The fourth and fifth days trickled past, marked only by changes in the quality of light leaking in through the shutters. At night, short, fierce bursts of automatic weapons fire echoed outside the compound and were answered with stuttering retorts from the gun tower.
During daylight, Mortenson snuck glances through the window’s slats. But the view—of the blank face of the compound’s outer wall— provided no relief from the tedium of the room. Mortenson was desperate to distract himself. But there were only so many times he could read Time’s withering critique of the cultural bias of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, or the breathless account of how sunflowers were becoming North Dakota’s newest cash crop.
The ads were the answer. They were windows home.
At what he judged to be the middle of the fifth night, Mortenson felt a wave of blackness lapping at his feet, surging up to his knees, threatening to drown him in despair. He missed Tara like a limb. He’d told her he’d be back in a day or two and it crushed him that there was no way to comfort her. He would give anything, he thought, to see the picture he’d taken with Tara on their wedding day. In the photo, he held her in his arms in front of the streetcar that had taken them on that enchanted ride. Tara beamed at the camera, looking as happy as he’d ever seen her. He cursed himself for leaving his wallet in his duffel bag at his Peshawar hotel.
Through force of will, Mortenson held the black water at bay, and turned the pages of the magazine, searching for a foothold in the warm dry world he’d left behind. He lingered at an ad for the Chevrolet Classic Estate Wagon, at the pretty suburban mother smiling, from the passenger seat, at something the two adorable children in the back of the safe, fuel-efficient, wood-paneled vehicle were saying to her.
For almost two hours, he pored over a spread selling Kodak Insta-matic Cameras. On the branches of a Christmas tree, hung like ornaments, were photos of an indisputably contented family. A distinguished grandfather, warmly wrapped in a cozy red bathrobe, taught an idealized blond boy how to use his new gift—a fishing pole. A beaming mom looked on while apple-cheeked children unwrapped football helmets and roughhoused with fledgling puppies. Despite the fact that Mortenson’s own childhood Christmases had been spent in Africa, and the closest he had ever come to a traditional tree had been a small artificial pine they dusted off each year, he clung to this lifesaver flung from the world he knew, the world that wasn’t this kerosene-smelling room and these malevolent men.
Dawn of his sixth morning in captivity found Mortenson’s eyes tearing up over an ad for a WaterPik Oral Hygiene Appliance. The tagline read, “A smile should be more than a memory,” and the text expressed unemotional information about a “bacteria called plaque that grows and thrives below the gumline,” but Mortenson was far beyond language. The photo of three generations of a stable American family standing on the porch of a solid brick home was almost more than he could bear. The way they all flashed dazzling smiles and leaned into each other implied levels of love and concern, the feelings he had for his Tara, the feelings no one here had for him.
He sensed, before he saw, someone standing over his bundle of bedding. Mortenson looked up, into the eyes of a large man. His silvery beard was trimmed in a scholarly fashion, and he smiled kindly as he greeted Mortenson in Pashto, then said, “So you must be the American.” In English.
Mortenson stood up to shake his hand and the room spun uncontrollably. For four days, as he’d become increasingly depressed, he’d refused everything but rice and tea. The man grabbed his shoulders, steadying him, and called for breakfast.
Between mouthfuls of warm chapatti, Mortenson made up for six days without speaking. When he asked the kindly man’s name he paused significantly before saying, “Just call me Khan,” Waziristan’s equivalent of “Smith.”
Though he was Wazir, “Khan” had been educated in a British school in Peshawar and spoke with the clipped cadences of his school days. He didn’t explain why he had come, but it was understood he had been summoned to take stock of the American. Mortenson told him about his work in Baltistan, spinning the tale out over pots of green tea. He explained that he planned to build many more schools for Pakistan’s most neglected children, and he’d come to Waziristan to see if his services were wanted here.
He waited anxiously for Khan’s response, hoping his detention would be declared a misunderstanding and he’d soon be on his way back to Peshawar. But he got no such comfort from the bearlike man before him. Khan picked up the Time magazine and paged through it distractedly, his mind obviously elsewhere. He paused at an ad for the U.S. Army and Mortenson sensed danger. Pointing to a picture of a woman in camouflage operating a field radio, Khan asked, “Your American military sends women into battle nowadays, does it?”
“Not usually,” Mortenson said, searching for diplomacy, “but women in our culture are free to choose any career.” He felt even that response contained the kernel of an offense. His mind raced through subjects where they might find common ground.
“My wife is about to give birth to our first child, a zoi, a son,” Mortenson said. “And I need to get home for his arrival.”
Several months earlier Tara had had an ultrasound done, and Mortenson had seen the fuzzy aquatic image of his new daughter. “But I knew that for a Muslim the birth of a son is a really big deal,” Mortenson says. “I felt bad about lying, but I thought the birth of a son might make them let me go.”
Khan continued frowning over the army ad as if he’d heard nothing. “I told my wife I’d be home already,” Mortenson prodded. “And I’m sure she’s really worried. Can I telephone her to tell her I’m all right?”
“There are no telephones here,” the man who called himself Khan said.
“What if you took me to one of the Pakistani army posts? I could call from there?”
Khan sighed. “I’m afraid that’s not possible,” he said. Then he looked Mortenson in the eye, a lingering look that hinted at sympathies he wasn’t free to extend. “Don’t worry,” he said, gathering the tea things and taking his leave. “You’ll be just fine.”
On the afternoon of the eighth day, Khan called on Mortenson again. “Are you a fan of football?” he asked.
Mortenson probed the question for dangerous hidden depths and decided there were none. “Sure,” he said. “I played football in col, uh, university,” he said, and as he translated from American to British English he realized Khan meant soccer.
“Then we will entertain you with a match,” Khan said, beckoning Mortenson toward the door. “Come.”
He followed Khan’s broad back out the unbolted front gate and, dizzy in the wide open space, had his first glimpse of his surroundings in a week. At the bottom of a sloping gravel road, by the minarets of a crumbling mosque, he could see a highway bisecting the valley. And on the far side, not a mile distant, he saw the fortified towers of a Pakistani army post. Mortenson considered making a run for it, then remembered the sniper in his captors’ gun tower. So he followed Khan uphill, to a wide stony field where two dozen young, bearded men he’d never seen were playing a surprisingly accomplished game of soccer, trying to thread a ball through goalposts of empty stacked ammunition crates.
Khan led him to a white plastic chair that had been set by the side of the field in his honor. And Mortenson dutifully watched the players kicking up clouds of dust that adhered to their sweaty shalwar kamiz, before a cry came out from the gun tower. The sentry had spotted movement at the army post. “Terribly sorry,” Khan said, herding Mortenson quickly back behind the compound’s high earthen walls.
That night, Mortenson fought for sleep and lost. By his bearing and the respect others showed him, Mortenson realized, Khan was most likely an emerging Taliban commander. But what did that mean for him? Was the soccer match a sign that he’d soon be released? Or the equivalent of a last cigarette?
At 4:00 a.m., when they came for him, he had his answer. Khan put on the blindfold himself, draped a blanket over Mortenson’s shoulders, and led him gently by the
arm out to the bed of the pickup truck full of men. “Back then, before 9/11, beheading foreigners wasn’t in fashion,” Mortenson says. “And I didn’t think being shot was such a bad way to die. But the idea that Tara would have to raise our child on her own and would probably never find out what happened to me made me crazy. I could picture her pain and uncertainty going on and on and that seemed like the most horrible thing of all.”
In the windy bed of the pickup, someone offered Mortenson a cigarette, but he declined. He had no need to make a hospitable impression anymore, and a cigarette wasn’t the last taste he wanted to have in his mouth. For the half hour that they drove, he pulled the blanket tightly around his shoulders, but couldn’t stop shivering. But when the pickup turned down a dirt road, toward the sound of intense automatic weapons fire, Mortenson broke out in a sweat.
The driver locked up the brakes and the truck slid to a stop amid the deafening cacophony of dozens of AK-47s firing on full automatic. Khan unwrapped Mortenson’s blindfold and squeezed him to his chest. “You see,” he said. “I told you everything would work out for the best.” Over Khan’s shoulder Mortenson saw hundreds of big, bearded Wazir, dancing around bonfires, shooting their weapons in the air. On their firelit faces, Mortenson was amazed to see not bloodlust, but rapture.
The lashkar he’d come with jumped out of the pickup whooping with glee and added fire from their weapons to the fusillade. It had to be almost dawn, but Mortenson saw pots boiling and goats roasting over the flames.
“What is this?” he yelled, following Khan into the frenzy of dancing men, not trusting that his eight days of danger had finally passed. “Why am I here?”
“It is best if I don’t tell you too much,” Khan shouted over the gunfire. “Let’s just say we considered other… contingencies. There was a dispute and we might have had a big big problem. But now everything is settled by jirga and we’re throwing a party. A party before we take you back to Peshawar.”
Mortenson still didn’t believe him, but the first handful of rupees helped to convince him his ordeal was finally over. The guard with the bullet-creased forehead stumbled toward him, his grinning face lit by both flames and hashish. In his hand he waved a wad of pink hundred-rupee notes, as filthy and tattered as he was, before stuffing them into the chest pocket of Mortenson’s shalwar.
Mortenson, speechless, turned to Khan for an explanation. “For your schools!” he shouted in Mortenson’s ear. “So, Inshallah, you’ll build many more!”
Dozens of other Wazir ceased firing their weapons long enough to embrace Mortenson, bring him steaming slivers of goat, and make similar donations. As the day dawned, and his stomach and shalwar pocket swelled, Mortenson felt the fear he’d carried pressed to his chest for eight days deflate.
Giddily, he joined in the celebration, goat grease trickling down his eight-day beard, performing the old Tanzanian steps he thought he’d forgotten to shouts of encouragement from the Wazir, dancing with the absolute bliss, with the wild abandon, bequeathed by freedom.
Chapter 14
Equilibrium
The seeming opposition between life and death is now cut through.
Do not thrash or lunge or flee. There is no longer a container or anything
to be contained. All is resolved in dazzling measureless freedom.
—from the Warrior Song of King Gezar
THE STRANGE SUBCOMPACT parked in Mortenson’s Montana driveway displayed more mud than paint. The custom license plate said “baby catcher.”
Mortenson walked into his snug home, amazed, as he was each time he entered it, that the quaint old house belonged to him. He put the grocery bags filled with things Tara had been craving—fresh fruit and half a dozen different pints of Haagen-Dazs—down on the kitchen table and went to look for his wife.
He found her in their small upstairs bedroom, in the company of a large woman. “Roberta’s here, sweetie,” Tara said from her prone position on the bed. Mortenson, in Bozeman only a week, had been in Pakistan for three months, and was still getting used to the sight of his small wife looking like an overripe fruit. Mortenson nodded at the midwife sitting on the end of her bed.
“Hi.”
“Howdy,” Roberta said, in her Montana twang, then turned to Tara. “I’ll just fill him in on what we were dialoguing about. We were discussing where the birthing should take place, and Tara told me she’d like to bring your baby girl into the world right here, in bed. And I agreed. This room has a very peaceful energy.”
“That’s fine by me,” Mortenson said, taking Tara’s hand. And it was. As a former nurse he was happy to keep his wife away from hospitals. Roberta gave them a phone number and told them to call her log cabin in the mountains outside Bozeman any time, day or night, whenever the contractions began.
For the rest of the week, Mortenson hovered so protectively over Tara that she felt suffocated by his attention and sent him out walking so she could nap. After Waziristan, Bozeman’s leafy fall perfection felt too good to be true. These long walks through the charming wooded streets around his home, past Montana State students throwing Fris-bees to their dogs in well-tended parks, was the antidote he needed to eight days in an airless room.
After he’d been returned safely to his Peshawar hotel, pockets crammed full of nearly four hundred dollars in pink hundred-rupee notes donated by the Wazir, Mortenson had taken Tara’s photo with him to a government telephone office and held it before him as he phoned his wife in the middle of Sunday night in America.
Tara was already awake.
“Hi, sweetie, I’m okay,” he said through a crackling connection.
“Where were you, what happened?”
“I was detained.”
“What do you mean detained? By the government?” He heard the tight fear in Tara’s voice.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said, trying not to frighten his wife any further. “But I’m coming home. I’ll see you in a few days.” On the three long flights home, he repeatedly pulled Tara’s picture out of his wallet, letting his eyes linger on it, taking long sips of medicine.
In Montana, Tara was recovering, too. “The first few days I didn’t hear from him, I figured, you know, that’s just Greg, losing track of time. But after a week I was a mess. I considered calling the State Department and talked it over with my mother, but I knew Greg was in a closed area and we could create an international incident. I felt very vulnerable, alone and pregnant, and whatever kind of panic you can imagine, I probably felt. When he finally called from Peshawar, I’d started forcing myself to face the fact that he could be dead.”
At seven in the morning on September 13, 1996, exactly a year since the fateful evening at the Fairmont Hotel, Tara felt her first contraction.
At 7:12 p.m., accompanied by a tape of chanting Tibetan monks that her father had chosen, Amira Eliana Mortenson made her first official appearance on the planet. “Amira,” because it meant “female leader” in Persian. And “Eliana,” which means “gift of God,” in Chagga, the tribal language of the Kilimanjaro region, after Mortenson’s late beloved sister Christa Eliana Mortenson.
After the midwife left, Mortenson lay in bed, cocooning with his wife and daughter. He placed a multicolored tomar Haji Ali had given him around his daughter’s neck. Then he struggled with the cork on the first bottle of champagne he’d ever purchased.
“Give it to me,” Tara said, laughing, and traded Mortenson the baby for the bottle. As his wife popped the cork, Mortenson covered his daughter’s small soft head with his large hand. He felt a happiness so expansive it made his eyes swim. It just wasn’t possible, he thought, that those eight days in that kerosene-smelling room and this moment, in this cozy upstairs bedroom in a house on a tree-lined street, snug in the embrace of his family, were part of the same world.
“What is it?” Tara asked.
“Shhh,” he said, smoothing the furrow from her forehead with his free hand before accepting a glass of champagne, “Shhh.”
The ph
one call from Seattle demonstrated the planet’s relentless march toward equilibrium. Jean Hoerni wanted to know exactly when he could see a photograph of a completed Korphe School. Mortenson told him about the kidnapping and his plans to return to Pakistan after spending a few weeks getting to know his new daughter.
Hoerni was so shrill and impatient about the progress of the school that Mortenson asked what was troubling him. Hoerni bristled, before admitting that he’d been diagnosed with myelofibrosis, a fatal form of leukemia. His doctors told him he could be dead in a matter of months. “I must see that school before I die,” Hoerni said. “Promise me you’ll bring me a picture as soon as possible.”
“I promise,” Mortenson said, through the knot of grief that had formed in his throat for this ornery old man, this contrarian who had for some reason chosen to fasten his hopes on the unlikeliest of heroes—him.
In Korphe that fall it was clear but unseasonably cold. The weather drove the village families off their roofs early to huddle around smoky fires. Mortenson had torn himself away from his new family after only a few weeks, trying to keep his promise to Hoerni. Each day Mortenson and the village men would bundle blankets over their shalwars and climb on top of the school to fit the final beams in place. Mortenson kept a nervous eye trained on the sky, worried that snow would shut them down once again.