Under an Afghan Sky (20 page)

He stopped and nodded his head my way. “You.”

I shrugged and said I wasn’t sure what to sing now, even though I knew he couldn’t understand what I was saying.

“You,” he insisted.

I wasn’t sure what to sing, so I reverted back to the hymns from church, the ones that had been drummed into my head as a girl in Catholic school.

Shafirgullah seemed to like that and clapped loudly after I finished.

“You,” I said to him, but he really didn’t need much prompting, launching into another passage of the Koran. His voice was soft and lyrical and almost sweet, and for a moment I forgot where I was. I imagined I was at a mosque back in Canada, where I’d attended several prayers with the imam who was helping me with a story on fundamentalism and how it can take root in young people.
I’d always thought the Koran sounded best when its passages were sung—unlike those of the Bible. My sister and I used to have a hard time stifling our giggles whenever our parish priest sang a prayer during Mass. Father O’Brien was the nicest man, but he could not carry a tune to save his soul, or anyone else’s.

On the other hand, I’d never heard someone sing the Koran out of tune—or at least, it never sounded out of tune to me. Maybe it was just the way it was written, and was more conducive to being put to music than the Bible. Or maybe Muslims were just better singers.

Shafirgullah was a pretty good singer, and he continued on for another half hour. Now, not many Catholics, no matter how devout, know the Bible well enough to quote directly from it at any length. One might have a favourite passage or two, but that was nothing compared with the way Muslims could quote the Koran. I wondered why that was. Maybe the Koran was written in a way that made it easier to memorize, and chant.

As for me, there were only a couple of passages from the Bible I knew by heart, and I knew them because they were the ones I had loved as a child, the ones I would say to myself over and over whenever I needed divine intervention. The one I knew best was a passage from the Gospel according to Mark, in which Jesus spoke to the people who had turned his house of prayer into a market:

This passage for me always summons up an image of a mountain literally being lifted up and thrown into the sea, even though I
know it is meant metaphorically—it speaks to one’s need to believe in the power of prayer.
This hole I am in is a mountain,
I thought, and I had said those lines to myself many times over the last week.

Now, as I sat listening to my captor recite the Koran, I began to wonder if it was actually true. Was it possible that we were both praying to the same God? I began to wonder if God was hearing me, or listening to me at all.

What if I called you Allah instead of God? I asked silently. Do you respond better to “Allah”? Because you can’t possibly be listening to him and me at the same time. Maybe if I called you Allah, you’d help me out of this horrible place and let me go home to the people I love. Why are you answering his prayers and not mine?

“You!” Shafirgullah’s voice interrupted my argument with God in the same way the sound of a glass breaking interrupts conversation at a cocktail party.

“Me what?” Then I realized he wanted me to sing. It was my turn, and I was running out of hymns I knew by heart.

Shafirgullah laughed and clapped when I had finished. I wasn’t sure what he would have done if he actually knew I was singing a Christian hymn. After all, he hadn’t given up trying to convince me that I needed to convert to Islam. We had the same argument each night he came back to the hole.

“Why you no Muslim? You must be Muslim.”

“I am Christian, but we believe in the same God,” I would argue back. “It’s the same God. I just pray differently from you.”

His English wasn’t good enough to sustain a full argument, so the conversation basically ended there, with him reiterating that I “must” be Muslim.

We went back and forth almost all afternoon, chanting and singing, until the point of light behind his head faded and night started to cast its shadow. I waited for the sound of digging; this was going to be my hour of freedom. They had the proof of life they needed, and now they were going to come and take me back to Kabul in exchange for some sum of money. I knew they would not come to take me out during the day—such activities needed the cloak of darkness, in case someone was watching. And my kidnappers were paranoid of airplanes and drones, of being spotted by Americans or the Afghan police.

Minutes passed into hours and there was no sound. Not even footsteps. Soon, it was after nine o’clock.

“Where Khalid?” I asked. Shafirgullah was again working the makeshift toothbrush around his mouth. He shrugged.

“They’re not coming tonight?”

“I don’t know,” the young Afghan said, looking at his cell phone. He punched a few numbers in it and I could hear an automated operator’s voice. Shafirgullah hung up and stood up, dialing again and holding his phone to the ceiling to try to get better reception. Unable to get through, he tried a different number.

“As-Salaam Alaikum,” he said. A brief phone conversation ensued before he hung up and turned back to me. “Khalid Kabul.”

My heart sank. If Khalid was in Kabul, there was no way I was getting out that night.

“Why Khalid in Kabul?” I asked.

Shafirgullah shrugged. He reached for the last box of juice, unwrapped the straw, and plunged it into the hole at the top.

“They no come tonight,” he told me.

I knew there was no point in asking why not, because he wouldn’t know, and even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to tell me in English.

“Cigarette?” he asked instead, waving a fresh box of smokes in my face. I nodded, and he handed me the package. I took the box of matches and tried to light one, but they were damp. Shafirgullah also tried, and we went through about a dozen matches until we were able to finally get one going. We smoked three cigarettes in a row, using the embers from one to light another, knowing that there were only a few dry matches left. And then we sat there in a nicotine-induced haze. My head was beginning to hurt, and I didn’t even notice the lamp was dimming until he pointed at it.

“Tsiragh,”
he said, the Pashto word for lamp. Khalid had brought a battery-operated hand-held lamp a couple of days before, replacing the kerosene lamp that had been polluting the air and our lungs for the last few days. I handed it over and watched as Shafirgullah took the batteries out one by one, pitching us into complete
darkness. He put the batteries back in and shook the lamp. The light was still very dim, but I didn’t mind, since my headache was beginning to worsen. I wondered if it was from the nicotine or the smoke or the dust.

“
Tsiragh.
Bad.” Shafirgullah put the lamp back down.

“Battery,” I said.

“Yes, battery,” he repeated. The word sounded the same in both languages for once.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“And matches,” I said, shaking the almost empty matchbox.

My head was now pounding, and I lay down and closed my eyes, praying that sleep would come more easily that night. The refrain from the last hymn I had sung echoed in my head.

Mercifully, I had fallen soundly asleep—the alarm clock now said six o’clock. It had to be morning. I’d missed the pre-dawn call to prayer. It was the longest I’d slept in a week. I went to the bathroom in the trash can—as I’d been doing most mornings, taking advantage of the fact that my captor was still snoring—and washed my hands with water from the watering can. Then I stood up and stretched and did kicks with my legs, just to keep them active. A routine, of sorts, although I didn’t want to admit even to myself that I was falling into one. It would mean that I was getting used to being a prisoner, and I wasn’t about to let myself go there.

Shafirgullah was still snoring when I heard the sound of footsteps above us. Could they be coming to release me? It made sense.
Khalid had said it would either be after dark or before daylight. I heard someone calling out in Pashto, so I shook Shafirgullah’s leg. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Whoever was outside kept speaking. Shafirgullah stood up and leaned toward the opening of one of the pipes.

“Salaam,” he said. A brief conversation followed, and then the sound of something sliding in through the pipes. A box of cigarettes, followed by matches, a lighter. Then batteries and several boxes of juice—and two sleeves of cookies. Supplies, since no one had come the night before.

“Abdullah,” Shafirgullah told me, pointing up to the ceiling. I nodded, and put the juice and cookies into one of the white plastic bags, after taking an apple juice. I was thirsty and hadn’t had anything to drink since the previous afternoon. The juice was cold and tasted good.

“You, biscuit?” Shafirgullah was holding out half a box of chocolate sandwich cookies. I shook my head. He shrugged and stuffed the remaining cookies down his mouth, one at a time. It amazed me how much he ate. At least three packages of cookies a day, and several boxes of juice. I felt sick just thinking about it. I was really only eating to pass time, and to make sure I at least had a few calories to burn in case I ever needed to walk—or run—out of here. I could feel already that my hiking pants were a little loose. I’d been wanting to lose a few pounds, but this was not the weight-loss program I’d had in mind.

I stood up and stretched again, pointing my toe to the opening of the pipe overhead, and almost falling over. I steadied myself by putting a hand on the dirt wall.

Shafirgullah looked at me quizzically. I tried to explain that I was trying to get a little exercise, but that wasn’t a concept he understood at all. He pulled out his cell phone and played Snake Xenzia
for the next half an hour or so, while I continued to do my stretches for the second time that morning.

Shafirgullah was on and off the phone almost all day, and I assumed he was talking to his brother or Khalid, until I heard what sounded like a woman’s voice coming through the receiver.

“Who was that?” I asked, curious. “Your mother?”

“Girlfriend,” he said with a grin, flashing his teeth at me.

“You have girlfriend?” I replied.

He laughed and nodded. “Like Khalid,” he said. Again, the language barrier stopped me from finding out anything more about her, so I left it at that and instead asked whether Khalid was coming back that night.

“No Khalid.”

I despaired at the thought of spending another twenty-four hours in this place with Shafirgullah. He wasn’t disgusting like Abdulrahman, but it was very difficult having nothing to say to each other, and a language barrier that prevented any semblance of a normal conversation.

More than anything, that’s what I was missing. A normal conversation. As a journalist, I spend my entire days in conversations with people, whether it’s my editors and producers, or the people I’m interviewing for a story, or the cameraperson, with whom I might spend hours and hours driving from one location to another. Or I’d be chatting with my friends on our BlackBerrys, which had become an essential in our lives. We were all single, and it was a way of keeping tabs on each other—to bitch and gossip or organize a drink and dinner on the way home from work. I spend my life talking to people and to have that suddenly taken away made me feel completely lost.

I missed the voices of my friends, those quick electronic notes with updates and questions, and plans to meet up. I missed the connections.
I pulled out my notebook and flipped it to an empty page. I could see there weren’t many more blank pages left, and I said a silent prayer to God that I would see freedom before the back cover of the notebook.

Hey dude,

I know you’re probably really worried about me back home and I’m just writing to tell you that I’m okay. My kidnappers are not hurting me, and they’re treating me well. Please tell everyone not to worry. I miss you guys a lot. I would give an arm and a leg to be having a beer with you right now, at Gretzky’s, watching a hockey game, and eating sliders until our guts are spilling over our jeans. How are the Canucks doing? I know it’s early in the season, but I’m not hopeful that it’s going to be so great. They’ll make the playoffs, but they’re definitely not a Presidents’ Trophy or Stanley Cup contender this year.