CHAPTER 6
Crouched on the dirty pavement, the fortune-teller studied my palm, shook his head, and started talking.
“What’s he saying?” I asked.
Dr. Ali, working with me because Farouq was busy with family obligations, shot me a look, somewhere between a smirk and sympathy.
“He says you will have a miserable life. Nothing will ever go right for you. You will always be unhappy. Do you want to hear more?”
“No,” I said. “I get it.”
I should have known this would be my fortune at the Kabul Zoo. Bored with all the obvious stories before the parliamentary elections in September 2005, I had made a bold move. I had gone to the zoo, planning to use it as an interesting way to tell the history of modern Afghanistan. My hook was Marjan the lion, donated by Germany in 1978, just as a coup by a Marxist party and Soviet sympathizers in the military sparked rumors of a Soviet invasion. Back then, in the zoo’s heyday, more than seven hundred animals lived there.
The next year, the Soviets indeed invaded, and Afghanistan became the major chip in the poker game between the Soviets and the West. The CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistani intelligence eventually decided to support the seven major Afghan jihadi parties, sending money and weapons, using Islam as a rallying tool. And by the end of the 1980s, the Soviets left, followed shortly by American pledges of help. The zoo languished.
An uncertain pall fell over the capital. The pro-Soviet government remained nominally in charge, but soon lost control of the countryside. The jihadi parties pushed toward Kabul, finally capturing the city in 1992. Their fragile warlord coalition held for only a short time. Warlords then took positions outside the city, shelling it while trying to kill and intimidate their rivals’ supporters. The Kabul Zoo was not immune—walls were knocked down or scarred with bullets. The zoo museum and the restaurant were rocketed.
Fighters from various factions, hungry for meat, soon realized the zoo had a ready supply. They kebabed the crane and the flamingo, roasting them over an open flame as zoo workers watched. They killed the two tigers for their pelts. One day a few fighters wanted to see how many bullets it took to kill an elephant. The answer: forty. Others stole the wooden fences from the zebra enclosure to feed fires. Animals died of starvation, of disease.
The bedlam inside the zoo mirrored what was happening in the city. Ask Afghans when the worst period of time was in Kabul, and they’ll never mention the Soviets or the Taliban. They’ll talk about this time, the civil war, when chaos and crazy ruled. They’ll talk about the warlords.
One afternoon at the zoo, a Pashtun fighter inexplicably jumped into the cage of Marjan, who promptly bit off the man’s arm. The man later died. The next day, the man’s brother went to the zoo for revenge. He threw a grenade into the lion cage, which sent shrapnel into Marjan’s muzzle, destroying one eye and almost blinding him in the other. The lion’s face was frozen in an expression somewhere between grief and a Halloween mask, with eyes that appeared to have melted into his nose.
Even then, the indignities were not over.
The Taliban, a Pakistan-supported movement of ethnic Pashtun students from Islamic schools called madrassas, had seized control of much of the south. Spreading fear and the sick kind of security that only fear can deliver, the Taliban marched north and east, finally arriving in Kabul in 1996. The warlords fled. Taliban leaders then declared that Afghans must live by their version of Islam. Women could not go outside without a burqa or a male escort. Men had to pray, grow beards, and cut their hair. No music, no TV, no photographs of people, no gambling on bird or dog fights, no flying kites, no fun. With this new if perverted kind of justice, life calmed down inside the zoo, but only slightly and only after the zoo director proved that a zoo did not violate Islam, a task more difficult than it sounds. Even so, bored young Taliban soldiers beat the bear with sticks and threw snowballs and rocks at the other animals.
Somehow the zoo survived, but just barely. When the Taliban finally fled Kabul in late 2001, after the September 11 attacks and the U.S.-backed invasion, all that remained were a few vultures, owls, wolves, the beaten-down bear, and Marjan, his bones showing through his coat. With his scars and melted face, Marjan became the symbol of all the injuries inflicted on Afghans over decades of war, of all the pain. His picture appeared on the front pages of newspapers worldwide and sparked numerous tributes on the Internet. He was Afghanistan—battered, blind, blurry, but still strong.
Within two months, he fell down dead. The bear followed soon after.
Obviously the international community had to do something. So it threw money at the problem, a reaction it would eventually have to all the crises in the country. All told, Americans donated the bulk of $530,000 raised by top international zoo managers. It was supposed to be more than enough to fix the problems at the Kabul Zoo. It was not. Afghanistan was not just a money pit; it was a money tar pit, a country where money stuck to walls and fingers and never to where it was supposed to stick. And the Chinese didn’t exactly help—a phrase that was to be repeated for years to come in almost every sector of government and aid, as China refused to do much in Afghanistan but profit from natural resources such as the country’s copper mine. Against the wishes of every other country, the Chinese government decided that the world’s worst zoo needed more animals. So it donated two lions, two bears, two pigs, two deer, and one wolf. The pigs, which resembled large Iowa farm pigs more than exotic zoo pigs, soon gave birth to five piglets. Afghanistan did not need pigs, considered dirty in Islam. It was another fine example of the unnecessary aid deemed necessary by somebody not in the country.
By the time I got to the zoo, right before the elections, the Chinese gift had been exposed as the Trojan horse it was. The male Chinese bear had died the year before, after swallowing a plastic bag filled with banana peels and a man’s shoe heel. Four pigs then died from rabies after stray dogs jumped into their pen and bit one. (Luckily the other three pigs were elsewhere at the time. Where? Who knows. They were mysterious pigs.) All the animals had to be vaccinated for rabies. Over the summer, the second Chinese bear broke out of her cage, walked down a zoo path, and hopped into the pigpen, which had a low wall apparently notorious among the animals. Two pigs were there—the other, somewhere else. The bear squeezed both pigs to death. Typically, the Afghans wanted to ascribe some sort of romance to the bear’s actions. They loved stories of star-crossed lovers, largely because many of them were forced to marry their cousins, whom they did not love in that soul-consuming, fatalistic way made popular by both Indian and Hollywood movies.
“She was lovesick and lonely and she missed her mate,” the deputy zoo director told me. “So she broke into the pig cage and tried to hug the two pigs, but she hugged them too hard and they died.”
I nodded and took notes. I tried to poke holes in his logic. “But weren’t they female pigs?”
“Yeah, so what? When you’re lonely, you’ll take love from anywhere, a female bear will take it from a female pig, no problem,” he said.
In Afghanistan, I would learn that this was too often true. The zoo workers surrounded the wayward lovesick female bear with torches and nudged her back to her cage. This was considered progress—earlier, workers would have just shot her. Facing reality, China announced it would stop donating animals to the Kabul Zoo until living conditions improved, while, of course, doing nothing to improve those conditions. The one surviving pig would be made famous years later by the international swine flu outbreak. Fearing what it might harbor, Afghans would isolate the country’s only known domestic pig, which already must have felt isolated enough because everyone thought it was unclean.
By the time Farouq came back to work, the election campaign was in full swing. Covering the election was a little like writing about the zoo—lots of scars, lots of confusion, lots of mysterious pigs. This election was the final step in the transition to full sovereignty outlined in the 2001 Bonn Agreement, the road map for creating an Afghan government that had been hashed out by prominent Afghans—including most major warlords—in Germany during the fall of the Taliban. Many of the country’s top warlords were running for parliament, including some who always made the “best of” lists drawn up by various human-rights groups that no one ever listened to, warlords accused of pounding nails into people’s heads, of pouring boiling oil over a body after cutting off a head, which Afghans swore would make a headless body dance.
For years, the international community and the Afghans had been toying with what to do about the warlords and past war crimes, pushing the issue around like a large piece of gristle. The UN, the Afghan government, and its backers had theoretically disarmed the illegal militias and defanged the warlords, but no one had been held accountable for anything. This election, in effect, would erase the board of all previous atrocities and eliminate any possibility of holding any of the warlords responsible for their crimes. Then again, maybe it was already too late. The capricious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, known for switching sides like a celebrity changing hair color, was the chief of staff to the commander in chief of the armed forces, a lengthy title that was largely ceremonial but that permitted Dostum to do pretty much what he wanted; Ismail Khan was now minister of power and water; several former warlords were also governors. The wing of Islamist party Hezb-i-Islami that claimed to have broken from founder Gulbuddin Hekmatyar backed many candidates for parliament. Meanwhile, Hekmatyar and the rest of Hezb-i-Islami were busy attacking U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan.
This election was, perhaps, the most confusing ever held anywhere. Somehow, a voter in Kabul was supposed to pick one candidate out of 390. The ballot folded out into seven large pages, and each candidate had a photograph and a symbol, because many Afghans were illiterate. But creativity ran out, and symbols had to be reused. Candidates were identified as different objects, including a pair of scissors, one camel, two camels, three camels, two sets of barbells, mushrooms, two ice-cream cones, three corncobs, two tomatoes, stairs, a turkey, two turkeys, one eye, a pair of eyes, a tire, two tires, three tires—to name a few. The symbols were randomly drawn out of a box.
The journalists struggled to make sense of the election, of the candidates, of the lack of interest back home. For me, the election was complicated by my inability to sleep. The Gandamack had welcomed me back and all was forgiven, especially after I repeatedly apologized for the Laundry Incident. I had loaned one of the Afghan women who ran the place a Pilates exercise DVD; the Afghan front-door guard, who lost one leg when he stepped on a land mine during the civil war, pumped my arm like it would deliver oil when I first returned. The Washington Post was there; the Guardian was there; the award-winning British TV journalist doing a documentary on female drivers was there; a photographer friend was there; a group of genial security contractors was there. But my personal life intruded. I had not yet ended my relationship with Chris—I wasn’t sure why, maybe because I was never home, maybe because I felt guilty, and maybe because, ultimately, I just didn’t want to be alone. Yet my boyfriend started sending me paranoid e-mails, or more paranoid than usual. I called him. He sounded paranoid.
“There are men outside, watching me,” Chris told me.
“It’s India. There are always men outside watching you.”
“Yeah, but they also know what I’ve done. And they’re watching your computer.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you drunk?”
“No. I was. Now I’m fine. I erased all the incriminating files on your computer.”
“What files? What are you talking about? You did what?”
“The proof,” he said. “They were watching me. They were scanning your computer.”
“You erased my computer?”
I was confused. Chris had never displayed any sign of mental illness before. He told me he had put up notes saying “Think of Kim” and “Remember Kim,” and that they were the only thing keeping him together. In other words, yellow Post-its were holding him in place. I told him to go to sleep, to get some rest. I called my office manager and asked her to check on him. This was getting messy. Then Chris called the U.S. embassy help line, asking for help. Someone called back and heard my work answering machine; someone else figured out my e-mail address and wrote me, asking what was going on.
“He’s a friend,” I wrote back, embarrassed to have my personal life enter my professional one. “He’s off his medication.”
I worried. For months, I had vacillated on whether to break up with Chris, but if anything happened to him, I would never forgive myself. He had never behaved like this before, but he had never spent this much time in India before, never been alone like this. India was a series of challenges wrapped in a mystical blanket covered in an existential quandary. I often thought that all the gods—maybe three, maybe three thousand in Hinduism—made it easier in India for there to be three thousand answers to a question that should have had only one. India was colorful, fabulous, energizing. India was a Chinese finger puzzle. India made you scream at people like a Hollywood diva for the smallest of reasons. India was a crazy football coach. It could break you if it didn’t make you stronger.
Chris was broken. He wouldn’t leave India without seeing me. I couldn’t leave Afghanistan in the middle of an election. I tried to throw myself into work and to avoid thinking or talking about my boyfriend. The guilt I felt had actual weight—I felt the responsibility of him moving halfway around the world for me, of me failing him, of fears about what was happening to him. I cried in front of Farouq and Nasir on a road trip. Farouq worried.
“I just want you to be happy,” he told me.
“Too bad I don’t have an eligible cousin,” I said.
Maybe the fortune-teller was right. An old friend, a photographer I hadn’t seen in more than a year, told me that I seemed angry and bitter. Overseas for longer than me and world-weary, she warned me that maybe it was time to move back to the States, that many things were more important than the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. Night after night, I lay in the Gandamack room that smelled like my childhood because of the wild marijuana plants outside my window. Night after night, I couldn’t sleep.
The construction next door didn’t help. Work started at 6 AM and often stopped at 1 AM. As with everything else in Afghanistan, no laws regulated noise or construction. Every night the pounding would be our dinner music. Every night the tenants of the Gandamack would try to make it stop.
Sean, the British journalist who was working on a documentary about female Afghan drivers, was particularly annoyed. I had met Sean with Farouq months earlier, in the garden of the Gandamack. It was a sunny day, and we were sitting outside in the garden beneath a large umbrella. A man approached us, said hello to Farouq, and thanked him for his advice. He was expansive and obnoxious, attractive and repellant, all in one package. He sat down at another table. I introduced myself, slightly defensive, worried about the man’s familiarity with Farouq.
“Call me sometime,” he said, handing me his phone number. I soon learned that Sean gave everyone his phone number.
I didn’t call at first, but I couldn’t help running into him everywhere. Sean was a few years older than me, his hair was prematurely gray, his chin was slightly receding, and his nose balanced out his chin. Yet there was something about him. Sean was so funny, he was always the center of attention, the ironic self-deprecating smart aleck with glasses who sat in the corner surrounded by smart attractive women. Sean was Kabul’s version of a B-movie star. He was also a war junkie, having done time in Iraq, and that addiction went a long way toward explaining why he was separated from his wife. Sean and I became quick friends. He had taken me on my first social outing to a brothel in Kabul, and he had told me when his friends had decided to drop me off early because I was cramping their style. He told me when he wanted to copy my story about the first traffic light in Kabul, as part of his documentary. In fact, Sean told me pretty much everything, as he told everyone pretty much everything, even when he told something that was supposed to be secret. Everyone knew that Sean was going through a divorce. Everyone knew that Sean really wanted to stay with his wife. And everyone knew that the divorce was pretty much Sean’s fault—he was always on the road, bouncing between war zones, an ageless man-child. But of all the people I had met in Kabul so far, few were as good company as Sean.
Now the construction next door stalked our days and nights. The Gandamack was a two-story guesthouse. The new project, allegedly another guesthouse, soon grew taller than the Gandamack, and the construction workers only seemed to stop working to leer at the female guests in the garden. Any silence was a kind of torture, filled with waiting for the pounding to start again. The hallways echoed with combinations of four-letter words I had never before heard. We tried various tactics to stop the banging at a reasonable hour. Someone found out who owned the land—a respected spiritual leader, a man I had interviewed. I called him one night in a panic.
“Please, please, please, can you get them to stop working by eight?” I asked the holy man. “None of us can sleep. None of us can work. I think I’m losing my mind.”
I even played the female card. “The construction workers are harassing the women living here. They’re looking at us. It’s against Islam.”
The spiritual leader was kind, conciliatory.
“Don’t worry, Kim, I will stop it. I understand. Don’t worry. It’s no problem.”
I got off the phone. “He says he’ll stop it,” I told the others.
But within an hour, the banging again sounded like war. I was reminded of what I already knew—any time I was told “no problem” in Afghanistan, the problem bit my head off. I again tried calling the spiritual leader, but the phone rang and rang. He never answered.
The next night, at about eleven, Sean pounded on the upstairs door of one of the security contractors, already in bed, not sleeping.
“Can I borrow your gun?” Sean asked the security guy. It’s possible Sean was drinking.
The security guy gave him a toy BB assault rifle and a real gun laser. Sean took the gun and aimed it toward the construction workers. He trained the laser sight on a man’s chest. It took the other workers seconds to see the red laser point, then a few more seconds to look over at the Gandamack and the window where a crazed Brit clearly was pointing a remarkably real-looking gun at them. That was what finally stopped the pounding—not reasonable talk, not negotiations, not promises, but the threat of violence. Another Afghan lesson learned.
Finally the election was held. The results were predictable—the warlords, drug lords, and fundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami candidates won their seats, along with a smattering of do-gooders, former civil servants, and women, who under the constitution were given one-quarter of the seats. Despite allegations of fraud and illegal militias, the international election-complaints commission could do little. When the commission reversed one of its only decisions to ban a warlord-linked woman from running, one of the commissioners quit.
Even my first warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, was allowed to run for parliament, despite his recent résumé of running an illegal militia and fighting the Americans before being arrested in Pakistan and jailed for a time. The disarmament commission reported that Pacha Khan had not surrendered all the weapons necessary to run for parliament. But still, the election commission allowed him, under the more-the-merrier warlord free-for-all. He won a seat. Like everyone else, he was now respectable, the past forgiven.
I stayed in Kabul for days after the election, the last visiting journalist in town. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to face Chris and what I knew I had to do. Finally an earthquake threw me out of bed, an earthquake that seemed to last for minutes and threatened to shake the Gandamack into powder. I flew back to India. The quake killed more than eighty thousand people, mostly on the Pakistani side of Kashmir. I spent barely a night with my fragile boyfriend before flying off to cover the earthquake. By the time I came back, Chris knew he needed to go home to Chicago. I also knew it—I couldn’t bear the responsibility.
“I think I want to break up,” I said as soon as I walked in the front door.
“I know,” he said.
Later I told him he needed to leave. Soon.
“But I want to stay for a while,” he said. “I want to be here for your birthday.”
“Go home for my birthday.”
I wasn’t trying to be cruel. The best gift he could give me was to get home safe. So I put my ex-boyfriend on a plane, threw away the Post-it notes bearing my name, and tried to forget about the lost files on my computer, which Chris had wiped clean. The next day I ran away again, back to Afghanistan, where life seemed simpler.