The Sewing Circles of Herat Read online

  Hamid was horrified when he heard what had happened as I was shown into the barely lit palace an hour late. He, his brother Shah Wali who had flown over from America and was looking miserable, and uncle Aziz, were all gathered round a small electric fire in a long sitting room with brocaded wallpaper and a tapestry on the wall. Clad in a fur-lined emerald green and black-striped chapan, one of the Uzbek long coats, with an astrakhan hat on his head, Hamid looked thin and drawn in the large winged leather armchair. For the last two months he had been in the mountains of Uruzgan trying to rally people against the Taliban, then negotiate a surrender, and his beard had turned almost white.

  Hamid was perhaps the only tribal chief in Afghanistan without his own militia and within a few days would take charge of a cabinet of squabbling warlords, many of whom had killed each other’s men and taken their lands. But he seemed unfazed and full of his customary fierce pride by which he would lay down his life for his country at the first perceived slight.

  ‘When I arrived in Kabul, I was met by the Defence Minister, General Fahim [military leader of the Northern Alliance] and the Interior Minister, Mr Qanuni [another senior member of the Northern Alliance] and they asked me where are your bodyguards. I told them you are my guards from now on. They were shocked!’

  I was not surprised. While I admired the principle, in Afghanistan’s bloody politics it had to be madness to trust these people who hated a Pashtun being in charge again and clearly wanted his job. I wondered why he did not call in some well-armed Popolzai tribesmen from Kandahar. But Hamid insisted, ‘I would not kill an ant to remain in this position.’

  It was hard to adjust to seeing him there in the palace in Kabul about to be made head of state in a ceremony that would be celebrated from Downing Street to the White House and shown live on television all over the world, after all those years of frustration in exile in Peshawar and Quetta, and our adventures in Kandahar living on trenchwater and mud-crabs. But instead of being exhilarated, I felt strangely depressed and, as I watched the tell-tale tic in his cheek, it seemed to me that his own feelings did not match his brave words.

  We hadn’t been talking long when he was called away to deal with a problem with Rabbani. Uncle Aziz, who had been deputy chief of protocol to King Zahir Shah so knew the palace very well, gave me a tour of the quarter in which they were camped with a running commentary, mostly stories of Afghan kings getting one over on the British as well as a few digs at the ‘ignorance’ of Rabbani who had apparently insisted on taking down what he had called ‘that old rug’, not realising it was a rare Gobelin tapestry sent as a gift to Amir Abdur Rahman by Queen Victoria.

  First he took me to the Peacock Room where he and Shah Wali were sleeping. The room was decorated with silk wallpaper printed with hundreds of peacocks but the heads of every single one had been painted over in white by the Taliban. ‘Can you imagine the time that took someone to do?’ asked Aziz, ‘the madness of it all.’

  It was a similar story in the dining room. The line of white discs along the wall had once all contained birds but had all been painted over. Someone had taken a knife to all the oil paintings, gifts from monarchs such as King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, and cut out any figure. This left some bizarre results such as the fishing scene over the fireplace which showed a fishing rod going into a river but no man holding it, next to a field with a cow’s body but no head. Even more strange, to cover some of the holes, black ink drawings of trees on white paper had been inserted behind the canvas.

  Outside, the stone lions guarding the entrance had all been carefully decapitated. ‘This is a country which cannot feed or educate its children, that has no healthcare, where people die by the age of forty, yet our government spent all their time removing heads and faces from things,’ said Aziz, laughing.

  By the time Hamid returned it was almost curfew so we talked quickly about his plans to ‘rid the country of warlordism’ and hopes to disarm the population. I tried to imagine him asking Ismael Khan or General Dostum to give up their arms. ‘Even the government became a warlord,’ he said. ‘That must never happen again.’

  A few days later foreign forces would arrive, mostly from Britain, to keep him in power just as they had tried to with kings in the nineteenth century. For all Hamid’s fierce protestations of independence and being ‘nobody’s puppet’, Italian troops would be patrolling the dark palace grounds with their avenues of bare trees and ruined buildings around which the castrated Najibullah had been dragged over and over again behind a Taliban jeep. As he stood at the door, a headless stone lion either side of him, the untrustworthy Rabbani guards watching on sullenly, he seemed the loneliest man in the world. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

  One morning a piece of pink paper appeared under the door of my hotel room inviting me to the re-opening of the National Gallery the following week. I thought I would stop by and see how preparations were going.

  The gallery was a strange insubstantial sort of building resembling a Bavarian chalet that had landed in the middle of an untidy Kabul street. It was a day without electricity and it was gloomy inside. On a table near the entrance was a pile of paintings with the faces scratched out. Upstairs a thin-faced man of about forty was swabbing furiously at an oil painting with a sponge, dipping it back and forth in a bucket of water.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

  ‘I am the artist,’ he replied with a half-bow although with his cream suit and neat-trimmed beard he did not look like one at all, ‘and I am also a doctor. My name is Dr Mohammed Yusuf Assefi and every one of my paintings is done in oils so when the Taliban wanted to destroy our heritage, our paintings, because they had people and faces, I covered them over with watercolours. Any figure or animal I changed to trees, flowers or mountains. I pretended to be repairing the paintings and instead I painted over them. Look, you see.’ In front of my eyes he rubbed at a shadow on a lake and a swan appeared swimming under the autumn trees.

  ‘And here.’ He sponged away a pot of flowers by a canalside and a peasant woman appeared carrying a bundle on her back.

  It was hard not to laugh. I’d never seen anything like it. ‘How many did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I painted over as many as I could, not just mine. I did eighty here in the gallery and forty-two in the Foreign Ministry. I did the ministry ones first, then when they started destroying the museum I knew they’d come here next so I did these too.’

  Unlikely as he looked for the part, particularly when I later saw him again driving along very slowly in his battered Volkswagen Beetle, clasping the wheel, I had come across one of Kabul’s cultural heroes.

  ‘How did you get the idea?’ I asked.

  ‘I used to have eight paintings hanging in the Presidential Palace and of course I was very proud. When the Taliban took over and executed Najib I heard they’d torn up those paintings because they had people and animals in, so then I hit on this idea of repainting the others to save them.’

  ‘That was an incredible risk. How on earth did you get away with it?’

  ‘The Taliban didn’t understand what was going on. I just walked into the ministry one day and told them I had been contracted to restore all the paintings. It took about a year to do all of them but I kept moving paintings around so they didn’t realise what I was doing and an official in a room with a painting wouldn’t suddenly realise a horse had disappeared. Of course it was risky and I could have been beaten and gone to jail but I love my country and wanted to preserve our heritage. And you see it took three or four days to do each one but it only takes a minute to bring the figures back. It’s like magic.’

  I stood there watching for a while as figures came to life under his sponge in front of me. Once I knew what he had done, the subterfuge was quite apparent, in some cases comically so. The scene of a man on horseback in the countryside had become a rather bad painting of a large tree with an immensely swollen trunk. A boat of a family outing on a lake had become a boat of sacks with no one rowing it.r />
  From outside suddenly came the sound of children’s laughter. I realised it was the first time I had heard this since arriving in Kabul, and we both went to the window. Thick flakes of snow were starting to fall and children were dancing about in the street trying to catch them. ‘It’s barf-i-awal, the first snow,’ said Dr Assefi. ‘Maybe finally the drought is over. Then we can start to live again.’

  MARRI’S DIARY

  Kabul, January 2002

  Snow again today and all the mountains are white. Everyone is hoping that this may finally be the end of the drought and Qargha Lake will be full again. Outside children are playing in the streets making snowballs and riding down the hills on trays and everyone smiling.

  Yesterday I went with Farishta to the city to the Womens League office by the old Zainab cinema to find out about jobs for women. There were so many other women there and everyone praying but no one knows yet.

  We hear on the radio that the world has promised our government a lot of money so surely they will soon reopen the schools. But there are still so many shortages and the city is a place of orphans. Even the Arg is without heat and light and water. We are all poor now.

  It was very busy in the city, many people coming back, the traffic hardly moving. It’s odd to see taxis coming into the city laden with things rather than leaving and trucks bringing in televisions and electronic things. The Post Office is open again. Everywhere there is the sound of hammering as people are repairing their houses.

  There are lots of foreigners in the city. My brother says every day there are television cameras in the bazaar. I wonder if Jamil’s friend, the lady journalist, will come. I heard from a friend who saw Tawfiq in Kandahar that he took my letters to Quetta. He says the Taliban are all in Pakistan.

  The loud planes still fly over but for now it is calm here in Kabul with all the foreign troops driving around, flags from their jeeps. Farishta is very naughty and persuaded me to go to Chicken Street and says some of the soldiers are very handsome. Sometimes the burqa is very useful for being able to watch and no one knows. She told me of one girl who sings Beatles songs as she passes foreign men and they don’t know if it is for them. We stood for a while and watched the British soldiers. Boys asked them for cigarettes and they drew pictures for children.

  1 Ambassador Dubs was abducted by members of a Maoist group in February 1979 and held captive in the hotel. He and his four captors were all killed when Afghan troops and Soviet advisors stormed the room.

  2 Elphinstone writes that the British gifts which found most favour with the King were ‘a pair of magnificent pistols, an organ and some pairs of silk stockings he had earlier admired’.

  3 Sikh aid did not come cheap. In return Shah Shuja ceded all territories on the banks of the Indus (including Peshawar) to Maharaja Ranjit Singh, gave him the Koh-i-Noor and promised to send him yearly 55 high-bred horses ‘of approved colour and pleasant paces’, 11 Persian scimitars, 25 good mules, an abundant supply of pomegranates, musk melons, grapes, figs, quinces and pistachios, as well as furs and Persian carpets, altogether to number 101 items.

  4 The object was to punish him not only in this life but also the next for a cannibal cannot go to Paradise.

  8

  The Story of Abdullah

  ‘He is the hero who does not ask the number of his foes but asks as to where they are’

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  IN KANDAHAR FOOTBALL STADIUM, a dusty pitch with concrete stands either side, two men, one in baggy cream shalwar kamiz and large plastic-framed glasses, and one in a shiny blue and purple tracksuit, were standing in the centre of the field, holding a hose and watering the same spot over and over, forming a small pool. The rest of the ground was grey and bone-dry. The man in shalwar kamiz, who introduced himself as Mohammed Nasir, head of the Sports Board, shook his head. ‘However much we water, we can’t get it clean,’ he complained, pointing at the muddy water through which a dark stain was just visible. ‘It’s where they used to erect the gallows to hang people. For the first three weeks the water ran bright red as all the blood came out of the soil.’

  Washing out the blood at Kandahar football stadium.

  ‘There’s also that patch over there but it’s not as bad.’ He pointed towards the goal on his left. ‘That’s the goalpost where they used to tie women and stone them.’ He returned to his hosing and I went and sat on one of the stands, my mind filled with baying crowds cheering on an execution. In the distance I could see the shining turquoise dome of the tomb of Ahmad Shah Durrani, Afghanistan’s first king, who was himself not averse to executing those who stood in his way.

  After a while I became aware of someone watching me. A teenage boy with a dirty face under a silver-embroidered scarlet skullcap had arrived on a bicycle and stopped in front of me, tapping his blue flip-flops on the ground.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Inglistan,’ I replied. ‘And you?’

  ‘Over there.’ He pointed in the direction of some tumbledown buildings behind the stadium.

  We chatted a little and he told me his name was Nida Mohammed, he was fourteen, and that he did not go to school because he had to earn money carrying goods in the market as his father had ‘disappeared’ in the jihad.

  ‘Did you ever come to an execution?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve seen more than a hundred,’ he said proudly. ‘I used to come because it was entertainment – there was nothing else to do. And it was interesting to see the reaction of the victim, if he would be scared. The best time was during Ramadan because then there would be at least one hanging or amputation a day, sometimes three or four.’

  ‘How did you find out about them?’

  ‘The Taliban announced them on the radio two days before – this man, son of this man, who killed that man, son of that man, will be executed on Tuesday at 2 p.m. They were usually either at noon or 2 p.m. Thousands of people came. I would meet my friends and if we had money we would buy pistachios or oranges. The left-hand side of the stadium would be full but the right empty in case they chose to shoot the man.’

  ‘Who chose?’ I hadn’t realised there was any choice involved.

  ‘The family of the injured party could choose the manner of death. Sometimes we would bet on what they’d choose. The person could be shot, hanged or sacrificed.’

  ‘Sacrificed?’

  ‘You know, like sheep. Their hands and feet would be tied and they would be laid on a block then their chest slit open with a long knife so all the blood and guts spilled out. Women were tied to goalposts and shot down or if they had committed adultery, they would be stoned. Once I saw some homosexuals have their hands and feet tied and a wall collapsed on top of them. That was interesting.’

  He was as matter of fact about it as if he were recounting a television documentary. I asked him to describe a typical execution.

  ‘Just before the time the Taliban officials would drive into the stadium in their Land Cruisers wearing their big black turbans. They would announce that this person, son of that person has committed this crime and the injured party has chosen this form of death. Sometimes they put hoods over their heads. During the shooting or sacrificing people would go very quiet then afterwards there would be all the crying of the relatives. They always made the family come and watch and collect the dead bodies. They used to keep an ambulance at the gate so when people had their hands or feet amputated they would be taken straight to the hospital.’

  ‘Did anyone speak?’

  ‘Afterwards the Taliban would say, “Learn from this. This is what will happen to you if you commit crimes. Remember what you have seen.’’ Then we would all go home. People were quiet then.’

  Nida told me he had to go. Before he left I asked him when the Taliban had held their last execution.

  ‘It wasn’t here,’ he said. ‘It was in the centre of town, in Herat Chowk just the day before the Taliban left.’

  ‘Do you know who it was?’

  ‘Of course.
It was Abdullah. Everyone knew him. He was a hero. His uncle works in the woodcutters’ bazaar.’

  He rode off on his bike before I could ask any more. It was too big for him and he wobbled as he looked back to wave. I sat there for a while puzzling about what he meant by ‘hero’ as Mohammed Nasir carried on hosing the same spot. The water gave a last spurt and cut out so he came over to join me and I asked him if, apart from amputations and executions, the stadium had actually seen any football in the seven years of Taliban rule.

  He laughed. ‘To start with they banned it altogether. But football is our national game so eventually they allowed us to play matches but only before 4 p.m. The players all had to be completely covered, arms and legs. You can imagine in the summer, what that was like for them, when it is a furnace here, more than 40°C. The Taliban used to come and catch those players who had rolled up their sleeves or whose beards were too short. They would drag them from the pitch and beat them with the butts of their Kalashnikovs.’1

  ‘And did people come and watch the games?’

  ‘Yes, football is very popular here. In the past, before television and foreign radio were banned and we became so cut off from the world, we even used to follow foreign teams. My favourites were Brazil and Manchester United. But the Taliban did not allow people to cheer or even clap. If a goal was scored all they could do was shout Allah-o Akbar. Now we must rebuild everything. I want a football federation where no beards are allowed. But we had a game last week and everyone was quiet and saying holy words because they were scared that there are still many Taliban here. We will have to teach them to clap and cheer and whistle again.’

  On my way out of the stadium, I noticed a plaque on the wall. In English and Pashto was written; ‘This Project has been completed with UNHCR and WFP funding on 21 May 1996’. It was the date that caught my eye for that was more than 18 months after that Taliban had captured Kandahar. Did Taliban officials laugh, I wondered, every time they passed by that sign to carry out their barbaric practices in a stadium paid for by well-meaning Western ‘infidels’ who thought they were encouraging sport.