The Places in Between (16 page)

"I want a second wife."

"Nothing. You don't have to pay in England."

"Then why don't I just go to England and get one for free instead of paying five thousand dollars here?"

"No reason," I said.

Abdul Haq looked at me suspiciously.

If you couldn't get around the system by agreeing to marry your sister to your wife's brother, you had to pay far more for a wife than most men could earn in a decade of work inside Afghanistan. In some villages you had to give your father-in-law two horses and fifty sheep in addition to cash. Everyone seemed to think the sums were ridiculously high but no one seemed able to get around the custom. Abdul Haq said most of his friends had to leave Afghanistan and work for three years in Iran to earn the money to pay the bride-price.

Someone fired three shots behind us. We ran a little, then stopped. They fired again. We ran on. Abdul Haq had no idea who was shooting but he thought they were aiming at us. The shooting stopped.

At about midday we came into Darai-e-Takht, a large village nestled in a gorge of the Hari Rud River. Darai-e-Takht formed the modern frontier of Ghor province and of Ismail Khan's formal territory. From now on Ismail Khan's authority was indirect, although he had appointed the governor of Ghor. Abdul Haq said this was where he was stopping. We sat in an inn. I was used to the greeting ritual that took place in private houses. Here everyone ignored us. I was conscious of not having washed for eight days, the stink of my socks and walking boots, and the dust on my pack.

A slender thirty-year-old entered and everyone suddenly stood up. He was wearing gold-rimmed, mirrored cat's-eye shades and a silver turban over his gold cap. Followed by thirty armed men, all older than him, he moved up the line, shaking hands in a steady, smooth glide to the most senior position in the room. He did not urge anyone to sit down or try to put someone else in the senior position. It would have been difficult for him to stop because of the men behind him carrying bandoliers and machine guns that, designed to be mounted on vehicles, must have been almost too heavy to lift. One of his retainers wore a Russian tank commander's cap with earflaps beneath his turban; another wore a blue naval jacket with brass buttons.

This was Mustafa, the commandant of Obey, who had apparently tried to kill me on the road near Obey and who, it transpired, had just shot at us. I never found out why. Perhaps he was asserting his anti-American credentials. Someone told me later that Mustafa's cousin had bet him that he couldn't hit me. Once seated he began speaking in a soft, high-pitched voice. His conversation had none of the solemn grandiloquence of Persian oratory.

"At last the walking foreigner, I see. Welcome. And where are you wandering—you must be cold ... Have you eaten?" He spoke quickly and did not give me time to answer; he seemed to be very amused by something—perhaps by having just shot at us.

As he spoke a gray-bearded secretary wrote down every word. The commander took off his turban and cap and ruffled his gleaming black, newly washed hair. His followers gazed at him.

"You are lucky to have me," he continued. "I will provide you with an honor guard of five men."

I smiled. "Please excuse us for a moment," I said, and took Abdul Haq outside. I did not want to lose one group of armed men only to be given another. I told him to tell the commandant that I needed to travel alone.

When we reentered, Abdul Haq sat down and talked to the young commander. "His Excellency Rory is traveling alone for his book. He should remain alone." He talked about the Emperor Babur, about anthropology, about my close friendship with Ismail Khan, about my travels in other countries. I had assumed Abdul Haq had little knowledge and less interest in what I was doing. But he had apparently remembered almost everything I had said along the way. He spoke convincingly and fluently and the audience listened attentively.

When he had finished Mustafa laughed out loud at me and Abdul Haq. "Then you will walk on, Englishman, and I will give you a letter of introduction, which my secretary will write. And you," he said to Abdul Haq, "can travel with me to Herat. I am sorry I don't have more time." He stood and walked down the line, shaking hands, and left, followed by his men. Abdul Haq embraced me, kissed me three times, and hurried after them. I walked outside to watch him go. He was the only bareheaded and clean-shaven man. He had his shoes only half on and he was stumbling through the mud with his rifle on his shoulder. I stood ready to wave a final time but he didn't look back. I was a quarter of the way through my journey.

MARRYING A MUSLIM

A man called Gul Agha Karimi had written letters to introduce me to people in Ghor. Gul Agha was a wealthy businessman, originally from this district, who owned a pizza restaurant and a shop in Kabul. I was very grateful for the letters, but I did not know how he was perceived in Ghor or how his introductions would be received.

He had told me that people from one village would accompany me to the next. This custom was once common throughout Asia. In Iran, Pakistan, and India, city dwellers often said to me, "Don't worry ... someone from the village will always walk with you ... They won't let a visitor walk alone." But such traditions and social structures had, in reality, vanished, and in my eighteen months of walking, no one had ever offered to escort me to a neighboring village.

Gul Agha's first letter was addressed to Dr. Habibullah Sherwal, who owned the inn in Darai-e-Takht where I had just met the young commandant. I found Dr. Habibullah; he glanced at the letter and said, "Give me a moment to change my shoes."

He reappeared a minute later in sunglasses with a Kalashnikov on his shoulder. He locked the door, and we set off on a one-night journey.

Dr. Habibullah was a portly man of thirty-six. His rifle kept slipping down his round shoulder, and he took small, quick steps in his brown tasseled loafers. He did not speak to me at all in the first twenty minutes we walked together.

I liked Abdul Haq but I preferred traveling without him. He had dominated my view of the landscape. The dangers and the geography of the country and its villages had been filtered through the mind of a man who was a Mujahid of Ismail Khan, based in Herat. Habibullah was a local. The fields through which we were walking belonged to him. The people on the road recognized him. I was pleased to have finally reached the hills and be moving farther away from vehicles and deeper into Ghor. The valleys were narrow and the Hari Rud River ran through gorges. It had not snowed for two days, but there was still a dusting of white in the hollows and on the upper slopes. Above our path were pillars of sand, and high in the cliff walls were caves used as sheep pens in the winter.

We passed a large round fort by the river. Habibullah waited patiently outside while I wandered among the crumbling walls half buried in snow, and climbed into a round tower to look across the valley. The fort seemed to dominate the path from every direction. I had no way of finding out how old it was—mud bricks could be almost any age. Then, having made sure I couldn't be seen from the path, I squatted down in the snow.

I had had diarrhea for a day. I had tried to avoid it by drinking only tea or purifying my water with chlorine tablets. Breads and soups were relatively safe, but no one washed his hands and we shared bowls. I was surprised I had not developed it three days earlier when Aziz and Abdul Haq complained of stomach cramps. But I had it now and I knew it was dehydrating me. I still felt quite strong but, if it persisted, I would have to try antibiotics.

When I reappeared, Habibullah was sitting on his heels in the afternoon sun. I apologized for taking so much time but he just shrugged. We started walking again, with me trying to adjust to his short steps after a week of Abdul Haq's rapid stride. We crossed the ford below Darai-e-Takht on a small bridge marked
ECHO—BUILT WITH FUNDS FROM THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY
. It had been built five years earlier and was already crumbling, but it was an important contribution, as this ford had been frequently impassable.
²⁶

When we reached the far end of the bridge, Dr. Habibullah pointed at a large black rock high on the slope behind us and said, "Commandant Mustafa—the young man whom you just met and who shot at you—shot two Taliban from there. They died here on this ground, which is my wheat field. Before that he was nothing—a smalltime mullah—but because he was the only man in this village to fight the Taliban he is now a commander."

"And you?"

"I didn't fight the Taliban. I fought the Russians from when I was fourteen for ten years with Rabbani's Jamiat, but when the Taliban came I went to work in Iran and Herat."

For four hours without a break, we walked along the Hari Rud River. Everyone we met greeted Dr. Habibullah with respect, not wariness. Dr. Habibullah embraced some of the men; others bowed over his hand and kissed it while he looked fastidious and uninterested.

"How much do you pay for a wife in Scotland?" asked Dr. Habibullah.

I told him.

"What is your religion?"

"
Jesewi
—Christian," I said.

"You believe in God?"

"Yes."

"One God?"

"Yes."

"Would you marry your mother's sister's daughter?"

"I don't think so."

"How about your mother's brother's daughter?"

"No."

"Your father's brother's or your sister's daughter?"

"No, not them either."

"Then who would you marry?"

"Probably someone not related to me."

Silence. Habibullah's questions suggested he was interrogating a Stone Age tribesman about kinship structures, but these were not anthropological questions. They were religious questions. Islam, much more than Christianity, is a political and social religion. Clear rules govern who and how you can marry. In this region most people married their first cousins.

A tall bearded man came running after us. He ignored my greeting entirely and asked Dr. Habibullah, "What religion is he?"

"He's a Jahdui—a Jew," said Dr. Habibullah.

"No, no. I'm an Esawi—a Christian."

Dr. Habibullah turned around, looked at me, and then said to his friend, "I can't work this out—is there a difference?"

Many people who fought in the holy war against the Russians must have known less about other religions than Dr. Habibullah.

The man led him aside and whispered to him, and then we were on our way.

"That man was a mullah," said Dr. Habibullah. "He said that you can marry our daughters—you are a type of Muslim."

This idea seemed to relax Dr. Habibullah. I didn't point out that Muslim women were not usually encouraged to marry Christian men.

Dr. Habibullah explained that he was called Doctor because he had completed a part-time veterinary course in Herat.

"Why are you carrying a weapon?" I asked.

"For the wolves."

"Are they dangerous?"

"Six months ago on that slope on my way to vaccinate some of the sheep on that hill, I came across the clothes and then the leg of a friend who had just been eaten by a wolf in the middle of the day. Two years ago five wolves killed my neighbor at eleven in the morning. Your stick wouldn't keep them away."

Dr. Habibullah told me about long walks he had done when he was young. He had led fifty men across the hills to Quetta to collect weapons. It had taken them two months to walk there from Darai-e-Takht and two months to return. They slept mostly in caves. Now, however, his brown tasseled loafers were cutting up his feet, and toward the end of the day he was hobbling.

"I can speak English," Dr. Habibullah said in Farsi, and then added in English, "My father name Aziz." He counted to twenty in English, only missing number eight.

"Well done," I said.

"That is nothing. I can count to one thousand."

I say, "Perhaps later..."

That night we stopped in Dahan-e-Rezak, Dr. Habibullah's mother's village. This was my first night in a tribal hill village. The valley was narrow with no room for large fields and the mud houses were built on terraces in the hillside. Two large sheepdogs were asleep on the flat roofs.

The villagers referred to themselves as Tajik, which seemed to mean they were Persian speakers who were not Uzbek, Hazara, or Pashtun.
²⁷
But other people called them the Aimaq of Ghor. Although they were famous for their colorful tents, they only lived in them during the summer on the high pasture, and I saw no sign of them during my visit. In the winter, they lived in villages of flat-roofed mud houses, not domed like many of the houses of the Herat plain. Recently the Aimaq, who numbered over half a million people, had settled into four major tribal groups.
²⁸
Dr. Habibullah said this tribe was known as Firuzkuhi, which means Aimaq of the Turquoise Mountain. They lived in the heart of the old Ghorid Empire.

Everyone in Rezak was descended from a single grandfather. There were six houses and seventy people in the village, though they got more food aid from international agencies by claiming there were thirty houses. The development agencies called this area "the hunger belt" and predicted a hundred thousand people would die from starvation that winter. No one seemed to be starving, and only one household had so little food that its members had left for the large refugee camp near Herat. But the village diet was limited to plain
nan
bread for breakfast and lunch and occasional beans for dinner.

The village's wealth was traditionally linked to its sheep flocks, but many had died in the war and the villagers now lived off UN grain and by selling a few sheep. The men supplemented this by working as builders in Iran. The women wove carpets in styles that could be sold in the markets of Iran and Pakistan.
²⁹
As in the case of many villages, however, their main source of cash was money the West, Iran, and Pakistan gave to encourage them to fight against the Russians and then against other Afghan groups.