The Places in Between (28 page)

About bedtime prayers a party that had surveyed the cave reported that it was very extensive and was sufficiently large to receive all our people ... I sent to call in such of the people as were at hand ... such as had any eatables, stewed meat, preserved flesh or anything else in readiness, produced them; and thus we escaped from terrible cold and snow and drift into a wonderfully safe, warm, and comfortable place where we could refresh ourselves.

When we reached the top of the cliff, we found ourselves, after days in the valley bottom, suddenly looking down on snow-covered ridges and slopes peppered with the marks of miniature avalanches. A band of brilliant turquoise light stretched along the crest of the eastern hills. We continued south. When the light had almost entirely faded and the snow was falling more heavily, I began to think about digging a snow hole for the night, but ten minutes later I saw lights to our right. We walked toward them and in half an hour reached a small hamlet, where some men were sitting on the roofs. This was, it seemed, Siar Chesme, where I had been told I would find a headman called Seyyed Kerbalahi.

"Peace be with you," I shouted up.

"You have a war dog?" they said, apparently uninterested in why we had just come off the mountain at dusk.

"No, I am looking for the house of Seyyed Kerbalahi ... I am a traveler and I need shelter."

"How about a fight now? Our dogs against yours ... come on...," and they put up the wolf whistle.

"This dog is not a fighting dog," I snapped. "If you try a fight, I'll kill your dogs with my stick." Perhaps sensing I was tired and angry enough to fulfill my threat, the men held the dogs back. I walked to the headman's courtyard and stood shivering and waving my letter of introduction. He shouted down, "Why are you here? The village mosque is twenty minutes back down the hill. You should go there..."

As on many previous nights, I was anxious to get Babur fed and housed and to find warmth myself. I emphasized my distinguished hosts and grand introductions. Eventually he allowed me in.

DEVOTIONS

Di Muezzin shab-e-vasler
Azan pechle rat.
Ai! Kum bakht,
Kia wakht he khoda yad Aya?

—Mirza Ghalib

From the Muezzin, on the night I lay first with my girl,
The call to prayer broke night into dawn.
Aagh, foolish wretch! What time is this
To remind a man of God?

Seyyed Kerbalahi's guest room was large and decorated with some of the most expensive carpets I had seen. He said he was too busy praying to speak to me. An old servant brought supper consisting of soup made from rotten meat, which I could not stomach, and bread. Seyyed Kerbalahi then sent his wife with some tea but he did not join me. I wondered if he was having a better meal next door.

This was a remote area. The servant who brought the soup had been to the nearest bazaar at Yakawlang but he had never seen Chaghcharan or any place of that size, and in a later conversation Seyyed Kerbalahi's nephew had to explain to him what an airplane was. The Seyyed's wife asked me about my journey, but she had not heard of any of the places I had walked through that day.

"Where have you been?" I asked.

"I was born in this village. I am the fifth and only surviving one of Seyyed Kerbalahi's wives, and I have never been more than an hour's journey by foot from this village in the forty years I have been alive."

She explained that the Seyyed's father had moved to this place in the mountains from Yakawlang in the 1940s. His family seemed to have prospered. All the Seyyed's brothers were senior mullahs and his son was studying in Tehran.

Although the Seyyed's wife was a grandmother she was not comfortable being alone with a man, and after five minutes of conversation she left. Seyyed Kerbalahi joined me after dinner. His real name was Rasul. He was called Kerbalahi, he explained, because he had been to Kerbala in Iraq to visit the sacred Shia shrine of Imam Hussein twice in the late 1950s, once for three months and once for five.
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I asked him why he had not completed the Haj by going on to Mecca.

"It would have been too expensive."

"But Mecca is quite close to Kerbala by the time you have gone from Afghanistan to Iraq."

"It would have been a seven-day trip so I came home."

He tuned the radio to a Pakistani channel broadcasting in Urdu.

"Can you understand Urdu?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I have put it on for your benefit."

He then began praying. Every minute or so, he interrupted his prayer to throw out a comment such as, "Later I will arrange for someone to dry your socks." Then he would start his prayers again from the beginning. I suggested gently that he finish his prayers before we spoke.

"But a guest is ordained by God," he said reprovingly.

"Thank you," I replied. "Well, there was something I wanted to ask you..."

"I am praying. We should talk later."

When he had finished, he picked up a large Koran and began to mumble over it and then glanced up and asked if I had any photographs.

I handed him the pictures of my family. He frowned at them briefly and handed them back.

"I have walked here from Herat," I said.

"I'm reading the Koran and your Farsi is not good enough for a conversation," he replied.

We sat in silence till I decided to lie down and sleep.

At dawn he began his lengthy prayers again. By the time he had finished, a crowd of villagers had gathered in the guest room. Seyyed Kerbalahi picked up my Dari-English dictionary and began looking at it a page at a time. Usually people who wanted to be seen reading my dictionary knew which way up to hold it. Seyyed Kerbalahi didn't.

He then moved to another position in the room, carefully opened a sandalwood box, and unwrapped a different copy of the Koran. The morning continued with rambling prayers, a little browsing of the Koran, and occasional bad-tempered visits to his balcony to tell anyone who wanted to see him that he was too busy with his religious devotions to be disturbed. I imagined this was the pattern of most of Seyyed Kerbalahi's days.

Finally I took my leave. On my way out I noticed two faded aquatint photographs on the guest room wall.

"They are my brothers," he said, "martyrs... One was killed in Lal and one on the path to Yakawlang." They were not dressed like most martyrs as Mujahidin but in neat Russian dress uniforms.

Seyyed Rasul Kerbalahi of Siar Chesme

THE DEFILES OF THE VALLEY

Seyyed Kerbalahi had told two men to accompany me. I was glad to have them because another foot of snow had fallen during the night, covering all tracks. We had to break trail up the steep slope behind the village, and in the loose new powder we slipped back one step for every three we gained.

Babur enjoyed it far less than I did, and I had to drag him a great deal of the way. We came onto the ridge after two hours. This was the central watershed dividing western Hazarajat from the province of Bamiyan, and we could see bare cliffs thirty kilometers east below us along the edge of the Zarin valley. This valley, the men said, marked the entrance to Yakawlang—my destination that day. The clouds were moving quickly in a cold wind, giving occasional glimpses of a pale sun.

Samarakot lay at the bottom of the slope. After I had taken Babur to an ice hole below the village for a drink, Hassan Zargon came to greet us. He was a kind, welcoming, and respectful host. He gave me two soft-boiled eggs and sent food out to Babur. Like Zia in Katlish, he provided a man with a white cloth and warm water to wash my hands, and he illed my tea glass and poured in sugar. Since it was snowing again, he said I should stay the night with him. I told him I wanted to reach Yakawlang that evening. He said it would not be possible. The town was two or three days' walk away. When I insisted, however, he told his seventeen-year-old son, Asad, and another boy to guide me over the next pass.

Crossing the Zarin pass would have been impossible without them. The snow was falling very fast. We caught glimpses of a few black rocks and at times a ridge would disengage itself from the fog and we would see, racing across the surface, a fine, sandlike flurry of snow, caught in the southeast wind. But most of the time the whiteout was total. Sensing the gradients, we picked our way over ridges and through deep snow bowls. We could not see the texture of the snow at our feet. Where the snow had fallen on a hard crust, it was knee-deep. Here, Asad was able to pick a route. But then he'd lose it and we would plow through much deeper powder, lifting our legs like sumo wrestlers with every step.

After an hour and a half the snow thickened and was driven horizontally into our faces. We were all very cold. At every ridge Asad turned and shouted through the storm, "
Manda na Bashi
" (May you not be tired). We sank into a deep drift and for ten minutes Asad plunged cheerfully around in a wide circle, till he had worked out where we were. I wondered how these ridges and valleys looked in the summer. Finally we were on the last slope into the Zarin valley, which was only twenty kilometers from Yakawlang. The pass had taken us three hours, and Asad and his companion were now going to walk back through the blizzard.

I offered Asad money but he was horriied. It seemed a six-hour round-trip through a freezing storm and chest-deep snow was the least he could do for a guest. I did not want to insult him but I was keen to repay him in some way. I insisted, feeling foolish. He refused five times but finally accepted out of politeness and gave the money to his companion. Then he wished me luck and turned up the hill into the face of the snowstorm. I turned along the Zarin valley, toward Yakawlang.

Babur the Emperor probably spent his final night before reaching Yakawlang on the slope we had just descended:

Before we reached the bottom of the Zarin pass, the day closed in around us. We halted in the defiles of the valley. The cold was dreadful and we passed that night in great distress and misery. Many lost their hands and feet from frost. Kupek lost his feet, Siyunduk Turkoman his hands, and Akhi his feet, from the cold of that night. Early next morning we moved down the glen. Although we knew this was not the usual road, yet placing our trust in God we advanced down the valley, and descended by difficult and precipitous places. It was evening prayer before we reached the other end of the valley. It was not in the memory of the oldest man that this pass had ever been descended when there was so much snow on the ground; nay it was never known that anyone even conceived the idea of passing it at such a season. Although for some days we endured much from the depth of the snow yet, in the issue, it was this very circumstance which brought us to our journey's end. For if the snow had not been so deep, how was it possible to have gone, as we did when there was no road, marching over precipices and ravines? Had it not been for the extreme depth of the snow, the whole of our horses and camels must have sunk into the first gulf that we met with:
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Every good and evil that exists
If you mark it well is for a blessing.

It was bedtime prayers when we reached Yakawlang and halted.

Five hundred years later I reached Yakawlang some hours after bedtime prayers. Asad had left me at about three in the afternoon. I knew I had to walk fast to reach Yakawlang that evening. The valley floor was low and broad and Zarin was a cluster of caves dug into the sandstone wall. The entrances to many of the caves had been finished with walls and it appeared from the caves' soot black ceilings that most of them were once inhabited. This was the first cave-dwelling culture I had seen. From here to Bamiyan more and more of the villages had caves, now used mostly for storage and to shelter flocks. Opposite the caves was a large, ruined mud castle.

From Zarin I emerged onto a clear, broad vehicle road, the road from Lal. This was the first clear road I had seen for two weeks, but I saw no vehicles on it, probably because the passes on either side were closed. For the first time, in the late afternoon sun, I could see the true color of the hills free of snow. There was a coal black peak with slopes of sulfurous yellow, an emerald green mountain, dark purple cliffs with a white crest, and in the foreground pale brown sandstone cliffs with dark eyelets of caves at the base, each stained with soot.