Under an Afghan Sky (4 page)

Now, looking into this crude opening in the rocky ground, I realized that my kidnappers wanted to hide me in this hole. And I wanted to be found.

“Go,” Abdulrahman ordered again, “it is a good room for you there.”

“No,” I said. I sat down again with my back against the mud wall. “I am not going there. I will stay up here tonight. I’ve slept on the ground before. I’ll be more comfortable here.”

“You must go,” he said. “You will not stay here.”

“Mellissa.” I hadn’t heard Khalid’s footsteps, but he’d joined Abdulrahman and was now sitting next to me. He said my name with four syllables instead of three—it sounded like he was saying Me-llis-si-a.

“Khalid, please don’t make me go in there,” I pleaded. “I am afraid of the dark.”

“Zahir stay with you,” he told me. “I come tomorrow to see you.”

“Can’t we stay back in that house? It was better there.”

“No,” Abdulrahman said, “it is not safe there. Taliban are in this area.”

“I thought you were Taliban.”

“Other Taliban.”

The two of them spoke in Pashto and then Khalid got up.

“I go now, see you tomorrow,” he said.

“Wait, Khalid, you said you would stay with me.” I looked hard at him.

“I see you tomorrow. Zahir stay with you tonight.”

“No, you promised you would stay with me,” I argued.

“Zahir my brother. He stay. I come tomorrow. I promise.”

And he was gone.

Abdulrahman stood up and pushed me roughly toward the hole. He was fat and strong; I tried to resist, but there was no way to struggle, even though I really did not want to find out what was down there.

“Go,” he said.

He grabbed my arm and yanked me to my feet and over to the hole. I looked down and saw the faint glow from Zahir’s flashlight.

“I don’t want to go in there,” I repeated. Abdulrahman was getting impatient. He reached and grabbed me underneath my armpits and threw me down the shaft—which was maybe eight feet deep and two feet wide—and into the hole, feet first. I landed on my butt.

“Go through!” Abdulrahman ordered from above.

I felt Zahir’s hand on my running shoe. “Come, this way,” he told me, and I saw that there was a tunnel running off one side of the hole. I inched my way forward, but the tunnel was no more than
about two feet high. My head hit the hard mud ceiling. I crouched down lower, slowing moving forward, following Zahir, who was crawling backward. The tunnel, about twelve feet long, opened up into a small space.

I looked around at the mud walls. The ceiling was made of old pieces of dark grey ceramic tiles and held up by two vertical wooden beams painted a bluish grey. There were hooks on the beams. The entire space was no more than six feet long, three feet wide, and just over five feet high. Two blankets were spread out, covering the dirt floor. The blankets, beige with coloured stripes, were woven from a thick canvas-like material. Two pillows bookended the hole on either side—one was a dark red velvet, the other a dirty white. A black metal bucket stood close to the entrance. In the middle was an old car battery, jerry-rigged to a light bulb attached to one of the hooks near the ceiling. A small plastic alarm clock sat on the battery. I noticed a white grocery bag to the side, a red plastic watering can, and my camera bag and knapsack in a corner. There was also a wooden door-like panel leaning against the wall next to the entrance.

Zahir sat cross-legged in the far corner.

“Sit,” he said. Abdulrahman was shouting down to us in Pashto, so Zahir crawled back over to the shaft and spoke to him for a few minutes. Soon he was back. He wrapped his kaffiyeh around his head and face, motioning for me to do the same with my scarf. He then covered the entrance with the wooden door. “Cover your mouth,” he told me. I was about to ask him why when I heard a noise at the top of the shaft. Someone was covering the opening with a board or some other object. I could hear digging. A cloud of dust came rushing through the entrance, filling the room. I tried to hold my scarf over my mouth but it was too late. I started coughing and looked up. That’s when it dawned on me that they were covering the hole with
dirt. No one outside would ever suspect there was a room underneath. After a few minutes, I heard footsteps above us, then there was silence.

I looked around. Everything was covered in a layer of dust. I tried brushing some of it off with my scarf but succeeded only in turning off the light bulb when I knocked the wires off the battery. Zahir turned on his flashlight and reattached the wires. The light came back on.

I sat with my back to the wall facing the entrance. I took off the coat Khalid had given me on the mountain. The inside was covered in blood. Zahir crawled over to me and pointed to my wound.

“Let me see,” he said. His English was as good as Abdulrahman’s and better than Khalid’s. I took off the smelly kameez, but the odour of stinky Afghan man stayed with me. I took a deep breath through my mouth. Zahir unwrapped the scarf that was tied around my shoulder. The sleeve of my own shirt was caked with blood. The blue-and-yellow flowered cloth was ripped, and I watched as Zahir lifted it from my shoulder. It was stuck to the wound, glued on with blood. I winced as he pulled it off. He reached for the white plastic bag and pulled out a roll of dark pink toilet paper. Ripping off a few sections, he wetted the paper with water from the red can and held it to my shoulder.

“Does it hurt?” he asked. I hadn’t felt pain from the wound until that moment. I nodded, watching from the corner of my eye as he wiped the wound. I didn’t realize until now how deep the cut actually was. It was still oozing dark red blood. Zahir shook his head and continued to wipe the bloodstains off my shoulder. After he was satisfied it was clean, he ripped a few more pieces of toilet paper from the roll and pressed them into the wound to staunch the blood.

“Let me see your hand,” he said next. I held
out my right hand and he examined the small stab wound. The blood had caked over, but the wound hurt when he touched it. My index and middle fingers were numb. Again, Zahir bandaged me with the pink toilet paper. Finished, he sat back.

“It is better?” he asked.

I stared at him and nodded. I was feeling a little dizzy, and realized I was still wearing just one contact lens, so everything looked blurry to me. Then I remembered that I always pack an extra set of disposable lenses when I travel, so I reached for my knapsack and opened the side pocket. I took out the package and peeled back the cover to take out the lens.

“What is that?” Zahir asked.

“It’s like glasses, in my eyes, to help me see.”

He watched as I poked the lens into my left eye with my dirty index finger. Finally, I could see properly again. I looked at my captor and blinked.

Zahir had dark eyes, set apart by a thin nose. He wore a beaded skullcap on the back of his head, like many Afghan men I’d met before. His kameez was a light green, with matching baggy pants. He’d left his brown leather sandals by the door.

“Where is Khalid? Where did they go?” I asked. I wondered if they had homes in the village. If they had beds, bathrooms, electricity, lights.

“They go home,” Zahir answered.

“A house?”

“Yes, a house.”

“Do you live there too?” I asked.

“I live there sometime,” he said. “I live in Pakistan. You know Peshawar?”

I’d never been across the border. I had been close to it with the Canadian troops, and I knew that Peshawar was just the other
side of the Khyber Pass. At one time it was a major supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan. Over the last year, it had become more of a haven for insurgents. I remembered hearing that there had been a suicide bombing there just a few weeks before. I asked Zahir if his family was from there, and he told me they had a house in Peshawar.

“How many of you are there? You, Khalid, do you have other brothers?” He told me he had three brothers and one sister.

“And you travel back and forth between here and there?”

“I go back there tomorrow,” he said. “We come to Afghanistan in summer. Peshawar in winter.”

“What do you do there?” I asked.

“I go to school,” he answered.

“School? How old are you?”

“I maybe nineteen or twenty.”

“How old is Khalid?” I thought Zahir had to be younger, since Khalid seemed to be the one in charge.

“He is maybe nineteen. Maybe eighteen. He is youngest.”

“Do your other brothers and sister come to Afghanistan too?”

“No,” Zahir said, “Khalid and I come with our father. Our work is here.” I asked him what he meant by “work.”

Zahir gestured with his hand. “This work.”

That’s nice, I thought. A kidnapping family! Why would he even bother to go to school when you can make a good living robbing people of their freedom?

“Your father is here now?” I asked.

“No, he back in Peshawar. I go tomorrow.”

“How do you get there?”

“My friend, have a car. We drive. It takes about six hours,” he said. Then he stared at me. “You are okay?”

Was I okay? I’d been kidnapped, stabbed, thrown into a hole, covered in dirt, and he wanted to know if I was okay?

“I’m thirsty,” I said. “Do you have water?”

Zahir reached for the red plastic can. “We drink this water,” he told me. I looked inside. The water was murky, and brown sediment had settled on the bottom of the can. I looked at him, unsure of what to do. He picked up the can and told me to open my mouth. I was skeptical but thirsty, so allowed him to pour a small stream of water into my mouth.

“More?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Enough, thank you.”

“Now we sleep,” he told me.

Zahir laid his head on the dirty white pillow and stretched his bare feet out so they were next to my pillow. He sat up and detached the wires from the battery. Before the light went out, I noticed on the small clock that it was only eight-thirty. It was pitch black without the light on. I covered myself with the coat I’d taken off and put my head down on the red pillow. The ground was very uncomfortable. Even through the blanket, I could feel the bumps and sharp edges of the hard ground. I shifted to my side, only to have a rock dig into my hip. I shifted again. I just couldn’t get comfortable. I sat up and leaned my head against the wall, but that was even worse. I folded up the coat to sit on top of like a cushion. That was a little better, but then there was nowhere to put my head. I lifted the red pillow and propped it against the dirt wall.

“Mellissa.” Zahir’s voice seemed loud in the darkness.

“Zahir.”

“You cannot sleep.” It was more of a statement than a question.

“No,” I answered. “It’s not comfortable. The ground is hard.”

“Yes,” he agreed. I heard him reach for the alarm clock. He used the light on it to find the black and red wires and reattached them to the battery. The light came back on.

“Zahir, I cannot stay here,” I said. “Please let me go home.”

He looked at me and nodded.

“It will not be long. I go to Pakistan tomorrow. My father will fix the money. Then you can go.”

“What do you mean ‘fix the money’?”

“We have your phone. We call. When money comes, you go to Kabul.”

I asked how long it usually took, already dreading the answer.

Zahir thought about this for a while, then said, “The last two people who was here—they here for two weeks.”

“
Two weeks?
I can’t stay here that long!” I looked around the hole. There was no way I could stay here for more than a night. Or two at most.

“Two weeks very fast. Not a long time,” Zahir said.

“Who were these people?”

“From Germany or somewhere Europe, I think,” he answered. “Money was fast coming. They leave two days ago.”

“Is that why you kidnapped me? Because you don’t have anyone else now?”

“No, we have more places like this.”

“Are there people in them?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Maybe two or three.”

Two or three.
Two or three other people, taken from wherever they were, sitting in holes like this one. I wondered who the others were. Where were they from? What did they do? And the kidnappers had just released two others. My mind was doing the math. A hundred thousand for each hostage! These guys could make half a million dollars in a few weeks. What a great business. Except that they use the money to buy guns so they can kill people.

“That’s a lot of people,” I said. “What happens if you don’t get money? Do you kill them?”

Zahir didn’t answer. He pointed at my knapsack. “Give to me.” I reached behind my pillow and passed him the black-and-red pack. He unzipped it and went through my things, just as Khalid and Shafirgullah had earlier in the day.

“What is this?” he asked, pulling out some cables.

“It’s wires for my computer,” I answered.

“Where is your computer?”

“In my hotel room in Kabul.”

He pulled out my wallet and went through all my cards again.

“You have no money here?” he asked.

“Your brother took it. Ask him for it.”

He took out my driver’s licence and my citizenship card and put the rest back.

“I will take these tomorrow to my father,” he said.

I thought about what an arduous process it was to replace my citizenship card. I’d had to do it once before, when my wallet was stolen from my workstation at the CBC in Toronto. I had to send my original birth certificate out to somewhere in Newfoundland, and then cross my fingers and hope that it would come back within six months. I reached for the wallet and pulled out my CBC identification card and my press card.

“Take these instead,” I told him. He gave me back the citizenship card and put the others in his pocket.

“Now we sleep,” Zahir said, and again detached the wires from the battery.

Darkness enveloped us. I struggled again to find a position that might allow me to sleep, but I couldn’t get comfortable. A million thoughts ran through my mind. It had been about ten hours since I was taken from the refugee camp. Had Paul called the CBC in Toronto? Did my editors know what was going on? Surely by now the military had been told. Maybe the Department of Foreign Affairs
would have had to be informed. The media liaison at the embassy in Kabul had been expecting me at the CIDA-sponsored school that afternoon. Had the Afghan authorities been informed? It all seemed so surreal. I was supposed to be at my hotel in Kabul, ordering room service and screening my tapes, preparing for an interview the next day with Afghan election officials. Even though the election was about a year away, they were beginning early registration of voters outside Kabul. That was to be my third story off the base.