Under an Afghan Sky (18 page)

The conditions at Bagram were terrible for prisoners, he told me. The Americans beat them up, and tortured them to try to get as much information as they could. I’d told Khalid I understood—I knew someone who had recently been released from Bagram after being held for almost a year, without a single charge ever being laid. That person was Jojo, Paul’s and CTV’s fixer in Kandahar. He was arrested for no apparent reason the year before when he was visiting a journalist, our friend Steve Chao, who was on the base for the network at the time. The military suspected him of having close connections to the Taliban.

And then suddenly one day he was released, and given a new set of clothes and new shoes. When we met him at the bus station
in Kandahar, he told us stories of being left out in the snow for hours without a coat, about how the prison guards allowed other prisoners to beat him, about how they wouldn’t let him sleep. He cried as we drove into Kandahar City.

In those eleven months, Jojo had changed. He had gone from being an eager, enthusiastic young man to being a bitter, angry one. He vowed that what happened to him should never happen to anyone again. He estimated that half of the prisoners at Bagram were innocent Afghans like him, beaten and made to suffer just on suspicion.

I had no doubt that Khalid’s friend was guilty of something, so I didn’t try to draw the comparison of innocence, but Khalid’s interest was piqued by the fact I knew someone who had spent time in Bagram.

“When you leave here, you must tell Jojo to call me,” he’d said. “I must talk to him.”

I was sure that Jojo was probably making phone calls to try to figure out who had taken me, and he’d probably really like to talk to Khalid right about now. I’d laughed and told him I would tell Jojo to call him for sure. And he probably would.

I noticed the spot of light on the wall behind Shafirgullah’s head. The sun had come up. Another morning, another sleepless night.

If I could sleep half as much as my captors, this would be a lot easier,
I thought yet again. The clock said seven and I realized I was nearly losing track of the days—something I never do. It was Friday. I had been in the hole for almost a week.

Shafirgullah was still sound asleep. I didn’t expect him to be awake for a while longer, so I stood up and stretched my legs. They
were stiff. I sat back down, settling in for another day of mostly solitude. I already knew the drill. Shafirgullah would wake up, do his ablutions, eat two packages of cookies, and quiz me on all the Afghan words he had taught me. Door, blanket, finger, head, everything we could point to in the confines of the cave.

Then we’d have a smoke, and then he might let me play the snake game on his phone for a few minutes. And I’d wait for the minutes and hours to pass. I got the sense he was starting to get bored as well. He’d come into the hole last night to replace Khalid, smiling—no, laughing—holding up two fingers and saying, “You, Kabul. Two day.” Which I’d mistakenly understood as “today”—but I knew that couldn’t be true. “Two day,” he repeated. Two days actually made sense. Maybe Khalid’s father had made contact with Paul, or someone from the CBC; maybe they had worked out some kind of deal for my release. It was possible. Anything was possible, but I had to keep reminding myself not to get my hopes up. Still, it was hard not to. Maybe I’d be out by Sunday. There was a flight to Kandahar on Monday. I’d be back in time to pack up my stuff and get the flight to Dubai on Wednesday, back on schedule—the day my tour was supposed to end.

Shafirgullah spent a lot of time on the phone that day. I got to play Snake Xenzia only once on his phone—for about ten minutes—and then he wanted to put his SIM card back in and make phone calls.

“Who are you talking to?” I kept asking. “Is it Khalid? Am I going to Kabul on Sunday?”

He just laughed. “Khalid, Kabul, he come tonight.”

“I want to go to Kabul,” I told him.

“You go Kabul, I go Kabul,” he laughed. “Two day.”

This conversation went on all day, and by the end I had it all planned out. I was sure the Afghan authorities were going to want
to talk to me. I’d do that once I got back to the city and returned to the Serena Hotel to collect my belongings.

Damn, I hoped my belongings were okay. I was supposed to have checked out on Tuesday, and I wondered if the hotel had sent someone to collect everything and empty the room, or was I still paying for it? I had a substantial amount of American cash from the CBC in the hotel’s safe to pay Shokoor and Sameem’s salary for the month. I wondered if it was still there and what had happened to the rest of my stuff, including my laptop. Thank goodness I wasn’t carrying that with me or my kidnappers would surely have taken it. They had already taken my Marantz—the digital audio recorder I had carried with me to the camp that morning, and the microphone that went with it, even though I warned them they would have no use for it. They had asked me to show them how to use it, but the batteries had run out so I hadn’t even been able to do that. Besides, I’d said, it would be useless to them without the editing equipment that was on my laptop. They didn’t care and took it anyway, as if to make a point. I imagined they were going to take it apart and use the guts inside to make IEDs—improvised explosive devices. The thought made me feel sick to my stomach.

Khalid didn’t come until later in the evening—well past the usual time of around six or six-thirty. The now-familiar sound of digging and the shower of dust that followed came at closer to eight o’clock that night. Shafirgullah scrambled out of the hole and his tall friend crawled in carrying three white plastic bags. Khalid smiled at me.

“I bring you chips,” he said proudly, untying one of the bags and pulling out a large package wrapped in newspapers. “Look at!”

I unwrapped the newspaper to reveal a mound of freshly fried potatoes—french fries—and a few pieces of ripped Afghan bread.

“Shogufa make,” he said, taking a fry and putting it in his mouth. “Eat!”

I took one of the fries and gingerly put it in my mouth. It was lukewarm, but I welcomed the taste of salt. A few days of nothing but cookies and juice was beginning to wear on my palate, which normally craves salt over sugar.

“You like?” he asked eagerly. I took a few more and nodded, stuffing them in my mouth.

“Eat some bread,” he said, ripping off a chunk and holding it out to me. I took it and chewed and nodded.

“French fries,” I said. “Shogufa made herself?”

“Yes, she is good. She know I like. She make. Eat. You must eat more!”

I took a few more and sat back. I wasn’t hungry, which was odd given my limited diet over the past few days, never mind that french fries are one of my favourite foods in the world.

“Why you no eat?” Khalid seemed upset.

I told him I was full and that I’d eaten enough. But the truth was that the fries made me extremely homesick. I’d eaten them almost every day before I came to Kabul. Paul and Al and Bob Weber, the Canadian press reporter, all teased me that I was going to start looking like a french fry because I ate so many. I’d exercised self-restraint for a few days, but Al always had chips on his plate and I would end up stealing half of them.

This was also a running joke with my girlfriends. Jen and I had gone to a sports bar in Toronto just a few nights before I left for Afghanistan—and ordered everything that was bad for us—beer, chicken wings, hamburger sliders, nachos. And then after we filled our bellies, we decided to order a side of fries for dessert.

So it didn’t seem right that I was being fed french fries while being kept a prisoner in a dark hole. Fries, in my mind, were to be
enjoyed with levity and laughter and friends. I couldn’t eat them at that moment, no matter how much I liked fries, because it made me so lonely for my real life.

Khalid seemed upset that I wasn’t eating, but he couldn’t force me. He ate the remaining fries himself, which were cold by then, and most of the bread. “I keep hot next time,” he promised, almost apologetic in his tone. “They too cold now.”

I told him not to worry and to tell Shogufa that I was grateful for her gesture.

Khalid reached into one of the bags and pulled out a newspaper. “You are important person,” he said, giving me a knowing look. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I shook my head no.

“Yes,” he insisted, and handed me an English-language Afghan newspaper—
The Afghan Times.
“Look.”

On the front page, an article about Marina Sung, a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian reporter who had been kidnapped from a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul. Obviously, they got some facts wrong, but it was clearly about me. It quoted the police chief in Kandahar as saying that the police were doing everything they could to find me. It also quoted someone from the refugee camp. It was badly written—the English was poor. The article was short, but my heart sank as I read it. It was one of my worst fears—that my captors would now think that I was more important than I am and increase their demands for my release. Maybe they would ask for more money, more prisoners to be let out of jail. But then it might also work the other way: maybe knowing that the police were on the case and looking for me would pressure them into releasing me, into “finishing my case,” as Khalid liked to refer to it.

“You are important person,” Khalid kept saying.

I’m not, I insisted. I tried to explain to him that as a reporter, I might be known by some people in Canada, but for the most part, it
wasn’t a very important job, and I wasn’t at all an important person. He refused to believe me, but I kept insisting. I told him reporters in Canada don’t make a lot of money. But my parents must have money if they could send me to school so I could be a reporter? I told him no, my parents didn’t work, and our family grew up with very little money. “Your company have money,” he argued. I shook my head. I told him no, I worked for a public television station that had very little money (at least in the news division).

He wouldn’t believe me. We argued back and forth for a while and then I gave up. There was no way of dissuading him from what he believed. Tired of arguing, I picked up the newspaper again. There was an article on Sarah Palin—the US elections were coming up and she was on the campaign trail, speaking in Texas.

Khalid pointed at the picture of her. “She very
shayesta.
Very pretty. I like her.”

“She is friend of George Bush,” I told him. “You no like her.”

“Friend of George Bush? You lying!” He shook his head in disbelief. I told him I wasn’t, that she was the vice-presidential candidate for George Bush’s party in the elections that were about to take place. Again he refused to believe me. She can’t be a friend of George Bush, he argued. Afghanistan hates Bush, and he was the reason for everything bad that had happened to his country. He told me about friends who were imprisoned and tortured and killed by George Bush’s army, and that if he were to ever see Bush, he would kill him by beheading.

He ran his index finger over the picture of Sarah Palin. “She very pretty,” he kept repeating. “She cannot be George Bush friend.”

“She is,” I goaded him a little. “So what would you do if you see her? Would you cut off her head too?”

“If I see her, I will… I will… touch her,” he said, staring intently at her picture. This came as a surprise to me. Sex was such a forbidden subject in this culture, and the subject had never come up
in conversation before. But now that he had started, he wasn’t about to stop. “I hungry for her. I would—touch her,” he said, spitting out the words as if they were thoughts that he had been trying to suppress but that suddenly didn’t need to be silenced.

“I touch her,” he continued, “and then I will cut her head off.” He smiled to himself at the thought and nodded. “I cut her neck. I cut her head off.”

“That’s not very nice,” I told him. “Not a very nice thing to do to someone if you like them.”

“I no like George Bush friend,” he said, “I hungry for her. I touch, then I kill her. I cut her head off.” He continued for a while on this train of thought, talking more to himself than to me. I was starting to feel uncomfortable, so I lit a cigarette and let the smoke and silence fill the room instead.

I scanned the rest of the newspaper. There was an article about President Karzai and the election that was set to take place in a year. And an article about Barack Obama’s campaign. Who had won the election back home in Canada? I wondered. It had taken place on Tuesday, the day after Thanksgiving. Elections were a big deal at the CBC, and I knew the entire network would be busy preparing for it. I’d filed a story the week before about soldiers voting at the base in Kandahar in the advance polls; I’d spoken to them about their thoughts on democracy and the voting process.

The US election was happening in a few weeks. November 4. It was going to be historic, and I said a silent prayer that I would be able to watch the results come in.

Khalid interrupted my thoughts. “Do you know who is Obama?”

“He’s hopefully going to be the next president of the United States,” I replied.

“He is good? You like?”

I nodded and put it in the simplest terms I could, explaining that he had voted against the US invasion of Iraq, that he was the opposite of George Bush, and that maybe things would improve if he won the election.

“You think he win?”

“I hope so.”

“Why you no like George Bush?” I could tell he was extremely curious about this. Like many Afghans, Khalid had difficulty understanding that people in the West have a choice when it comes to political leadership. So I tried to explain that not all Americans had voted for Bush, and that not everyone thought we should be involved in Afghanistan or Iraq. This intrigued him greatly, and he wanted to know more. It was a lesson in Western democracy, and I had an interested student.

“George Bush bad,” he concluded after a long discussion. “Taliban good.”

No, I argued, how could the Taliban be good when so much of the population was repressed during their time in power? Women had to stay at home, girls weren’t allowed to go to school; there was no freedom to speak of for most people.