The Lovers (22 page)

The good news about a possible reconciliation gave a welcome boost to Zakia and Ali just as the home front began to unravel. Relations with Ali’s aunt had become tense, and not just because the apartment was overcrowded. “They feel in danger, too. Even we do,” Ali said. “Until we negotiate and make a deal and come together,
we feel in danger. It’s even risky when you’re together with your friends. Someone who is your friend can harm you worse than someone who doesn’t even know you. He might not realize what he’s telling someone about you. If he’s close to you, he will be dangerous to you.”

One day Ali called Jawad, deeply agitated. We had given him a letter, on
New York Times
letterhead in Dari and English, with a copy to both him and his wife, a “To Whom It May Concern” letter that asked whoever read it to please call our bureau in Kabul and included Jawad’s and my phone numbers. My thinking was that if one or the other of the lovers fell into the hands of police, the evidence of some foreign interest in their case might possibly prevent the worst from happening to them—particularly to Zakia—and it might help alert us to their situation more quickly. Now Ali was calling from his military deployment to ask whether that letter would protect Zakia from arrest by the police if she went out alone and was stopped.

No, it wouldn’t, we told him. The most we could hope for was that it might protect her from summary rape, and that was iffy—the great majority of policemen cannot read or write, so she would have to be lucky enough to encounter someone who was senior enough to be literate and savvy enough to care what foreigners might think. It was a long shot.

What was going on? we asked Ali. It turned out that he had been transferred to Bagram Air Base, the massive American military base a couple hours’ drive from the capital. “My wife called me and complained about my aunt and her daughter-in-law, who are mistreating her. She was upset and asked me to send her back to Bamiyan. I thought my aunt was someone I could trust and expected she would give us refuge, but now it seems she has slapped me in the face and my wife cannot stay with her. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think I should commit suicide.”

The country was in a state of suspense over the bitterly disputed results of the April presidential election, and it was clear there would have to be a second, runoff election in June. As a result, Ali’s unit had been activated in preparation for deployment
somewhere in the provinces to protect polling places, hence the transfer to Bagram. There was no longer any question of leave days every weekend; now he and Zakia were reduced to talking by phone again, and his next leave would not be until after elections, many weeks away.

Matters came to a head in their hideout, and the aunt demanded that Zakia leave as soon as possible. Zakia had been feeling ill for several days and wanted Ali to take her to a hospital. Relations had soured with Ali’s aunt to the point where the aunt would not take her, and Zakia could not hope to find her way there alone. Moving out would also require a man to escort her; social norms made it nearly impossible for her to find another place on her own, and anyway Ali had unwisely—but typically—taken most of their money with him.

Ali said he would try to get permission to leave the base, but the next day when we spoke to him, he was even more despondent. Turned down for a leave because of his unit’s pending deployment, he had tried to get a guard on the perimeter to let him sneak off the base but had been rebuffed. He had called his father to come down from Bamiyan to take care of his wife, but Anwar would need a couple of days to travel, and Zakia was increasingly frantic about leaving.

“It’s because of my bad luck that these things keep happening,” Ali said, and he told Zakia on the phone that he would try to escape. In a more levelheaded moment, much later, he was more honest about himself. “You buy danger for yourself by the things you decide to do.”

We pleaded with Ali not to try to escape from Bagram, saying it could only end badly. He might not have known that base well, but I did. The largest American base in the country, Bagram was heavily guarded, with patrols, high-tech monitors, trip wires, pressure sensors, video cameras, surveillance blimps, and fences within fences. The Afghan National Army billets were within the broader American perimeter. Not only would escape be nearly impossible, but Ali risked being shot if he tried it.

We offered instead to arrange to take Zakia somewhere safe
ourselves, perhaps to a guesthouse or to the home of a woman. I called an Afghan-American woman who lived outside Kabul with her Afghan family—educated, Westernized people who were sympathetic to Zakia and Ali’s plight—and she agreed to put Zakia up until Ali could join her. Ali refused the offer flatly, and we argued about it; I asked him why he didn’t trust us. “I trust you. I even trust your dogs,” he said, which is a common expression, invoking Afghans’ almost universal contempt for canines. “But Zakia would never agree to stay with someone she doesn’t know.” Meaning he would never agree to let her. We suggested that she go to the WAW shelter until he could join her, but he rejected that out of hand.

It was two days before we heard from him again; his phone had stopped answering, and we suspected, rightly, that he’d gone ahead with his escape plan. He and two friends had climbed the main fence, carrying a blanket to drape over the rolled concertina wire that lay on the other side of it. He was crawling over the wire when a patrol came along and caught him.

“They nearly shot me when they saw me in the wire,” he said once we got him on the phone; he had been locked up in solitary confinement during those two days when we could not reach him. “I was given a hard time, accused of being a spy. They told me you haven’t spent one month in the army and now you want to sneak away from the base?” Taliban infiltrators were a constant worry in the Afghan National Army.

In the coming week, he tried twice more to escape the base and was each time punished. “I told them if you stop me a hundred times, I will still try to escape.”

Anwar reached Kabul several days later after a dangerous journey. Hazaras need to take great care on both of the two main highways connecting Kabul with the Bamiyan Valley, one through Wardak Province slightly to the south, and the other through Parwan to the north. Both roads have stretches that go through Taliban territory, and while the roads are normally under government control, the Taliban do occasionally manage to set up flying roadblocks, as they are called, and Hazaras often do not get through alive when that happens. Reports of road-blocks
ahead forced him to turn back twice. Anwar was delayed, too, by the funeral of someone in their village; however urgent his son’s and his daughter-in-law’s entreaties might have been, funerals take precedence over nearly everything, and Anwar was an old man, inclined to the long view.

Once in Kabul, though, he calmed his sister down. She agreed to give them a few days to find another place to stay. I passed Anwar a little money to help with that—Ali was still in the army lockup, so he could not go to collect money from WAW—and the last thing we wanted to see was Zakia and her father-in-law wandering the streets of Kabul, inviting arrest.

Ali was calmer when he heard that his father had arrived, and he thought he would soon find a way to get off the base to join them. In the meantime he had a request. Once they moved Zakia out of his aunt’s house, how about if we got WAW to give them all the money they had received, and he would buy a house in Kabul so they did not have to rent any longer? A few thousand dollars would, he thought, be enough for a smaller home.

“Ali,” we said to him, “your wife is in hiding. The police are searching for you both. Zakia’s family is looking to kill you. You’re in jail on the base. And you want to buy a house?”

That day Jawad got a call from Anwar, who also thought fugitive homeownership was a dumb idea. Jawad had called Anwar before, usually through one of his sons, but the old man had never before called him, and he did so now with Bismillah’s help. He wanted to thank us for all we had done for his son, and he wanted us to know that he thought his son was wrong and foolish to have spurned offers of help and rejoined the army. Unless they were able to make a deal with Zakia’s family—and even if they did—the couple’s only hope to really live in peace was to leave Afghanistan. Anwar also wanted to meet us in person; it turned out he had lugged down from Bamiyan a hand-woven felt rug, which he said was a thank-you gift for helping his son. It was probably worth a month’s earnings, yet I had no choice but to accept it.

Ismatullah called as well. “Ali does not realize what he has to do,” he said. “He is too young to understand what is good or bad
for him. Tell him he needs to listen to you. He needs to go outside the country. His life is in danger.” Jawad asked Ismatullah why he didn’t tell his brother that himself. But Ali was not answering his phone to his older brother. “He is tired of listening to everyone tell him what he has to do,” Ismatullah said.

Then, to our surprise, a few days later Ali was freed from the base lockup and even managed to get out of Bagram on a leave, determined to desert for good this time. When we met Ali in Kabul, Jawad and I spent most of the time trying to persuade him to find a better hiding place, one where we could visit them more safely than if they were sharing a house with an Afghan family. They needed to
not
stay with relatives; relatives provide a trail to them. In response Ali was his usual blend of nervously insecure and unreasonably cavalier. He was hopeful that the mediation that Shukria was running with Zakia’s father was going to bear fruit; in addition, Ali’s aunt’s son, Shah Hussein, had been meeting with Zakia’s brothers to talk about a deal. “Didn’t it occur to you,” we asked, “that her brothers might follow his aunt’s son or figure out where he’s living, find her, and then find the two of you?” Again he brushed that aside. We said we would be willing to get them a private house with a wall around it and a driveway, which would make it possible for us to drive off the street and not be noticed by neighbors when we made a rendezvous with them. We would pay the four hundred dollars a month it would cost. Finally Ali agreed, as he often did, just to get us off his back, but instead of moving to the sort of place we’d suggested, he moved out of the aunt’s house in Chindawul and into another house a few hundred yards down the hill. It was only a hundred dollars a month, so he suggested we could give them the three-hundred-dollar-a-month savings over what we had proposed; we refused to pay any of it. We had an ally in Anwar, and Jawad set to work persuading the old man that moving again, away from Chindawul and into a secure house, would be a good option for them as well as for us. The last thing I wanted was to feel responsible for their capture.

Reconciliation was starting to look less likely, too. Shukria was having a hard time with Zaman and his sons and supporters.
Initially willing to talk, Zakia’s father had become aggressive and uncooperative. He accused Shukria of hiding Zakia in the WAW shelter and demanded to be allowed to look for her there.

“That man used such bad language,” she said. “It was unacceptable.” Amid her shouting and his cursing, she drove him from her office and WAW’s administrative compound. Something had happened to make Zakia’s family less willing to negotiate a settlement, and we would soon find out what that was.

There were many times when I marveled at my growing involvement with this couple. The line between observer and actor had first been crossed when we helped them escape from the police pursuit in Yakawlang, but now, with each passing week, further compromises seemed easier to make than to refuse: helping them with their housing, giving them advice, trying to talk them out of situations that might prove disastrous, urging them toward a sensible course of action. That’s the thing about stepping over the line; once you do, it’s hard not to do it again. Having helped them get this far, how could I just stop? I knew that if I turned my back on this young and often foolish pair of lovers, it would only be a matter of time before the worst happened, and I would never be able to forgive myself. The more I did for them, however, the more they expected me to do; the more dependent they became, the more independent they wanted to seem; the more I did, the more I felt obliged to do. I felt like their personal Friar Laurence, in an increasingly compromised scenario.

It’s not as if Zakia and Ali’s case was particularly terrible. On the scale of horrendous abuses of women in Afghanistan, Zakia’s situation, so far, did not rate very high. Consider Lal Bibi, the young woman who was abducted and raped by a pro-government militia commander, who then married her to escape prosecution; or Bibi Aisha, her nose and ear cut off by her Taliban husband; or Gul Meena, chopped up with an ax and left for dead—all were far worse cases.

There were some cases similar to Zakia’s as well, such as that of
Amina, whose family gave the same sort of guarantees and assurances that Zakia’s family promised her if she returned.
²
Then they killed her on the way home from a shelter—exactly what Zakia thought would happen to her if she left the shelter to return to her family. Similarly, Siddiqa
³
was coaxed home and then stoned to death with her intended by her neighbors and relatives. Even more similar was the story of Khadija and Mohammad Hadi, who were also from Bamiyan, also a Tajik and Hazara couple. When Khadija was taken into custody, her lover’s angry neighbors drove his entire family out of Bamiyan and he lost touch with Khadija, until she disappeared and lost touch with everyone.
⁴

So while there are many worse cases, they are expressions of the sort of fate that awaits Zakia and Ali if events were allowed to follow their natural course. While things had not gotten as bad as they could have, it was still possible that they would. Like it or not, their story had become mine, and I could not turn my back on it as I nearly had after that first encounter in February 2014. It had become clear that no one was going to step in and rescue them, whisking them away to safe lives in America or Sweden. I realized I would have to start thinking seriously about getting them out of Afghanistan myself. I had already stepped across the line; why not follow the story to its inevitable conclusion? If they ended up dead, I would always regret not having tried harder. In this effort I had one supporter, Rabbi Shmuley. During one of our late-night talks, he started in on me after he finished with the American government. “You’re the only one who can make this happen. You have to make sure this story has a happy ending, and a happy ending is not living in a cave in Afghanistan.”