The Lovers (34 page)

Nobody heard about the story of Layla and Waheed, for instance,
until it was too late. Both employees of tailors on the same street in Kabul, they met through work. Like Zakia and Ali, they were different ethnicities—Layla was Pashtun, Waheed was Tajik. They were similar in age, too, Layla eighteen and Waheed twenty-two. They also knew each other from early childhood, growing up in the same neighborhood. Once Layla reached marriageable age, Waheed sent emissaries to her father but was rebuffed, seven times in all. Finally they eloped together; accounts vary as to whether they got married or just planned to do so. They were able to stay hidden for some months by the dangerous stratagem of going to one of the country’s worst districts, Imam Sahib, a Taliban-infested area in Kunduz Province, and staying there in the home of a distant relative. Word reached them, however, that their families had discovered their hiding place and had alerted the police, who were on their way, as had happened in the case of Zakia and Ali.

On February 20, 2015, Layla and Waheed fled the relative’s home in a taxi, sitting in the backseat together. They had already made a pact to kill themselves if anything happened to the other or if they were caught and forcibly separated or imprisoned. Now Layla told Waheed she had bought what are branded in Afghanistan as Pakistani Gas Tablets, a rat poison in tablet form that when ingested or moistened releases deadly phosphine gas (a pesticide so powerful it is banned for that use in most countries). The lovers agreed to take the tablets if the police caught them. Approaching the edge of Kunduz city, they came to a police checkpoint. Convinced they would be discovered, Layla began washing a handful of tablets down with a bottle of water. Waheed tried to intervene, and they wrestled in the backseat, but he wasn’t able to prevent her. Seeing it was too late, Waheed despaired and took some of the tablets himself. As it happened, the driver just slowed down at the checkpoint and the police waved them through. Soon both young people were convulsing, and the terrified taxi driver rushed them to the hospital. Layla was dead on arrival; Waheed survived after his stomach was pumped. Dr. Hassina Sarwari, who runs the women’s shelter in Kunduz, went to the morgue to view the girl’s body. “How difficult it is to live in a country where you die if love
comes along,” she said. No one heard about their case when they were still on the run. It was too late by the time anyone did.

The public attention to Zakia and Ali’s story has given them some degree of protection. It helped to pressure Afghanistan’s president into resolving their criminal case, so they no longer needed to worry about being hunted by the police—though they were still hunted by her family. Along the way they became heroes to people in their own generation and to all Afghans who believe in love. They may yet become martyrs of love as well. They each continue to insist that if one of them were killed, the other would commit suicide. In that case Anwar and Chaman would bring up Ruqia, and Zakia and Ali will have been just another typical Afghan love story after all.

Underlying the refusal of the United States or the international community to do anything more for these lovers is a presumption that taking them out of Afghanistan to safety would be yet another marker of failure, an admission that their own society and its laws cannot protect them. By leaving them in Afghanistan, we are saying that our massive investment in the country’s rule of law and its treatment of women did have some success, that the couple is proof of that. They are free, and they are alive.

They would not be alive if it were not for groups like Women for Afghan Women, which would not exist without foreign financial support. Without foreign intervention there would be no shelters in Afghanistan, no EVAW law, no prosecutions (however limited) for stoning women to death or forcing little girls to marry old men. Zakia and Ali’s legal case was not resolved through the legal system, not really; it was resolved by an exceptional and secret decree of the president of Afghanistan, one that established no principle in law, that was his to give and a future successor’s to take away. Even though the EVAW law was cited to resolve the case, it was not the real engine of the final decision to release Ali and let the couple formalize their marriage. In the face of a public outcry on their behalf, it was merely expedient to do so. In addition, Zakia and Ali’s survival was financed and subsidized by concerned donors, without which they would not have lasted much more than
that first month on the run. And they were abetted by my using the considerable resources at my disposal as a foreign journalist.

Committed to the narrative that the rule of law and the pursuit of women’s rights are success stories in Afghanistan, no Western embassy wanted to admit failure in such a high-profile case as this. None has even commented on the situation publicly. If Zakia and Ali are killed, those who turned them down for asylum will know who they are. When such blame is passed around, there will be plenty to reserve for myself—both for failing to succeed in helping them escape and for shining what ultimately was an unhelpful light of publicity upon them, making them too famous to hide but not important or famous enough to be saved.

Perhaps we all should have pushed them harder to go to Rwanda, as Shmuley Boteach had urged early on. Bizarre as that solution may have sounded, it actually worked. Fatima Kazimi, her four children, and her husband were all successfully processed by the UNHCR in Kigali, as refugees fleeing danger and persecution in their country of origin, and the United States accepted their request for asylum. That claim was based entirely on Fatima’s role in saving Zakia’s life and protecting her from her family. Just over a year after their arrival in Rwanda, Fatima and her whole family were in Baltimore, safe from whatever danger—real or imagined—they had faced in Afghanistan. When Ali heard the news, he had no bitterness over the irony of it. “Okay, they exploited our case, but we don’t have any problem with that. We wish them well.” He did not think that route would have worked for Zakia and him. “The difference between us and them is that they weren’t illiterate,” he said. “They were literate so they could find out what to do. It would have been much harder for us.”

A combination of poor weather in Bamiyan, grounded flights, and bad news elsewhere kept us from visiting the couple for much of the winter, but Jawad and I managed to get there late in February 2015. By then Ruqia was gaining weight and the weather had eased and was just normally cold; the snows came in light dustings
that were more decorative than cumulative. Ali’s brothers and Anwar were worried about the continuing drought and its effect on the next season’s crops. When we spoke with Zakia about the couple’s plans, she insisted to us that she wanted to try again to flee Afghanistan, perhaps in the spring, but first she would have to convince her husband that it was the right thing to do; he was reluctant to try again, she said.

“With Ali it’s only God who has any power over him. No one else can force him to do anything.” She said that at least Ali was no longer going out unless accompanied by his brothers. He was awkward around their daughter, though, Zakia said, which amused her. “He likes to take her and hold her, but when he does, he becomes shy and doesn’t want the others to see him holding her,” she said. “But he loves her, I know that.”

From her own family, Zakia had no news at all, which was perhaps just as well, she said. “I don’t know what they’re doing and whether they know about the baby. I don’t think they do.”

“Yes, I’m reluctant to leave,” Ali said when we asked him about this issue. “Your homeland is that place you will always love, and even though there are threats to our lives, every pass in this country is precious to me.” But he insisted he knows that leaving would be best and is ready and willing to do it as soon as possible. Zakia is the problem. “I have a life partner, she has equal rights to me. If she’s not satisfied with going abroad, we can’t do it,” he said. “Life partner” was a term I had never before heard him use. It was not part of the lexicon even of educated Afghan society, and it sounded false from him.

When we talked to Zakia in front of her husband and family about leaving Afghanistan, she was diplomatic to the point of opacity. “Whether I go or I stay, it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re happy, and we are,” she said. She flashed her transformative smile and hardly seemed worried about any threat to their happiness. When I voiced that observation, she immediately contradicted me. “No one knows what is going on in someone’s heart,” she said. “No one can ever know that.”

When we talked to Ali alone, he was not surprised to hear
that Zakia had said he was the one who opposed leaving. “When anyone else asks her, she says she wants to go, it’s true,” he said. “When she talks to me, she says she wants to stay here.” Why would she want that, with a new baby to worry about? Ali smiled knowingly, the way he often did when he prepared to make a profound observation or deliver one of his many aphorisms. “Because when she’s here, she can smell her parents in the air,” he said. “The smell of her parents, her mother and father and brothers and sisters, is here. She can still smell them. That’s what she tells me that she won’t ever tell you.” I knew what he meant, that smell of one’s childhood, so deeply rooted in a place, the one we never forget no matter how old we get.

Sometimes the argument in Anwar’s house about leaving Afghanistan became bitter and contentious. Ali’s brothers and father are all adamant that the couple needs to go abroad, that they cannot remain like this indefinitely. “Enmity like this, they will never give it up,” said Bismillah. Zakia’s father and brothers abandoned everything because of Zakia’s love story; as they would see it, honor killing is all they have left to redeem their tattered lives. Zakia and Ali owed it to themselves, their baby, and their family to go once winter was over, the family kept saying. Early in February the argument blew up, and harsh words were exchanged between Anwar and Ali; it was sparked when someone asked Ali where the
neka
document was, to be sure he could get it quickly if they had to run again.

“We’re done with running away,” Ali said. “There is the proof of our
neka
.” He indicated Ruqia, who was then less than two months old. “This is our big proof that we are married, and now neither the Afghan people nor the nation can do anything to us. We have our proof.” The child was swaddled tightly, as Afghan infants usually are, with a red knit cap on her head, bearing the letters
ABC
, and her face carefully made up. Her eyes were framed in black, with charcoal eye shadow on her eyelids top and bottom, and deep black mascara on her eyelashes; she looked a little like a baby raccoon. (The eye shadow is called
surma,
made from a ground black stone, and many rural Afghans believe that making
up babies’ eyes like that, for both boys and girls, helps their sight develop better.)

Ali’s brothers took Anwar’s side, criticizing Ali for again letting romance run wild over common sense. They insisted that Ali and Zakia had to make serious plans to flee the country; once abroad, they could find work and send money back to help resolve the family’s debts, so it would help everyone. As long as they stayed in Afghanistan, they were a burden to the family with a death sentence hanging over them, and once dead they would be no help to anyone.

They all had heard of Afghans who’d escaped abroad and were later able to bring other relatives along or who with even simple jobs were able to send fantastic sums home; Zakia and Ali could be their vanguard, a hedge against an uncertain future. Ali angrily replied that they wanted him to ruin his life by leaving his country so he could pay off their debts. They retorted that much of that debt was due to him.

What’s more, Ali’s oldest brother, Bismillah, scolded him, what future did any of them have in Afghanistan? “Look around you. One day the Taliban will be back. Security gets worse every month. No one wants to fight for this government—look at you. Did you? The foreigners are all leaving, most of them are gone already. Where will you and Zakia be when the
takfiris
¹
come back? They’ll be a hundred times worse than Zaman and Gula Khan.”

Remarkably, this tension had no apparent effect on the relationship between the family and Zakia, who arguably might be considered the original source of their troubles. In Anwar’s house she was treated like a princess by everyone—even, the brothers insisted, by their wives. Three of Anwar’s five sons were now married and living under his roof. The brothers said that they treasured Zakia even more than they would have otherwise because of her decision to sacrifice everything in her life for Ali and their family. Having once opposed the couple’s love affair bitterly, they had come to embrace it wholeheartedly. “In this house Zakia does no laundry, no cleaning, no cooking,” said Ismatullah, the one who had smashed Ali in the face with a rock when he tried to join
Zakia at their uncle’s house. “We won’t let her work as long as she’s here,” said Bismillah. Asked how her sisters-in-law felt about that arrangement, the brothers were bemused by the question; naturally they would be happy about it, because they had been told to be happy about it and women must obey their husbands. Also, it was a venerable tradition in Afghan homes to revere and coddle the newlywed bride, who always gives up her own family to move in with her husband’s, and that special treatment intensifies once she becomes a mother. That may well be one of the reasons Afghanistan’s birthrate is the tenth-highest in the world.
²
Zakia told us that the sentiment was genuine, even from her sisters-in-law. “It’s really true. My sisters and everyone are always telling me not to do any work,” she said.

“We have a saying,” Anwar said. “ ‘When a flower is too precious to leave outside, you put it in a vase on the table.’ Zakia is like that flower to us.”

There was something else to thank Zakia for, a kind of epiphany provoked by what the lovers had been through. Her love affair with Ali had a galvanizing effect on his family’s attitudes toward education. In a sense Ali’s frequent references to Zakia and himself as educated people acknowledged their understanding that the world had changed and it was time for Afghanistan to become part of it. In this new world, Anwar was saying, women had rights, too, and love was not wrong. Educated people were those who knew and accepted that; uneducated people were all the others. Anwar’s family was now educated, Zaman’s family was not.