The Lovers (32 page)

The four of them found a hotel in a neighborhood close to downtown Dushanbe that had been recommended by the Consultant as relatively inexpensive, in an area frequented by Afghans. A sprawling, Soviet-era place, the Hotel Istiqlol (“Freedom”) had two separate wings. Anwar and the lovers stayed in one side, and Jawad in the other. He paid for them and the desk clerk refused to give him a receipt. When the shift changed the next morning, the new desk clerk asked for payment again or, absent that, since they had no receipts, a little bribe to start the day.

Because their visas were valid for up to a six-month-long stay, their plan was to find an inexpensive apartment and settle in there, waiting to see if there was any progress on visas from the Canadians or the Americans, before claiming asylum as refugees. If there was progress, they could return to Kabul within those six months. Once they were refugees, the Tajik authorities would cancel their visas, forbid them residence in cities like Dushanbe, and force them to relocate to remote parts of the country. Covered by the rugged Pamir Mountains, more than 50 percent of Tajikistan is over ninety-eight hundred feet in elevation, with many peaks above twenty thousand feet, and 93 percent of the land area mountainous. It is a place of breathtaking beauty, however ruthless and unscrupulous its apparatchiks might be; tourism is unsurprisingly rare.

On their second day in Dushanbe, Ali and Anwar went out house-hunting around midday. They were separated from Jawad
by a few hundred feet when four men came and surrounded him. They wore cheap suits with no ties.

“They showed me their badges and said they were secret police. They said, ‘What are you doing here?’ and ‘We are going to deport you.’ I said, ‘What have I done?’ They said, ‘You came here yesterday, and you’re walking around like this in the city?’” The suggestion was that merely doing so was an offense.

A car pulled up, a ratty old Lada, with two more policemen inside. Two of them shoved Jawad into the backseat between them while two others got in the front. “Let me call my friend,” Jawad said, and took out his phone—thinking to warn Ali to get out of the area—but they snatched it from him and told him to shut up. Then they came right to the point, as they dangled handcuffs in front of his face. “Give us your money.” He took out a pocketful of somonis, but they scoffed at that and began methodically searching him. “They touched me everywhere, all my pockets, everything, until they found my money,” he said. Because Jawad did not trust the hotel, he and the others had taken their cash with them when they went out. Jawad was stripped of all the money he had, nearly a thousand dollars, and turned out of the car. The policemen told him to return to his hotel, and when Jawad protested that he now did not have taxi fare, they gave him 20 somonis. The first taxi that stopped demanded thirty but finally settled for twenty when Jawad said he had just been robbed.

“You’ve met our police, have you?” the driver said. “Welcome to Tajikistan. We have no crime here. We just have police.”

The Tajiks also claim to have the world’s biggest flag, a banner nearly a hundred feet high by two hundred feet wide, flying on a hill in the center of town and visible from nearly everywhere in the capital. This is the country’s only serious claim to any respectable sort of fame, but it’s not true.
⁴

As an Afghan, Jawad was no stranger to corruption, but the blatancy of it in Dushanbe astonished him. “It’s always money, money there. It’s worse than Afghanistan,” he said. “They are like fishes—their mouths are always open, and they’re saying, ‘How much money do you have?’ They openly ask you for
money. No one in Afghanistan would do that.” Jawad also was an ethnic Tajik, but these were not people he recognized or felt any kinship with at all, even though they spoke the same tongue. These were post-Soviet creatures, inhabiting a regime that was thoroughly rotten. “We expected a greedy, corrupt country, but not like this,” he said.

The plan had to change. We discussed it and decided that it would be best if Ali and his family immediately applied for refugee status instead of waiting; it was only a matter of time until the police turned their attention on them as well. Once registered, they would have some measure of international legal protection. It was dumb luck that they weren’t together with Jawad when he was picked up; as it was, finding their way blind back to the hotel was difficult. They did not know its name—the sort of thing that happens when you can’t read signs—but they managed to explain to a taxi driver where they were staying, well enough for him to understand and take them there (overcharging them by a factor of five).

They all went to the UNHCR office early the next morning and were there when it opened, but the door staff simply told them to go away, without any explanation. They stayed and insisted on speaking to someone, standing in the street and worrying that the police would come at any moment. Finally, after many phone calls between the American embassy in Kabul and UNHCR, an official came out, a thin woman in some sort of uniform, with a miniskirt so short that it shocked the Afghans. When they explained that UNHCR in Kabul had sent word about their case, the official called them liars and sent them away again. They had the impression that unless they paid someone, no one was going to help them. Advised by UNHCR in Kabul to keep waiting, they persisted, and after a few hours a female staffer came out and wordlessly handed them a slip of paper on which was written the name of an organization, Rights and Prosperity, and its address. That simple act had taken nearly six hours, with no one else in line ahead of them. Fortunately, Jawad was there to read it for them.

The staffers at Rights and Prosperity were sullen but cooperative
and explained what would happen next. The trio would have to establish a residence, then go to the police station in the neighborhood and register with the police, leaving their passports there for a few days. When they got the passports back, they could then return to Rights and Prosperity and begin the formal process of applying for refugee status. Jawad helped them find an apartment, looking over his shoulder the whole time, but the secret police did not show up again.

Once Ali and family knew where to go—the location of the police registration office and the Rights and Prosperity NGO—it seemed risky for Jawad to remain with them and likely that his presence might draw unwelcome attention to them from the police. At three o’clock the next morning, Jawad went to the airport for the five-o’clock flight to Dubai. He borrowed three hundred dollars from Ali for his travel expenses, but this time he hid the cash better, deep in the lining of his laptop bag. At the airport the immigration police had the same openmouthed, bottom-feeding approach as they closed in on him. “How much money do you have?” and “Give us all your money,” and “Tell me the truth, do you have dollars?” were their conversational openers. He insisted that he had none, and although they pulled his possessions apart and body-searched him thoroughly, they never found it.

Zakia and Ali and Anwar were now on their own, at the beginning of what they thought would be a long road toward resettlement in a third country. When they appeared for registration at the police station in Dushanbe, they were extorted to pay bribes; the standard ten-dollar fee for registration became fifty dollars each, and then, before they were allowed to leave, the police demanded another hundred; so they paid a total of two hundred fifty dollars, when the official fee would have been closer to thirty for all of them. Then they had just two simple steps left: picking up their passports after registration and returning to the Rights and Prosperity office to lodge their claims for refugee status.
⁵

It was clear by now that Tajikistan would only be a transitional place at best, even though they spoke the language; there was little or nothing for them there. Everywhere they looked, they saw evidence
of the corruption and degradation that came out of decades of being part of the Soviet Union. Even the country’s mosques were subjugated, with the authorities giving mullahs a selection of sermons they were allowed to read and jail terms if they did not. A taxi driver offered to find Anwar a second wife for the night. Another pointed out that “in that building are eighty girls who give massages” and told him how little it would cost. Prostitutes plied the street corners at night; uniformed policemen were their pimps. Drug dealers were everywhere. Tajikistan is an important staging area on the drug route between Afghanistan’s poppy fields and the proliferating heroin cribs of Russia and the former Soviet republics. Anwar was horrified. “I have nothing but contempt for this country,” he said later. Hopefully it would be different in rural areas, where once registered as refugees they would be obliged to stay until their cases were processed.

By October 6, Zakia and Ali and Anwar had their passports back from the Tajik police’s registration office in Dushanbe, where again they’d been extorted for another hundred dollars. Jawad had arranged a taxi that could take them directly from the police station to the Rights and Prosperity office to lodge their applications for refugee status. Oddly, they did not go immediately. The next day, when Jawad called, Ali told him he was going to wait yet another day to complete the process because it was raining heavily that day. Then they let another whole day—this one of dry weather—go by before going to the office. Asked later why they had delayed so long, Ali shrugged and said, “We were negligent. I don’t know why.” Finally, on Thursday morning, October 9, three days after they retrieved their passports from the police registration office, they got into a taxi and went to complete their applications as refugees. A few blocks from the Rights and Prosperity office on Hofiz Sherozi Avenue, two plainclothesmen standing on the street flagged the taxi to a stop and ordered the three passengers out of the car. The three-day delay might not have mattered, although perhaps it gave the secret police time to decide what to do with them.

It was the middle of the morning, and the street was full of
passersby; none showed any sign of concern as the secret policemen systematically searched the two men and then demanded that Zakia give them her purse. Ali tried to stand in front of her, but they shoved him out of the way and threatened to handcuff him if he tried anything else. They made Zakia take off her gold bracelets and hand them over; they found the five thousand dollars the couple carried—their entire savings and the remainder of all the donor money from WAW.

When Zakia did not give up her bag, a policeman tore it from her hands—something that in Afghanistan would have been tantamount to touching another man’s wife. Ali snapped and lifted a fist ready to strike the policeman. On his fist was his antique turquoise ring, which they noticed as they grabbed his arms. The ring was his proudest possession, given to him by his mother, who had it from her mother, who had it from hers, the oldest and most valuable thing he owned. “Please don’t take this ring, please! Think of God, think of Mohammad!” Ali pleaded with them. He grabbed one of the policemen by the lapels, but that only infuriated them, and they began beating and kicking him. Still, people passing by did not bother to look—or did not dare.

“It is better to die than to live in a country like that,” Ali said. “No one has ever touched my wife’s bag, but those cowards did. I tried to hit them, and they saw my ring and grabbed my hand and took the ring, and they started punching me, hitting me.”

Satisfied they had stripped Zakia, Ali, and Anwar of anything of value—including their cheap cell phones—the policemen hailed a taxi, put them in it, and paid the taxi driver the fare to the border with Afghanistan, telling him to take them there and nowhere else. “Leave this country,” they said. They were forced to abandon in the new apartment their suitcases, full of what meager possessions they had brought along; the taxi driver said he had not been paid for any side trips. “I guess it was our destiny,” Ali said.

Their deportation did seem to be more than a random act of corruption, as was probably true of Jawad’s earlier robbery. Tajikistan is a Soviet-style police state where nothing happens by accident. The reasons for the robbery and expulsion remain murky.
Perhaps, in a country characterized by pimping policemen and roving drug dealers, a happy ending for some unknown Afghans’ love story had aroused official contempt in an anonymous apparatchik’s office, somewhere up there on that hill in the center of Dushanbe under the world’s not-biggest flag. Or perhaps some Afghan employee at the American embassy in Kabul or in the UNHCR office there, who disapproved of Zakia and Ali’s love affair, had informed on them deliberately. Besides the American embassy and UNHCR, Jawad and myself, no one else knew that they were going to Tajikistan and exactly when. We had even been careful to misinform the Consultant, advising him that their travel date was weeks away, not days.

Too frightened to defy the policemen, and with no funds left, Anwar and the lovers had no choice but to do as they’d been told. The road from Dushanbe to the Tajik border town of Panj-e-Payon took them to within two miles of the border, but the taxi driver refused to go the rest of the way unless they paid him more money. They’d been left broke by the police, however, so they got out and walked. Once they were at the border on the Tajik side, the Tajik border guards demanded another bribe to let them cross. Since they could not pay, they were made to wait for several hours, sitting in the sun by the roadside. When they protested that Tajik policemen had robbed all their money, the border guards threatened to arrest them for slandering government officials. Finally, at 2:00
P
.
M
., the border crossing closed for the day and they were told to come back in the morning. They slept by the road that night, and the next day they managed to convince the border policemen that they really were out of money and got across, but then they had to walk three miles before they could find a taxi. Fortunately, they had a distant relative in the city of Kunduz, about forty miles to the south, and they persuaded the taxi driver to take them there to be paid. The relative also loaned them bus fare for the all-day journey back to Kabul, and by the following day they had returned to the capital, hungry, dirty, exhausted, and discouraged, with no money and none of their most valued few possessions.