The Places in Between (2 page)

"
Waleikum a-salaam. Chi kar mikonid?
" he repeated quietly, leaning back and running his fat manicured hand along the purple velveteen arm of the sofa. His bouffant hair and goatee were neatly trimmed. I was conscious of not having shaved in eight weeks.

"I have explained what I am doing many times to His Excellency, Yuzufi, in the Foreign Ministry," I said. "I was told to meet him again now. I am late."

A pulse was beating strongly in my neck. I tried to breathe slowly. Neither of us spoke. After a little while, I looked away.

The thinner man drew out a small new radio, said something into it, and straightened his stiff jacket over his traditional shirt. I didn't need to see the shoulder holster. I had already guessed they were members of the Security Service. They did not care what I said or what I thought of them. They had watched people through hidden cameras in bedrooms, in torture cells, and on execution grounds. They knew that, however I presented myself, I could be reduced. But why had they decided to question me? In the silence, I heard a car reversing in the courtyard and then the first notes of the call to prayer.

"Let's go," said the man in the black suit. He told me to walk in front. On the stairs, I passed a waiter to whom I had spoken. He turned away. I was led to a small Japanese car parked on the dirt forecourt. The car's paint job was new and it had been washed recently. They told me to sit in the back. There was nothing in the pockets or on the floorboards. It looked as though the car had just come from the factory. Without saying anything, they turned onto the main boulevard.

It was January 2002. The American-led coalition was ending its bombardment of the Tora Bora complex; Usama Bin Laden and Mullah Mohammed Omar had escaped; operations in Gardez were beginning. The new government taking over from the Taliban had been in place for two weeks. The laws banning television and female education had been dropped; political prisoners had been released; refugees were returning home; some women were coming out without veils. The UN and the U.S. military were running the basic infrastructure and food supplies. There was no frontier guard and I had entered the country without a visa. The Afghan government seemed to me hardly to exist. Yet these men were apparently well established.

The car turned into the Foreign Ministry, and the gate guards saluted and stood back. As I climbed the stairs, I felt that I was moving unnaturally quickly and that the men had noticed this. A secretary showed us into Mr. Yuzufi's office without knocking. For a moment Yuzufi stared at us from behind his desk. Then he stood, straightened his baggy pin-striped jacket, and showed the men to the most senior position in the room. They walked slowly on the linoleum flooring, looking at the furniture Yuzufi had managed to assemble since he had inherited an empty office: the splintered desk, the four mismatched filing cabinets in different shades of olive green, and the stove, which made the room smell strongly of gasoline.

The week I had known Yuzufi comprised half his career in the Foreign Ministry. A fortnight earlier he had been in Pakistan. The day before he had given me tea and a boiled sweet, told me he admired my journey, laughed at a photograph of my father in a kilt, and discussed Persian poetry. This time he did not greet me but instead sat in a chair facing me and asked, "What has happened?"

Before I could reply, the man with the goatee cut in. "What is this foreigner doing here?"

"These men are from the Security Service," said Yuzufi.

I nodded. I noticed that Yuzufi had clasped his hands together and that his hands, like mine, were trembling slightly.

"I will translate to make sure you understand what they are asking," continued Yuzufi. "Tell them your intentions. Exactly as you told me."

I looked into the eyes of the man on my left. "I am planning to walk across Afghanistan. From Herat to Kabul. On foot." I was not breathing deeply enough to complete my phrases. I was surprised they didn't interrupt. "I am following in the footsteps of Babur, the first emperor of Mughal India. I want to get away from the roads. Journalists, aid workers, and tourists mostly travel by car, but I—"

"There are no tourists," said the man in the stiff jacket, who had not yet spoken. "You are the first tourist in Afghanistan. It is midwinter—there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee. Do you want to die?"

"Thank you very much for your advice. I note those three points." I guessed from his tone that such advice was intended as an order. "But I have spoken to the Cabinet," I said, misrepresenting a brief meeting with the young secretary to the Minister of Social Welfare. "I must do this journey."

"Do it in a year's time," said the man in the black suit.

He had taken from Yuzufi the tattered evidence of my walk across South Asia and was examining it: the clipping from the newspaper in western Nepal, "Mr. Stewart is a pilgrim for peace"; the letter from the Conservator, Second Circle, Forestry Department, Himachal Pradesh, India, "Mr. Stewart, a Scot, is interested in the environment"; from a District Officer in the Punjab and a Secretary of the Interior in a Himalayan state and a Chief Engineer of the Pakistan Department of Irrigation requesting "All Executive Engineers (XENs) on the Lower Bari Doab to assist Mr. Stewart, who will be undertaking a journey on foot to research the history of the canal system."

"I have explained this," I added, "to His Excellency the Emir's son, the Minister of Social Welfare, when he also gave me a letter of introduction."

"From His Excellency Mir Wais?"

"Here." I handed over the sheet of letterhead paper I had received from the Minister's secretary. "Mr. Stewart is a medieval antiquary interested in the anthropology of Herat."

"But it is not signed."

"Mr. Yuzufi lost the signed copy."

Yuzufi, who was staring at the ground, nodded slightly.

The two men talked together for a few minutes. I did not try to follow what they were saying. I noticed, however, that they were using Iranian—not Afghan—Persian. This and their clothes and their manner made me think they had spent a great deal of time with the Iranian intelligence services. I had been questioned by the Iranians, who seemed to suspect me of being a spy. I did not want to be questioned by them again.

The man in the stiff jacket said, "We will allow him to walk to Chaghcharan. But our gunmen will accompany him all the way." Chaghcharan was halfway between Herat and Kabul and about a fortnight into my journey.

The villagers with whom I was hoping to stay would be terrified by a secret police escort. This was presumably the point. But why were they letting me do the journey at all when they could expel me? I wondered if they were looking for money. "Thank you so much for your concern for my security," I said, "but I am quite happy to take the risk. I have walked alone across the other Asian countries without any problems."

"You will take the escort," said Yuzufi, interrupting for the first time. "That is nonnegotiable."

"But I have introductions to the local commanders. I will be much safer with them than with Heratis."

"You will go with our men," he repeated.

"I cannot afford to pay for an escort. I have no money."

"We were not expecting any money," said the man in the stiff jacket.

"This is nonnegotiable," repeated Yuzufi. His broad knee was now jigging up and down. "If you refuse this you will be expelled from the country. They want to know how many of their gunmen you are taking."

"If it is compulsory, one."

"Two ... with weapons," said the man in the dark suit, "and you will leave tomorrow."

The two men stood up and left the room. They said good-bye to Yuzufi but not to me.

TANKS INTO STICKS

Outside Yuzufi's office, I bought some jam rings from a glass box in a pastry shop. The men who had just interviewed me were not new to their jobs. The reactions of the hotel staff implied that they were well known in Herat. They had probably worked for the KGB-trained KHAD. But I was disturbed that they were already functioning so effectively within the two-week-old administration and I wondered how they had found me. I ate all thirty biscuits quickly, dropping crumbs on my shawl, walking in the dust below the curb. My boots kicked over the tracks of donkeys, tires, and other men's shoes. I was worried that these men would not allow me to walk. I felt trapped. I wanted to be moving again and to see the places between Herat and Kabul.

Herat that morning looked like an Iranian shantytown. Everything had been constructed hurriedly and recently. On the flat roofs of half-finished shopping arcades, bare girders clustered like dead insect legs, and the walls were the same color as the sand drifts by the curb. This was the architecture of political Islam, representing its combination of Marxism and puritan theology with drab Soviet brick. Most of the men were dressed like provincial Iranians, in dirt-speckled black or faded brown. I did not like the city. To fill time I went to the bazaar to get a walking stick.

I had carried the ideal walking stick through Pakistan. It was five feet long and made of polished bamboo with an iron top and bottom; I had walked with it for nine months but had not brought it into Afghanistan. It was called a
dang,
and Jats, a farming caste from the Punjab, used to carry them, partly for self-protection, until the middle of the twentieth century. Many people in both the Pakistani and Indian Punjab still had their grandfathers' sticks in their houses. Young men liked to play with my stick, spinning it around their bodies, bringing the base down in an accelerating arc on the heads of imaginary opponents. One man told me that his great-grandfather had killed the last lion in the Punjab with his
dang.
I liked walking with my
dang;
striking the ground on every fourth step gave a rhythm to my movement. It was useful when I was climbing and it took the weight off my left knee. But no one else carried them now except the riot police. The word
dang
had an archaic flavor and people laughed when I used it.

Afghan students were sitting near a giant medieval bronze cauldron in the Herat Friday Mosque, staring at the jagged Ghorid script on the colonnade.

I asked one of the students where I could buy a heavy walking stick.

He giggled. "Like an old man?"

"Like an old man."

"But you are young. Why do you need a stick?"

"Because I am walking to Kabul."

"Take a bus." They all laughed.

"Or a plane," said another. They laughed more.

"So you've no idea where I could buy a walking stick."

"Nowhere here. We have cars in Afghanistan."

"Where do your old men get their walking sticks?"

"They make them."

I continued beneath the remaining vaulted sections of the old covered bazaar, which Robert Byron watched being mostly demolished in 1933. I wasn't sure what to call the stick. It certainly seemed a waste of time to use the Punjabi word
dang
in a place where people spoke Persian. But whatever word I used, people denied having heard of anything like it, so I asked where I could find a broom handle and was directed to a wheelwright's store. Against his shop wall, surrounded by baskets of henna and dried apricots, were dozens of pine poles. They were much heavier than the bamboo I had carried in the Punjab, but there was no bamboo to be found in the bazaar. I chose one that was five feet long, reasonably straight, and well balanced in the center.

Now I needed the iron. I followed a cloud of dark smoke down the main street and found a blacksmith with scorch-marked cheeks working a bright red furnace. In south Asia, a blacksmith would have been a low-caste man, an untouchable. But this man, Haji Ramzun, had visited Mecca and was respected among his peers. I explained my walk and what I wanted done to the pole. He offered to fix a section of rusty pipe to the bottom and a large nut to the top, paint them both sky blue, and charge me for six days' work. I walked on.

I turned off Piaz Furushi, which meant "Onion Street" but was filled with sellers of rugs and gold, and entered a courtyard. A donkey lay asleep in the center of the square. Five men were sitting on rugs sharing their lunch. I sketched the design of the stick, and one of the men, Wakil Ama, said he could help. He led me to the anvil fixed to the rough wooden planks of his shed. A crowd of young boys gathered to watch him. He took a sheet of green metal salvaged from a Russian armored personnel carrier, and cut off a triangular piece on a small guillotine. Then he bent this into a cone and welded the seam; plunged it in water; pierced a hole; forced the piece over the wood; hammered a nail through the hole; and cut off the nail head. He worked quickly and in silence. Then he paused. The point was sharp and it was more a spear than a stick.

I explained that in Pakistan my stick had a round top, not a pointed one. He shrugged. I asked if he had any metal balls.

"No."

"Does anyone else?"

"Hussein might," said one of the older spectators.

There was much chattering and then everyone looked at me.

"Well?" I asked.

"We have no ball," said Wakil Ama.

"How about Hussein?" I suggested.

Wakil Ama shrugged again. "Hussein might."

"Can someone lead me there? I'll go there now."

Wakil Ama shouted at a young boy, telling him to guide me. The boy ran off, giggling, forcing me to run after him. We raced through a dark covered arch into a large courtyard, turned down another street, and stopped at a junk shop. On the pavement was a battered tin tray containing the face of a cheap alarm clock, a shell case from an antiaircraft round, and a lead ball.

We returned to the forge. Wakil Ama took the ball, grunted, and welded it to the point of the stick. Then he plunged it into water and wound another strip of tank metal around the base. The metal was dull and sharp barnacles of welding slip hung on the seams, but I now had a strong, well-balanced stick, weighing about three pounds. Wakil Ama smiled at the result. He accepted payment only reluctantly, leaving me to choose the amount. Then he offered me some tea.