The Ink Bridge (29 page)

I AM STILL RUBBING KABUL'S crust from my eyes when we catch the
Tunis
out of town. It is light early and the streets are quiet. Dogs stretch and yawn, the pink curves of their tongues roping in the tepid sun.
Naan
shops are open, they seem to never shut, and there are people squatting by the gutters sipping their first cup of
chay
.

Afghans drive on the right-hand side of the road. But it seems more of a suggestion than a rule. Cars fit where they can. Bikes, trucks, taxis, horse carts used as chariots, and pedestrians meander over broken strips of tar and dirt, into chaotic roundabouts, through roadblocks and around whistling traffic police. There are left- and right-hand drive cars, all Toyotas, imported cheap from Pakistan, Iran and Europe.

There are Pakistani trucks by the side of the road out. High-fronted like ancient carts with painted panels of mountains and streams and birds. They are fringed with camel bells. The drivers are asleep inside, feet propped on steering wheels, mouths open.

Melons from Mazar-e Sharif are coming into town by the truckload. Afghans are mad for them. They are sweet and perfumed, crisp between the teeth. They are piled high on trucks. Men lie on top, scarves wrapped round their faces to filter the dust.

As we leave town we cross the Shomali Plain.

‘The Russians fought here, then the mujaheddin and Taliban.' Arezu is crunching an apple, the words are juiced-up and slurred. ‘It was blown apart. They have grown grapes here for hundreds of years. Some people say Alexander the Great brought them.'

But all the vines here are new. It is not hard to imagine why. Tanks and mortars took care of them along with most of the population.

There are stalls starting to open by the side of the road. Tomatoes, melons and cucumbers, and phone recharge cards. We stop for fuel and Arezu hops out and returns with apricots. She seems to exist on fruit alone. She shares them around the passengers. They are sweeter than any apricot I have ever eaten. The flesh falls from the stone and dissolves in my mouth. The juice runs over my new shirt.

The road is good. Broad and smooth and filled with traffic heading north. Beyond the Salang Tunnel: Mazar-e Sharif, Kunduz, Badakhshan, the ‘stans' – Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan; and off to the far north-east: China. You could go anywhere with a little money and determination, if it wasn't for bandits and the Taliban.

‘I don't know what you were talking about with the road. It's fine,' I say to Arezu.

She just smiles at me.

I pull out my journal and hold the pen over the page, threatening it. But the words stay inside. I write the date and
Kabul to Bamiyan
. And the pen hovers some more.

‘Writer's block?' Arezu asks, cheerfully.

‘Don't believe in it.'

‘Really?'

‘Yes,' I say. ‘No.'

‘Both?'

‘I didn't talk for a whole year once.'

‘Like a vow of silence.'

‘Something like that.'

‘How did that feel?' Why didn't she ask me why? That would be my first question.

‘It felt like nothing. Like I had nothing to say. Like words were not enough.'

‘What did your mother say?'

I look at her for a moment and know I cannot tell her, not yet. In place of the answer comes a huge rush of memory.

‘When I was six, I was climbing a tree in a park by the river. The branches swept down to the ground and I just stepped into the sky. I climbed high, higher than I had ever been, until my mum was just a full stop below. And once I was there, I stood upright on my branch and let go with my hands, balancing with the wind rushing past my ears. I remember the sway in the tree, and how I knew that its roots were deep into the soil. And I felt the danger of falling, or flying, and the thrill of it. I felt like I was between two things and I could choose to go either way: climb back down or step off and fly. I was only six, how could I feel that?'

I shake my head free of the memory. ‘I don't know what that means,' I say.

Arezu lays her hand on top of mine. ‘Perhaps it doesn't mean anything yet,' she says. ‘But one day it might.'

About an hour into the trip we take an unmarked turn to the left. At first it appears we have driven into a quarry, then it becomes a stream. The
Tunis
lurches and rolls like a drunk.

‘Welcome to the real Afghanistan,' says Arezu.

And so we spend the next four hours. First and second gear get a workout as third and fourth lie idle, their teeth still sharp and new, grinning at their poor overworked cousins. We average about twenty k's an hour, the driver stealing time on the rare straight sections and slowing to a crawl to pass trucks and buses above the drop to the Ghorband River. Small boys push donkeys laden with freshly cut grass along the rocky verges. They gulp our dust as we pass. We stop for sheep-jams – twenty or thirty deep across the road, a heaving mass of wool and shit and lanolin. The herdsmen, old men and young boys, beat them with willow sticks until they move enough for us to pass.

At lunch we stop at a
chaikhana
perched above the road. The men eat along a verandah on plastic mats, squatting on the floor with
naan
and
kabob
and tin pots of green tea. Arezu and I are shown a room.

‘I can't eat with the men. Not in this town,' she says.

‘Where are we?'

‘Chahar-deh-e Ghorband.'

‘Didn't you say something about not stopping in Ghorband?'

‘We'll be okay. What do you want to eat?'

‘What are the choices?'

Arezu looks around at the place. ‘
Pulao
or
kabob
.'

‘I'll go
kabob
.'

‘Brave man.'

Arezu orders
kabob, qabli pulao
and
shorwa
– a thin soup.
Naan
is slapped onto our mat.
Chay sabz
is poured. The food arrives. Arezu turns the
pulao
over with her spoon. ‘This is just rice,' she says. ‘
Zardak
?
Kheshmesh
?' she asks the cook. He shrugs. ‘No carrots or raisins in town, I guess,' she says, dabbing
naan
into her
shorwa
.

My
kabob
is cubes of blackened meat alternated with pinches of fat. I pull some from the metal skewer with my
naan
. It is rubbery and tastes earthy. I wash it down with tea. ‘What is that?' I ask.

Arezu picks up a skewer and examines it closely. She smells it, pulls a hunk off and chews it. ‘Lamb's kidney,' she decides.

‘Yummo.' I finish it though. The chef is sharpening his knife on a worn stone. He looks like he doesn't take complaints lightly.

‘This is the last Pashtun village before we hit Hazara territory. They are a bit unfriendly here. They don't like outsiders.'

‘Nice place to run a business.'

Back in the
Tunis
. Back on the twisted road with our twisted backs. The faces change. They become more Asiatic. Here are the sons and daughters of Genghis Khan. The Hazara. They are threshing wheat stalks, sorting the grain from the chaff with long wooden forks, casting them to the breeze. They are cutting feed for their donkeys and sheep, setting it in piles. They are selling apples in shingle boxes by the road. The children are riding donkeys, their curious eyes following us.

The houses are flat-roofed, winding back into roadless valleys. They hang from rock, small-windowed, low doorways leading to dark interiors. The light here is blinding. It arcs from hill to hill with welding-rod intensity. The hills are terrifying in their beauty. They are a mass of great seams, fold upon fold, pushed into the sky. They are buckled and spired and pinched upwards by giant hands. I am storing this all, choosing the phrases I will describe it with later when I am able to write them down without tearing great holes in the paper.

We wind up the Shibar Pass. I look in my guidebook and find that Alexander the Great crossed here in the winter of 327 BC, his men dying of the cold far from their Macedonian homes.

Russian tanks lie rusting by the road. The Russians fled Afghanistan in 1989 after ten years of trying to bring the country into line. I imagine young Russian soldiers, stoned on local hashish, twitching the barrels of their Kalashnikovs at shadows. The mujaheddin slipping under cover of night up to their eyries where they pick the infidel invaders off one by one.

After the pass, we plummet into Bamiyan Province. This is where Omed's story began and this is where I have been travelling to since the day I last saw him. My ears pop as we fall and the pressure we are under loosens its grip on us. I wonder where Omed is and think of the possibilities good and bad. What it will feel like to stand in front of him after all this time? What I will say? I practise my lines.
How have
you been? What happened to you?
Will he have forgotten all the English he once knew?

The road needles itself through huge turrets of rock. The river is channelled into fields.

‘Some people say the Afghans can get water to run uphill,' says Arezu, pointing at a channel disappearing into the hillside.

We stop at an army checkpoint at Shash-pul (Six Bridges). They check our passports and laugh at my
shalwar kameez
. They are bored. It is too safe in this valley for them. There is nothing to do but drink
chay
and stare at the hills. We get out of the car while they smoke, and poke the luggage, and chat to the driver.

Arezu points out a red hill. ‘That is Shahr-e Zohak – the City of Zohak.'

‘What's Zohak?'

‘Not what, who. Zohak was a character from Persian legend who lost his soul to the devil and took over his father's throne. The devil came to him disguised as one of his subjects, kissing him on the shoulders. Black serpents sprung from the kisses, demanding daily meals of human brains. When anyone tried to cut them off, they returned hungrier than before. Zohak grew very powerful and took over the kingdom of Persia where he became a tyrant for a thousand years. After that a hero called Fraidun managed to banish him to a mountain peak. And that's it there.' Arezu points to the turreted ruins on the hill. ‘The locals say that the black serpents, when they couldn't get their daily meal, opened up Zohak's skull and dined on his brains.'

‘Cute story.'

Arezu nods. ‘There have been forts there since before Jesus was born. The Shansabani Kings built that sometime before Chingis got to it in 1221.'

‘I take it
Chingis
is Genghis Khan and when you say
got
to it
what you are trying to say is
destroyed it
.'

‘Well, these fortresses were a bit tough for the great khan and his soldiers. The only way into the city was via a single-file track that led through a tunnel in the rock. There were turrets overlooking the track and the guards would send arrows down from the slits within the walls. There were no stairs into the turrets, they were reached by ladders that were pulled up afterwards. It was impregnable.'