Under an Afghan Sky (25 page)

Khalid sat up—he must have dozed off for a while—and reached for the cookies. “You like this one?” he asked.

I nodded and told him they tasted much better than the fruit creme kind.

“I bring more. What else I can bring you for? Chips? Bread?”

“Nothing, Khalid. Just bring me back to Kabul. Please.”

“I bring you more chips,” he said, smiling. “Shogufa make. You like. You must eat.”

I was exhausted with this constant exchange. I just shook my head and rubbed my stomach again.
“Dard,”
I said weakly when he looked at me questioningly.

I wasn’t sure if it was psychosomatic, but the more I told him I was in pain, the more pain I felt in my stomach. It was sharp and
reminded me of the pain I’d felt right before my surgery. I reached for the Tylenol bottle in my knapsack and swallowed two pills with a sip of apple juice. Khalid watched intently, his brow furrowing as I put the Tylenol back.

“Mellissa, you are sick.”

“I’ve been sick for a long time, Khalid. You didn’t know this when you took me.”

“We get doctor,” he said. Unless the group had a trustworthy doctor they could bring to the hole, I knew this was not going to happen. It would be too much trouble to dig me out during the day and take me into the village to see someone. They would never take the risk that someone might notice or that I might try to escape.

I just shook my head. “No doctor.”

Khalid considered the options for a while, and I could tell he was troubled because he tossed and turned and couldn’t get comfortable, even after I had turned off the lamp to try to get some sleep.

“Sleep not coming to me,” he told me after a while.
“Tsiragh.”
I turned on the lamp and shone it into his eyes.

“Sleep not come to you?” he asked.

I shook my head. We lit cigarettes, and Khalid asked me what my house looked like in Canada. I described for him my cozy one-bedroom condo in Regina. The more I talked about it, the more homesick I felt. I missed my bed, my couch, my television; my routine at home.

He told me about his family’s house in Peshawar, where he would be going after my “case was finished.” He was also hoping to bring Shogufa there to live, and when I asked whether she’d like it there, he told me that even though there were fifteen other people living in the house, they would have their own room. He assured me that she would be very happy living with his family.

Finally, sleep came to Khalid, and I was once again left alone with the sound of his snoring. I took out my rosary and started praying, asking God to please let me fall asleep. He must have been listening because the next thing I heard was tapping overhead. I sat up and reached for the lamp. The alarm clock told me it was just after six.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
It sounded like someone was poking a stick on the ground, looking for the hole.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Then footsteps. Whoever it was, he was walking all around the covering of the hole.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
I wondered who it could be. Dare I call out? Khalid was still sound asleep. I wasn’t sure what to do.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
It couldn’t have been someone from my gang because no one called down to us. The tapping continued. After about half an hour, I could hear the footsteps fading into the distance.

When Khalid woke up, I told him what I’d heard. He took out his cell phone and made a few calls.

“Taliban,” he told me. “They are all over this place.” He made a gesture with his hands to emphasize the words “all over.” But I didn’t believe him. I thought it might be the police, acting on a tip and trying to find me. That’s why my kidnappers were nervous. “Taliban want me to give you to them,” Khalid repeated. “They give us the money.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said stubbornly. “If they are giving you the money, then why don’t you just give me to them?”

“We give your friends five days,” he said. “Or we kill you.”

“Five days is not a lot of time to get all that money together. They will need more time.”

Khalid assured me they wouldn’t kill me, that it was just a threat to get “my friends” to come up with the money sooner rather than later. But when I asked what might happen if five days passed and nothing happened, he didn’t have an answer.

“Then you kill me?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I promise you. I no kill you. I tell you on the first day. I no kill you. You are my sister. I no kill my sister.”

“You promise?” I insisted. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being killed. My philosophy about life is that I try to live a good one, but if my time is up, it’s up, and God has his reason for moving me out of this world. But I desperately wanted to get inside the head of my kidnapper, to try to get a few clues about what would happen next.

“I promise, Mellissa. I no kill you. But we may go from here,” he said.

“What do you mean? You want to move me?” I asked.

Khalid nodded. “This place. Not safe.”

Dearest M,

It’s after eleven o’clock, darling, and I hate the thought of going to sleep. I think of you lying in the darkness somewhere, on a hard, filthy floor, and it scares the hell out of me. Are they abusing you? Are you alone? I try to be positive that it will end soon and you will come back safely, but there are moments when a deep sense of despair takes over, and I’m afraid I’ve lost you.

Love you, M.

Two days later, Khalid returned with a Kalashnikov. It hadn’t really occurred to me that my kidnappers had been guarding me without a gun until then, and it was easy to understand why. It wouldn’t have been hard for me to grab the gun and shoot Khalid or Shafirgullah while they slept, and then shoot whoever came into the hole next, and just keep shooting my way out. It was a risk, and not a risk they had wanted to take—until now. Obviously, something had changed.

“Take this,” Khalid said, handing me the gun, and he crawled back up the tunnel to bring down other supplies.

I cradled the Kalashnikov in my hands, turning it over and around, studying the old Soviet assault rifle carefully. I put my hand around the pistol grip and my finger on the trigger. The magazine had been removed—I assumed that Khalid kept that close. I wondered how many people the gun had killed since it was made, and who had owned it before.

Khalid returned with several bulging white plastic bags and a can of water. He smiled at me. “You like gun?” he asked. I handed it back to him and told him big guns scared me, but I would learn how to use it if he taught me.

“Maybe I teach you,” he said. “But see this first.” He handed back the camera he had stolen out of my bag the first day, and I took the camera out of its case.

“Shogufa,” he said. “You want to see Shogufa.” He turned the
camera on, and there, on the screen, was the image of a very pretty young girl.

“Yes, she is very
shayesta,
no?” he asked.

She
was
very
shayesta.
She had long black hair and big dark eyes, and even under her orange headscarf, I could tell she was beautiful. There was a series of photos: Shogufa in what appeared to be a garden, looking shyly at Khalid from a doorway. Shogufa with two other girls—her sisters, Khalid told me—and then with a little girl, another sister. There were dozens of photos of other women and children, at Shogufa’s family’s home, I assumed. Khalid pointed out Shogufa’s mother (his aunt) and other relatives. They all looked happy, smiling, and normal. I wondered if they condoned what the men in their family did for a living. I imagined that their lives were cloistered, sheltered from the guns and the violence, the threats and the kidnappings. I scrolled through what felt like dozens of photos, and then I came to one of Khalid holding a gun to my head. That was the first day, when he discovered the camera and he and Shafirgullah took turns taking pictures with their hostage.

I went back some more. All the pictures I had taken at the refugee camp. The family I’d planned on doing a photo essay about: the cobbler and his son in their mud hut. The woman who had lost her family when a bomb destroyed her home. All of these people whose stories and struggles I’d wanted so much for Canadians at home to hear, to see, so that they could understand that there was a painfully human cost to the war in Afghanistan. I now feared I would never get to tell their stories.

I kept scrolling. It was Eid at the PRT, and there was my little girl in the pink scarf, staring at me with her big eyes. Two little boys, sitting on the dirty ground with their burka-hidden mothers, hoping to get into the compound so they could receive the Eid gifts the soldiers were handing out. Inside, a little girl with short hair
and a blue dress, likely no more than three or four years old, sitting in the back of a wagon while her father collected the gifts for their family. A Canadian soldier in his fatigues, handing out cooking oil to a young boy.

A picture of Paul, crouched down, smiling at a woman with a baby. I wondered where he might be at that moment. I scrolled back some more. A photo of my girlfriends in Toronto the night before I left for Afghanistan. I’d cooked dinner at my friend Kas’s house, where a bunch of us had gathered. It was now rare that we were all in the same city together, but there they all were—Kas, Angela, Marie, and Jen, with plates of turkey meatballs and macaroni and cheese, and glasses of wine—a happy send-off before I went on assignment halfway around the world to a war zone.

Khalid was looking at the pictures too. He pointed at the wine on the table in the photo. I was pretty sure that his fundamentalist interpretation of Islam frowned on women who drank alcohol. “You drink?” he asked, pointing to the big glass of wine that was in front of Kas. We tended to pour each other
big
glasses.

“That’s my friend’s,” I told him. “I was having a martini.” I knew he would never know what that meant, so I continued to try to push the envelope a little. “Martinis are stronger than wine.”

“You drink?” he asked again. I nodded, and he shook his head disapprovingly. “It is bad,” he said.

“No, it is good,” I argued, smiling to myself. My friends and I joke that our lives revolve around booze. It might be an exaggeration, but not much of one. Beer and wine and vodka were staples at any gathering, and I took pride in the fact that, unlike most Asian people I knew, whose faces would turn beet red after just one drink, almost everyone in my family could hold their alcohol. Just thinking about it made me thirsty. One drink, or twenty, could certainly help me pass the time in here. I’d been several weeks without drink
already. We had smuggled a few bottles of illicit hooch—”lens cleaner” we journalists called it—into the dry Kandahar base, but it went quickly given the number of thirsty journalists there and the long hours we worked. It was probably good for me, I thought, to go without booze for a while longer, but I promised myself I would find a good martini as soon as I was free again.

Khalid took the camera back and pointed it in my direction. I put my head down, not wanting to be photographed in the cave—it felt somehow like I was accepting my place as a hostage, and I didn’t want to resign myself to reality. He took a picture anyway, then put the camera into its case. It was just as well. I couldn’t bring myself to go through any more memories.

Khalid had brought more french fries. “Chips, Mellissa, you must eat,” he said, pulling out a newspaper-wrapped bundle. “Shafirgullah say you no eating.”

It was true. My stomach had been bad the last few days and, during the time Shafirgullah was with me, I could barely get a cookie down without feeling as if I were going to throw up. I was down to my last two Cipro, and I’d been taking small bites out of the big bitter pills, hoping to make them last. Shafirgullah had noticed and must have told Khalid. They were obviously keeping a close eye on my health.

“I haven’t been hungry,” I told him as he unwrapped the fries. They had been packed with a few torn-off pieces of bread. I took one and put it in my mouth. It was cold and salty, and I couldn’t eat any more.

Khalid was visibly upset. “You must eat. Shogufa made for you!”

“Please thank her for me. She is a good cook, and I know she went to a lot of trouble, but I’m not hungry, Khalid. My stomach is
dard.
”

My captor responded by ripping off a piece of bread and putting it in my hand. “Eat this,” he ordered. Then he reached into one
of the plastic bags and pulled out a small box. White pills encased in plastic. I didn’t know what they were. “I talk to doctor. He give me medicine,” he told me.

“What doctor? What did you tell him?” I asked.

“I tell him you
dard.
He say this is good. Take one.”

I studied the pills. There was no date on them, no name, no description. I wondered if he really got them from a doctor or maybe they were something Abdulrahman had—he had tried to give me pills for the pain in my shoulder from the stab wound.

“I can’t take these pills, Khalid. I don’t know what’s in them. They might not go with the pills I’ve been taking already, and I could get sicker. That wouldn’t be very good.”

Khalid looked both frustrated and concerned. I felt bad for him. Perhaps he had indeed gone to the trouble of consulting a doctor and getting the medication and I wasn’t grateful and eager to take it. But I wasn’t about to ingest any drug I didn’t know. I put the pills in my pocket, next to my passport, and thanked him, saying I would maybe take them later if I felt worse. That seemed to pacify Khalid a little. He pushed the bundle of french fries and bread in my direction.

“Eat. A little, little,” he was almost begging me.

I obliged by taking a couple of cold fries and chewing slowly. “They are delicious,” I told him. “Please tell Shogufa I like them very much.”

He seemed happy about this. “Shogufa. She make for you. She no happy you here.”

I’d been wondering what Shogufa thought, I told him. She couldn’t be happy that her future husband was holding a woman hostage in a dark hole. Khalid said no, she wasn’t; she wanted him to let me go. I thought about the pictures I had seen of her. Likely she was uneducated, living with her parents until she was married
off—and then she’d spend the rest of her life under a burka: the fate of most women in this war-torn country.