“I’m going to the bazaar,” he said. “Wasim’s helping his uncle at the hotel. Want to come?”
I left Val a note.
We walked down Chicken Street on the way to the bazaar. Alun was looking for a shop that sold English language books where he hoped to find another Georgette Heyer. We stopped at a chai shop.
Alun poured himself a cup of tea. “I’ve never been so happy in my life. I feel...” He searched for the word. “Liberated.”
“So you knew before?” I didn’t quite no how to put it. “You knew that you preferred boys.”
“I suppose I knew, but it was like I’d put the knowledge away in a box that I never opened.”
“And now you’re in love.”
“First time in my life.”
“Me too,” I said. It was true.
“And you crossed some of the highest mountains in the world.”
“I did. Love and Lomotil cured my acrophobia.”
“I just wish ... you and Val...” I sighed.
“Yeah.”
“Are you going to tell your mum and dad about Wasim?”
“I was thinking I might write to my sisters and get them to tell Mum.”
We walked back down Chicken Street and I was admiring some lovely Afghan dresses and rattling on about how I wished I could buy one.
Alun shushed me.
“Do you hear that?”
In among the general street noise there were the strains of a miserable version of “Gimme Shelter”. A skinny, hollow-faced, short-haired white kid was trying, unsuccessfully, to play a battered guitar with one arm in a splint.
Alun looked at him. “That can’t be...”
It was. It was Dolf. He looked shocking. He had no money. Junkies had stolen his rucksack. All he had left was his battered guitar and his passport. He was trying to busk, to raise seven afghanis so that he could sleep in a hotel garden.
“Dolf, I’m so sorry.” Guilt washed over me. “Everything took longer than we thought. I...”
What could I say? I was too busy having sex?
We took him back to the Shangri-La and tried to get him to eat, but it was like he’d forgotten how.
“I wait, but I run out of money.”
“But we left plenty of money for food,” Val said.
“De hotel guy doesn’t buy me food. I have to give my blood to get money for de bus ticket.”
If the man behind the samovar hadn’t given him tea and bread, Dolf would have starved.
Alun looked at me accusingly. “Come on, man. Let’s get you to a hotel.”
Wasim’s uncle took one look at Dolf and sent for a doctor.
The doctor was an elderly man with a long white beard. He spoke good English and told us (several times) that he used to be King Zahir Shah’s doctor. He examined Dolf.
“Will he be all right?” I asked.
“Only the One knows,” the doctor said.
I didn’t find that comforting. He made a cast for Dolf’s arm and then he said, “You must get him out of Afghanistan. It is not a good place to be ill.”
That was it. He didn’t give him any medicine or suggest a special diet. Wasim’s aunt, a tiny woman with two teeth missing, took Dolf into their living area.
I felt so bad. “Is there anything we can get you, Dolf? Is there anything you need?”
“Apart from better friends, obviously,” Alun added.
Dolf looked back from the doorway. “Yes,” he said. “Find Ulla.”
“Ulla’s gone her own way, man,” Alun said.
“I must know that she is safe.” Dolf had tears in his eyes. “I love her.”
“We’ll find her,” I promised. This time I meant it.
Alun shook his head. Even he didn’t believe Dolf had ever had a chance with Ulla.
The last we’d heard, Ulla was on her way to Kabul to meet Billy, so since we were in that city I thought the least we could do was ask around.
Val thought it was a waste of time. “She can look after herself.”
I went out on my own in the end, walking down Chicken Street, showing people Dolf’s photo of Ulla. I was determined to find her for Dolf, but I got the impression that every westerner in that town was affected by heat or hashish, and the shops were closed for the eastern version of a siesta.
When I got back to the Shangri-La, everyone was gathered in the restaurant.
“Wasim has found out where Ulla is,” Alun said.
“Great,” I said, but once my eyes had adjusted from the afternoon glare to the dim light of the restaurant, I realised that no one was smiling.
“I heard someone talking about a western girl arrested at the airport,” Wasim said. “It was Ulla.”
“What was she arrested for?”
“It was a drug bust,” Val said. “She was trying to smuggle hashish out of the country.”
Thirty-three
Echo of a Distant Land
Friday was visiting day at Kabul Jail. Wasim was working at the hotel; Alun had gone off to teach his first English class. Dolf wanted to come but Wasim’s aunt wouldn’t let him. Just Val and I took the bus to the jail.
“You came to bed late last night,” I said as the bus trundled down a wide road overhung with plane trees.
“I was talking to the New Zealanders.”
The bus driver leaned on the horn as he tried to scatter a small flock of sheep that was wandering down the road. The bus stalled and the driver couldn’t restart it, so the passengers had to get off and push start it.
“This place is poison,” Val said when we got going again. “Bad things happen to people.” He meant Dolf and Ulla.
“It’s not the place,” I said. “It’s what people do when they’re here. Alun’s really happy.”
So was I, or at least I had been briefly.
“He’s just enjoying himself. This is the first time he’s ever been in love, he told me.”
Val stared out of the window at the cement-block houses of the richer residents of Kabul who lived in the foothills.
“Nothing will come of it.”
“You don’t know that, and anyway it’s none of your business what he does.”
“You made it your business to help Dolf and Ulla and you hardly know them. Alun’s my closest friend. Maybe my only friend. His family expects me to look out for him.”
We sat in silence until an American girl called Elisha got on the bus. She was going out to the jail as well. Her real name was Cindy, but she belonged to a cult called the Children of God whose members all take biblical names. They have a commune in Kabul, and one of the things they do is visit the westerners in the jail.
“Most of them are there for trying to smuggle drugs out of the country,” Elisha told us. “The conditions are terrible. Prisoners don’t get anything—no food, no blankets. Their families have to supply all their needs. Westerners have a tough time. They can work in the laundry or prostitute themselves. In the winter the temperature falls below freezing and there’s no heating. They get sick and die.”
Outside the bus windows, the mountains beyond the city still had snow on the peaks, even though it was summer.
“We collect money from travellers to help feed them,” Elisha continued. “We take them food, blankets and soap.”
Kabul jail was a mud fort just outside the city—a low, dark building squatting in the foothills. Men with rifles patrolled the three-foot thick walls.
A guard in a blue uniform two sizes too big for him searched us before we were allowed through the gates. Elisha led us past a bare courtyard with bars around and over it, which was crowded with Afghani prisoners. It smelt of urine. Mean-faced men who looked like bandits, spat as we passed; thin teenagers, barefoot and in rags, begged for money; a crazy old man shouted at the sky. We passed the steaming, stinking laundry. Huge wooden doors set into another three-foot thick wall led to where the Afghani men of higher class and the male foreign prisoners were. Someone was cooking kebabs over a charcoal brazier. Two men with blond ponytails and bea
ds were playing chess. Several other westerners slept in the shade of the wall or read books. They all came to the bars when they saw Elisha.
At the heart of the prison was a smaller barred courtyard that held half a dozen female prisoners. There was one white-skinned girl lying on a filthy mattress. It was Ulla.
She didn’t respond at first when we called her. When she finally came to the bars, it took her a while to work out who we were. Her skin was yellowish, she’d lost weight, and her hair was greasy and tangled. She was wearing a T-shirt and a worn pair of baggy Afghan pants held up with a piece of string. Then she did something I thought I’d never see her do. She cried.
Billy had asked her to smuggle hashish into Europe, to finance his new ashram.
“I was already sick,” Ulla said. “Hepatitis. I picked it up in Tunisia, I think. Billy told me they never search western women. I didn’t even try to hide the stuff.”
“What’s your sentence?” Val asked.
“A fine of ten thousand afghanis or one day in prison for each gram.”
“How much were you carrying?”
“One kilo and a half.”
Val worked it out before I did. “That’s more than four years.”
She looked at us. She knew she wouldn’t survive that long. We gave her the food we’d brought with us and some gritty soap. “We’ll see if there’s something we can do.”
She smiled that painful smile of hers and shook her head.
“There is nothing you can do,” she said. “It is my karma.” “We must get Ulla out of prison,” Dolf said when Val and I told him the story of our visit to the jail. “I cannot go home until she is free.”
We were back at the Shangri-La for lunch with the others. Everyone agreed with Dolf, but no one had any idea how to achieve it. We ate in silence. Then we all chipped in a few afghanis for the food. Brenda, the New Zealand girl, was keeping a tally in her diary of how much they were spending.
“That’s about ten cents each for the meal.”
Alun was looking thoughtful. “Listen, I failed arithmetic all the way through school, and I’m not exactly sure how much a New Zealand dollar is worth, but if ten afs is about ten cents, doesn’t that mean that ten thousand is about fifty quid?”
Dan was trying out the free hashish and the smoke was thick in the air. We were all having trouble with the maths. Brenda did some long division on the back of her diary. She nodded.
“I’ve got money in my bank account in England,” I said. “I could send for fifty pounds.”
“That’s very noble of you, Adelaide, but how long will that take? Remember how long the Vestal Virginians were waiting for money to be sent. And that was in Turkey.”
“You need to do some fundraising,” Brenda said.
We took up her suggestion. We asked every westerner we saw to make a donation to the Free Ulla Fund. Most of them gave us something, but they were all on limited budgets. Wasim knew where to find relatively wealthy Afghani boys who were desperate to wear western clothes and Val sold a pair of jeans and his grandpa shirt. I sold the things Dieter had left behind, including the crampons. (It’s hard to believe, but apparently it snows heavily in Kabul in winter.) I even managed to sell a pair of my hot pants. It turns out some Afghan girls wear all sorts of things underneath their tents. We all chipped in small amounts. Wasim’s uncle contributed a bit.
At the end of the day, when Alun counted up what we’d collected, we had a lot of money, hundreds of afghanis. It was enough to live in Afghanistan for weeks, but it was only worth five dollars, a long way off what we needed.
“We need to find someone who is still thinking in terms of American dollars, not afghanis,” Val said. “I’ll go to the British Embassy tomorrow.”
He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go with him.
It was the first night that we hadn’t made love since Maimana. I lay next to Val, listening to him breathing. I couldn’t get to sleep. I’d been trying to imagine the two of us together back in London. I just couldn’t picture it.
When I woke the next morning, Val had already left. Alun was teaching, Wasim was working, Dolf was recuperating, Dan was busy smoking hashish. That left just me and Brenda to go into the business district where a few modern buildings, some of them four storeys high, sat alongside the river. In the shadow of these modern concrete buildings, women crouched in the shallows washing their clothes and dishes, the hems of their black tents floating around them.
Some enterprising foreigners in the business district were exporting Afghani carpets and clothing. It took a while, but we got fifteen dollars out of one of them. Someone suggested we try American Peace Corps workers and we found two of them eating at Sigi’s which is the most popular hippy restaurant. Richard from Milwaukee and Walter from Seattle were both teaching at the Kabul University, something to do with building and increasing crops. They’d seen the conditions in the jail and were generous compared to hippy travellers, but we still had less than half what we needed and we were running out of options. By lunchtime, I had pretty much given up.
Brenda wanted to go to the post office before it closed for the siesta. I went with her, even though I’d decided not to send the postcard of Paris to Terry. Brenda and Dan had arranged for their friends and family to write to them at various places along their way.
There was a queue at the Poste Restante counter. I was thinking how nice it would be to get some news from home: who was going to be playing in the footy Grand Final, what colour Dad had painted the rumpus room, if my brother had talked Mum into keeping the kittens born under the house. It’s funny how you can never leave home and be very well informed about the world just by sitting in your lounge room. Yet there I was actually out in the world and I had no idea what was happening anywhere. Australia could have disappeared off the map for all I knew.
It was only a few minutes to closing time when Brenda got to the counter. She showed her passport and the man searched through a box of letters. There were none for her.
“Can you look again,” Brenda insisted.
She got him to look under B as well, in case it had been filed under her first name. The postal clerk was glancing anxiously at the clock. People in the queue were complaining, but Brenda wanted to search under Dan’s names as well. I was thinking it must be time for tea and a cherry pie, when Brenda snatched the box from the postal clerk just as he was about to put up his closed sign (written in four languages). She searched through the whole box.
“There’s nothing for us,” she said sadly, “but there’s one for you, Jackie.”
“There can’t be,” I said. “No one knows I’m here.”
She held up an envelope. It had an English stamp on it and my name.
I ripped it open. It was written in tiny, neat handwriting. It was from Veronica and Vanessa.
Dear Jackie,
We do not know if you will ever receive this letter, but we have some news that we thought you should know about. Mrs Tranberg made us welcome when we dropped by to tell her Dolf was okay, and insisted we stay with her while we were in Amsterdam. Well, imagine our surprise when Dolf rang from Tehran! That is how we know you are heading for Afghanistan, or at least that is what we think he said. The line was real bad and his voice was so faint. Anyways that is why we are writing to Kabul.
After we left Holland we went back to London and found your place. Jackie, your little apartment was not empty so we could not stay there like you suggested. Your Irish neighbor was real nice though and she let us stay in this tiny box room on the first floor. It is not much bigger than a closet but we are thankful to have somewhere to stay for free as our money is short.
Anyways, we discovered that it is your friend Colleen who is living in your room. And she is not alone. I am just going to have to come right out and tell you this, Jackie. Your boyfriend Terry is there with her. It seems he came over to surprise you and found Colleen there and, well, I do not know what went on, but now they are living together. The Irish lady is not happ
y with the arrangement. We thought it best that you know before you get back. I hope it is not too much of a shock.
Our parents have arranged to fly us home, so we will be back in the States by the time you get this letter, if you ever do.
Sincerely yours
Veronica and Vanessa
PS I have put my address in Virginia on the envelope. It would be real nice if we could be pen pals.
“Lucky you, getting news from home,” Brenda said as she walked out of the post office letterless.
I was wondering what had happened to the Scottish druid and how Dolf had managed to ring home from Mr de Lacey’s without anyone knowing.
“Not really,” I replied. “My boyfriend is sleeping with my best friend.”
Ex-boyfriend, I thought, ex-best friend.
“Oh, I thought you were with Val.”
Yes, well, I guess I was in no position to be critical. As a matter of fact, regardless of how things turned out between Val and me, I discovered I didn’t care at all about Terry. I took the postcard of Paris out of my bag, tore it into small pieces and threw it in the air.
Val still hadn’t come back when we all met for dinner that evening. It was the New Zealanders’ last night in Kabul.
“Are you on your way to India?” Alun asked.
“No, we’ve been to India. We’re going the other way—to Europe.”
Dan spread their map of the world out on the carpet and pointed out their route marked in Biro—from Auckland to Melbourne by boat, hitching to Darwin, island hopping to Singapore, train to Thailand, plane to Calcutta and then buses to Kabul. I’d thought that the hippy trail was a well-worn track heading East from Europe to India and back. It hadn’t occurred to me that Australians and New Zealanders would be heading the other way. If you come from our part of the world, India isn’t in the East at all, it’s in the West.
“We’ve done the hard bit,” Brenda said. “The rest is easy.”
I looked at their map and traced the way we had come. I found Ankara, Tehran and Herat. Previously I wouldn’t have been able to find Iran on a map, I hadn’t even known that Afghanistan existed. I’d known that we were heading east, but I hadn’t realised how far east we’d travelled.