The Lovers (12 page)

“This is my story, too,” she said. “Don’t forget that you have to write about me.” She looked at me sternly; I made no comment.

Later Mauricio took Zakia and Fatima outside. As Fatima and
Zakia crossed the street, Mauricio crouching and shooting, their police escort went wild and began screaming and cursing at him. One policeman unshouldered his automatic rifle and aimed it at him. They did not think it right to photograph women, whether the women had agreed to it or not. After all, how can a woman possibly give consent without a man to speak for her?

To the policemen and many others in Afghan society, this encounter would likely encapsulate the disconnect between Afghan and Western culture. It meant something else altogether to Zakia.

“It gave me hope,” she said. “I was happy, because now I knew there were people who wanted to help us and cared about us.” The outside world might have been mysterious to both Zakia and Ali, but they felt it was something important, and its interest in them was somehow validating. As they well knew, in the eyes of their own society, in the rules and strictures of their culture, they were now outcasts. That these apparently important foreigners were accepting them on their own terms and seemed to feel that what the lovers wanted was not in the slightest unreasonable—and was even praiseworthy—seemed powerfully enabling to this pair of isolated young people.

We had already reached Ali on his cell phone, but he felt safest meeting us at the women’s ministry. Fatima felt it would be best if that meeting did not take place on the same day as Zakia’s visit, so her family’s spies in the government couldn’t claim that Fatima was arranging assignations between them.

Ali came the next day, and it was not surprising that he was a handsome young man and a tad vain about his looks. His lush black hair was swept up and back in a pompadour, his beard close-shaven, his trousers tight, and his artificial saddle-leather shoes both pointy and holey. Like Zakia, he was poor, but he had style. His eyes were an arresting shade of golden amber, and what was most striking—I had to check the pictures of Zakia to be sure—nearly the same rare color as hers. On his cheek was a prominent, deep-set bruise, and I asked about it.

“Since this love story began, I have had two bad accidents,” he said.

Since this love story began.
I would soon learn that Ali often referred to Zakia and himself as the participants in a love story, as if some higher power had written it for them and they were mere mortals acting out their roles.

The first accident that he referred to was when the Humvee he was in while on military duty rolled, three years earlier, and ruined his leg. The second “accident” was the bruise his brother Ismatullah gave him when Ali tried to get to Zakia as she pleaded for his father to take her in.

Unlike Zakia, Ali was never surprised that people were interested in their story and what had befallen them. It seemed to him natural and inevitable. “Our story is the same as Shirin and Farhad,” he said. “We are stuck in such a story.”

It is an old Persian story, immensely popular in Afghanistan and retold in many forms in popular culture, but particularly in folk and pop songs. Shirin, the beautiful princess, tells the stonecutter Farhad that she is promised to the prince but that if he could move a mountain for her with his pickax, she would marry him instead. So he sets about carving the face off a nearby mountain, and when the prince sees he has nearly finished what had seemed an impossible task, he sends a witch to whisper to Farhad that Shirin has already married the prince. Despondent, he kills himself, and when she finds that out, she, too, kills herself.

How is this their story? I asked Ali. “If in this temporary world, they don’t reach each other, then God knows they might be able to do so in the next world,” he explained. Every great love must be doomed to experience its happy endings in some afterlife, it seems, whether Romeo and Juliet or Shirin and Farhad? He didn’t know the story of Romeo and Juliet, so we summarized it for him; he especially liked the ending. “My ambition is also the same. Even if I were killed with my fiancée, I would have reached my ambition. If they separated us, I would commit suicide.”

A pattern was beginning to emerge in the passions of this shabby, earnest young man with the shining amber eyes that seemed to light up when he started telling stories, whether his and her more recent ones or those ancient tales. When we called him the day
before to arrange meeting him, his ringtone had been a love verse from a song retelling the story of Yousef and Zuleikha. Today’s was some lines from an Indian musical about Layla and Majnoon. The Persian poet Nezami’s epic retelling of the old Arabian story has circulated in one version or another throughout the subcontinent as well, and it traditionally includes these Arabic verses:

I pass through the lands of Layla,

Kissing now this wall, now that wall:

It is not these lands that I love,

But the one who dwells within.
⁷

Ali has of course never read poetry, but his illiteracy has not robbed him of literature, to be sure. It was all there, set to music.

That is how their courtship progressed, in those long, numerous telephone conversations that began when she was still just past childhood and he not yet quite an adult. Over and over they replayed for each other the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew, how they knew. For Ali, what those many months in the army were like and his fear of being rejected because of his deformity (as he imagined it to be). For Zakia, the months during which she wished she had said to him something different from what she had, when he proposed across the wall. When they ran out of gossip about the people they knew, or talk of farm life, or antics of children and animals, he would tell her a story, often one he had told before. Her favorite was Yousef and Zuleikha, the Islamic version of the biblical story of the Prophet Joseph (he of the
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat).
In the Islamic telling, Yousef is sold as a slave to Potiphar and falls in love with Potiphar’s wife, Zuleikha (who is named only in the Islamic versions, not in the biblical story), but is banished. He finds his love thirty years later, when he has gained freedom, prestige, and power and she has become an old woman but still loves him. One kiss and she is a young beauty again. It is not only a popular story among Afghans and in many Muslim societies, it is also a sacred story, recounted in the Koran approvingly—despite the themes of romantic love triumphing over
married rectitude, which are explained theologically as love of a higher sort than the carnal, romantic kind.

“I asked her how she liked it,” Ali said. “Her reply to me was that I am ready to wait for you for fifty years.”

The first article that I did in the
New York Times
after that trip up to Bamiyan had already generated tremendous interest. But I really began to be deluged with reader mail after I wrote on March 31
⁸
about Zakia’s escape from the shelter and the couple’s elopement, with police pursuing them as criminals and Zakia’s family after them as well—a story I might have missed if Shmuley hadn’t alerted me. Many of those readers demanded that something had to be done to help Zakia and Ali. Not a few readers upbraided me, too: “You’ve drawn attention to them, now do something about it,” one wrote. Little did I appreciate at the time how prophetic those words would become. “Can’t the
New York Times
just send a plane in and get them out?” If only it were so simple. None of them were quite as insistent as the rabbi from New Jersey, though, and unlike many of the others, he had a plan, or at least part of a plan. He had a wealthy benefactress, he said, who was determined to spend whatever was required to save the couple’s lives, which of course meant getting them to safety somewhere outside Afghanistan. A very wealthy benefactress. Shmuley was not just any rabbi but “America’s rabbi,” as his own website and some news accounts
⁹
described him; he was the late singer Michael Jackson’s rabbi, he was a television personality, a columnist, a passionate defender of Israel, a self-promoter, a Republican politician, and a friend of Sean Penn and Oprah Winfrey. He runs an organization called the World Values Network,
¹⁰
which seeks to promote Jewish values among the wider community, and he has prominent political friends on both sides of the ideological divide in America. He is a consummate networker, a talent he developed during years as Cambridge University’s resident rabbi,
¹¹
when he actively invited the interesting and the powerful to speaking and debating engagements and made many lasting friends. He is also an author; his best-known book is
Kosher Sex
and his most recent is
Kosher Lust.
¹²
Both are more serious than their titles might suggest
and, among other things, promote Shmuley’s vision that Jews should make more children—he himself has nine.

Rabbi Shmuley had managed to find Fatima Kazimi’s contacts through some social-networking site after he saw her name in the paper, and he’d gotten in touch with her independently. After that first article on Zakia and Ali ran, Fatima was disappointed that the story hadn’t focused on her and on her efforts to save the couple, and for a while she’d stopped talking to us. But she was talking to Shmuley, actively. The rabbi had become my back channel to a women’s activist in the Hindu Kush, which was only a couple of mountain ranges away from my bureau in Kabul.

The outpouring of interest and offers of help made me feel guilty about the various forces I had unleashed. Would all this publicity really help Zakia and Ali? “You’re responsible for them now, I hope you know that,” one reader wrote. He had a point. In ways that are hard to fathom, all the publicity had emboldened the couple to make the move they did. Later, when I had occasion to ask Zakia what had given them the courage to flee together, she looked at me with surprise. “Because we knew there were people who cared about us. We knew you would help us.” That was an awful leap of faith, but to them it was as if they were no longer alone; if we were interested, so many others would be, and somehow—in ways they had really not thought through very fully—that would solve everything. They were no longer just Zakia and Ali; they were the
story
of Zakia and Ali, which was bigger than they were and as full of promise as it was fraught with danger.

It would not have been the first time that the glare of publicity saved an Afghan woman from an unhappy fate. In 2012 a young woman named Lal Bibi was abducted by a member of an Afghan Local Police (ALP) unit in Kunduz. The ALP are irregular militias that are trained by American Special Forces troops to act as community self-protection. At best they are a well-armed neighborhood watch; at worse they can be a criminal scourge on the communities they’re meant to protect. One of the ALP militiamen, who was named Khudaidad, claimed he was entitled to take Lal Bibi in marriage because of an old
baad
contract, an agreement made when she
was very young as the result of a dispute between their families.
Baad
is a common practice, in which young girls are exchanged to compensate for a marital infidelity, a murder or other transgression, or just to settle a debt. Lal Bibi and her family claimed there had been no such agreement, and they pressed charges against Khudaidad for raping her and accused three members of his unit, including its commander, of aiding him in her abduction and rape. He calmly defended himself against the charge by claiming he had married her shortly before the rape, and, he told the
New York Times,
¹³
“Once the marriage contract is done, any sexual intercourse is not considered rape.”

Lal Bibi may have objected to her marriage, but that was forcible marriage, a lesser crime, rather than rape, he said. The policeman produced a mullah who confirmed he had performed the marriage rite before any intercourse took place. The unusual thing about Lal Bibi’s case was not so much what had happened to her but that her family members decided to go public about it. After a national outcry, President Hamid Karzai intervened and ordered the ALP unit disbanded. It was but was then quickly replaced with another ALP unit headed by the brother of the commander of the first unit. (Once again a unit allegedly trained and mentored by American special-operations troops). Defying threats and intimidation from the
arbakai
and their friends, Lal Bibi’s family traveled to Kabul, where prosecutors eventually sentenced all four police officials involved to sixteen years in prison. During his trial Khudaidad dropped his insistence on the marriage defense and came up with a more novel one. He asked that Lal Bibi’s veil be removed during the trial so that, he said, the court could see that she was far too ugly for anyone to have wanted to rape her.
¹⁴

Women’s advocates lobbied hard in support of Lal Bibi and her family in that case, and it was a rare win for a female victim of violence.

If Lal Bibi’s impoverished and disenfranchised family could prevail against American-backed militiamen, normally accustomed to impunity for their actions, perhaps Zakia and Ali’s case was not entirely hopeless. Now that they were free, everything had
changed. The sort of money and support that people were offering them could well prove decisive in finding a solution for them, either by paying her family a large enough bride price to go away peaceably or by making it financially plausible for the couple to escape the country. Their story did not have to end there, in some rotting Afghan lockup or at the business end of someone’s vengeful bludgeon. Unfortunately, Zakia and Ali seemed to be well and truly gone. For the moment at least, they had decided that disappearing was a safer bet than waiting around for help, even though it meant that no one could find them to offer that help.