Under an Afghan Sky (15 page)

“Stand up,” Khalid ordered. I did, and he led me back—I assumed—to the entrance of the hole. I could hear digging and then felt myself being lifted and dropped. I tried to brace myself, but I landed on my ankles. A sharp pain shot through both of them. I shoved my headscarf off my eyes and looked up.

“Go!” Khalid shouted from above. “Go!” I crawled back through the tunnel and into the room. I shook off the dust from my clothes and sat back down on my new duvet. I looked at the clock—it was just after four in the afternoon. I could hear the Afghans speaking to each other above me, and I lit another cigarette as I waited.

Thump.

The shuffle of shoes, and soon Khalid’s black kameez appeared in the doorway. He took off his faded black leather shoes and placed them carefully by the entrance, then brushed the dust from his clothes. I realized they had all been fastidious about removing their shoes. He rearranged his black skullcap on his head and sat down, staring at me with his wide-set eyes.

“You stay tonight?” I asked.

“I stay.”

“Good.”

Another
thump,
more shuffling, and Shafirgullah appeared with two white plastic bags: cookies, juice, cigarettes. He ripped open the package of smokes and offered them to me and Khalid. We each took one, and Khalid lit them with a lighter he fished out of his breast pocket. Inhale, exhale. Blue smoke filled the small cave, and I felt a head rush with each puff.

We finished our cigarettes, and Shafirgullah scampered up the tunnel and out of the shaft. The digging started again and dust rained down over everything.

Shafirgullah shouted down to Khalid, and then he—and the others—were gone. Khalid reached over and dusted off the duvet. Then he took my hand and placed it between his big palms.

“How are you, Me-liss-si-a?”

“How do you think I am?”

“You not happy.”

“Of course not. You’ve taken me away from everything. My family, my friends, my life. You have taken everything from me. How can I be happy?” My voice was cracking. I didn’t want him to see me cry, so I pulled my hand away from his and turned to face the wall. He didn’t seem to know what to do. He put his hand on my shoulder and tried to tell me it would be okay, but I wasn’t listening. He patted my back and kept telling me I would soon go back to Kabul.

“But I need to go back now!” I could hear myself almost yelling, but I felt almost as though I was out of my body, a spectator to this drama. “I have a family! I have a job! I need to go back to them! You don’t know what you’re doing to me!”

He turned my head to face him and stared me directly in the eye.
“Don’t cry, Me-liss-si-a,” he said.

“Mellissa,” I finally corrected him.

“Don’t cry.”

“I want to go back to Kabul. Khalid. Please. You have to help me. You said I am your sister. You have to help me get back to Kabul. You’re the only one who can help me. You have to talk to your father and tell him I need to go back.” I was pleading with him, but I didn’t care. He might be the only chance I had to make this nightmare end sooner than later. And he seemed sympathetic. He looked into my eyes and wiped away a tear I didn’t even know was there.

“I am sorry for you, Mellissa. I am sorry you are not happy.”

“Then please help me. Please, Khalid. You’re the only person who can help me. You took me; you must help me get out. Please.”

He nodded and readjusted his skullcap. “I will talk to my father.”

“Talk to him now. Please call him. Now. I can’t stay here any longer. Please.”

Khalid shook his head. “I call tomorrow.”

“Call him now. Please. Call him now.”

“Tomorrow,” he replied as he reached into his breast pocket for his cell phone.

I sat back dejected, as if all the energy had suddenly been sucked out of me. I picked up my notebook and began to write, seeing out of the corner of my eye that Khalid was punching in numbers on his phone. A loud voice, which I thought I recognized as his father’s, came through the receiver. Khalid’s voice dropped, sounding more apologetic, with none of the authority I’d come to expect from him as the leader of my motley gang of kidnappers. They spoke for a few minutes, and then Khalid hung up the phone.

“Was that your father?” I asked. “What did he say?”

“He say your friend must call him. They fix money and then you go.”

“Give me his phone number and let me call my friend,” I asked.

“No, I call.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. I not call from here. I call tomorrow, when I will go to Kabul.”

“You’re going to Kabul tomorrow?”

He nodded.

“For how long?”

“One day maybe. Maybe I come back Friday.”

I had more questions. He told me he would take his motorcycle there and that he always stayed with his sister’s husband, who had a small room somewhere in the city. His sister was in Pakistan with the rest of the family.

“What does her husband do?” I asked.

“He is Taliban.”

“Is he really Taliban or like your type of Taliban?” I asked. I was curious how he saw himself.

“He is Taliban.” Khalid made a gun with his hands. “He kill people for Taliban.”

I must have looked a bit skeptical, so he went on to tell me about the time his brother-in-law got into a gunfight with some American soldiers and killed three of them, even though he was shot in the shoulder himself.

“He killed three soldiers?” I didn’t believe him. “Where did this happen?”

“Ghazni. You know Ghazni.” I nodded. Ghazni was just southwest of Kabul, a province away from the country’s capital. But I still didn’t believe him. It seemed highly unlikely that a Taliban fighter,
even a true Taliban, could get away alive after shooting and killing three American soldiers.

“Why you going to Kabul?” I asked.

“I have work.”

“What kind of work?” I imagined that he might be heading back to the refugee camp he had taken me from, trolling for someone else to steal. Khalid smiled at me as if trying to tell me that I didn’t want to, or need to, know. It felt a little sinister to me, but it stirred my curiosity.

“You want to take someone else.” It was more of an accusation than a question. He kept smiling, and I knew he wasn’t going to tell me. I gave up and reached for the package of cigarettes.

We spent the night talking, not turning out the lamp until well after midnight, according to the alarm clock.

Khalid seemed especially happy to be able to speak openly about his girlfriend of six months, Shogufa, who was in fact his first cousin on his mother’s side. He talked about going to her house all the time, and how she made the best bread and fried potatoes. She had long dark hair and brown eyes. She lived with her parents, and her mother was Khalid’s aunt. His mother’s younger sister, he told me. She was fifteen, maybe sixteen, but he wasn’t sure.

“She is very
shayesta,
” he told me. “Like you.”

“Shayesta?”
I repeated. Again, my Pashto was failing me.

“
Shayesta
—very pretty,” he said again.

I asked if he had a picture of the very
shayesta
Shogufa, and he promised to bring me one.

“Does she know what you do?” I asked.

He looked at me and seemed to be thinking. “She know little, little,” he said after a long pause.

“She knows you take people and keep them in places like this?”

He nodded. “A little.”

“And what does she think? Does she know about me?”

Khalid looked down and cracked his knuckles. All ten of them, and then he cracked his toes. And then his neck.

“Did you tell her you took me?”

He nodded.

“And? What does she say?”

“She no happy.” He lit a cigarette and offered me one. I took it and he held the lighter out. I took a long drag and we finished our smokes in silence.

Khalid blew out the lamp. “Sleep coming to me,” he told me and he stretched his long body out next to me. His dirty feet were too close to my pillow for my liking.

I turned to face the wall and took out my rosary, fingering each bead and praying silently until I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning with a kink in my neck. I reached for the lighter and lit the lamp. I glanced at the clock. It was way too early, and I was angry at myself for not being able to sleep more. Even another hour would have helped me get through the day faster. Another hour of escape. I lit a cigarette and inhaled it in a few long puffs before opening my notebook.

Dearest P,

Another morning, and another day in this hole. I’m holding up fine, but smoking a lot. Between the cigarettes and the dust, I’ll be lucky if I can get out of here without some horrible respiratory disease.

Khalid stayed last night. He’s interesting. I think he feels responsible for taking me, and responsible that this isn’t being resolved as quickly as he told me. He’s really not a bad person. We talked about his girlfriend all night—he’s really in love! I mean, as in love as an eighteen-year-old kid can be, but it made the time go by. More than anything, I just miss talking to people. You, and my friends, and not having my BlackBerry or my phone is a really odd feeling. To be so disconnected from the world, from you, and from everyone I love. I’ll feel even more cut off when Shafirgullah comes back tonight. At least with Khalid here, there’s someone to talk to.

I’ve said this before, darling, but try not to worry about me. I’m fine. Really. I’ll get out of here soon enough.

Good morning, P. I hope that wherever you are, you’re having a good hot cup of tea and a croissant—or two. One for me. I miss you so much. Do you know?

xox

Khalid slept for twelve hours, not waking up until about noon. I can’t remember the last time I slept that late, not even when I was hungover, which didn’t happen often. When he got up, he told me to turn around while he crawled up to the entrance of the hole and relieved himself into the water bottle.

After opening another sleeve of cookies and drinking three boxes of juice in a row, he grew talkative again. I decided to pick up where we had left off last night.

“When can I meet Shogufa?” I asked.

He laughed. “She want to see you. I say no. She no happy.”

“Of course she’s not happy. How would you feel if someone had taken her? And put her in a place like this?” I gestured around the hole. “This is no place for her, or me, or anyone. Especially a woman.”

“She want to see you,” he said. “I no let her.”

“I would like to meet her too,” I said, even though I knew that would never happen. It would be a disaster for Khalid to have his girlfriend see exactly what he does. I imagined she was a typical Afghan girl, like so many I had met in this poorest of war-torn countries: big eyes and a shy smile, half hidden under a headscarf until she married, and then put into a burka, where she would remain hidden from the world for the rest of her life.

I thought of the young girl I’d met just a few weeks before in Kandahar, outside the gates of the camp where the Canadian Provincial Reconstruction Team was based. The PRT was where
the military and the civilian components of the country’s mission in Afghanistan met. More than twenty-five PRTs were set up throughout the country to provide services to the Afghan people. It was where officials and staff from other government departments and agencies were based—sort of an outreach outpost—and where they could deal directly with Afghans who needed help. It was the centre of Canada’s civilian–military cooperation program, providing assistance to the Afghan people while fighting a war in their country.

We were at the PRT early one morning because it was Eid, the celebration of the end of the month of Ramadan, and the Canadian military was giving out gifts to families in Kandahar: jugs of cooking oil, bags of rice and sugar and flour, tea, and scarves for women—an Eid package that would feed many of them for the weeks to come. We were told in advance that the handout was by invitation, that only a few hundred families had been invited to come to the PRT that day to receive gifts, families that had been identified by outreach workers in the weeks before.

We arrived early, and the front gate of the compound was already swarmed by a sea of humanity: women, children, all without invitations, all clamouring to get in. Word had spread that the Canadians were handing out food, and it seemed that everyone in Kandahar wanted—needed—something. There were women with children on their backs, and many older children just standing on the street and tugging at the sleeve of every foreigner who walked by. I felt a pull on my headscarf and turned around. A little girl, maybe five or six years old, in a pink headscarf—stared back at me. She had big deep brown eyes and a wide smile. As I took a picture of her, she turned away. Shy, I thought, but then she looked up at me again. I took another picture, and she reached out to look at the screen. I showed her the picture. She beamed and grabbed the camera to show her friends.
Soon I was surrounded by a group of girls. I took pictures of all of them and turned the camera over to show them. The little girl in the pink scarf clung to my side. An older boy joined the group. His name was Zhalil, he told me. He spoke pretty good English and was able to act as my translator.

I turned on my recorder and held the microphone to his mouth.

They wanted food, he told me. They wanted to know if I could help them get through the gates of the compound. They knew that food was being given out and had been sent by their parents. The little girl in the scarf said she had an older brother who was in a wheelchair, his leg blown off in a bomb. The boy pointed, and I saw a young man, a teenager, in a wooden wheelchair.

“That’s her brother?” I asked. The girl nodded and tugged at my sleeve again.

Just then, two women in dirty blue burkas came rushing toward me, pointing their fingers at the gate and yelling something in Pashto.

“They say it’s not fair that only the rich people, friends of Afghans who work here, got chosen to receive gifts,” my young translator told me. The women continued to yell and point, standing so close to me that I had to step back with the microphone or the sound would be too loud, too hot, to use in editing.