The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 11

  Princess Homaira as a young girl in Kabul.

  ‘We had come back from the king’s palace where we had all been watching the new Candice Bergen film in the private cinema and everyone had gone to bed,’ she recalled. ‘I couldn’t sleep, it was too hot and I was excited because it was in the middle of my wedding – we had had the first ceremony two days earlier, the civil ceremony, and were due to have the main reception with all the guests two days later. It was a clear night with a big full moon and, about 1 a.m., I went out to the garden for some air. Suddenly I could hear the sound of tanks. It seemed odd, the annual military parade was due so sometimes there would be tanks practising early in the morning but this was too early.

  ‘I went back in the house and upstairs to the second floor and from there I could see over the walls of the palace and all these little heads sticking up from tanks moving nearer. Instead of going past they were stopping and pointing their guns towards the house. There had been rumours that Daoud [the former Prime Minister] was planning a coup but my grandfather had always insisted “Daoud’s my cousin, he would never stab me in the back”, and had refused to do anything.’

  It was a foolish claim for the whole history of Afghanistan’s monarchy was one of treachery and intrigue, cousin murdering cousin, brother murdering and blinding brother. One of Zahir Shah’s predecessors, Abdur Rahman employed foodtasters to test even his tea, and used to keep horses saddled by the door of the palace so he could leave at a moment’s notice for fighting in any part of his kingdom, as well as fast mules for carrying treasure if he had to flee. By the head of his bed was a cupboard with glass doors in which his best rifles were kept and under his pillow were two loaded revolvers. As a further precaution he would stay awake working until 4 a.m. then sleep in the day on the grounds that any treachery was usually carried out at night.

  When Abdur Rehman died, his eldest son Habibullah who succeeded him immediately occupied the Arg, the large fortified complex that included the treasury and arsenal, fearing one of his brothers would try to seize the throne. The estate had both inner and outer walls and along its tree-lined roads guarded by stone lions were dotted various domed and colonnaded sandstone buildings that had served as guest houses, audience chambers and harems. It was in one of these palaces that Homaira’s family were living when the tanks rolled in.

  ‘I knew something was going on so I quickly woke up my husband and father,’ she continued. ‘My father, who was His Majesty’s military commander, went to the balcony and saw the tanks so phoned his headquarters but as he lifted the receiver the line went dead. Then the lights went out. My father and husband ran down to the office to get the guns which was obviously useless, how could you fight off a coup with some revolvers and one machine gun? I had my own pistol, which I always carried.

  ‘Father told us to sit on the steps in this kind of glass conservatory full of plants and canaries in wooden cages that was before the main entrance to the house, but I’d seen too many Columbo programmes so I said “No” and took my mother and younger sister and girls we used to look after and told them to lie down in the corridor leading to the bedrooms which had only a couple of windows. I saw my father and husband coming up the stairs with guns, and then the tanks started firing and I couldn’t see them anymore, there was so much dust. They shot at my bedroom, my father’s bedroom and my sister’s bedroom and we couldn’t breathe. Then we heard another shell from inside the house and all the glass breaking and the sitting room caught fire. My mother rushed to put on trousers in case they hanged us.

  ‘Our plan was that if they captured us we would kill each other. The main thing was not to be captured alive because who knew what might happen. I was to kill my mother and sister.

  ‘I had learnt to use my father’s pistol at the age of five and had my first gun when I was seven so I was used to shooting and we all felt anything was better than torture. Anyway my father said, “I think it’s me they are looking for,” so he started to go and my little sister grabbed his legs begging him not to. He bent down to pat her head and push her away, and as he did, machine gun fire sailed over his head. It would have killed him if he hadn’t been leaning over. They arrested him and took the rest of us into the drawing room, which was full of broken glass. I could see three tanks outside and Daoud in his white Toyota looking with binoculars and he saw us.

  ‘Around 7 a.m. they took us to the king’s palace where my grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins were in the dining room, about twenty-three princes and princesses surrounded by soldiers. There were helicopters overhead. That’s how I spent my honeymoon, sleeping under the dining room table – very romantic. We were kept there for about a week not knowing what was going to happen, whether we were going to be killed or what had happened to my father.’

  Finally, one morning at 4 a.m., they were taken to the airport and put on a plane from the state airline Ariana. Homaira’s nine-year-old cousin Prince Mostapha held her hand as they walked to the steps. Before boarding they were searched and the gold chain with a miniature Koran, which Mostapha wore round his neck, was ripped off by a soldier. When the young prince kicked out in protest, the soldier knocked him to the ground with the butt of his rifle. Mostapha grabbed a handful of earth and put it in his pocket.

  They were flown to Rome where they joined the king who had been in Italy recuperating from an eye operation, and somewhat mortifyingly, was in the midst of taking a mud bath at a spa on the island of Ischia when he was informed of the coup. Homaira had hoped her father, General Abdul Wali, would be on board but in fact he was in solitary confinement in Kabul Central Prison being tortured so badly that his femur was smashed, leaving him with a permanent limp, and it would be three years before she saw him again.

  Ever since that hot July day in 1973, the royal family had been in exile in Rome, living in borrowed homes on the generosity of other foreign rulers. Largely forgotten, they became part of an ancien régime left adrift in a country far from home. All that remained other than Mostapha’s pocketful of earth, which he put in a silver pot that he kissed and placed under his pillow every night, praying for a return to his homeland, were the photograph albums. There were a few family snapshots relaxing in the palace gardens or the princesses in traditional costume and headdress, but mostly they contained black and white news pictures, showing the king riding in open Rolls-Royces or stepping off planes to be greeted by Mao Tse Tung, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Jawaharlal Nehru, Marshal Tito, General de Gaulle, all figures of a bygone age. The king had grown old and frail, spending his days painting, reading French novels, playing chess, photographing animals and landscapes, and listening to Indian sitar music.

  King Zahir Shah with John F. Kennedy.

  It was in Rome that I met Homaira, by then a woman of forty-eight, though she seemed much younger and never stopped talking or laughing except to answer her constantly ringing mobile phone. I had gone to interview the king because the Northern Alliance had broken through Taliban lines at Bagram and were only twenty-three miles outside Kabul, and with American planes blasting away at Taliban positions, it looked as though the capital might fall any day. From State Department officials in Washington to shopkeepers in Kandahar, suddenly people were talking about Zahir Shah as the ‘only hope’ for peace and stability in Afghanistan. But while I was having a pre-interview coffee with his son-in-law General Wali, a message had come to say His Majesty was suffering from lumbago and would have to postpone our appointment, so Homaira had offered to show me around.

  It was a glorious blue and gold autumn day, and Homaira was the perfect guide to a city I had never visited, weaving in and out of traffic like a native in her old Volvo, often narrowly avoiding pavements in her enthusiasm to show me the Colosseum or the track used for chariot races. As she drove round the majestic monuments and fountains decorated with chariots and gods that seemed to grace every street, she sang along to Robbie William’s cover Mack the Knife on the car stereo.

  Yet as home as she seemed i
n Rome, even looking the part, effortlessly handsome in leather jacket and tailored trousers, Homaira confessed that she considered arriving there as the end of everything she had loved. Growing up as a princess in Kabul may not have been the fairytale lifestyle that the title suggests but she described a blissful childhood with a surprising degree of independence. The eldest daughter of the king’s eldest daughter, the exquisite Princess Belquis, Homaira had no brothers and was a confirmed tomboy. ‘During my grandfather’s reign, girls went to mixed schools, to the cinema, listened to foreign groups like The Beatles, went swimming, wore short skirts, but even then I was different,’ she laughed. ‘I learnt to ride at the age of two and a half, to use my father’s pistol at five, and was the first woman in Afghanistan to drive a car, going all over town with my pistol in my belt, though I always had a guard. I loved movies and often slipped away to the Park Cinema. I accompanied my grandfather everywhere.’

  The Arg was sprawling rather than grand and the king did not wear a crown nor ride in a carriage. But even so Homaira had grown up used to being surrounded by ancient tapestries and oil paintings that had been gifts to her ancestors from other monarchs, and to travelling around in one of her grandfather’s prized collection of Rolls-Royces or her uncle’s Thunderbird as well as going on elaborate expeditions hunting deer and quails with hundreds of retainers.

  Suddenly the entire family was crowded in one flat. Everything they owned had been left in Kabul – the only thing they got past the guards before boarding the plane was a miniature painted by the king which Homaira’s husband had slipped out of its frame and hid under his shirt. It now hangs in her parents’ apartment in Rome. The royal family had no property or bank accounts abroad and initially the king refused to accept any help. He sold his cufflinks, watch, camera and the carpets he had taken with him as gifts for his doctors and used the proceeds to rent a small villa in Quartimiglia just outside Rome.

  ‘There were twenty-four or twenty-five of us in a four-roomed villa,’ recalled Homaira. ‘People were saying we had lapis lazuli castles but we had nothing, only the clothes we had left in. No money. We were living on one egg a day.’

  Although several offers of financial support came in, the king was determined not to be dependent on one person or country. Eventually accommodation and a monthly allowance were arranged with contributions from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, the Shah of Iran, and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. It was an unfortunate choice as over the next few years the Shah was deposed and Sadat assassinated. After that, King Fahd picked up all the bills.

  Life in Rome demanded both a sudden adjustment to a new life, as well as an exposure to all sorts of new freedoms. In the first year Homaira gave birth to a daughter, Mariam, then less than two years later, shocked her family by announcing that she was leaving her husband even though it had not been an arranged marriage. ‘I thought it was love,’ she smiled sadly. ‘My mistake.’ It was the first divorce in a royal family where kings were notorious for taking many wives. Her parents took away the two-and-a-half-year-old Mariam and refused to give her back unless Homaira returned to her husband. ‘I could not do that. I even went to court but they wouldn’t give me a divorce and custody because they wouldn’t recognise my marriage as it had been halted in the middle so we would have first had to get properly married which of course was impossible.’

  Desperate for money and distraction, she looked for work. ‘Horses were all I knew, so I got a job in a stables in Rome, mucking out,’ she explained. There she met a Scotsman who persuaded her to go to England where she found a job working for champion show-jumper Carolyn Bradley in her stables in the pretty Cotswold village of Broad Marston. No one knew she was a princess. A few years later, after Bradley’s unexpected early death, she took a job as a photographer’s assistant in England, then moved back to Rome where her daughter, by then thirteen, was finally entrusted to her care.

  ‘So you see I am the black sheep,’ she said, winding up her story with a quizzical smile, the ashtray in front of her overflowing with butts. We had been talking all day, driving round the city, stopping only for lunch in a trattoria where Homaira told me she had a surprise. I closed my eyes as instructed, opening them to see Zia Mojadiddi, an old friend to whom I had been introduced by Hamid Karzai and who now lived in San Diego among the large exiled Afghan community. Zia was a radio-journalist and I had spent many an hour at his house in Peshawar as he patiently explained his country to me, often with Hamid interjecting, and the two of them arguing about long-ago tribal battles. We had not seen each other for eleven years.

  By the time Homaira finished her tale, we had moved on to espressos in a steamy windowed café where dusk had turned to night and the crowd transformed from middle-aged women with big coiffured hair and designer shopping bags to young men in leather jackets clasping ruby-lipped girls in tight-waisted dresses, sipping Negronis. The café was on a piazza of apartment blocks in the northern suburbs and across the road was the Fleming Hotel, a drab 1970s-style block full of Japanese tourists wearing cameras and name badges trailing in and out of the lobby and into coaches.

  Outside on the square, six or seven carabinieri sat impassively in squad cars, flicking cigarette ash onto the road through half-open windows, for the Fleming had become the meeting place of the royal court in exile. For a while Homaira and I sat and watched a group of olive-skinned men in dark suits and dark glasses huddled in yellow alcoves, scheming and smoking. Among them was her cousin Mostapha.

  A plump-faced man of thirty-eight with black sideburns and a balding head, Prince Mostapha Zahir was the person most of the dark suits were waiting to see. As the king’s spokesman, he was the closest most people would ever get to the eighty-seven-year-old former monarch, and was relishing the attention. The prince’s chest seemed to puff out peacock-fashion as he paced back and forth across the dingy lobby, one mobile phone constantly glued to his ear and another in his hand. ‘One for commanders and one for other people,’ he explained. ‘I’ve had calls from twenty-seven provinces, eighty-five satellite calls from commanders. The Taliban are collapsing and everyone wants to surrender to His Majesty.’

  Occasionally he would deign to sit with one of the groups for a few minutes and there would be a flurry of papers and business cards as they presented their case before one of his phones rang again and he would stride off. Among those waiting for a word of princely approval were an oil executive from Dubai hoping to build a pipeline across Afghanistan to bring gas from landlocked Turkmenistan to Pakistan and on to Europe, an exiled academic living in Geneva with a plan for a school of fine art, and a bright young lawyer from San Francisco whose father had edited the Kabul Times and who wanted to help draw up a constitution for the new Afghanistan.

  Talking to some of them, I found myself drawn into all the intrigues of a long-forgotten court that after almost thirty years in exile suddenly saw power once more within its grasp, advisors and relatives surfacing, many of whom had never worked, forming cliques, reliving feuds, and plotting against the others in the rush for ministries and ambassadorships. ‘Do not believe anything he says,’ whispered one advisor after seeing me talking to someone else from the king’s office, ‘his uncle killed my uncle.’

  General Abdul Wali had described his father-in-law’s court in Kabul to me as ‘like Europe in the Middle Ages’, and at the Fleming Hotel, apart from the modern suits, that was exactly how it appeared.

  Watching it all with a sceptical eye was Homaira. ‘My grandfather never wanted this,’ she said. ‘He was happy here in Rome. He had a simple life, going for walks and every day driving downtown for a cappuccino in Café de Paris in Via Veneto where he would read Le Figaro and Paris Match and smoke a cigar and sometimes go to the French bookshop. Believe me, he never talked about restoring the monarchy. He always said there must be someone better than me to run the country. But no one ever emerged.’

  We were debating whether to go back to my hotel or have a late supper in a nearby Iranian restaurant when Homaira’
s phone rang. It was the king asking us to go over there if we didn’t mind that he might be in his pyjamas.

  ‘Now?’ I asked in surprise. His house was an hour’s drive away. ‘It will be midnight!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t sleep much these days. He watches CNN all night. He’s very upset about the bombing.’

  We set off on a motorway heading north and took the turn-off to Olgiata, a private estate of villas surrounded by high privet hedges that is home to footballers, film-stars and Cicciolina, the porn-Queen, and so discreet that even the lampposts are painted green to blend in with the pinewoods. To reach the king’s house we had to go through three checkpoints, the last of which was a concrete roadblock where we had to leave the car. ‘My grandfather’s life has changed dramatically since September 11th,’ explained Homaira, shaking her head. ‘He hates all this.’

  There was good reason for the Italian police to be vigilant, particularly with journalists. Only two days before the World Trade Center attack, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Panjshir commander and leader of the Northern Alliance, had been killed when two North Africans presenting themselves as Moroccan journalists walked in to interview him with a bomb inside their camera. The king himself had survived an assassination attempt back in 1990, again by someone posing as a journalist. A Portuguese Muslim called José Paulo Santos de Almeida had carried out an entire interview then picked up a Kandahari dagger that he had brought as a gift and said, ‘Now I’m going to have to kill you.’ He stabbed the king three times in the head and chest, obviously intending a mortal wound to the heart, but the dagger was stopped by a tin of Café Crème cigarillos inside the old man’s breast pocket, leaving him lying bleeding on the cream sofa but still alive. ‘The funny thing is,’ said Homaira, ‘his doctors had pleaded with my grandfather to stop smoking and he refused, but he used to smoke huge Romeo y Julieta Havanas and he had just swapped those for the small cigarillos. Now he refuses to give up the cigarillos, saying they saved his life.’1