Magic Bus (15 page)

The waiter brings us a plate of macaroons. Nazzer leans back on the cushions, falling silent as the sugar dissolves in the tea.

‘Thousands of people were executed when Khomeini revealed the true nature of his interpretation of God's will,' he says after a moment, afraid to raise his voice, unable to contain himself. ‘Newspapers were closed, politicians disqualified, the “just and pious” Council of Guardians became our new masters. The Holy Shrine here in Mashhad became a $2-billion business, running farms, mines, carpet factories, in fact, most of Khorasan province. It, like the Foundation for the Oppressed and War Veterans, is among the biggest employers in the Middle East. Who controls them?' He looks around the room and whispers, ‘The clerics – and their lawyers.'

He goes on, ‘Twenty-five years ago we made a choice. The
people welcomed Khomeini. We championed the Islamic state. We died for it. But we never expected our choice to last for ever. Today, if every simple man and woman in Iran voted for a secular state, our wish would not be respected.'

Nazzer is speaking so quietly now – and with such taut anger – that to hear I must press my head towards him.

‘You ask me if the hippies caused the Iranian Revolution. I tell you no, my friend, because there was no revolution. Only betrayal. Today, we still live in a dictatorship; the only difference is, the new version hides its greed behind beards and turbans.'

He falls silent. He chooses a macaroon. For a time, the only noise is of his eating.

‘We were all idealists once,' he adds, reaching for another sweet.

It's not just lost ideals Nazzer shares with the West. I ask him, ‘You no longer believe you can change the world?'

‘Our high-minded leaders think they are ordained to govern until the Hidden Imam reappears, along with Jesus Christ.'

In Shi'ite Islam the Twelve Imams are believed to have been sent by God as guides to mankind.

‘But you told me the Hidden Imam disappeared into a cave in the ninth century,' I say.

‘And so we wait for his return,' he replies, at once bitter, detached and defeated. ‘We wait.' The waiter returns to refill our glasses. ‘Now,' Nazzer announces in his energetic, official voice, ‘do we still need to visit the Martyrs' Cemetery?'

At the evening market on Modarres Street, bookstalls sell copies of the Koran and out-of-date L. L. Bean mail-order catalogues. A beggar leans on a broken wall, cracking sunflower seeds with his teeth. I walk back to my hotel, past a fresh, talkative Turkman girl loitering in the foyer, and return to my room. I set the chair by the window and, within sight of the gilded resting place of Imam Reza, begin to type up my notes.

After a few minutes, I realize I'm staring at the blank screen, unable to find the right words. I stand, pace up and down the room, return to my chair. Again nothing. I look at my notepad.
My thoughts dwell on Nazzer, Sahar and Babak, on their disillusionment and the power of dreams. I think of the calm order of my private striving. I get out of the chair again. Look out the window. Gaze at my face in the mirror. In my weakness, I grasp for the familiar, turning on the television.
Harry Potter
is showing. In Farsi.

In the grey dawn, the Holy Shrine is swathed in ruby-red spot lamps and strings of fairy-lights. Hotel cleaners in full black
chador
and yellow Marigold rubber gloves mop marble banquet halls. A neon-lit bronze of Khomeini – cold eyes, sensuous lips, imperfect – growls at a segregated queue of locals waiting in line for thin, platter-size loaves of bread pinned to boards on line of nails.

As my coach pulls away from Mashhad, a passenger walks down the aisle offering dates to fellow travellers. A Bugs Bunny Santa Claus dances from the rear-view mirror, around quotations from the Koran. A student lawyer sits next to me. He's distracted by my tattered photocopy of the first trail guidebook.

‘Hippie?' he says, leafing through its heady pages. ‘In my language, the word means a wastrel, a messy person who has no plan for life.'

My magic bus heads towards the border.

Three days I've been here in limbo. Three times I've hired a car and driver and headed out of Herat. Each morning at the same time, I've pulled up outside the remaining walls of Maslakh camp, called out to the Pashtuns in the fields, ‘
Senga ye?
' – ‘How are you?' – then climbed back in the car and returned to my hotel. Yesterday, three white beards –
spingera
– awaited me, squatting on the ground at my usual spot, their long, loose, cotton shirts gathered over their knees. I greeted them with phrasebook in hand. My driver helped me to exchange a few pleasantries.

‘Are you a journalist?' they asked me.

‘I'm a seeker,' I answered – borrowing from V. S. Naipaul – then drove away.

I want to speak to the Pashtuns, proud, independent and largest of Afghanistan's four ethnic groups. The Taliban, with Pakistan's contrivance, sprang from their number. I want to understand the origins of their idealistic religious fantasy, to create a perfect global caliphate on a model of Mohammed's seventh-century Arabia. I'm also curious to see what remains of Maslakh, until last year the largest refugee camp in Asia. But I need to be invited as a guest, not to force my way in like an intruder. Then, this morning, I broke through, catching a glimpse of a hidden world. I was invited to tea.

Twenty-five years of war – first against the Soviets and then amongst themselves – displaced more than five million Afghans. One-third of the population fled to Iran, Pakistan and other neighbouring countries. Near the Iran–Afghanistan border, Maslakh, which means slaughterhouse, was at its peak home to 160,000 displaced men, women and children. After my experience in Turkey and Iran, I realize that I can't sail past this bleak outpost.

The driver drops me off at the gate. A hawk-nosed raisincleaner,
English-speaking and carrying a Kalashnikov, leads me into the mud-brick alleys. A cobbler sells single shoes for one-legged mine victims. Barefoot children play a game like marbles with the vertebrae of small animals. Boys carry scraps of firewood and greasy plastic bottles of river water past cell-like bakeries. In a bare courtyard a woman in frayed blue
burqua
blows on a cooking fire. In the last months, much of the sprawling, five-mile-square clay city has been flattened by bulldozers, the dispossessed given ploughs and money to go home, their irises scanned to prevent them from returning and making a second claim. My hosts are among those too frightened to leave the camp.

A wooden door opens in the street wall on to a plain yard. Above us hangs a grape trellis. The vine has withered and died. In a corner stands the
hujdura
, the male guest-room.

‘You can call it a Pashtun drawing room,' says my guide. His face is so deeply lined that I cannot guess his age. Twenty-five? Forty? ‘And pride for a Pashtun is to have his
hujdura
filled with guests.'

The tidy room is painted sky-blue with a hip-height band of white. Coloured mats cover the earth floor, and cushions run around the edge. On the wall are posters of an idyllic Swiss village, a truck on a Karakoram highway and one listing the advantages of polio vaccination. There is no furniture. An informal
jirga
– or community council meeting – has been convened to welcome me. I leave my shoes at the door. My guide stows his gun.

He gestures for me to sit. The men are at prayers and he asks if I will wait until they finish. A boy – one of a dozen looking through the deep-set, unglazed window – pours water from a tin jug over my hands into a tooled basin. A cloth is laid on the carpets and upon it an unexpected meal: goat curry, stewed okra, yoghurt and na'an.

‘You Canadians have fed us many times,' explains my guide. ‘Now we will feed you.' He stretches his hand out over the food and says, ‘In the name of God the Merciful, the Compassionate.'

I eat some vegetables and the bread, dipping it into the gravy, leaving the meat for hungrier mouths. Ten elders arrive singly and
in pairs, sitting cross-legged around the room in white
shalwar kameez
, embroidered Kandahari caps or twisted turbans on their heads. Their beards are clean and combed, every hair in place. In their plastic sandals are husks of chaff. They wait in silence for me to finish my meal.

Only when tea – milky and tasting of cardamom – is poured do they start to talk, passing around a bowl of boiled sweets. Each man then rises to shake my hand. I introduce myself again, explaining that I want to carry their words and stories back to the West. ‘I need to understand,' I say to them.

‘I left my fields in 1978,' says a stony-faced white beard, holding my eye. The year Afghanistan began its long slide into chaos. During the first communist revolution, thousands of villagers were executed in a Stalinist attempt to reform rural society. ‘I was a landlord with good land.'

‘What did you grow?' I ask.

‘Grapes. The most delicious grapes in Zabul. I was arrested and my neighbours took my fields, forging the sale document. I escaped to Iran.'

He met his wife in a camp there, my guide translates. Their children were born there, and a first grandchild. The family only moved back over the border to Maslakh when the Iranians closed their camps.

‘The Russians did not kill individuals,' volunteers the next man, a bicycle repairman. His tone is formal, his account dispassionate. ‘They bombed villages.'

In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, propping up the pro-Moscow regime. Over the next decade, more than 100,000 Red Army soldiers occupied the country. The United States seized the chance to injure its Cold War enemy by supporting the factional
jihad
, feeding $700 million a year to the
mujaheddin
in one of the largest covert operations in history. An army of 35,000 fervent fighters was trained in part by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency as well as by the Green Berets and US Navy Seals. A handful of
mujaheddin
were even schooled at a CIA paramilitary camp in Virginia.

‘Twelve years ago, the governor called me to his office, saying that the Russians were about to attack my village and to protect my family,' the bicycle repairman goes on. ‘That night, seventy-six people were killed, including my sister and her three children. Killed not by the Russians, but by arguing
mujaheddin
.'

The dream of a pure Islamic state was used by the US to defeat the Soviets, then channelled by Pakistan into the creation of the Taliban. In 1989, the Red Army withdrew, leaving behind 1.5 million Afghans dead. Nine months later, the Berlin Wall collapsed. In Washington, the CIA celebrated their victories with champagne, while civil war would soon reduce Kabul to rubble.

A third man, thin and grim-faced, opens his mouth to speak, revealing small, pearly teeth. ‘My teeth are white because I never lie,' he says, ‘because I never eat my words, nor those of another man.' His body is a skeleton covered with faded skin. ‘I tell you, every night I dream of smelling my soil again.'

‘I want to build
my
mud house on
my
land,' interrupts a fourth elder, his impatience and powerful voice punching through the civility. ‘If you tell me I can do this in two years, I want it in one. If you say one year, I want it now.'

‘But why can't you go home today?' I ask them. It is eighteen months since the Taliban, the radical rural movement which emerged as the victor in the civil wars of the late 1990s, was bombed out of power by the US Air Force. Already, ‘remnant Taliban elements' are attacking the International Security Assistance Force and undermining the precarious national stability.

‘Home?' says the white beard. ‘Look at us. What do you see?'

I see swan-white turbans and beards ‘long enough to protrude from a fist clasped under the chin'. I see guns at the door. I know that their wives and daughters aren't allowed outside the house unless accompanied by a male relative. I realize that for them Islam is to be practised as God intended: as a religion, a code of law, a political system, a way of life.

‘Every good Muslim must wear a beard,' he explains, ‘but ours make travel impossible.'

‘We cannot go home. We have old enemies who will say we are al-Qaeda and tell the Americans to kill us.'

‘But I will never swap my turban for a cap,' insists the bicycle repairman, his voice terse.

‘Only because a turban keeps your ears warm,' interjects a round-faced elder, the joker in the pack, smiling over the tea leaves in his glass.

‘The Taliban had our support because they protected us,' explains the white beard. ‘They ended the civil war and executed criminals.'

At first Islam's Warriors were welcomed by most Afghans, restoring order, making the country safe for the first time in a generation. But their narrow and chauvinistic interpretation of the Koran espoused absolute piety and unquestioning conformity. Television, music and chess were banned. Cassette tape fluttered like bunting from checkpoints. Their rigid dictatorship was based on a kind of fascist idealism, rather like that of Franco's Spain; a combination of strong, existing institutions and heavy-handed neo-traditions.

‘But the Taliban restored order at the expense of tolerance,' I say. ‘And diversity. And more lives. They closed women's hospitals, stopped girls from going to school…'

‘Would your daughter be surprised if you told her to go out of doors wearing the veil?' interrupts the white beard, spreading his broad hands.

‘Of course,' I say. ‘Because mine is not an Islamic culture.'

‘You are the Raw, the unenlightened, the
Khareji
,' says the thin, grim elder.
Khareji
means foreigner. ‘You cannot understand.'

‘Please clarify,' the round-faced elder asks me, easing away the sudden sharp anger, ‘why the Americans supported us as
mujaheddin
but are now against us?'