‘Very few people come in here, so I can examine your homework, now and again.’ But the girl never returns.
‘My heart is dirty,’ he confides to his younger brother. He knows he should not think about girls.
A little girl comes into the shop. Maybe she is twelve, maybe fourteen. She reaches out a dirty hand and looks pleadingly up at them. Over her head is a dirty-white shawl with red flowers. She is too young to wear the burka. That is only donned once the girl has reached puberty.
Beggars often come into the shops. Mansur usually sends them packing. But Rahimullah remains standing and watches the childish heart-shaped face and takes ten notes out of his pocket. The beggar girl looks at them wide-eyed and grabs them greedily. But just as she is about to get them Rahimullah’s hand slips away. He makes a large circle in the air with his hand and holds her gaze.
‘Nothing is free in life,’ he says.
The girl’s hand freezes. Rahimullah gives her two notes.
‘Go to a hammam, wash and come back, and I’ll give you the rest.’
She quickly puts the money in the pocket of her dress and hides her face behind the dirty shawl with the red flowers. She looks at him through one eye. One cheek has smallpox scars from old sores. Sandflies have left their mark on her forehead. She turns and leaves; the slim body disappears down Kabul’s streets.
A few hours later she returns, clean.
‘What the hell,’ says Rahimullah, in spite of her wearing the same dirty clothes. ‘Come with me to the back room and I’ll give you the rest of the money.’ He smiles at her and they go into the room.
Mansur is uncomfortable, left on his own in the shop - he doesn’t know if he should leave. Suddenly the salesman comes back out.
‘She is yours,’ he says to Mansur.
Mansur is frozen to the spot. He stares at Rahimullah. He glances at the door to the back room, then tears out of the shop.
The Call from Ali
He feels sick for days. Unforgivable, he thinks. Unforgivable. He tries to wash, but nothing helps. He tries to pray, but to no avail. He searches the Koran, he visits the mosque, but he feels dirty, dirty. The unclean thoughts he has been harbouring of late make him a bad Muslim. God will punish him. Everything you do comes back to you, he thinks. A child. I have sinned against a child. I let him abuse her. I did nothing.
The nausea turns to world-weariness when, after a time, the memory of the beggar girl recedes. He is tired of life, the routine, the hassle. He is bad-tempered and grumpy towards everyone. He is angry with his father who chains him to the shop while life goes on without him.
I am seventeen, he thinks. Life is over before it has even started.
He sits moping behind the counter, elbows on the tabletop, forehead in his hands. He lifts his head and looks around: at books about Islam, the Prophet Muhammad, famous interpretations of the Koran. He sees books on Afghan fairytales, biographies of Afghan kings and sovereigns, large tomes about the wars against the British, magnificent books about Afghan precious stones, textbooks on Afghan embroidery, and thin ‘pancakes’ from photocopied books about Afghan custom and traditions. He scowls at them and bangs his fist on the table.
Why was I born an Afghan? I hate being an Afghan. All these pig-headed customs and traditions are slowly killing me. Respect this and respect that; I have no freedom, I can’t decide anything. Sultan is only interested in counting money from sales, he thinks. ‘He can take his books and stuff them,’ he says under his breath. He hopes no one heard him. Next to Allah and the prophets, ‘father’ is the single most important person within the Afghan social order. To oppose him is impossible, even for an operator like Mansur. Mansur quarrels with and walks all over everyone else - his aunts, his sisters, his mother, his brothers - but never, never his father. I’m a slave, he thinks. I am worked to the bone for board and lodging and clean clothes. Most of all Mansur wants to study. He misses his friends and the life he led in Pakistan. Here he has no time for friends, and the one friend he had, Rahimullah, he does not want to see again.
It is just before the Afghan New Year - nauroz. Big feasts are planned all over the country. For the last five years the Taliban forbade feasting. They considered nauroz a heathen celebration, a worship of the sun, because its roots were in the Zoroastrian religion - the worship of fire - which originated in Persia in the sixth century BC. And so they also forbade the traditional New Year’s pilgrimage to Ali’s tomb in Mazar-i-Sharif. For centuries pilgrims had flocked to Ali’s grave, to purge themselves from sin, ask forgiveness, be healed and greet the new year, which according to the Afghan calendar starts on 21 March, the spring equinox, when night and day are of equal length.
Ali was the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law and he was the fourth caliph. He is the cause of the polemic between Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims. To Shia Muslims Ali is second in the order of succession after Muhammad, to Sunni Muslims he is fourth. But even for Sunni Muslims, like Mansur and most Afghans, he is one of Islam’s great heroes. A brave warrior, sword in hand, says history. Ali was murdered in Kufa in 661, and, according to most historians, buried in Najaf in Iraq. But Afghans maintain that his followers, who feared that enemies would take revenge on his body and mutilate it, exhumed him. They lashed his body to the back of a white she-camel and made it run as far as it could. Where it collapsed they would bury him. That was, according to legend, the place that came to be known as Mazar-i-Sharif, ‘the tomb of the exalted’. For five hundred years only a small stone marked the grave, but in the twelfth century a small tomb was built after a local mullah was visited by Ali in a dream. Then Genghis Khan arrived on the scene and desecrated the tomb, and once again the grave lay unmarked for several hundred years. At the beginning of the fifteenth century a new mausoleum was built above what Afghans believe are the remains of Ali. It is this burial chamber - and the mosque that was later built beside it - that draws the pilgrims.
Mansur is determined to make the pilgrimage. He has been thinking about it for some time. He needs only to get Sultan’s permission, as the journey will entail being away from the shop for several days. If there is anything Sultan hates, it is Mansur being away.
He has even got hold of a travelling companion, in the shape of an Iranian journalist who often buys books from him. They got into a conversation about New Year’s Eve celebrations and the Iranian said he had room in his car. I am saved, Mansur thought. Ali calls me. He wants to forgive me.
But then Sultan says no. His father will not do without him for the short time the trip will take. He says Mansur must catalogue, supervise carpenters putting up new shelves, sell books. He won’t trust anyone else. He won’t even trust his future brother-in-law Rasul. Mansur seethes with anger. Because he dreaded asking his father he postponed it until the last night before departure. But not on your life. Mansur nagged, his father refused.
‘You are my son and you jolly well do what I say,’ says Sultan. ‘I need you in the shop.’
‘Books, books, money, money, all you think of is money,’ Mansur shouts. ‘I’m supposed to sell books about Afghanistan, without knowing the country. I’ve hardly ever been outside Kabul,’ he says crossly.
The Iranian leaves next morning. Mansur is in revolt. How could his father deny him this? He drives his father to the shop without a word, and gives monosyllabic answers when asked a question. The accumulated hatred against his father rages inside him. Mansur had only finished ten classes when his father took him out of school and put him into the bookshop. He never completed high school. He gets a no to all his demands. The only thing his father has given him is a car, to enable Mansur to drive him around, and the responsibility for a bookshop where he is turning to dust amongst the shelves.
‘As you like,’ he says suddenly. ‘I will do everything you ask me to, but please do not think I am doing it willingly. You never let me do what I want. You’re crushing me.’
‘You can go next year,’ Sultan says.
‘No, I’ll never go. A
nd I’ll never ask you for anything again.’
It is alleged that only those whom Ali calls can go to Mazar. Why does Ali not want him? Were his thoughts so unforgivable? Or does his father not hear that Ali calls him?
Sultan is chilled by Mansur’s hostility. He glances over at the repressed, tall teenager and is frightened.
Having driven his father to his shop and the two brothers to theirs, Mansur opens up his own and sits down behind the dusty desk. He sits in his ‘think-dark-thoughts’ position with elbows on the counter and feels life imprisoning and overwhelming him with dust from the books.
A new consignment of books has arrived. For the sake of appearances he feels he must know what is in them. It is a collection of poems from the mystic Rumi, one of his father’s favourite poets and the best-known of the Afghan Sufists, Islamic mystics. Rumi was born in the 1200s in Balkh, near Mazar-i-Sharif. Yet another sign, Mansur thinks. He decides to look for signs that will underpin his decision and show his father up. The poems are about cleansing oneself in order to get closer to God - who is Perfection. They deal with forgetting oneself, one’s own ego. Rumi says: ‘The Ego is a veil between humans and God.’ Mansur reads how he can turn to God and how life should revolve around God and not around oneself. Mansur feels dirty again. The more he reads the more he is determined to go. He keeps returning to one of the simpler poems:
The water said to the dirty one, ‘Come here.’
The dirty one said, ‘I am too ashamed.’
The water replied: ‘How will your shame be washed away
without me?’
The water, God and Rumi all seem to be deserting Mansur. The Iranian is no doubt high up in the snow-clad Hindu Kush mountains by now. Mansur is angry all day. When night falls it is time to lock up, fetch his father and brothers and take them home, to yet another bowl of rice, to yet another evening in the company of his witless family.
As he fastens the shutters over the door with a heavy-duty padlock, Akbar, the Iranian journalist, suddenly appears. Mansur thinks he is seeing ghosts.
‘Haven’t you gone?’ he asks in an astonished voice.
‘We did, but the Salang tunnel was closed today, so we’ll try tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I met your father down the road, he asked me to take you with him. We’ll leave my place at five tomorrow morning, as soon as the curfew is lifted.’
‘Did he really say that?’ Mansur is speechless. ‘It must be Ali calling - imagine that, he really did call me,’ he mumbles.
Mansur spends the night with Akbar to make sure he wakes up and as a guarantee that his father won’t change his mind. The next morning, before dawn, they are off. Mansur’s only luggage consists of a plastic bag full of Coke and Fanta cans and biscuits with banana and kiwi filling. Akbar has a friend with him and everyone is in high spirits. They play Indian film music and sing at the top of their voices. Mansur has brought his treasure with him, a western cassette, Pop from the 80s. ‘Is this love? Baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more’, resounds out into the cool morning. Before they have driven half an hour Mansur has eaten the first packet of biscuits and drunk two Cokes. He feels free. He wants to scream and shout, and sticks his head out of the window. ‘Ouhhhh! Aliiii! Ali! Here I come!’
They pass areas he has never before seen. Immediately north of Kabul is the Shomali Plain, one of the most war-torn areas of Afghanistan. Here bombs from American B52s shook the ground only a few months ago. ‘How beautiful, ’ Mansur shouts. And from a distance the plain is beautiful, against the backdrop of the mighty snow-clad Hindu Kush mountains that proudly rise up to the sky. Hindu Kush means the Hindu killer. Thousands of Indian soldiers have frozen to death in these mountain ranges, during military sorties on Kabul.
When one enters the plateau the landscape of war is apparent. In contrast to the Indian soldiers, the Hindu Kush did not stop the B52s. Many of the Taliban’s bombed-out camps have not yet been cleared. Their shelters have been turned into large craters or are strewn over the area, exploding when the bombs hit the ground. A twisted iron bed, where a Taliban might have been shot in his sleep, resembles a skeleton by the roadside. A bullet-ridden mattress lies near by.
But the camps have mostly been looted. Mere hours after the Taliban fled the local population was in there, pilfering soldiers’ washbasins, gas lamps, carpets and mattresses. Poverty made the plundering of corpses inevitable. No one cried over dead bodies by the roadside or in the sand. On the contrary, the locals desecrated many of them: eyes gouged out, skin torn off, body parts cut off or chopped into bits. That was revenge for the Taliban having terrorised the Shomali Plain people for years.
For five years the plain was the front line between the Taliban and Massoud’s men from the Northern Alliance, and sovereignty of the Plain changed six times. Because the front was continually moving, the local population had to flee, either up towards the Panshir valley or south towards Kabul. The locals were mostly Tajiks and anyone who dragged their feet might suffer the Taliban’s ethnic cleansing. Before the Taliban withdrew they poisoned wells and blew up water pipes and dams, vital to the dry plain, which before the war had been part of Kabul’s bread basket.
Mansur stares in silence at the awful villages they pass. Most of them are in ruins and rear up in the landscape like skeletons. The Taliban systematically razed many of the villages to the ground when they tried to subdue the last part of the country, the missing tenth, the Panshir valley, the Hindu Kush mountains and the desert areas bordering Tajikistan. They might have made it had September 11 not happened and the world started to care about Afghanistan.
The remains of twisted tanks, wrecked military vehicles and bits of metal whose purpose Mansur can only guess at, lie thrown around. A lonely man walks behind a plough. In the middle of his patch lies a large tank. He walks laboriously around it - it is too heavy to move.
The car drives fast over the pot-holed road. Mansur tries to spot his mother’s village. He has not been there since he was five or six. His finger constantly points to more ruins. There! There! But nothing distinguishes one village from another. The place where he visited his mother’s relatives as a little boy could be any one of these heaps of rubble. He remembers how he ran around on paths and fields. Now the plain is the most mined place in the world. Only the roads are safe. Children with bundles of firewood and women with buckets of water walk along the side of the road. They try to avoid the ditches where the mines might be. The car with the pilgrims passes a team of mine-clearers who systematically blow up or render the explosives harmless. A few metres are cleared each day.
Over the death traps the ditches are full of wild, dark-red, short-stemmed tulips. But the flowers must be admired at a distance. Picking them means risking blowing off an arm or a leg.
Akbar is having fun with a book published by the Afghan Tourist Organisation in 1967.
‘“Along the roads children sell chains of pink tulips”,’ he reads. ‘“In the spring cherries, apricots, almond and pear trees jostle for the attention of the traveller. A flowering spectacle follows the traveller all the way to Kabul”.’ They laugh. This spring they spot a lone rebellious cherry tree or two that have survived bombs, rockets, a three-year drought and poisoned wells. But it’s doubtful whether anyone can find a mine-free path to the cherries. ‘“The local pottery is amongst the most beautiful in Afghanistan. We recommend you stop and take a look in the workshops along the road, where artisans make plates and vessels following centuries-old tradition”,’ Akbar reads.
‘Those traditions seem to have suffered,’ says Said, Akbar’s friend, who is driving the car. Not a single pottery workshop can be seen on the road up to the Salang Pass. They start to ascend. Mansur opens the third Coke, empties it and throws it elegantly out of the car. Better to litter a bomb crater than mess the car up. The road crawls up to the world’s highest mountain tunnel. It narrows; on one side the sheer mountain cliff, on the other running water, sometimes a waterfall, sometimes a stream. ‘“The Government has put tro
ut out in the river. In a few years there will be a viable colony”,’ Akbar reads on. There are no trout in the river now. The Government has had other things on its mind than fish-farming in the years since the guide was written.
Burnt-out tanks lie in the most incredible places: down the valley side, in the river, tottering over a precipice, sideways, upside down or broken into many bits. Mansur quickly arrives at a hundred when he starts counting. The majority originate from the war against the Soviet Union, when the Red Army rolled in from the Central Soviet Republics in the north and thought they had the Afghans under control. The Russians soon fell victim to the Mujahedeen’s shrewd warfare. The Mujahedeen moved around the mountainside like goats. From afar, from the lookout posts in the mountains, they could spot the Russian tanks snailing along in the valley bottoms. Even with their homemade weapons the guerrillas were virtually invulnerable when laying an ambush. The soldiers were everywhere, disguised as goatherds, the Kalashnikov hidden under the goat’s belly. They could make surprise attacks whenever needed.
‘Under the bellies of long-haired goats you could even hide rocket launchers,’ Akbar relates, who has read everything available about the war against the Soviet Union.
Alexander the Great also struggled up these mountain roads. Having captured the area around Kabul he walked over the Hindu Kush on his way to central Asia on the other side of the Oxus river. ‘Alexander is supposed to have composed odes to the mountains, which “inspired mystic thoughts and eternal rest”.’ Akbar continues to recite from the Tourist Organisation guidebook.
‘The Government made plans for a ski centre here,’ he suddenly shouts and looks up at the steep mountainsides. ‘In 1967! As soon as the roads have been tarmacked it says!’