The Lovers (15 page)

While we waited, Zahra told us about her hopes for her six children, who were all in school; her eldest, an eighteen-year-old, Ahmed Zia, was first in his class in twelfth grade, wanted to go to university to become an engineer, and was proud that he’d just been able to vote in the presidential election for the first time. (When we later spoke to Ahmed Zia, he was contemptuous about Ali and Zakia. “What they did was wrong,” he said. He would never tolerate one of his young sisters behaving like that, he said. But neither would he give Zakia and Ali away, out of respect for
his parents.) Zahra herself could read and write but had only a few years of school; her husband was a schoolteacher as well as a landowner. None of this could have been possible in Afghanistan a decade ago; in fact, Zakia and Ali could not have been possible, Zahra said. If today they were pursued by society and its laws, it was only the fault of ignorant, uneducated people like their neighbor. “That stupid woman,” Zahra kept calling her.

So much had changed since the Taliban time, Zahra mused, when she taught her daughters in secrecy in her home, since the Taliban had closed all the girls’ schools.
¹³
Now they could study openly, and the Hazara girls in their community did so. They could watch Bollywood love stories on television and listen to romantic music on radios and mobile telephones, which also had all been forbidden. Yet they still lived in the shadow of that time. The Taliban had injected something new and malevolent into Afghanistan’s intensely private culture: the concept that honor, as it applied to women, was not an issue just for the man whose honor was at stake, the man who owned those women. Instead it was something that concerned everyone; not only the state but every man had the obligation to enforce honor, as he saw it. The Taliban had gone, but the intrusive attitude of its notorious Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice was left behind, among people like “that awful woman,” as Zahra called her. Or, for that matter, among the Bamiyan police, who were then pursuing an eighteen-year-old for the supposed crime of fleeing a place where she was staying legally and voluntarily.

Anwar sat cross-legged, alternately dialing his son’s cell phone and looking out the window. The photographer, Diego, was restless and had disappeared; later we discovered he’d gone into the kitchen, in the women’s quarters, and found Zakia, posing her under a beam of sunlight coming through a chimney hole in the mud roof. Diego was fond of his sunbeams and was forever trying to find them in the dark dwellings of Afghanistan. He said he hadn’t understood that men were not allowed in the women’s quarters; it was a serious cultural breach, one that could easily get a man killed in the wrong house. Diego’s English was semifluent
but spotty; it was hard to be sure what he didn’t understand, versus what he chose not to understand if it got in the way of a picture.

I asked Anwar how it came to pass that, having beaten his son for starting his affair with Zakia, he now was going to the ends of the earth for him. “It is true that I punished him then, but now I have changed my mind. It happened because I saw that my daughter-in-law stood behind my son and was brave enough to say she loves my son, and now it is an honor for us to stand behind her,” he said.

Zahra teared up listening to him.

“Now she is a part of my family, she is my own daughter. She is a part of my family now, and I would do anything for her as well as for him. Even more for her.” As an answer it was pretty unsatisfactory, little better than a handy if heartfelt slogan. It was more likely that once Zakia’s family began publicly denouncing their son and threatening his life, Anwar’s pride and that of his sons was challenged, and perhaps that pushed them to rally to his side. Zaman’s pride wanted to see his daughter dead; Anwar’s pride would see his daughter-in-law honored instead.

About midafternoon Ali finally showed up, his arrival heralded by half a dozen children from the compound who had staked out the path from the road; again he had hitchhiked. It turned out he had gone to a village farther up the highway where he thought he could contact us by cell phone; instead we had by then reached his hiding place, where
our
phones only worked from the hilltops.

His ringtone that day, which we heard sometimes when we climbed the slopes to call him, praying we would get through to him before the police arrived, was a Pashto love song by Latif Nangarhari:

Come here, my little flower, come!

Let me tear open my breast

And show you my own heart, naked.
¹⁴

It was an emotional few minutes as Zakia packed Ali’s bag for him and gathered her own plastic bags into one larger sack. We explained that we would give them a ride to the nearest safe place and
wanted to interview them and photograph them on the journey as we went, so long as we could do it without compromising them further. They were strangely quiet and calm, even oddly cheerful at the prospect of this next leg of the run, while everyone else was taking it hard. They understood that there was no other course of action; everyone else felt complicit in forcing it upon them.

I asked Zakia why she did not wear the all-covering burqa to disguise herself as they fled, and she laughed scornfully. “I will not put that thing on me,” she said. Similarly, I was surprised that Ali had not changed his look at all; his hair was still full, brushed up in the front and slicked back, and he had not grown out his beard much, one of the easiest things to do in a society where beards are commonplace, more so than clean-shaven faces. He laughed. “She would never agree to look at me if I did that.” It was too cheerful a moment; one wanted to grab these kids and say,
Hey, you won’t be choosing your haircuts and dress in jail.
They did agree, however, that they would change their costumes in the next day or two, so that their colorful outfits, especially hers, would not be so easily recognized from any published pictures.

Diego had spotted another ray of light shining through a hole in the roof somewhere and wanted to delay our departure to get both of them in it, but we insisted on giving him no more than a minute and then bolting. Ben had already run ahead so he could get in front of them for footage of them heading down from the promontory, finally together and really fleeing. The lovers held hands, unbidden, as they walked, and when they came to what passed for a footbridge—three spindly, skinny birch trunks laid across the rushing river, so thin they bounced at every step—they crossed one by one, Zakia not even bothering to take off her high heels. The rest of us crossed gingerly and awkwardly in our Gore-Tex boots, worried about all those phones and cameras falling with us into the icy torrent below.

Before we piled into the cars, I slipped Ali a thousand dollars when no one else was looking. He had never asked for it, but neither did he question it, just tucked it into his shirt. I did it on impulse, although I’d been thinking of it earlier; I made sure none
of my colleagues saw me. It was all money that various readers had pledged, even begged me to pass on to the couple, I reasoned, and they would follow through on those pledges in time, no doubt. And if they didn’t . . . well, it seemed the least I could do. Ali’s last thousand afghanis were not going to get them far, to be sure.

Much more of an issue than the money, journalistically, was abetting their escape. It was one thing to talk to them and photograph them on the run, but we were now providing the getaway cars. Once we put them in the cars with us, the die was cast; I was no longer just an observer but in a pretty important way a participant. The money could be dismissed as a humanitarian gesture, like giving money to a starving family while reporting in a miserable refugee camp—who wouldn’t? This, however, was helping people flee criminal charges placed against them by their government. There was no chance to ask my bosses what they would think about this, but that was just as well, since I suspect I know what the answer would have been and I would not have been able to obey it. Zakia and Ali were here in part—I would come to realize how much a part—because of us. As the reader had said, “You’re responsible for them now.” What else could we do? We had the only cars available in Kham-e Bazargan; Haji’s minibus was out on its rounds. So should we have waited there until the police arrived and then photographed their arrest? How cynical and exploitative that would have been. It came down to this choice: abandon your principles and stick to your humanity or stick to your principles and abandon your humanity. True, documenting their arrest would have been the better story, dramatically speaking, but who could live with that? We all felt uneasy about it, but I told Ben and Diego, “Look, if we work with them here, they won’t want to cooperate, because they need to be running. If they run into the hills, we won’t be able to stay with them for long. If we put them in our cars, we’ll be able to work with them in some privacy and security.” Which was all true, to a point, but it was still an equivocation.

Later we would learn that the police arrived at Haji and Zahra’s that evening, only hours behind us. They might well have passed us on the road, lost to sight in the dust swirls our cars stirred up.

On the long drive down to Nayak Bazaar, we had time to talk with the couple about their flight so far, and I asked if it had been worth it, escaping from the women’s shelter and eloping. “Yes, it’s worth it because we love each other,” Ali said.

“If we had only had one day together, it would have been worth it,” Zakia said. “How can I be sad? We’re together. I’m with my love.”

One thing that became clear talking to both of them was that their time on the run had convinced them they had no long-term future in their own country; they said they had decided that their ultimate solution would be to flee abroad.

Then Jawad and I swapped cars, letting the photographers have some time with Zakia and Ali for the rest of the ride. Ben was happy to interview and video them inside the car, but Diego wanted them outside again, against the dramatic backdrop of the barren mountain landscape.

“Look, Diego, we’re on the run,” I said. “The cops are searching for them. Half the country is talking about them. You can’t possibly shoot them outside the car.”

He was insistent, and I finally gave in a little. “But only if the road is empty and then only for three minutes, no more.”

Our car was in front, some distance ahead of them, and when we arrived on the outskirts of Nayak Bazaar, we realized that the second car with Zakia, Ali, Ben, and Diego inside was nowhere to be seen and was a lot more than three minutes behind us. We doubled back, only to find Diego posing them on top of a hillock, a fair walk from the road but in clear view of anyone who came along. I often wonder how differently it all would have ended if they’d been captured there and then by that carload of police on their way back from where we’d just been, because one of us had been too journalistically eager for yet another piece of the story.

I took over the lovers’ car and banished Diego to the other one. We carried on into the town, dropping the couple at the top of a side street that headed off into the mountain up a jeep track. It was nearly dark. Another two hours’ walk from there would take them to a safe house, one they had used once before, and after that they
would set off across the mountains for Wardak, now that they had enough money to find a driver with a jeep, and then find buses to take them to southern Ghazni Province, to one of the Hazara communities in that otherwise dangerous province. Ben Solomon wanted to follow them.

“Out of the question,” I said. “How could they possibly escape with a big white American tagging along?”

My story ran in the
Times
three days later, on April 22, along with the video
¹⁵
by Ben on our website, and Diego’s stills,
¹⁶
which were so good that his presumptive perfidy had to be forgiven. The cumulative effect was to take a terrific story that already had generated a great deal of interest and increase that manifold.

The print story
¹⁷
had a suitably nonspecific dateline, “
HINDU KUSH RANGE
,
AFGHANISTAN
,” a large area that traversed more than a third of the country. It ended:

They hoped to be hundreds of miles away by Saturday morning, but were not sure which way they would go. The road to the north went through Taliban country. To the west, bandit country, where they risked being robbed—or worse. The road to the south went over passes still blocked by snow.

There was no road east, but they could always walk.

That was a bit of protective obfuscation. Their real plan was to wait for the snows to melt to the south and then make it over the passes to Wardak Province: Taliban country but also Hazara country. Before they took their leave, I told them I didn’t think they could keep hiding in these barren, unforested mountains; every stranger was a subject of suspicion. Two youthful strangers in love and on the run were a red flag.

“Give it a few weeks, then come to Kabul,” I said. With five million people in the city, there had to be somewhere they could find to disappear among them. But then what right did I have to be giving Zakia and Ali advice?

6

MYSTERY BENEFACTOR

Zakia and Ali were saved again and again by the kindnesses of strangers. Villagers who sheltered them on the run. Passersby who spotted them and chose not to call the police. Journalists who wrote about them and made it harder to dispose of them—not just ourselves but also many Afghan journalists who had picked up the story. Women’s advocates who lobbied on their behalf in the face of official disapproval. Then there were the strangers all over the world, but particularly in the United States, who were moved enough by their story to try to do something about it, readers who both encouraged and sometimes shamed me into keeping on their case and later became contributors whose money, mostly in modest donations, kept the couple going. When you’re on the run, poverty is a potent enemy.