The bathroom is a cubicle in the kitchen, divided off by a wall with an open hatch; it is not much more than a hole in the concrete floor and a tap. In one corner is a wood-burning stove where water can be boiled for washing up. There is also a large water-tank, which can be filled when there is water in the pipes. Over the tank is a small shelf with a shampoo bottle, a bar of soap, which is always black, some toothbrushes and a Chinese toothpaste tube containing a grainy substance with an unidentifiable chemical taste.
‘This was once a nice flat,’ Sultan reminisces. ‘We had water, electricity, paintings on the walls, everything.’
But during the civil war the flat was pillaged and burnt. When the family returned the flat had virtually been demolished and they had to make do as well as they could. The oldest part of Mikrorayon, where the Khan family lived, lay on the front line between the forces of Mujahedeen hero Massoud and those of the hated Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Massoud was in control of large parts of Kabul, while Hekmatyar’s power was concentrated on a height outside Kabul. They shot at each other with rockets, many of which landed on Mikrorayon. On yet another height the Uzbek Abdul Rashid Dostum had established himself, on a third the fundamentalist Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Their rockets landed on other parts of the town. The fronts moved from street to street. The warlords fought for four years until at last the Taliban rolled into Kabul and the warlords fled to make way for the priestlings.
The battles ceased six years ago but Mikrorayon still resembles a battlefield. The building is peppered with bullets and shell holes. Many windows are covered in plastic rather than glass. There are cracks in the ceilings and the top flats are burnt out; gaping wounds where rockets once exploded. Some of the fiercest battles of the civil war took place in Mikrorayon and most of the inhabitants fled. On the heights of Maranjan, above Mikrorayon, where Hekmatyar’s forces were assembled, nothing has been done to clear up after the civil war. Rocket-launchers, destroyed vehicles and tanks lie scattered around, a mere fifteen-minute walk from the Khan family home. This was once a popular picnic spot. Here too is the grave of Nadir Shah, Zahir Shah’s father, who was assassinated in 1933. Now the tomb is a ruin, the cupola full of holes and the pillar broken. The less impressive tomb of his wife, next to his, is in an even worse condition. It looms up like a skeleton on a projection overlooking the town, all in bits. Someone has tried to fit the pieces together, so the quotations from the Koran can be read.
The whole hillside is mined, but amongst the broken rocket-casings and metal rubbish can be seen something that bears witness to peace. Inside a circle of round stones orange marigolds grow. They alone have survived civil war, drought and the Taliban.
From the heights, at a good distance, Mikrorayon looks like any place one might chance upon in the former Soviet Union. The buildings were a gift from the Russians. In the fifties and sixties Soviet engineers were sent to Afghanistan to build the so-called Khrushchev blocks which eventually filled the Soviet Union, and which were exactly the same wherever they were built, in Kabul, Kaliningrad or Kiev: five-storey apartment blocks with two, three or four rooms.
When one gets closer to it is clear that the shabby impression is due not to customary Soviet decay, but bullets and war. Even the concrete benches by the front doors are smashed and lie like overturned wrecks on the pitted earth that was once asphalt.
In Russia babushkas sit on these benches, old women with walking sticks, moustaches and headscarves, watching everything that goes on around them. In Mikrorayon it is only old men who sit outside the houses and gossip, while the prayer beads slide between their fingers. Barely a handful of trees are left standing to give them meagre shade. The women hurry past carrying shopping bags under the burkas. One rarely sees women stop to have a chat with a neighbour. In Mikrorayon women go visiting if they want to chat, and make sure no men outside their own family see them.
The apartments were designed on Soviet principles of equality, but there is certainly no equality inside the four walls. While the idea behind the building of the apartments might have been to create classless dwellings in a classless society, in practice the Mikrorayon flats were seen as residences for the middle classes. At the time they were built, it was a sign of status to move from the mud huts in the villages around Kabul to the apartments with running water. Engineers and teachers, shop-owners and truck-drivers moved here. But the word middle-class now means little in a country where so many have lost all they had, and where everything has regressed. The once soenviable running water has been a joke for the last ten years. On the first floor there is cold water in the pipes for a few hours each morning. Then nothing. Water reaches the second floor now and again, but no water ever reaches the third floor, the pressure is too weak. Wells have been dug outside the flats and every day children stream up and down the staircase carrying buckets, bottles and kettles.
Likewise, the electricity supply used to be the pride of the apartments. Now, on the whole the inhabitants live in darkness. Owing to the drought electricity is rationed. Every other day there is power for four hours, between six and ten in the evening. When there is power in one part of town, another part is blacked out. Sometimes everyone is blacked out. The only solution is to get out the oil lamps and sit around in semi-darkness while the acid smoke stings the eyes and makes them water.
The Khan family live in one of the older apartment blocks, by the dried-out Kabul River. Bibi Gul looks on the gloomy side of things, as she sits confined within the cracked concrete desert, far from the village where she grew up. Bibi Gul has not been happy since her husband died. According to his relatives he was hard-working, deeply religious, strict but fair.
When his father died Sultan took over the throne. His word is law. Anyone who does not obey him will be punished. Not only does he lord it over the household, but he also tries to rule over the siblings who have moved away. The brother only two years younger than him kisses his hand when they meet and God help him if he dares contradict Sultan, or even worse, lights up a cigarette in front of him. Respect must be shown to the older brother in every way. Sultan has his reasons for such strict behaviour. He believes that if families are not disciplined and hard-working, there will never be a new, prosperous Afghanistan.
If neither scolding nor hitting has any effect, the next punishment is rejection. Sultan never talks with or about his younger brother Farid. Farid refused to work for Sultan in his bookshop and started up his own bookshop and bindery; Sultan has never spoken to him since. Nor is anyone else in the family allowed to talk to him. Farid’s name is never mentioned. He is no longer Sultan’s brother.
Farid also lives in one of the devastated apartments in Mikrorayon, only a few minutes away from the Khans. When Sultan is in his bookshop Bibi Gul visits Farid and his family, without Sultan’s knowledge. So do his siblings. In spite of the prohibition Shakila accepted her brother’s invitation before her wedding and spent a whole evening with him, telling Sultan that she was with an aunt. Before a girl gets married all the family must each invite her to a farewell dinner. Sultan is invited to family celebrations but not his brother. None of the cousins or uncles or aunts wants to fall out with Sultan; that would be unpleasant and unprofitable. But Farid is the one they love.
No one really remembers any longer what happened between Sultan and Farid, just that Farid left his big brother in a rage while Sultan shouted after him that the bond between them was broken for ever. Bib Gul asks them both to be reconciled, but the two brothers just shrug their shoulders. Sultan, because it is the duty of the younger to ask for forgiveness, Farid because he feels it is Sultan’s fault.