Shadow of the Silk Road (30 page)

There had been stories of infants slaughtered, of bodies defiled. But of these they knew nothing. ‘What they did was enough.’ It was the present that obsessed them now. The past lay unidentified beneath the dust. So they spoke of their rifled furniture in the same
breath as their murdered families, breaking in and capping one another’s stories, while Tahir translated.

‘Now we have no school, no road, no clinic. We are surrounded by villages with electricity, but it hasn’t come here. Nobody favours us, because we’re Hazara. The government does nothing. We fought in the jihad against the Russians, but…’

‘We have only one stream. Animals and humans drink from the same canal…’

‘The Taliban killed my cows!’

‘Look!’ A fat, hirsute man yanked up his shirt. His stomach and chest were corrugated by a foot-long scar from belly to armpit. The fingers of his hand were stumps. ‘I stayed behind to fight.’

Another said darkly: ‘The government won’t help us. Only a revolution will help us.’

They were not pleading, but angry: angry at their exclusion, as if the Taliban’s branding of them as separate and inferior were being reiterated in calmer times. ‘Write about us,’ they said.

Tahir and I went out into the village, where only a watchful dog or a crying child betrayed a building’s habitation. But once the ruins fluttered with voices and we came upon an improvised school. Threadbare carpets covered the earth floor of a gutted house, where forty children sat. There was no furniture, no light. A blackboard stood in a crumbled alcove, where a young woman was teaching geography. In the sunlight falling through the fractured walls, the children turned to stare at us, clear-faced and smiling. Under the gaping roof next door a young man was holding an exam among older students, some of them adults, male and female mixed. A few of the women were miraculously beautiful. The teacher stood in a patch of broken sun. I stayed and listened for a while, wishing I spoke their Persian. His voice made a nervous music. But it was the women who burnt the eyes with tears. The Taliban had hated them. All schools were closed to them. Together with a ban on music, chess and the flying of kites, no woman’s voice was to be heard in public–on pain of whipping–nor her laughter, nor even her footsteps.

We went back to our car in the twilight. We had both gone silent. A shepherd was driving a pair of goats with mud-clogged
fleeces up the street. In a tenantless courtyard, someone had planted winter wheat. And above the ruined walls a kite was sailing.

In the streets of Mazar, a few hours after sunset, nothing moves. The crescent moon of a new Ramadan rises over the domes of the Hazrat Ali, and the main roads become the haunt of dog-packs which shiver the night with their howls. But between the last sunlight and darkness, the call to prayer releases the faithful from their day’s fast, wavering and multiplying through the city in a long, melancholy clamour.

I turn into the side streets, no longer wary, to find a meal in the darkening bazaar. Underfoot the patchy tarmac turns to compacted rubble. Beyond the memorial portrait of Massoud, the mujahid hero against the Russians, past bicycle repair shops and sellers of tin, I go into markets cluttered with wares from China and Pakistan. Outside the wedding shops, the billboards of synthetically painted brides are being hustled away.

Less than a year ago these streets had been quartered by the militia of rival warlords–the Uzbek Dostum and the Tajik Mohammed Ata–but now, in a first, uneasy reaching beyond Kabul, the national police have moved in. By nightfall the streets are empty, as if by curfew. In their upper storeys no light shines. The windows are cracked or gone, where the sacred pigeons roost, and human life has shrunk to street level.

I stumble on a
chaikhana
and enter a glow of feasting. The host sits in a kiosk between the doors, wielding festive authority. On the platform opposite him a throng of villagers reclines, scooping rice and tearing bread at low tables, swirled in robes which double as bedclothes–they are sleeping here–and focusing me with careless curiosity.

Then their stare returns to the black-and-white television suspended from the ceiling. They are watching the votes being counted for the first general election in their history. Their eyes are sharp and still. Their talk is a murmur. Outside, the walls still
flutter with the posters of seventeen presidential candidates, one of them a woman. The election, so far, has passed without disruption. Three days before, in the early morning, queues of men and veiled women had snaked outside the polling stations.

A young man, cross-legged beside me, starts to talk in a goulash of Russian and English. He wears a waistcoat banked with pockets, like a travelling toolkit. His eyeballs are yellow with fever. ‘Dostum is winning. Dostum will be president.’ He sees me wince, and laughs. ‘Well, he may be a bad man, but he’s
our
bad man.’

I glance at the villagers who are standing up to pray now, their gaze against the wall, facing south. I ask: ‘And what are these people feeling?’

‘They are not from here.’

Later one of them lurches over and stands above me, stroking such an immense beard that he seems to be glowering from a bush. Then he shouts something, and pulls an imaginary trigger.

‘He is asking if you are not afraid of the Taliban al Qaeda?’

I am unsure how to answer. It is unmanly to admit fear, but complacent to deny it. I fall back on the will of God, and the bush grins and retires. His companions are preparing for the night, unfurling shawls and rewinding turbans, settling into the chrysalis of their robes. So long as they are in motion, their swank and glitter transforms them. But as they fall asleep, they look strangely undone. The nestled faces seem thinned, the beards a fallen disguise. Many are malnourished, scarred. Their ankles poke out like mahogany sticks. Looking down at their closed faces, I wonder what they have suffered, what inflicted.

As I make to leave, the lights go out–the whole city plunged in darkness–and the
chaikhana
seethes with jokes about Karimov. Their electricity, they say, comes from Uzbekistan–but only when the president is making illicit love in the dark.

A few miles north of Mazar, beyond cotton fields and pomegranate orchards, rears the grim fort of Qala-i-Jangi. It was built over a century ago by the Afghan king Abdurahman, and its
walls jut and retract under violent, saw-tooth crenellations. I came here with Tahir, unsure of our welcome. The fort was the regional headquarters of Dostum, and was black with rumour. He himself, Tahir said, had retreated west to Shebergan, to await the outcome of the election, hoping for a post in Kabul’s cabinet (he was not to gain one) and claiming that his private army had all but disbanded.

We circled a scrub-speckled glacis, where the outworks had crumbled away. Children were playing netball in the dry moat. An Afghan flag flew from the ramparts. Beneath the gate-tower, flanked by two obsolete howitzers, Tahir shouted up for permission to enter, inflating my importance, while an officer hesitated on the parapet.

After a long time, and an unsmiling scrutiny of documents, we were granted a hurried half-hour, dogged by a soldier, roaming the wasteland of pines and silent barracks, their inmates gone. Ringed by mud towers and crenellations, we might have been walking through a far past. But on the gateway to an inner ward, a notice in English read: ‘Kal-i-Janghi was destroyed by vicious and devil Taliban-Al Qaida and was again repaired capitally after the downfall of terrorism by the initiative of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, leader of NIMA [the Northern Alliance], deputy defence minister…’

Even among the violences of 2001, the events these words conceal left a bitter question mark. Dostum had returned bloodily to Mazar in the wake of the US–British invasion, and within days of the city’s fall the embattled Taliban had surrendered en masse at Kunduz, a hundred miles to the east. Then their foreign fighters–some three thousand Pakistanis, Arabs, Uzbeks, Chechens, Uighurs–were separated off from the native Afghans. Stuffed into freight containers, more than two hundred to a crate, some were trucked to Shebergan, others to Mazar. About 470 were incarcerated here in an insulated compound. That evening several blew themselves up with hand grenades. Next morning, as Northern Alliance soldiers began tying their hands, they turned on their captors, killed a CIA interrogator, and seized some weapons. For six days they held out from their prison block, surrounded by
troops firing down from the battlements, and blitzed by US bombers and helicopter gunships. Eighty-six survived.

Beyond the gateway we entered an enclosure powdered with thistles and cotton. Marooned in its centre, overlooked on all sides by battlemented walkways, the prison block was a riddled shell. Its cemented façades were so shattered that its shape was hard to descry. A rain of bullet holes covered them, thickening round leftover doors and windows. Tentatively we went into a passage, wading through rubble and dust and stray sunbeams. The plaster had cascaded from the walls, the ceiling girders crashed in.

‘We were not maltreating them,’ the soldier said. ‘They just attacked us.’

I asked him through Tahir: ‘What were these people like?’

But he only said: ‘Pakistanis, in a bad way, and some Chechens…’ He was bored, wanted us to leave.

Once or twice the wreckage eased from a painted dado of grey on whitewashed walls, or polished cement floors. A bathroom was still hung with tiles. Here and there Afghan and American names were scribbled on the plaster. And once we came upon the iron stairway to a basement, crashed into debris, where the last defenders had taken refuge. Dostum’s soldiers had poured down diesel fuel there and set it alight. We trod delicately, as if we might disturb something. The soldier’s boots grated in the silence. He started to sing a faint marching song.

We emerged in numbed silence. Across the scrub all around us loomed the ramps and parapets from which Dostum’s militia and US Special Forces poured in their fire. The container lorries by which the prisoners had come were a twisted heap nearby. I brushed the dust from my clothes, catching a tinge of fear. The crumpled fields beyond the ramparts had become the mass grave of the Taliban, some with their hands still bound behind them. A few miles beyond, the desert was strewn with the bones of those they themselves had slaughtered.

Hafizullah is a friend of Tahir’s. He was born in Maimana, where I hoped to go, of mixed Uzbek and Tajik descent, calling himself neither. He has boyish hair and eyes, but his small, cusped mouth
says shocking things. In 1997 he was in high school in Mazar when the truckloads of Taliban came thundering through the streets.

‘We lay low in the school,’ he says. ‘Then we heard gunfire that increased all evening. It was the Hazara turning on the Taliban. I think they were afraid they would be killed, so they got the blow in first. In the morning I went up on to the rooftop and saw the bodies of the Taliban lying in the street, and people taking them away in handcarts. I saw a wounded Taliban shoot at a militiaman, then they killed him.’

He speaks these things with excited clarity, sitting in a stark room, looking back on a boy of sixteen who thought he might die.

‘But then the Taliban came back, and it was terrifying. They fired a rocket at the school, smashing an upper floor. We were sheltering below. They came in and ordered us out at gunpoint. ‘Infidels!’ they yelled. ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘We’re just students,’ we said. ‘We’re learning the Koran! The holy Koran!’ We were able to speak to them, because we had learnt some religion and knew as much as them, they were very simple. But they made their headquarters in our school. We were there over two weeks, afraid to go out. We just drank what water we had with us, and ate a little bread, and grew beards as we were told. Our teachers too.’ He touches his chin. ‘Now we saw the bodies of the Hazara in the streets. They threw them out, and they were lying there for days, the dogs eating them. And later we saw the handcarts again, as their people tried to take them away.’ He does not talk about this often, he says.

‘The Americans arrived three years later. They came to the school looking for interpreters, and selected me.’ He is touched by a flash of pride. ‘They took me to the Qala-i-Jangi. I was used as a liaison between an Afghan commander and the American operator guiding the bombers. The Afghan directed them to the centre of the fortress, a thousand metres from us. We’d laid out flags over the ground to give our position, but I saw the plane circle and drop a five-hundred-kilogram bomb wide off-mark. I was crouching under a wall and saw it coming for us. The noise was terrific. It hit the Afghan soldiers round me, and flipped a tank on to its side. I don’t know how many were killed. The wall fell on me’–he
cringes against a cupboard beside him–‘and I woke to find myself buried, and a bloodstained body on top of me. I couldn’t move. There was chaos everywhere, and I saw arms and hands lying about. In the end a British logistics team dug me out. I was unhurt, except for my hearing. Then I ran. I just ran away. But that night Dostum withdrew his men from the castle wall, and the American bombers went in.’

Out of this trauma he had become a medical student–he had finished three years of seven–and his English had grown fluent.

‘All my life there’ve been bullets and bombs. We just hoped to stay alive, to have bread. And I thought it would always be like this. But now we’ve had a year of peace, and there’s this hope.’ His face is brimming with the present. ‘Young people are different now. The divide has grown between the generations. My father, for instance, can’t find any work. He’s well educated, but he’s out of date, with a Soviet-type education. No computer training, no languages.’ He grimaces without regret. ‘The future belongs to us now.’

Across stubbled desert through a world of mud–village courtyards and walled fields where small mud-coloured dromedaries stood–Tahir and I drove towards Balkh, which Afghans call the oldest city in the world. The husks of Russian tanks littered the way like dead reptiles: casualties from the Taliban advance of 1998. To our left, in haze, hovered the mud-brown Hindu Kush. Ahead, the horizon was feathered by a long, yellow-green oasis.