Val climbed into the back. It was completely dark by then and we had the road to ourselves. I reversed for about five miles until the lights of the border post had disappeared. Gertrude overheated again. We’d forgotten to fill up the radiator ... and the water container. I pulled off the road.
“That’s it,” I said. “She’s not going any further.”
I thought Val would get angry. He just nodded. “We’ll decide what to do in the morning.”
As I was unrolling my sleeping bag, I came across Ulla’s BIT notes. I don’t know why I suddenly took it into my head to read them by the light of Val’s torch. I wanted to see what they had to say about Afghanistan, but the torch illuminated the last paragraph of the Iran section.
“There’s a stretch of land between Iran and Afghanistan that doesn’t belong to anybody,” I said.
I read more and wished I hadn’t.
“Don’t attempt to cross the ten miles of no-man’s-land at the border on foot. Many bandits hang out in this area and have the habit of knifing you and splitting with your possessions.”
We weren’t in Afghanistan. We were in no-man’s-land.
Twenty-seven
Breakfast in No-man’s-land
I wasn’t about to sleep outside in no-man’s-land, so I spread my sleeping bag in the back. I’d made Dolf nervous, so he wouldn’t sleep outside either. Val didn’t want to be out there on his own, so we all ended up inside the taxi. It wasn’t going to be a very comfortable night. I could feel the floor ridges through the sleeping bag.
I couldn’t get to sleep. At first I kept hearing noises. I imagined bandits circling the taxi with guns in their belts and knives in their teeth.
I knew Val wasn’t asleep either.
“How are we going to survive?” I asked. “We’ve only got eighteen pounds between us.”
He didn’t reply at first.
“There’s something you should know,” he said.
His voice in the dark was tinged with guilt.
My heart thudded. What guilty secret did he have now?
“I’ve got more money, twenty-five quid.”
“But you said—”
“I know. I was keeping it in reserve. For emergencies. I stole it from my father.”
I was relieved. I thought he was going to tell me he was secretly married or had an incurable disease.
“I just heard a twig snap,” I whispered.
“Jackie, there are no trees,” Val said. He felt around for my hand and squeezed it. “We’ll be all right.”
I didn’t see that he had any information to back that up.
I slept for a few hours, but then a noise woke me. I wasn’t imagining it this time. It sounded like someone being strangled. When that noise stopped, I could hear heavy footsteps. It sounded like a giant. I dug Val in the ribs, but he didn’t stir.
The sun had just climbed above the horizon. I got up on my knees and looked out of the window. I was nose to nose with a turbaned and bearded man. I screamed. So did he. That woke Val and Dolf up. The man didn’t have a gun, but I could see a large knife sticking out of his belt. That awful sound started up again, like a lion with indigestion. Then I saw where it was coming from. There was a camel behind the man.
“If he’s planning on robbing us or stealing the taxi, he’s going to be very disappointed,” Val said.
I could tell that Val was just as scared as I was, but he opened the door and got out. Even if the man wasn’t a bandit, I had been sleeping with two men, neither of whom where my husband. That was bound to be punishable by stoning at least.
The man was wearing a loosely tied turban with one end hanging down to his shoulder. A collarless shirt hung almost to his knees over baggy trousers. He didn’t hold Val at knife-point or ask for our money. He inspected the taxi and seemed puzzled by its lack of seats and windscreen. Val shrugged his shoulders. How could you explain such things using six words and hand gestures? Perhaps the man thought we’d already been the victims of bandits. Who knows? Whatever he thought, he invited us for breakfast. He hit the camel behind its knees to make it kneel down and then he pulled some food out of one of the saddlebags slung over the beast. There was nothing but rocks and dry earth in every direction, but he had fresh bread to eat and a sort of liquid yoghurt to drink. There wasn’t really enough for four, but he insisted on sharing it with us.
As usual, he assumed Val was the one in charge. He rattled off something unintelligible.
“He wants to know where we’re going.” Val was confident in his interpretation.
He pointed east. “Afghanistan.”
The man rested his hand on his heart. Afghanistan was his country. Then he beckoned Val to follow him to the camel. Looking over his shoulder as if someone might be following him, he put a finger to his lips. There was a twinkle in his eyes—it was a charade. I went over too, despite the fact that the camel smelt disgusting and bared its teeth as we approached. One saddle bag was crammed full of army boots. He took a pair out and wanted Val and Dolf to try them on. It was never too early for commerce in that part of the world. Val shook his head and made a sign that was supposed to indicate that we had no money.
The man made more signs, pointing east and then back towards Iran.
“I think he’s a smuggler,” Val said.
“He’s smuggling boots?”
“Apparently.”
The man pulled what looked like bars of soap from the other saddlebag.
“And soap.”
We started to pack up our pathetic belongings, rolled up the sleeping bags and got ready to leave. The man was confused. He couldn’t understand what was happening to Gertrude. Val mimed. We were going. The car was staying. It took the Afghan a while to understand this concept. He pointed to the spare wheel. He wanted it, even though the tyre was flat.
“Help yourself,” Val said.
The Afghan didn’t call out, he didn’t whistle, as far as I could tell he didn’t make any sort of signal at all, but within a few minutes two more turbaned men and some children arrived.
They picked over Gertrude like locusts. They jacked her up onto stones and removed her wheels. They took the broken food box. Wood was a valuable commodity in a place with no trees. The doors were carried off on men’s heads. I don’t know what they planned to do with them. Our friend unhooked the pink gingham curtains and helped himself to the orange cushions. I opened the bonnet for them, and they took out the battery and the engine. Someone siphoned the diesel out of the tank. In less than an hour the taxi was an empty shell. The children climbed over her like she was a jungle gym.
It was sad leaving Gertrude behind after all we’d been through together. She’d been more than a vehicle. She’d been a home, a refuge, a friend and a last link with my old world. I like to think that she’s still a playground for the children in no-man’s-land, or that some enterprising person has turned her into a chicken coop or a tea stall.
No one said, “Well, that’s it. We’ll give up now and go home.” There was no discussion. I picked up my suitcase, Val helped Dolf put on his rucksack and then put on his own, and the three of us set off to walk to Afghanistan. It was like we’d all been infected by the same bug. I wondered if we were all hiding our true reasons for continuing to head east. I’d given up trying to justify my actions. For the time being I was just going wherever the drifting sand (and my remaining thirteen pounds) would take me.
We’d walked for about half an hour when the first bus of the day came bouncing along the almost non-existent road. The bus stopped and picked us up. It wasn’t a nice air-conditioned coach like the one Val had been on from Tehran. It was an Afghani bus—small, rickety, and old. It was made mainly of wood and the type of bus with the engine sticking out at the front under a square bonnet.
The bus was crowded even before we got on. It was built to seat about twenty-five people but there must have been at least forty packed into it, sitting three to a seat, crouching in the aisle. There were ten more men sitting o
n the roof among the strapped-on luggage. We managed to squeeze inside. On board were all the hippies we’d met at the border the previous day, sweaty and complaining after being forced to stay in a hotel that charged twice what they would have normally paid.
The bus driver chose that moment to collect the fares from his passengers.
“One hundred afghanis,” he said. He spoke in English but with an accent that made him hard to understand.
“A hundred afs is way too much,” an American said. He wasn’t the usual long-haired hippy, he was tall, tanned and muscly, like a basketball player. “I’ve crossed before, man. It should be sixty.”
We had no idea what the exchange rate was, but it did sound like a lot of money.
“You pay or you get off,” the bus driver said.
Made brave by their numbers, the others hippies all got off the bus and staged a sit-in by the side of the road. The local passengers said nothing, unimpressed by this show of foreign courage. The driver was flustered; the ploy of threatening to leave the foreigners in no-man’s-land had probably worked in the past. This lot wasn’t budging.
“You cannot stay here.” The driver looked to the sky for support. “Get on the bus. Get on the bus.”
This was not how foreign tourists were supposed to act. The driver herded his passengers back onto the bus. The local passengers sat in silence, while the driver drove off muttering to himself. I think he was embarrassed by his failure to rip-off the infidels.
Dolf had taken far too many painkillers and was glassy-eyed and swaying. A Swiss guy wearing a long-sleeved check shirt (which looked far too hot for the climate) gave Dolf his seat. Val and I had to crouch in the aisle. I looked out of the back window to say a final goodbye to Gertrude, or what was left of her. She disappeared in a cloud of dust. To tell the truth, I wasn’t that sorry to leave her behind. It was like someone had lifted an extremely heavy weight off my shoulders. I was glad someone else was behind the wheel for a change and I could enjoy the scenery—even if it was just rocks and sand.
The American and the bus driver were still arguing.
“I should have been suspicious when this guy didn’t make us pay for the trip before we left,” the American said. He was an engineer. He’d been working in Afghanistan for a year and a half with an American company who were building an airport. He was just as worried about losing face in front of his people as the bus driver was.
After a few more miles we reached the border post, which was a hand-painted sign that said Afghanistan and one bored man sitting in a rickety dog box. The bus didn’t even stop. I thought we’d just made the easiest border crossing in the world, but after another couple of miles or so there was a proper checkpoint. This one was a dilapidated mud-brick building and a barrier across the road made from a tree branch. Most of the western males had hair longer than Dolf’s had been, but they’d got their visas in Tehran, some in London, where the officials weren’t as fussed about the length of visitors’ hair as they had been in religious Mashhad. For once it was the locals who had their bags searched, presumably for boots or soap smuggled in from Iran. When all our documents had been checked, we got back on the bus. The guard raised the tree branch and we were in Afghanistan, a country I’d never even heard of a month before.
We’d been travelling for less than an hour when we stopped again. This time for a tea-break. There was a little chai shop out in the middle of nowhere, another mud-brick square.
“Must belong to his brother-in-law,” the American grumbled. “Another chance to rip off the infidels.”
Personally, I was quite happy to stop for a cup of tea.
There were low tables outside the chai shop covered with striped rugs. I was wondering where the chairs were, when, to my surprise, the locals took off their shoes, hopped up on the tables and sat down cross-legged. I looked at Val and Dolf.
“When in Rome,” Val said.
We took off our shoes and climbed onto a table. We didn’t have to order. There was no menu, someone brought us tea and bread and bowls of unidentifiable stew. There was no cutlery. We scooped up the stew with the bread. There were no sugar cubes with the tea; instead there were boiled lollies to suck as you drank.
Dolf, who didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects from his second injection, ate some bread. The driver was still trying to get the troublesome foreigners to pay for the trip. “I will take you to the police if you do not pay.”
We’d barely crossed the border and we were either going to be left to the bandits or thrown into jail.
“Go ahead,” the American said.
I didn’t think that was the way to behave in a dangerous country. Since Istanbul I’d been hearing warnings about Afghanistan on the travellers’ grapevine—scary stories of theft, people left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and even murder. Surely they had to be based on some original truth? The BIT notes, as usual, steered clear of specifics.
There are more rip-offs and uncivilised incidents in Afghanistan than anywhere else.
From the bus window Afghanistan looked harmless enough. We passed walled villages consisting of clusters of mud-brick houses with rounded roofs that made them look like loaves of brown bread. The buildings had no windows looking out onto the outside world.
I looked at the latest stamp in my passport. The date was 23 V 1351. I’d lost track of the date. It was July when I left London, so I guessed it must have been half way through August. It’d been a while since I’d seen a calendar, but last time I looked it was 1972. We’d entered different time zones before. Time had changed gradually, half an hour or an hour at a time. The Afghani border was different.
“Look.” I showed Val the date stamp. “We didn’t go forward half an hour like at the last border. We just jumped back in time—more than six hundred years. It’s 1351!”
The engineer knew about dates as well as the appropriate price of a bus trip. He was keen to re-establish himself as the one with local knowledge.
“They use a different calendar here, starting from 622 AD when Mohammed fled from Mecca. In fact I read somewhere that they use three different calendars in Afghanistan—this one for everyday things, a lunar calendar for religious stuff, and the western calendar for international business.”
“Sounds complicated.”
Everyone else was ignoring the know-it-all American, but I was happy to get some solid information for a change. I’d always thought that travelling taught you things, but so far I had more questions than answers.
“The Islamic month starts when two witnesses claim they can see the first crescent of the new moon. They go tell some official and he announces the new month has begun.”
“What happens if it’s cloudy?” I asked.
The American didn’t have all the answers.
We stopped in a town called Herat and, true to his word, the bus driver took us to another featureless, mud-brick building which he told us was the police station. Led by the American, we all trooped inside. The one policeman didn’t speak English, or any of the other European languages that the passengers tried out on him. The bus driver told his story in rapid Farsi. The American engineer, despite his detailed knowledge of local culture, had learned about as much Farsi in eighteen months as Val had in a couple of days, so our case was hampered by the fact that the bus driver also had to tell our side of the story. The American drew figures in the air in case he was misrepresenting us. The policeman looked perplexed, but he came up with a compromise. Those who’d had seats had to pay eighty afghanis, those who’d had no seat had to pay sixty. The bus driver and the American shook hands.
No one had any Afghani money anyway, so the driver then had to drive us to a bank (well, a mud-brick building where money could be exchanged). I found out what the exchange rate was. We’d risked having our throats slit to save thirty-three pence.
Twenty-eight
Strawberry Ice-cream
Herat was a peaceful place, a relief after the bus and border hassles. The buildi
ngs were all mud-brick with unpainted wooden window frames, some with dirty cracked glass in them, some with none. Shops opened out onto the street and baskets of vegetables, fly-covered meat and sacks of grain were spread out beneath wonky verandahs made of twiggy thatch supported by tree branches. Apart from the buses that travelled to and from other towns, there were almost no motor vehicles in Herat. People travelled by bicycle or horse and cart. The local version of a taxi was a two-wheeled carriage covered with brightly-coloured flowers and tassels, pulled by a horse bedecked with bells and pom-poms. Instead of beeping horns and roaring, untuned engines, the traffic sound was the clip-clop of horses’ hooves and the jingling of bells.
The other westerners from the bus went to the Hotel Jami, but we followed the advice of the BIT notes (always full of broke junkies) and chose the Sharq Hotel instead.
Despite its ominous name, the hotel was a charming two-storey building. We were led to a big upstairs room with three beds made of woven palm leaves, and a balcony where we could sit and watch the people going about their lives in the street below. Downstairs there was a teahouse where a man sat cross-legged behind two gleaming copper samovars. He was old and turbanless. His head was shaved and he had a neatly trimmed white beard and moustache. The sleeves of his brown shirt were rolled up as if ready for action, but he was perfectly still. Behind him were shelves of small teapots, neatly arranged with the spouts all facing one way, one row of red ones, one row of blue and two of white. The customers sat on raised platforms covered with lovely patterned rugs.
I’d been scared of going to Afghanistan, but as soon as I got there my fear disappeared. I had an urge to stop the relentless journey east.
“I wish we could stay here for a few days,” I said.
“We can do that later,” Val said. “On the way home.”
I imagined Val and I travelling home together, relaxed, with time to look at scenery and historic buildings—with time to get to know each other.