Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church

Preface

As I am coming to the end of my first draft about my glorious, transformative trip to Kabul, I hear the news from Pietro that a German woman was abducted today from a restaurant one kilometre from his guesthouse. She was eating lunch with her partner in broad daylight, just like I did ten days ago, when four armed men came and took her away.

I find myself angry because it seems to give the lie to the beauty of my stay there, the gentleness and sweetness that I was treated with the whole time. As I’m writing now the cynical voice in the back of my head is ever louder, sneering at my love for the city, my affection for the people we met. I feel like a fool.

I also find myself running Bourne Identity scenarios in my head where, with a few well-chosen words in Farsi, I single-handedly overpower and blow away the four men with one of their AKs, while Pietro hides under the table. Then I lead him by the hand and run out of the restaurant, hop into a taxi to the airport, hijack a plane and fly to safety. Maybe I take down a helicopter or two for the hell of it.

Both reactions just seem to point to how impotent I am with relation to Afghanistan. I don’t want to believe the violence is possible, and when I imagine it I send it into cartoon land.

Intellectually I know that stories of terrible things happening in Kabul don’t negate my experience. Even if those men had come for me, it wouldn’t erase the good experiences I had had. Life everywhere is complex: it’s almost so obvious it doesn’t bear saying. But still I hear my old school friend’s sneering superiority. “Yes. This doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m glad you had a nice time, but this is a War Zone we’re talking about” - and that is how you sum up and write off a whole city of beautiful, sweet, frightened people who are full of longing. Or rather, “I’m sure they are beautiful, but that doesn’t mean I need to go there. There are lots of beautiful people in the south of France as well.”

And the only answer I have is the desire that I could open up my mouth so wide that my head could split in two and the whole experience could surge out intact in living colour, exactly as it happened, exactly how I felt it, with no intermediary. Instead I have this piddling little scribble of black on white. Frustrating doesn’t begin to describe it.

Four Days in Kabul

Kabul is dirty, broken, overcrowded, and buried in several feet of shit, dust and garbage. I fell in love with it on contact.

We arrived after an overnight flight from Istanbul which stopped in Ankara and Baku. At Baku, at God knows what time of night, I looked blearily out of the window to see that the plane had come to rest on open tarmac, no airport in sight. Nobody got on or off the plane. A large tanker had pulled up from out of the syrupy dark and we were refuelling. The smell of toast filled the plane, followed by paraffin oil, and then, unaccountably, the sweet smell of roses. Pietro thought that might be insecticide. Always the romantic.

Early in the morning, we descended through hazy air, into the steel-blue embrace of the mountains which cradle Kabul. I was disappointed that the many wrecked airplanes I had heard about had been cleared away from the runway, but was instead treated to the sight of many military aircraft from all over the world. Kabul airport, like most of Kabul, is under construction. Huge slabs of gorgeous marble are made treacherously slippery by the fine dust of construction. Doors are replaced by floaty tattered net curtains. There were no “pardon our dust” signs. I guess they figured that visitors should get used to the dust straight away. I had my first sight of the Afghan security police, wearing slate green uniforms and gendarme-style caps, they gazed evenly at us, meeting our eyes, strolling coolly up and down the queues as we waited to have our passports processed.

Everyone who goes to Kabul is treated to their own Damascus road experience. Stepping out of the cool, dark interior of the airport terminal, you are blinded temporarily by the sun which is refracted through layers of light yellow dust, and reflected off the light tan buildings and street.

Waiting outside for the driver to come, we fended off several offers of taxi rides. A man pulled up seats in the shade, and insisted we sit down (the Afghans who were hanging around were not offered the same). Pietro heard music and wandered off to investigate, and I fiddled surreptitiously with my headscarf. I had worried about the whole hejab issue. Pietro reminded me that I was showing respect for a tradition, rather than trying to pass as Afghan, but I wanted to look like I belonged. I had gone to a Pakistani neighbourhood near my parents’ house in England, and bought baggy pants and a long over-shirt with matching scarf. They were a dreamy dusty blue, like the pictures I’d seen of burqas, with little beads sewn into a floral pattern. I wrapped the headscarf around my head and shoulders as I was getting off the plane, and pinned the slithery fabric into place. I said to Pietro “So, do you think the men of Kabul are safe from my dangerous beauty?” and he, God love him, said “Not yet; they can still see your eyes.”

I decided to think of my hejab like a costume for a show..When you are in a play, you are given clothes to wear. They aren’t your clothes, but you accept them eagerly, and try to give the impression that they are yours. As you walk around in these new clothes, you pay attention to see how they make you feel and what they can teach you about your character. The clothes definitely grew on me. By the time I got back on the plane, I wasn’t bothering with the pin, and the flowing voluminous fabric of my shalwar and headscarf felt powerful and feminine.

The ride to the guest house was breathtaking. I couldn’t take pictures, couldn’t even speak for a while afterwards, just trying to process all the new things I’d seen. The streets in the city are all packed with people, donkeys, children, horses, cars, street vendors, bicycles, handcarts, all going in various directions. Traffic cops, some armed, stand at major intersections and roundabouts. They have little ping-pong paddles that they supposedly direct traffic with, but I didn’t see many people paying attention to them. The people of Kabul perform a kind of miracle dance in the roads, surging forward, slowing, shimmying to avoid each other. It’s as if there’s a communal mind they’re all tapped into, a rhythm they all understand. Mothers with small children walk straight into the path of moving cars, halt centimetres from the side of the car as it passes, and continue their path the second the space is free in front of them. Bicycles swoop out into the middle of intersections, people go the wrong way around roundabouts, busses stop abruptly to let people on and off, and throughout all of this the traffic keeps moving, invisible buffer-shields repel the vehicles from each other, the laws of physics bend and snap back and everyone passes each other unscathed. (Of course this is not true. Apparently, there are accidents all the time: the cracked windscreens and crumpled fenders of the taxis bore witness to that. Apparently, motor accidents are a leading cause of death in Kabul. It’s just I never saw an accident, and it seemed like they ought to be occurring all the time.)

The images from the streets flashed at me as we hurtled through downtown Kabul. The hundreds of fruit and vegetable sellers crowding the sidewalks. The enormous, four foot long watermelons, mounds of apples, apricots, tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes and onions. Horses and donkeys pulling carts, their ribs sticking out and heaving in the heat. Little children, unattended, everywhere. Two little boys eating fruit under a flatbed trailer, parked by the side of a busy main road. Girls in black dresses with white headscarfs all over the place – Pietro told me they were school uniforms, which gave me a little thrill of pride. Young boys pulling carts and pushing wheelbarrows at full pelt, running their little arses off. Two little four year old boys walking along with their arms around each other.

Then as I raised my eyes from the streets I saw the hills, and behind them, faint in the bright hazy air, the mountains, thousands of feet higher, cradling the city. To my tired eyes, the nearby hills seemed like magic eye pictures. At first glance you see the tan brown hill, apparently barren and unformed. As you stare longer, the houses swim into view: houses built from the same rock and earth as the hill itself, unadorned except for the occasional heavy metal gate or flapping red curtain. At night, those same hills look like enormous ocean liners, dark hulks against the luminous night sky, the regularly placed florescent lights from their windows showing just how populated the hills are.

Drinking all this in, unwilling to blink even, I was dimly aware that Pietro was on the phone to his guest house. “Yes,” he said “we’re in the car now and we’re on our way over. Tell me, Najibullah, have you got room for us? Will it be all right for us to stay there?” I goggled at him. As he hung up, I asked in what I hoped was a calm voice, “Am I to understand that you never arranged our accommodation until now?”
He grinned happily and said “That’s right.”
“Okay.” I said. “So that’s the kind of party we’re at.”

to be continued......