Under an Afghan Sky (10 page)

“You must eat.” Abdulrahman was poking a straw into a carton of mango juice. I watched as he slurped it back in a few short gulps, the sound of the straw making a sucking sound as he searched for the last drop of juice in the carton. He stretched out on his blanket and went to sleep.

I took my rosary out of my pocket and silently started to pray again.

I must have dozed off after a little while. I woke to see that the spot of light on the wall behind Abdulrahman’s sleeping lump was fading. I looked at the clock. It was just after four-thirty in the afternoon. I could hardly believe that I’d spent another day in the hole. I should have been back at the Serena, screening videotape from the shoot that Shokoor and I were supposed to go on that day. After that, I would have been getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner at the Canadian embassy. My contact at the embassy, Isabelle, had invited me the week before, when I was firming up my travel plans to go to Kabul. She wanted me to meet a Pakistani journalist who was embedding with the Canadian contingent in Kandahar for a few weeks. He would also be coming to dinner, and she hoped I could tell him a bit about the embedding program and what the south of Afghanistan was like.

I was really looking forward to turkey and stuffing and pie. I love Thanksgiving, and every year, I try to write a letter to someone in my life I’m thankful for. I got the idea from one of my teachers in high school, Sister Josephine Carney, who was the sister of the then-archbishop of Vancouver. I received a letter from her several years after I graduated, saying she was thankful God had sent me to her class and how she hoped I learned as much from her as she did from me. I’d called to thank her, and she told me it’s her Thanksgiving tradition every year to thank someone for being in her life. I pulled out my notebook again and wrote to Paul.

Hi, darling P,

It’s almost 5 o’clock in the evening. Thanksgiving, October 13. I should be going to the embassy now, but I’m still in this hole, as far away from turkey dinner and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie as I can be. In fact, the only thing I’ve had to eat all day is a few chocolate sandwich cookies. I hope that if you’re on the base, or at the PRT, that there’s a piece of turkey on your plate, and lots of stuffing and gravy. An extra portion for me.

It’s one of my favourite dinners and I wish I could be cooking it for you and everyone else. You’ll have to try out my great stuffing someday. It’s made with sticky rice and reconstituted dried shiitake mushrooms. You will love it. I also make a pumpkin-pecan pie that you’d love. It’s the traditional pumpkin on the bottom, and the traditional pecan on the top. I started making it a few years ago because some people always prefer to have one or the other, and then you end up with two half pies at the end of the night. This way, everyone gets a bit of both, and they don’t have to feel piggish about it. I serve it with whipped cream. I think you’d love it, and I hope I get to make it for you next Thanksgiving.

Please try not to worry about me. I’m okay. The cut on my hand is tingly to the touch, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting my motor skills, since I’m still able to write. It’s just not the most comfortable place here, that’s all. But for the most part, my kidnappers have been treating me well. I’m just feeling a little homesick, missing Thanksgiving, and most of all, missing you.

xox

Dear M,

You’ll love this, M. We’ve been given code names by the embassy. I’m Victor 7. Every time we need a ride somewhere, we have to call and use those names. They don’t want us travelling outside the Gandamack without an escort. And, hey, yesterday was Thanksgiving Day. Al and I were invited to the embassy for turkey, but were too exhausted, and distraught. I just hope we can have Thanksgiving together next year. Please come back soon, M. I can’t be disappointed. We can’t let this end in Afghanistan where it began.

xx

I was finally getting hungry thinking about turkey and stuffing and gravy, so I opened a new package of chocolate cookies and stuffed one in my mouth. I could feel my back top-left tooth ache a little, and I shuddered at the thought of a cavity, but I kept chewing. Pumpkin-pecan pie it wasn’t, but at least my captors were not starving me. I pulled out another cookie. The crunch of the bag and the cookie wrapper made Abdulrahman stir. He had been sleeping for hours. He sat up and yawned.

“What is the time?” he asked.

I handed him the clock. He looked at it and gave it back to me. The light in the hole was very dim, and everything looked a pale shade of green.

“When are they coming?” I asked.

Abdulrahman shook his head and rubbed his fat belly.

“I not feel so good,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Stomach. Something I eat not happy.” He moved past me to the opening of the hole. He took my garbage pail and my roll of pink toilet paper, covered the hole with the wooden door, and crawled to the end of the tunnel. A horrible stench soon filled the small space. I thought I might die from the fumes. I remembered seeing matches in the plastic shopping bag, so holding my breath for as long as I could, I fished around in the bag and dug them out. I lit one after another, and exhaled.

Soon, he was back. He left the garbage can a few feet away from the entrance to the hole and rinsed his hands with the water from the green can. I scowled at him, angry he was using up the clean water, and angry that he had stunk up the room.

He smiled. “Better, much better,” he said, reaching for the plastic bag. “Why you use the matches?” he asked, looking at the burnt matches scattered around.

“So I could breathe,” I replied.

He glared at me, and then pointed to the bracelet on my wrist. “Take this off,” he ordered.

Fuck, I thought. I had been wearing my little charm bracelet so long that I forgot I even had it on. I don’t wear much jewellery—my late Great-Aunt Eileen gave the bracelet to me when I was fourteen, and I hadn’t ever taken it off. I also had on two small rings—one was my late grandmother’s wedding ring, the other my sister gave me when I got my master’s degree. It was silver, with the words
Semper Fidelis
—Latin for “Always Faithful” and the motto for the US Marine Corps—engraved on it. I took it to mean I would be always faithful to my morals and principles as a journalist.

“No,” I said.

“I will kill you,” he said, grabbing my arm.

“No! You’ve already taken enough from me,” I yelled, remembering how he had rifled through my makeup bag the night before, taking things for his wife. He grabbed my arm and tore the bracelet from my wrist, almost burning my skin with the chain in the process.

“It is very nice,” he said, smiling as he turned it over in his fat hand.

I removed both rings and stuffed them in my pocket while he was examining the bracelet.

“I see you,” he told me. “Give to me.”

“No, you can’t have my rings.”

“I will kill you.”

“Kill me. What will your brother say? What will Khalid say? They will kill you if you kill me.” This made him angry and he lunged at me.

“Stop!” I yelled. He had grabbed my long shirt and was trying to pull it off me. I stood up quickly and hit my head on one of the wooden beams. The rings fell out of my pocket. Fuck, I thought. I must have not stuffed them in deeply enough. Abdulrahman let go of my shirt and picked the rings up off my blanket.

“Give them back to me!” I yelled.

“Very nice,” he said. “I give to my wife.”

“You can have the silver one,” I told him. “Give me back the other one. It means a lot to me.” He stared at me for a while, then threw the silver ring at me, holding up my grandmother’s ring. “I give this little one to my wife.” He put it in the pocket of his baggy pants.

“You’re disgusting,” I spat.

“My wife will be very happy,” he said, smiling. Then, as if nothing had happened, he reached for the cookies, opened the package, and starting stuffing them in his mouth.

“I don’t think you should eat any more,” I said angrily, “if you’re not feeling well.”

“I am hungry,” he said. “I will have dinner soon.”

“Dinner?” I asked.

“I go when they come.” He pointed at the roof. “I go have dinner.”

“That’s nice. You think I’m not hungry? That I don’t need dinner? I should be having a very nice dinner now in Kabul.” My eyes were flashing with anger.

“You have biscuit,” he said, pointing at the chocolate cookies beside me. “I no eat your food.”

“Good, or you will be fatter,” I told him.

He rubbed his stomach again, and I worried for a second that he was going to go back to the bucket.

“My wife very good cook,” he told me. “She make rice.”

I asked him where his wife was, and he said that she was waiting for him so they could go to Pakistan together. Abdulrahman and his family spent the winter in Pakistan and their summers in Afghanistan, where they did their “work.” I knew that many insurgents—including the Taliban—head back to Pakistan in the cold months of the winter and return in the spring for the summer fighting season. I was pretty sure my kidnappers were not real Taliban insurgents, but it still didn’t surprise me that they would “winter” across the porous border.

“We have home there. All together. My brother and his wife—Khalid father and mother. Khalid, other brothers and sister. My uncle and his wife.”

“Your house is very big.”

“Yes, it is very nice house. Twenty people—more than twenty people—live there, yes.”

“Your wife must hate living with your family,” I said sarcastically, unsure if he would understand. And he didn’t.

“My wife like our house. We have room for us and baby.”

There was a noise outside.

“Shh.” Abdulrahman put his finger to his lips and looked at the ceiling suspiciously. I heard footsteps and voices.

“Abdulrahman.” The voice came from outside. Abdulrahman stood up and leaned over me to speak into one of the pipes.

“Hezbollah,” he said softly. The voice outside spoke back in hushed Pashto, and the two men conversed quickly. He turned to me. “Khalid,” he said, pointing up.

I felt a wave of relief. I heard digging, and I covered my face with my scarf and hid the white plastic bag under my blanket.
When it was over and the dust had settled, Abdulrahman moved the wooden door to the side and crawled up the tunnel. Cold air blew into the hole. It was mid-October, and even though temperatures could get as high as thirty degrees Celsius during the day, it was often very cool at night. Shokoor had warned me of that before I came to Afghanistan.

“Bring a sweater, Mellissa,” he told me via email. “It is not like July and August when you were here last. It can get cold in the evening.”

The air carried with it the hushed voices of the men standing outside. I could hear them speaking softly to each other. Then more shuffling, and I was surprised to see Abdulrahman crawling back through the tunnel toward me.

“Where is Khalid?” I asked.

“He coming. I must do something first.” He pulled out a cell phone from his pocket. He pressed a few buttons and held it up to me.

“What is your name?” he asked. It was clearly a phone with the capacity to record several minutes of video.

“Mellissa,” I answered.

“What do you do?”

“I am a journalist,” I said.

“What is your father name?”

“Kellog.”

“Okay,” he said and stopped the recording. He pressed a few buttons, and said something under his breath in Pashto.

“We have to do again.”

He asked me the same three questions and I answered. I knew this drill. We had all seen so many videos of hostages, usually with guns pointed at their heads, answering questions and begging for their lives. At least I didn’t have to do that. I remembered seeing Jill
Carroll from the
Christian Science Monitor
and Daniel Pearl from the
Wall Street Journal,
looking frightened as they begged for their lives and for their governments to leave the countries they were being held in. I felt terrible for their families. I wondered what it would be like to be forced to say something I didn’t believe in, to have to beg for my freedom in such a public venue. I was relieved I only had to answer a few short questions. At least for now.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked.

“We send to your family. Your company,” Abdulrahman answered, glaring at me like I was stupid for not knowing.

“You taking to Pakistan? You give to your brother? Your brother send? How will you send? Email?” I asked, slipping back into broken English. I was full of questions that I knew he could not answer, and part of me was repulsed by the fact that I needed anything from this foul man who I hated.

“Yes, yes, yes,” he said as he gathered his skullcap and brushed off his pants. “I go now. Goodbye.” He crawled back through the tunnel and up through the hole. I waited again, and wondered what would happen if my parents ever saw that video. I was afraid of what it would do to them, how much it would frighten them. I wished the Afghans wouldn’t send it, but at least then my family would know that I was alive. I pictured my parents sitting in their bright kitchen watching the video, sick with worry about me. I did not want anyone to see that recording because I knew how it would look. At least the men weren’t pointing their Kalashnikovs to my head.

I heard more footsteps above me, and then a soft thump. A kaffiyeh-wearing figure was shuffling toward me, and there was someone behind him.