Under an Afghan Sky (9 page)

There was silence for what felt like hours. Abdulrahman reached over and touched my leg again. I shuddered and shook his hand off me. “Do not touch me,” I repeated again. “Allah will kill you.
I
will kill you.”

At this, he laughed. “You cannot kill me! You are a woman!” He undid the string on his pants.

“I can and I will. I know karate. And you will be dead. And Allah will send you to hell.” The karate thing was a half-truth. I know tae kwon do, a martial art intended for practising self-discipline and control, but I had no problem using it for self-defence or murder at this point. “You will go to
jahannam.
” I used the Muslim word for hell, which I had learned from an imam in Toronto a few years before when doing a story on the arrest of eighteen men for allegedly plotting terrorist attacks on Canadian targets like the CN Tower and Parliament Hill.

“Allah will send you to
jahannam,
” I repeated.

Abdulrahman scratched himself and pulled down his pants. I inched closer to the wall next to me.

“Stay away from me,” I warned again. Then I saw the glint of a knife.

“I must fuck you,” he said, more menacingly, holding what looked like a small carving knife to my throat.

“Fuck off, go to
jahannam,
” I repeated. He pressed the blade into my neck. I closed my eyes and started to pray.

When he finally moved away from me, he reached for the wires on the battery. “Sleep time,” he said.

“No,” I answered. “I want to sleep with the light on.” He shrugged and turned his back to me. I left the light on for much of the night, even though I knew the bulb was dying, but I didn’t sleep. I rocked back and forth in a fetal position, hoping that I would wake up and realize this was all a horrible nightmare. I repeated the
Hail Marys, looking at the clock and watching the seconds pass into hours, until I could see a faint spot of light on the wall behind Abdulrahman’s head.

Monday, October 13, 2008, 7 a.m.

My dear P,

I hope wherever you are, you are sleeping on a soft mattress, your head resting on a sheeted pillow. I’ve spent the last two nights on hard ground, and I haven’t been able to get much sleep at all. I can’t imagine how worried you must be about me. I just need you to know that I am okay. My stab wounds have scabbed over and I’m not bleeding anymore. I’ve eaten a few cookies since my last breakfast at the Serena, but I’m not really hungry.

I’m in a hole somewhere outside Kabul. I don’t really know where, or which direction we were going in, but we had to hike over a mountain and into a village.

I’m not sure where you are—whether you’re on the base in Kandahar or maybe on your way to Kabul, but I’m sure you’re sick with worry, just as I’d be if it was you who had disappeared. These guys just want money. I don’t know how much, but I will take out a loan when I get back and repay whoever can put up the cash right now.

It’s Thanksgiving today, and I’m supposed to be at the embassy for a turkey dinner, and even though I’m in this hole, I have a lot to be thankful for. This year, I’m thankful for you. I’m thankful for all the fun and laughter and happy times we’ve been lucky enough to share.

I’m not afraid to die, you know that and we’ve talked about it so many times. I don’t believe in regrets and I like to think I’ve tried to live a good life.

But we shouldn’t be talking about death. I’m coming back soon. And we can
get on with our lives and our plans. We have a lot to do, remember? Surfing in Tofino to start.

xox

“What you writing?”

Abdulrahman hadn’t moved all night, but now he was sitting up and staring at me. I didn’t want to look at him.

“Give to me,” he ordered, motioning to my notebook. I handed it over and watched as he read my letter to Paul, although I’m not sure he actually read it, or understood what he was reading, since he threw it back at me pretty much right away.

“I go bathroom,” he said, pulling down his baggy pants. I quickly turned around as he reached for the pop bottle by the door. With my back turned, I could hear him rinsing his hands with the water from the green can, and then he burped.

“You hungry?” he asked me, unwrapping a sleeve of sandwich cookies and offering them to me. I shook my head, then watched as he ate one cookie after another until the whole package had filled his bulging stomach. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and reached into his pocket for his cell phone. Like Khalid, he also had taken the phone apart and was now putting in the battery, the SIM card, and then fitting on the back cover. He turned the phone on, pressed a few buttons, and then put it back into his pocket.

“You have cell phone?” he asked me.

“No, Khalid took my phone,” I answered. “Can I use your phone to make a call?”

He shook his head.

“Please, Abdulrahman. Please let me call.”

“No. They know you okay. We call.”

“When did you call?”

“Khalid father call. He is boss.”

“Has he already called?”

“I do not know. Yes. No. Maybe he call tomorrow.”

“Khalid’s father is your brother?”

“Yes. He is boss.”

“Khalid is his son.”

“Khalid youngest, but he is very brave.” Abdulrahman seemed both proud and jealous of his nephew.

“So Khalid is number two. His father is boss, he is second. Yes?” I was trying to get an idea of the hierarchy of this family organization and figure out where this fat Afghan fit in.

“Khalid is boss here. Khalid father—my brother—in Pakistan.”

“Your nephew is your boss?”

Abdulrahman twitched his nose, probably not liking the way that sounded. But he nodded.

“Yes, but he listen to me. I know things he don’t know. You ask many questions.”

“I’m a reporter. I’m supposed to ask questions.”

“Okay. Ask me something.”

“You want me to interview you?” This was a strange request, but Abdulrahman seemed to like the idea of being the subject of an interview. I reached for my notepad and flipped to an empty page. I pulled out my pen and took off the cap.

“Where are you from?” I started. “I mean, where were you born?”

“In Kabul.”

“Is that where you live now?”

“Sometime. Sometime I live here. Sometime I live in Pakistan.”

“Where are we? What is the name of this town?”

“Tsk, tsk.” He waved his finger at me. “Not allowed to ask this.”

“Are we north of Kabul? How far are we from Kabul?” I asked.

“Maybe we are north. Maybe we are west. About one hour to Kabul.”

“Why can’t you tell me where we are?”

“I cannot. My brother kill me.”

“What do you do with all the money that you get from kidnapping people?”

“We buy gun. Kalashnikovs very expensive. We buy at market.” I was surprised that there was a gun market and asked him where it was.

“You know Mazar-e-Sharif?”

I nodded. Shokoor had tried to persuade me to go to Mazar-e-Sharif the year before to do a story on a women’s program in the city, northwest of Kabul. We never made it there because of time constraints.

“There is market in Mazar-e-Sharif. We buy gun there. Very expensive.”

Mazar-e-Sharif,
I scribbled on my notepad.
Guns, very expensive.
“How expensive?”

“For one, maybe one hundred thousand afghanis.”

I did the math in my head.
US$2,000 for a used Kalashnikov,
I wrote.

“Is that all you buy with the money?”

“No, we also buy things to make bombs.”

“You know how to make a bomb?”

“It is easy. You need only few things. We make many bombs.”

“But you’re not really Taliban, are you?”

“We are different but same.”

“Is Mullah Omar your brother’s boss?” I was referring to the man known as the leader of the Taliban.

Abdulrahman laughed. “No, we do not know Mullah Omar, but he is very good man.”

“So, if you’ve never met or talked to Mullah Omar, you can’t really be Taliban.”

“We are all different Taliban.”

“Either you’re Taliban or you’re not. If your boss is not Mullah Omar, you’re not really Taliban.”

“We are all different Taliban. And this area where we are—many Taliban.”

“Is the Taliban the same as Al Qaeda?” I asked. Abdulrahman smiled and looked at me. “Osama bin Laden is very good man. Very good person.”

“So you are connected to Al Qaeda?”

“We do not know bin Laden. But he is a very good man.”

It was becoming more and more obvious to me that my kidnappers were no more than a gang of thieves who seemed to espouse the same anti-Western philosophies as the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but they weren’t real terrorists, or real members of those groups. The insurgency in Afghanistan was becoming fractured, more like a patchwork of disenfranchised groups that hate the central government and the presence of foreign troops in the country. My kidnappers were most likely just a group of thugs who hated the government and wanted foreigners to leave. Afghanistan is full of criminal gangs like these. Kidnapping is a big business, with a lot of money to be made on unsuspecting foreigners. I’d heard stories about hostages being bought and sold, and even if their kidnappers weren’t Taliban, they eventually ended up in the hands of the Taliban, or other insurgents. Lives are measured in dollars, and in the desperation of the kidnappers to make a quick sale. I knew I did not want to be traded or sold to the Taliban.

“What do you do with the bombs you make?” I asked.

“We put them on roads. Americans come on road.
Boom!
” His laugh was now starting to sound more like a cackle.

“I thought the Taliban did that.”

“We all the same.”

“Why do you hate America?”

“They come, they kill our people. America very bad. George Bush—you know George Bush? He very bad man.”

“I agree, I think George Bush is a very bad man,” I said. This wasn’t completely untrue, and I figured it was time we agreed on something.

“Yes, George Bush very bad person.” He seemed to spit with every word.

Suddenly, the light went out. I jumped back and grabbed the alarm clock, pressing the button on the side to light up its face. Abdulrahman took it from me and held it by the battery. He detached the wires and then held the clock up to the light bulb at the ceiling. He unscrewed the bulb and screwed it back in again. Then he ripped apart the wires and rewired them together before reattaching them to the dying battery, after giving it a good shake. The light bulb buzzed and came on, but it was now even dimmer than before.

“Battery no good,” he said, pointing at the grey slab next to me. He took the cell phone out of his pocket and scrolled through the numbers until he came to the one he wanted. Through his receiver, I could hear the phone ringing on the other end. A man answered, and after a brief conversation in Pashto, Abdulrahman hung up.

“He bringing light,” he told me.

“Has he talked to your brother yet? Has he talked to Zahir?”

“Zahir going to Pakistan today. He talk to my brother.”

“He better tell your brother to hurry up and fix this. I can’t stay here any longer.”

I was thinking about my comfortable room at the Serena Hotel, where many foreigners and diplomats stay when they travel to Kabul. The Serena had been the target of suicide bombers about ten months before I arrived. Several men entered and detonated a suicide vest. A Danish delegation was there at the time, and several foreigners were killed. The target was the hotel gym, where I had worked out on a treadmill the morning I met Shokoor to go to the refugee camp. Since the attack, the hotel had taken steps to tighten security, and Shokoor said it was a fortress, which was why he had reserved a room there for me on this trip. I thought about that nice comfortable room and wondered what would happen to my belongings. Would Shokoor call the hotel and tell them to pack me up if I couldn’t get back in time to check out? My laptop, my BlackBerry (I said a little prayer of thanks that I’d left it in the room, because it was my phone book, my connection to everything, and I would have hated the kidnappers to go through it). I figured everything I’d brought with me to Kabul would still be there. And I hoped that Shokoor was okay—and that my kidnappers weren’t now going after him.

Abdulrahman was unwrapping another sleeve of cookies. I watched as he put one after another in his mouth, wiping the crumbs from his face with his kameez as he offered me what was left—about three cookies. I shook my head.

“Why no eating?” he asked, shaking his head at me in return. “You must eat.”

“I’m not hungry.” This for me was a rare statement. Everyone who knows me can attest to how much I like to eat—and how much I eat. My friend Kas calls me the “human garburator,” and every cameraperson I have ever worked with knows how much I like to stop at whatever fast food joint is on the road between shoots. I used to joke that I spend my life thinking about my next meal. I bring shopping bags to work full of food to last me throughout the day—salads, sandwiches, leftover pasta. When a bunch of us went out for dinner on a rare night off during the Beijing Olympics, we ordered plates of food—fish, chicken, and vegetables—all served
family-style, as is the Chinese custom, and prompting the cameramen to joke that I must have a tapeworm: I ate more than they did combined. We ended up having to order more.

Whether it’s a deep-fried fish, dripping with sweet and spicy sauce in a Beijing restaurant, or A&W onion rings on the road between Regina and Saskatoon, I love to eat. I also love to cook. And I don’t discriminate when it comes to food, though in the past few years I’d been staying away from pork. I’d covered the Robert Pickton story—the pig farmer in British Columbia who killed prostitutes. Canadians know the details of this horrific mass murder very well. He lured prostitutes to his farm, tortured and killed them, and fed their bodies to his pigs before slaughtering the animals, which may have been processed for human consumption. I couldn’t bring myself to put a knife and fork into a pork chop after that.