The Lovers (17 page)

“How hard can it be to get passports?”

“Not hard at all, if you’re not worried about the FCPA.”

The meaning of those initials was immediately clear: the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes it a federal crime for American citizens to pay bribes in foreign countries, even where it’s a standard and locally accepted practice. His mystery benefactor would want none of that, Shmuley said. The couple would have to find a way to obtain passports legally, without getting caught on the outstanding criminal charges.

That was not hopeless, since both of them had fairly common first names—Mohammad Ali was his; he had no surname, like many rural Afghans. Zakia, too, had no surname,
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which is even more common among women. (Kept in purdah, women have even less need of a full name than men.) So if the couple went to the passport office one at a time, that might possibly work. There was a risk in it, to be sure, especially if no officials could be bribed.

Finally, after two weeks of ducking us, Ali, out of money, agreed to meet us outside a hospital in a busy part of town. We picked him up and took him to the Ché restaurant, in the Kart-e-Seh neighborhood, which passes for upscale in Kabul. The Ché is one of a type of Afghan restaurant, rarely frequented by foreigners, in which the tables are traditional raised platforms with cushions, each in a separate enclosure arranged around a central garden. Each has room for half a dozen people; with thatched roofs, thick vines, and screening around the sides, they are very private spaces. The ostensible purpose is to provide a place for families to dine in seclusion, so the women cannot be seen by others, and they do function
that way. With a cooperative management, they also provide privacy for couples and mixed groups of unrelated people, and are often full of young people willing to defy social convention, courting and even, on occasion, necking. It was a perfect place for us to sit down with Ali away from prying eyes.

Ali had changed little since we’d last seen him nearly a month before; he was still beardless, his hair still in a pompadour, a style that stood out in Kabul. He was restless and nervous, and every few minutes his phone rang on silent and he looked at it with concern. I filled him in on what we knew. There was an Afghan employee at the American embassy who had been assigned to speak to him about their case, and we programmed the number into his phone so that he would recognize it when it rang and know it was okay to answer. We told him there was a wealthy American who wanted to help him and Zakia, who had enlisted an Afghan fixer to be their go-between, and we programmed Aimal Yaqubi’s number into his phone as well. He had trouble understanding why we were introducing Aimal into the matter, though I explained that as a journalist I couldn’t act on behalf of someone trying to find a solution for him. “But we trust you, and we only want to talk to you. We know you will help us,” he said. It was hard to explain the notion of professional distance in any way that made sense to him, all the more so since it had begun to ring false to me.

While we talked, Ali was skittish and scarcely touched the food we ordered. When we told him about Shmuley’s plan to get them to Rwanda, as a way station en route to America, he looked at us blankly. I realized we had to back up and start with some basic geography; he had only the vaguest idea of other countries, let alone other continents. A map to him was a meaningless piece of paper with strange lines on it. He had never seen an African or any black person; the only foreigners he’d ever seen were the European troops who helped train his army unit in Farah, and the first foreigner he’d ever seen up close was me. From time to time, I’d catch him looking at me sidewise, as if trying to figure out what manner of beast this could be or what I was up to, really. After a long explanation about Africa—how far away it was, how different
the climate, culture, and language, where it was located in relation to the United States—he said he understood, but it was clear he really did not. I didn’t begin to try to explain Rwanda and what that country specifically is like. “Whatever Africa is, that would be better than hiding in caves,” he said.

We told him that Women for Afghan Women had been receiving donations from people in the United States who’d read about the couple’s case and wanted to help them. The organization was interested in giving him a lawyer who would fight their criminal case for them, and would he want to talk to the lawyer? He refused; as far as he was concerned, WAW was an organization that ran shelters, and shelters were bad. They would try to get Zakia to go into one, and she would be a prisoner there again indefinitely. On this there was no reasoning with him; no use pointing out that Zakia would have been long dead without the Bamiyan shelter, whatever her complaints about it. He would not consent to go to WAW’s office himself to pick up money from the donors, for fear they would somehow detain him; he wanted us to do it for him, but we refused. His cell phone rang again, and this time he answered it and had a fraught conversation with Zakia. She was worried about him, he said, and when he hadn’t answered her earlier calls, she’d grown alarmed that something had happened. She knew that her brothers were in town, and though Kabul was a city of 5 million people, its size was beyond their imagining; it was as remote and foreign to them as Africa would be.

We asked him if he had collected the three hundred dollars that E. Jean Carroll had sent in the name of Ali, care of any Western Union office in Kabul, but he had not. We realized that Anwar was innumerate, though he’d said, out of embarrassment and politeness, that he could take down the coded number needed to collect the money. So we wrote it down for Ali and said we could take him to one of the transfer offices; there are many of them attached to Afghan banks. Ali was fine with numbers on a telephone, but written down on paper they were just so many hieroglyphics. Jawad would have to go along to help him.

We chose a Western Union office on Darulaman Road because
it was on a busy street but set back from the road. This particular bank had been the target of a Taliban suicide bomber the year before, in an attack that had killed a dozen people; many of the walls still had scooped-out patches from the shrapnel, and the windows were cardboarded over. It was ready for the next attack; unlike lightning, suicide bombers often strike the same place twice, and the office’s entry was obscured by sandbagged blast walls and HESCOs, huge metal mesh containers filled with earth. It was menacing but private. The Western Union clerk confirmed they had the money, under that code number, but Ms. Carroll had sent it to first name Mohammad, last name Ali, and as far as the bank was concerned, his documents said he was first name Mohammad Ali, no last name. It’s a common problem in Afghanistan, where more than half the population gets by with only one name.
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I relayed this to Ms. Carroll, who corrected the first wire, sending a second payment immediately. By the next day, Zakia and Ali had three hundred dollars, enough money to live on, by the courtesy of an American stranger who had simply been moved by their story. From Ali and Zakia’s point of view, three hundred dollars was enough to get by on for a month, and they remained adamant that WAW was off-limits, though the organization by now held several thousand dollars in donations for them.

Ali was being uncooperative journalistically as well. Our video department wanted to do a follow-up of the piece that Ben Solomon had shot in Yakawlang. Our photo desk wanted to shoot them again, too, and send a still photographer along whenever there was a new development in their case. We were constantly bombarded by requests from Afghan journalists who also wanted to follow their case; we didn’t like turning our colleagues down, and this was, after all, a story about Afghan society that Afghans needed to hear. Ali was adamant, though, that they wanted no further photography, and he did not even want his wife to talk to us anymore. They also wanted no part of the Afghan press. It was too dangerous, he felt, and it was hard to argue with that.

His attitude was not going to help us keep interest in the couple high enough to force some sort of resolution. In journalism the
great stories are the ones that can bring about change. This one could change the lives of two people who otherwise had no real prospects and perhaps give some real encouragement to others like them. But increasingly my subjects seemed to want nothing to do with us if they could not see the immediate practical benefit. I tried to persuade them that cases like theirs rarely end well when kept far from public view. I could not keep their story alive if a half of it, Zakia, was no longer speaking to me. Ali claimed he understood that, but then all that he would agree to, and only reluctantly, was to arrange for Zakia to speak to us on the phone from their hiding place. That’s where we had to leave it for the time being.

Shmuley called me nearly nightly in those days, worried that his fixer was having trouble persuading Ali to meet with him. I said we had done as much as we could. I suggested that Aimal should go easy; we, too, had backed off, so Zakia and Ali did not feel pressured. Meanwhile Shmuley was also in touch with Fatima Kazimi, as was E. Jean Carroll, and Fatima was regaling them both with her own tale of woe.

I heard about this firsthand when Fatima arrived in Kabul late in April. She bustled into the
New York Times
compound in Wazir Akbar Khan, the diplomatic quarter of Kabul, dressed in her usual purple head scarf and the modesty trench coat favored by many Afghan women in official life. Fatima was not happy. She had just seen a translated copy of my latest article on the lovers, published April 22,
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and was outraged that it focused on the couple and did not mention Fatima’s role in the case. “I expected you to write about me,” she said. “I brought them to you.” In fact, the first article did mention Fatima prominently, quoted her at length, related her role in getting Zakia to the safety of the shelter—all things that were corroborated by many witnesses in Bamiyan, including several people who’d been in the court. Fatima just wasn’t the central figure in that piece, nor should she have been. She had already complained to me then that she was disappointed that the first article made it a Romeo-and-Juliet love story and not a Fatima Kazimi rescue story. Then, when they had eloped, my March 31 article
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had revisited the issue of Fatima’s role, appropriately, since
some were accusing her of engineering Zakia’s breakout. Again Fatima was not the focus; the lovers were.

Now Fatima wanted us to set the matter straight and write another article about how terribly she had been treated in this affair. She claimed to have fled to Kabul with her entire family because she could no longer endure the many threats she was receiving in Bamiyan. She claimed to have lost her job at the women’s ministry. “The entire village of the girl’s father filed a complaint against me and accused me of helping Zakia escape—or helping Ali kidnap her, as they put it,” she said. “I actually didn’t do anything.” She purportedly did help by allowing Zakia to get a telephone from Ali while she was in the shelter,
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but Ali and Zakia both deny she had anything to do with that—although she did allow them to have a chaperoned meeting in the shelter at one point. “Whether I say I did help or did not help, everything comes back to me from the beginning,” Fatima said. “I stepped in and stopped the court from doing something terrible. Yesterday her family members came to my former home in Bamiyan, looking for me, but I had moved. My life is in danger, and I am under threat. If I don’t leave the country, something may happen to me or my family.” She had four children, teenagers and young adults, and a husband. “You need to write that.”

I was starting to have a hard time believing any of this, thinking that perhaps Fatima had gamed this whole thing from the beginning. I was shocked to discover that she had persuaded E. Jean Carroll to send money to help protect her. Fatima was earnestly depicting her case as more dire—and more important—than that of Zakia and Ali, who really
were
in danger of being killed (as Fatima herself had pointed out from the beginning). “Only the governor is on my side now, and how long can the governor defend me?” she said.

The governor of Bamiyan has executive authority over all the provincial government offices, save the courts; he controls the police force, so he can prevent arrests, order interventions, provide bodyguards, and so forth. He is a Hazara, like Fatima, and it’s an overwhelmingly Hazara place; if anyone were likely to be in danger there now, it would be Zakia’s Tajik family members, whose opposition to the marriage on ethnic and religious grounds would
expose them to the anger of their more numerous Hazara neighbors. Zakia and Ali were at risk of violence at their hands, no doubt, but Fatima?

She was insistent, though, and I said we would write about the case again and probably mention her as well; in a piece a couple of days later,
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I noted the role she had in alerting us to the case. Who was I to say, really, what the truth was in the matter? Maybe she
had
received death threats and was frightened by them and honestly felt that the only hope was to leave Afghanistan.

It certainly was true that anyone connected with sheltering women in Afghanistan was under intense pressure. Just the year before, the case of Bibi Aisha had contributed to a backlash against women’s shelters after a picture showing that her nose had been cut off appeared on
Time’s
cover. Bibi Aisha was widely criticized in Afghanistan after that cover picture
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—including by officials in the office of President Hamid Karzai—for bringing shame to her homeland, and she now lives with a foster family in Virginia, spurned in her own land and not only by the Taliban. The subsequent crackdown against women’s shelters was led by prominent conservatives
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who accused the shelters of undermining traditional values, promoting adulterous conduct, and even fronting for prostitution. One television network, Noorin TV, sent its star “investigative reporter,” Nastoh Naderi, to the Women for Afghan Women shelter.
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Denied entry, he stood in front of the gate and had his crew film men as they walked in. The men were guards who were employed by the shelter, working in the compound but not in the building that housed the women clients. On air Mr. Naderi described the guards as johns coming to patronize the prostituted women inside. The government then tried to take control of the women’s shelters, all of which were run by either private charities or the United Nations, but was forced by an international outcry to back off and instead instituted regulations controlling their activities, under the purview of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs.
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