MATTHEW LEEMING
0Kabul n the trail of genetic traces of Alexander's soldiers in Afghanistan, I arrived in Badakhshan. the country's most remote and beautiful province that abuts China. I went to see my old friends at the government guest house, which is set on an island in the middle of the Kokcha river. We sat on a terrace with the river roaring 20 feet below us. Night fell quickly, and I looked up at more stars than I have ever seen before in my life; it was as if my sight had been miraculously restored. Occasionally, an orange tracer shell arced silently upwards as government soldiers tested their guns. The only thing to do for fun here is to take naswar. I asked Shafid, a turbaned old man who seems to have some sort of decorative function, what it was, and he said, It is part of narcotic. When you put it in your mouth, you will become like crazy man.' He showed me how to cup it in the palm of your hand and throw it underneath a raised tongue. It looked like ground tobacco and tasted revolting, and had no effect on me. Shafid said it was no good and went to fetch dope (chas) instead. When I gave him a packet of Rizla papers, his eyes nearly popped out of his head: he claimed never to have seen this invention before. I doubt this, because he proceeded to roll a Brobdingnagian spliff, jabbering at me in Farsi. I think he said, 'This is called a Kandahar Carrot.' With truly Afghan hospitality, he insisted that I take bigger and bigger puffs. After a bit, and with great difficulty, I went to get my Walkman and lay down on the pathway staring up at the stars and listening to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. Heaven must be a bit like this.
At vast expense, I hired a pickup to Alexandria-on-the-Oxus. At dusk, we stopped at a chai khana (tea house) at Rustaq and I was accosted by a boy who spoke excellent English. He was called Nauser. He invited me to spend the night at his house. We sat in a room upstairs with five men, all either obscure relatives or people be had just befriended. I was sitting crosslegged and clumsily knocked the chai over, cursing myself. But they all said, `No, no; it's good luck.' The only entertainment. apart from me, was a tiny black-and-white television, powered by a car battery and showing a Tajik soap opera, which none of them could understand. Suddenly, there was an on-screen kiss. Nauser called to others in the next room. They rushed in and there was complete quiet until it was over.
Four days of travel later, I hitched a lift on a lorry and spent the morning ascending the Anjuman Pass that links Badakhshan to the Panjshir Valley at 15,000 feet, We followed the river upwards until it became a stream, still the same beautiful aquamarine, with waterfalls white like ice. Just before the pass proper, there is a marshy lake, which is the source of the Anjuman river. Here the aquamarine deepens to a green-turquoise. The pass itself is spectacular. To get a better view, I joined my fellow passengers riding shotgun, like presidential bodyguards, on the running-boards, leaping on and off to push when we got stuck. At the top, I took a picture of the lake, the road winding up to it, and on either side massive mountain ranges stretching beyond the horizon. I was standing on the watershed between Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, between the Oxus and the Indus river systems. It was very hot, and the sky was the light-blue of the lapis lazuli mined in the Blue Mountain, very close by.
On the way down the other side, I had the usual futile conversation with the passengers. Could they come and live with me in England? No, I said firmly, that was illegal. Was I married? Why not? Was it really true that in England men could go with men? 'Yes,' I said, 'and with animals, too.' One boy said that he had seen women with women on Tajik TV, which is obviously the sort of corruption the Taleban were out to stop — and quite rightly. Tajik TV seems to be the source of all the lubricious excitement available here. Then we got on to reli gion and evolution, my views on which offended them so much that I had to get back in the car. The only novelty was that one boy said triumphantly, 'Why does it say "In God We Trust" on American money?', as if he had floored me with a previously unacknowledged argument for the existence of God. 'I don't know,' I said. 'Something to do with the Freemasons, probably.'
At Bagram airbase I hitched a lift on a UN flight back to Kabul. On the plane I met a well-known writer and old Afghan hand. He was wearing wraparound dark glasses and an open-necked shirt showing perfectly coiffed silver chest hair. He had a rather attractive woman in tow. I said that I wanted to go to the Wakhan Corridor. He was discouraging. He wanted to stop me encroaching on his patch. I do the same if I meet people in England who want to go to Afghanistan. Leave it alone. It's mine. He said that I would get ripped off by porters, kidnapped and tortured to death. Only his considerable machismo and negotiating skill in Farsi prevents this from happening to him, apparently, 'And I have to re-negotiate with my guides every morning,' He kept his wraparound dark glasses on all the time. After making my flesh creep, he left me sitting in the shade of an abandoned Russian plane on the tarmac and disappeared with an armed guard.
Recently I have been thinking that one advantage of being a writer as opposed, say, to running a tile factory is that I don't get abusive letters from customers. Then I went to the press centre and found the most vituperative ad hominern attack that I have ever received. It was from an academic in Manchester who has a vertebra of Philip of Macedon. My reference to his possession of this relic in The Spectator has riled the Greek archaeological services with all the added bitterness of the Elgin marbles dispute. I admitted my mistake, which was to suggest that a lab unconnected with his university could extract DNA from it: 'If you want a correction published on this point, I should be only too glad to suggest to the editor that he should do so. He may not feel, though, that it is a point of any substance at all, But I know that an academic's perception of what constitutes a point of substance can differ from a normal person's,' which I thought both witty and offensive, comparable in its own way to Dr Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield. I printed it out and reread it repeatedly by the light of a paraffin lamp in my guesthouse, giggling at my own cleverness, like Mr Toad.
Previous page
