flashquake Nonfiction

Understanding
by J. Malcolm Garcia

Today, Mohammad Khan and I passed each other as I was about to enter the building where the staff of the Belgian humanitarian aid organization Solidarites live in Bamiyan, an Afghan village ten hours north of the capital Kabul. A photographer and I and our Afghan translator work for Knight Ridder newspapers in Washington. We're renting rooms here while we report on internally displaced people living in caves nearby.

Most of the Solidarites staff are in their mid-twenties and recent graduates of French universities. Some worked in Africa before being assigned to Afghanistan. The boyfriend of one of the staff recently joined her and they occasionally argue. They found a kitten and have told the cook to keep the hall doors closed so they can let it out of their room where it cries when left alone.

"Taliban," Khan whispers stopping me with a tentative grip. His gray, grease stained smock smells of smoke. His splotchy beard creates an uneven patchwork of hair around his thin face. He points at the two-story mud brick building with its log beams and hollow windows.

"I know."

A Solidarites staffer had told me that Taliban officials once lived here. The building was partially destroyed after September I I th, during a Northern Alliance offensive, and the Taliban fled.

Karim Khalili, a vice president in the new government and the warlord of Bamiyan province, offered it to Solidarites providing they repaired it.

The staff installed plumbing and electricity. Carpets were cut for the floors. A new Westinghouse oven and stove was shipped from Pakistan. The Afghan cook, however, still uses a charcoal pit hollowed out of the kitchen floor to bake nan bread. A generator hums all night lighting bare bulbs in the hall ceiling.

Khan takes my hand and leads me slowly through the gate as if I've never been here before. As if this was still a forbidding place. We follow a steep uneven staircase to the second floor and stop outside my room. I hear the kitten crying. The sounds of guitars and drums from a CD player in another room ricochet off the walls and spill outside where feral dogs soak up the sun and chickens peck at the cracked ground.

Khan runs a small, calloused hand over what I had dismissed as meaningless graffiti-like squiggles scrawled across my door. He makes me understand that the thick, black loops and scattered dots scrawled with a magic marker spell the name of a Taliban leader.

"Mulla Mohammad Hassan," he says in rough English. My translator is out and Khan gropes for words. "Taliban arrest three hundred Hazara in Bamiyan. We were not fed. At night we were whipped by metal cable. Too much beating. On our backs."

The Hazara people are the dominant ethnic group in Bamiyan and date back to Genghis Khan's warriors. In the late 1990s, reports of Hazara men, women and children being massacred by Taliban fighters in northern and central Afghanistan were common. Homes were ransacked and destroyed. Now, the United Nations provides returning families with tents. Everyone hopes for a mild winter.

"I told Talib, I'm not a robber," Khan says. "I not have gun. Every night hit me with cable. They say, You are Hazara. Kill many Taliban."

Khan holds out his arms palms up showing me where Taliban soldiers held his wrists against a boiling tea pot. I look away.

"Mister, see?"

He can't bend his wrists. Tendon damage. I follow him into the main hall where a dozen doors line up against the wall. A Solidarites staffer wrapped in a bath towel sorts through T-shirts, jeans, sneakers and socks stacked outside her room. She bends over and Khan and I look away.

"Mulla Gul Mohammad Akhund," Khan reads from the first door. He studies a phrase scribbled in pen by the name. "Taliban always together."

Khan and I move down to the next room and the next until we pass four doors without names. The wood shines and smells as if it has just been cut.

"New, new, new, all new," Khan says tapping the doors.

The CD shuts off and someone yells something in French. In a minute, music starts playing again drowning out the kitten. Several Solidarites staff dance in the hall laughing. I turn to Khan and he takes my hand and presses my fingers against the limp wrists of his right arm. He presses hard until I feel the rough ridges of dead skin like petrified wood against my palm. He watches me, leans forward. As if he expects me to say something. As if now I should understand.

Copyright 2002 by J. Malcolm Garcia

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