There were times when I got so caught up in the daily search for somewhere to sleep, something to eat, getting to our next destination, that I forgot we were still looking for Alun. The day was almost over, so we didn’t have to think about that till morning. We went out in search of food. Dolf said he wasn’t hungry and went straight to bed. I was pleased to find that the food was more interesting than in Iran; I’d had enough rice and lamb to last a lifetime. We had a good meal—eggplant with yoghurt and mint, chicken, rice with shredded carrot and raisins. By the time we’d eaten, it was dark.
Herat is the second largest city in Afghanistan, but the main street was a dirt road and there were no street lights. We made our way back to the Sharq Hotel. There was only the thinnest sliver of a moon that gave next-to-no light. The shops that had been all open when we went out, were now shuttered and invisible. Val was just a faint, grey figure, like a ghost. I reached out to hold on to his arm so that we didn’t lose each other in the dark. He was just doing the same thing, and our hands clasped. When we got back to the Sharq, the man in the teahouse was still there next to his steaming samovars.
We’d brought food for Dolf, but he was asleep. I’d decided I’d wait forever if I was going to wait for Val to tell me what he was thinking, with regard to me that is. I’d have to be the one to break the ice or swim the channel between us. I rehearsed what I would say as I washed my filthy clothes in the hand basin and draped them over the balcony. By the time I’d finished, Val was asleep.
“Dere is blood,” Dolf said the next morning.
He was staring at the crumpled sheet on his bed which was polka dotted with blood specks. My first thought was that he had some deadly disease.
“Where’s it coming from?”
“Small creatures,” Dolf said.
“Bed bugs,” Val said.
Those charmingly rustic palm-leaf beds were home to bedbugs. Val had a few bites. I had a couple. Dolf was covered in them. He’d squashed about a hundred of them during the night. Blood-sucking insects seemed to be drawn to his pale skin. His infected mozzie bites from Turkey hadn’t healed and he was still scratching the fleabites he’d got in the goat herder’s barn. Now he had a new set of bites to add to his collection. The painkillers had given us the illusion that he was getting better, but now there were none left. Dolf had the runs too, even though he’d barely eaten, and of course his arm was in a splint. Val and I were fine, but Dolf couldn’t leave the hotel.
I bought breakfast in the street—bread and yoghurt—and took it back to Dolf at the Sharq. The bread was flat bread like in Turkey and Iran, but called naan. It came in huge oval shapes about three feet long, and people rode past on bicycles with their bread draped over the handlebars. The yoghurt came in an unfired clay bowl and was tart and bubbly, like it was starting to ferment, but, back at the hotel, with six inches of bread and a pot of tea it made a good breakfast. I sat with Dolf, feeding him pieces of bread and cups of tea.
We were back on our quest to find Alun. We assumed he was in Afghanistan, but that was all we had in the way of clues. After a good night’s sleep and food that wasn’t lamb, I was more positive. I actually believed that we had a chance of coming across someone who had run into him. Seeing a pasty white guy travelling with an Afghan boy, eating with him, sharing a hotel room, that must have been unusual. There were a lot of westerners in Herat so we started with them. Val and I went to the Hotel Jami and other places where hippies stayed. We asked every westerner we saw. There were notice boards at some of the hotels with the usual business cards and flyers for restaurants and buses. There were also messages from travellers trying to make contact with each other.
Cassie, meet me at Kandahar Post Office on 5th September, Peter.
Single chick looking for cool guy to travel with to Kathmandu. For sale, Pentax SLR camera.
Any price considered.
I wasn’t really expecting to find a note from Alun. I didn’t.
We asked some of the locals if they’d seen anyone fitting Alun’s description. We showed them the photo of him with Wasim. Every Afghan we spoke to was friendly and helpful, even if they were only trying to sell us stuff—sheepskin vests, Afghani shirts, hashish. They had a quiet dignity. They were polite. They were probably still thinking I was a heathen whore, but they didn’t feel the need to show it. That was the men of course. The women were a different matter. They were there in the streets, but we couldn’t see them. Every one of them was covered from head to foot with a garment like a tent which consisted of yards and yards of finely-pleated material, black or pale blue, hanging from a skullcap to their feet. There was a hole cut for the woman to see through, but even that was filled with netting. In Iran, we’d at least been able to see women’s eyes. Now no part of them was visible.
I was even more conscious of my body, even though I was wearing my ankle-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse.
It was hot, the sort of day when you just want to lie in the shade and read a book, but we kept asking about Alun. All day. My early morning optimism had run out. I’d seen a sort of castle made of mud bricks in the distance and a ruin with five crumbling minarets and I wanted to see them up close. I was tired of the wild-goose chase. I wanted to learn about these places I was visiting, see more than a seedy hotel and a teashop. I wanted to wander around the bazaar and bargain for one of the beautiful embroidered purses I’d seen.
But then I remembered Alun. There was one thing that still bothered me about him disappearing into the night in Istanbul. Why hadn’t he left a note? He’s the sort of guy who gives you a running commentary on his life. It just wasn’t like him to go off without a word. I kept searching. I couldn’t afford to buy souvenirs anyway.
Late in the day, we stopped to eat. There was a row of shoes outside the restaurant. We left ours with them. Inside it was cool with a stone floor and a domed roof. As usual, there were no tables and chairs, just a platform covered with a lovely carpet. This one was woven with a pattern of small squares—blue, pink, and faded red—arranged in diamond shapes. We ate spinach, potatoes, and cucumber salad. And of course we drank tea. In Afghanistan you don’t buy tea by the cup; everyone gets a pot of their own.
“Now what do we do?” I said as I sipped my tea. I’d run out of ideas.
Val hadn’t. “We go to Kabul.”
“It’s a waste of time. We’re never going to find Alun.”
“Everyone goes to Kabul, we have to at least look there,” Val said.
A lot of people we’d met on the road were heading to Kabul, some of them just to experience that exotic place, others, like Ulla before she met Billy, were drawn to it because of the legal hashish.
“If we don’t find Alun in Kabul, then we’ll go home.”
I liked it when Val referred to us as “we”. I dared to imagine us travelling together back to England. What would it be like back in London. Would we go to the cinema? Have lunch at his mother’s restaurant? Would I invite him back to my bed-sit?
We bought tickets for the bus to Kabul, which was leaving at six-thirty the following morning. On the way back to the hotel, Val gave in to a persistent shirt seller who had followed him for half an hour. Afghan shirts have buttons at the neck. The opening starts on the right shoulder and curves to the middle like a crescent moon. Instead of buttonholes there are loops of material to hold the buttons. The traditional shirts that Afghan men wear are drab grey or blue and hang to the knees. The clever Afghans had worked out that boys from the West like shorter more colourful shirts, so they made them waist length from material meant for women’s dresses.
Dolf wasn’t up to the journey to Kabul, so we decided we’d leave him at the Sharq Hotel. It was cheaper for him to stay there for a few nights than to pay for a return ticket to Kabul. He didn’t put up any resistance, but made us promise to look for Ulla as well as Alun.
“Sure we will, man,” Val told him, though in our search of Herat we hadn’t mentioned Ulla once.
I was sitting on the balcony at the Sharq Hotel w
atching the people of Herat go about their business—a man with several carpets balanced on his turban, a girl young enough to have an uncovered head carrying an enormous bucket of water, an old woman with her tent thrown back catching her breath in a doorway. There were also two young men strolling down the middle of the road hand in hand. That wasn’t unusual in itself. Since Turkey I’d noticed young Muslim men walking along holding hands. It was what male friends did. These two weren’t wearing traditional Afghani clothes. One wore a pair of jeans and a western-style short-sleeved shirt. The other was wearing a T-shirt and green pants. Flared green pants.
I leapt to my feet and leaned over the balcony. “Hey!”
They didn’t hear me. I ran down the rickety hotel stairs and out into the street.
“Wait a minute!” I shouted. “I want to talk to you!”
They turned around and saw me running towards them. They looked at each other and bolted. I ran after them. It was stiflingly hot and I’d done nothing but sit in a variety of vehicles for three weeks. I don’t know where my energy came from. A man working on an upturned bike outside a bicycle repair shop watched in astonishment as the two boys raced into his shop, closely followed by a crazy western woman shouting at them to stop.
The two young men were terrified of me. They cowered in the back of the shop. I grabbed the one wearing the green pants, dragged him back out into the street and knelt down to examine his trousers more closely in the fading light. A crowd was starting to gather. Val came panting up behind me, too out of breath to speak.
I pointed at a stain on the left knee of the green pants. “See. Strawberry ice-cream. Remember, back in France in Lucien’s truck?”
It felt like France was about five hundred years ago. Val nodded. They were Alun’s loon pants.
Twenty-nine
Absolutely the Middle of Nowhere
When Val got his breath back, he tried to explain the situation. He’d learned a few more words of Farsi, but it was still beyond him. By some miracle there was an old man in the crowd who spoke reasonable French and a little German. I’m sure the story of how he acquired those languages would have been really interesting, but at that point I was focussed on one thing. I wanted to shake the boy by the shoulders and make him tell us immediately what he’d done to Alun. I still hadn’t adapted to the ways of the East—that was not how to go about it. Val knew he had to restore the dignity of the young men who had been assaulted by the crazy infidel girl, so he invited them and the French-speaking man to a teashop across the street.
We all sat cross-legged on a platform covered with a faded red and blue striped rug and drank tea. Val explained the situation. The old man nodded wisely and translated the proceedings for the listening crowd that had followed us across the road. He asked questions in French and occasionally lapsed into German. They were both comfortable having this conversation in second-hand languages, but I couldn’t understand any of it. I was imagining Alun being knifed in a dark alley, left for dead, all for a pair of green trousers.
All eyes were on the old man and he was enjoying showing off his long-unused language skills. Val translated for me.
“He says he bought the pants for a hundred afghanis from a westerner who wore glasses.”
“He could be lying.”
“I don’t think so.”
The old man was chuckling to himself, pointing to the Afghan boys and then to Val’s shirt.
“What’s he saying?”
“He thinks it’s very amusing that westerners wanted to dress like Afghans while Afghans wanted to dress like westerners.”
Val managed to guide him back to the subject. He got him to ask the young man if Alun was alone. He shook his head. He was with an Afghan boy.
“Does he know where they are?”
I had to wait for the question to be asked and the answer to be relayed back from the old man to Val and finally to me. I could hardly contain my impatience. Alun could have been just around the corner.
“He says they were talking about going to Mazar-i-Sharif which is where Wasim’s family lives.”
“How long ago?”
“About five days.”
Val asked him where Mazar-i-Sharif was. The old man waved vaguely to the north. It was starting to get dark. The crowd dispersed. The show was over. We got up at five, bought bread and yoghurt for breakfast, packed our bags and arranged for Dolf to be moved to a room free of bedbugs.
“We’ve given the hotel owner money,” I told Dolf. “He’s going to buy food for you and keep an eye on you.”
“We’ll be back in three days,” Val said. “Four at the latest.”
At the bus station, after a lot of arguing, we managed to get a refund of most of our fare to Kabul. The bus to Mazar-i-Sharif didn’t leave from the bus station, but from a dusty back street that, even at that time of day, was crowded with people and donkeys.
The bus to Mazar, it turned out, wasn’t a bus at all, but a Russian-built military truck with wooden benches in the back for passengers. The other passengers were all Afghan men. They nodded politely as we climbed in. The canvas roof wouldn’t support any weight, so the luggage was all on the floor leaving nowhere for our feet. My pink and orange suitcase and Val’s rucksack were squeezed between sacks of grain and bundles wrapped in dark red rugs tied with rope.
The truck left Herat on a dirt road. At first we passed through orchards—pomegranates, apricots, almonds—and fields of ripe wheat. I saw women working in the fields wearing traditional Afghan clothes. Their dresses were maroon, dark green and navy blue with floral patterns like Val’s shirt. They had embroidered panels on the bodices and on the cuffs. One was embroidered in gold thread. They looked like naughty girls playing in the dirt in their best dresses. The cultivation grew sparser, occasional flocks of sheep—with straggly dark-brown fleeces and fat bottoms—replaced the crops.
Then we left green behind. The truck made slow progress through a dry brown landscape, bouncing over the rough dirt road.
The truck had a two-man crew. As well as the driver, there was another man who hung onto the back and jumped out to put a wedge under the wheel when we stopped. When we were ready to set off again, and he was sure everyone was on board, he would remove the wedge, jump on the back and shout something like burrubakai. He was a young man, quiet, with gentle eyes and a pale blue turban coiled on his head. His name was Fakir.
By mid-morning, my bottom was sore and it felt like the vertebrae in my back would break through my skin with all the jarring and knocking against the wooden seat. The truck stopped at every village and the passengers were ever changing. They climbed aboard with their bundles, bags of vegetables, and at one stage a wooden cage full of chickens. They rode for a few hours and then got off again. We stopped several times for prayers.
It was like we really had stepped back in time. It could easily have been 1351. I could imagine that for hundreds of years, people had lived in simple mud-brick houses just like the ones we were passing, and travelled along that same dirt road wearing similar clothes, patiently enduring the discomfort. The only thing that would have been different was the truck.
We had lunch at a village, ducking through a low doorway into a cool earthen room with crooked walls. There was no furniture. We sat on dusty rugs on the dirt floor. Without us saying a word someone brought rice and meat and tea.
When we went back to the truck, word had spread that there were foreigners in the village. Boys gathered to see us, while young girls wearing faded floral dresses over baggy pants and carrying younger siblings on their hips watched from doorways. As the truck took off, half a dozen barefoot boys ran after us for a way.
In the afternoon, mountains appeared in the distance. High mountains.
“That must be the beginning of the Hindu Kush,” Val said.
“Part of the same mountain range as the Himalayas,” I said.
He looked impressed by my geographical knowledge. I didn’t tell him I only knew because Dieter had mentioned it
when he was raving on about mountains of the world.
I remembered Alun poring over his map, trying to find a way around the Alps.
“For someone who doesn’t like heights, Alun couldn’t have picked a more mountainous route if he’d tried.”
The truck started to climb, crawling up the weary, brown mountains and then creeping down into a valley to a splash of green where a village clung to the edges of a muddy river. Later we came to a halt because the road was blocked by a rock fall. We had to wait for more than an hour while men from a nearby village removed the rocks one at a time by hand.
Just as it was getting dark, the truck stopped at a small town. The other passengers picked up their baggage, climbed down and melted into the dusk. Val and I looked at each other.
“Mazar?” Val asked Fakir, who was just about to disappear as well, leaving us standing in the dark in the middle of nowhere.
He shook his head. “Qala-i-Naw.”
We had stupidly assumed that the truck would only take a day to get to Mazar-i-Sharif.
“Where do we sleep?” I mimed resting my head on my hands.
Fakir smiled at our ignorance. I suppose if you live in that part of the world it’s obvious, but it wasn’t to us. He led us to a featureless mud-brick building, where a man wanted twenty afghanis for a room. Val thought that was too much and beat him down to ten.
“What about food?” I asked, miming eating.
The man shook his head.
The room had no furniture just a few threadbare carpets.
“Perhaps for twenty afghanis we might have got a bed,” I said.
I realised that it was the first time Val and I had ever been alone. All the time we’d spent together, day and night, there had always been someone else there. It seemed like a long, long time since we’d slept side by side in the back of the taxi, a lifetime since Val had kissed me in the middle of another nowhere.
My whole journey had been a series of chance meetings, random intersections. I’d been like a pinball, bouncing around without a plan or purpose. On the way to Tehran I’d been sure that Val and I would get closer, but instead we’d ricocheted off in different directions. The moment had passed. It seemed hard to get back to that closeness, harder somehow now that we were alone. He spread out his sleeping bag on one side of the room. I spread out mine on the other. Anyway, I was so sore and tired, all I wanted to do was close my eyes and lose consciousness.