Mahbuhbullah: then and now.
AI KHANOUM, DASHT-E-QALEH — Above the dung-colored rapids of the Panj River, in the shadow of some stern sedimentary cliffs, sprawls the carefully measured grid of the city Alexander the Great built for his Afghan trophy wife, Roxanne, in 328 B.C.
Little remains of Alexandria Oxiana. Nomad invaders sacked the temples and the main palace in the second century B.C. Front lines washed over the gymnasium and the living quarters during the Soviet invasion. Taliban howitzers pummeled the bathhouse and the citadel. Northern Alliance marksmen used the limestone curlicues of Corinthian columns for target practice.
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But you can guess the outlines of a perfectly round theater where wild garlic now sprouts through bits of pottery in a circular field. You can clasp your fingers around a warm shard of red, glazed clay and imagine the pitcher it once completed, full of wine. You can picture, amid the patterned brickwork French archaeologists excavated in the 1960s and then abandoned, girls running down to the river -- the Oxus of antiquity -- to fetch water in ewers they balance on their heads, and shepherds heading to the jade hills at sunup with their flocks. You can see men and women living and dying anonymously in the city the Afghans poetically call Ai Khanoum: Lady Moon.
It is easy to envision all this because on the other side of some abandoned tank berms and trenches lies the silt-rich farmland of Dasht-e-Qaleh, where people still live this way, nameless and abandoned by everyone -- even by time itself.
I haven't been to Dasht-e-Qaleh in eight years. It could have been 800. It could have been eight days.
The road to the village is still made of mud. Jackknifed farmers still hoe the quilts of their wheat and pea fields with wooden, hand-held tools. Boys no older than 10 still holler neighborhood sheep into flocks to take to pasture at dawn. Mahbuhbullah, my friend in whose house of mud and straw I roomed in 2001 and 2002, still spends his days squatting between the furrows of his pumpkin patch.
With the help of some local boys and my half-erased memory I locate his house at the very end of a long, crooked alley barely wide enough for our sedan. I find Mahbuhbullah where I left him eight years ago: in his field, talking with a neighbor. He rises slowly from the ground on the far edge of the field. He has gained weight. The dimple in his forehead is more pronounced. He walks slowly, squinting at me against the sun: His eyesight, like mine, has gotten worse with age.
Then his face crumbles into that wonderful smile that graced many of my days in northern Afghanistan at the beginning of this war, his pace quickens, and I am scooped up into a bear hug and rushed into the house, where his wife Nargiz is kissing me on the cheek, three, six, nine, 12, 18 times. Photos come out. Children, all grown up, come in. Nargiz is laughing; her voice sounds like a river. She has not aged a bit.
Najiba, Mahbuhbullah's first wife, lives in a separate house now, in a different part of the village, with her five children. This seems to please Nargiz, who shares Mahbuhbullah's bed. She has borne him five more children since I saw her last. Her youngest son yawns and smiles in my arms. He has his father's smile.
Mahbuhbullah is not smiling. He worries that war will return here. In recent months, the Taliban has begun to encroach on his village. The Islamist militia has taken over three villages to the northeast -- the nearest less than an hour away on a dirt road. (So time does exist here, after all -- it is needed to determine the proximity of conflict.) Much of Kunduz province, which begins a dozen miles to the west, is under Taliban control. If the Taliban comes to Dasht-e-Qaleh, Mahbuhbullah worries, NATO and Afghan troops will follow. There will be fighting. The D30 field gun that now rusts in a highland pasture overlooking the village may once again pummel his fields with 122-millimeter shells. There may be house-to-house searches that will frighten his 13 children and upset his beautiful wife, Nargiz. Maybe even air raids, which in Afghanistan have a history of discriminating poorly between civilians and combatants.
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