The Lovers (35 page)

More concretely, the trip to Tajikistan and the months in hiding in Kabul had convinced them all, and importantly Anwar as the head of the family, that illiteracy was not just a condition, a fact of their lives; it was an affliction that cursed and limited them. Handicapped like that, they could not cope in the world outside their farm and village, but they could no longer ignore that outside world.

So one of the unexpected consequences of the love story of Zakia and Ali was that in the 2015 school year, which in mountainous parts of Afghanistan begins after winter ends, all
seven of the school-age grandchildren in Anwar’s household were going to school, five of them for the first time. (Two others had started the year before.) Five of those seven are girls. Of Anwar’s eight sons and daughters, now all adults, only two of them could read and write, and neither very well; Anwar now wants each of his grandchildren to at least stay in school long enough to become literate.

“Those travels taught us that we couldn’t tell the difference between a house and a public toilet. We were helpless because we couldn’t read,” Anwar said. “It made us think how important this education is.”

The impact of the couple’s love story went beyond their family as well. “The younger generation in Afghanistan saw this as a successful love story and discussed and debated it in their circles, especially in cyberspace,” said Zahra Sepehr, head of a Kabul-based advocacy group called Development and Support of Women and Children.
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“It had a tremendous positive effect in the society and gave young people the encouragement that religious and ethnic differences are no hindrance to a successful marriage based on love.” Ms. Sepehr said that the couple’s own example ended up saving a woman in Kabul from an honor killing. The woman named Soheila, was twenty-one, and a Shia Hazara, and the young man involved, Jawed, was twenty-five, a Sunni Tajik—like Zakia and Ali with the sexes reversed. Both of their families opposed the union. “The couple approached my office. We did a mediation between the two families, gave them the example of Mohammad Ali and Zakia, and told them marriage is the right of every person. Everyone has the right to choose the person he or she wants.” Ms. Sepehr said the mediation did not succeed in persuading all their relatives; the boy’s father and uncles, and some of the girl’s uncles remained opposed. But it encouraged the couple, Ms. Sepehr said, and it did reach Soheila’s father, who knew that his daughter’s love was so strong that she would run away if they prevented the marriage. His solution was a practical one, and very Afghan. He put his daughter into hiding and spread the word among their families that he had killed her, then quietly arranged for Soheila and Jawed
to elope to Pakistan, where they now live in safety—and secrecy, with her father’s honor publicly intact. It’s what passes for a happy ending to an Afghan love story. “This happened because of the example of Zakia and Mohammad Ali,” Ms. Sepehr said. “Now when I talk to any couple like this, I tell them their story.”

On January 11, 2015, Zakia’s brother Gula Khan returned to the valley. At first no one knew where he was staying, but he’d been spotted on the road and then in the bazaar, and family friends told the couple about the sighting. Later they learned he was staying in the house of his father-in-law in Kham-e-Kalak. Anwar and his sons were wary; the brothers took turns standing guard at night. The Bamiyan police were informed and promised to keep an eye out, but even Ismatullah, himself a policeman, thought that was an empty promise. (Like most Afghan policemen, Ismatullah was not allowed to bring his service weapon home when off duty.) Anwar no longer had his old shotgun, which he had sold when the family ran out of money. So after Gula Khan’s return, Ali’s older brothers brought home the dog and staked it outside. He was a mongrel with plenty of bark, and they put him in the gap in their compound wall as an early-warning system. They fed the animal well, but it would remain a dog with no name. In communities where people get only one name, animals get none.

Zakia forbade Ali to go out alone (actually, as she put it more diplomatically, Ali agreed to accept that restriction after they discussed it). “It’s difficult to protect yourself from your enemy, because you don’t know when they will act against you,” Ali said. Then some money arrived, sent via Western Union by an anonymous donor, who wanted them to have a thousand dollars to help with baby expenses.
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Half of it they spent on fuel and food for the winter, and with the rest Ali bought a gun. When he went to the fields with his brothers, he would tuck the nine-millimeter Russian-made Makarov pistol into his belt (he didn’t see any point in paying extra for a holster) and pull his shirt out to cover it, but only partly. Even so, he had trouble concentrating on field work,
constantly looking up when anyone appeared on the horizon. Ali said he thought the gun qualified as a baby expense.

“I’m fine with that,” the donor said when he heard about it. “Of course he has to protect himself and his family. That’s his first responsibility.”

There had been no indication so far that the determination and anger of Zakia’s family toward the couple had cooled at all, and there are many such cases where families have waited years before exacting vengeance. The family of a girl named Soheila, from Nuristan, pursued her for eight years after she broke off an arranged child marriage, attacking her, the employees of the shelter where she stayed, and the man she wanted to marry, and prompting authorities to jail her.
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Soheila was a victim of the abusive traditional practice of
baad,
but even by the standards of
baad
her case was shocking. Nine years before Soheila was born, her father’s grown son, Aminullah, eloped with the intended wife of his father’s cousin, setting off years of violent feuding between two sides of their family. When Soheila was born, her mother died in childbirth. Aminullah was her half brother, by a second wife of her father’s. Her father, Rahimullah, decided to resolve the family feud by giving Soheila in
baad
to the cousin who’d been wronged by his son. So Soheila was being sold, at birth, by her father on behalf of her half brother to resolve a dispute that began long before she was born. When Soheila turned five, the two families tied a
neka
with the approval of a mullah, arranging for the celebration and consummation of her marriage to the cousin when Soheila reached the legal age of sixteen.
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No one told the girl about her betrothal until she turned thirteen, and once she knew, it did not take her long to figure out that her white-bearded husband would be sixty-seven when they wed—and she would become the fourth wife of what would be considered a very old man in Afghanistan, where the average healthy male life expectancy is closer to fifty years.
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On the eve of her wedding day, Soheila ran, going to the only place she could think of—to her maternal uncle’s house in a neighboring village. Her uncle said he would have to return her to her
family the next day, and out of desperation she asked her male cousin, Niaz Mohammad, if he would help her run away. She later said she acted not out of love but simply because she had no other options, yet just the act of being alone together made Soheila and Niaz adulterers in the eyes of Afghan society and law, and they soon decided to get married. Later love came as well, and then pregnancy.

For eight years Soheila’s father and her half brother, with the help of other men in their family, pursued her and Niaz from the remote mountains of Nuristan to Kabul’s slums. They first tracked them down when Soheila was pregnant with the couple’s child, and her father persuaded the police to arrest them both on adultery charges; their baby was born in prison. Later, Women for Afghan Women managed to get Soheila and her child out of prison and took her into one of its shelters. Soheila’s family fought bitterly against the divorce case the organization brought to vacate her child marriage to the elderly cousin. They showed up in court with a dozen witnesses claiming that Soheila’s
neka
was not tied until she was sixteen years old. When the court ruled in her favor, the family pretended to be willing to take her back in while her husband’s court case continued and then attacked her and WAW representatives when they showed up at their home, the women in her household setting upon her and beating her and the men taking out guns to shoot at the social workers. Soheila escaped with help from neighbors, but afterward her family members threatened to kill her lawyer and called Soheila with so many death threats that she began recording them to show police. Finally, in May 2014, Soheila’s divorce from the old man was final, after a mandatory waiting period under Afghan law, clearing the way for charges against her real husband to be dropped. He had spent most of four years in prison; she had spent most of those four years in the shelter.

Eight years after she fled the arranged marriage, there was no sign that her family members had lost their determination to either bring Soheila back to marry the old man or to kill her. An Iranian filmmaker, Zohreh Soleimani, made a documentary on
her case
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and actually persuaded Soheila’s father and half brother to discuss her on camera. They were unabashedly frank about what they would do to her if they could.

“If the court grants her divorce, he would say, ‘What is the court?’” the half brother, Aminullah, said of their father in the interview. “If she runs away, unh,” he said, gesturing as if pulling a trigger. “We are not afraid of dying, we are not afraid of killing. For us it is like killing a sparrow. If she is not coming back to us and goes with that donkey of a man, she will be killed.” His unapologetic vitriol was all the more extraordinary considering that it was Aminullah’s own elopement thirty-three years earlier that had caused Soheila to be sold in
baad
in the first place. Even more ironic, he told Ms. Soleimani in the interview, in an effort to justify the idea of child marriage, was the fact that he had engaged his own daughter to an older man when she was only three days old. More ironic still, that daughter had recently eloped herself, rather than fulfill the bargain with the old man. Despite their failures, Mr. Aminullah and his father both stick to the view that the women in their family are their property and that their rights over them are absolute.

It is a commonplace view in Afghanistan, but rare to hear it enunciated with such frankly murderous intent. Soheila’s father, Rahimullah, was if anything even worse than her half brother. “My child belongs with me,” her father said. “Me or someone from my tribe, we will find her. Even if she goes to America, we will find her. Wherever she is found, she will be killed. With all the strength that God has given me I will ask God, before they take another step, ‘God, kill both of them.’ She will be lost to both worlds.”

Soheila and her intended, Niaz Mohammad, were finally married in September 2014, formally, but it was a sad ceremony. Niaz Mohammad had contracted hepatitis in prison, and complications from that condition led to diabetes; he is too ill to work. Only a few of his own family members attended the wedding, and during it Soheila’s phone rang. It was her brother again, she said, promising to kill her, one way or another, one day or another.
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Memories are long in Afghanistan when it comes to matters of honor or perceived honor. Zakia and Ali take a somewhat fatalistic view about the whole situation, one common in their society: this is just their destiny. They are largely indifferent to the role that they and their story have played in Afghan society. They are confused when anyone suggests that they have become symbols for Afghanistan’s youth and harbingers of a change that remains elusive and distant. For all their defiance of their society’s norms, their ardor was romantic rather than revolutionary. Zakia will probably never be a feminist as anyone in the West would understand that concept. Strength of character, determination, independence of spirit—these are intrinsic character traits rather than political postures. Zakia still believes in obeying her husband, as long as he is sensible. Her husband believes in telling her what to do, so long as she agrees. They both believe in love, but it never occurred to them that this might in some way threaten the established order.

Still, Zakia will not be ruled the way so many other Afghan women are ruled. If she and Ali ever do manage to escape the country, she may well decide to learn to read and write one day, as she has said she wants to do, and Ali says he would join her if she did. Or she might decide to go to work or to school, and that would be a negotiation as it is for families anywhere, depending on how many children they have, how much money they can earn. On the other hand, if they do not manage to leave Afghanistan or decide against doing so, the backbreaking work of life on a subsistence farm may well prove too hard for such luxuries as education and literacy, at least for themselves.

Whether they leave or stay, their children, whether boys or girls, will be educated. They will choose their own mates, they will make their own lives, and ultimately it is they who will be the ones who will realize Zakia’s human potential. It is probably not a potential that she could ever really fulfill by staying in Afghanistan. “Whatever happened has happened,” as both Zakia and Ali often said, and repeated when they went back to Bamiyan to face whatever fate awaited them and their daughter. “What will be, will be.”

After a fresh fall of snow in February 2015, a year after I first
met the couple, Ali went out trapping birds with his brothers up in the mountains above his village. He was much more relaxed there than when he was working in the fields and the bottomland by the river; the Tajiks never climbed the mountains on that side of the north-trending gorge, and he even left his pistol at home. Ali is still a big bird lover, and the quails and snow finches he usually hunts are prized for their song as well as their meat; even the little snow finches, not much bigger than sparrows, are tasty, though they are eaten only as famine food, since their song is so pretty. Instead they are kept in handmade cages of twigs and thin branches woven together. Ali has birdsongs recorded on his phone and often holds the phone behind his back and plays them, to prompt the real birds to sing.