could find work and Zakia would still have a
mahram
with her.

The family had already told us this was what they wanted to see happen, and they wanted our help to persuade the couple it was their only solution. Anwar said he would make sure his son began answering his telephone.

When we called Ali, his phone’s ringtone was by Ahmad Zahir, the martyred Afghan pop singer, verses from his famous song “I Don’t Say It.” Ahmad Zahir was the Elvis Presley of Afghanistan, a crooner who is still popular today but in the 1970s had really electrified audiences—especially young women and girls, much to the anger of the conservative establishment. The son of a former prime minister, Zahir was so popular that the Communists feared him as well, and many of his songs were loaded with politically critical double entendres. During the early Communist regime of President Hafizullah Amin, Mr. Amin put Zahir in jail.

Then came the wedding of President Amin’s daughter. The Communists took power, vowing to outlaw arranged marriages
and abusive customary practices like
baad,
in which girls are sold at young ages to settle a debt or a blood feud, and
baadal,
in which families swap brothers and sisters in marriage, a deal that usually guarantees at least one or two unhappy spouses. President Amin flouted the socialist ideology and arranged a
baadal
wedding for his daughter, Ghul Ghutai, and his son, Abdur Rahman, to their first cousins, the son and daughter of the president’s brother. Ghul Ghutai was furious, and she fought bitterly against the marriage but eventually agreed. At the last minute, however, she refused to show up for her wedding unless Ahmad Zahir could sing at it, so the president ordered him released and the charges against him dropped if he agreed to sing at the wedding. The first song he chose was “I Don’t Say It”:

I don’t ask you to set me free

from the prison of the body:

Rather, take me bodily to paradise,

and there in that garden

Fill my heart with joy.

Remember, O Death the Hunter,

remember this soul, like a bird in its cage,