Farishta Read online

  Harry was dozing even as he clung to the door handle, his head bobbing with each bump. His driver and vehicle commander, the most spit-and-polish pair at the PRT, were silent—keeping their eyes on the road that under a sudden downpour was now only visible through the triangles made by their thumping wiper blades. When the rain ended and the sky brightened from dark pewter to gunmetal gray, we crossed a narrow bridge spanning the Balkh River and pulled onto a remarkably smooth dirt road. I was asleep within minutes.

  “Angela.” Harry was tapping my arm. “We’re almost here. You’ve been out for the past hour.”

  Our convoy rolled to a stop before a large assembly of bearded men in snowy white turbans. They all wore the traditional pajama-like brown and beige shalwar kameez topped with gray blankets or dark wool overcoats. Despite the cold, they had leather sandals strapped to their bare feet.

  The men stared at me briefly when I got out, but quickly turned their attention to the British colonel, who was holding the certificates, printed on one of the copy machines at the PRT, that would confirm their compliance with the Interior Ministry’s orders to hand over excess weapons and ammunition to the government. A blue UN truck, idling nearby, would cart their munitions off to a cantonment, where they would be inventoried and destroyed or turned over to the Afghan Army.

  Rahim barely acknowledged my presence as he climbed out of the Beast and moved to Harry’s side to translate his remarks into Dari for the assembled mujahideen. The Afghan men had formed tight clusters around the grenades, rocket launchers, machine guns, and boxes of ammunition that were laid out in orderly rows on three blood-red carpets spread on the dirt in front of the local commander’s walled compound.

  “Honorable Commander and heroic fighters.” Harry scanned the men’s faces to be sure he had their attention. “I would like to thank you on behalf of your president and the PRT for your willingness to hand over your weapons and ammunition to assure a peaceful future for your country.” Rahim’s translation of Harry’s remarks was clear and precise. The men nodded gravely.

  Harry paused to allow Rahim to finish, then heaped more praise on the men for driving out the Taliban in 2001 and for their willingness to hand over their tanks and armored personnel carriers to the UN the previous year.

  I was observing the ceremony a few yards away from Harry and listening to the men around me discuss their hidden caches of weapons—the ones we would never see. Their other conversation was about me.

  “Who is this woman? ”

  “She must be one of the British officer’s wives, but why would he bring her here?”

  Rahim trailed Harry as he strode slowly down the neat rows of munitions, hands clasped behind his back, brow furrowed, and lips pursed. Suddenly, Harry stopped and turned in my direction. “Good gracious, Angela, I have completely forgotten to introduce you. Please join us over here and allow me to present you to the commander and his men.”

  As I stepped forward, Harry introduced me to the silent, staring crowd.

  When he mentioned the millions of dollars the United States was spending on reconstruction in the north, the old man who had speculated about my marital status spat in the dirt and grumbled, “What reconstruction? The American money is going to the Pashtun friends of the president and rich foreign contractors.” Rahim did not translate that remark.

  After Harry handed out the certificates, we followed the commander into a room inside his compound. Thick cushions lined the walls of this narrow space that was lit only by small openings in the mud walls.

  A worn green oilcloth unrolled in front of us, covered the length of the room. As soon as we were seated, barefoot young men padded down the oilcloth, placing cups, bottles of soda, and large warm rounds of fresh baked naan in front of the guests. More men pushed their way into the crowded room and squeezed onto the cushions.

  Hot platters of meat and rice were set before the guests. The men kept their eyes on Harry and as soon as he dipped his fingers into the great pyramid of greasy rice, tore off a chunk of tender lamb, chewed it, and smiled, they began ripping the naan into small pieces and devouring their own trays of qabale palau.

  The conversations about me continued and I listened, amused.

  “So this woman is from the American government?” growled a young man, licking his fingers and pulling another strip of lamb from a bone buried in the rice. “Is she a soldier?”

  “She looks like one of our women, but for those clothes.”

  “Why is she dressed like a man?”

  “Why would her husband let her do this? ”

  Rahim did not translate any of these comments for Harry or for me.

  Cleanup was fast and efficient. Three of the barefoot youths collected the bottles and cups. Four others picked up the half-eaten trays of palau, while the remaining two rolled up the oilcloth, which still contained large uneaten pieces of bread, bits of rice, and portions of lamb. They carried the cloth into the next hallway, where thirty more men were waiting to eat. It was unrolled, and the used cups and half-eaten food trays set in front of the second string of diners who devoured our leftovers and drank from our cups with gusto. The unseen women and children in the kitchen, who had prepared the food, would be given whatever scraps the men did not eat.

  Harry suggested I ride back to camp in my vehicle with Fuzzy, Jenkins, and Rahim. “I won’t be very good company, Angela, since I’m certain to be sound asleep for the entire trip.”

  Fuzzy and Jenkins, who had remained with the Beast while we ate, were anxious to get back to the PRT before the cooks stopped serving dinner. I was too drowsy to talk to Rahim, who sat stiffly on his side of the backseat staring out the window. Jenkins had turned up the heat, adding to my lethargy. I dozed off as soon as we pulled onto the dirt road and headed for home.

  Just before sunset, I was startled awake by the horn and headlights of an approaching truck. Jenkins swerved violently, narrowly avoiding a collision with the brightly painted and dangerously overloaded vehicle.

  “Fucking asshole!” he muttered. “Oops, sorry, Angela,” he added as he forced the Beast back into our lane. Fuzzy glared at him but said nothing.

  Rahim ignored Jenkins’s outburst and still had his back to me. We rode in silence until we passed another one of the stupas.

  “Rahim,” I said, formulating a question I hoped would break through his wall of silence. “Do you know anything about the origins of these mounds?”

  He surprised me by responding to my question immediately. “They’re the remains of ancient mud-brick and earthen temple complexes,” he replied in a weary monotone. “Grave robbers long ago removed everything of value, but most of the mounds have never been excavated by professional archaeologists. They were Buddhist temples almost two thousand years ago, long before my country became an Islamic nation. Some are even older.”

  “Have you met the men who are excavating the Greek ruins near Balkh?” I asked, wishing that Professor Mongibeaux were here to help me reach out to this sullen young man.

  “I have heard about the work of the French archaeologists there, but I have not met them,” said Rahim in a disinterested voice.

  “Fuzzy, we’ve seen that dig, haven’t we?” asked Jenkins.

  Fuzzy nodded. “It looks like one of them tomb-raider movies.”

  “It’s bloody amazing,” added Jenkins. “Greek columns and Buddha heads all dug out of the same pit! ”

  All conversation ceased when the sun briefly set fire to the Hindu Kush and plunged into the western desert. Ahead of us, in the blood orange eastern sky, lightning pulsed inside an expanding thunderhead.

  “Beautiful,” I said aloud.

  “Yes,” replied Rahim, turning his head in my direction to look at the mountains.

  “Rahim, have you spent your whole life in Mazār? ”

  He sighed and shook his head. “No. My sisters and I were born here, but my parents took us to Karachi when the Taliban came to power in 1996. I finished high school and started university there,
but my father wanted to come home in 2001. We are Tajik and he thought he should support the Northern Alliance in their fight against the Taliban. He died of a heart attack a few weeks after our return, so now I must work as an interpreter to support my mother and three sisters.”

  “Your English is very good. How long have you worked at the PRT? ”

  Fuzzy turned around and looked at Rahim. “Tell Angela how the U.S. Special Forces blokes recruited you.”

  “Right,” said Jenkins, laughing. “He had to get his mother’s permission, Angela! No offense, Rahim, but you’re the only one at the PRT who’s seen any combat up here. It’s a great story.”

  “Okay, no offense taken, Jenkins. I’ll tell it.” Rahim began to relax in my presence for the first time. He curled one leg up, stretched his arm over the back of the seat, and faced me directly.

  “For several days after the fighting started in Mazār, my mother wouldn’t let me leave the house. Parts of the city were being bombed, but we didn’t know who was doing it since the Taliban had cut the phone lines and they controlled the only radio station. Nobody had cell phones then. We knew from BBC shortwave reports that there was fighting in the south, and that the Americans had sent soldiers and airplanes to attack the Taliban at Tora Bora, but there was no reporting on the fighting up here.

  “One morning when the shooting and bombing stopped for a few hours, my mother told me to go downtown and find some food for our family. I was buying bread near the Blue Mosque, still concealed under my scraggly teenage, Taliban-required beard, when a truck with American Special Forces soldiers drove up. One soldier jumped out and came over to buy naan. He greeted me in Dari, and I replied in English. His Dari was terrible,” Rahim said, laughing softly.

  “I had studied English in Mazār and for four more years in Pakistan. When I answered him in his own language, he immediately asked me if I wanted a job as an interpreter. He told me I would have to shave my beard.”

  Rahim closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the seat. “I needed the work, but I told him I’d have to ask my mother’s permission, so he and his men drove me to my house. They told my mother how much they would pay me. At first, she said no, but I insisted that I wanted to do it and reminded her that we had no more money for food. She finally said yes if the soldiers promised to keep me safe. They promised.

  “I was nineteen years old. By late the next afternoon, I was pinned down by machine gun fire inside Qala-i-Jangi fort, where the Taliban were making their last stand against the Northern Alliance and the Americans. The soldiers had already broken their promise to my mother.” He laughed.

  “I crawled around in the mud behind your soldiers, eating their revolting MREs, translating instructions to the Northern Alliance fighters, and praying to Allah that my mother’s son would not be brought home to her wrapped in a sheet. I am not a soldier, Angela, and I was very afraid,” he admitted with surprising candor.

  “The next day, the Northern Alliance and your soldiers flooded the tunnels and drove out the remaining Taliban, including an American. It was horrible. I have never told my mother about this battle. One of the Northern Alliance generals captured several thousand Taliban in Kunduz, brought them to our province in shipping containers, and left them to die in the desert. Some of them were only boys!”

  Rahim was so young to have experienced such horrors, although I had to admit he was the same age as most of the soldiers. He seemed to have survived it all without serious residual trauma, but I felt a strong desire to shield him from anything like that in the future.

  “Many, many people were killed during those days of fighting, Angela. If my mother found out, she would have forbidden me to work for the soldiers after that, but I liked being an interpreter and my family needed the money. We still need the money,” he added with a heavy sigh.

  “I would like to return to the university, but I must support my family so I stay with the PRT.”

  The sky was now almost dark, and Mazār was about thirty miles away. When rain began to pound the Beast with fat drops, Jenkins and the colonel’s driver ahead of us slowed for a procession of small children crossing the road. Each little boy and girl was bent under an enormous bundle of sticks and brush.

  “Where are these children going?” I asked Rahim.

  “They are bringing fuel back to their village so their mothers can cook,” he replied. “As you can see, we Afghans have cut down most of our trees for firewood. Long ago, much of my country was covered with forests of cedar, pine, oak, and fir. We had wild animals living in the mountains. Now even many of our fruit orchards and vineyards have been chopped down for cooking fuel.”

  I watched the sad parade of children disappear into the darkness.

  “We used to export dried fruits and nuts all over the world, Angela. Now all we export is opium paste,” said Rahim bitterly.

  “I still don’t understand why these little children are out gathering firewood so late,” I replied. “Isn’t it dangerous? ”

  “Angela, Afghan men do not do this sort of work, and the women are not allowed out in public, so it is the village children who must perform this task every day. Sometimes they go onto the property of other farmers to find fuel. They do it in the evening so they won’t be caught and beaten.”

  “But if there are no trees left, what are they collecting? ” I asked.

  “They cut down bushes and reeds that grow along the irrigation ditches. Unfortunately, the more of these bushes the children remove, the more erosion our farmers suffer. It is a vicious cycle, but how can they stop it? Their mothers need fire to cook.”

  “We see kids like those little ones every time we go out on patrol,” said Jenkins.

  Fuzzy nodded. “Yeah, poor buggers should be in school.”

  “You’re right about that, Fuzzy,” said Rahim.

  “Rahim, how do you think the handover ceremony went today,” I asked, changing the subject. I wanted to take advantage of this temporary break in his wall of silence.

  “It was just like all the others,” he said. “The khans order their men to put out their oldest and most useless weapons for the colonel to admire. Everyone makes a speech. I translate. The muj collect their certificates, the colonel reports their compliance to Kabul, and the major weapons caches remain concealed.”

  I was stunned at his sudden burst of candor, although it confirmed what I’d overheard when the men standing near me had been discussing their hidden weapons caches. “So this has happened before? ”

  “All the time,” he replied. “Right, fellows? ” he asked Jenkins and Fuzzy.

  “I’m afraid it’s true,” said Jenkins.

  We were now driving in the dark, with only oncoming headlights visible through the rain. There was no shoulder on this road. Overloaded trucks, many with only one headlight, continued to speed by us with inches to spare.

  I was growing to like this quiet young Afghan, no matter how unwilling he was to like me. He was direct and honest—and though I hated to think it, he was about the age my son would have been.

  “What did you study at university? ”

  “Architecture,” he replied. “I had a wonderful Afghan professor in my first and only year at university in Pakistan. He wanted to start a renaissance in traditional building practices, using the earthen wall and mud-brick designs of our ancestors with a few modern alterations. He teaches in Germany now, but he has many followers in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I continue to study his writings on my own,” he added, patting a worn textbook on the seat next to him.

  “Today in my country, only farmers still build the old way, but it is our way. It uses our Afghan earth and dung and chopped straw, it is beautiful, and it is perfectly adapted to our climate. City people stupidly have great disdain for traditional architecture. They want so-called ‘modern’ cement and cinder-block buildings, which require heating and air-conditioning.

  “Someday when I get my degree, I will design beautiful buildings that respect our ancient architect
ural customs. I will make my people proud again,” he said in a voice that resonated with determination.

  Jenkins turned off the main highway, and we bounced down the last quarter mile to the PRT. The Beast’s headlights glinted off the deep pools of water ahead of us.

  “The power must have gone out while we were away,” I said, noting the darkened buildings on both sides of the road. This was the first time I’d been outside the PRT at night.

  “Angela,” snapped Rahim, “we have not had electricity in Mazār for weeks.”

  “What do you mean? ” I said. “The power was on when we left the PRT this morning.”

  “The PRT runs on electricity from generators, Angela. Can’t you hear them roaring day and night?”

  He was right, of course. I heard the generators all the time. They had kept me awake my first night at the PRT, but had rapidly become background noise, which I no longer noticed. It had never occurred to me why the PRT would have power when the rest of Mazār did not.

  Rahim wasn’t finished. “Only the wealthy in Mazār can afford their own generators and diesel fuel. Look around you, Angela. Where do you see lighted buildings?” he demanded.

  It was then I noticed for the first time that only the PRT, a few sprawling compounds owned by warlords in our neighborhood, and the Kefayat Wedding Club several blocks away with its illuminated plastic palm trees, were lit up and visible through the rain.

  “Why is there no power? ” I asked. A flush of shame rose in my cheeks. Was I so cosseted in the PRT that I hadn’t noticed the darkness that surrounded us every night?

  “Angela, do you not know that most of Mazār’s meager supply of electricity comes from across the river in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan?” asked Rahim, as though he were addressing a child.

  “If the governor doesn’t pay the bill, or the lines break, or our northern neighbors don’t have enough power to sell to us, there is nothing we can do.” He turned his back on me and stared silently out the window at the dark shadows of men drinking tea in the few shops illuminated by flickering kerosene lamps.