My fixer, Azar, is eighteen. He is a big bony boy, big hands, big smile. His clothes are greasy and torn and he always wears the same clothes. In mutilated English he blurts out that he expects to be paid FEEF-TEE DOE-LARRSE FUR EVVER-REE DAY-EESE. It is the first thing he says. He is humble, and also angry, and I tell him we will see how good he is, and he’s no good at fixing, and after a day of sightseeing I tell him twenty bucks, and he is happy until I tell him I won’t use him again. Anger washes over his face like a cloud passing over the sun.
Azar comes back the next day and takes me to taste the poverty of his family. He has six brothers and two sisters and “home” is like a crowded stable. No one has work. They are too hospitable and they look at me like I am their answer to something. I tell Azar, “O.K., you will be my back-up fixer in Kabul.” Working together frustrates both of us, but I feel good giving Azar $20 for a day with me, and he feels good taking it, but he is always angry after.
The Spinzar Hotel is an ambivalent sarcophagus.. Mornings begin with breakfast in the sunshine of the dining room on top. The gaudy architecture, the spiral staircases, the faded 1960’s posters from Afghan tourism advertising smiling British blondes skiing, the long hallways with missing light-bulbs and moldy carpets, the cold, barren rooms—it is as heavy and unappealing as an old bearskin coat and it both suffocates and comforts me. The other hotel guests all appear to be permanent.
The waiter makes me walk over to his table and ask for something, and while standing there he interrogates me out of apathy while staring out the window. Each day’s questions become more private, but he never comes to my table. The apathetic waiter sat at his table and smoked, across the big dining room, nostalgic for the days when banquets filled the hall with guests and food and laughter. Some days he only stares at me. The heavy décor is matched by the heaviness of life on the streets, and you feel it from the dining room.
Kabul in March is a dirty, cold, windy city. By then the snow has melted away from the valley but the mountains remain white and frozen. Dirt covers everything, whipped up by old Kazahk and Uzbek trucks that groan and bump over the pot-holed roads and slop through the mud of the morning thaw, and by convoys of Hummers with big guns sticking out of them and U.S. soldiers tucked inside, frightened. The speeding convoys run people down on the streets. There is a thick, cold tension on the street—the week after I left, Kabul exploded in riots and suicide bombings after the latest hit-and-run by U.S. forces.
From the top of the Spinzar I watch the masses of people moving along the canal, the dust rising and blowing them sideways, the people boarding the old, heavy silver-and-blue buses like cattle boarding a train, and the buses roaring off in clouds of dust. Walking the streets of Kabul, the people and dust are as thick as a cattle drive. Like the waiter who didn’t want to move from his chair, there is a momentum of decay and hopelessness, as if everything you do will be meaningless, but you must do it, and that is how I felt everywhere in Kabul.
Azar takes me to a refugee “camp” on the outskirts of the city. The refugees came home from Iran and Pakistan after years of suffering. “The women beg in the streets,” says Jafaar, the community delegate. We are touring shattered buildings that are “home” to 300 families. “There are no jobs for men or for widows. During the winter many children died. Colds. Coughs. Diarrhea. Fevers. There are no doctors helping us. There are two water pumps but these are far from the buildings.”
The gutted, crumbing “buildings” are exoskeletons of former apartment houses and they are seething with suffering. You can see this in the eyes of the old woman cooking gruel in a greasy pot, her only pot, and her only gruel. You can see it in the toothless smile of the government soldier who searches people as they enter the refugee “camp,” his partner smoking a cigarette, finger on trigger. You see it in little Soman, who is hysterical to see you, because she lives with the terror of being a six year-old girl in a war zone, and she cannot help but choke with excitement, which escapes like a squeal out of her mouth and startles even her, making her eyes dart to the adults in fear and her lips seal shut like a clam. Hope and fear bubble behind Soman’s darting eyes.
Soman is excited because I have come to the building where she lives, the “home” where she has risen in the morning to find her playmate, Farida, dead, after she plunged three floors and landed face first on cement. They show me the puddle of blood, frozen. There are no bathrooms and no banisters on the stairs and no lights, and three children have fallen in the past month. That is why Soman is hysterical: someone cares enough to witness, to ask questions about people’s lives, to listen to their stories. Across the hall on the third floor, where Soman lives, I peer into an empty room, because they did not want me to go there, and the floor is dotted with piles of ****, like neatly spaced cookies on a huge cookie sheet, half-filled, because it is not safe to move through the building or go outside, where the outhouses are, in the cold, dark night of Kabul.
Covering walls and floors is plastic sheeting branded UNHCR and I ask when UNHCR brought these. They didn’t: they buy the sheeting in the market. There is a blast-hole where the cold wind of Kabul blows over little Soman, huddled up with her mama and her papa and her two sisters and brother, in one bed, shivering, and the images of Soman shivering and Soman squealing with joy and Soman splitting her skull open in the middle of night, haunt me every day I am in Afghanistan, and after.
“The United Nations—UNCHR—this is just a name but they are not caring about us,” said a woman’s rights advocate. “The U.N. says they are helping these refugees but they are not doing anything. If you ask the refugees they will say: ‘We do not know those people. Who are they? They do not come here. No one comes here.’ ”
I asked. It was true. At the offices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees—whose brand logo is “UNHCR”—the official spokesman was contemptuous and disinterested. “Those people are not refugees. They come to Kabul for a hand out but we are not in the business of hand-outs to people who do not need them.”
No, but photographers and journalists take pictures of the plastic sheeting branded UNHCR—free advertising to win donations from Americans and Europeans back home.
“I told you the UNHCR and UNICEF they are all coming here and making pictures and films and some calendars,” Froozan told me, twice. “They are taking these pictures and publishing these pictures but they do not help the Afghan refugees. They are just selling these pictures or using them to make money for themselves.” I worked for UNICEF in Ethiopia in 2005. I didn’t want to admit it, but Froozan was right.
I was opening the door to my room at the Spinzar when someone shouted, “Where are you from?” I looked up to see a big Afghan man coming down the hall. “I’m from America.” He was walking fast, his robe in the wind behind him, and his voice thundered through the hall. “I HATE AMERICANS.” He was on me now like a raging bull and I turned and looked him straight in the eye. “All Americans or only the terrorist Americans?” The big man stopped. He was surprised. A smile came over his face, and then he laughed. I didn’t.
Mohammed Miraki was born in Afghanistan in 1983. His family fled the Russian invasion of 1982, arriving in the U.S. in 1984. “There are people starving on the streets,” Mohammed tells me straight off. A social scientist with a PhD, Mohammed is gentle and soft-spoken. He is also appropriately outraged by the ongoing international war crimes against his people.
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