MAZAR-E-SHARIF — Friday in Afghanistan: a day of leisure, war and poverty permitting. The more pious families dress up for a trip to the mosque. The less pious pack lunches and drive out of the smoggy tumult of the city for roadside picnics.
I sleep in, until 5:30. Half the house is up, mostly the women, who take turns insisting that I eat: bread, tea, the delightful lamb dish the family's matriarch is already stewing outside in a giant aluminum vat over a fire in a cut-up oil drum. I nibble on the meat and take leave. A young man named Hamidullah, a good friend of Ramesh, my translator, has invited me to go hiking in Sholgara.
The last time I was in Sholgara, eight years ago, the city was a front line in the massive turf war between the private armies of two powerful Afghan warlords, Ustad Atta Mohammed (now the Tajik governor of Balkh province) and Abdul Rashid Dostum (the Uzbek general whom human rights organizations accuse of mass murders of war prisoners, and who keeps falling in and out of favor with the Karzai government). Combat has ebbed but never ended, and small, locally based detachments of the two militias still clash here from time to time. A few months ago, the local police chief tells me, there were some kidnappings; a Western relief agency's car was ambushed and burned; a group of road workers were shot at.
Hamidullah pouts when I bring this up.
"You are my guest," he says. "Where I am taking you, it is secure."
Mazar-e-Sharif to Sholgara
Afghanistan's blood-drenched history, ancient and recent, rolls past the car windows.
Here is the turnoff to the city of Balkh, where Alexander the Great took his first wife, Roxanne, whom the record-keepers at the time described as the second-most beautiful woman in the world, after Stateira, the wife of the Persian king Daruis III.
Here are the crenelated bulwarks of Qala-i-Jangi, a 19th-century castle where Dostum, in 2001, stabled his horses and kept his prisoners. Here, in November 2001, a CIA operative was killed during an uprising of Taliban inmates; the U.S. air raid called in to quash the uprising killed almost 400 prisoners. The air raid also killed Dostum's horses; their cadavers were left to decompose long after the human bodies had been removed. The memory of that smell hits me as we drive by.
Twenty minutes west of Mazar-e-Sharif the paved road ends. Our car kicks up pale dust as we drive alongside the turbid, mocha-colored Balkh River, pregnant with the snowmelt and clay it picks up as it meanders from the Hesar mountain range 100 miles to the south. The river gurgles like the names of the landmarks it scythes through: the Alborz range, the Chishmish Afa springs. Hamidullah tells me the springs become warm in the winter.
Past the Alborz range, the temperature drops 10 degrees and the air clears. In the far distance I see snow where the Hindu Kush tapers into the Turkestan Mountains, with peaks propping up the pale sky at 10,000 and 13,000 feet. The mountains are white, then blue, then gray, then green as they swell toward us.
"I love you, Afghanistan!" Hamidullah exclaims. He is 21.
Sholgara
We pull up to a pedestrian rope bridge sagging over the murky Balkh River, leave the car, and cross the bridge on foot. In a month, after the snowmelt that feeds it is gone, the current will slow down, disgorge the mud into the fields and pastures up north and run clear blue, and men and boys will swim in it on hot summer nights, if there is no fighting.
At a farmhouse on the other side of the river, Hamidullah's cousin and an 8-year-old nephew join us. We will return to this house for a lunch of creamed spinach, rice, fresh vegetables, lamb, and wheaty nan served on a dastarkhan spread over the carpeted floor, and my driver, Qaqa Satar, as he always does when we eat together, will make little lifting motions with his hands, ordering me to eat, eat, take more, because I am too thin, because I eat too little -- but, really, because I am his guest and because he wants to show me a good time. So what if his homeland is a war zone?
For now, we begin our hike.
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