The Places in Between (5 page)

Suddenly there was an explosion, the ground trembled under our feet, and acrid black smoke rolled from the field on our left. I had not imagined how loud a land mine could be. The others didn't turn their heads.

We were in a gravel desert stretching bare to low hills on either side. There were no trees to deliver variety of height and color. The gravel and sand would not alter with the seasons. In the Iranian desert, there would have been marks in the soil made by the plow, vertical lines formed by pylons, drab eagles on power lines, and scraps of plastic bag. Because of the drought and the poverty in Afghanistan even such bland signs of human occupation were missing.

But the road was flat, the day was cool, my feet were comfortable, and my pack didn't feel too heavy. The pace of my legs began to transform the rhythm of my breathing and of my thinking, although I still felt unusually nervous. I wondered whether, after fifteen months of walking across Asia, my luck was running out. I had promised my mother that this would be my last journey and that if I made it safely to Kabul, I would come home.

I began to take longer and faster strides, half racing along the dirt track. My anxiety faded and I reveled in the movement of my muscles, remembering that in forty days the walk might be over. I had left the offices and interviews in Herat behind and I was once again pushing east. I watched the pebbles flashing past beneath me and felt that with the strike of each heel step I was marking Afghanistan. I wanted to touch as much as possible of the country with my feet. I remembered why I had once thought of walking right around the world.

After two hours, we arrived at a bazaar, Herat Sha'ede, consisting of a short line of mud shops on either side of the mud road, eight kilometers outside Herat.

"Here," said Qasim, "is our night's halt."

"But there are three hours of daylight left. We can do another fifteen kilometers."

"Ahead is only the desert. We must stop here for the night. We can cross the desert tomorrow."

At this pace I wouldn't reach Kabul in six months. But I had no map with which to contradict him and I didn't want to start an argument on the first day, so I reluctantly agreed. Qasim handed his sleeping bag to Abdul Haq, tugged a crease out of his camouflage jacket, and turned toward a mud house. I followed him. We took off our boots on the threshold, stooped beneath the arch, and entered a dark room. I could just make out twenty men in camouflage uniforms, sitting on the carpet. They all stood to greet Qasim. I pushed clumsily through the crowd with my pack, laid it in the corner, and then went through the formal greetings—"
Salaam aleikum. Chetor hastid? Be khair hastid?...
"—and sat and drank tea with them. It was an infuriatingly short day and I hoped to get rid of my companions soon.

When the men began to chat, I took Qasim aside and put two hundred dollars into his hand, asking him to use it to buy our food. This was six months' wages for some Afghans, but I wanted to keep Qasim on my side. I told him I would give him some more as soon as he let me continue alone. He said nothing, but he folded the bills and put them in his breast pocket. Then a squinting, dark-faced man with a patchy beard pushed into the room. He was even smaller than Qasim and was introduced to me as Qasim's brother-in-law Aziz. Qasim told me that Aziz wanted to walk with us. We were now to be a group of four.

THESE BOOTS

Half an hour later, Qasim suggested I go with him to see the bazaar. He wanted to buy some boots. I followed him down the street into a small hut. A pair of white suede boots with fur tops stood on rough planks nailed to the sagging mud walls. Qasim asked the shopkeeper to get them down and then sat on the floor, struggling to put them on. They went well with his camouflage trousers, he thought, but they were too small for even his tiny feet. He and the shopkeeper then rummaged through the pills, rice, cigarettes, and batteries and found a pair in red leatherette. They were very big. In exchange, Qasim gave the shopkeeper his pair of battered combat boots. The shopkeeper seemed to have got a bad deal. Combat boots were everywhere, supplied free by the CIA. I assumed, however, that the shopkeeper could count on calling on Qasim and his contacts for something later. I was more worried for Qasim. The new boots seemed guaranteed to shred his feet.

Qasim was delighted. He stepped, hand in hand with the shopkeeper, over a tray of onions and into the sunlit street, roaring "
Salaam aleikum
" (Peace be with you) at some passing men. The men shouted, "And also with you." They hugged, kissed, and, Qasim still holding hands with the shopkeeper, began a lengthy patter of formal greetings. Qasim had apparently forgotten about me. I was left alone in the shop front, looking at the street.

The landscape reminded me of a Victorian print of the Orient. To the north, beyond the crumbling mud buildings, flocks of sheep moved on a gravel desert that wrinkled gray and green under a deep blue sky. To the east, my destination, I saw the distant snow peaks of the Paropamisus, half dissolved under a paler light. Men in black turbans with thick white beards walked very slowly down the street of the bazaar, rosary beads trailing from their hands and their ankle-length coat sleeves teased by a flurry of pale dust. The low sun glinted on tiny mirrors in the prayer caps of two young men wrestling on the roadside, and on the package of Iranian crackers beside them. A white pickup raced across the uneven track, its windshield displaying a large card that read,
SHIPPED FOR MR. SHAFIQ, KABUL FOR THE UAE, FREE OF DUTY.
In the truck bed a man in a black turban stood holding a mounted Russian antiaircraft gun.

I stepped out of the shadows into the street. A crowd was watching an argument between a policeman and a bus driver, who was shouting that under the new government even policemen should pay for a ride. Suddenly the two shook hands and parted, laughing. Perhaps because the bazaar was full of strangers no one seemed to look at me in my Afghan clothes. I wandered on slowly with the sun on my face in the late afternoon heat.

Herat had been overcast and cold, but here the day was warm. The air was very clean and the desert floor pristine. I looked along the gentle lines of the shop fronts. The clear light was absorbed in the baked mud of the walls. I was pleased to be in this place. But these things were also signs of poverty. There would have been more cement and plastic in this bazaar thirty years ago, before the war. Even this desert was new—it had appeared out of the fields in the recent drought. I wandered down the womanless street, listening to the rich roar of the unemployed mullahs and the illiterate gunmen discussing cousin-marriage. No one was buying anything; everything, it seemed, was bartered or given. Everyone knew each other. Two young men talked to each other about me, where England was, and what a foreigner ate and carried and enjoyed. It was an easy rolling chain of speculation that didn't require my participation.

"He may be tougher than he looks," one of them said as I passed, "but I don't think he understands what he is doing." They smiled at me and I grinned back.

Men resting

After half an hour, Qasim and Abdul Haq reappeared with another soldier and suggested we visit the garden outside the bazaar. About a kilometer away, we turned toward a cemetery up an avenue of cypresses that hid us from the village. The men were all carrying their rifles and Qasim's new friend was for some reason holding a naked bayonet. I was still trying to understand Afghanistan, as I did other countries, in terms of its scenery, history, and architecture. But this was a country at war and I was not in control of the gunmen beside me. I still could not believe the Security Service had any interest in protecting me for free. Nor could I believe that they would let me walk across the province if they thought I was a spy. It was possible that they had simply told Qasim and Abdul Haq to take me outside the city and kill me. No one would notice in the middle of a war. I felt it would be ludicrous to be killed only eight kilometers into my journey and not for the first time worried that when I was killed people would think me foolhardy.

But the soldiers weren't thinking of killing me. They only wanted to show me other people's graves. They left me and climbed onto the roof of an abandoned building to smoke cannabis.

"This is the shrine and mausoleum of Saint Ulya," Qasim shouted down. "He was a very important man; he was 'Ten-Feet-Tall.'" It was a fittingly large grave. I returned to looking at the landscape. In front of me was a two-hundred-foot-long mud wall with a gate. I entered and continued down a dark tunnel for about thirty feet until a courtyard opened on my left. From the sunken floor, mud surfaces billowed twenty feet into the air, forming steps and roofs, walls and courtyards. I watched the play of shade and refracted sunlight on curving ramparts, wooden struts, granite keystones, and beehive domes. At one of the miniature windows a pair of young eyes, above a veil, appeared and disappeared. The floor was scattered with grain husks from the autumn harvest and the door frames were stained with soot. I climbed some stairs onto the roof and found a lean-to of dead branches that served as a kitchen, containing two faded machinemade rugs, a hurricane lamp, and a tea towel depicting a mosque.

"That is all that the family possesses," Qasim shouted up, appearing with the others. "One hundred people live in this building." I could not understand this medieval tenement block—a village in a single building with circular stairs, half-stories, and abortive tunnels.

"They are very poor," I said.

"
Jang-e bist-o-se saal bud. Ab nist. Mardom-e-karia gharib...,
" he replied. I did not need him to complete the phrase because I had heard it word for word from men in Herat and Kabul. "There has been war for twenty-four years. There is no water. The villagers are poor, illiterate, mad, and dangerous. Afghanistan is destroyed." In this standard analysis, Islam and ethnicity did not feature and violence was the product of crazy rural illiterates. It suggested a little education, money, and counseling might restore a golden age that existed before Afghanistan was "destroyed." But I was not sure how the exact words of the slogan had become so fixed or what part the media had played in it all. It told me nothing about this community.

We walked back into the garden. Beyond the avenue was a shriveled, formal box parterre and faded roses, and in the center a dry concrete pool. Despite twenty-four years of war and four years of drought, the grass was green and mown. I still expected Afghanistan to look like an apocalyptic wasteland, with untended fields and a shattered society held to ransom by the dangerous and the traumatized. I had not anticipated the smiling warmth of the bazaar or the peace and beauty of this elaborate garden on the edge of the gravel sands.

When Babur had visited, Herat was planted with many gardens.

In Herat I saw the garden of Ali Sher Beg, the public pleasure grounds
at Gazergah, the Raven-garden, the new Garden, Zobeideh's garden, the
White garden, and the City garden.

Babur pursued a passionate interest in creating watered paradises in the arid soil of his kingdom in Kabul. This is his entry from 1504:

In the mountains [west of Kabul], the ground is richly diversified by different kinds of tulips. I once directed them to be counted and they brought in thirty-two or thirty-three different sorts of tulips. There is one species which has a scent in some degree like a rose ... On the outside of the garden are large and beautiful spreading plane trees, under the shadow of which there are agreeable spots finely sheltered ... I directed this fountain to be built round with stone ... At a time when the Arhwan flowers begin to blow, I do not know there is any place in the world to be compared to it.

The slender shadows of thorns fell like a jagged Kufic script over the new mud wall. Out of sight, beyond the wall, the desert into which we would walk stretched unbroken. We stood up and Abdul Haq picked a pink flower and put it in my cap. There was a large full moon to the east, the air had stilled enough for the snow to be visible on the upper slopes, and a low orange sun was descending dust-muffled to the west. I, with a tiny pink flower in my cap, strode with the three armed men down the avenue of cypresses toward the sunset.

A rare flock of pigeon-doves—perhaps the kind that Babur's father kept—dipped among the fruit trees. Abdul Haq unslung his barrel-chambered Kalashnikov and handed it to me. It was heavy.

"Go ahead," he said, smoothing his drooping mustache with his right hand.

"What?"

"Kill the bird." He pointed at the last dove, descending, wings folded, toward the empty pool.

"No, thank you."

"Don't worry. Go ahead. It's the government's ammunition, not mine."

Part Two

Heraut ... stands in a fertile plain, which is watered by a river [the Hari Rud] crowded with villages and covered with fields of corn. The inhabitants of the country around Heraut are for the most part Tajiks ... a mild, sober, industrious people.