The Lovers (14 page)

That was all theoretical, since there could be no visuals unless we did find them, and no one was talking about where they might be. They had left their home village of Surkh Dar in secrecy shortly after our interviews with the fathers. First Zakia, at night in a full-length shawl, accompanied by Ali’s mother, had taken a taxi to the town of Nayak Bazaar, the administrative center of the mountainous district of Yakawlang. A relative had agreed to put Zakia and Chaman up for one night, but not the couple together, who would be too easily spotted. The next night Ali and his father similarly took a taxi up to Nayak Bazaar, and Anwar left the couple together there. They had thought they would easily find a place to stay but realized that people had begun looking at them suspiciously. Separately they could evade detection, but together they were Zakia and Ali, and people could readily add it up. In these remote mountain places, every stranger sticks out.

The road they took up to Nayak Bazaar was a spanking-new, Japanese-built highway for the first forty miles or so, quite possibly the best road in the country for as long as it lasted. There had been an unusually large amount of snow late that winter, and in their flight they passed the newly groomed ski slopes on the flanks of the Koh-i-Baba range, which at the time were still being patronized by a smattering of late-season Western skiers.
⁶
The road between Bamiyan and Band-e-Amir is so good that there’s even a Western-funded NGO
⁷
devoted to promoting women’s cycling that uses it for bike touring, a sport previously unknown to Afghan women and rather awkward for someone in a burqa.

The paved road ended after Nayak Bazaar. With Zakia clutching two plastic bags of clothing and Ali a small backpack, they walked up a dirt road out of the town and then left it for a trail up into the mountains. That first night they ended up sleeping outdoors, with a fire beside the path, and then the next day they walked all day until they came to the village of Kham-e Bazargan, where they knew there was a home with distant relatives who had long ago been neighbors in Surkh Dar village. They had not realized how spread out Kham-e Bazargan was; it extended along the highway through the spectacular Yakawlang Gorge for miles, and the little market area was far from the homestead they sought. Ali had been there once, but many years before, and by car, not by foot. That night, rather than enter the market and run into the wrong person, they took refuge in a cave in an area so barren they could not find enough sticks for a fire. These mountains were not as high as the Koh-i-Baba, but they still rose up to fourteen thousand feet and in those first weeks of April were still partly snow-covered. The days were as sunny and mild as the nights were harsh and cold. After a second night in the cave, they finally found the home of Zahra and Haji Abdul Hamid, which sat on its own promontory above the Yakawlang River, in a steep gorge with towering mountains on either side.

It was a typical rural Afghan home, a compound surrounded by a wall of mud wattle that enclosed gardens and yards, with several interconnected mud-brick buildings that gave private areas for the wives of the sons and communal areas for the men. There were three other homes nearby in the tiny hamlet on that knoll, but they all belonged to close relatives. The hamlet could be seen from the main well-graded dirt road, but it was a mile’s hike away, down into the bottomland, across the river on a shaky log bridge, and then back up the steep knoll on which the homestead stood.

Not for the first time, Zakia and Ali approached the home with no guarantee of what reception awaited them. They were former neighbors, distantly related like nearly everyone in their village, but still they had no way to know for sure how these people would react. Fortunately, when the couple related to Haji and Zahra what
had happened to them the past couple weeks, the older couple readily agreed to give them refuge.

“At any home, when we were running, we would knock on the door and say, ‘We are running because we’re in love,’ and usually they would take us in and help us,” Ali said. “It was not because we were Hazaras and they were Hazaras. It’s because everyone has at least once experienced love in their early lives, and they knew what it meant to be in love, even if they didn’t have their love with them still. Even the governor, when Zakia-
jan
was in the shelter, she said, ‘It’s not because you’re Hazara that I’m helping you but because she loves you and she shouldn’t be without you.’”
⁸

The house of Zahra and Haji was the first place where Zakia and Ali had felt safe since their flight from Bamiyan town. It, too, was a mud-brick dwelling, but the window frames were all of hand-planed lumber, painted a cheerful sky blue; the compound was freshly swept and as clean as a place with packed earthen floors could be. The roof was supported with battens of crooked birch trunks. In the bottomland wheat and potato seedlings were already sprouting, the green making a startling contrast with the dull brown and pale golden colors of the dirt slopes above. Higher on the mountainside, another green smudge had started to appear, a dusting of grass sprouts, watered by the still-melting snow. “It was good to begin a new life with greenery and spring,” Ali later said. They took walks in the steep grazing lands, reminiscent of the slopes where they spent their childhoods together herding sheep. It was as close to a honeymoon as they were likely to have. “They seemed so happy together,” Zahra said. “For the whole week they were here, they were never fighting or angry.”

Then one day Zahra’s children came home from school and said other kids had asked them who they were hiding. An old woman, another distant relative from Surkh Dar, heard what the schoolkids were saying. She stopped into Zahra’s house on her way home and spotted the couple.

Haji told them they would have to leave soon; it was only a matter of time before word got from the old lady back to Surkh Dar and then to either Zakia’s family in Kham-e-Kalak or to the
authorities in Bamiyan town. That evening Ali climbed to the top of the mountain, where he was able to get a cell-phone signal, and called his father. He and Zakia were down to their last thousand afghanis, about twenty dollars, and out of places to go. Anwar was also nearly broke and could not afford the cost of a taxi to reach them. “Call the journalists,” Ali said. “Maybe they can bring you to us.” His father said he would try, but he wasn’t at all sure he could trust us; he said he would also try to raise some money from relatives.

My colleague Jawad had been doggedly calling Anwar every day looking for news, and he reached him shortly after he spoke to his son. Anwar said he did not know for sure where his son was, but he was running out of money and he wanted to try to find him. He agreed to help us reach him in the hopes that our involvement in the case could get the couple out of the country. We were on the next morning’s flight to Bamiyan. At the airstrip there we were met by our two most experienced
Times
office drivers, Fareed and Kabir, who had crossed the Hindu Kush from Kabul by car overnight; the risk of Taliban checkpoints was too great for any but the most foolhardy foreigners to travel by land. Fareed and Kabir took the precaution of stripping their cars, their persons, and the contents of their phones clean of association with foreigners; there have been occasions when the Taliban have murdered travelers in the Ghorband Valley route to the Shibar Pass simply for having dollars in their wallets rather than afghanis.

We set out early in the morning, picking up Anwar and his son Bismillah a mile outside of Surkh Dar, lest Zaman’s family spot us, and began driving up into the heart of the central highlands. We were in two cars, with eight people including the drivers. Also with Jawad and me were Ben C. Solomon, a
Times
videographer
⁹
and Diego Ibarra Sánchez, a still photographer who was on assignment for us then. Anwar was cautious about telling us where we were going, and Jawad said it was clear that he still wasn’t sure if he could trust us and was trying to decide whether he should. We shifted passengers around so Jawad and I could sit with the old man and Bismillah, and for the next couple of hours we set about trying
to win Anwar’s trust and confidence. We assured him we would never give away Zakia and Ali’s location nor divulge his role or that of his sons in helping to hide them.

Stopping in Nayak Bazaar, we all had a breakfast of freshly baked loaves of round flatbread and oily eggs in a long, low room with plastic sheeting stretched in front of the windows to keep the sun’s heat in, greenhouse style. Our presence in the bazaar, which was just a half-mile-long strip of shops along the muddy road, caused a commotion. Two carloads of foreigners were hardly low-profile; we might as well have been a traveling circus. We worked out with Anwar a plan to keep the photographers away from the couple’s hiding place, once we found it, until we could discern if it was safe or not for the couple to join us—and whether they were willing and able to cooperate.

I had deep misgivings and a growing sense of guilt; it seemed likely that we would expose the couple if we did find them, without any guarantee that a more visual story about them would save their lives. In fact, the opposite could happen: It might make them easier for their pursuers to find. I thought about aborting it all but then thought that if the old man wanted us to come, it might be the right thing to do. This could not be great country to be a fugitive in for long; there just weren’t enough places to hide unless you really were staying in caves, and for how long could they possibly do that? The remotest corners of Afghanistan were populated, if thinly, and they would have to go out to get water and food.

It was especially difficult for a woman to hide anywhere in this society. Amina, the teenager who was killed after fleeing her family’s arranged marriage in Balkh Province,
¹⁰
was picked up by the police within an hour of her arrival, during daytime, at the bazaar in the provincial capital, Pul-e-Kumri. Bibi Aisha, sold as a child bride to a Taliban commander, fled when her husband was away fighting and went to the nearest market town, where police promptly picked her up and returned her to the family, even though in that area it would have been clear it was a Taliban family. She is the girl whose nose was cut off by that husband as punishment for having run away and later she was featured on the cover of
Time
magazine.
¹¹
Even being with a man is sufficient camouflage only if the man is taken for a brother or husband, and Afghans are quick to sniff out ones who are not. When sixteen-year-old Soheila,
¹²
given away in marriage years before she was born to an elderly man, fled with her cousin Niaz Mohammad, the two were repeatedly stopped by police, even before her family pursued them. Policemen somehow could tell they weren’t married.

How much harder it would be for the lovers to successfully flee with foreigners in their vicinity. In the course of our search for them, we were conspicuous as probably the only Westerners within a hundred miles. For several hours we wended our way up the Yakawlang Gorge, a place of spectacular but forbidding views and only this one dusty road, no side roads at all for many miles at a stretch. When we reached Kham-e Bazargan and the homestead where they were hiding, Anwar continued to insist on the fiction that he did not know where they were. Instead he said he would go and ask directions from that distant homestead on the little knoll, a mile off the highway. Worried that if they
were
hiding there, our presence would surely give them away, I told the drivers to split up our cars a little, parking a mile apart, and persuaded the photographers to keep their gear and themselves out of sight. For them this long trip without the prospect of a single frame was a bitter pill, which both Ben and Diego took with a mixture of equanimity and frustration.

Anwar and Bismillah came back at a trot. This indeed was where the pair were hiding, and Zakia was still there—but not Ali. The night before, Haji had told them they would have to leave today; Ali took off before dawn—they weren’t sure where to, but probably he hitchhiked to the next village, three hours’ drive away. Haji had gone in pursuit, furious that Ali had not taken Zakia with him as Haji had asked. He took the minibus he owns, which plies the mountain roads as an informal, private bus service. As bad as all that was, it was a godsend that solved our conundrum: the worry that we would inadvertently give away the couple’s location and compromise their safety. We had found them just as they were in the process of eviction, and that had nothing to do with us.

Zakia refused to come out even to talk to us, however, until her husband returned—even with her father-in-law, Anwar, there. We sat down with Anwar and Zahra to wait and to discuss what had transpired. “I’m deeply concerned. They have to go now, I did it just for God’s sake to help them,” Zahra said. “I support what they did—they love each other—but the problem is if it comes to a dispute between families, they might kill each other, and they might kill us, too. They might kill them and cut them into pieces.”

Haji returned, having been unable to find Ali, but friends had called him to say that Nayak Bazaar was full of rumors that the pair were hiding in his place; they told him he should expect the police to arrive soon to apprehend them. “The police could arrest all of us for this,” he said, apologetic but adamant. “Now they’re calling it a kidnapping.” He wanted us to leave immediately, taking Zakia with us. But she refused to emerge from the women’s quarters, Zahra was not going to force her, and none of the men would dare enter. I promised Haji we would take them with us the moment Ali returned, which then put us in the uncomfortable position of providing them with getaway cars, but there seemed to be no alternative. I justified it by saying that we would use the car journey as a means to interview and photograph them in safety, which we could no longer do at Haji’s house without putting them all at risk of arrest. I was also uncomfortably aware that we were stepping over that line that separates journalists and their subjects. We were becoming part of the story, whatever we might tell ourselves; more accurately, whatever
I
might tell myself and, as the person in charge, compel the others to go along with.