Under an Afghan Sky (14 page)

Shafirgullah is spending a second night in the hole alone. We passed the time by reading phrases out of an English–Farsi phrase book and smoking cigarettes. I’ve been so good about the smoking since last summer, but there’s not much else to do in here. I shudder at the thought of what all the smoke and dust, and kerosene fumes—is doing to my system, but I have no options.

I just hope you know that I’m okay. I know you must be so afraid for me, but I need you to know that I’m not afraid. I don’t think these guys want to hurt me at all. I just think they’re a bunch of young thugs with guns and a messed-up idea of Islam and the West. I’m not afraid of them, and you shouldn’t be either. They’re not bad people. They just don’t understand tolerance, and probably never had a chance to learn when they were young.

I looked over at the sleeping Shafirgullah and tried to imagine him as a little boy. Did he grow up poor? Did he and Abdullah go to school? I imagined they were like the orphans I had met the year before in Kabul at a state orphanage for boys; girls were housed in a separate orphanage, which I visited later. Many of them had lost their parents in the war, and their prospects for the future were
seriously limited. They slept in bunk beds in a dark and dirty building, twelve or more to a room. During the day they went to classes. The younger ones learned how to read and write, and the older ones learned a trade. The government official in charge of orphans told me they had to make sure children were given as many opportunities as possible because it was too easy for the Taliban to recruit young men, especially those who felt they didn’t fit into society. I saw a young boy, maybe six or seven years old, his face scarred with burns that he’d suffered as a baby. I watched as he hung around the playground alone and tried to ignore the taunts of the older boys. I asked him his name. Sediq. He told me that his parents died because of warlords and that he missed them so much. He was happy to be in the orphanage because he was fed and given clothes, but he had no friends and he was lonely.

I couldn’t forget the emptiness and despair I saw in his eyes. I could still see his sad, scarred face even now. He was exactly the kind of boy the Taliban would try to recruit. The director of the orphanage said as much. And he was one of so many in Afghanistan. I’d left the orphanage that day feeling utterly helpless. I could tell Sediq’s story to the world, but who was listening? And even if people listened, what could they do to help him?

Maybe Shafirgullah and his brother grew up like Sediq. Maybe they grew up in an orphanage; maybe they were abandoned by their parents. They probably had a little schooling, since they could speak a bit of English, but I imagined they were probably young boys without a stable family life and without much to keep them occupied, trying to navigate their way in a country torn apart by decades of war. Why wouldn’t they fall prey to criminal gangs and terrorist groups like the Taliban? That’s where they could find a sense of community, a sense of belonging. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me, but it also left me feeling quite depressed to think
that my kidnappers really had no choice. Why go to school when you can make hundreds of thousands of American dollars kidnapping foreigners? For young men who don’t have much of an opportunity to succeed in the way we Westerners typically think of success—a steady job, good income, roof over your head, food on the table—criminal activity is often the only viable option.

It’s like asking the Afghan farmer to plant pomegranate trees instead of poppies because stopping the heroin trade is how we in the West believe we can win against the Taliban. But for that poppy farmer, harvesting a pomegranate crop might yield only a fraction of the money he could get for a poppy crop. It might be wrong, and the farmer might even know that drug money is being used to fund the Taliban’s activities, but at the end of the day, he’s got a family to feed.

There are no excuses, P, for what the kidnappers have taken from me. My freedom. But all I can do is try to understand why they do this. It’s not right, but it’s their world, and all we can do is try to understand.

Night, night, darling. I hope that wherever you are, you’re getting more sleep than I am. Love you. xox

I put the pen down and tucked myself back inside my blanket. It was so uncomfortable, and I could feel now that the ground was quite cold. I reached inside my pocket for my rosary and prayed.

Shafirgullah kicked me in the leg as he turned in his sleep. It was a hard jab, and it startled me. I sat up and looked at the clock. Six in the morning.
Damn,
I thought,
why couldn’t you give me another hour of sleep? Another hour of unconsciousness, another hour of escape from this hole.

The morning passed as it had the day before. The young Afghan woke up and did his ablutions and prayed for half an hour, then ate an entire package of cookies, washed down with two pouches of juice. I noticed there were only two left.

My stomach was hurting a bit, and I huddled myself into a fetal position, turning my back to Shafirgullah. I stared at the wall, hoping the feeling would pass. It did, but came back in waves throughout the morning.

“You okay?” Even my kidnapper knew something was wrong. I shook my head and rubbed my stomach in an attempt to tell him I wasn’t feeling so good. “Ah,” he said, looking concerned. He offered me juice, which I refused, and some cookies, which were the last thing I wanted. He also asked if I wanted to play the snake game again. I took his phone and distracted myself for a few minutes, until even the game got too boring. As soon as I gave it back to him, he put the SIM card in and made a call. The conversation was in Pashto, but I didn’t even have to guess whom he was speaking with.

“Khalid still in Kabul?” I asked.

“Khalid no Kabul,” he answered. He pointed his finger down. “Khalid come.”

I was about to ask when, but my tummy rumbled with another wave of discomfort. I wondered what I would do if it got worse, and reached for my knapsack. I always carried pain medication because I’m plagued with migraines, so I have a constant supply of Tylenol, Advil, and beta blockers. I fished around. Fuck. They were all sitting in my toiletries bag back at the Serena Hotel. I looked into the side pockets, hoping to find something. My hand wrapped itself around a pill bottle. Cipro. Yes! It was supposedly the cure-all for anything that might come along, including a poison gas attack. I had brought it to Afghanistan the year before, thinking that I would need it if I drank bad water or ate bad food. And I’d been warned by my colleagues that the bad food would more likely come from inside the military base than out in the cities. I hadn’t needed it, but I remembered doling out a few pills to my friend
Don Martin, who was there for the
National Post
before he left on what would end up being a very long trip off the base.

I opened the bottle and saw that there were five big white pills left. I bit one in two, then swallowed a half with a chug of cherry juice. The syrupy sweetness of the juice didn’t stand a chance against the bitter pill. I gagged but got it down, the horrible taste spreading through my mouth and down my throat. I took another swig of juice and swished it around my mouth to wash out the bitterness. And then I waited for the ciprofloxacin to do its thing.

I must have dozed off again because I woke up to Shafirgullah poking my leg and pointing to the ceiling. It was about two in the afternoon, and I could hear footsteps and digging overhead.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Khalid,” he replied.

“Why is Khalid coming now?”

Shafirgullah covered his head with his kaffiyeh and I did the same, as again the dirt came down all around us. Soon, the sound of digging faded and I could hear the sound of a board being dragged away. Then a
thump,
and a figure dressed in black crawled down the tunnel.

“Hello, Me-llis-si-a.” He was back to pronouncing my name with four syllables.

“Khalid, salaam,” I replied. “Why are you here now?”

“I say I come today. I bring you blanket,” he said. I noticed he was dragging behind him a thick baby blue duvet. It was big and fluffy and warm and I thanked him. Shafirgullah lifted my other blanket and my red pillow and shook off the dust. I folded the new blue blanket in half and set it down on my half of the hole, like a sleeping bag.

“It is good, yes?” Khalid asked.

“Yes, thank you.”

“How are you, Me-llis-si-a?”

“I am okay. I would be better if I could go back to Kabul.”

“Yes, inshallah, you will go.”

“When?”

“It take… time. Three, maybe four days.”

My heart sank at the thought of spending even another hour in the hole.

Khalid looked around the hole, then peered into the plastic bag. “You not eating, they tell me.”

I shook my head and argued that I had actually eaten lots of cookies and drunk lots of juice.

“Shafirgullah say you sick,” he said accusingly. I admitted that I’d had a little bit of a stomach upset but assured him I was okay.

He nodded. “If you not sick, we go out.”

“Out?” I asked, pointing up to the ceiling. Khalid nodded again, and I looked over at Shafirgullah, who was nodding and smiling. I wasn’t sure what to think. Maybe I was being moved to another location. Maybe they had fixed up the other house—the one from the first night—and that would be my new cell. It was a lot bigger and a lot more comfortable, and at least I wouldn’t be in semi-darkness all the time. I looked up the tunnel and could tell from the light cast at the end of the shaft that the sun was shining outside. Khalid told me to take off my scarf, which was loosely draped over my shoulders. I removed it and handed it to him.

“I am cover your eyes,” he told me, folding the scarf in half lengthwise and wrapping it around my head like a blindfold. Instinctively, I reached to pull the scarf from my eyes, but Khalid held my hand.

“No,” he said. “You take off later. Come now.” He led me by the arm to the entrance of the hole and gave me a gentle push. I heard the rustle of feet scampering ahead of me. I assumed it was Shafirgullah.

“Go up,” Khalid said. I blindly crawled up the tunnel until the top of my head no longer hit the ceiling and I knew I was in the shaft.

“Stand up,” Khalid ordered from behind me. I stood and was wondering how I was going to climb to the top when I felt the Afghan lift me up from the bottom of my legs. Two sets of hands reached down and grabbed me under my arms. I was lifted out and set down on the ground.

“Wait,” came Khalid’s voice from below. I heard him drag himself out of the shaft and felt him take me by the elbow. “Come, quickly.”

We were walking forward, not off to the side, as I thought we would if we were going back to the abandoned house. I guessed that we were going to the other house that I’d seen, the one about fifty feet from the hole. I tripped as we went down some stairs, and Khalid steadied me, whisking me through what I assumed was the door to a house, around a corner, and through a hallway, until we stopped and he sat me down on what must have been a ledge.

“Turn around,” he said. I followed his instructions, turning my head to face him so he could remove the scarf. We were in a large room with a window. My back was to the window and I was staring at a wall covered with peeling yellow paint and riddled with bullet holes. The cement floor was covered in dirt. A piece of scrap metal lay in the corner.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Shafirgullah house,” Khalid answered. He was sitting next to me on the ledge. I turned around to look out the window.

“Do not look,” he ordered. I realized he didn’t want me to see anything about where we were, which I hoped was a sign that I might be released soon. My kidnappers wouldn’t want me to tell the authorities about any landmarks, whether they were
mountains or a house or some trees, that would allow them to find this location.

“This is a nice room,” I told him. “Why can’t I stay here?”

“It is not safe,” he said.

“It looks very safe to me.” I could hear the roar of jets overhead, and I wondered where the closest military base was. I assumed it was Bagram, as we couldn’t be too far from Kabul.

“Americans,” Khalid said, referring to the sound of the jet engines. “Police come here. They have guns. You see?” He pointed to the bullet holes in the wall. “Not safe for us.”

Shafirgullah appeared in the doorway and said something to Khalid in Pashto. He was followed by another man dressed in a white kameez and matching pants, and wearing a white skullcap. Looking closely, I realized he was the one with the lazy eye who had come down to the hole with the others on the second night.

“Stay here, don’t look out,” Khalid ordered and followed the others out, leaving me sitting alone in the empty room.

As soon as he left, I turned around and looked out the window. I could see two large hills, or mountains, on either side of the house. The sky was cobalt blue and cloudless, and I could feel the heat of the sun. Khalid was outside having a cigarette and speaking on the phone. I walked to the doorway and saw that there was a hall leading into another room in the obviously abandoned house.

Shafirgullah must have seen me, for he came back in, his eyes flashing.

“No!” he said angrily, and I took that to mean that he wanted me to sit back down on the ledge. I obliged, and he left the room again. I sat in the room alone for what felt like the better part of an hour. Shafirgullah was praying out in the hallway, and I could hear other voices coming both from within the house and outside. I walked around the room a bit, glad for the chance to exercise my legs.

Khalid came back and told me it was time to go.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Back,” he replied, taking my scarf and blindfolding me again. He led me out of the house the same way he had led me in. I could hear voices. We had walked a few steps when suddenly Khalid pushed my shoulder down. “Sit down,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“Sit down! Do not move!”

I dropped to my knees and sat quietly. I couldn’t sense anyone next to me, so I wasn’t sure what was going on. I heard the sound of a jet engine in the distance. Perhaps they didn’t want to be spotted and that’s why we had stopped moving. A few minutes later, I felt a hand on my elbow.