The Lovers (2 page)

All of which is more than just the backdrop to the story of the lovers Zakia and Ali, who as young children fled with their families into the higher mountains when the Taliban came to the valley and who returned after the massacres were over. What happened here long ago, and not so long ago, made these two young people who they are. It shaped not only the destiny that they had defied but also the other one they were on the verge of making on this night when the mountains all around them were struggling to hold on to winter and the Persian New Year was about to begin. In ways odd and thoroughly unexpected, the Taliban had turned Zakia and Ali’s entire world on its head and by both their defeat and their bitter resurgence had made the story of these lovers what it would be. Without the Taliban there would have been no Western intervention; without a Western intervention, the story of Zakia and Ali would have been a short tale with a bloody ending.

The warlords who fought the Taliban and later helped form the Afghan government that replaced them were, where women were concerned, as bad as and sometimes worse than the Taliban. Only the insistence of the Western countries on equal rights for women led to a constitution and laws that protected women, at least legally. Culturally was another matter. In recent years, as the Taliban threatened to return to power, Afghan leaders and their Western allies had grown unwilling to expend political capital challenging cultural conservatives on the government side. As a result most gains on behalf of women were made in the early years after the Taliban’s fall, with relatively little accomplished once the resurgent
Taliban became a more potent threat after 2012. Western intervention had made it legal for Zakia to choose her own spouse and even to run away with him, but now Western timidity had stranded Afghan women like her in an uncertain limbo of cultural and official hostility.

Zakia was Tajik, and Ali was Hazara; she was Sunni, and he was Shia. Zakia’s family was opposed to her marriage on cultural, ethnic, and religious grounds. Now that she had run away, she’d violated another cultural taboo. In Afghan culture a wife is her husband’s property; a daughter is her father’s property; a sister is her brother’s. It is the men in a woman’s life who decide whom she will marry, and by running off with someone else Zakia was not just defying their will but stealing what they viewed to be rightfully theirs.

Ali stood outside the earthen wall surrounding the low mud buildings of his family farm compound in the village of Surkh Dar, on the far side of the Bamiyan Valley from the women’s shelter that held Zakia. The village was a short way outside Bamiyan town, a few miles past the larger, westernmost of the Buddha niches. Ali was twenty-one then, three years older than Zakia. He stuffed his gloveless hands into the pockets of his faux leather jacket, but it provided little warmth. He, too, was dressed in his finest, getting ready to meet his lover, the woman he hoped soon to make his wife. On his feet were his tan leather shoes with pointy toes, the only pair of footwear he owned besides plastic sandals. If it were not for the holes worn through the sides of their uppers and the caked mud on their soles, these shoes would have seemed more at home on the cobbled lanes of Verona than in the muddy late-winter fields of Bamiyan. Ali stamped the ground, not just to stay warm in the cold and the light freezing rain but because, accustomed as he was to long days of farm labor, any prolonged physical inactivity made him uneasy.

He mulled over how they would greet each other when they finally met for what would be the first time in months, not counting
screaming scenes in the Bamiyan provincial courthouse. Would she call his full name, Mohammad Ali, the sound of which had always gladdened and surprised him when she whispered it over the line during the years of clandestine telephone conversations that characterized their early courtship? Zakia was the only woman, besides his sisters and his mother, he had ever heard speak his name. Or would she just say
tu,
the familiar “you” in their language, Dari, a dialect of Farsi or Persian? Three hours earlier she had called and said this would be the night that she made good her escape to elope with him and that she would call when she went over the wall, but it was not the first time she’d said that. As the hour crawled past midnight and his phone didn’t ring, he began to lose hope. He kept the cell phone next to his heart, in an inside pocket to protect it from the intermittent freezing drizzle. A battered old knockoff of a Samsung Galaxy, this cheap Chinese smartphone full of love songs and recorded birdcalls bore the story of his life.

One of the songs from their long courtship, which he’d chosen for tonight’s ringtone, played on a continuous loop in his head. It was from a song by Bashir Wafa, an Afghan pop singer, covering the story of the Prophet Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, who in the Islamic version of that ancient tale are named Zuleikha and Yousef:

If Zuleikha repents, sighing from the bottom of her heart,

Yousef will walk free, the fetters fallen from his ankles . . .
⁶

Sometime after midnight of the Persian New Year, he gave up. “I thought she must have been kidding with me and had decided against going through with it,” he said. He tried her phone for perhaps the tenth time, but there was no ring, only the impersonal phone-company message: the same nasal female voice both in Dari and in English announcing Zakia’s phone to be outside the coverage area. Just in case, he hung his phone on a nail in the wall outside because the signal in their village was too weak within his house. Then he went inside to lie down on his bed, like Zakia’s a mattress on the floor, this one of earth. He left the window of his
room open despite the cold so he would be able to hear the phone sing; there was only a wooden shutter without glass, simply a pane of plastic sheeting stretched over the opening, which he slit at the bottom and peeled up just in case.

As Ali went dejectedly to bed, Zakia huddled with her two roommates, Abida and Safoora, across the valley.
⁷
The three of them had planned to creep out of their beds just before midnight and wait inside the front door of the big house until the guard outside was asleep. The Bamiyan Women’s Shelter, run by the UN Women organization with an all-Afghan staff, at that time held fifteen girls and young women like themselves, all there because of the threat of beatings or death from family members or forced marriages to people they could not bear or illegal child marriages or because they were raped. Safoora’s case was particularly distressing. Brought to court in a dispute between two families over the terms of her engagement at fourteen years of age, she was taken into a back room at the courthouse and gang-raped by court employees. She complained, but the judges blocked any prosecution of the rapists, and so Safoora was in the shelter fleeing their retribution and fearing her own family’s wrath against her. It is commonplace for Afghan families to murder a daughter who has had the poor judgment or bad luck to be raped; the rapist is often treated with shocking leniency. They call it “honor killing.” Zakia had fled to this shelter to escape an honor killing as well, though for a different reason.

They say that in the heyday of the Bamiyan Buddhas, when this remote mountain valley was a center of pilgrimage and the spiritual capital of the Greco-Buddhist Kushan Empire, the eyes of the great Buddhas Solsal and Shahmama comprised hundreds of precious stones, rubies and sapphires especially but diamonds and emeralds as well. Fires were kept lit at night behind those yard-wide orbs. The gemstone lenses magnified the light and sent multicolored rays across the valley, where they would have been seen sparkling at night from many miles away, particularly on the upper plateau, which lay at nearly eye level opposite the behemoths’ gaze.

Tonight on this same plateau, a male guard was on duty in the
courtyard of the women’s shelter in a small guard shack that was just big enough for him to lie down inside. The girls knew that he was ill and would probably have fallen asleep on duty, which indeed he had done. Zakia had the SIM card for her cell phone, but the phone itself was in the hallway, hidden in a cupboard. Inside the shelter building, there was a woman guard whom they had expected to be asleep, but she wasn’t. The guard challenged Zakia when she heard her stepping outside her room. Zakia quickly ducked into the bathroom, making up a story that she wanted to take a late shower. This delayed her another twenty or thirty minutes as the two other girls waited for her and Ali kept trying unsuccessfully to get through on the phone.

Safoora, younger than Zakia, was excited for her but sad to see her go—she was along just to help Zakia and the other older girl, Abida, escape. Zakia had been not only an older sister to her but also the sparkler that lit up their shabby existence: colorful, vivacious, and, in the privacy of the company of other young women, contemptuous of the social rules that had driven them all to this refuge. Abida, an overweight girl about Zakia’s age, married as a child to an abusive husband whose beatings drove her here, had decided the day before that she would flee with Zakia to return to her husband. They agreed to help one another over the wall of the shelter and run together.

It was a shelter from the harm that awaited them outside, but it was also a prison; one of the terms under which all such facilities in Afghanistan operate is that they promise not to allow the girls and women to leave until their cases are settled, if they can be settled. Many of them are in the shelters indefinitely, with few future prospects except to return to whatever family hell drove them there in the first place.

Zakia was determined that would not be her fate. The girls hugged and said their good-byes to Safoora and then began dragging mattresses out to the wall at the back of the courtyard. The mattresses were stiff, full of cotton tick; doubled over and piled one atop the other, they made a ledge halfway up the eight-foot-tall wall, so Zakia could clamber up. Later on she would insist, as
she had agreed with the other girls to say, that no one had helped her escape, that she had simply walked out the unlocked front door when everyone was asleep and hopped the wall on her own. From the top of the wall, she reached down to pull Abida up as well, but the girl was too weak to pull herself up and too much deadweight for Zakia. Abida later claimed that her friend had abandoned her to save herself. Zakia insisted that the girl was too heavy to make the climb, but she also was aware that Abida wanted to return to an abusive husband. Zakia thought it was probably just as well that the girl did not do so. Abida was not driven by love but by desperation and might well have been killed for her efforts.

Looking back from the top of the wall for a brief second, Zakia saw that she had let go of Ali’s photo on the way up; it had been clutched in her hand and was crumpled badly. She did not hesitate, though, and at about one in the morning Zakia dropped to the ground outside the wall, in her high heels, carrying a plastic bag full of clothes. She ran lightly down the hill in the direction of the Great Buddhas, pursued by a pack of barking dogs, then stopped under some birch trees on a traffic circle at the edge of the upper plateau and dialed Ali. There was no answer. Digging into her bag, frantic, she pulled out a loaf of bread and began breaking off pieces to throw to the dogs to stop the barking.

Over in his village of Surkh Dar, Ali heard the phone ring on its nail outside and raced from his room, but by the time he reached it, the ringing had stopped. He called her back, and this time Zakia answered. Their situation was perilous. It was just past one in the morning, and she was a woman alone and therefore subject to arrest, not only by police but by any man who passed and wanted to take the law into his own hands—or worse. In a society where rape was often not regarded as a crime if the woman were found alone, worse was likely. Ali woke his father, Anwar, to tell him that the escape was on and then called a village friend, Rahmatullah, who had already agreed to help them elope by driving them to a hiding place higher in the mountains.

Rahmatullah’s battered maroon Toyota Corolla wouldn’t turn over in the cold at first, but the engine finally caught. Ali stamped
his foot impatiently as his friend insisted on warming up the engine for a few minutes. The drive was only fifteen or twenty minutes down the unpaved road, along the front of the Buddha niches, through the old bazaar, and up the hill to the higher plateau, where Zakia waited. The sparse grove of birch trees at that spot was too thin to hide her, so she lay prone in a shallow drainage ditch beside the traffic circle. It seemed to Zakia that it took them nearly an hour to arrive, and by then she could see the alarm being raised at the shelter and hear the commotion there as searchers ran around the walls outside, only a few hundred yards from her hiding place. Hunkered down in the ditch, she did not see Ali in Rahmatullah’s car as it first arrived, until he alerted her with another phone call.

When the car stopped near her, it set the pack of dogs to barking again, and Ali jumped out to help her put her bag in the trunk. Each spoke the other’s name, and in that small way they were—as they both understood—declaring their rebellion against their society’s strictures and customs. There are many husbands in Afghanistan who have never used their wives’ names, even when addressing them directly. When they address their own wives, often it will not be with the personal “you”—
tu
in Dari
⁸
—but with the formal you,
shuma,
⁹
the same word one would use to address a stranger or an official. They never mention their wives’ names in conversation with others. There are many Afghan men who do not know the first names of their best friends’ wives. It is considered offensively intrusive to ask men the names of their daughters, let alone their wives.
¹⁰

Ali led Zakia across the muddy lane, she all aswish in her full-length skirt and
chador namaz,
a long, flowing scarf, and he with a lightweight woolen scarf, a
patu,
pulled around his body against the cold but little else for warmth aside from his thin leather jacket. The snow had stopped and the skies cleared, but the moon was new and the night quite dark. As they got into the car, Zakia took his hand in hers and held it tightly. If she had kissed him it would hardly have been more unexpected and only slightly more subversive.