The Sewing Circles of Herat Page 14

  But I didn’t feel elated or champagne-high. Instead I felt strangely disconnected as though watching what was happening from outside on some grainy film. I had only ever been in Afghanistan in war and kept expecting to hear the boom-boom of cluster bombs and loud throbbing of gunships filling the sky and see people with panicked faces running toward us as they had at Jalalabad.

  Going back is a hazardous endeavour. I was scared that I had remembered Afghanistan as more than it was because what I was really remembering was being young and fearless with a sense of everything in life still to come. Over the years I had edited out the death and destruction, keeping only the snow-capped peaks, orchards, streams, wild-eyed warriors on motorbikes with marigolds sticking out of their guns, crossing rivers on inflated goatskins and sleeping under stars. But as if the past had been waiting for me, now I was back in the country, I vividly recalled the afternoon dust-storms that matted the hair, clogged the mouth and caked the perspiration on the face, and endless journeys on destroyed roads through grey deserts, head pounding from lack of food or drink and excess of music. The driver had been playing his favourite Pashto tape ever since we crossed the border, a monotonous nasal whine, but after so many years of music being banned by the Taliban, I did not have the heart to ask him to turn it off.

  It was dusk as we drove through the city checkpoint and into Herat, waved through cheerily by the men of Ismael Khan whose merriment looked as though it might have been enhanced by artificial substances. Nearer now, and out of the dust-storm we could see that the minarets were more than one hundred feet tall which was why they had been visible from such a distance and there were five of them, four in a square and another some distance away. One was slightly fatter than the others and looked as if it had had a large bite taken out of the side. The minarets were in the old part of the city and we headed for the new part, drawing up at the Mowafaq, Herat’s only hotel, and a place one had to be careful how to pronounce. Just in front was a busy crossroads with a traffic island where the Taliban used to hang their victims and according to the driver had bodies hanging there as recently as two weeks before. The name of the crossroads was Gul, which means ‘Flower’ in Dari and Pashto. As we opened the doors of the car, women in faded blue burqas clawed at us for money, but were cuffed away by our guards. Knowing these must be war widows, I wanted to protest, but Ayubi winked at me and slipped them some notes, then bowed to us in farewell.

  ‘I have to report the successful completion of my mission to Tora Ismael,’ he said, ‘now you will rest and I will come for you to present you to him.’

  I started to ask what time, in my British way, but he had wrapped his cloak around him and was gone, striding off with people clearing the way in front.

  On the steps of the hotel a polite young man in a pinstriped suit several sizes too big addressed me in perfect English. ‘Excuse me, are you Britisher?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, stepping back. He had come so close he was almost touching me.

  ‘You are the first real Britisher I have met. Do you mind if I ask you a question?’

  ‘Not at all. Go ahead.’

  ‘Can you please tell me how many positive adjectives are there in the English language?’

  Ayubi.

  Since the Taliban had ridden into town in their tinted-windowed jeeps six and a half years before, patrolling the streets with their Moral Police, it would have been impossible for this man to speak openly to a Western woman. Now he finally had the opportunity and his first question was on a point of grammar. To my shame I didn’t have a clue.

  We both stood there silent for a while, dissatisfied by the encounter. In my bag I had a bundle of pens to give to children and I wondered whether to offer him one, but it didn’t seem quite appropriate.

  ‘Oh well, I was extremely honoured to meet you,’ he said eventually and walked away.

  The lobby of the Mowafaq was dark and foreboding, the dusty glass reception cubicle empty apart from a black Bakelite telephone that was not connected to anything. But the worn red carpet up the stairs and the rubble-filled swimming pool out the back suggested the hotel might once have had pretensions of grandeur. A small man with a permanently surprised expression, who looked like a young Charlie Chaplin with a tuft of black hair, thin black tie and white shirt, but without the moustache or bowler hat, appeared from the back and led us upstairs to the restaurant to be registered in a large ledger. The restaurant was busy with turbaned men who were scooping up rice with their hands and looked too big for the small white plastic tables, like a feast of Henry VIII and his cohorts on picnic furniture, and it was lit by pink and green neon strips which kept flashing on and off with the vagaries of the power-supply.

  It was iftar, the time of the day during Ramadan when the fast is finally broken, first with a palm-date, then a large meal, and the men were noisily slurping from plates of rice and meat. The restaurant had a printed menu card with various dishes so we sat down at one of the tables overlooking the traffic island and started making our selection.

  ‘A lamb kebab and qabli rice, please,’ I said in Dari to a sullen young boy who had come to take our order.

  The boy looked up from his feet then laughed. Presuming he was not comprehending my accent, I pointed at the item on the menu.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Eggs.’

  ‘What about what they are eating?’ I gestured towards the men in turbans.

  ‘Finished. Eggs.’

  Begging for nan: a quarter of all Afghan children die before they reach the age of five.

  The ancient Greek historian Herodotus had referred to Herat as ‘the breadbasket of Central Asia’ but things had clearly changed. The illuminated glass refrigerator case in the dining room contained only a pot of pink jam and some rusted cans of Russian peas and the shops in the bazaar had nothing but Iranian mango juice, and we were ridiculously delighted when one day we came across a boy selling a wheelbarrow of American food parcels, dropped from the sky in between bombs in yellow plastic packets marked ‘A Gift from the People of the United States’. Inside were sachets of peanut butter and strawberry jam, pop tarts and boil-in-the-bag herb rice. It was hard to imagine what an Afghan might make of this.

  That first night, the eggs arrived pale and wan and swimming in oil, a fly trapped in the white. Across the room the turbaned men were gnawing on chicken bones, soaking up the last juices on their plates with bread then gobbing noisily into a rusty spittoon. After a while they all got up, slung their guns on their backs and left, looking well-sated, in order to get home before the nine o’clock curfew. The timing of curfew was random as none of the mujaheddin on the checkpoints had watches but we knew it had started because there was a guard post just in front of our hotel and every time a car or bicycle approached, men jumped out into the road, thrusting their Kalashnikovs in front and shouting ‘Kalash!’ in a fearsome way.

  The pink and green lights of the restaurant flashed twice then went off, pitching us into darkness, and there seemed to be nothing to do but fumble our way up the stairs to our rooms and sleep. The door to the terrace was ajar, a moonbeam stretching across the corridor and the old man employed to sweep the floors with a brush of birch twigs gestured to me to follow him outside. By night, the destruction and the colourlessness of the landscape were not visible and the brilliance of the moonlight in the clear air highlighted the domes and the minarets. I caught my breath the way one does in front of a work of great art or listening to a sublime pianist play Schubert Impromptus and the old man who had never seen or heard such things grinned, satisfied.

  Back in Afghanistan. I went to bed with all the excitement of a child on Christmas Eve, not caring that the bombing had blown out the glass from the window of my bedroom and the plastic sheeting which had replaced it let in a stream of freezing wind. Sleep did not come readily. Apart from the flapping of the plastic, there seemed to be a colony of wild dogs on the pavement below, and cries of ‘Kalash!’ echoed throughout the night.

  The next mornin
g, woken at 4.30 a.m. by the call for breakfast before the day’s fast began to find that the basin had iced over, I went back out to the terrace. In the dawn sun the minarets seemed to be sparkling. There had once been four or five times as many and, although they looked plain brick from a distance, they had been covered by turquoise, grape-blue and opal glazed tiles in intricate designs and formed part of a musalla or religious college so spectacular that Byron wrote on seeing the ruins, ‘there was never such a mosque before or since’. Only a few pieces of faience on the towers remained, and it was these that were catching the light, a small reminder that back in the fifteenth century, while Europe was undergoing its own Renaissance, Herat had been a city of great wealth and splendour. I shared the excitement of Byron who felt he had discovered the long-forgotten capital of the Oriental Medicis.

  In the other direction I could see a huge baked brick citadel of thick walls and turrets, dominating the city on a large mound that was thought to contain the ruins of the fortress of Alexander the Great but had never been excavated, and the whole surrounded by a dry moat. It looked like the sort of fairytale fort a child might draw, but over the centuries its ramparts had frequently been used to display the heads of enemies and few places in Central Asia had seen so many bloody battles. Both Genghis Khan and later Timur (or Tamerlane as we know him in the West from Timur-i-lang or Timur the Lame because an arrow wound had left him with a limp) had fought beneath its massive walls in their bids to conquer the world. Genghis Khan is said to have wiped out all but forty of the city’s 160,000 inhabitants.

  Herat’s location as both an ancient crossroads of trade caravans and part of the traditional conquerors’ route to India had always attracted invaders, and in the nineteenth century a series of young British officers passed through on Great Game reconnaissance missions, fearing that the Russians would use the route to invade India from the west. The first of these was Captain Charles Christie,1 who entered the gates of the great walled city in 1810 posing as a horse-dealer but was in fact an agent for the East India Company trying to find out the plans of Tsar Nicholas. Spending a month there, impressed by the fertile valley surrounded by vast deserts, he was dismissive of the citadel, writing, ‘on the whole it is very contemptible as a fortification’.

  His view that the citadel had no hope of holding out against a modern European army was to be proved right more than a century and a half later when the Red Army swept into town. No city suffered more than Herat under the Soviet occupation. In protest to the Communist takeover around a hundred Russians were killed in an uprising in 1979 led by Ismael Khan who was then a major in the Afghan army. Publicly hacked to death, their heads were paraded on spikes around the city. A furious Kremlin sent in tanks and helicopter gunships which for three days pounded the city, pulverising buildings, destroying one of the minarets and leaving a hole in another, and killing an estimated 24,000 people.

  If the Russians were hated by the Heratis, the Taliban were despised. When the Taliban took the city in 1995 not a single Herati was drafted into their administration. The Heratis and their liberal history in which a woman had played such a key role in the city’s cultural heritage, as well as their large Shia minority, were anathema to the uneducated village mullahs of the Taliban. To put the Heratis in their place, they referred to them as ‘strangers’, banned speaking of Persian, closed the city’s historic female bath-houses which were the only places where hot water was available, forbade visits to the many shrines of Sufi saints, and whitewashed over a mural in the Governor’s office showing five hundred years of Herat history. The painting had been the lifework of artist Mohammed Sayed Mashal, his gift to the city he loved, and he died shortly after its destruction. Although the official cause of death was lung disease, most Heratis believe he died of a broken heart.

  Now these latest invaders were gone and standing on the terrace, looking across all these centuries of history and bloodshed in the pale winter sunshine, I suddenly caught the scent of pines that I remembered from my last visit when Herat was still under Russian occupation.

  Down below, the sunrise had brought on the day, bringing everyone out as suddenly as if a switch had been flicked. Pony traps with red tasselled bridles jingled by as well as large men wobbling along on small bicycles and the occasional pick-up full of gunmen. On a verge by the road a man was setting up an old box camera, placing a stool for his clients to sit solemnly in front of a painted backdrop of a Tyrolean meadow full of gaudy pink and yellow flowers. A traffic policeman with a white jacket, a peaked cap and a handheld Stop sign had even appeared at the traffic island and seemed to be laughing though everyone was ignoring his frantic signalling.

  The hotel was on the corner of two wide treelined avenues, Blood-bank Street and Cinema Street. I chose to explore the latter, though the cinema had been demolished by the Taliban. A crowd of beggar women and children quickly collected in my wake, tugging at my clothes. Looking for a place to escape, I ducked into a gateway just along from the hotel. A path led to a white colonial-style building with a sign saying in English and Persian Literary Circle of Herat.

  I stared at it, intrigued. First settled five thousand years ago, Herat has always been regarded as the cradle of Afghan civilisation, so renowned as a centre of culture and learning that one of its leading patrons of arts in the fifteenth century, Ali Sher Nawa’i, claimed, ‘here in Herat one cannot stretch out a leg without poking a poet in the ass’. Babur, the first Moghul Emperor, descended from Tamerlane on his father’s side (and Genghis Khan on his mother’s), visited his cousins in Herat in 1506, only a year before it fell to the Uzbeks. In his memoir The Baburnama,2 a sort of personal odyssey which tells of what he calls his ‘throneless years’ wandering Central Asia in search of a kingdom, having lost his own tiny Ferghana, he wrote of the city being ‘filled with learned and matchless men’.

  Herat’s golden era was under Queen Gowhar Shad, wife of Tamerlane’s youngest son, Shah Rukh. The name of Herat’s most important queen is almost unknown in the West but she used her power as wife of a ruler whose empire stretched from Turkey to China to find and promote the best architects to carry out such grand projects as the ruined musalla. She also sponsored painters, calligraphers and poets, usually in the romantic language of Persian even though the Timurids themselves were Turkish-speaking. One of her protégés was Abdur Rahman Jami, widely considered the greatest-ever Persian poet with his prolific outpouring of ghazals and couplets. Her court artist Bihzad is regarded as the master of Persian miniatures for his intricate depictions of hunting scenes and chivalrous encounters between tall princes and reclining maidens in intense colours such as deep lapis blue made from powdered jewels. One of the first miniaturists to sign his paintings, he headed the Herat Academy from 1468 to 1506 and became so famous that many miniaturists tried to emulate his style, signing their work ‘Worthy of Bihzad’, though Babur was characteristically frank, writing, ‘he painted extremely delicately but he made the faces of beardless people badly by drawing the double chin too big’.

  Over the years the city had been sacked so many times that it was hard to imagine any of this artistic spirit had survived. The door of the Literary Circle was open and I walked in, unsure what I would find. The building seemed to rumble in protest as overhead planes flew low, American bombers heading south to Kandahar where the Taliban were threatening to fight to the last after Mullah Omar had announced that he had had another dream that he would stay in power. The rooms were bare and deserted but I noticed a pair of scuffed black sandals outside a door on the left. Inside a man in a black polo neck who looked like a young Robert de Niro was sitting at a desk moodily staring into space. He introduced himself as Ahmed Said Haghighi, the society’s president, and invited me to sit down.

  I asked him how the Circle had survived the onslaught on culture of the Taliban years and he smiled wearily. ‘It was not just those years,’ he said. ‘Here in Herat we’ve been fighting a war on culture for hundreds of years. Ever since the death of Queen Gowh
ar Shad you could say.’

  ‘How old is the Literary Circle then?’

  ‘It was founded in 1920 by the poets of the city to make known the rich culture and heritage of Herat. We used to have literary evenings when people would come and read their works but we’ve always been opposed by governments. Many times the doors of this place have been shut down. The Communists locked up many intellectuals and when the Russians came in 1980 they wanted to turn this into an institute of propaganda so many of our members fled to Iran. But the Taliban was the worst time. First they tried to turn us into a propaganda voice, then they came and padlocked the door and publicly whipped our members so we were forced to become an underground movement, meeting in members’ houses to secretly read stories and poems.’

  On the shelves were piles of stapled papers that looked like a monthly journal. ‘Yes, we call it the Eighth Orang, it means throne in English, after a poem called Haft Orang3, the Seven Thrones written by Jami, the most famous poet of Herat, during the most turbulent years of the Timurid Empire. We thought if he could write such a work at that time then why shouldn’t we in our difficult time.’

  I was surprised that they had been able to get it past the head of censorship. ‘The Taliban were stupid,’ he replied. ‘They didn’t realise what we were writing. We used symbolic language as in any totalitarian state to convey our messages. Some writers used devices such as the discourse of birds and animals.’

  He fell silent and I wondered if I should leave. There was not even a paraffin heater in the room and in the sub-zero temperature my feet felt like blocks of ice, but then he started speaking again without looking at me.