ARRIVAL

"If you see a blind person walking around a well, and remain quiet, it is a sin."

—Dari proverb

June 29, 1973

The brittle lion teeth of the desert rages, until we swoop down on a green strip in a salt desert, and see the New Mexico type adobe arches of an airport. We are at Kandahar, where natives are greeted like royalty as they descend from this miracle bird which has effortlessly soared over the hot sand hills. Dark, bearded, sun-wrinkled men push a staircase up against the plane, we glimpse camels and straw in one wing of the solo structure, then as quickly the stairs are pushed away, and we are airborne again, for Kabul.

It is Thursday, almost noon, when we land in Kabul, nine and a half hours from the ESDT. We had watched Kabul develop from the air, rugged, uneven patches of green and gray linked and edged by arteries of streets and roads, bowled by gray hills on two sides, and the ice laced Hindu Kush on the other—dusty hot, full of mirages in its large plain position in the middle. After deplaning, feet down on the cracked cement, we are dazed from the long trip and the falling heat like an out of season coat. Someone huddles us unprofessionally together for a group picture, collects our passports stuffed with visas like dealt out poker cards, as turbaned men and women squatting under thick scarfs, and children with dark round eyes watch us from the observation patio above, like so many strange intruders. We move into a bursting stuffed room of people to gather our baggage, fill out a form, then rattle through a sort of customs, to pause in a a waiting room/receptacle hall of chadris-ed women and modern-heeled, mothers-to-be, and skinny pairs of boys and girls clutching welcoming bouquets to greet their liberated brothers or fathers who have traveled beyond them.

Like limp laundry, we are scooped up, dropped in Peace Corps hands, cradled together volunteers, but not before the pajama-billowing, drab gray-dressed porters, one-half my weight, have carried away the baggage and shuffled disappointedly when we pay with the only funds we have, a German mark. Piled into an old Toyota truck, our luggage in another, we are swept into the city down one long straight street.

Now we know we have come to another side of the world: the baked faces of turbaned men walk stoically along the treeless avenues; donkey- burros and men carry stone-heavy long burlap bags, curved over their narrow backs like some outrageous sculpture of a hunchback; they sit on their heels along the jewie, the open ditches sewers loud with their filth and collection, as other vehicles swerve and scream by, driven without apparent rules. A bus swerves between us and another bus, loosely clothed men clinging out the windows like stickers on a bush, inanimate this moment. Women, ghostlike beneath their veils, or blatantly westernized in too high hairdos or raised shoes, appear as infrequently as ice in this broiled culture. Bazaars with their nut-brown owners settle among the rich colors of fruits or small packaged items, and colored soda water. But watching out of dry nervous eyes, we have not yet seen the fullness of this place.

At the Peace Corps complex, a repossessed hotel, full of wooden chairs with fine-rope supports, whitewashed walls, and a roomful of well-wishing Peace Corps volunteers (PCVs), we are greeted, warned, briefed and then as suddenly in line to be vaccinated for polio, tine-tested, shot to ban rabies, doused with malaria prophylactic pills (Aralen), and injected with gamma globulin by a sprite, white-goateed and teasing Dr. Jenkins.

Our group is arbitrarily divided; Tom and I are sent to the Ashraf Hotel, where a bulbous manager-guest with an idiotic fawning smile and a young thin boy with the posture of a coveted dreamer, proudly nod and point as they show us our rooms for the next two nights. We weave down a dark, narrow corridor and push open a door. Before us, resting on a linoleum checkered floor are two straw mattresses beds; their side boards and bottom rest alternatively on cinder blocks and akimbo wooden legs, as the beds lean wryly from the four corners. The mattress in its lumpy shape suggests an upright chaise-lounge; each is covered with two coarse sheets and a rough felt blanket. Against one white-washed wall (abundant with unidentifiable holes the size of potholes and loose cracked plaster, electric wires to engage the straggling bald bulbs in the ceiling to shine on call) stands a yellow-spun wooden dresser with drawers at the bottom, strangely heavy like the air in this room, a plastic table and two metal chairs with black vinyl covers for seats, a limp dusty pair of everyone's universal draperies over a design of glass and punctured screens, and a short door going out to a one and half-foot balcony ledge.

There is not yet time to absorb the senses of this places; we are whisked back to lunch at the PC training quarters, a lunch of iodine-basked tomatoes and cucumbers, nan, tea and boiled water, a pilau of rice, raisins and nuts and some mystery variety of meat; then we wander back to the bleak hotel room, test the water in the lightless bathroom which spits out of the spigot after long gurgling, nod at the spongy dampness around a tub and the putrid smell from the clogged waste just below the flush toilet, then sling our backs over sleeping bags, for a brief rest. We push ourselves awake again. It is 5:00, and seeking company, and wanting to sate our curiosity, rather than feed any appetite, we return to the PC office, where dinner comes large and plentiful, with mellow apricots and the national dish of ground beef and sauce (awshak), rice, carrots and raisins and yogurt, more nan, more tea. We drink unquenchably, our throats tight from the heat and dust, our noses full, even as we easedrop on the TEFL coordinator, our boss-to-be, who gives out details of our training and language instruction to begin the next day, as if dispensing rare, overly-culled mysteries.

It is 7:30 p.m. as we move along the streets of shadows, the darkness unnatural, past bent or staring men motionless along the bazaars, silent, suspended now like garish pus on a broken bone, before tailor shops and the guarded Iranian embassy with its Persepolis noble lion insignia, past night fruit stands piled high with grapes and round melons, beyond closed compounds, entrances and walls, where we are inaugurated into the the procedures of prayer time, families of women moving out toward some uncensored destination, single children floating in grinning lightness, a boy reciting the Koran in a lush-throated song, but mostly men, old and slow, bent and stretched prostrate on their prayer mat, turned facing Mecca's profound illusion in the west. Overheard, from open windows, come the shrill raucous sounds of modern music, an announcement rattles in succession from a station with brief English, then it is quiet, and we see a veiled figure leaning over the jewie. She coughs, begins wailing without explanation or identify, the sound plaintive, whirling up into the night as if smoke, and we wonder if she is tubercular, or in mourning for something else. But we can only pass on, more stiffly, up to our hotel rooms, where the heat shoots us like buckshot. Like retired puppets, our stings and handlers suddenly cut, we flounder, limp. There is energy only to settle in a rigor mortis abandon, and try to sleep.

Beyond our window in the courtyard, resonant with flowers and shade tress, cornered by straw roofed houses, or an undulated western fire escape, stretch the city houses of the ghosts who had passed us on the street. Suddenly out of them come the sounds, lonely as gathered time, of the final evening prayer, the strains assailing the mercifully cooling air of penetrated night, obliterating all other sounds during its solo flight, the deposited daily coverlet of faith, as a soul glides from the garden. Intermittently we sleep; the room like any other room where one struggles to settle on a hot night, in the dark forceless, strange, offering no rungs to let the weary climb a ladder of references or rest.

I wake at 3:30 Friday morning even before the birds and lay long before boarding the balcony to feel a maiden breeze, to see for the first time the baked gray-beiges of the compounds around us, their forms sharp in the not yet risen dust, mountains arrogant, unchanged, classic beauties marking the edges of sight.

On a rooftop in the distance, a small capped boy sweeps sand from his roof of straw; the square outlines of white-washed walls fall below, weedy.

We have read our list of recommended books, the humorous tales of Americans in Afghanistan in 1972, Spies Behind the Pillars, Bandits At the Pass: the Misadventures of an American Foreign Service Family Assigned to a Hardship Post, The CIA and Other Disasters; Through the Khyber Pass; Following Bengal Lancers on Holiday; The Ganges & the Gurus by Kathleen Trautman; as well as the definitive study by the American anthropologist team of Louis and Nancy Dupree, Afghanistan, so we knew about the country and this city, theoretically, like someone who has read all the books on sex education and human anatomy but never actually engaged in an intimate relationship.

What can we know?

We know about following any ridge of hills that crisscross Kabul down to the river, descending like a rock in quicksand to the warren of straw-thatched, leaning stalls, dun-colored, walled compounds, open, pungent sewage ditches, and men bent in half, donkey and camels stalking, burlap bags, boxes, heaved high on human or animal's dragging flanks and broad backs, as children collect their dung as it falls, a family's fuel to dry for winter warmth, or cooking fires.

And, we know, have been told, how difficult it is to stop before one of a thousand indistinguishable walls, knock on the wide wooden door, and enter.

We know something of how this city had been two decades earlier, how Kabul in the 1950's, like the captain of an otherwise sinking ship, flourished with authority and new status, at the heart of the Cold War's manic race to cultivate strategic alliances and invest Western money. The land, its leaders had learned from their still recent past, century-old tussles with British and Czarist would-be expansion, the secret to power and influence: Play one power against another.

Then, as now, as perhaps it would always be, the country was dirt poor.

Step by step in the 50's and 60's, the Soviet Union had built an international airport, provided cheap black-market flights north to insure markets for its goods, offered obligation-laden loans, equipped and trained the Afghan military with tanks, uniforms, MIG fighters and artillery. A network of rock and dirt roads sported man-pulled carts, camels, donkeys, taxi, and jeep travel. There were no railroads and no rivers deep enough for ships in this country.

Yet people came there, over and over, from all corners of the globe—in those years most recently from Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Japan, Iran, the Netherlands, Turkey, Russia and the U.S. They descended regularly into this land-locked and slightly xenophobic country, where the price of basic food, lodgings and labor ranked among the cheapest in the world. At that time, the population of Afghanistan was 12 million, more than two-thirds of whom were farmers growing wheat and vegetables or nurturing orchards and livestock on the three percent of the land which was arable, in the snow-fed river valley's on the northern side of the 20,000 foot Hindu Kush.

People lived as they had for thousands of years without benefit of sanitation or medicine or literacy or government-services. Merchants exported dried fruit, found sellers in India and Pakistan—when Pakistan didn't close its borders—while lamb skins, karakul, was traded to the U.S. The per capita income was about $20.

A strong, rigid and conservative Sunni Islam ruled intrinsically every aspect of life. Pushtoons, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Arabs, Kutchis and Turkomen practiced the Pillars like drinking their tea or eating daily nan, while resident in the bleakest mountainous areas, relegated to low-paying menial jobs, the Mongol-originating Hazaras made up the small minority of Shi'ite followers, a group actively discriminated against, especially by the ruling Pushtu families.

But in that insular, isolated country, the culture of Islam, not necessarily the known "laws," ruled in those years. People looked to mullahs for authority on daily social issues, as well as advice on religion, medicine, and law. Anyone serving in the Cabinet had to be a Moslem. Foreigners were welcomed but carefully monitored in a capital full of spies and informers. And, technically, foreign marriages were not legal.

In the late 1960's, Kabul had bustled, lively with sprawling classical eastern bazaars and shops, broad avenues, a scattering of sparkling new offices, hotels, banks, government offices; and madly illogical foot, motorized and animal traffic. It was, also, the required stopping place for the WT's, "world travelers," the international youth traveling cross-country from the States or Europe to the fabled riches of India and beyond. Here were easy drugs and the cheapest accommodations and food in the world from a people legendary for their hospitality to everyone.

The Kabul we arrived in still pulses.

People moved in swirls of color: Traditionally garbed men in their striped silk chapans, intricately wound flowing turbans and woven ethnic caps, billowing peron and tanbon, blended with sandaled or high-heeled and veiled women in chadris (burqa), or long, flowery shawls. School girls in black uniforms and demure white scarves, boys in monotoned shirts and loose draw pants stuffed into oversize trousers to attend classes, walked beside modern Kabul women in Jacqueline Kennedy-esque coiffures, high heels, and miniskirts.

For those with any money, the city opened like Ali Baba's cave. Here was a paradise for creative shoppers, treasure hunters who savored rolling up their sleeves, navigating taxis and buses between sprawling destinations, and bargaining over green tea and sweets in the back rooms of thousands of hospitable but canny shopkeepers, or off the donkey-borne inventory or rolling wooden cart of more itinerant salesmen.

The bazaars were everywhere. In addition to those on "Chicken Street," the nerve center for the WT's, there were those for locals and expatriates—at Jade Maiwand, Charahi Saadaat, and Bagh-I-Umumi, where one can garnish household goods, wild ducks and partridge, electrical supplies, silver jewelry, chapans (traditional long-sleeved coats), gilims (woven rugs), or hunt for knitted goods off the Nadir Pushtun Wat. The interested bargained for hours for pusteen (fur-lined embroidered coats) at Jade Wilayat; pawed through rows and rows of second-hand clothes imported by the ton from the States and Northern Europe near the grain bazaar at the Mandawi; searched for books and magazines and canceled stamps; or re-supplied lost photograph equipment or found a new camera on some corner, somewhere.

Besides ubiquitous food stalls, kebab stands, and the handful of "formal" Afghan restaurants (in the Afghan Department Store, the Metropole and Spinzar Hotels, and in Sitara), one could find Chinese, German, and Italian food, and even—although legally forbidden—beer and wine.

The standard "footprint" of the city, in 1973, as we learned quickly, began at the center of Kabul in Zarnegar Park, with its mausoleum of Amir Abdur Rahman, Queen Halima's ornately decorated nineteenth century home. To the northeast sat the Ministry of Education and the beginning of the Salang Highway going to the north provinces, to the south the Afghanistan Tourist Organization and the National Archives. Further on was the Arg or Citadel, a complex housing Afghanistan's monarchy, the site for coronations, audiences, and occasional loya jirga from the 1880's on. The Citaldel's main gates opened on to Jade Istiqlal (Independence Avenue), which ran past the Ministry of Defense and onto the Kabul River; to Pushtoonistan Square, the heart of modern Kabul into the 70's, with the Khyber Restaurant on one side sharing the Ministry of Finance building and the Kabul Hotel with its bustling restaurant just down the block.

The Pul-i-Khushti Mosque, on Nadir Pushtun Wat, beside the Pul-i-Khusti Bridge, sat like a crown in the oldest part of Kabul, where stalls, drying carpets and food stands crowded the river bank, while webs of unpaved streets, the entrance to the Char Chatta Bazaar, moved out from the wide avenue between the bridge and the Jade Maiwand. Four centuries before, a covered bazaar with four arcades, open squares, fountains and colorfully-painted walls, it flourished, a warren of open air commerce, cobblestone streets, livestock lots and stalls, housing the Sikh moneychangers, along with sellers of silk, embroidered caps, silver, used clothes and a myriad of other things.