The Lovers (16 page)

There were hundreds of such readers who reached out. An American named Walker Moore wondered if he couldn’t pay a bride price that would make Zakia and Ali’s match acceptable to both their families; Walker Moore turned out to be a
nom de pinceau
of two collaborative painters, John Walker and Roxann Moore; the Zakia-and-Ali story reminded them of their own union, which
had been bitterly opposed by Roxann’s conservative Southern Baptist family in Texas, Mr. Walker said. Adele Goldberg, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, offered to make a donation to help relocate the couple. Dr. Douglas Fleming, a physician and cancer researcher from Princeton, offered to donate a hundred dollars a month to them for a year to cover their expenses on the run, and his later donations proved critically helpful. E. Jean Carroll, who wrote a relationship advice column for
Elle
magazine and also runs a matchmaking service, Tawkify.com, offered them “airfare to the US, a chaperone for Zakia, and a place for them to stay”—until they were married. She, too, later sent money that helped in their escape. Beth Goodman also offered to host them in the United States. Many had vaguer but also heartfelt requests. “I’m French, I’m a woman and I live on the same planet,” wrote Louisa Roque. “How can we help their parents to open their minds and hearts?”

The response went ballistic after we finally had both photographs and video of them together to accompany the words. It was gratifying that we’d touched a nerve and moved so many people. I no longer felt that this was a case that lay outside the boundaries of hope. At the same time, it was frustrating. Helping Zakia and Ali stay on the run was no more sustainable in the long term than many of the other things that well-intentioned Westerners have been doing for Afghans, whether paying them salaries ten times the Afghan norm
¹
or providing their military with steeply subsidized fuel, much of it diverted to the black market.
²
There was little that anyone could do to help the couple in any permanent way unless a government stepped in and made it possible for them to leave their country. For those countries that might have been so inclined, that was politically difficult—in part because of popular backlashes against immigration in many Western countries and in part because so many of those countries needed to show skeptics back home that Afghanistan was improving on human rights and merited their continued national investment. With criminal charges hanging over the lovers, it became diplomatically awkward and contradictory for countries that had donated so much money to rule-of-law development
work in Afghanistan to then turn around and say they had no confidence in the Afghan justice system, however many flat-earthers wielded its gavels. The United States alone had by 2014 spent more than $1.2 billion on rule-of-law programming
³
to do things like train judges and promote equal rights for women.

President Hamid Karzai could always choose to step in and pardon them or order the charges dropped. But this was even more of a long shot; Karzai’s wife, an obstetrician before their marriage, had rarely been seen in public afterward and no longer practiced her profession.
⁴
Once seen as a champion of women’s rights, Mr. Karzai was now widely viewed by most women’s activists as having betrayed their cause.

While there was little these readers could do to help the couple directly, their money could buy some breathing room, and it soon began accumulating in the account of Women for Afghan Women
⁵
after I began answering reader mail with this note:

Dear Readers,

Pardon the impersonal e-mail but so many people have written me about the Afghan lovers that I can’t answer everyone right away, although I aim to do so eventually.

Many of you have asked how you could help and, previously, I haven’t had a satisfactory answer.

However, now a well-respected and long-established organization, Women for Afghan Women, has decided to start a fund dedicated to assisting the couple. The group’s executive director, Manizha Naderi, has assured us that 100 percent of any donations to that fund will be passed directly to the couple.

. . . .

I feel sure that WAW has the means and the capacity to get donations to them personally.

With warm regards,

Some people had taken the initiative even earlier and sent money to a trusted accountant to deliver to Zakia and Ali, which,
I had quietly had assured a few of the more persistent among them, would be a safe way to do it. Before that money could clear from the bank for the accountant to deal with, however, we had rushed off to our rendezvous with Zakia and Ali up in the mountains in Yakawlang, so it had been my own money I gave them, telling myself I was just fronting it temporarily. WAW later made donations to them easy and efficient, and the group was beyond any reproach; it was undoubtedly the most effective NGO in Afghanistan fighting for women’s rights on a basic, practical level and the biggest operator of women’s shelters.
⁶
WAW’s seven main shelters are in some of the country’s most difficult areas. It also runs family-reconciliation and counseling centers and homes for children whose mothers are in prison. Eventually the
Times
ran a notice on its website telling people how they could donate to help the couple. The money that came in was not huge, a few thousand dollars, partly because I advised donors who asked how much to give that large sums of money were not necessary and might be distorting or cause problems in their own right. In Afghan terms the donations were adequate to keep the couple alive and help finance a safe place for them to hide. I suspect this was the first time the
New York Times
had in effect encouraged its readers to send money to criminal fugitives, which is technically and legally what Zakia and Ali were, however bogus the charges against them. Editors in New York were as moved by the story of the Afghan lovers as everyone else was.

If only we could find Zakia and Ali to let them know about all these offers of help. For quite a while, they were not aware that a fund-raising drive was under way on their behalf. Since we had left them in Nayak Bazaar in late April, there had been no word from them at all, and Ali’s phone went unanswered, sounding not so much as a lovesick ringtone. His father and brothers said they had heard from him and thought he was in Ghazni Province or maybe Wardak, they weren’t sure. He called them when he had a signal; they couldn’t really call him, and of course nor could we. I was beginning to think that they had gone ahead and fled to Iran, and if they had, the story ended there—my story and possibly their story. Iran would be a dead end in almost every respect. While there are
950,000 legally registered Afghan refugees in Iran, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
⁷
the real number is as much as three times that, most of them living there illegally.
⁸
The Iranian government has long since stopped granting refugee status to new arrivals, so all those who have arrived in recent years are undocumented illegals, without even the limited rights afforded refugees and guaranteed by international conventions and United Nations agencies. They cannot legally work, have no civil rights, cannot send their children to school—and could never be legally resettled to a third country.
⁹
At any moment they could be forcibly deported back to Afghanistan, and they often are. Some are killed and their bodies returned to the nearest border post with no explanation from the Iranian authorities. For Afghan refugees, just getting to Iran could be a dangerous crossing through forbidding deserts, far worse than anything Mexican and Central American immigrants face in the American Southwest. And since an American journalist could not follow refugees to Iran, there would likely be nothing more I could do for them and little more to write about them. The only thing Iran had in its favor as a destination was language; Farsi or Persian, the language spoken in Iran, and Dari, which Ali and Zakia spoke, are nearly as mutually intelligible as British and American English.

Finally, late in April, Ali called us; they could be in Kabul the next day, he said, if it was okay with us. He wanted assurances they would be safe there, and we told him that the big city could give them anonymity they would never find elsewhere, and there was donor money waiting to help them with expenses. Two days later Zakia and Ali arrived with his brother Bismillah and moved into the home of his aunt, his father’s sister, who lived not far from the old city in central Kabul, in a neighborhood of squatters’ buildings erected on the steep slopes of the Chindawul Hill.

Historically, Kabul had been settled on a flat plateau with several small mountains that jut up singly from the plain, but in the past decade its population had increased from less than a million to more than 5 million residents, and squatters had moved higher and higher on the steep slopes of places like Chindawul that were once
viewed as uninhabitable, carving small plots out of the rock and filling the reclaimed space with slapdash cinder- and mud-block constructions.

With no services but electricity, if that, such homes were cheaper the higher up the hill they were located. The aunt’s house was a one-room shack made of mud brick and concrete, reached by a fifteen-minute climb up an already steep dirt path, which soon becomes
so
steep that it’s replaced by a nearly vertical stone staircase, with two hundred fifty steps to reach the aunt’s house. The entire dwelling was no bigger than an American-size bedroom, with a primitive latrine and a gas burner and a bowl for a kitchen; a curtain hung across the room to give the couple some privacy. They stowed their few possessions, mostly just clothing, in the plastic bags they’d carried them in; at first they didn’t even have mattresses to sleep on, just fake-bamboo mats. The nearest water was at the foot of the hill, and they hauled it in a pair of big plastic jerry cans, like those used for gasoline, slung across their shoulders at either end of a stout stick.

Although Chindawul was a safely Hazara neighborhood, Jawad and I decided not to draw attention to Zakia and Ali by meeting them there. Instead we arranged to meet Ali alone, reasoning that they were easier to recognize as a couple than singly. We would pick him up outside the Pamir Cinema, at the foot of the hill, one of the few places he knew in the city. Half an hour before the meeting, Ali called to tell us his brother Bismillah had gone ahead to the meeting place to check it out and saw one of Zakia’s older brothers on the street nearby. Did we know anything about that?

Of course we didn’t, but our meeting was canceled and Ali again stopped answering his phone when we called. Another week went by before we were able to make a meeting happen, and then only by calling his father and persuading him that we had no reason to expose them to risk; spotting the brother there was just bad luck—or good luck that they saw him first and not the other way around. If that brother was in Kabul, he was probably working as a day laborer, and the Pamir Cinema is a common meeting place for laborers looking for day work, so in the future it would probably be a good place for us to avoid.

The night before, E. Jean Carroll, the advice columnist, had e-mailed to let me know she had done something that had never occurred to me would work—she sent money to Ali via Western Union. She gave me the coded number of the money wire to pass along to him so he could collect it. We relayed the details via Anwar, hoping that the prospect of receiving money would reassure Ali we were on his side.

I let Rabbi Shmuley know that Ali had come to Kabul, as I did several of the other well-wishers. Shmuley activated the fixer we had found him, Aimal Yaqubi, but Aimal had no more luck getting through to Ali than we had earlier. While we were waiting to meet with Ali, though, Shmuley had come up with a plan. He was outraged at how hard this had become. He’d gone straight to Samantha Power, the United States representative to the United Nations, and tried to persuade her that she had to push the American government to save the couple. By his account she had in turn persuaded the U.S. secretary of state, John Kerry, to try to do something, but despite their efforts both finally had come to the conclusion that they could not force the American government to change its policies and issue the couple a humanitarian visa to save them from persecution. With criminal charges against them, and the United States supposedly an ally of Afghanistan, taking them directly out of the country would mean using the visa system to help Afghans escape their own, American-financed criminal-justice system. They would have to resolve their case first, legally, or they would have to get to another country and apply for a visa there, a process that Shmuley said he was told would take them six months or more even with Samantha Power behind it.

Shmuley had come up with a novel work-around. He said he’d been in touch with his good friend President Paul Kagame of Rwanda and that Mr. Kagame would issue visas to Ali and Zakia and would let them stay as his guests for as long as it would take for them to get visas to go on to America, a process that Rabbi Shmuley said Samantha Power promised to expedite—provided the couple were out of Afghanistan. This would be financed through Mr.
Shmuley’s World Values Network, using money from a mystery benefactor: a very wealthy woman, as he had said.

Not only did it seem a bizarre solution, but there was a serious complication. As it stood then, only Ali had his identity card, or
tazkera,
which was required in order to get a passport; Zakia’s father had possession of her
tazkera
and was not about to give it up. So she could not even apply for a passport, and Ali would have to do so at the risk of being arrested on the outstanding bigamy and kidnapping charges.