Rahimullah Habibullah slouches in a chair by the gate of Sherpur Cemetery, watches the British couple by the grave.
They stand with their hands cupped at their waists for ten, fifteen minutes. Then the woman moves near a tree behind the tombstone and asks the man to snap a photograph. He takes several pictures. When he's done, they walk down a stone-rutted path toward Mr. Habibullah, past broken tombstones and unmarked graves. They tip Mr. Habibullah two dollars and leave.
More than one hundred people, mostly Europeans, lie buried in this ruined Kabul cemetery. No Afghans. Only foreigners. Germans, Swiss, some Americans. Mr. Habibullah doesn't know why foreigners have a separate cemetery.
They just do, he says shrugging. The cemetery has always been the place in Kabul where foreigners were buried.
In 1987, a Russian general stopped at Mr. Habibullah's tire shop just outside the cemetery gates, gave him a paper and told him he was the new caretaker of Sherpur. He didn't ask questions then; and now, at fifty-eight, he still doesn't.
He looks at his watch. Three o'clock in the afternoon. Only one couple so far. He was busier under the Taliban. Relatives of the dead always visited then and tipped well. Times are different now. The Taliban left but the radio warns against traveling. Bandits on the roads. Terrorists.
You forget the dead when you are scared for your own life, Mr. Habibullah says.
He stands, shuffles over to the grave visited by the British couple. A breeze catches his white beard lifting it off his chest. He tugs his tattered coat around his chest, eyes crinkled against the dusty wind. His bare feet look hard as bark. He stares at the ground where a tombstone lies partially strewn with brush.
Germain Tanguay
Quebec - Canada
1944 - 1972
After the Russians left Afghanistan in 1989, the new government built a mud brick wall around the cemetery. An Italian priest would read from a book over certain graves. Mr. Habibullah didn't understand the words.
Most of the foreigners buried in the cemetery died in Kabul. Only five people have been laid to rest here since Mr. Habibullah became caretaker. The last one was a German doctor in 1992. His burial was hasty because of fighting in the city between opposing Afghan forces. A man told Mr. Habibullah that the doctor's wife would bring a tombstone. She never did.
Sometimes as he watched a casket lowered into the ground, Mr. Habibullah would realize better than he ever had before that some day he would die. The thought depressed him and he would return to his seat by the gate and leave the grieving family alone.
Mark Aurel Stein
Born at Budapest 26 November 1862
He died at Kabul 26 October 1943
A man greatly loved.
Mr. Habibullah sweeps the graves with a shredding straw broom every morning and tries to water the spare trees that stand like half-starved sentries along the footpaths. But he doesn't have a water pump, and the nearest well is far and buckets of water get heavy. So the trees will die.
Summers, Mr. Habibullah picks flowers wherever he sees them in the city and scatters them over the graves. When they wither and die he picks more. Flowers are lighter than buckets of water.
A Northern Alliance soldier holding a machine gun watches Mr. Habibullah from the second floor of a bullet-scared house overlooking the cemetery. Mr. Habibullah ignores him. Soldiers, he says, ruined the cemetery.
When factional fighting broke out between Afghan forces in the early 1990s, the cemetery was a battleground. Many of the stone and marble tombstones were shattered from exploding rocket shells and hand grenades. Huge chunks of the wall fragmented into dust. In all the years since, only two people offered to help repair the damage. A woman brought buckets of mud to patch the wall and a doctor donated forty trees that Mr. Habibullah couldn't water. No one offered to mend the graves.
Six members of Mr. Habibullah's family were killed by a grenade during that time and were buried in a cemetery for Afghan people on a hill overlooking Sherpur Cemetery. Their graves like hundreds of others around them were marked with green flags to show they died in the fighting.
Frederick Newgard
American engineer
Born 7 February 1908
Seattle
Died 31 July 1946
Kandahar
When the Taliban was in power, officials with the Ministry of Virtue and Vice would come by the cemetery two and three times a month and question Mr. Habibullah.
"Why do you keep this place?" they would ask him. "You keep foreigners' graves. Why?"
"I'm an old man," Mr. Habibullah told them. "I can't do any other kind of work. If foreign or Afghan, graves are no problem. If you tell me not to work, I not work."
The Taliban let him stay. Each time they left, Mr. Habibullah would sit in his chair by the gate consoled by the silence of the cemetery.
In loving memory of
Ron Henley — Age 30 years
Carol Henley — Age 28 years
Motor accident on the Salang Pass
On 30th June 1964
Mr. Habibullah's favorite grave lies beneath a large marble tombstone shaped as a cross. He likes it because the deceased was married to an Afghan. The memorial inscribed on the tombstone explains that Eva Sharif was from Holland and died in 1988. Her husband was born in 1939 in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul.
Mr. Habibullah wonders how they met. He wonders if the husband is dead and if he is buried in an Afghan cemetery or in another country.
At four o'clock p.m. Mr. Habibullah locks the gate for the day, walks to the tire shop he once owned all those years ago, and sits on a bench. He crosses his legs and asks a man for a cigarette.
A very slow day. Only the one couple. At one time, Mr. Habibullah earned ten, twenty dollars a day in tips from families visiting the cemetery.
He draws deeply on the cigarette. Tomorrow, he will sweep the graves and wait for visitors.
He doesn't think of dying. When he dies, everyone in his family will come and stand by his grave and recite from the Koran. Then they'll bury him and leave. They'll visit once a week. He has been fortunate. He was not killed in the wars. If the fighting has truly stopped he may never get killed. He may never have a green flag fly over his grave.