Human Cargo (42 page)

Since there was no building standing for the school to occupy, the first lessons took place in the shell of a compound, teachers and children crouching in the remains of former rooms that had been swept clean and divided by curtains of bright cloth. Within three days of their return, looms had been erected in houses that were hastily being rebuilt around them, and children as young as six and seven were sitting in their rows on long benches, plucking threads through the taut string. I found twelve-year-old Abdul Hakim, a thin, energetic boy with the quick movements of a small animal, eager to practice the English he had acquired in Peshawar. He led me from the school along dusty tracks between the ruins to where his five brothers and sisters were at work, chattering and weaving like a row of brightly colored little birds. It was their turn to go to school later in the day. The family has been lucky. They came home to find their house, though partially ruined, at least unoccupied. Their neighbors had found theirs intact, but inhabited by a family able to produce deeds proving ownership: the house had changed hands many times in twenty-three years, starting, after the original family’s departure, with a new set of deeds, forged by a local warlord.

The teacher who walked with us was Jawad Wafa, a slender, gentle young man with soft brown hair. He is twenty-two. Jawad came from Bamiyan, in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush, and his family has spent the years of exile in Iran. Jawad himself had to stay in Pakistan. “My father,” said Jawad in his soft, precise English, “was a farmer, with many fields of wheat, and a religious scholar. When
fighting came to our village in 1988, he decided that we should leave and go abroad, though my two married sisters were to stay behind. We left one night on foot, with a donkey and a horse to carry our things to Qetta in Pakistan. But my eldest brother had heard that things were better for refugees in Iran, and he went ahead to see. He sent word that he had found well-paid work in a factory making loaves of sugar, and that there was work there for my other five brothers as well. I was only eight then. Even though the work was enough to support all of us, I hated Iran. In the street, people used to insult us and call us names. Our accents were different. At last, I was given a place in a religious school in Qom, but one day the religious police picked me up and held me in jail for a month and shaved my hair.”

Jawad was never safe. He has the distinctive flat face and slightly slanting eyes of the Hazaras, and during the long years when Afghans were living in great numbers in Iran—2 million people at the peak—there were periods of mass expulsions back into Afghanistan, particularly of young men. They were picked up in the streets or late at night, held in camps near the border, then pushed across with orders not to return. The day came when this happened to fourteen-year-old Jawad, and he found himself in Herat, alone, with no money and no friends.

“The Taliban were just starting to be powerful. I saw them in the streets, with their great turbans and their scissors to cut the hair
of
men they thought wore it too long. They stopped me all the time to ask if I had said my prayers. After a few days I found a way to go back to Bamiyan, but it was six years since I had left and my married sisters did not recognize me. I got ill and didn’t know what to do. I tried to get back into Iran, but I was stopped at the border and pushed back.”

Jawal now had little choice but to find a home in Pakistan. He heard of a religious school in Peshawar, founded by an Iranian cleric, and for the next five years he lived and studied in the madrassa. He saw his parents only once: he got word that his father had had a stroke, so he slipped across the Iranian border by night to
see him, returning the next day to the madrassa. Meanwhile, in Pakistan the mood was changing. Soon confrontations between the traditional religious teachers and their secular young pupils, who wanted to be taught to speak English and use computers, led to bitter fights and expulsions, Jawad was one of eighteen young men deemed to be troublemakers and expelled. He was trying his hand as an apprentice tailor when he met Aziz, an energetic and somewhat older Hazara, who was then in the process of setting up a school for Hazara weaving children in Peshawar. Aziz offered him a deal: he personally would coach the younger man in English and political science, if Jawad would join his school and teach the children to read and write.

Jawad was one of the teachers whom Aziz sent on ahead, as the Taliban were pulling out of Kabul, to prepare for the transfer of the school back to Afghanistan. He found an abandoned and derelict building, bought some whitewash, acquired tables and chairs. In May 2002, the school traveled across the mountains in a truck, with its textbooks. The children missed just three days of schooling. “I am very anxious,” Jawad said to me. “I am anxious but also hopeful. I need a proper university education if I am to help my country. But I have too little time to study and no one to help me. I plan to become a lawyer. If we don’t have social justice, we will never become men for ourselves: our destiny will be that of people who carry wheels on their shoulders for others.”

•   •   •

IN
1836,
LIEUTENANT
Colonel Sir Alexander Burnes, visiting Kabul with a British military expedition, set out west from the city on a journey into the mountains. From Kareez-i-Meer, where he and his party halted for the first night, he noted in his journal that he could see, “in the hazy distance, a vast vista of gardens extending for some thirty or forty miles… No written description can do justice to this lovely and delightful country. Throughout the whole of our journey we had been lingering amidst beautiful orchards, the banks of which were clustered over with wild flowers and plants in profuse
abundance.” Among the “wide spreading plane-trees” and the grapes, “which imparted a purple tinge to the hills,” Burnes spotted porcupines, hedgehogs, and marmots, though he observed, with his sportsman’s eye, that “everything that yields a fur” was hunted by the Afghans. What Burnes had seen was the fabled Shomali plain, the former orchards of Kabul, a rich plateau irrigated by deep wells and the snowmelt, which flowed along the
qanats
or channels buried far underground to water vineyards and fruit trees. Babur, the Moghul emperor Zahiruddin Mohammed, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, who spotted sixteen varieties of wild tulip growing in the hills around Kabul, one of which bore the scent of red roses, loved the Shomali plain and came, in the sixteenth century, while on his way to India, to picnic beneath its mulberry trees. There he remarked on the excellence of the quinces and plums, and observed that the valley was home to parrots, mynah birds, peacocks, and monkeys, and that the local people laid snares for migrating herons and cranes, in order to decorate their turbans with the feathers.

But the Shomali plain was also where, during the 1980s and 1990s, the mujahedeen fought one another and the Soviets for the approaches to Kabul, and where the Taliban decreed a scorched-earth policy to level the ground for self-protection. Over a period of several years, acting alone or ordering others to do their work, the Taliban shelled the leafy Shomali villages into ruins, set fire to the vineyards to starve the economy, destroyed the avenues of planes and poplars to prevent the rebuilding of roofs, chopped down the mulberry trees that gave shade and fruit to passing strangers, dropped mines down the wells and
qanats
and laid them in the fields of wheat. The Shomali plain came to be a symbol of Taliban savagery. By the summer of 2002, when I saw it, it was a derelict, deserted, silent wilderness, broken only by the red printed warnings about unexploded mines, and by the clusters of green flags waving on the end of poles, each marking the grave of a martyr, a man who has died a violent death. It was a barren, desolate place.

But not, as it turned out, entirely empty.

Searching for signs of Babur’s earthly paradise, I saw two men, with white beards and flat felt Afghan hats, at work in a half-burned vineyard close to the main road north toward Mazar-e-Sharif. Behind them were the ruins of a once large village and the great stumps of what must have been a magnificent row of mulberry trees. The men were gently picking up unexploded shells and putting them on a pile, ready for collection by a demining agency working in the plain. It was hot and still and very dusty. The men were cousins.

In the early 1980s, explained the older man, Haji Kamal, the village of Logar, named for the province of his great-grandfather, who had planted these lands, had been home to forty families, most of them related to one another. With its avenues of trees, its orchards of apricot, apple, plum, and pear, Logar had been a tranquil and shady place. Haji Kamal and his three brothers had owned, between them, 12,000 vines, from which they produced 600 sacks of raisins and many table grapes, sold in the bazaar in Kabul together with wheat, melons, maize, apricots, walnuts, and several kinds of cherries, as well as an abundance of the sugary white mulberries that the Afghans eat dried during the winter months. The Kandari red grapes were the sweetest, Haji Kamal told me, but not the most valuable; those were the white ones, which he dried slowly inside the house. He had grown eleven varieties of grape, drying most of them in the sun during the month of October, on the roof of his house or spread out on the ground. In the late 1970s, Chinese farming technicians had visited Logar and introduced pomegranates to the valley, and these, too, had made him a fine crop. Haji Kamal’s family, with his children and his brothers and their families, had grown to eighty people by the time the mujahedeen came, and they shared between them eight milking cows and a donkey, as well as a small tractor. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, he had just opened shops in Kandahar and Kabul, and made a deal to sell fifty tons of raisins each year to China.

After the Soviet shelling began, and he began to fear for his family’s lives, Haji Kamal sent his wife and children to Pakistan. They
left by truck at dawn, taking with them the cows. It was a morning so cold that there was heavy snow in the passes and one of his pregnant daughters lost her baby. He stayed on fighting with the mujahedeen, then joined his family in a rented house in Peshawar, where he sent his young sons, but not his daughters, to school, and from time to time he made the journey home across the mountains to check on his abandoned fields and crumbling house. Until the Taliban were defeated, he had not judged it safe to come back, but here he was now, with his cousin Amir Jan, also one of several brothers, planning, with the help of UNHCR and various foreign aid organizations, which were providing rafters and windows, to rebuild the compound in which they had once lived. In the years of exile his family had grown from eighty to two hundred people; but if the fields could be made fertile again, there would be enough food for them all.

The two elderly cousins, with their lean bearded faces and elegant pale gray turbans, led me to see their compounds, now mounds of dust and rubble around the stumps of the mulberry trees that had once provided such dense green shade. In one, a large white tent, donated by UNHCR, sheltered some of the women and children who had returned with them; there was a cow, tethered to a pomegranate bush. It was a bleak but not despairing scene. The water from his well alone, Haji Kamal said, gave him great pleasure: very cold and very pure, it reminded him that he had come home from his borrowed life in a rented room in Peshawar, where he had always felt hot and cramped. “Though I found everything ruined, I knelt down and kissed the ground. I don’t expect a harvest for two years. But at least we can walk along the road, in safety, even at night. We feel safe.”

•   •   •

BEFORE I
LEFT
Kabul, early one morning] went to watch the families arriving at the UNHCR reception center at Pulicharki, site of a notorious Taliban prison, under a fold of the tall ocher mountains. UNHCR has put up tents and hangars, where they hand out
rations of wheat, buckets, bars of soap, and plastic sheets, and where doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières monitor the health of the new arrivals and vaccinate against measles and polio. UNHCR gives small sums of money to every returning refugee, though the aid agencies are conscious that they must not show too much favor to the refugees and thereby produce resentment among those who endured the Taliban years. The money men, who are all Afghan, supervised by UNHCR, sit cross-legged behind wire cages, counting out the dollars. One tent has been made into a simulated mine field, where families are walked past the weapons they might expect to find, unexploded, in their fields. Over the mountains to the east, in swirling bursts of dust, come the trucks, their painted sides catching the sun, swaying under their loads of mattresses and blankets, mats and sewing machines, bicycles and cooking pots, accumulated in exile. The families who climbed out talked about how hard life had been in Pakistan and about the perils of the journey during which they have been preyed on by police and guards in search of bribes. Farmers in the 1970s and 1980s, they have since become cobblers and builders, shopkeepers and mechanics. The young boys speak little, but the girls are bold: egging one another on, they talked of the education many have received and about their plans to become doctors and teachers in the new Afghanistan. A small, robust, outspoken girl of fourteen, who can remember almost nothing of their village and had spent ten years in a refugee camp, said that her plan was to attend Kabul University. On her head, she wore a plain scarf. “I am not in the habit of wearing a veil,” she said. By midday, the process of arrival was over; it had been an orderly, cheerful procedure. The morning’s 5,000 returnees, with their buckets and bars of soap, were on their way, by taxi or in the cars of relatives come to collect them, to discover what was left of home; or what they have come to call home, for it is said that more than half of all those “returning” to Afghanistan in 2002 were in fact born outside the country. The brightly decorated trucks and buses were climbing the mountain passes again, to collect more returning families.