The Punishment of Virtue (13 page)

Meals were eaten communally, but segregated by sex, the women in the house, the rest of us in the
maelmastun
. The youngest brother, whose lifelong task it is in Afghan families to serve the others, would shake out a long plastic tablecloth on the floor. He and the children would carry dishes of food along the corridor: a chicken stew, rice, and a few raw vegetables, including my favorite—long, mild white radishes. There would be a dish for every two or three people. And within reach of everyone, a big metal bowl filled with a Kandahar delicacy:
shlumbi.
It is watered down yogurt, sometimes embellished with chopped cucumbers or mint. I don't like sour. I made everyone laugh by pointing at my stomach and saying that if I drank
shlumbi,
there would war down there.
War
was one of the first Pashtu words I learned.

After a while, I almost stopped noticing the stony mounds outside the door. You had to pick your way among them to get to your car, or if you wanted to go outside to pee at night. One day I saw one of our little boys playing knucklebones, with real knucklebones.
I wonder whose they are,
I caught myself thinking with macabre humor.

In another corner of our graveyard was the Arab Cemetery, where many of the Al-Qaeda fighters killed in the final assault on the airport were buried. It was starting to gather crowds. In a typical example of Afghan self-contradiction, Kandaharis who had resented the Arabs' arrogance when they were alive began visiting their graves now that they were dead, in hopes of intercession on high. I remember relatives of my staunchly anti-Taliban host family arriving all the way from Quetta in Pakistan, with their sick daughter. They had come to the burial place of the Arab “martyrs” to pray for a cure. An embarrassed Governor Shirzai tried to close the area to prevent gatherings of fervent pilgrims.

In keeping with Achekzai tradition, the family's five adult sons worked in the transport trade. Nazir Ahmad was a machinist, honing auto engine parts on his spinning lathe. The others worked in the shop of the eldest, Nissar Ahmad, in one of the city's oil-splotched car yards, tricking out huge cargo trucks with fanciful decorations: panels painted with elaborate scenes and framed by metal curlicues, meeting in a towering point high above the truck's cab like the prow of a ship. And around the skirts, a fringe of jingling metal ornaments that would lend a truck's struggle over bumpy roads the sound of a glad-hearted festival. In one of the most impoverished countries on earth, truck owners will lay down thousands to tart up their prize possessions. My Achekzai brothers made sure they got their money's worth. The shop was famous for Nissar Ahmad's embossing on chrome plates. I would visit him sometimes and watch him work, sitting cross-legged on the ground, holding the plate down with one bare foot. He still owes me a fish, complete with scales and an eye, like the ones he uses to finish off the bottom panels of the truck broadsides, sometimes five or six feet long.

The brothers were short and a little stocky. When they left the house in the morning, piling into their white station wagon with their shawls slung around them against the cold, I could not shut out the picture of myself as Snow White, with the brothers playing my five dwarves. “Hi ho, hi ho, it's off to work we go…”

Each of the four older ones had four or five kids. I never did get completely straight who was whose. Willowy, black-haired Gulali used to follow me everywhere, getting into my stuff, pouring water for me to wash my hands, and fetching a thermos of tea or my notebooks for me. Unable to speak more than a few words in her language, I must have seemed like a toddler to her, and she would mother me importantly, as though I were her doll. Sadia was the mischievous one, always scrapping with the other kids. Four-year-old Guldani flirted inveterately, sidling up to my imposing driver. One of the baby boys, Tawwab, took an unaccountable shine to me. He would sit in my lap as I lay on a mat spread outside in the evenings, lean back against my raised knees, and place his feet, with careful deliberation, in my face.

Mahmad Anwar would come over with some fighters every once in a while to check on me. Sometimes he would spend the night with us in the
maelmastun
. And I often stopped by his headquarters to hear the latest. Despite its dignified exterior and its location on the main thoroughfare, it was an utterly unsalubrious place: walls discolored and flaking, no running water, leftover food drying in the corners.

Mahmad Anwar welcomed me unquestioningly. With a warm salutation, the nappy fighters on the door would usher me upstairs, accepting me as one of their own. I learned how to greet the people gathered in Mahmad Anwar's office with the ritual that Afghans perform when they enter a room. Everyone stands up, and you shake hands all around, greeting each person in turn. If you know someone well, there is a kind of dance step you do: left hand to your friend's right shoulder, right hand to his waist. Then you take a half step back and let your right hand slide across to his, and clasp it. One of Mahmad Anwar's friends did this with me once, and put his right hand smack on top of my bosom. He almost died. The optical illusion had worked too well; he had actually thought I was a man. Handshakes done, everyone sits back down, and the greetings go around again, the newcomer meeting the eyes of each person in turn, wishing him peace, asking after his health and family.

It seemed oddly contradictory to me: the dignity and ceremony of this salutation, performed by the otherwise wild Achekzais.

Mahmad Anwar never tried to hide anything from me. When I showed up, day or night, I was ushered into his cramped and misshapen situation room: dirty carpet on the floor, dirtier mattresses as a bedding/seating combo, a leaning stack of ammunition boxes in a corner, a few Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. Whatever he was discussing, I was welcome to follow along. Often it had to do with disarming leftover bands of Taliban in Helmand Province to the west. In private, I would give him advice, similar to what I had told those opium dealers. He really had to clean up his headquarters, I said. And he should not be allowing his men to smoke pot. It was giving them a bad reputation.

Mahmad Anwar loved to swagger around in the olive green U.S. Army parka the Americans had issued him, with its fur-trimmed hood. His men were wearing the traditional Afghan outfit of baggy trousers, long tunic, turban or sparkly cap, shawl slung over one shoulder. But a rough sort of uniform was starting to shake out in Kandahar. Western-style clothing was coming to be a badge of the new regime. Security officers like Mahmad Anwar wore fatigues, provincial officials wore shirts and ties, even teachers wore Western clothes in school. But they would not be caught dead in them on the street; tight trousers, exposing the shape of a man's legs all the way up to his crotch, were just too unseemly by local standards. Teachers brought their school clothes to work and changed in the cramped communal space of what passed for a teachers' lounge.

And so I spent my time trying to describe life in post-Taliban Kandahar to my unseen audience a world away.

One afternoon, I was working on a piece for
Morning Edition.
My deadline was coming at me like a cavalry charge, and I was transfixed with concentration. Suddenly—I could have killed him—one of my host-brothers shattered it. He rushed into my sanctum with some flustered noise about the chief of police. On his heels scampered the little girls to straighten up the room. It was like the flight of wild creatures ahead of a forest fire.

A moment later a mighty man entered, one of the largest I have ever seen. He was surrounded by four or five bodyguards. Their presence seemed to use up all the space in the room. It was Zabit Akrem.
So this is the big man I've been hearing about.
Mahmad Anwar's boss.

For, when Shirzai seized the governorship, President Karzai gave the provincial security apparatus to Mullah Naqib's Alokozais, to preserve some balance of power. Zabit Akrem reaped the police department.

Akrem and his soldiers sat themselves down and began making small talk. After a curt salutation, I turned and went back to smacking my keyboard.

“Sarah,” my host-brother interrupted after a minute. “Mr. Commander wants to speak to you.”

“I'm busy. He'll have to wait till I'm done.” Unbelievable affrontery.

“Sarah.” My host brother's tense voice broke a silence. “Zabit Akrem is a big person. He doesn't have much time. He wants to talk to you for a minute.”

I sighed and flounced around to face him.

Foreigners, Akrem informed me, were forbidden to live in private houses. I would have to move out of the compound for my “safety,” and take up quarters at the hotel.

I was indignant. Suddenly there were laws in Afghanistan, and staying in a private home was against them? That filthy excuse for a hotel was infested with fellow journalists, not to mention seedy-looking Afghans haunting the halls. There were only one or two women reporters, and I didn't fancy walking around with my hair drying in front of a lot of unknown Afghan men. I knew my safety and ability to work in hidebound Kandahar depended on my reputation. Living as part of a family put me in a category that made sense, culturally. And it fit in with the protection precept I was going by. I was here under the protection of the Achekzai tribe. Staying with an Achekzai family offered a lot more security than living with a bunch of other foreigners guarded by a few paid gunmen. And another thing. Those gunmen, I understood, were Akrem's tribesmen. Their other job was to keep tabs on where reporters went. Just freed from police-state conditions in Quetta, where we had to dream up ruses to shake the intelligence agents assigned to us for our “protection,” I had no intention of submitting to that nonsense again.

“Sorry, I'm not going,” I informed Akrem. “I have a father here, and five strong brothers. I'm much safer here in ‘my' house than in any hotel. Besides, I'm leaving in a few days.”

We haggled for a while, the brothers backing me up. Finally I won out, Akrem agreeing that I could finish out my rotation in the house.

I met him again a little later, the first week in January 2002, in his office at the police department. A crack journalist from
Time
magazine, Michael Ware, and I had come up with a harebrained scheme to strike off across the vast deserted wasteland of Helmand Province to the west of Kandahar, in search of fighting with Al-Qaeda. Mick wanted to take along some police fighters for protection. And when Akrem found out and wanted to talk, Mick conveniently had an urgent deadline and asked if I would go.

It was more than a little intimidating to face him in his office, stars on his shoulders, surrounded by uniformed fighters, scarcely glancing up from behind his massive wooden desk.

“I thought you were leaving,” he said. Yeah, well…Heart pounding, I told him a fairy tale about having some friends I wanted to visit in the Helmand Province capital. I said I would only go that far. “So, you've got a lot of buddies with black turbans,” Akrem retorted, meaning Taliban. I let it go and retired, just about backing out of the room the way courtiers did in ancient Persia before the king of kings. I heard him say in a stage whisper aside: “These foreigners tell a lot of lies.”

“It's true,” I told him later, when we became friends. “I was lying. But you lied to me, too!” He threw back his head and laughed.

With the exception of one other hostile meeting the next spring, Akrem and I did not exchange another word for almost a year.

One day in early January, school was ready to open. It would be the first time in about a decade. I simply could not resist taking my three littlest girls up the road to register, with hundreds of other yelling, zooming, laughing, excited neighborhood children, after they had all but somersaulted into the
maelmastun,
where I was at work, squealing and mimicking the act of writing with fingers on their miniature palms: “We're-going-to-school, we're-going-to-school, we're-going-to-school!” It seemed a historic errand, a more important task than finishing my piece for
All Things Considered
. My grip on precisely what my mission was here in Kandahar was loosening.

From rueful experience, I could recognize signs of approaching burnout: a frenetic tinge to my energy when it rose, and, like a background monotone, a fatigue, a growing lassitude that had been creeping up on me and was now upon me, blinding me to stories. Even so, I eyed the approaching end of my NPR tour, in early January 2002, with a sense of dislocation and some loss.

I ended up overstaying my scheduled departure date. And only with some difficulty did I resolve to turn my back at last on this uncouth city that had wormed its way into my heart. I stopped off for a series of raucous or formal good-byes: with my adoptive family—they sprinkled water behind my departing yellow car in a Pashtun tradition—and with Ahmad Wali Karzai, the younger brother President Hamid had left behind to hold down the fort in Kandahar, and, when I set off on that bone-crushing road to Spin Boldak and Pakistan, with my various Achekzai comrades at the border.

At the barracks where I had first been assigned the young bodyguard Fayda, one of the scruffy fighters asked me, “Are you a journalist?”

“She's
our
journalist,” his comrades chorused.

And so the love affair began.