The Places in Between (13 page)

BREAD AND WATER

Abdul Haq walked beside me toward Obey, talking about his life. Perhaps because he was younger and stronger than Qasim or Aziz, he did not seem tired by the walking. The others had dropped five hundred yards behind. I enjoyed talking to him. Unlike Qasim he did not seem to tailor his stories in order to extort things from me. He told me he had become a holy warrior, a Mujahidin, ten years earlier, when he was thirteen.

"I was a cook in Ismail Khan's camp before I was allowed to fight that Russian agent Najibullah. When the Taliban reached Herat in 1995, I did not take to the hills with Ismail Khan. Instead I fled to Iran, leaving my wife and two daughters."

For three years he sold spare parts in truck stops in Shiraz and Tehran, which may have been where he picked up his clean-shaven look and his baseball cap. When he returned to Herat in 1998, he was imprisoned by the Taliban. He spent six months in a cell so crowded the prisoners slept standing up. His daily ration was one piece of
nan
bread and a glass of water.

"One of the guards offered to help me escape if I could raise one thousand three hundred and fifty dollars. I told my wife to sell our clothes in the bazaar. My daughters went without meat. I sent messages to my friends and borrowed a hundred dollars from one, two hundred from another. Finally I had the money and he let me go. I went to the hills to fight for Ismail Khan against the Taliban. They were good times. We had a lot of money from Iran and other countries. We slept in tents. Every night we bought sheep from the Kuchi nomads to feast. Four months ago I went down to Herat. There a man—not a man—a shaitan—a devil—reported me to the Taliban and they put me in jail to execute me. But after ten days Ismail Khan captured Herat and I was freed."

"Do you have any money?"

"Yes. I am a rich man. My job in the Security Service is as a driver. I am paid eighty dollars a month but I get more, much more—a great deal—for doing little contracts in the villages."

"What contracts?"

"No one can check my truck because I am from the Security Service—so people pay a lot to use my truck. I can carry anything."

"Aziz?"

"Aziz is very poor. He has nothing. His detachment has not been paid for months. He will be lucky to get forty dollars this month. We have taken him with us to help him."

"And Qasim? Is he as poor as he says?"

"Qasim, no. Qasim is very rich. But his father and grandfather were nothing. Less than nothing."

"But he is a Seyyed."

"A descendant of the Prophet? So he says," said Abdul Haq and laughed, "but no one has ever heard of his family. Now he owns two villages next to Herat. He has six thousand dollars at home in cash."

"Because..."

"Because he is close to Ismail Khan. He can help himself to foreign money."

"You are all officers in the Security Service?"

"Qasim and I are. We are Mujahidin. Most of our colleagues used to work in the KHAD." (The body set up by the Russian KGB.)

"But I thought you used to fight the Russians?"

"What can we do? Qasim and I can't run a Security Service. We can barely read and write. We have to use the experts. Like the man who interrogated you. The one with the goatee..." Abdul Haq blew out his cheeks and traced the shape on his chin.

"Yes?" He had not told me he knew the man who questioned me.

"That was Gul Agha. He has a revolver hidden here." He patted the side of his chest. "He is a very big man. He was not a Mujahid. He was in Iran working in the Security Service while we were fighting in the hills."

"And Qasim? What is his job? Is he a commander?"

"Qasim? No. Qasim doesn't work in an office with paper. Qasim's job is to deal with bad men ... question them and deal with them for men like Gul Agha."

Abdul Haq never elaborated on this comment so I do not know precisely how Qasim dealt with people on behalf of the man who had questioned me. This, however, is an eyewitness report of an interrogation that took place in Qasim's headquarters building six months later in September 2002, recorded by Human Rights Watch:

They tied his feet and hung him [upside down] from the ceiling, so that his hands touched the ground. After beating him with whips, they brought two electrical wires, and they wound the wire ends, the metal part, around each of his big toes. Then they shocked him. On his big toes there were burns, like a ring about each toe. The skin there was black and bloody. A new man came in. He looked around and then said to the men who were torturing Arbab, "What are you doing? You are not doing it right." And he made the men take off the wire from [his] toes and wound it around his thumbs instead. His hands were tied together but hanging on the floor, and they stepped on his hands with their boots while they did this. Then the new man said, "Now I will make him do the death dance." And they shocked him again. He was moving all about and shaking all about by his feet. And he fainted and lost consciousness.

When we reached a graveyard on the outskirts of Obey after three hours' walk, it began to rain. The largest tombstones were eleven-foot megaliths of black granite, framed by the obligatory piece of wrecked Russian armor and a ruined caravanserai.

Walking down the main
bazaar
street, we were stopped by a group of armed men.

"Is this the American?"

"He is English. We have come from the Emir Ismail Khan," said Qasim.

"That is impossible. You would be in a car."

Aziz and Qasim's black-and-white keffiyeh scarves and their military radios marked them clearly as Ismail Khan's men, but we had reached a place where the governor's authority was diminished. The local ruler, Mustafa, was a new commander and his loyalties were uncertain. The Obey group did not want outside units coming in, but they probably pretended not to recognize Qasim as Ismail Khan's man because they were not prepared to challenge his leader directly.

Qasim, Aziz, and Moalem Jalil were detained. Abdul Haq and I were ordered to sit in the truck stop. This was a modern version of the ruined caravanserai we had passed on the edge of town. Its courtyard was filled with truck-churned mud and the stench of human excrement. Rows of donkeys stood patiently in the rain. Their nostrils had been cut open to let in more air, a sign they were being taken to high altitudes. I had walked some way with a mule in Iran but had left it because the police thought I was an Afghan using the animal to smuggle opium or other goods on the mountain tracks. Unshaven men with bloodshot eyes loaded these donkeys with yellow waterproof bundles. The men wore fake designer hooded tops and heavy jeweled watches loose on their thin wrists. I guessed from their clothes that they lived in Tehran.

Abdul Haq and I were sitting on the floor of the restaurant eating a large portion of mutton when Qasim entered to say we could not go farther because of the rain. Qasim would not say more, only that it was dangerous and that, had we not had a local like Moalem Jalil with us, we would not have got this far. I wondered if the Obey men didn't want us to see them loading opium onto the donkeys, but I doubted it. They didn't seem to care when we walked through the courtyard. The problem was probably rivalry between Ismail Khan and the Obey militia.

I told Qasim I was leaving in an hour regardless and he went back to talk to the militia. Finally he returned and repeated that the road ahead was far too dangerous—there were roadblocks manned by bandits. I wondered if
bandits
was a euphemism for the Obey militia. We would be robbed and killed. We had to take a car to Saray-e-Pul.

"How far is that?"

"Twenty-five kilometers."

That was five hours' walk and only four hours till dark. "I'm going to walk," I said.

There was a pause and then Abdul Haq said, "And I will go with him."

Qasim hesitated. "Well, Aziz and I will get a jeep and meet you there."

THE FIGHTING MAN SHALL

It was raining hard when we walked out onto the street.

"Five hours ... no problem," yelled Abdul Haq at Qasim's departing back. "I can do it. Not Qasim. Me. Look at me ... a gun, two magazines, three hand grenades, kung fu ... I'll get them ... Should have seen me yesterday ... Then I had three magazines, five hand grenades."

I walked out of Obey matching Abdul Haq's long strides and wondering whether the Obey militia would shoot us. We passed the next three kilometers in silence. We had entered camel country: three sheltered by a wall under their bundles, one walked beside an old man, and a herd grazed in the desert. When we reached the next village, Abdul Haq began shouting again about how many Taliban he had killed. He had never used earplugs when firing his automatic weapon and he was half deaf.

"Sixteen of them?" I asked.

"Sixteen? No, eighteen. I killed eighteen myself one afternoon, in an ambush, with my Kalashnikov." He lifted his rifle to demonstrate and shouted, "Baah ... Baah ... Baah ... I kept five of the prisoners alive and took them with me into the hills ... walked two days and two nights, living off snow. One man died in the snow. Nineteen dead because of me." He tilted his baseball cap farther back on his head.

Farther on, in a grove of trees, we caught up with a nine-year-old boy on a donkey. Abdul Haq gave the boy a cigarette and balanced his rifle on the moving animal. Then he tried to climb on. The donkey set off at a trot with Abdul Haq clinging on, one knee hooked over its bony back and a long leg bumping along the ground. Then the boy left us. At dusk the hills closed in around us, the rain stopped, and we could see no villages. We looked up at the bare ridgeline.

"If there was someone up there...," said Abdul Haq.

"We'd be in trouble," I said. We were on a narrow track between a steep hill on our left and the Hari Rud running fast below us on the right. On the far bank was a flat exposed gravel beach. There was no cover.

"Here I am," Abdul Haq roared at the wilderness. "No problem. I am a man. I'll get them." He turned to me. "Qasim is a woman, right? He can't walk. In fact, he is a queer." He turned to me to illustrate the kind of things Qasim did with other men. "In fact," he continued, "when we get back I'm going to fuck him. Ahhh," he roared, "what a woman."

Silence. Neither of us spoke for some time. I noticed that we were walking and breathing more quickly than usual. A loose stone fell and we both spun around.

"You're not afraid, are you?" I asked.

"No. Are you?"

"No." Although I was nervous, I was reveling in the beauty of the low hills and the pale dusk. Everything was very still and silent. The long line of cliffs continued above us and we could see no one on the track. Abdul Haq stopped, looked up, and suddenly fired at the ridge. His rifle's muzzle flashed and the sharp explosion echoed around the valley.

"That will frighten them away ... all of them—bandits, villagers, wolves."

We continued, barely able to see the path. It began to rain again. A country without electricity is dark on an overcast night. Then, all at once, there was barking and dogs sprinted toward us, angry and invisible. Abdul Haq pulled at the cocking handle of his Kalashnikov; I shouted and threw stones. The dogs followed us, enraged, to what must have been the edge of a hamlet. The rain increased, soaking our boots and jackets. The four-year drought had clearly ended. After another forty-five minutes, Abdul Haq spun around and grabbed at something in the dark. It turned out to be a man who had been standing behind a tree. I was impressed by Abdul Haq's reflexes. I had not noticed the man.

Abdul Haq cocked his Kalashnikov, placed it against the man's head, and demanded to know what he was doing. The man didn't move but replied very slowly that he was relieving himself. Abdul Haq searched him thoroughly and released him with a warning.

A fog had closed in around us and the rain continued; we could see nothing. Five minutes later I took a step into thin air. As I fell, I managed to grab a thornbush, which came away in my hand but slowed my drop down the cliff. I ended up on the riverbank, spread-eagle about fifteen feet below the road. Abdul Haq shouted down and I shouted back, "
Man khub hastam ... man khub hastam
" (I'm fine, I'm fine), while he laughed. I found a chimney cut into the cliff wall and climbed up with difficulty to join him.

We had been walking for over five hours from Obey, it had been dark for a couple of hours, we were both now shivering, and the rain was turning to snow. Our destination was on the other side of the Hari Rud River, which had swollen with the downpour and was moving very quickly. It would be difficult to cross without ropes. We had heard a truck moving behind us, the first since morning. Abdul Haq suggested we ask it to drive us across the ford. I was reluctant because I didn't want to travel a single step in a vehicle on this journey, but I knew that Aziz had probably been waiting two hours in the snow already and it didn't seem worth the fight.

The truck came around the corner. Abdul Haq stepped into the road and stood in the glare of the truck's headlights, pointing his rifle at the windshield. The driver stopped and drove us through the ford to the other bank. Aziz was waiting with a flashlight. I stumbled beside him through the snow, falling a couple of times into drifts. At the door to a house, I took off my wet boots and brushed the snow from my hair and coat. Then we entered. Our host sat me by the fire and I put my white, peeling feet as near the flames as I could and gratefully accepted a cup of tea. It was ten o'clock at night. For once I was too tired to write in my diary, so I played a game of chess with our host.