The communists, using a tiny but deeply indoctrinated band of army officers, seized power in a military takeover in 1978, and made Taraki – Prem Lal’s first choice in his secret despatches to Moscow – President of the Republic.
Within a year, between three and seven hundred communists had come into the open or had been converted: most of them were probably opportunists. That may well have been the high point of their power. Thereafter, each faction’s murder gangs hunted the other’s assassins in city streets, and eventually hundreds of ‘anti-Party’ communists were jailed and hanged as first one element, then the other, gained the upper hand in government: that is, such government as there was.
Prem Lal was not now popular in Moscow. He had exaggerated the power and unity of the Afghan communists.
The Russians, as was admitted by some of their policy makers who visited Kabul, had blundered into the Afghan adventure for several reasons. Henry Trofimenko, a leading expert on East-West relations, claimed that the occupation was attempted because the Kremlin feared an American invasion of Iran. ‘We felt ourselves to be under pressure,’ he said.
The military and the geopoliticians, however, felt that the country would make an ideal springboard for extending Soviet power into the oilfield of the Gulf; and to pressure China with the implied threat to India. The Soviet Communist Party pressed for the invasion on genuinely sentimental grounds: to go to the aid of their beleaguered Afghan brothers, faced with counter-revolution. Some circles (such as the KGB) wanted a buffer against Islamic propaganda, now threatening the USSR’s Moslem population. Anyway, Afghanistan’s minerals made it potentially one of the richest countries in Asia: which interested the heavy spenders among the Soviet ministries.
There were three Red Afghan dictators in three years. Amin had followed Taraki, and now Karmal was in charge: and he was KGB-trained. The Soviet Army had actually brought him into the country from his exile in Prague. Prem Lal’s work shrank to next to nothing. Karmal was developing his own organization, Afghan State Security, the KHAD. If it took over, there might be no Soviet Rezident: or else one would be sent direct from Moscow, a Russian, working from the Soviet Embassy. Prem Lal badly needed an achievement, to convince Moscow that he was both active and successful.
Pondering these facts, Prem Lal had an idea. Moscow said that Zionism was behind the counter-revolutionary forces, and claimed that Pakistan was infiltrated by Zionists. Prem Lal would find a Zionist nest, a Jewish network.
And where to find such a thing in Kabul, Moslem Afghanistan? He knew. Nobody else, though, had yet thought of it. He smiled to himself.
Ministry of the Interior figures showed that there were now six hundred Jews in Afghanistan, mostly in Herat and Kabul. There was, for instance, the daughter of that Bokharan magnate Isakhof, who was the son of Isaac of Bokhara. Prem Lal had been compiling a dossier on her for some time now. She behaved like a Westerner, wore slacks, smoked, had a flash, modern apartment in the New Town, spoke foreign languages, and mixed with diplomats. Everyone knew that diplomats were spies. Spies always had accomplices, as did traitors and saboteurs …
He drove past the imposing new buildings, the mansions, embassies, apartment blocks. Then he was there. One of the best apartment blocks in New Kabul, in the whole country, in fact.
‘A quick check’ was KGB jargon for a meeting which should produce a private advantage for the officer involved.
‘You are not an Afghan at all, you know,’ Prem Lal said, as he placed his worn leather despatch-case on the table. ‘We keep an eye on all you people.’ He stared at her.
He had just sat down at the dining-table in the apartment of a highly attractive girl, just as he had seen his superiors do, back in Prague, when out on training exercises. Every job had its perks, its fringe benefits. Frightening young women into providing companionship – and more – was one of them.
He looked around the well furnished room. This could almost be a home in Europe. Plenty of pine panelling, a tidy kitchen glimpsed through an archway, open-plan, with the bedroom over there, next to the bathroom. Posters advertising pop groups on the wall, everlasting dried flowers in a Victorian vase, striped tribal rugs. She must have picked up these ideas from the foreign colony in Kabul. They had loose morals, of course, everybody knew that, even though they professed to despise the hippies and other drug-takers, who were their fellow nationals.
The girl said nothing. She was wearing her hair in a bunch, gathered on the top of her head, well washed jeans, and a fisherman’s sweater over a rollneck sweatshirt. Her nails were lacquered bright red and she was smoking a cigarette, probably a foreign one, Prem Lal thought. She certainly was attractive. And only twenty-six.
‘I said, “You’re not an Afghan at all, you know.”’ He was relishing this experience. Ever since he had found her card and photograph in the files of the Security Police, three days before, he had known that he would.
There was plenty of time. ‘It is only my duty, you understand, as an officer, and I am a Grade Six officer of the KHAD, to root out and identify those who might prove to have irregularities in their background or associations.’
‘I was born in this country, of parents who were also born here, in Kabul,’ she said. Better not say any more or any less than this odious creature demanded. He was fat, middle-aged or older, oily, his breath smelt of garlic, and he wore patent leather shoes, a bright check suit of shoddy cloth, and carried no less than five flashy pens in his handkerchief pocket. His hair was dyed a startling black.
‘There is a saying, “If a dog is born in a stable, that does not make it a horse”,’ said Prem Lal. He was pleased with the phrase, which he had been saving for such occasions as this, occasions which would doubtless become more and more frequent now that the right people were in charge of the country. He hadn’t shown her his identity book, which would have told, by his name, that he was of Indian origin; and he had a Hindu name.
He had been born here, too, and his father, Raman Lal, as well as his grandfather, Moti Lal, had been servants of all the Afghan governments since the turn of the century.
In any case, he was going to change his name to Prem Ramanov. That would sound good, almost Russian, in Moscow. Meanwhile, here in Kabul, he had plenty of power.
‘I have here a file which says that you have not been abroad; yet you live like a foreigner, I notice. I would like to see your identity book.’
She rummaged in a striped canvas holdall and brought it out. He opened the stiff blue covers of the little booklet with a sniff. It looked as if it had been shaken up with the earth from potatoes, which no doubt it had, in the bottom of that shopping bag. Some people had no respect for documents. When Afghan identity books had first been issued, under the previous regime, people had opened stalls on the outskirts of the cities, hiring them out by the day or the week. The customers were peasants who might be asked for them on the streets after they had come in from the countryside. But as neither the peasants nor the police were very literate, the whole operation petered out.
No, she hadn’t been abroad, or it would have said so here. But the document recorded that she did speak three foreign languages, and Western ones at that. An educated girl, capable of intellectual conversation no doubt. That might well mean that she was some kind of a socialist, too. Still, one had to be careful; there were so many fakes about, Maoists, Trotskyists and so on, deviators, degenerate scum.
He returned the booklet.
‘You are the daughter of Daniyel of Bokhara?’
‘Yes.’
‘And, of course, your parents did not support Israel? You see, we do know a thing or two. We do know that you and all your family are Jews, Yahud. Now, anyone can believe anything he wants to in Afghanistan. But if that belief causes him to harbour thoughts detrimental to the wellbeing of the country, well, that is a different matter, isn’t it? If that belief caused him – or her – to do anything against the State, that would be a dangerous belief.’
‘The flap of your s
uit jacket is torn,’ she said, suddenly.
Prem Lal sat forward and frowned, at first taken aback, thinking that she was changing the subject, then realizing that such a remark was too absurd to have such an intention.
There could only be one other reason. She was hinting that she might mend it for him, might be prepared to be friendly.
Prem Lal said, ‘The Great Leader, Babrak Karmal, has said in an interview with a correspondent of The Times that General Zia, President of Pakistan, has planned, as a Zionist and Israeli agent, to invade this country of ours. So those who believe in Zionism, like Zia, are our enemies, and they must be dealt with.’
This might be the right time. ‘But, reverting to your remark about my jacket pocket: yes, you are right, it needs mending. I caught it on the edge of a metal filing cabinet last week. I have no woman to look after me. You may care to repair it, now. Or I could bring it to you, in prison, and you could do it there. People have a lot of spare time, you know, while their cases are being investigated.’
‘Cases?’ She wondered what she had done, or could be alleged to have done. After all, she was an architect, not politically active or engaged in crime of any sort.
‘Miss Maryam, crimes against the State, as I shall define more closely in a moment, often take the form of economic sabotage.
‘You see,’ said Prem Lal, ‘we keep an eye on you people.’
Then he said, ‘It is surprising how often illicit things are found in Jewish houses. We can always find what we want to find.’
Yes, of course, Maryam thought. It’s easy to plant evidence.
Prem Lal sat back in the chair, savouring the possibilities.
He might take her to a restaurant: the police could get free meals almost anywhere. Not, of course, to the ‘Twenty-Five Hours’, in West Shahr-i-Nau Park: that was Chinese. They might be secret Maoists. The Blue Club, now that had a striptease show …
‘I’ll sew it up now,’ she said.
He took off his jacket, and she brought her sewing basket. Yes, thought Prem Lal, she does look attractive, sitting there. She could do more than mending for him, all right.
She was frightened, he could see that. Yes, he could have a fling. After that, she could be his first Zionist agent.
She was searching in the basket now, as he watched, for needle and cotton. Like her shopping bag, the thing was untidy. It even had pieces of paper in it, all kinds of odds and ends.
Things were so much neater in Prague, places like that. Women there took real pride in their sewing …
Where did she get her clothes? She didn’t make them, he was sure. Probably at the Apollo Boutique, near the Blue Mosque. They had things there from West Germany, Italy, France. Capitalist goods, of course, but pretty things. He could go to the boutique with her. Or to a tea dance, at the IC, the Intercontinental Hotel. Five to seven p.m. That cost only fifty afghanis, about seventy-five cents. After that, take in a film: one of those Indian musicals, at the Timur Shahi Cinema. Even the artistes of the Tajik Dance Ensemble, the Lola, ‘Tulip’, group, had done that. They came from the Soviet Union, led by the great choreographer, Walamat-Zada. You couldn’t see Indian films in the USSR, they’d said.
She had found the needle and thread and looked tense now, worried, as she bent over her sewing.
‘How about something to drink?’ he asked quite mechanically. The Russians always insisted on drinks, although Prem Lal had no head for alcohol.
Maryam put down the jacket and brought him a glass of wine, the thick, red, sticky stuff those Italians made and sold at Tritons, just off the Daral-Aman road, the only wine makers in the whole of a country famed for its seventy-two varieties of grapes. Well, it was sweet, didn’t make you gasp, not like that dreadful vodka …
He drank it, she finished the small repair, and Prem Lal, well pleased with his day’s work, took his leave.
‘I shall visit you again tomorrow, Maryam Jan, at about this hour. You may care to have a meal ready; something like lamb koftas with aniseed. I may be able to protect you, but can give no guarantee.’
An hour later, following an anonymous telephone tip-off that Prem Lal was carrying enemy money, a US hundred-dollar bill, sewn into the flap of his pocket, he was garotted in the torture chamber of the KHAD’s headquarters at Shashdarak. His end was tidied up with a death certificate which said, quite accurately, ‘died from sudden inability to breathe, followed by heart stoppage.’
The call was traced, since even automatically dialled ones were logged in Kabul these days. But the trail ran out at the switchboard of the subscriber to Kabul 31851 – the Intercontinenal Hotel. The operator could only say that it had been placed by someone using a public call box in the lobby.
Maryam knew that sooner or later someone from the Afghan KHAD, or from the Russian KGB, or even from GRU, Military Security, would see her dossier, the one that Prem Lal had had with him. Then they would be after her. Especially if he had left a report or memorandum.
Early next morning she went into town, without any real plan. There was nobody to help her, nobody in Kabul whom she could trust. Young intellectuals were either taken in by the regime, which promised so much and said the present terror was ‘an interim measure’, or had no contacts among the ordinary people of the country. Westernized city folk had disregarded everyone else for too long. In any case, Prem Lal had said, ‘We keep an eye on all you people.’
Some other town might be better: nearer a border, perhaps. Mazar was too close to Russia, Herat only led to Iran. Kandahar might be too far from Pakistan, their nearest neighbour. Where else was there? She looked in the window display of Bakhtar Airlines, the Afghan internal carrier. ‘Fly in the new YAK-40s, the Soviet wonder-jets! Fly Bakhtar to Mazar, fifty minutes, to Herat, seventy minutes, to Kandahar, to Kunduz.’ Kunduz! On the military road to the Soviet bases. ‘Twenty-seven passengers, in amazing comfort, flown by Afghans, at over 8,000 metres up in the sky!’ Those YAK-40s, passenger aircraft, had been adapted for war. Kandahar, Mazar and Herat, when the people rose against the Russians, had been bombed and strafed. The terror bombing had killed perhaps twelve thousand people. Half of each city was in ruins. And those places led nowhere.
Anyway, as she could see through the plate-glass window, intending passengers were now required to produce their identity books, whose numbers were noted by the ticket clerk.
She looked at shopkeepers, beturbaned grocers who peered back enigmatically, seeing only a Western girl, or perhaps a Russian or a Cuban, nothing to do with them. In the more modern shops she saw people in fashionable Western clothes, but now, as never before, Maryam thought, there was something closed-in about their faces. They did not smile, and had that wary look which meant they would not confide anything that they might know about a hope of escape, of freedom, to someone they didn’t know. People drew back from the Russians, Czechs, East Germans, strolling in the streets. Many of them, even men out shopping with their wives and, occasionally, children, carried slung Kalashnikovs, or guns in holsters. The Afghans were mingling with the representatives of a new empire. New, but with the very ancient and specious pretension that it was here for the good of all.
Maryam was now looking into the window of the Kabir Boutique, at Ansari crossroads, reading a sign. It said: ‘Best Afghan handicrafts, made by the Bani-Israil. A new consignment from Jalalabad.’
That was it! The Bani-Israil. She would go to the caravanserai of those people, near Jalalabad, in the southland where the Pashtun warrior tribes lived, the People of Israil. She could take the fast Mercedes bus. It made the trip in less than three hours.
They were not asking for permits, on the buses: not yet, anyway.
2 Fazli Rabbi, Innkeeper
Jalalabad
Afghanistan
JUNE 8
That night Maryam slept in the women’s section of the Jalalabad caravanserai. She had a bed next to a muffled figure who had also recently arrived.
In the morning the woman said, ‘Madam, excuse my imper
tinence, my name is Karima. I am looking for a man called Kara Kush, The Eagle. Do you know where I might find him? I know serais always have information. There isn’t one near Kabul now.’ That was what, people whispered, the Muhjahidin called their hideouts.
In Karima’s home village, she remembered, people always went to the Serai, the local halting-place and inn for travellers, if they wanted information about anything or anyone. Now she could only remember having heard about the one at Jalalabad, a hundred and forty-five kilometres from Kabul, and had taken the bus there – in the opposite direction from that of The Eagle’s headquarters.
Maryam looked at the other woman, trying to work out what she meant. The Eagle? Well, there were plenty of dotty old dames ranging up and down the country, and they said the strangest things.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid that is something I have never heard of.’
The timid, bundled-up old woman, and her young, sophisticated sister, seemed to have nothing in common. Yet each had had the experience of sending an enemy of their people to his death, and their paths would cross again.
Karima called out, almost in anguish, ‘Oh, how can I find the great Eagle, my sisters?’ The other women, sitting or lying in the dormitory, simply looked at her, expressionless.
Then one of them, who had heard the servant’s first words to Maryam and had scuttled away, drawing her veil across her face, was back, tugging at Karima’s sleeve.
‘Who are you, mother? Never talk before strangers about The Eagle. It is dangerous.’
‘I have to find him. I am Karima, from Turkestan and Kabul. He does not know me. But I want to join him.’
The other woman, who had the wiry frame and weather-beaten face of a mountain shepherdess, said, ‘You stay here. It may be for a day or two. If he wants to see you, he’ll send a message. Just stay in the Serai; and listen – never mention his name. If anyone asks, say that you are a traveller, looking for work.’