The authorities kept an eye on him and five years later he was arrested again. Once more he was given the opportunity to meditate on Persian philosophy behind prison walls, but now a new accusation was added to the old one; he was labelled petit bourgeois, middle-class, according to Communism one of the worst terms of abuse. The charge was that he made money after the capitalist model.
This all happened during the period when Afghanistan’s Communist regime, in the heat of suffering caused by war, tried to wind up tribal society and introduce ‘joyful’ Communism. Attempts to collectivise farming led to severe hardship amongst the population. Many poor farmers refused to accept land that had been compulsorily purchased from rich landowners, as it was contrary to Islam to sow in stolen soil. The countryside rose in protest and as a consequence the Communist schemes were seldom successful. In time the authorities gave up. War sapped everyone’s strength; after ten years it had claimed 1.5 million Afghan lives.
When the petit bourgeois was let out of prison, he was thirty-five years old. The war against the Soviet Union was, on the whole, being fought in the countryside and Kabul was left more or less intact. The grind of daily life occupied people. This time his mother managed to persuade him to marry. She produced Sharifa, a general’s daughter, a beautiful and bright woman. They married and had three sons and a daughter, one baby every other year.
The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and the inhabitants looked forward to peace at last. But because the regime in Kabul continued to be propped up by the Soviets the Mujahedeen did not lay down arms. They took Kabul in May 1992 and civil war broke out. The apartment that the family had bought in a Soviet-built block of flats was situated right on the front line, between the warring factions. Rockets hit the walls, bullets shattered the windows and tanks rolled over the courtyard. After they had cowered on the floor for a week, the hail of shells quietened down for a few hours and Sultan took himself and his family off to Pakistan.
While he was in Pakistan his bookstall was robbed, as was the public library. Valuable books went to collectors for a song - or were exchanged for tanks, bullets and grenades. Sultan himself bought up some of the books stolen from the national library when he returned from Pakistan to see to his shop. He got some real bargains. For a handful of dollars he bought works hundreds of years old, amongst them a 500-year-old manuscript from Uzbekistan for which the Uzbek government later offered him $25,000. He found Zahir Shah’s personal copy of his own favourite, the epic poet Ferdusi’s great work Shah Nama, and bought several books dirt cheap from the thieves, who were unable even to read the titles.
After nearly five years of intense fighting between the mujahedeen warlords, half of Kabul had been reduced to a pile of rubble and had lost 50,000 citizens. When Kabul’s inhabitants woke on the morning of 27 September 1996, the city was totally quiet. The previous evening Ahmed Shah Massoud and his army had escaped up towards the Panshir valley.
Two bodies hung from a pole outside the presidential palace. The larger was soaked through with blood from head to foot. It had been castrated, the fingers were crushed, the torso and face battered and there was a bullet hole through the forehead. The other had merely been shot and hanged, the pockets stuffed full of Afghani, the local currency, as a sign of contempt. The bodies were those of former president Muhammad Najibullah and his brother. Najibullah was a hated man. He had been head of the secret police at the time of the Soviet invasion and was said to have ordered the execution of 80,000 so-called enemies of society. He was the country’s president from 1986 to 1992, supported by the Russians. After the mujahedeen coup Massoud became defence minister, with Sibghatullah Mujadidi as president for the first three months followed by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Najibullah sought refuge with the UN after an attempt to flee from Kabul airport was thwarted, and he remained thereafter in confinement in a UN compound in Kabul.
When the Taliban made their way through the eastern districts of Kabul and the Mujahedeen government decided to flee, Massoud invited the prominent prisoner to accompany them. Najibullah feared for his life outside the capital and chose to stay behind with the security guards in the UN building. Besides, as a Pashtoon he reasoned that he could negotiate with Taliban Pashtoons. Early the next morning all the guards had disappeared. White flags - Taliban’s holy colour - flew over the mosques.
Kabul’s inhabitants gathered in disbelief round the pole in Ariana Square. They gazed at the men who hung there and returned quietly home. The war was over. A new war would start - a war that would trample all joy under foot.
The Taliban established law and order, but simultaneously dealt Afghan art and culture the final blow. The regime burnt Sultan’s books and turned up at Kabul Museum carrying axes, towing along with them, as a witness, their own Minister for Culture.
Not much remained in the museum when they arrived. All loose items had been looted during the civil war: potsherds from the time Alexander the Great conquered the country, swords that could have been used in the battles against Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, Persian miniatures and gold coins. Anonymous collectors from all over the world bought most of it. Very few artefacts were saved before the looting started in earnest.
A few enormous sculptures of Afghan kings and princes were left standing, and thousand-year-old Buddha statues and murals. The foot soldiers went to work, exhibiting the same spirit as when they had devastated Sultan’s bookshop. The museum guards cried when the Taliban started chopping away at what remained of the art. They hacked at the sculptures till only the plinth remained, in a heap of dust amidst lumps of clay. It took them half a day to annihilate a thousand years of history. All that remained after the vandals had done was an ornamental tablet, a quotation from the Koran, which the Minister for Culture had thought best left alone.
When the Taliban’s art executioners left the bombed-out museum building - it had also been a frontline target during the civil war - the guards were left standing amongst the debris. Laboriously they gathered up the bits and swept up the dust. They put the bits in boxes and labelled them. Some of the pieces were still identifiable: a hand off one statue, a wavy lock of hair from another. The boxes were put in the basement in the hope that sometime in the future the statues could be restored.
Six months before the Taliban fell the enormous Buddha statues in Bamiyan were blown up. They were close to two thousand years old and Afghanistan’s greatest cultural heritage. The dynamite was so powerful that there were no bits left to gather up.
It was against the backdrop of this regime that Sultan Khan tried to save parts of Afghanistan’s culture. Following the book pyre at the roundabout he bribed someone to get out of prison, and the same day he broke open the seal on the shop. Standing amongst the remnants of his treasures, he cried. He painted big black lines and squiggles over the living creatures in the books the soldiers had overlooked. That was preferable to them being burnt. Then he thought of a better idea - he pasted his business cards over the pictures. Thus he covered the pictures but could just as easily uncover them. At the same time he put his own stamp on the works. It might one day be possible to remove the cards.
But the regime turned relentlessly more ruthless. As the years passed it adhered more and more rigorously to the puritanical line and its goal of living ever more closely by the rules from the era of Muhammad. Once again the Minister for Culture called Sultan in. ‘Someone is out to get you,’ he said, ‘and I cannot protect you.’
That was when, in the summer of 2001, he decided to leave the country. He applied for a visa for himself, his two wives, sons and daughter to settle in Canada. His wives and children lived at that time in Pakistan and loathed the refugee existence. But Sultan knew he could not give up his books. He now owned three bookshops in Kabul. One shop was run by his younger brother, another by his sixteen-year-old son Mansur, and the third he ran himself.
Only a fraction of his books were displayed on the shelves. The majority, about ten thousand, were hidden away in attics all
over Kabul. He could not allow this collection, which he had built up over a period of thirty years, to be lost. He could not allow the Taliban, or other aggressors, to destroy even more of the Afghan soul. Anyhow, he had a secret plan, a dream, for his collection. When the Taliban had gone and a reliable government returned to Afghanistan, he promised himself that he would donate the complete book collection to the looted public library in town, where once hundreds of thousands of books had adorned the shelves.
Owing to the death-threat Sultan Khan and his family were granted a visa to Canada. But he never went. While his wives packed and prepared for the journey, he invented all sorts of excuses to delay. He was expecting some books, the bookshop was threatened, or a relative had died. Something always got in the way.
Then came September 11. When the bombs started to rain down over Afghanistan, Sultan left for Pakistan. He commanded Yunus, one of his younger, unmarried brothers, to stay behind in Kabul and look after the shops.
When the Taliban fell, two months after the terrorist attack on the USA, Sultan was one of the first to arrive back in Kabul. At last he could stock up his shelves with all the books he wanted. The history books with black lines and squiggles he could now sell to foreigners as curiosities, and he could remove the business cards that had been glued over pictures of living creatures. He could once more show off Queen Soraya’s white arms and King Amanullah’s chest, plastered with decorations.
One morning he was in his shop, drinking a cup of steaming tea, watching Kabul wake up. He laid plans for how to realise his dream and thought of a quotation by his favourite poet Ferdusi. ‘To succeed you must sometimes be a wolf and sometimes a lamb.’ The time has come to be a wolf, thought Sultan.
Crime and Punishment
From all sides stones whizzed towards the stake, and most struck. The woman refused to cry out, but a cheer soon rose from the crowd. One powerful man had found an especially good stone, large and jagged, and he threw this with force, aiming it carefully at her body, and it struck so violently in her abdomen that soon the first blood of the afternoon showed through the chaderi. It was this that brought the cheer. Another stone of equal size struck the woman’s shoulder. It brought both blood and cheers.
James A. Michener, Caravans
Sharifa, the pensioned-off wife, is waiting in Peshawar. She has no peace. She knows that Sultan will turn up one of these days, but he can never be bothered to tell her exactly when he is leaving Kabul, so Sharifa expects him home every hour for days on end.
Every meal is prepared in case her husband shows up: a plump chicken, the spinach he loves, the green homemade chilli sauce. On the bed are clean, freshly ironed clothes; letters lie orderly in a box.
The hours pass. The chicken is wrapped up, the spinach can be reheated and the chilli sauce is put back in the cupboard. Sharifa sweeps the floors, washes curtains, busies herself with the perpetual dusting, sits down, sighs, sheds a few tears. It’s not that she misses him. But she misses the life she once had as the wife of an enterprising bookseller, respected and esteemed, the mother of his sons and daughters; the anointed.
Sometimes she hates him for having ruined her life, taken away her children, shamed her in the eyes of the world.
Eighteen years have passed since Sultan and Sharifa got married and two years since he got himself wife number two. Sharifa lives like a divorced woman, but without the freedom granted divorced women. Sultan is still her master. He has decided that she must live in Pakistan in order to look after the house where he keeps his most precious books. Here is the computer, a telephone. From this address he can send off book parcels to clients, receive emails - everything which is impossible in Kabul where post, telephone and computers won’t function. She lives in Pakistan because it suits Sultan.
Divorce is not an alternative. If a woman demands divorce she loses virtually all her rights and privileges. The husband is awarded the children and can even refuse the wife access to them. She is a disgrace to her family, often ostracised, and all property falls to the husband. Sharifa would have to move to the home of one of her brothers.
During the civil war early in the nineties, and for some years under the Taliban, the whole family lived in Peshawar, in the district called Hayatabad, where nine out of ten inhabitants are Afghans. But one by one they moved back to Kabul, the brothers, sisters, Sultan, Sonya, the sons; first sixteen-year-old Mansur, then twelve-year-old Aimal and lastly Eqbal who was fourteen. Only Sharifa and her youngest daughter Shabnam stay behind. They keep hoping that Sultan will take them back to Kabul, to family and friends, and he keeps promising, but something always gets in the way. The tumbledown house in Peshawar, which was meant as a temporary shelter against the bullets and grenades of Kabul, has now become her prison. She cannot move without permission from her husband.
The first year following Sultan’s second marriage, Sharifa lived together with him and the new wife. In Sharifa’s eyes, Sonya was not only stupid but lazy too. Maybe she wasn’t lazy, but Sultan never let her lift a finger. Sharifa cooked, served, washed and made the beds. At first Sultan would lock himself and Sonya into the bedroom for days on end, only occasionally demanding tea or water. Sharifa heard whispering and laughter commingling with sounds that cut her to the heart.
She swallowed her pride and appeared the model wife. Her relatives and girl friends recommended her for first prize in the wife contest. No one ever heard her complain, quarrel with Sonya or show her up.
When the honeymoon was over, and Sultan left the bedroom to attend to his business, the two women were thrown into each other’s company. Sonya powdered her face and tried on new dresses. Sharifa tried to chirp like a fussing mother hen. She took on the heaviest chores and little by little taught Sonya how to make Sultan’s favourite dish, showed her how he liked his clothes organised, the temperature of the water he washed in and other details that a wife should know about her husband.
But oh, the shame! Although it is not unusual for a man to take a second wife, and sometimes even a third, nevertheless, it is humiliating. The slighted wife will always be labelled inadequate. Anyway, that is how Sharifa felt, because Sultan so obviously preferred his younger wife.
It was necessary for Sharifa to justify this new wife of Sultan’s. She had to make up an excuse to show it was not her, Sharifa, who was at fault, but external circumstances that had ousted her.
To anyone who was willing to listen she divulged that a polyp had developed in her womb. It had been removed and the doctor had warned her that if she wanted to survive she could no longer lie with her husband. It was she, Sharifa, who had asked her husband to find a new wife and it was she who had chosen Sonya. After all, he was a man, she said.
In Sharifa’s eyes this imaginary ailment was less shaming than the fact that she, the mother of his children, was no longer up to the mark. After all, he had only followed the doctor’s advice.
When Sharifa really wanted to lay it on thick, she would recount, with sparkling eyes, how she loved Sonya like a sister, and Latifa, her child, like her own daughter.
In contrast to Sultan, men with more than one wife usually keep a balance in the relationships, spending one night with one wife, the next night with the other, for decades. The wives give birth to children who grow up as siblings. The mothers keep an eagle eye on the children’s treatment; no one is favoured in front of the other. They also make sure that they themselves receive the same amount of clothes and gifts as the other wife. Many of these co-wives hate each other intensely and never speak. Others accept that it is the husband’s right to have several wives, and become good friends. After all, the rival will most likely have been married in a put-up job, arranged by the parents and often against her own will. Few young girls’ pipe dream is to be the second wife of an old man. Whereas the first wife gets his youth, she gets old age. In some cases none of the wives really want him in their bed every night and are delighted to be let off the hook.
Sharifa’s beautiful brown eyes, the ones Sultan
once said were the most lovely in Kabul, stare into space. They have lost their radiance and are encircled by heavy lids and soft lines. She discreetly covers her light, blotchy skin with make-up. Her white skin has always compensated for her short legs. Height and fair skin are the most important Afghan status symbols. It has always been a fight to keep up her youthful appearance - she conceals the fact that she is a few years older than her husband. Grey hair is kept at bay by home colouring, but the sad facial features she can do nothing about.
She crosses the floor heavily. There is little to do since her husband took her three sons back to Kabul. The carpets have been swept, the food is ready. She turns on TV and watches an American thriller, a fantasy film. Good-looking heroes fight dragons, monsters and skeletons and conquer evil creatures. Sharifa watches intently, in spite of not understanding the language, English. When the film is over she phones her sister-in-law. Then she gets up and walks over to the window. From the second floor she can see everything that goes on in the backyards below. Head-high brick walls surround the yards. Like Sharifa’s they are all full of clothes hanging out to dry.