Sunrise with Seamonsters (20 page)

Men stand idly in Herat's main street. You think they are jay-walkers until a horse cart approaches; then several men wave their arms—they are traffic policemen in Afghan robes and turbans; and several more scurry around with twig brooms and squares of cardboard—they are the Department of Sanitation. The driver reins his horse, obeying the frantic signals of the man with flapping robes, and the red pompoms and bells on the decorated cart sway as the vehicle proceeds. But the horse has been
startled; he raises his tail and as he does so the men with brooms rush to the steaming pile, sweeping and scooping, and this they deposit at the side of the road, in the drains under the fruitstalls.

The bells of the horse carts tinkle throughout the night. It is a pleasing sound, but I got no sleep in Herat. Twice, once at midnight and once at about three in the morning, I was awakened by music—not eastern music, no stringed instruments or screeching voices, but trumpets, farting cornets and snare drums and the gulping sound of tambourines. It might have been a school band parading to a football game, except that this was the dead of night. I heard them coming when they were several streets away; it went on, distantly, for twenty minutes and then was raucous under my window. It was a band, men with lamps preceded it, their lights swinging, and I could hear but not see what I took to be children running in the street: their laughing voices and animated feet. The music was brassy, the drumming loud, though the tune was unfamiliar. It was the sort of bizarre nightmare old men have in German novels, and I watched with some apprehension the glint of the instruments, the nodding turbans and dancing lights.

It was typical of my baffling Afghanistan interlude that not only did I never discover who the musicians were, I also could not find a single person who had heard them playing. In such an atmosphere one could become paranoid in the twinkling of an eye, but the travelers had other things on their minds. They were certainly exercised about the exchange rate, and most of the conversations I overheard sounded like financiers' anxiety turned into slang.

The news was bad: the dollar was quoted at fifty Afghanis, but the first shock the hippies got was from a sleek robed man who beckoned to a chief and offered him forty-five Afghanis.

"So the black market rate is lower than the bank's. Right? Beautiful."

"I remember when you could get seventy to the dollar."

"Seventy! I remember when it was around ninety—and a bed was fifteen. You figure it out."

They stood in groups, cawing like brokers faced with a plunging market, the worst in years. And the amazing thing was that these youths, whose own description of themselves was "freaks"—the girl in the torn blouse, the bearded one with the cracked guitar, the boy who walked around in his bare feet during that very cold night in no-man's land, the ones in pajamas, pantaloons, dhotis; the men with ponytails, skullcaps, and sombreros, the girls with crew cuts and copies of Idries Shah, all of them fatigued after their flight across Turkey and Iran—the amazing thing, as I say, was that they talked with impressive caution about money. They were carrying French and Swiss francs, German marks, sterling and dollars; their money was in greasy canvas pouches and gaily colored purses and sequined bags with drawstrings.

At times, when the topic was drugs or religion, they were impossible to talk to. They struggled with the debased language of drug psychosis to express abstract concepts they had got third-hand from drop-out philosophy majors. But when the subject was money they never mocked: they were serious, cunning and shrewd by turns, because they knew—even better than their detractors—how much their life, so seemingly frivolous, was underpinned by cash.

"Listen, Bugsy got fifty at the bank."

"That's his fault for going to the bank."

"Yeah, fifty's not the official rate. Maybe here, but not in Kabul. I'm sure we can get fifty-eight."

"Fifty-eight is peanuts!"

"Anyway, we can't afford to get to Kabul at this rate."

"Bad scene, man," says a boy wandering over to the group. "I just changed some money."

Several eagerly importune him: "What'd you get?"

"Fifty-one."

"Hear that? So there's hope," says another. "I'm not changing mine for less than fifty-five."

The difference between fifty-one and fifty-five Afghanis is about seven cents.

"We've got English pounds," says a girl in a long grey skirt who has been listening with some intensity.

"You're fucked, baby."

A very thin boy with a scraggly beard considers this obscenity for a few moments, then says, "Yeah, you are. See, they're only buying dollars because the rate is low. They won't buy pounds but they'll sell you dollars for them—probably about two bucks for a pound. Then they'll buy the dollars from you. So you get ripped off twice."

The girl was dejected. She said, "I don't know what to do."

"Hang out. We don't know what the official rate is."

"Can't someone make a phone call?"

"This used to be a groovy place. What happened?"

"The cheapest country in the world," said a French boy. "Hah! It is not so!"

"Someone said he got fifty-two."

"You call
that
good?"

The conversation continues; it is circular, studded with rumors, and inconclusive. The oddest thing about it is that it is taking place in the wildest part of Afghanistan, where only thistles grow. Money is the unlikeliest subject here, but it is the only subject, because it seems as if the hippies are being priced out of the country, and like restless speculators in a time of crisis they find they are being driven to different places, to
Pakistan where the rate is fairer, and to India, where at the Mohan Singh Bazaar you still get (so one fellow remarks with a touch of confidence) eight and a half rupees for a dollar.

An Asylum in Kabul

On September 7, 1973, a Dutchman, an Englishman and a Canadian entered Afghanistan from Pakistan. They had come from India and were driving what might have been a stolen Volkswagen. Their knapsacks were in the back seat. Outside Kabul they picked up an Indian hitchhiker. They drove to Kandahar and then to Herat, where they dropped the Indian and found a hotel for themselves.

Herat is a good contact point: it is safe and changeless. When the hippy is confused he refers to Herat's Message Board: "Patrick it's behind the mirror", "
Je reste à I'hôtel Yaquin depuis Le 12—Chambre No. 1, t'attends
", "Couldn't go Northern Route. Left for Kandahar Mon Sept. 24th. We'll be waiting...", "
Estoy en el Hotel Shaib",
"Dying to see you. Peace, Judy", "if we are not there on the second look for note at Mustapha Hotel", "Hope you don't look like this from your dysentery [postcard with skull on it]. Get well soon and—contact me in London to hitchhike Scotland." And there is the occasional telegram, such as the following, which I eventually decided was a birth announcement: "TRUE HAS SOON BOTH WELL NUM."

Sometime on the evening of the 10th, the travelers looked for their knapsacks and discovered that the Canadian's was gone. Concluding that the Indian had stolen it for the money and passport, the three went to the. Herat Police Station.

It is not clear what happened then. The police would not say later what exactly took place. What is certain is that when the police asked for identification none of the three could produce it. The Canadian, whose name was Peter, grew violent and attacked the policeman who told him he was under arrest. They were handcuffed, and because Peter was especially violent, he had leg-irons as well as manacles.

After being held for three days at Herat Police Station, they were taken in the back of a truck, handcuffed and lying on the floor, the bumpy six hundred miles to Kabul. This is at least a twenty-hour ride and must have taken two days. The Englishman and the Dutchman were released with a warning; Peter was held. "And we could hear him yelling," the Dutchman said.

About a week later the Dutchman was walking down a back road in Kabul and saw, quite by chance, Peter shambling in the sun, still in his handcuffs and manacles. He was being transferred from one prison to
another, though at the time the Dutchman thought he was just being allowed some fresh air. He was surprised that Peter had not been released. He felt it had something to do with Peter's bad temper. He told the British Embassy.

The embassy official who saw Peter a few days later said that he was certain Peter was insane, either from the ordeal of the Afghan prison or else an imbalance of long-standing. Peter was raving, and he showed signs of having been badly beaten. The embassy official secured Peter's release on the understanding that he would be committed to the insane asylum in Kabul, Sanai Hospital, a crumbling wreck of what looks to have been a mission hospital; it is on the far side of Kabul, behind one of the rocky hills that ring the city. The British official cabled the Canadians in Islamabad.

It was from the Canadian Third Secretary, a man I shall call Albert, that I heard this story. We were in the Kabul Hotel, a marble mausoleum built by the Russians in the 1950s. Albert was nervous. The police had not given him any help, but had said Peter had assaulted them. And there was a further problem: assuming the legal tangle could be unraveled, how was it possible to get Peter out of the country if he was raving mad?

"I hate going up to that nut house," said Albert. "I get depressed."

"I'd like to have a look at it," I said.

"You'd have to be crazy to want to go there," said Albert. He realized he had made a joke and gave an embarrassed honk of laughter.

We parked in the shade of the asylum to keep the car out of the hot sun, and posted the driver nearby. Albert had been warned that patients sometimes tried to hijack visitors' cars. The building was a low one-storey affair with a corrugated iron roof and thick bars on the windows on which patients clung, staring out with large eyes. Their heads were shaven, their faces were grey, and some—clutching and balancing like monkeys—yelled to us as we passed by.

We were admitted by a fat sad-looking guard in a faded blue smock and skullcap. He shut the door after us, and secured it with two bolts and a padlock. I took one step and the stink hit me, a high stinging reek of putrescence, piss, dampness, mold and stale food. The chattering patients, all in dirty striped pajamas, flocked over to us. They were skinny, many were old, but although their eyes were wild and their teeth rotted to fangs, they did not appear to be violent. Then it was easy to see why: the guard, I noticed, was carrying a heavy truncheon. He paddled his palm with it as the lunatics frisked about us.

"Hello mister!"

"Goo' morning sir!"

They knew more English and used it with greater fluency than most Afghans I had met so far.

One put out his dirty hand, and so as not to offend him I shook it. The others were encouraged. They gathered, wagging their hands at me until the guard raised his truncheon, making them cower. I counted the men as we walked into the ward; there were twenty-six men, but only seventeen beds. It would have been impossible to fit more beds in the room—they were less than a foot apart—but I wondered where the others slept.

"What did I tell you?" asked Albert. "Ever see anything like it?"

Under a filthy blanket, in a bed jammed against the wall, Peter was sleeping. His feet protruded from the blanket, and I could see sores on his ankles from the leg-irons, some scabs the size of quarters. He was tall; even sleeping in a crouched position his head butted the top of the bed and his feet were against the bars at the bottom end. His skin was yellow-grey, his cheeks sunken and my first thought was that he was dead; he was covered with flies—on his face, on the blanket, on his open sores. Albert touched his shoulder and shook him slightly. He did not wake; briefly the flies left him, then returned.

"He sleep," said one of the lunatics. "No sleep at night—all talking and—" He made fluttering gestures with his hands to indicate excitement.

Albert said, "I think he's been up all night. We should let him sleep."

"What about the food?" I asked. Albert had brought a bag of bread, chocolate, cheese and ginger ale, because Peter had complained about the hospital food.

"If I leave it they'll steal it," he said.

We left, and returned in the afternoon about five o'clock. Peter was still sleeping, but he woke up and raised his head when Albert called his name.

"Hi," he said drowsily. "What have you got?"

"Some food," said Albert. "How're you feeling?"

"Okay. I want to go," he said. The blue-smocked guard was standing behind Albert. Peter said to him, "I'm going with my friends. Let's go."

"In a few days," said Albert. "Here." He opened the bag and took out a can of ginger ale.

"Freedom," said Peter when Albert popped the opener.

Albert took out a bar of Toblerone chocolate and tore off the wrapper.

"Freedom," said Peter, and he began to eat it. He had spoken the word languidly; he repeated it, chanting in a deadened voice.

"There's some bread in the bag, and cheese, and another can of ginger ale. You'll be okay."

"English." A lunatic stood several feet away, hugging himself. "English iss goot."

"Get me out of here, man," said Peter. "Let me come with you." He
spoke softly, not moving his head, still eating the chocolate. His hands were large, and I could see the sores on his wrists. The manacles must have been huge: he wore a six-inch cuff of sores.

"You've been sleeping a lot," said Albert. "That's good."

"I love candy bars."

"Do you sleep at night?"

"No." Peter put his hands over his eyes. "The past three nights they tied me up."

The guard smiled and played with his truncheon. He didn't understand English. He was a big man. It was a lunatic asylum: he had been chosen for his size.

"I want to go. Get me out of here."

"We'll be sending you back to Canada pretty soon."

"No, I'd rather stay here."

I said, "In the hospital?"

"Afghanistan. I love Afghanistan." He saw I was looking at his sores. He lifted his hand and kissed the largest sore.