The Places in Between (10 page)

"That man is Taliban," said Abdul Haq. "You're going to get me killed." Then he laughed. Each of us thought the other would get us both killed and he found that funny. So did I. But I could not grasp his view as an Afghan of the history of this featureless landscape. "That's a Russian APC, isn't it?" I said as I stood up.

Abdul Haq grunted, "P sixty-six."

"What's that building?"

"Nothing," Abdul Haq replied.

"It's a caravanserai, isn't it?"

"No."

I walked over to look at it. Abdul Haq was not interested. Instead he pointed to a low mound and said, "There is the grave of a Taliban. Our group ambushed them here six months ago, killed five of them."

"Qasim, were you part of the ambush?"

"No, I participated in an ambush two kilometers farther on."

"I missed that one," said Abdul Haq.

Abdul Haq's landscape was composed of violent events in the recent past. Despite his laconic manner, his continual clowning, and his unpredictable threats, Abdul Haq was an intelligent and literate man. He knew that this was Babur's route and that ahead lay remote mountain regions that had once contained two ancient civilizations: the Buddhist culture of Bamiyan and the now-lost Islamic capital of the Turquoise Mountain. But he didn't care. These were the things politicians talked about in their speeches about the historic greatness of Afghanistan.

He saw Afghanistan as a poor, superstitious country with corrupt leaders and nothing to gain from looking backward. His sympathies were with baseball caps, not caravanserai. When he denied the building was a caravanserai, I do not think he was being ignorant. He was saying that whatever the building had once been, it was nothing anymore. He doubted it had ever been much in the first place. He was probably right. We were farther from the main Silk Road, nearing impassable peaks. The building had probably never attracted many traders and was likely never filled with precious gems or even the everyday goods that Babur describes being traded in Afghanistan: "slaves, white clothes, sugar-candy, refined and common sugar, drugs and spices."
¹¹

Qasim was limping when we set off again. He suddenly seemed very small and old. Just before dusk we saw a village on our right.

"Where do you plan to stop tonight?" I asked Qasim.

"At Dideros."

"How far is that?"

"Near."

"How many hours' walk?"

"Three perhaps."

"If this road is as dangerous as you say, we cannot walk in the dark. We must sleep here," I said.

"Are you too weak to walk?" snapped Qasim. His voice was more high-pitched than usual. "This is the desert."

"There is a village there."

"We don't know anyone in that village. It would be too dangerous to just walk in."

It was more dangerous to walk at night. I said so and turned off the road. The others followed me.

GENEALOGIES

Like most in the valley, this village, Buriabaf, was perhaps half a kilometer from the path—in contrast to the Indian subcontinent, where houses cling to the edge of the road. Perhaps this was to discourage visitors. A farmer with a rifle on his shoulder directed us to the headman's house. We walked single file beside a canal flowing with clean water and lined with a double row of bare poplars. The water had picked up the last pale intensity of the evening sky and the reflections of the silver trees trembled in the water. There was no one in the street.

We crossed a bridge, turned down a narrow lane, and found a dark wooden door. We knocked. The headman appeared. He was a young man with an incomplete beard. Qasim brought his heels together, leaned forward on the balls of his feet in an approximation of a salute, and then, after lengthy greetings, said, "Our car has broken down."

"Where?"

"In the desert," said Qasim. "We are officers of the Security Service." He produced a bundle of letters from his jacket. The headman summoned another young man from the compound and they gazed at the letters together.

"His Excellency Rory," continued Qasim, "gives international financial assistance to villages in Afghanistan."

The headman glanced skeptically at my faded woolen blanket, stick, and pack, but he asked us in.

We entered a compound arranged above a sunken courtyard ten feet deep. At one corner was a ruined tower with battlements. Beside it ten men, mostly armed, stood watching us. Qasim didn't even glance at them. The headman stood back politely at the guest room door and Qasim pushed past with a patronizing smile. The rest of us removed our shoes at the door and followed; a sockless Abdul Haq complained loudly about his feet. It was a small, unfurnished mud room. We sat on the earth.

"Where have you walked from?" asked the headman.

"From Herat," said Abdul Haq, "we're shattered."

"But I thought you said that your car..."

"Could you get someone to massage my men?" asked Qasim. He was lying on his back with his feet up on the wall.

"Of course," said the headman, summoning one of the boys staring at us from the door. He was put to work on Aziz's leg muscles.

"This is a very poor village," said Qasim loudly to me. "The headman is a very poor man." Then he winked at the headman, who looked perplexed.

I retrieved a Steinbeck novel from my pack, hoping to read it. It was the only English book I'd been able to find for sale in Herat. Qasim took it from me and began to mumble over it.

"I can read English," Qasim said to the headman, pointing to a phrase. "This says 'Ox-kew-lee.'" He turned to me and asked, "'Ox-Kew-Lee,'
chi ast
?" (What is Ox-Kew-Lee?)

I looked at the phrase. "It means '
khosh amadid
' but we normally pronounce it 'You're welcome.'"

Abdul Haq, perhaps jealous of this learned conversation, took off his Chinese baseball cap, turned on his military radio—which gave its normal static hiss—and barked, "Ansari, Ansari" into it.

In fifteen months of sleeping in village houses I had seen countless interiors, but it was difficult to decipher much from the uniformity of cheap rugs, Koran boxes, and family photographs. I rarely had a chance to look properly at a village. I said I'd go for a walk.

"No, you won't," said Qasim.

The headman and the other villagers looked at me to see if I would accept this order.

"Why not?"

"It's too dangerous for you to go out alone."

"I'll be fine," I said, smiling and standing up.

"Aziz will have to go with you."

"Aziz is too ill," I said.

"What can he do if you insist on going for a walk?" asked Qasim.

Aziz staggered to his feet and we walked outside together. Aziz carried a rifle and wore a black bandanna and a checked Arab scarf. He looked—deliberately perhaps—like a Palestinian fighter. He rarely smiled and was always the first to point his weapon at passersby. When we were with the other two I couldn't get him to speak.

"How are you?" I asked.

"Very sick," he said. "I don't know how much farther I can continue." Although his legs and his chest had been getting much worse in the past three days, he was still forced to carry Abdul Haq's and Qasim's sleeping bags as well as Qasim's rifle.

Entering the village I had seen little of interest. As in most villages everything was hidden behind high, blank courtyard walls. There were no squares, gardens, or restaurants. The only public place was the mosque, and in Sunni areas villagers wouldn't let me enter a mosque. Now as I walked in the dusk I noticed how the mud varied from coarse, dove gray bricks to pink, waxy plaster on the walls, the path, and the canal banks. Towers and domes were silhouetted against a darkening, cloud-troubled sky. One of the thick walls of an old fort had crumbled inward, revealing an overgrown rose garden in a courtyard sunk twelve feet below the level of the street and fed by a slender waterfall. I could see a mulberry tree through a half-open gate. Firelight played around the thick frame of a high window. The deep courtyards and the old arches and windows that rose just a foot above the street had been parts of substantial houses built long before, now folded into the foundations of the village.

"Do you agree with Qasim that this is a poor village?" I asked Aziz.

"No," said Aziz, "this is a good village with good water. A rich village. People live well here—avenues, gardens, a big mosque."

"But Qasim said..."

Aziz laughed, "This is not poor. I am poor." And he leaned his shoulder against mine.

We walked back to the headman's house in silence. A young man was waiting to let us back into the compound. The gate closed behind us and that was all I ever knew or saw of that village. Perhaps the villagers knew who had first dug the canals and who had built the corner tower. They might have told me who had resisted or collaborated with the Russians or the Taliban. But I was tired and I doubted I would learn much in a single evening.

I was generally confused when villagers talked about history. Entering the guest room, I remembered how a Muslim Turkish host in Iranian Kurdistan had talked about his village a year earlier.

"Goz Hasle is a very old village, God be praised," the Turk had said. "My father was born here and my grandfather was born here. We were always here."

"What does Goz Hasle mean?" I asked.

"It means 'cross-wearing girl.' "

"So it was a Christian village?"

"No."

"But then why is it called 'cross-wearing girl'?"

"My grandparents did not live alongside Armenian Christians. The Armenians left a very, very long time ago."

"When?"

"When my father was a child."

Faced with these contradictions I assumed, perhaps unfairly, that his family had helped the Ottomans drive the Armenians out.

"Where was the Armenian church?"

"I don't know."

I left it at that. Only when thinking back months later did I remember that my host had kept his horse in a long building with a tall door, a base of neatly dressed masonry, and a wooden roof soaring thirty feet high; in the south side was the trace of an arched window.

Every night, in over five hundred villages, I interviewed people about their possessions, communities, and history. I was not in control of these conversations. I was often tired, and as I interviewed others I was also defending myself against suspicious questions and trying to be polite to my host.

My notebooks were filled with facts about places I could rarely find again on maps. I had made sketches of medieval mosques, accounts of previous visitors, lists of people's possessions and their incomes, copies of feudal genealogies, and diagrams of arrow-making or weaving. I had recorded claims about recent killings, descriptions of possible Neolithic burial mounds, and short biographies. I had speculated on pre-Islamic or pre-Hindu religions suggested by a burial practice or a carving on a stone pillar.

Writing for two hours in my diary each night had become a fixed habit. I looked at the importance of mass-produced imported goods, foreign missionaries, and development agencies in remote communities. I considered the journeys men had made on pilgrimage or for work in cities. I observed how religion, language, and social practices were becoming homogenized, and how little interest people took in ancient history. I noticed all of this but I was not sure whether writing it down was any more than a cover story to justify the journey to myself. I was certainly motivated by more than anthropological curiosity.

LEST HE RETURNING CHIDE...

In the guest room an old man was making a long speech to the villagers. Five boys sat wide-eyed and silent, perhaps too young to understand the sense but awestruck by the modulations in his voice, his whispers, his laughs and gestures. Their eyes never shifted. Afghan toddlers never interrupt in the guest room.

"Here he is at last," said Qasim to the headman, seeing me enter. "Now's your chance to tell Agha Rory what you want. I have told Agha Rory what a poor village this is. Is there anything you need, headman?"

"A tarmac road."

"Well, that shouldn't be too difficult, should it, Rory?" said Qasim.

Before I could reply, the headman, thoroughly excited, shouted, "If you'll excuse me, money for a new mosque."

Another villager joined in, "And money for crops, if you please."

Qasim beamed and nodded and said, "Keep going. Rory has thousands of dollars to spend."

"If you please, hand pumps ... more hand pumps..."

"And a tube well, if you please."

Silence.

"Well," I replied, playing my role for Qasim, "I will present a report on your requirements to Kabul."

"Why, Agha Qasim, are you accompanying Agha Rory? Are you there to protect him from wolves and bandits?" asked the headman.

"No, no," replied Qasim. "We are with him because we are the greatest of friends. We are walking with him all the way to Chaghcharan."

I smiled and nodded, hoping our destination was also a lie; otherwise, we'd be together for the next four weeks.