The Places in Between (36 page)

This moment was new to me. I had not dreamed or imagined it before. Yet I recognized it. I felt that I was as I was in this place, and that I had known it before. This was the last day of my walk. To feel in these final hours, after months of frustration, an unexplained completion seemed too neat. But the recognition was immediate and incontrovertible. I had no words for it. Now, writing, I am tempted to say that I felt the world had been given as a gift uniquely to me and also equally to each person alone. I had completed walking and could go home.

MARBLE

Crossing a ridge, I saw a large plain, a row of concrete apartment buildings, and, on another ridge eight kilometers away, the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel. I descended into the Campanie Plain. The city's main streets were filled by telephone booths, cyclists maneuvering between ancient buses, taxi drivers, policemen in peaked caps, and stalls lined with postcards of buxom Hindi actresses. A man shouted at me. I turned and he ran to join me.

"Get off the road," he whispered. "This is much too dangerous for you. There are British and American soldiers ahead. You can't just walk into Kabul; they will arrest you. Come with me. You can stay in the mosque."

"They won't hurt me, thank you."

He looked at me, perplexed. "But you're an Arab, aren't you?"

"No," I smiled. "British."

I turned off the main road. For nearly an hour I walked through blocks of modern concrete villas with the curving balconies of Art Deco ocean liners. They were predominantly three-story houses and must once have belonged to prosperous people. Where mortar rounds had opened the walls, I could see plaster moldings inside and the stumps of mature trees in large gardens. The flat roofs, where snipers had lain, had been chipped by small-arms fire, but the scalloped decoration was still visible. The pockmarks that ran in a line across every wall—rising from left to right just as an automatic weapon moves in the hand—touched bands of green and rose-colored marble. The broad avenues lined with scorched plane trees were mostly deserted. But I heard the voices of children. Generous windows were sealed with mud bricks, and plastic sheeting stretched across some ceilings, suggesting life continued in single rooms.

I climbed the ridge into a wind that drove the dust into my eyes and passed the Intercontinental Hotel. I remembered the last time I had been there. The "Usama expert" of a British newspaper sat at a corner table, beneath the terra-cotta frieze—a piece of mystifying abstract art that before the Taliban period had been a row of Buddhas. He had reached under the filthy tablecloth to pour Pakistani whiskey into his glass of Fanta and three waiters and three stringers had stood around the table. The stringers weren't eating any more than the waiters. You needed an expense account to spend fifteen dollars on a bad kebab and five French fries. The stringers had hoped someone would lend them a satellite phone and the waiters had hoped to clear away a glass still holding a drop of whiskey.

I came down off the ridge into the center of town and passed a traffic jam composed of seven stationary white Land Cruisers. The older ones said UN on their sides and contained young foreign men and women with Afghan drivers. The newer, sleeker models with one-digit license plates and a picture of the martyred leader Ahmed Shah Masood stuck to their darkened windshields belonged to the senior Tajik military commanders. The SUVs had been stopped for a parade.

Fifty Afghan men of varying ages wearing gleaming white helmets above dirty bearded faces and dress uniforms two sizes too large were marching in a single, shambling lope, giggling a little and glancing from side to side to see how passersby were taking it. Four pairs of soldiers held hands. This was the new Afghan army established by the United States.

A platoon of armed British paratroopers in berets stood in the next street. One patrol was examining the Hobnob cookies and Minibix cereal packets in the supermarket, and another was buying antiques. While the corporal dithered between a Ghorid coin and a terra-cotta Huma bird, a beggar in a sky blue burqa tried to make him put a banknote into her cracked brown palm.

Turning into a side lane past the Indian embassy, I picked up a sheet of paper from the street. It was from a draft proposal intended for the Afghan government, written in English:

There is a consensus in Afghan society: violence must end, respect for human rights will form the path to a lasting peace and stability across the country. The people's aspirations must be represented in an accountable, broad-based, gender sensitive, multiethnic, representative government that delivers daily value.
⁶⁷

To my right I saw the hill that hid the emperor Babur's tomb. His grave lay on a terrace below a black mountain wall that rose as clean as the back of a marble throne. It faced a gentle slope, a broad valley, and the snow peaks of Hazarajat. Beside it were the shattered stumps of two giant plane trees, which may have been those Babur describes placing in the hill's garden fifteen years after his walk. Babur planted the trees when he was nearly forty. The cousins who had patronized him in Herat were dead and so was Qasim. Herat itself had been invaded by the Uzbek warlord and was never to recover. There was no one left to prevent Babur's drinking:

On Thursday 21st [April 1519] I directed that an enclosure should be made on the hill, on the brow of which I had planned out a garden. On Saturday 23rd I planted shoots of the plane and of the sycamore within the enclosure. At noonday prayers we had a drinking party. At daybreak the next morning, we had an early drinking party within the newly enclosed ground. After midday, we mounted and returned toward Kabul. Reaching Khwajeh Hassan, completely drunk, we slept there.

A decade later, Babur—who by now had conquered India—heard that his son Humayun was dangerously ill. He ordered Humayun brought by water to Agra, but the doctors were unable to cure him. A courtier said God sometimes allowed a man to live if his friend offered the man's most valuable possession. Babur replied that his own life was the dearest thing to Humayun as Humayun's was to him. He would give his life to God in sacrifice for his son's. The courtier begged Babur to retract this pledge and to offer the Koh-i-Noor diamond instead. But Babur replied that even that stone was not worth a life. According to a contemporary, "He walked three times round the dying prince, and retiring, prayed to God. After some time he was heard to exclaim, 'I have borne it away, I have borne it away.'"

As Humayun recovered, Babur began to sicken. He died on Boxing Day 1530. He had asked to be buried on this hill in Kabul, with his grave open to the sky. His great-grandson built a marble mosque beside the tomb, with an inscription that reads in Peter Levi's translation:

Only this mosque of beauty, this temple of nobility, constructed for the prayers of saints and the epiphany of the cherubs, was fit to stand in so venerable a sanctuary as this highway of archangels, this theater of heaven, the light garden of the godforgiven Angel King whose rest is in the garden of heaven, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur the Conqueror.

The side palace built by later Afghan kings was wrecked. The sunken floors of the water tanks were smashed; the plaster was crumbling; and bullet holes dotted the embossed leather ceiling. The holes made by mortar shells mirrored those in the abandoned Soviet apartment blocks across the road.

The afternoon sun threw the long shadows of saplings up the gentle slopes, over the traces of fourfold paths and fountains. Babur had founded an Indian empire and his descendants incorporated scalloped Indian Mughal arches into the mosque's design. But the hill of his tomb climbed north toward the Central Asian snow peaks he had crossed on his way from Herat, and beyond them to his homeland and Samarkand.

Turning into a side lane, I opened the gate of what had once been Usama Bin Laden's third wife's house. On the doorstep was my Babur asleep. I put my pack down and at the familiar sound he woke, trotted over, stumpy tail wagging, and rolled on his back for me to scratch his stomach. I'd never seen him look so healthy, rested, and alive.

Epilogue

Usama's wife's house was now rented by my friend Peter and filled with British men and women working in Afghanistan, who had been feeding Babur shepherd's pie for a week. One of them, Mel, had become particularly devoted to Babur and spent much of each day stroking, grooming, or feeding him. After a lifetime of bread, Babur was now eating meat three times a day. He spent most of his time asleep in the garden, shaded by the vines or the mulberry trees. For an almost wild dog, he seemed to adjust quickly to domestic life.

Babur and I left by car two days later, following the Kabul River through the Khyber Pass to Pakistan. The car was small, and Babur and I shared the front passenger seat, his hindquarters between my legs, his paws on my shoulder, and his dribble on my sweater. He was terrified of cars, having never seen them in his village, and he dribbled a great deal.

In Pakistan, I arranged Babur's vaccinations, his vet's certificates, his enormous kennel, and his seat on the plane to Britain. The Pakistani summer was starting and Babur, who was most happy rolling in snow, was hot. But I wasn't too worried. He seemed entranced by the lush grass and the bird-filled trees. He was going to my home in Perthshire, where it would be cool beneath the oaks.

Finally, everything seemed finished. I was booked to fly to London that day and he would follow the next. I went out into the garden and he woke, looked up, and rolled lazily onto his back. I didn't scratch him for as long as I would have liked because I didn't want to worry him. But I suppose he guessed something was up because when I had got in the car, he came trotting around the back of the house with his white-muzzled wrinkled face in the air. He stopped at the gate, watching me as the car backed down the drive.

After twenty months of walking, I flew out of Islamabad with a layover at Dubai International Airport, where I was served at McDonald's by a Filipino from Luzon. I landed in London and noticed its glass shop fronts and posters of half-naked women. Where I had been in Asia the tarmac roads petered out into bare patches of littered earth. Here the concrete ran clean from the roads over the curbs and up the walls of the houses, so that the whole city seemed rendered as a single room. Middle-aged men in suits stood in the streets at midday, looking lost and soft.

I took the sleeper up to Dunblane and walked the last twenty kilometers home. It was dawn and the halogen lights were still lit along the road. Rabbits stood beneath single trees. The sheep were scattered across a grass plain that could have supported a flock fifty times larger. Under a close, small sky, the river was still and broad and labeled PRIVATE, NO FISHING. A line of daffodils had been planted along the verge, in front of an avenue of bare beech trees.

Clean metallic signs announced a school and a forty-mile-an-hour speed limit. A cat leaped over a gas station wall. The cars were parked in front of the houses with their noses thrust over the close-mown lawns. There were conservatories, dark green ironware tables behind thigh-high walls, and birdbaths with hanging seed. I imagined knocking and saying, "Where is the headman? I would like to stay."

I reached an eighteenth-century bridge built just wide enough for a horse. A smart silver sign beside it announced that it had been restored with European Union funding in 1990, twelve years earlier, and reopened by a general. It was overgrown with nettles, and a fallen log blocked one end.

I climbed into the hills. Two overfed ponies with long manes and hair over their eyes trotted toward me through the rough gorse and the mist. It was a Scottish mist, damp on my hands and cheeks. At Muthill I stopped in the pub for breakfast. The landlady asked, "Why are you walking?" I remembered the reasons I had given Afghans. She added, "Are you doing it for charity or are you on holiday?"

I crossed the old stone bridge at the south end of Crieff, and the gravel sank into the damp earth beneath my boots as I turned up the drive. A sycamore had fallen, revealing the campsite. The heavy oaks strained forward, two years thicker. The dark, stiff bark of the sweet chestnuts had been forced farther apart, revealing more smooth underflesh. Someone—my father, I assumed—had moved six large box trees from the woods. I could see the yew ahead and then the gray columns of the house, dark with damp. I strode toward the steps. If I had been in a car someone would have heard me arrive, but as it was, no one was in the hall to greet me.

Much later, when I had kissed my mother and gone up to my room, I thought again of the telephone call I had received in London. It was Edward from Pakistan to say that Babur had died the day before he was meant to get on the plane. Someone had given him rack of lamb. After eating bread all his life, he had neither the teeth nor the experience to handle a bone. The shards cut up his stomach and killed him. I had thought that line of smells by unmarked boulders, stretching to a snow-ridge horizon, with ice holes for drinking, would finish with good meat, oak trees, rabbits, and a warm house. But it ended with his death.

I don't imagine Babur would have been very impressed to see me crying now, trying to bring back five weeks' walking alone together, with my hand on a grizzled golden head, which is Babur, beside me and alive.

Acknowledgments

This book was written at home in Perthshire. I was lucky in the many friends who read it in draft form. I owe particular thanks to Patrick Mackie, Stephen Brown, Edward Skidelsky, Minna Jarvenpaa, and Rachel Aspden for giving the book more life and all its commas.

To Clare Alexander for her imagination and energy; Mary-Kay Wilmers for first publishing me; Jason Cooper for understanding the journey and editing it skillfully; and Peter Straus and Andrew Kidd for editorial support. For the many improvements in the American edition, I am very grateful to Flip Brophy, Stacia Decker, and Rebecca Saletan.