Farishta Page 11

  SEVENTEEN

  January 18, 2005

  “You seem to be picking up far more information than I ever have,” Harry said, handing me the report I’d written on the weapons handover. “I’d appreciate it if you don’t mind coming with me to all my meetings outside of camp.”

  “I’d love it, Harry. That’s why I’m here.”

  Much to Rahim’s relief, Harry and I didn’t need him for the frequent disarmament discussions with local UN officials since everyone at those meetings spoke English. Despite our friendly conversation on the trip back from Sholgara, Rahim had made it abundantly clear that he wished to spend as little time as possible in my presence.

  Since my language skills had to be kept secret, we brought Rahim along to translate the first time Harry and I went to see Governor Daoud, the former warlord who controlled Balkh Province. Rahim made a point of sitting as far away from me as possible.

  Harry frequently saw the governor to convey complaints the PRT received from delegations of Hazara men. Under the Taliban, the Hazara, a minority sect, were brutally massacred. Tens of thousands had fled to Iran and Pakistan, leaving behind their land and possessions.

  At least once a month, small groups of Hazaras bundled against the cold in their gray blankets appeared at the gates of the PRT to deliver handwritten requests for help in recovering their lands. Their letters, always written by a scribe in elaborate Perso-Arabic script and marked in purple ink with the fingerprints of the illiterate petitioners, detailed their repeated accusations of land theft against Daoud’s sub-commanders. We could offer no help other than our useless promises to hand their petitions over to the very Afghan authorities they believed had taken their property.

  The first time I arrived at Daoud’s office with Harry and Rahim, a member of the governor’s staff escorted us with much bowing, scraping, and fluttering of hands into a large reception hall. It was a garishly furnished room with high ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and overstuffed brocade chairs on gilded legs—a stark contrast, I would soon learn, to the cramped, musty offices of governors in the other northern provinces.

  Daoud had led thousands of mujahideen against the Russians and then against the Taliban. After the expulsion of the Taliban, he had been engaged for several years in combat for control of the northern provinces with his former Northern Alliance ally, General Kabir. Both men had voluntarily given up their tanks and heavy weapons and agreed to an uneasy truce in late 2004. Harry was convinced that the presence of the PRT in Mazār was the sole check on both men’s desire to wield absolute power in the north.

  With great fanfare the governor swept into his office, followed by his entourage, thirty minutes after we had already consumed several cups of tea awaiting his arrival. I was prepared for such behavior. Traditional displays of power in this part of the world required that supplicants be kept cooling their heels for at least this long. With his tardy arrival, Daoud had indicated that he considered us to be the “supplicants.”

  Despite walking with a severe limp, this stooped, white-haired man radiated an aura of unquestioned power. The governor greeted us with a slight bow and brushed an invisible piece of lint from his green silk cape. His beard was neatly clipped and, like the other men in the room, he wore a snowy white turban.

  Harry presented me to the governor, who regarded me silently while Rahim translated. The governor greeted me in Dari and awaited my response.

  I replied with a simple Dari greeting and extended my hand, which he took briefly, then dropped. “So you speak our language? ” he said, adjusting his glasses and staring at me with unreadable black eyes.

  When I hesitated Rahim jumped in, “Wali Sahib, the woman only speaks a small amount of Dari. I am here to interpret for her and the colonel.” The governor’s eyes remained trained on mine.

  “Do you not use her name?” he asked Rahim sharply.

  “Yes, sir, I call her Angela,” Rahim replied, lowering his eyes in apology.

  “Angela. What does this mean in our language?” the governor asked Rahim, who was now watching me.

  As I held the governor’s gaze, I heard Rahim answer, “It means ‘angel,’ farishta in Dari.”

  “Farishta,” the governor repeated slowly. “Well then, please be seated, Farishta-jan, and let us begin this meeting.”

  I could see that Rahim was uncomfortable with the governor’s reply. He knew, as did I, that I had just been insulted. What little authority I had as a representative of the U.S. government had been casually dismissed by the governor’s use of the familiar jan, a Dari term of affection among friends and family members. One did not use jan with strangers, especially in an official setting, and I knew Daoud would never use it with Harry. In this case affection was not the governor’s intent. By daring to address me in public with such familiarity, he was ensuring that everyone in the room knew he did not consider me to be on an equal footing with the British colonel.

  Male servants entered silently to refill our cups with tea and replenish cut-crystal bowls with the pistachios, green raisins, and sugar candies we had been munching while waiting for the governor. Electric heaters blasted warm air from the ceiling.

  While the governor sat stiffly in his throne-like chair, Harry presented the PRT’s current list of complaints. The governor responded, as Harry had predicted, with vague promises to create a committee that would investigate the latest charges of land theft from the Hazaras. He assured us that we would be summoned to meet again at an unspecified future date to receive his committee’s report.

  Sitting on the governor’s left, in a dark blue uniform with red epaulettes and three silver stars on each shoulder was his new chief of police, a senior Pashtun policeman from Jalalabad, whose scraggly beard and beaked nose reminded me of Fidel Castro. The police chief traveled everywhere with a Pashto interpreter since he did not speak a word of Dari, which made him an odd choice by the central government to lead a Dari-speaking, provincial police force in northern Afghanistan.

  The requirement for Rahim to interpret everything from Dari into English for Harry, back into Dari for the governor, and then for the police chief’s personal interpreter to repeat everything one more time in Pashto, tripled the length of our meeting. This, along with the endless pouring and drinking of green tea and the governor’s thirty-minute absence from the reception room to say his afternoon prayers, stretched what should have been a one-hour meeting into three and one-half hours with no bathroom breaks for the governor’s captive audience. To say it was taxing would be an understatement.

  Nothing concrete was accomplished, and neither Rahim nor I had any idea what the Pashtuns were saying to one another. That, I presumed, would be one of Major Davies’s responsibilities.

  I had seen little of Davies since his arrival five days ago. He had spent all of his time behind closed doors in the intelligence cell to begin the task of sorting out the mess his incompetent predecessor had left behind.

  After that first meeting, and to Rahim’s great relief, Harry began rotating interpreters each time we met with the governor or any other official, so I could start assessing the accuracy of each one’s translations. They all appeared to be providing correct accounts of what was being said, and I hoped that soon I would be able to end this ruse and start using my Dari. There was still no word from the PRT’s head interpreter, Professor Sayeed, who remained in Kabul recovering from his illness.

  “Angela, did I mention that Edwin Trumbull, the British diplomat who was based here last year, will be coming up to Mazār from Kabul next week to make his official farewell calls?” asked Harry as we returned to the PRT from another meeting with the governor.

  “No, you didn’t. How did he and Brooks get along?” I asked.

  “Not well,” Harry said with a shrug. “Brooks had been at the PRT for more than six months before Trumbull arrived with the first British regiment. There were some territorial issues, which I don’t believe they ever really resolved. For the most part, they functioned independently.�
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  “So what’s Trumbull like?”

  “I’ll reserve my comments on Trumbull and let you make your own judgment when you meet him, Angela,” Harry replied with a sympathetic smile. “I’ll be in Kabul for meetings while he’s here, but you must definitely arrange to go with him on his calls. It will be an excellent opportunity for you to get to know some of the key political players in the region.”

  “That would be terrific,” I said, embarrassed by my lack of solo appointments outside the wire after several weeks at the PRT.

  It was not to be.

  The day after Harry left for his meetings in Kabul, I was standing in the chow line when I spotted an unfamiliar civilian pulling a tray from the cart. I walked up and introduced myself to Edwin Trumbull.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Morgan,” he said. “I heard you arrived a few weeks ago and that you’ve been ill. Hope you’re on the mend,” he added, adjusting his glasses to examine the steaming trays of roast pork and lamb chops.

  “I’d love to join you this week on your farewell calls,” I said as we moved together through the chow line.

  “Right,” he said with a pained look on his face. He set his tray down and removed his glasses. “Unfortunately, Miss Morgan, I’m afraid that’s just not in the cards. I have worked very hard to develop contacts for Her Majesty’s government, and I don’t want these people to think that I’m now handing them off to an American. Nothing personal, mind you, but I am planning to introduce my replacement in absentia, and I don’t want any confusion about which governments you and I are representing. I’m sure you understand.”

  He held my gaze and awaited my reaction. With a lump in my throat and my pulse suddenly in high gear, I took a deep breath and fought to suppress the tears that were about to betray my vulnerability. I was speechless, stunned, and offended at his blunt refusal to my very reasonable request.

  Trumbull scooped boiled potatoes onto his plate and continued to stare at me, his raised eyebrows forming thin arches over his drooping lids. “I’m confident your predecessor, Mr. Brooks, whom I remember with great fondness, left you with detailed notes and letters of introduction, which you can use to make your own calls.”

  I was ashamed to admit that Brooks had left me nothing but a cell phone with abbreviated names that I couldn’t decipher and stacks of documents that were going to take me months to sort through. I had no ready reply to Trumbull’s withering sarcasm and finally lowered my eyes in embarrassed silence.

  Trumbull grabbed his tray, took a few steps toward the officers’ mess, then turned to hurl another dart in my direction. “Oh, by the way, I’ve been invited to a reception tomorrow for the Mazār consular corps. I’m not officially a consul general, and neither I presume are you, but they have always included me in their little gatherings. I forgot to mention it earlier. It’s at the Turkish Consulate. I’ll take you along as my guest unless, of course, you’ve received your own invitation.”

  I had not. My face reddened as I struggled but failed to come up with some response to Trumbull’s barbs.

  “No need to wear a head scarf, my dear,” he added with a simpering grin. “With the exception of the Iranians, this is a fairly secular Islamic crowd. Most of our consular colleagues will be in business suits. I’m not quite sure what you should wear since you’ll be the only woman, but I’m sure you’ll sort that out. Be ready at 1800 hours sharp.”

  He vanished into the officers’ mess and left me standing alone in the hallway with a tray of food I no longer wanted to eat.

  EIGHTEEN

  February 8, 2005

  The Turkish Consulate was one of the largest and most heavily guarded compounds in Mazār-i-Sharīf. Its rooftop, bristling with almost as many communications antennas as the PRT, left no doubt about the Turkish government’s intense interest in northern Afghanistan.

  As soon as the British military escort dropped Trumbull and me at the entrance, the Turkish consul stepped forward to greet us. I braced myself to be ignored, insulted, or both.

  “Edwin, so good to see you again. I hadn’t planned it this way, but you must consider this gathering as your official farewell party.”

  Trumbull returned his greeting and introduced me with a perfunctory nod. The Turkish consul had much better manners. He turned to me with a broad smile and extended his hand. “Miss Morgan, for you, our modest consular officer assemblage will have to serve as your welcoming party. Please go in and help yourself to drinks and food. No Afghan guests this evening, so the bar is open.”

  Edwin stayed on to chat with our host, while I took a deep breath and walked alone through a curtained doorway into the main reception room. Although I kept reminding myself that this gathering was just like the hundreds of others I had attended during my diplomatic career, I found myself suddenly immobilized by a sensation that could only be described as stage fright. Small clusters of men, talking, drinking, and eating—the Mazār-i-Sharīf consular corps—all stopped speaking and turned to stare at me, the first woman to invade their all-male domain. I remained frozen in place until I heard a familiar voice.

  “Angela! Welcome to Mazār!” It was Stefan in an expensively tailored gray suit, waving at me with a drink in his hand. The other men glanced at Stefan and then at me to observe my response.

  “You are looking lovely as always, although slightly more concealed than when we met in Dubai,” Stefan said taking in the black slacks and shapeless gray tunic I had worn in deference to my Islamic colleagues. Seeing that many of them had availed themselves of the bar, I regretted that I hadn’t dressed with a bit more western flair.

  “Stefan, what a wonderful surprise to see you here,” I gushed, trying to suppress the grin that was spreading far too quickly across my face.

  “Prepare yourself to be invited to these rare but very stuffy little gatherings from time to time,” he said, with a look of mock pity on his broad Slavic face. “There’s certainly not much else going on in Mazār that you could or even would want to attend. Except, of course, for the Mazār Social Club, which this crowd would never be invited to and probably doesn’t even know about.” He waved his hand dismissively at the Central Asian diplomats in their ill-fitting black suits, thin black ties, cheap shoes, and white socks.

  “I’m so glad to see you, Stefan. What are you doing in Mazār?” I asked, my voice catching slightly. It wasn’t wise for me to be feeling this thrilled about running into a Russian diplomat whom I barely knew and whom I certainly shouldn’t trust. I could feel my cheeks burning and hoped Stefan hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t realized until now just how lonely I’d been feeling.

  “I was sent up here for a few days to audit the consulate,” he said, “and our consul general invited me to come with him tonight. I was secretly hoping you would be here, and here you are! What can I get you to drink? ” he asked, his pale blue eyes lingering for an uncomfortably long moment on mine.

  “A glass of white wine would be wonderful.”

  Stefan returned with another tumbler of vodka for himself and a chardonnay for me.

  “So what’s the Mazār Social Club?”

  “Hasn’t Mr. Trumbull told you about the Mazār Social Club?” Stefan laughed. “He certainly spent enough time there during his year at the PRT.”

  I shook my head and took a long sip of the chilled wine. It felt so good to be having a civilized drink that I had to remind myself to slow down. I was already dangerously close to losing myself in front of Stefan.

  “It’s at the UN residential compound where a lot of expats live. It’s the only place in town where those foreigners who like to drink alcohol and party a bit after work can safely gather a few nights a week to—how do you say it—let our hairs down.” He laughed again.

  “Do you know all these men, Stefan?” I asked, looking at the consuls, who had resumed their conversations with one another.

  “I was acting Russian consul general up here for a few months last year, and yes, I do know them. Finish your drink, and I’ll do
the introductions,” he said, steering me toward a window that looked out over the garden. He lowered his voice again and added, “I don’t suppose Trumbull has been very accommodating. You’ll find he’s not one to share information unless it’s to his benefit.”

  “He’s made it quite clear that I’m on my own.”

  Trumbull ignored me for the entire evening, but Stefan, his fingertips resting lightly on my elbow, steered me around the room introducing me to the consuls general from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, India, and finally to his Russian colleague.

  The older man smiled, shook my hand, then looking intently at Stefan whispered in Russian, “This is the woman you met at the Emirates Towers? You must . . .” Stefan cut him off with a sharp glance, then said to me in English, “Angela, you must be thirsty. May I get you another glass of wine? I don’t want to bore you any longer than necessary with old Mr. Alexandrov.”

  Although I didn’t think Stefan knew I spoke Russian, I was careful to show no reaction to the unexpected comment of his colleague or to Stefan’s abrupt change of subject. It was clear that he had reported our meeting in Dubai to his superiors. Stefan led me back to the bar, where our Turkish host joined us and insisted on presenting me to the Iranian consul general, an elderly, gray-bearded gentleman, wearing a black turban and a floor-length white robe. He was standing in the far corner of the room with his assistant, drinking an orange soda.

  When we approached and I greeted him in deliberately halting Farsi, he stiffened and handed the soda to his assistant. I extended my hand in greeting. He nodded curtly, kept his eyes on the floor, and folded his arms tightly across his belt. After a mumbled reply, he turned away and walked to the other side of the room. Apparently, not everyone in this crowd was prepared to accept a woman. His nervous assistant approached me several minutes later to explain in hushed tones that it was my gender and not my nationality that had prompted the consul’s diplomatic brush-off.