The Lovers (3 page)

They had been declaring their love for each other for years now in secret and then publicly for the past six months of her effective
incarceration in the shelter. They had never been alone together indoors, let alone in the backseat of an automobile. Mostly they had seen each other only in glimpses and clandestine encounters in the fields of their families’ adjoining farms and on one day when they were taken to have their case heard in court. Zakia’s death sentence was decreed that day in court: implicitly by her judges and in screamed imprecations by her mother, father, and brothers. For two and a half years before that, they had managed to find glimpses of each other and some stolen minutes together on the farm and along village lanes and footpaths, and they had managed to speak many, many times by telephone. Ever since she entered the shelter six months earlier, however, even telephone calls were difficult; phones were forbidden to the girls. Zakia and Ali had been able to meet, with chaperones, only once during that time. Now here they were holding hands.

It may sound like a small thing, but people who had never heard their parents address each other by name, have certainly never seen them hold hands, even in private, let alone in a public place. Courtship even among engaged couples is usually forbidden. Modernized Afghan families might allow a fiancé and fiancée to meet, but only strictly chaperoned and never alone, and not with any sort of physical contact; more often the couple first meet on their wedding night. Both the wedding ceremony and the accompanying celebration are nearly always segregated by gender. Afghan soldiers often hold hands. Children hold hands. Young Afghans of the opposite sex, married or unmarried, in public, never. Where did Zakia get the idea? Neither Zakia nor Ali had ever been to a movie theater—there wasn’t a single one in the entire province—and in their villages there was no electricity, let alone television. Although larger villages would sometimes have one shared TV, usually it would be watched only by men, since women were not allowed to attend public gatherings. What gave Zakia the boldness to take his hand in hers? Is holding hands just an innate human impulse? That, like so much else about their story, was a mystery.

Perhaps it was just as simple as this: Having defied one set of grand conventions, to openly and publicly declare her love for Ali
and now to elope with him in defiance of her family, her culture, her tribe, and her sect, Zakia was not now going to be bound by any of her society’s petty strictures. If she wanted to hold his hand, she would. When I had an occasion to ask her, much later, why she had done so, Zakia’s response was this: “Why not?”

Rahmatullah, in the driver’s seat, was stunned to see them sit together so intimately. “He was scared, but he’s my friend, so he went along,” Ali said. The two lovers in the back, finally together after so many months, didn’t know what to say to each other. “We hadn’t expected this to happen—we didn’t really know
what
would happen,” Ali said. The pack of dogs surrounded the car and barked furiously as it pulled away. The couple lay down in the backseat as the car passed the shelter and headed out of town.

The escape had been so unexpected that they still had to arrange the next leg of their flight. Two days later, after the Persian New Year’s Day holiday, Zakia’s court case was to be moved to Kabul. Bamiyan is a mostly Hazara place, so they felt safer there—the courts were dominated by Tajiks who sympathized with Zakia’s family, but the police and the governor, the women’s ministry, and the majority of the people were Hazaras and could be expected to sympathize with them. That would not be the case in Kabul, they worried; there were many more Tajiks and Pashtuns than Hazaras there. In Kabul, they feared, Zakia could easily be ordered returned to her family, for what would then become the last few days of her life.

Now they were on their way to the home of a distant relative of Ali’s in the Foladi Valley, which cut southwest up into the Koh-i-Baba range, rugged, fifteen-thousand-foot-high mountains running from east to west and framing the southern reaches of the Bamiyan Valley. The relative’s name was Salman, and Ali’s father and his uncle had only just called him as Ali was driving off to get Zakia; now Ali called him from the car. Salman was reluctant at first, partly because he shared his home with four brothers and he would have to get the fugitives inside without the brothers seeing Zakia.

“Why did you do this?” Salman said.

“It happened, and now that it happened, we can’t take it back,” Ali said. “This happened, and we’re with her, and we’re escaping.”

They arrived in Foladi at Salman’s house around the time of the first call to prayer, the
subh,
when the mullah begins chanting over the loudspeakers in the minarets at the first sign of dawn, which at that time of year was about five in the morning. It was easy enough to hide Zakia; Salman led her into the women’s quarters in his part of the house, a compound with several separate mud-walled buildings, one for each of the brothers. Only his wife and young daughters were there, and no male but he could enter. Ali could not go there; staying with his wife-to-be prior to marriage would itself be considered a crime, and hiding Ali elsewhere in the house was much more difficult with so many brothers and their families around. So after a hurried breakfast of bread and tea, Salman and Ali headed out, trudging through a foot and a half of snow, up the flank of the mountain, for the ninety-minute hike to the village of Koh-Sadat.

Elders from Koh-Sadat met them outside the first house in their village; the elders had been watching them climb for the past quarter hour. In so much of this barren, treeless landscape, it was nearly impossible to hide even from watchers miles away. “We have come to buy donkeys,” Ali said. Koh-Sadat was locally famous for its donkeys, so it wasn’t an implausible excuse. For the rest of the morning, they saw one donkey after another. This one was too small, and that one was too old, and the other was okay but too expensive. By then it was time for lunch, and no one can visit an Afghan community without being invited to lunch. They dragged that out as long as they could, the men sitting cross-legged on the mud floor, picking off small pieces of bread to scoop from the communal plate of pilaf and talking about whatever subject occurred to them.

Finally, in late afternoon, they left with apologies and excuses but no donkey and trudged back down to Foladi and Salman’s house. “We drove them crazy with our donkey bargaining,” Ali said, sharing a laugh with Salman.

By the time they got back, Ali’s father, Anwar, had come and
a mullah named Baba Khalili had driven in over the Koh-i-Baba mountains from neighboring Wardak Province to marry them. One of Ali’s brothers and his cousin Salman would be the witnesses as they tied the
neka:
the signing of a document agreeing on the terms of the marriage and noting the requisite two male witnesses and the mullah who presided (significantly, the bride need not be present, and often is not). Because all of them, save the mullah, were illiterate, they would dampen their thumbs on an ink pad and press them to the paper in lieu of signatures. The
neka
would specify that Zakia, daughter of Zaman of Kham-e-Kalak village, would receive in the marriage a hundred thousand afghanis (about eighteen hundred U.S. dollars at the time) and a
jreeb
of land (about half an acre), from Ali’s family. Normally such a payment would go to her
father
as a bride price, although formally it would be deeded to the woman, since a bride price is officially illegal. Sometimes a small portion would be used to buy jewelry for the woman, but that was at the father’s discretion. Zakia’s father was not present and in no position to collect the hundred thousand afghanis, which was just as well, because Ali and his father were in no position to pay.

Mullah Baba Khalili demanded thirty thousand afghanis to tie the
neka,
formalizing it with the reading of Koranic verses and his signature and stamp. It was a huge sum for such a service, some five hundred fifty dollars, but the mullah was performing the ceremony without the customary presence of the girl’s father—and without asking too many questions. “If I don’t tie this
neka,
no one will ever tie it,” the mullah told Anwar when he balked at the price. The reputation of mullahs for greed is legendary in Afghanistan, one of the reasons they are the butt of many jokes in an otherwise devout land.
¹¹
“If anyone ever challenges it, I will testify for you,” the mullah told him.

The young couple spent their wedding night in the unfinished loft of Salman’s home, a low-ceilinged, thirty-foot-long room with no stove; it was far too cold for consummation. “It was a long time before we had a real wedding night,” Ali said. “We were so cold all we could do was hold each other for warmth.”

The next day they moved on, traveling this time in a taxi that
Anwar had arranged and brought for them from Bamiyan town, a couple thousand feet below. They were heading farther up the Foladi Valley as it climbed toward the highest peak in the Koh-i-Baba range, the Shah Foladi, sixteen thousand feet high. Partway up they were welcomed into the home of a distant relative, Sayed Akhlaqi. This time they could travel together openly because they were now married, but they were still foolishly raising eyebrows, even among those friendly to them, by holding hands.

Their stay was short-lived; the next day Sayed Akhlaqi’s son raced up the road from Bamiyan on a mud-splattered dirt bike, breathlessly reporting that the police knew they were in Foladi and were on their way. The son worked as a servant in a government building and had heard the police making the arrangements, urged on by Zakia’s enraged family members. The police would arrive by evening, and it was already nearly sunset. The couple and Anwar piled into the taxi and headed farther up the mountain. As they climbed the switchbacks, Ali’s phone rang; it was someone from down below alerting them that the police had already left Sayed Akhlaqi’s house and would probably catch up to them soon. Looking back, they could see the dust being raised on the lower road by the big, forest green Ford Ranger police pickup truck as it climbed toward them. The bedraggled old taxi had no hope of outrunning it, so they stopped at a glade of small trees and heavy brush, where a creek cut across the road. The newlyweds fled into the brush along the creek on the downstream side of the road while Ali’s father, Anwar, went the opposite way, on the upstream side, hoping, if seen, to draw the police’s attention from the lovers. The driver carried on, but the police truck soon caught up to him. He refused to give them away and denied having had them along—although there weren’t many fares on this lonely road toward the Shah Foladi peak. His story was that he had been on his way to pick someone up but never found the person.

Zakia and Ali hid deep in the bushes, he behind a log and she lying down in the wet streambed nearby. “The driver protected us. He said he was looking for us, too, and hadn’t been able to find us.” The policemen worked their way back down the hill, stopping
and shining their truck’s searchlight into the brush. “I don’t know how they didn’t see us,” Zakia said. “It seemed like the light was right on us.” At length the police escorted the taxi back down the mountain, holding the driver overnight for questioning before letting him go.

For a while the couple searched for Anwar but had no idea where he was; he searched for them as well, equally fruitlessly. It was inky dark, and no one had flashlights. Ali and Zakia began to walk up the mountain, skirting but staying off the road. They trudged, wet and freezing, through the snow, and then at times through slush brought by a fitful rain, until six hours later they reached one of the lower summits of Shah Foladi. Zakia had to take off her heels after they broke and walk in her bare feet.

Between them, to stay warm, they had only two thin woolen
patus
—Sayed Akhlaqi had given them a second one—which became both blankets and coats for them. The batteries on both their phones were nearly dead, but from the top of the mountain Zakia managed to get off one call to Ali’s uncle. “We’re lost. Can you tell us where we are?” she said. He wasn’t able to help them find their way out, but he did understand from what they said where they were and said he would send help at daybreak.

That night they were too tired even to gather firewood and slept rough on the cold, wet ground, huddled in the
patus.
“We weren’t so tired that we weren’t happy. We were so happy to be together. We had each other,” Ali said.

Zakia was less romantic about it. “I was just cold and scared,” she said.

By the next day, they reached another false summit. “We thought we were dead, but we kept climbing. My uncle had said to meet at the top of the mountain, and when we got there, we heard some people, and I shouted ‘Sattar!’ but no one answered,” Ali said. Sattar was his uncle’s son, and when he did not reply, they thought the men up there must have been pursuers searching for them, so they hid until the voices receded. Finally they found Azhdar village, a place Ali remembered from going partridge hunting with his brothers and his father; from there a trail went back down to his
own village, skirting the Bamiyan Valley. It would be fifteen miles of rugged terrain to cross, but it would take them away from the dangerously cold heights of the Shah Foladi.

The second night they slept outside again but were able to gather firewood to stay warm, and the next day they reached the outskirts of Ali’s own village of Surkh Dar. Even then they waited two days, sleeping in monks’ caves carved into the soft sandstone of the cliff faces, just a ways up the hill. “They didn’t find us, even though the entire police department of one province was looking for us,” Ali said.

When they finally made contact with Anwar, early on the fifth night of their marriage, the old man was back in their village; it had taken him two days to find his way off the mountain himself. Anwar arranged for Ali and Zakia to stay with a member of the provincial council who had a home in their village. It was just in time; by then the police had become convinced that the couple could have survived only by coming back to Surkh Dar and hiding there somewhere, so they began searching house by house.