A House White With Sorrow: Ballad for Afghanistan

A House White with Sorrow

Ballad for Afghanistan

By

Jennifer Heath

Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Heath

All rights reserved.

First (physical) edition published 1996, by Roden Press

Second (physical, illustrated) edition published 2002, by Baksun Books on behalf of Afghans4Tomorrow Afghanistan Literacy Programs

Third edition published 2011 Kindle Book © Jennifer Heath

The cover for A House White With Sorrow was designed and letterpress printed by Brad O’Sullivan on the Kavyayantra press at Naropa University.

Cover linocut by Sarah and Matt Corry.

In memory of my father,

to Jack, Matthew, and Sarah

and

for Tamim, Ali, Hussein, Abdul, Mohammed, Malli, Ghulam,

Ahmed, Aisha, and Shireen…wherever you are

and

for Roxanne Gupta and Wahid Omar…with thanks.

Contents

Prologue

Book One: A Separate Brown Planet

Book Two: Inside the Lion’s Jaws

Book Three: The Fruit of Heaven

Book Four: The City of Lamentations

Book Five: Jihad

Book Six: Brown Ocean, Little Salt Lake I Love to Sail

Epilogue

A Brief Glossary

Afterword

Prologue

On December 24, 1979, the Soviet Union, under Leonid Brezhnev, invaded Afghanistan with tanks and aircraft that entered the country by roads and airports built with Soviet and United States aid. The two superpowers found Afghanistan a perfect spot for spying on one another. In return, Afghanistan received tools for modernization. Afghanistan is landlocked and bounded on all sides by China, Pakistan, Iran and territories of the former Soviet Union: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It is one of the poorest nations on Earth, yet one of the richest in physical beauty, culture and history. It has now suffered three decades of war.

The lands that today comprise Afghanistan were once on the trade route to India. Each traveler and conqueror left a legacy, making it a confluence of civilizations. In the 7th century A.D., Arab invaders brought Islam to Afghanistan, establishing it as the primary religion. Most Afghans are Sunni Muslim (whereas Iran, for example, is primarily Shi’a). The major ethnic groups include Pashtun, Tajik, Nuristani, Uzbek, Turkoman and Hazara. The Pashtun have dominated since 1747, when Ahmad Shah established the Durrani dynasty.

In the 19th century, the British, having imposed their empire on India, became fearful that Russia would seep through Afghanistan to the Indian frontiers. British and Russian competition became known as The Great Game, and resulted in three British invasions of Afghanistan from 1838 to 1919, when the Durrand Line on the Indo-Afghan frontier was ratified by Britain and Afghanistan, dividing the Pashtun people into separate nations. In 1947, when Pakistan became independent from India, Afghanistan demanded self-determination for the tribes and launched a movement to establish a separate state called Pashtunistan. The results were chronic battles and skirmishes with Pakistan, finally resolved in 1967.

Meanwhile, Soviet influence was growing. The 1979 invasion precipitated a bloodbath, but the Afghan people have never tolerated invaders. Not for nothing was Afghanistan called Land of the Unruly, Land of the Insolent.

I am bound on the sword for

the pride of the Afghan name.

I am Khushal Khattak,

proud man of this day.

—tombstone inscription 17th century

Book One

A Separate Brown Planet

Alauddin Sayyid

September 7, 1980

Near Qandahar, Afghanistan

Shells roll down the morning sky.

I squat on the roof with Ghulam the farmer’s boy, huddled against the wind kicked up by the Soviet helicopter that daily circles the villages, strafes its fields, then tilts back toward Qandahar.

There is a blast. A long flame runs along the ground. Ghulam pitches against me. My gaze catches the flat, red star on the chopper’s tail. The star spurts and expands, until all I see is red.

Ghulam slides off the roof and falls to the powdery earth. He lands face down and still as a stone.

I dive for the ground. Mud sticks to the blood on my shirt, my trousers, beard and eyes. Blood from the boy who’d been listening to my stories of life in America and France. My life story that seems a lifetime ago before the Shoravee shayytan, the Russian devils, invaded our country.

A woman darts from the hut. She spills to her knees. She clutches the boy. Shakes him as if she could wake him. Frantic, falsetto cries rise from her throat and she jerks the veil from her head.

I cradle Ghulam and carry him into the house. The mother stumbles into my shoulder. Ghulam is the third one she’s lost to Russian fire.

I lay Ghulam on the charpoy. His thin body sways on the rope bed. The first villagers who heard the mother’s cries and saw the flares and shrapnel shove into the hut. I turn and walk out the door. A greybeard holds me back.

Badal, Alauddin Sayyid, the ancient demands. Blood revenge, Daktar Sahib.

I elbow him aside. I am sick of revenge. Sick of war. My stomach coils. The weight of blood and mud presses against my eyelids.

The wheatfields are embers. I vomit on the path.

Akbar & Anique Sayyid

1959

Washington, D.C.

Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

Anique sings and flutters around the patio table. She brushes dew from the cloth. The French, she tells her children, invented perfection.

Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

Anique sings to Jeanette Crowell. To the white napkins she’s folding into fans.

She sings to her grandmother’s silver cutlery and polishes it with her sleeve. She cups her hand under the tea cozy, checks the pot’s warmth, plumps the pillow on her husband’s chair.

Ambassador Sayyid will soon be finished with prayers and hungry for the baguettes she buys at the Belgian market on K Street and the English mulberry jam from a small grocery run by Moroccans in Georgetown.

Even before Da’ud had freed women of purdah, Anique enjoyed flaunting her Frenchness. It was more important back then. And her husband defied everyone to let her have her way. It was not Mohammed—God bless him and grant him peace—who made the laws of purdah, but ordinary men who came after, he said. Akbar’s mother had stuck her fingers in her ears to block this devil talk.

Anique raises her arms, stretches and glances about the garden to see if the servants are spying. She picks two roses and places them in a vase on the table.

In Washington, the servants care little about her activities. They are immigrants from Bolivia or Ethiopia. There are no reports from the cook to the KHAD, the Afghan Secret Service. Anique can’t help looking around again anyway. She is not like Jeanette, who takes liberty for granted. Anique has learned the hard way to treasure fresh, free air.

In the beginning, the custom of sheltering women angered her. She regretted her marriage. She hated Akbar. She wanted to smother him under their blankets. To suffocate him. When they made love, she lay cold and gray and panicked. She struggled to keep her throat open, her lungs from shrinking, waiting for his last soft spasm.

She discovered pleasure in purdah when Shaer was born. Within the veil, she was secure and still. Nothing existed but a clear, compact outline of herself protected inside the filmy, impenetrable wall of silk or rayon. Nursing her baby boy under the chadri, she felt whole. Purdah was no longer a prison, but a welcome place of solitude.

That still surprises her.

In Kabul, the royal women and wives of high government officials crowded into overstuffed rooms. Gossiping and teasing, they sought solace from the turmoil of men. They talked of equal rights. Progress. Then, at the sound of footsteps, they quickly covered their faces.

When the unveiling was ordered, no one disobeyed Da’ud. No one ever did, though Allah and their brothers and fathers might strike the women dead for their bare faces and blasphemy.

Akbar was too permissive, the women said. Anique was too haughty. She would always be a ferenghi, a foreigner. She sneered at them and clamped the chadri’s lace visor over her eyes. She had no friends.

Now she has Jeanette.

Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

With luck, the Foggy Bottom rain will wait until after breakfast. There are deep puddles in the cracked flagstone-and-cement courtyard, left from last night’s downpour. Poor Akbar. He hates the rain.

They met at the Sorbonne. It was a love match and they married despite Sayyid family objections. The old and venerated Sayyid clan—Durrani, the Pearl of Pearls—had had a different arrangement in mind. A bride’s price. A tribal exchange of property and status. Anique came with no sheep, no camels—what would she do with a sheep or camel? Walk it on a leash along the Champs d’Elysses? She had no land, no pastures, but a house in Montpelier and a Paris flat her cher papa had left her. A lot of good those did shepherds and nomads.

Her dowry was her strawberry hair, a boulevardier sashay and flinty patience. Like that of the Prophet’s dearest wife, A’isha, Akbar assures her. Anique doubts it, but she likes to hear it.

And, of course, there are her children.

Halal! Halal!

They yodel at the patio doors, wave and bound toward her. Shaer leaps and bats a high leaf on the magnolia tree. It spins and crackles. He bows to his mother like a gallant Scaramouche.

Yasmin and Maryam toddle onto the terrace and cheer for Shaer.

Her beautiful girls.

Bon jour, Maman, they call in chorus, prodded by their brothers. With one arm, Shaer lifts both his sisters onto their booster seats. Skinny Yasmin reaches for the sugar bowl. Shaer stops her hand.

Ay, mon dieu! Anique cries. Yasmin, did you not wash?

Yasmin shakes her pink curls and folds her freckled arms behind her back. Raven Maryam imitates her.

At breakfast on summer Sundays, the children play at French manners. La politesse for her sake. With this game, she fancies she civilizes them. The French, she tells them, also invented civilization.

Alauddin escorts Anique to her chair and holds it for her. She tucks her skirt and sits, nodding contentedly.

In Alauddin, Anique sees the mad Macedonian blood of Alexander, Sikander the Greek. As if a stray strain of blue-eyed Nuristani stock has sneaked into the Sayyid gene pool.

In Shaer—furiously scrubbing Yasmin’s fingers with his napkin—Anique sees Darius the Persian. Fierce, walnut eyes and honey skin like Akbar’s.

The girls are divided that way, too. East and West.

The filigree of a new moustache is settling across Shaer’s upper lip. When the whiskers finally grow as bushy as his father’s, Shaer will be more the lion for which he was named than this strapping, awkward donkey in a basketball letter sweater.

Alauddin is one year younger and hairless as a Swede.

Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

The boys stand at attention as the barefooted Ambassador crosses the patio puddles. Washington’s seaboard air makes Akbar perpetually queasy.

The boys kiss Papajan’s hand. His eyes are bleary from sobh, the first day’s prayer, and he wears his morning piety like a comforter around his traditional tunic and velveteen vest.

His sons wear traditional American high-school polo shirts, blue jeans and loafers.

Anique grins at Akbar and puckers her lips in a covert kiss. She reaches across the table, sweeps his hand and pours milky Indian chai into Akbar’s cup. He has such fluid beauty, organic dignity no Frenchman could hope to possess. Flesh and blood out of fairy tales.

At university in Paris, Sardar Akbar became more or less resigned to indecently dressed women with loud opinions. The nakedness was not titillating. There was no poetry without mystery. But the women’s cocky high spirits excited him. When Ambassador Sayyid feels deceived or confused by the convolutions of the kafir mind, the heathen mind, he asks his French wife’s advice. What she gives him is lively mocking, slapstick impersonations of congressmen and their shrill wives, of stealthy diplomats squinting across highballs at cocktail parties. Her bedroom skits never fail to make Akbar’s teeth ring with lust. And if she keeps sending him these belly-stirring kisses across the teapot, she can have kafir breakfasts, lunches and dinners every day for all he cares.

He believes in love, for he believes in progress. He believes Afghanistan, pinned in time like a desert rose, can no longer remain a stronghold against the speeding, graceless 20th century.

He smiles at Anique. He rubs his knee against her thigh. Delicious indecency. He butters his bread. The mulberry jam tastes like talkan, the mulberry jerky of Akbar’s youth. A hard, blushing pomegranate sits on the porcelain dish at his place.

He sugars his tea. One spoonful. Two. Three and four. He wraps his hand around the pomegranate. A channel to home. The Prophet—God grant him peace—said the fruit would purge the system of hatred and envy.

Akbar feels none of that, only a low, humming devotion to Allah and Afghanistan, to Anique and his fine daughters and sons. They will be educated in the West. In the fountain of progress. They will be doctors or engineers or agriculturalists. They will bring the new world to Afghanistan, while they live strictly by the code of Pashtunwali.

Each day, he rehearses them in the rules of Pashtunwali: hospitality, geniality, truce, persistence, constancy. The honor of women. Bravery, asylum. Honor among men, between enemies. Steadfastness, righteousness. Badal…blood revenge.

And daily he warns Shaer and Alauddin against corruption and mercurial faith. Against western disdain for God, for honor, for family. What is a man with his clan, he tells them, if not lost and invisible, wandering in wilderness, ashamed before Allah.

His sons will uphold the laws of Islam. They will make a love match between the 20th century and the word of God.

For Allah is great.

Allah o akbar.

A Folktale of Pashtunwali

The tents were pitched and the women prepared the evening meal. As dusk approached, a rider came out of the desert. He rode to the tent of the Khan and leaped from his horse, prostrated himself at the Khan’s feet, and demanded protection. A large band of horsemen with whom his family had a blood feud was following him and would surely kill him. The old Khan, wise beyond years and pure as his white beard, granted the supplicant asylum. The man was led to the guest tent and told to ready himself for dinner.

At dinner, the Khan’s young son stood and pointed at the stranger. Oh, my father! the boy cried, that is Badshah Gul, who two months ago murdered my brother, your oldest son.

Yes, but now he is a guest in our camp. He has asked for asylum, and we have given it to him. Remember, my son, even if it takes a hundred years, your brother’s death will be avenged.

The young son left his father’s tent. He took his brother’s dagger from its honored place. He crept to the guest tent. He buried the dagger in the breast of Badshah Gul. The blood of badal flowed dark and thick.

The next morning, the body of the guest was discovered. Cries and lamentations ran through the camp. The old Khan tore his clothing and ripped his turban in agony. Who could have done this? Who could have brought dishonor on the name of our family? The camps of the Baluch will forever condemn us for this dishonor!

The young son threw himself at his father’s feet. He pleaded forgiveness. It was blind rage, he said, that had driven him to dishonor the clan.

The old Khan took the knife which had killed the guest and plunged it into the heart of his son.

Carey Crowell

September 7, 1980

Jones Camp, Peshawar, Pakistan

I’m full of foreboding. Spiders creep under my skin. Is that surprising in this refugee camp? At night, when I close my eyes, I see bodies. This morning, goats bray outside my window, crying to be milked, while my little son Jahan pulls at my tit with such greedy force, I bite my lip to resist flinging him away.

As I sit on our bed waiting for Jahan’s small mouth and needle teeth to stop pumping, I picture these crowded quarters turning into empty space. My husband, Alauddin Sayyid, is flipping, spinning in air. Then I imagine Shaer, his brother, his enemy, up to his knees in guts and bodies. Shaer’s arms are open, aimed at catching Alauddin’s fall, but Alauddin keeps falling and never lands.

I have no patience today for Jahan. His blue eyes spell mischief. When he’s finished suckling, I shake myself loose and give him to Hazrat. Professor Jones, who founded this sanctuary for the maimed and homeless of Afghanistan, calls Hazrat my worthy right hand, but she is my dearest friend, my companion, the one who listens enraptured to my memories.

Don’t worry, Carey-jan, Hazrat says, taking the baby. You will hear from Daktar Sahib soon.

A new woman and her three bony kids arrived last night. On foot from the far north. The journey took more than a month. In that time, the stomach stops growling.

We settle the newcomer into a lean-to in a corner of the refugee compound. The camp women created this shelter of goat skins lined with diapers from my mother’s elaborate care packages. At least this jury-rigged home will be absorbent.

Today, the sun is dry for a change. For once, the Peshawar humidity has let up, the mold that crawls over everything has taken a breather. This fresh, arid air, so like Afghanistan, will not last.

To make room for the goat-skin dwelling, we destroy more vines and shrubs in this lovely Raj garden. That Professor Jones, a prep-school headmaster from Virginia, managed to procure this mansion for this purpose from the Pakistani bureaucrats amuses me—but not today. My hands are shaking and I jab my thumb on a thorn. JesusMaryandJoseph! I swear like my mother. My mother, the indominatable Jeanette Crowell, has an unbreakable bond with JesusMaryandJoseph! especially the exclamation point. She is a connoisseur of exclamation points, but so forceful and unbeatable, I have always relied on her perverse strength in spite of myself and, today, I envy it.

The refugees who understand Christian curses laugh at me. The laughter is catching and soon the others are guffawing, too. I’d laugh along, I’d be a good sport, if it weren’t one of those days when everything goes haywire. And it has been too long since I had word of my husband 300 miles away.

If there were stairs here, I’d fall up them. If there were mirrors, I’d crack them. If I had a tire, it would go flat.

Jeanette Crowell

1980

Paris, France

Dearest Daughter:

I can’t imagine what possible use you’ll have in that godawful concentration camp for my memoirs, as you put it. But hell, dearie, you can employ my purple prose to line the chicken coops. (I do hope you’re not in charge of chickens or any barnyard creatures. Take a lesson from your mother’s own tragic experiences.)

The beginning? Which beginning? Anique suggests I tell you how we became friends. She promises not to censor my recollections! It’s as good a place to start as any, I suppose, unless you’re dying to know my place of origin, mother’s maiden name, etc. In that case, I’ll gladly supply you with my stack of invalid passports. After all these years in the sacred service, you can bet it’s a tall stack, each stage of my life boiled into green-and-gold books stamped diplomat.

The sacred service is also a kind of beginning, for it giveth and taketh away and provideth every goddamned little thing. Gawd, am I glad to be out! It may have appeared to you that I put great stock in protocol, that miserable diplo-motto, but believe me, kiddo, it was merely lip service. In practice, I gave protocol short shrift.

Which is what brought Anique and me together. My forwardness inviting myself to the Afghan Embassy in Washington for tea was most definitely anti-protocol. Since the Crowell family was on its way to Afghanistan, I figured I’d get the skinny on the place. And I was terribly curious about this French wife of the Ambassador. I wondered how on earth she could bear Islamic attitudes toward women.

"Have you ever heard of a Frenchwoman who wasn’t candid?" I asked your father.

I arrived armed to the teeth with peonies. It turns out Anique despises peonies. They remind her of funerals.

Although Ambassador and Madame Sayyid gave many modest parties, Anique had few daytime visitors. Muslim wives were treated as outsiders as if they were invalids. There weren’t many calling cards in Anique’s silver dish.

Not that she cared. She’s not one for hen parties. Within Akbar’s family, she was accustomed to being an outsider, and she’d lost track of her Parisian friends. She’s revived some of those friendships lately, and I find her crowd rather dreary and shallow. But to each his own, n’est-ce pas, dear girl? She might as well have stepped off the planet when she married Akbar.

We’d made our date for Wednesday, the one weekday I didn’t have to chauffeur Teddy to some horrid after-school activity. Gad! Aren’t you fortunate there are no cub scouts in that wretched dump of yours, but I suppose instead you’ve already got my grandson bowing toward Mecca.

Anique woke early and before darling Akbar had finished his morning prayers and breakfasted, she had the cook mobilized baking petit fours. And there were the inevitable watercress sandwiches. At one-thirty, when the Ambassador drifted back to his office after lunch, Anique unlocked the liquor cabinet. Fortification. (And it was the key to that cabinet, you see, that would unlock our hearts.)

It was one of those grimy Washington afternoons that passes for an autumn day. I wore the