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  “Aren’t you afraid?” I asked.

  She looked up at me with her luminous dark eyes. “My grandmother says if you are afraid to do what is right, you might as well be dead or in jail yourself. She is right, and no, I am not afraid,” Nilofar said defiantly.

  “I’ve been told that some of the women in this prison are being mistreated. Do you know if this is true? ”

  “Madam, these women are not mistreated. The female guards try to help them, but they have little to give.” Nilofar told me that although the female wardens were paid only twenty dollars per month, they often used their own money to buy fresh fruits and vegetables for the imprisoned women and children, who rarely had visitors.

  “This girl,” she said, gesturing toward a young woman in a green head scarf, watching listlessly as her infant son chewed on a worn rubber ball, “has been accused not of killing her husband, but of knowing who the killer is. Her husband was forty-five, and she was fifteen when her parents forced her to marry. The man beat her frequently.

  “She thinks her twin brother came to her house in the night and killed her husband, but she wants to protect him from her husband’s powerful clan, so she will say nothing. When her baby turns three, her husband’s relatives will claim the child because it is a boy. They will take it from her. She has threatened to kill herself when they do.”

  A toothless old woman snored loudly as she dozed openmouthed on her back in a far corner of the room. The long veil covering her head and arms had slipped off, revealing a horribly disfigured face and stumps where there should have been fingers on both of her hands.

  “This woman was given by her parents in marriage to a commander in Chahar Bolak when she was thirteen,” Nilofar continued, her eyes glistening. “They say she was very beautiful. Her husband was fifty and had three other wives. One of his men brought home stolen jet fuel for the women to cook with. They thought it was kerosene. It exploded in their faces, setting them all on fire. Two of the wives were killed. This woman’s two young children, who were standing next to her, also died. She burned her fingers off trying to get them away from the fire. Her husband accused her of murdering his wives and his children. Once she left the hospital, she was brought here. That was three years ago.”

  “How old is she, Nilofar?” I asked, looking at the woman’s raw gums and scarred lips.

  “That one is twenty-eight years old,” she said.

  These women were not being mistreated in prison. The whole system was rigged against them. Without a powerful patron who could bribe the appropriate officials, they had no way out.

  “Nilofar-jan, I wish to speak with the American woman,” said the elderly warden, easing her bulk onto the cushion next to mine. Nilofar hovered nearby to provide the translation, which I did not need.

  The warden launched into a plea on behalf of the silent staring women who lined the walls of their prison home. “Madam, I have worked as a guard in the Mazār-i-Sharīf prison for seventeen years. Under the Taliban, most women were only kept here for a few days until they were taken to the soccer field and stoned to death. Anyone could accuse them and there were no courts or trials.

  “The women in here have had their trials and they are safe under this government, but most will never leave or they will be sent to the prison in Kabul. Can’t you help them? They are not criminals.”

  “I’ll be reporting what I’ve learned to my embassy in Kabul and . . .” The words felt empty to me and I struggled to say them with any conviction. A male guard rapped his baton loudly on the bars of the women’s cell and put an end to my conversation with the warden. He insisted that we leave immediately.

  Nilofar walked with me to the parking lot, where Fuzzy and Rahim were entertaining an excited gaggle of little boys next to the Beast.

  As soon as we exited the prison, she casually draped a loose head scarf over her hair. She was making a silent but courageous statement by refusing to cover herself with the burka, which was still worn in public by almost every woman in Mazār. While her boldness would not result in any formal punishment, as it would have under the Taliban, it nevertheless exposed her to constant harassment and to the simmering anger of traditional Afghan men who still preferred their women hidden from view.

  “Now you see the hopeless legal problems these women face,” she said as we approached the Beast. “Perhaps you will be able to help them.”

  “You’re a good woman,” I said, squeezing her hand. “The embassy will receive my report tomorrow, but I honestly don’t think there’s much my government will do for them.”

  The query from the minister of women’s affairs had been only about the possible mistreatment of female prisoners, not about the much broader issue of basic rights for Afghan women or jail cells filled with marriage “criminals.” My report that there was no evidence of abuse would close the case as far as Plawner and the minister were concerned. I looked down with a sense of shame and regret at this determined young woman, who continuously put herself in harm’s way when all I had to do was type out another report and hit the SEND button.

  Fuzzy had climbed into the passenger seat of the Beast and was tapping on his watch to remind me of the time. Rahim remained standing outside, his hand on the open car door, trying not to stare at Nilofar.

  “Do you need a ride home? ” I asked Nilofar.

  Her somber mood vanished as she glanced up at Rahim with a mischievous smile. “I was going to take a taxi, but if the young man would not mind to drop me at the university, I am most grateful.” Rahim, whom she thought would be driving us back to the PRT, looked away in embarrassment.

  “Hop in and let’s go,” I said, climbing into the driver’s seat. Fuzzy wedged his rifle below the window so it was out of sight, and Rahim, his eyes downcast, held the rear door open for Nilofar.

  “You are driving? ” she asked me with a puzzled laugh. “Is this allowed? ”

  Rahim looked at Nilofar and said in Dari, “With Angela-jan, everything is allowed.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  March 7, 2005

  “This will sadly be my last meeting with all of you,” said Harry to those of us who had taken our assigned seats for his weekly five P.M. staff meeting in the officers’ mess. Sergeant Major had decided in late February to print out our names and titles on pieces of construction paper and place them on the chairs he thought we should occupy.

  There were always visitors and new arrivals and never enough chairs. He wanted to ensure that the regulars were able to sit down quickly and avoid the endless dance of musical chairs that delayed the start of every meeting. His plan had met with some resistance, but it worked.

  My designated location was between the ops officer and the quartermaster. With our new seat assignments, I found myself at every meeting directly across the room from Major Davies, whose staring made me painfully self-conscious. He radiated disapproval at what I’m sure he felt were my brash American ways, and he continued to avoid my presence outside the confines of these formal meetings.

  “My replacement, Colonel Robert Jameson, will be arriving with our new Foreign Office diplomat, Richard Carrington, next Monday,” said Harry. “We, unfortunately, won’t have a formal handover, but I’m sure you’ll make them both welcome,” he added, before extending his usual request that each of the “regulars” spend a few minutes telling everyone what they were working on. It was going to be a long meeting. I raised my eyes and met the major’s expressionless gaze.

  The meeting dragged on until supper. I ate quickly with Fuzzy and Jenkins in the soldiers’ dining hall, which still felt more welcoming to me than the officers’ mess, and rushed back to Harry’s office to lock up a sensitive report I’d left on my desk. He was packing for his morning departure.

  “Angela, please feel free to keep using the extra desk in my office,” he said as he sorted through his personal effects. “I’m certain Carrington and Colonel Jameson won’t mind.”

  Harry stopped digging through his file cabinet and looked up. “
Angela, it’s been a real pleasure working with you. Brief—but I hope as useful for you as it has been for me. I heard from one of the officers about Trumbull’s refusal to take you on his farewell calls with the local officials. I’m sure things will be better with the new lot now that you’re a bit of an ‘old-timer.’”

  “Harry, I’ve been here less than three months.”

  “Yes, but that’s longer than either of the two newcomers,” he replied. “None of us spends very long here. With more than two months under your belt, you may now officially be considered an expert.”

  “Hardly.” I laughed. His words touched me. I was going to miss this man.

  “One request before I go? ” he added as he removed the photo of his wife and children from the wall behind his desk and stuffed it carefully into his briefcase. “I agreed to represent the PRT at a provincial council meeting in Aybak the day after tomorrow. Since I won’t be here, I was wondering if you would be able to attend in my place.

  “It’s a three-hour drive one way, but the canyon road through the mountains is spectacular and it will give you a chance to meet the governor of Samangan Province. You should take an extra hour after the meeting to visit the Buddhist caves outside town. They are remarkable. Our guards at the safe house will be able to tell you how to get there.”

  Early Wednesday morning, our two-vehicle convoy quickly covered the first thirty miles to Aybak on the newest paved section of the ring road that cut a dark gash through the pale salt flats east of Mazār. The only time we had to slow down was for the ragged processions of children crossing the road near a sprawling displaced persons camp where the road forked north to the Amu Darya River.

  This camp had sprung up after the fall of the Taliban. Hundreds of returning families lived here under flapping sheets of blue plastic that did little to protect them from the icy winds gusting off the Hindu Kush. Little girls and boys who could not have been more than five years old dodged trucks and buses as they sprinted across the highway to sort through piles of trash near a cluster of shipping containers that had been turned into roadside market stalls. The children were beginning their daily trek into the foothills in search of brush for their mothers’ cooking fires, but since garbage could also be burned, they collected that as well.

  “Rahim, is there nothing else for these families to cook with?” I asked as Jenkins braked for another group of children dragging a recalcitrant donkey across the road.

  “No, Angela,” he said. “Look around. There is nothing but desert brush and soon that will be gone, too. These refugees have very few animals, so there isn’t enough dung for them to burn and none of them can afford bottled gas,” Rahim added.

  Rahim, Fuzzy, and I waved at two little boys who had stopped by the side of the road to watch us pass. Barefoot and dressed in rags, they smiled and lifted their tiny clenched fists in the universal thumbs-up gesture of greeting that thousands of Afghan children had learned from western soldiers.

  As we left the children behind, I could see in the distance a line of abandoned electric transmission towers. These were the giant rusting sentinels Stefan had described—the skeletal remnants of Mother Russia’s failed attempt to pacify and electrify this unconquerable land.

  Ahead of us, the morning sun lifted above a cloudbank sitting low on the horizon and temporarily blinded all eastbound drivers. Jenkins donned his sunglasses, but removed them five minutes later, when our convoy turned south into a shaded, marbled canyon that cut through the foothills of the Hindu Kush.

  The contrast between the blazing desert landscape and the alpine scenery inside this canyon was stark. The sides of the road were dotted with thick clusters of rockroses and trumpet flowers, which grew in profusion among the boulders and even over the treads of abandoned Russian tanks. Long lines of camels, loaded with boxes and bags of cargo, padded with studied indifference through patches of melting snow.

  An hour later, Jenkins dropped Rahim and me at the entrance to the governor’s faded gray headquarters on a litter-strewn plaza at the center of this small provincial capital. He and Fuzzy waited in the Beast just across the street, while the follow car went on to the safe house.

  Rahim and I entered the dimly lit hall and took our seats just as the meeting began. The large room held the standard arrangement of wooden chairs tightly packed around the walls.

  The issues raised by the aging governor to the assembled NGO representatives were seemingly hopeless and of almost Biblical proportions—too few wells to provide water for the thousands of refugees who were returning from Pakistan and Iran, a tuberculosis outbreak in one village, a plague of locusts in a nearby valley, no medical care available for the injured from last week’s earthquake.

  The meeting had dragged on for two and a half hours when I saw the door crack open. Fuzzy, a worried look on his face, poked his head in and scanned the room to make sure Rahim and I were still alive. Once we had made silent eye contact, he pulled the door shut.

  After the meeting, we headed up to see the Buddhist caves carved out of a hillside just above town. Rahim knew the way, but he had no idea who had fashioned the caves out of solid limestone many centuries ago. As our two vehicles bumped up a winding dirt road to the site, I could see an unmarked Range Rover idling next to an enormous rock dome. An Afghan driver sat in the vehicle smoking a cigarette.

  “Looks like some tourists beat us up here,” observed Jenkins. “Probably some of the expats who were at your meeting with the governor.”

  We parked and headed toward the massive six-meter sphere that had been hewn from a solid block of yellow limestone. A small hut was carved in stone at the top of the polished dome. As three European men emerged from the shaded entrance of the structure, one began waving in my direction.

  “Angela, what a delightful coincidence,” he shouted in a thick French accent, cupping his hands around his mouth. It was Jean-François Mongibeaux, the archaeologist I’d met at Plawner’s dinner in Kabul.

  “We meet again, Jeef,” I shouted back while stepping gingerly onto the wooden walkway that led over a deep chasm to the top of the dome where Jeef stood with his companions.

  “We came to Aybak this morning for a provincial council meeting. The PRT commander said we shouldn’t leave without a visit to the Buddhist caves,” I said after he introduced me to his colleagues.

  “I have passed by here many times over the past thirty years, but my colleagues visiting from Paris wanted to have a look since we were so close,” Jeef explained, nodding at the other men.

  “We drove over the Salang Pass yesterday and spent last night at a guest-house in Pul-i-Kumri. We’re on our way to see how my dig in Balkh has survived the winter. I had actually planned to stop by the PRT to see if you were in. But here you are!” He laughed, clapping his hands together.

  Rahim was watching this reunion with great interest. Here was the archaeologist I had been telling him about. He was clearly bursting with questions, but too shy to be the first to speak.

  “So, young man,” said Jeef, stepping forward to shake Rahim’s hand, “you probably know far more about this remarkable site than I do.”

  Rahim shook his head and smiled at the gregarious white-haired Frenchman. “Sadly, sir, like many of my countrymen I know very little about Takht-i-Rustam or any of the historic locations in northern Afghanistan. Angela has told me about you and your work in Balkh. I was hoping you would be able to teach me something about my country’s ancient history.”

  “Then let me be your tour guide today,” said Jeef, setting off at a brisk clip toward the caves. In a rapid-fire mix of English—and French for the benefit of his colleagues from Paris—he explained that Buddhist monks had carved the earliest of these caves into the hills of Samangan Province almost two thousand years ago.

  “Much of the story behind these caves is still pure conjecture,” added Jeef as we followed him through a small nondescript opening in the side of the barren hill and entered a vast hand-sculpted complex of cool, naturally lit co
rridors, market stalls, and domed temples.

  “You know, of course, Rahim, that your country was a major crossroads of ancient eastern and western cultures for centuries. Are you also aware of the fact that your ancestors prayed to Buddha for more than a thousand years under the Kushan Empire and then under the Persians? ”

  “I have heard that tale before, and everyone knows about the great Buddha statues of Bamiyan that the Taliban destroyed, but they didn’t teach us about this in school,” he replied.

  “Why do you think that in the Dari language, ‘God be with you’ translates as Khuda hafiz instead of Allah hafiz?” asked Jeef with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Perhaps you are right, Professor.” Rahim laughed. “Even after thirteen hundred years as an Islamic people, we may still be hoping for the blessings of the great Buddha.”

  Jeef led us into the first of two enormous domed temples with natural skylights carved into the smooth curved walls. Dusty beams of sunlight illuminated the elaborate but fading lotus leaf murals at the apex of the thirty-foot ceiling.

  The voices of our little group of soldiers and archaeologists echoed along the wide corridors as we scattered to explore the caves and niches that burrowed deep into the mountain. Rahim and I stayed close to Jeef, fascinated by his stories.

  “The first modern explorers to find these long-abandoned caves were the British officers Maitland and Talbot, who wrote about their discovery in 1886. They claimed that these caves were grander than any they had found surrounding the colossal Buddha statues at Bamiyan.

  “It’s shameful what the Taliban did to those irreplaceable statues,” Jeef said with bitterness in his voice.

  “Yes,” agreed Rahim as he ran his fingers over the dusty stone niches where jeweled statues of Buddha had once stood.