Turning Thirty

I turned thirty in Afghanistan. It was my second birthday here. The last time I’d been hit with a weird flu three days before and the fever finally broke as I entered the last year of my twenties. My chowkidar and friend, Halim came into my room to my weak groans and cheerily offered me a bowl of rice and beans. He told me again that no doubt I had malaria. “Today check blood?” he asked hopefully, just like every other day. Here everything is malaria. If you have a toothache they suspect malaria.

With such an inauspicious precedent for birthdays in Afghanistan, this year I wasn’t going to make a big deal of it, but word got out. I should have known. Information is collected and disseminated in this country with uncanny speed. I’ve heard stories of someone coughing in the old city of Faizabad across the river and returning home to the new city to find everyone discussing his health. I don’t have a TV or a radio or the Web here, but I find out everything going on in the world from Halim, who has some mysterious source, unerring and never-ending. Halim was the one to tell me that Canada -my own country - had a new Prime Minister, one “Pool Mortaan.” The Afghans know when the roads are good and when they are blocked, they know when new troops land in Kabul and where they’re from, they know when there are cornflakes in the bazaar and when there aren’t, and they knew it was birthday. They knew and they weren’t going to let it slip by without a party.

We were up in Baharak at the time, two hours away from Faizabad, and even more of a backwater. But when the men of the office ushered me into the sitting room to the place of honour they’d managed to collect a tabla, an electric keyboard, a cassette player with several tapes, and a whole platter full of candy and the type of plastic flowers you see in funeral homes. In the middle of these was a box wrapped in shiny paper and labelled with an A4 printout of ClipArt lettering spelling out “Tawalaat Mubarak! Happy Birtday Mr. Rayn!”

Afghans rarely do things without speeches, candy, bright plastic flowers, and dancing. My party was no exception. The office manager, Tawab, presented me the ensemble with a long speech full of compliments and apologies for the meagreness of their gift (it turned out to be a pair of flashy sandals). I got caught up in things and made a little speech of my own, and got some polite laughter when I said that all I got for my birthday last year was a bowl of rice, but I don’t think the joke translated well. I handed around the candy to gloss over the awkward moment. They perched the flowers up around me, then one of the drivers hit it with the electric keyboard, the agronomist, it turned out, was no slouch on the tabla, and the dancing began.

A party in Afghanistan is a strange affair for the unaccustomed, and mostly it has to do with the dancing. First of all there are no women. The women on staff had come to me earlier to congratulate me and present their excuses and apologies for not being able to attend the party that night. The excuses were pleasant fictions; the fact is that women do not go to men’s parties. So right away Westerners are deprived of one of their primary reasons for going to parties: mingling. There is no mingling. You go to parties to appear, to eat, but chiefly, you go to dance. And you will not be dancing in a crowd, anonymously. You will be dancing alone in the middle of a cheering, clapping, singing circle of your own sex.

At first I thought I could just blend into the cheering and clapping and singing. Then two grown men with beards came and pulled me up and into the middle to a general roar of approval from all. So I danced. It was not the moment to be shy about it. I pulled out moves that should only occur at Michael Jackson concerts or in French music videos. Not only me. Everyone danced. The engineers danced. A sixty-year-old plumber danced. On my thirtieth birthday I danced with old bearded men.

Things calmed down a bit when they brought tea. One of the younger guys said that this was such a good party that they should start celebrating everyone’s birthday. “First you find when is birthdays,” Halim said. “Then you take this party.” Everyone laughed and started asking who knew their birthdays, but only Halim did because his uncle, in a burst of foresight, wrote it down.

The bag of candy made another round. One of the drivers, who I always thought looked a little like Prince, took the keyboard and sang a very old Afghan song, lamenting the years of war. People fiddled with the cassette player, which had more blinking lights on it than an aircraft carrier but wouldn’t play tapes. They abandoned cassettes and struck up with keyboard and drum once more for the last big push to the end. Someone started singing. They pulled me to my feet again and everything rose to a clapping, stomping crescendo with me twirling insanely in the middle of it. All of them were on their feet. I think someone threw money at me. I’m not kidding.

The next morning I found the plastic flowers in my room. They had arranged them in the empty candy bag and wrapped shreds of wrapping paper around the whole bouquet. On the plastic leaves they’d taped words cut out of the card. It looked like a fifth grade art project for Mother’s Day: “Mr. Rayn,” “Birtday,” and “Happy.” It sort of summed it all up, really.

Afghanistan, By Road

Travel by road through Afghanistan usually starts at the airport. At the airport you are not waiting for a flight; you are waiting for a flight to be cancelled. The general rule is that a UN Humanitarian Air Service flight will go as scheduled unless there is the presence or absence of wind, dust, or weather (any kind), pebbles on the runway, ice, snow, hail or the rumours thereof. Hearsay, whim, or any other type of thing that may be deemed threatening or mildly inconvenient, such as military manoeuvres (any, anywhere) are also sufficient to cancel a flight, as is the time being before, after, or exactly, say, 2pm or any other time. Another, simpler, way of determining if the UN flight will go is to book yourself on it and arrange your schedule so that all your plans will fail unless it goes. This will almost certainly guarantee that it will not. In this case you will have go by road …

The airport today is like a reunion. People keep coming in through the metal detectors to an increasingly loud hail of greetings from those who have already made it through “security.” In most airports the security guards don’t just smile at you when you set off the scanners or play “eeny-miny-moe” to decide who to search, but at Kabul International they throw employees into the job before they are fully trained, forcing them to rely on their native hospitality rather than the usual power-trip employed by fully-trained security personnel. Also, here it is assumed that foreigners are here to do some good, rather than import havoc. I don’t know where they got that idea. Maybe all of these white NGO and UN vehicles zooming around give the humanitarian effort an illusion of productivity. In any case, at the moment several representatives of the humanitarian effort, myself included, are sitting in the newly spiffed-up lounge of the Kabul airport talking about our holidays and complaining about the UN.

“The flight will be cancelled. I don’t know why they always make us wait to hear it. It will be cancelled for sure.”

“I heard it’s raining in Kunduz, so they won’t fly.”

“UN pilots are wimps, they never fly if there’s even a little cloud in the sky. It’s not like Kunduz is full of mountains; you can just drop down through the clouds and there it is. I don’t see the problem.”

“Ok, they should just tell us now, and then we will drive.”

“You have a car?”

“You’re so lucky. I have fill out all these requests for transport in advance. It would take me a week to get a car.”

A man comes in and waves a paper and says the flight is cancelled. He couldn’t be more bored. We all groan and exchange “I-told-you-so” looks, then filter back through the airport to collect our luggage. Back outside, the cell phones and satellite phones and radios come out as everyone tries to make alternate plans. I position myself near the people who said they had a vehicle. One of them is Sherine from AKDN. She’s going to try to make it to Taloqan tonight, and that’s where I want to go. My friend from Faizabad, Floortje, is interested as well, but she has to get permission. So do I, technically, but my country director is out on leave, so I pretend I’m exempt. This is pure fiction, of course, and later I will be severely reprimanded for what I’m about to do. But right now, the idea of hopping into a car with a load of friendly companions and making a run for the north seems too good to pass up. We load things up and wait while Sherine’s colleague Nazeem makes irrelevant phone calls outside until she shoos him into the front seat and we head back into Kabul. The plan is to go to Floor’s office first and see if we can find someone to rubber-stamp her permission to go up by road. I’m feeling free and adventurous and I tell her she should hang it all and just go, but she’s not having it.

“They’d sack me for sure if I did that,” she says. Floor has a reputation for individualism and wildness. It’s why I like her.

At her office, we discover that her country director is at a meeting and can’t be reached. We try the radio, hoping to get the second in commands up in Taloqan, but when we finally do they tell us to hold on while they consult. I pass the time thinking of things to say to the radio operator, who is one of the most beautiful Afghan women I’ve ever seen, not that I’ve seen many. The decision finally comes back: Floor is not allowed to go. Apparently AKDN is not on her organization’s list of approved vehicles to travel with. She is fuming. She asks why, with a polite restraint that I admire. Apparently AKDN vehicles don’t have Codan radios, according to someone there. The fact that our vehicle is a fully equipped newer model Toyota Landcruiser with a very functional Codan doesn’t seem to impress them. It’s the kind of incomprehensibly silly decision that probably comes from one person’s sighting of one AKDN car without an antenna, a singular observation from which it has been extrapolated that their whole fleet must be similarly ill equipped. Floor uses up the rest of her impressive restraint trying to reason with her superiors and finally gives up in disgust and signs off. She’s not coming.

Sherine, Nazeem, and I, so reduced in number, press on, but first we must wind around Kabul a little to find the house of some relatives of the driver, because he has talked Sherine into taking them along. When we get there, several minutes of greetings and invitations to stay for tea, for dinner, for the night ensue until Sherine’s patience finally erodes and she herds everyone back into the car. The two relatives climb into the back with the luggage and we blast off again. By the time we leave Kabul it’s after 12:30 pm, and it’s at least a six-hour drive to Taloqan. We’re not supposed to be on the road after dark, so this is going to be pushing it.

The outskirts of Kabul roll away behind us and we cross the Shamali Plains with the Hindu Kush Mountains looming up ahead of us, hazy behind a cloud of dust the wind has blown in. Nazeem is talking endless nonsense and Sherine makes a show of exasperation.

“He is like a baby,” She tells me. “He cannot do anything on his own.” Nazeem smiles impishly behind his glasses, and turns his head towards the back seat using his whole body as though his neck doesn’t work.

“Sherine Sherine are we going to stop for food?” He speaks like this, without a comma between the repetition of her name and the rest of his sentences, and he has a lisp that makes her name come out “Sthureen.” He probably can’t help it, but I get the feeling that he knows how irritating it sounds and makes use of this as much as possible. She rolls her eyes at me.

“You see? He is always like this! I’ve been with this man for a whole week,” she says and grins her huge smile at me. “He tried to sleep in the same room as me, but I said ‘No! Absolutely not!’”

“I justht wanted to be closthe to you Sthureen. Becausthe we are a team Sthureen.” His eyes roll to the edge of his head and glint at us through his glasses. This saves him the effort of turning his neckless body and makes him look impossibly cheeky.

In Charrikar we stop for food, and Nazeem, Sherine, and the relatives pile out and disperse into the market, returning with kufta, naan, and potato fries. I think it’s the tastiest food I’ve ever had in Afghanistan. It’s as if every other place in the country has forgotten about spices except this one. I rave about it as we hit the road again, eating as we go. Sherine tells me that when she worked in the Panjshir Valley, they would come down to Charrikar just for the food. Nazeem has bought kebabs and discovers at Sherine’s insistence that they are not as good as the kufta. “I told you, Nazeem, you should have bought kufta.”

“Yes Sthureen you are right,” he says ingratiatingly. She rolls her eyes at me.

“He is a baby,” she says.

We climb up through the town of Jabal-e-Saraj, and I remember my first trip through the Salaang when I arrived in Afghanistan. It was the dead of winter that time and there had been some accident on the pass so the vehicles were stopped and backed up through the town. Our driver brought us bread and eggs and oranges and we ate them in the truck while the milling crowd gathered to stare at us. This time we just sail through and the curious looks we get are brief.

The road winds up into the mountains and I’m leaning out the window of the Landcruiser, trying to take pictures. The Salaang pass has a kind of mascot who appears painted on every informative signboard on the way up, looking fruity in his big rubber gloves and telling passers-by to remember their snow chains and to obey directions of the road personnel (optimistically supposing there are any). He also cheerily points out that there are mines just off the road, which we would do well to avoid since “Mine is the Enemy of Humanity.” The series of avalanche galleries that foreshadow that actual Salaang Tunnel are huge cracking concrete structures that feel like the leftovers of a former civilization. I guess in a way they are. The Russians who built this road as a supply route for their occupation of Afghanistan have long since gone and left only their rusting tanks, their concrete, and their bad memories.

When I first saw the Salaang Tunnel over a year ago, it looked like the mouth of a monster gaping out of the mountainside, fanged with icicles and dribbling huge pools of mud. They’ve apparently been working on it since then. Now it is a nearly respectable thing with lights and ventilation fans and a road surface that doesn’t pitch cars like corks in a storm. I feel a little wave of nostalgia for a more wild and adventurous time when the road was by no means sure. With no exciting unknowns or darkness to distract me this time I turn my attention back to Nazeem, who is explaining how he is planning to get a Canadian passport. The idea is to have some accounting firm sponsor him by offering him a job.

“But don’t they have to prove that no other Canadian could do the job first?” I ask.

“Yesth of coursthe this is right but you need a lawyer,” he says.

Sherine jumps on him. “Yes Nazeem, you need a lawyer so that he can tell lies for you.”

“Yesth Sthureen honesthty is always the bestht policy. He will sthay that they need an Indian accountant like me.”

Sherine’s comment on this is a bit vulgar.

“Yesth Sthureen honesthty is always the bestht policy and sthometimes it is not.”

Sherine turns to me. “Nazeem is trying to collect passports for every country,” she says, washing her hands of him then thinking better of it and launching a breathtaking five-minute attack on his every motive. He settles himself in his seat and loves the attention. While she is at full steam he fumbles with his can of Pepsi until her patience snaps and she snatches it from him, opens it, and hands it back. “You can’t do ANYTHING on your own!”

“Sthureen I have sthixty-stheven points on my testht for Canada and they are sthaying now that sthomeone needs only sthixty-five stho it is no problem if I want I can go.”

She gives up. The country rolls by, the villages, the old men sitting by the roadside, the workers trilling their donkeys along, mud houses with electric blue window frames, little groves of trees bright green and cherry blossoms against the brown rock hills. Sherine says she has had enough of the Hindi music in the cassette deck and puts on something in Arabic. We settle into the jolting rhythm of the road. Hours pass.

We are getting closer to Pul-e-Khumri. Nazeem wants to stop and see a friend of his at the office there. But it’s getting late and Sherine wants to keep going. “No. No. Nazeem. We are not going to stop. Do you think we are going drive in the dark and violate our security rules just so you can see your friend who you talk to every week? No Nazeem.” But he is oblivious. He wanders off with the satellite phone at our next bathroom break and talks for five minutes to his friend assuring him that we will certainly visit. Back on the road Sherine retaliates by poking the phone out the window and calling him herself to say we cannot come. Undaunted, Nazeem prevails with his innocent clueless act until Sherine give in and we pull off in Pul-e-Khumri. The Codan radio crackles and after a lot of shouting into it, it is revealed to us that yet another person wants a ride. Sherine threatens him. “If you are not at the office with all your things when we get there we are not waiting. We are leaving. Nazeem, I’m just going to leave you there with your friend. I’m not joking. You always break security rules and then say you didn’t know. You know perfectly.”

“Sthureen when do I break sthecurity? Sthureen?”

Before we arrive at the office we encounter the guy who wants a ride rushing home to get his laptop. We stop, blocking traffic in the middle of the street so Sherine can yell at him.

Our stay at the office lasts for about one cigarette. Nazeem sees his friend, fulfilling a purpose that remains veiled since they hardly say anything to each other. The laptop guy rushes in at the last minute and Nazeem pauses at the car door to say goodbye to his friend or possibly just to infuriate Sherine. She tells the driver to start driving away. It’s almost five by the time we leave.

The journey slowly lapses into silence as the light leaves us. By the time we reach Kunduz - still almost two hours from Taloqan - it is twilight. Half an hour later it is fully dark. From time to time Sherine takes a moment to abuse Nazeem for making us drive at night. He makes sycophantic apologies and looks very, very pleased with how everything has turned out.

They drop me at the Mission East guesthouse in Taloqan. The relatives help unload my bags and scrabble around on the floorboards looking for a bottle of soy sauce I’m missing. I thank Sherine for the ride. She tells me to come visit them anytime I’m in Baharak. Before the door closes I hear Nazeem start up again. “Sthureen …”

Sherine treats me to another of her Cheshire grins and turns to blow up at him again as they drive away.

Eternity and the 11th Grade

When I was in 11th grade I fell in love with a girl. We rode the bus home together. That is, we rode the same bus. I would usually try to manipulate things so that I could sit near her or so I could at least see her, but I couldn’t manage to sit next to her – except once. Which isn’t surprising; my whole relationship with her was characterized by me never saying or doing anything to let on that I liked her while wishing like mad that she would come running across the parking lot to me (or something like that) to make life as huge and wonderful as a dream. That never happened, but one day something small and wonderful did happen, because on that day she came and sat next to me.

I remember two things about it, mainly. One was that it was raining outside and when we came to her stop she asked if she could borrow my raincoat. It was an MEC Gortex raincoat, and she used to talk to me about how much she liked MEC. Of course I handed it over and felt something like butterflies as I watched her step off the bus wearing my coat. Looking back, I know that was my chance. She was giving me every sign in the world, and I was still torturing myself over how to find out for sure if she liked me instead of just taking the plunge, telling her how enchanted I was. She kept the coat for two days, and I guess I was supposed to ask for it back as an excuse to talk to her again, but I never clued in. Anyway, she wore a particular kind of perfume that I always thought smelled good, and when she finally gave the coat back it smelled like that. Torture and bliss: it smelled like her.

The other thing I remember is the song that was playing on the bus that day. Our bus driver was a famous grouch with a heart of gold. He always played the radio on his bus, and even though he liked country, he could be convinced every time – usually by one of the prettier girls – to switch it to LG73, the station of teen-aged choice in those days. On this particular day, Right Here Waiting For You by Kenny Marks came on. “Oh, good song!” she said, so I paid attention. I memorized it, actually. I sang it to myself. I wallowed in the tragedy of it:

Wherever you go / whatever you do / I will be right here waiting for you.
Whatever it takes / oh how my heart breaks / I will be right here waiting for you.

And so it became the theme song of my crush, of my teen-aged life, of my own imagined world. I was a tragic hero, always waiting, right there waiting for her, even after she stopped waiting for me to pull myself together and ask her out. She finally started seeing some guy on the basketball team and after grade 11 she moved to a different school. I have no idea where she is now. I hear she’s married.

My raincoat smelled like her for a long time after that day on the bus. I still love that smell. Sometimes it wafts to me out of the blue, on the street, in an elevator, when a woman leaves the train, and a wistful longing comes back to me. The Kenny Marks song, I’m afraid to say, has a similar effect. In a way these are the scent and soundtrack of my life. They remind me of being just out of reach of something wonderful. I feel like that a lot.

These are stupid things to admit. I’m in Afghanistan. I should be writing about the history in the making all around me, the rebuilding of a country, the greed, the nobility, the hopeful and the hopeless, those who sit in the ash heaps and those who pick up stones and sand and make bricks in case someone should need a home. There are plenty of issues; there is so much news. The Taliban are back on the rise, there is a new constitution, a man blew himself up in the capital after Christmas, elections are coming soon. But I am here, wistful and nostalgic. I am here, self-absorbed. I am here, and my colleague’s computer on random play list next to me just started playing Right Here Waiting For You. After years of education and growing up, after making adventurous choices and coming here, far, far away from home, I’m still not very far from the 11th grade.

I do have a point to all this. I’ve always had an acute awareness of my own ache of longing for … something. A song, a smell, a sunrise on the right day can awaken it with such force it stops me in my tracks. It makes me feel like crying, like I’m so far away from home, but it is also so beautiful I want to freeze everything and savour it forever. I don’t think it’s nostalgia over teenaged love or sappy love songs, really. I hope not, because it’s already pretty embarrassing to admit what I already have about Kenny Marks. No, I think it’s more like what the writer of Ecclesiastes meant when he said:

I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men …

I want something big and beautiful to happen, and I want it to last forever. In 11th grade I wanted a girl to turn and run to me suddenly, and I would be right there waiting for her. I spent my teenaged years imagining whole worlds of beautiful things that never happened, except in little fleeting moments like that day on the bus.

But isn’t that what we do? Don’t we arrive on some barren landscape, some ruin in our lives and after sitting for awhile in a heap, at a loss, don’t we start to wish, hope, long that instead of this, it could be beautiful? That is what we are doing in Afghanistan when we are at our best – imagining this place remade, and inching our way towards our vision, impossible as it is so many days. Maybe none of us are so far from 11th grade, maybe we shouldn’t even try to be. Maybe everything that awakens our longing, every time we hear some line in a song, some musical phrase, some chorus that lifts our soul and we don’t know why; every sudden whiff of perfume, the scent of pine trees, the smell of rain before a storm; every time the moon rises over the mountain, every splash of colour in a ruined landscape, every kite that still flies; every time someone turns to us and runs - or when she just sits next to you on the bus – maybe these are the things that are beautiful in their time and leave us with a dream of eternity that we can’t shake from our hearts.

It could be that I’m making too much out of a Kenny Marks song. It’s not a song one should make much of anything out of. Eternity is a tall order for one song, especially that one. (I certainly hope that the soundtrack to my eternity is not Right Here Waiting For You). But I do hope is that whatever that feeling is - whatever longing perfume and pop ballads awake in me - I hope it means that there is something big and beautiful, something huge and wonderful, and that one day it will happen.

A Rainbow Umbrella

Spring in northern Afghanistan brings with it an impossible green and patchworks it all over the hills, enough to make you feel like running forever for the sheer gigantic joy of it. My friend wrote that a new wheat field is “so green it breaks your heart” and I can’t think of any better way to say it. I was driving back home today over roads bad enough to ruin tanks, my heart breaking over and over at the sight of the world, the sun cutting through the rain clouds and the mountains up so high I couldn’t believe they weren’t falling over. Then a man came walking through the fields holding a bright rainbow coloured umbrella up like he was Arnold Palmer at Palm Springs and I swear I heard God laugh out loud.

This week I have walked up hills steeper than avalanche chutes, smelled mint underfoot, stumbled upon the fireplaces of shepherds. I have visited springs so old they still have the forgotten magic of the world in their waters, and divided bread with nut-brown men whose eyes crinkle in thousand year old smiles. I have shared secret shyness with barefoot children, shared my bedroom with scorpions. I have traded political manoeuvres with wealthy men and governors, handed money to shivering workers, discussed the ratio of sand to cement with engineers, weighed the merits of dynamite over hammers, and stood with afghans quiet as gravestones under the moon while the earth shook beneath us. In the silence afterwards we heard the mountains come loose and roll down like thunder.

In the evenings after work we walk the streets of Baharak in the falling twilight. It takes a long time for the light to leave the sky purple and dusky and then the moon rises like a queen between two peaks and spreads her soft glory. In the bazaar, men chatter, buy food, shout, push each other around, tell their stories, laugh. Girls slip through the crowd, buying candy, whispering and giggling while they are still young, before they become women and disappear. Children trail after their fathers or bounce on donkeys, always looking back over their shoulders at what has passed, absorbing it with their already ancient eyes. The place is full of movement and age and secret allegiances I will never understand. One of my friends is buying a vest, a hideous denim piece with gold zippers. The rest of us joke around in English so our jokes are never complicated and they are always for my benefit. We move on, buy oranges, move on. Outside the market there is a field, a patch of dirt surrounded by the skeletons of Russian tanks. The Tajiks are playing volleyball. The Pashtuns, recently come from Pakistan, are playing cricket. Women skirt the edges, a blue and white border, silent. I watch and spit mandarin seeds on the ground. I am as peaceful now as ever. A lazy evening in the park. I feel … accustomed.

Some small secret knowledge comes to me, as it has been coming to me all my life: I will never belong here. I am a witness; I do not collaborate. All of these scenes flicker past me on a screen as big as the world. I’m convinced they mean something and I’m trying to catch the edges of it, the trailing joy, the streams of glory, the terrible, beautiful ache of longing, and my words are always glancing off into men with umbrellas and earthquakes and the rising moon. Annie Dillard says, “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” So that is what I’m trying to do, the least thing: just be here.

A small girl, cute as anything, is running and looking back in a game of tag and she nearly crashes into me. She looks up with a wary, dark brow and skirts around me carefully. I turn now and walk back to the surrounding walls of the office compound that is my home. For now.