CHAPTER 12
AFGHANISTAN
Julia Gallo knew the Pashtu word for whore. She’d heard it muttered behind her back and under people’s breath in countless villages throughout Afghanistan. This time, though, it was different.
The four boys standing above her in her small, mud cell were repeating it in an effort to build up their courage. For what, she had no idea, but she knew that it wouldn’t be good. She was being held by the Taliban, that much she had ascertained, and Taliban children were raised on extremist videos. They were subjected from ages as young as three years old to videos of suicide bombings, beheadings, torture, and rape. It was a diet of unadulterated horror that served to desensitize them to violence and inoculate them against having any pity whatsoever for their enemies. Gallo had no illusions about how they viewed her. She was their enemy.
In less than a week of captivity, she had become an emotional and physical wreck. They kept her in a room twelve feet long by eight feet wide. The room had one window, which had been nailed shut and covered over on the outside by a piece of canvas. Her only connection with the world outside was a small ventilation hole the circumference of a Coke can cut into the bottom of one of the walls near the floor. Through it she could make out a small tree of some sort in the foreground and a narrow mountain valley beyond.
Lying on her stomach studying the tree and the small sliver of valley was the only thing that kept her from losing her mind.
Using the tree, she marked the passage of the hours based on the shadows cast by its slim trunk and twiglike branches. She counted its buds and wondered if she would still be here, still be alive, when the tree bloomed. She marveled at how despite being a doctor and understanding the science of life, she had never really stopped to appreciate it. There was a bitter irony in coming to finally value and understand it only to be on the verge of losing it.
Gallo subsisted on the meager amount of food she was given once a day—short, ropy pieces of beef, scraps of nan bread, or almonds, washed down with lukewarm tea. For her bodily functions, there was a hole in the floor on the opposite side of the room.
A narrow wooden bed with a thin blanket was the only furniture she enjoyed, and at night the temperatures fell so low, Gallo wondered if she was more likely to die from hypothermia than at the hands of the Taliban.
She knew why she had been taken. Sayed had been right. The Taliban were going to make an example of her. She had pushed her luck too far and it had finally run out.
The Taliban had interrogated her mercilessly upon her arrival. They had called her a spy and had threatened to execute her. Why they had not yet done so was a mystery, but she had read enough accounts of kidnappings in Afghanistan to know that it could take time before they finally dealt with her. That was the way things worked here. They could be incredibly cruel, like cats that had caught a mouse. They delighted in seeing their captives suffer.
Julia had been required to take a security preparedness class in the United States before leaving for CARE’s mission in Afghanistan. She learned about what to do and what not to do and that kidnappers could keep better control of you if they kept you frightened and off balance. She tried not only to remember the training she had received about how to handle being a kidnap victim, but also why she had come to this country in the first place.
Julia had come to Afghanistan because she wanted to help its people. She now realized that she had also come in search of adventure, even danger. The longer she had been in-country, the bolder she had become, and in becoming bolder she had taken up an extremely provocative cause. Though she deeply believed in what she was encouraging Afghan women to do, she now had time to truly examine her motives. Would she have been as passionate if her trips into the countryside didn’t serve to heighten her sense of danger?
Looking death in the eye, she could no longer delude herself. She had been addicted to the danger. She justified the risk by focusing on the people she claimed to be helping. She reveled in the awe her peers back in Kabul showered upon her for traveling so far outside the relative safety of an already unsafe city. She was a smart woman and should have known much better.
Life in Afghanistan was an extremely dangerous gamble. She hadn’t needed to go looking for trouble. Working at the CARE hospital in Kabul was dangerous enough. Afghanistan wasn’t some drive-through safari park where as long as you kept the windows rolled up and the doors locked you’d come out unscathed.
She had pushed her luck farther than she should have, and the crushing isolation she had since been subjected to, and the promise of a very unpleasant fate, only drove the point home. But of course, now Sayed was dead and it was too late.
Julia wondered if her mother knew what had happened. Certainly, the CARE International doctors were aware that she and Sayed had gone out and had not returned. The question, though, was whether they even knew where to begin searching for her. By Gallo’s calculations, they were at least three, maybe four hours away from where she and Sayed had been ambushed. A bag had been placed over her head and her watch had been taken away, so she had no idea how long they had traveled before reaching wherever they now were.
The door to her cell had been repeatedly kicked open, both day and night. She never knew when anyone was going to materialize in its frame and she tried to keep her headscarf wrapped around her head at all times. When the men did enter, she kept her eyes cast down toward the floor. Her heart palpitated and she had trouble taking deep breaths. It was like living through one prolonged panic attack.
Intermingled with the feelings of terror and loneliness were the sorrow and guilt over Sayed’s murder. While she tried to push the image of him from her mind, it always found a way back in. They had killed him in cold blood and she knew they were capable of that and worse toward her.
The chanting of the young boys increased in intensity. Gallo steeled herself for what was going to happen. Being in captivity, she had not taken her birth control pills recently and then almost laughed out loud at herself for the concern. Getting pregnant was the least of her problems at this moment.
She looked at the young boys and recalled the high level of homosexual activity among the Taliban. There was an old fable that said that birds flew over Taliban territory with only one wing because they needed the other to guard their rectums.
One of the boys reached his hand out to touch her breast. Reflexively, Gallo slapped it away. The other boys laughed, and the first boy’s face flushed red. Julia couldn’t be sure whether it was embarrassment or anger.
The boy, who couldn’t be more than sixteen, drew his hand back and struck her hard across the mouth. Julia tasted blood. The other boys laughed and the chanting began again in earnest. When the boy reached out to touch her breast again, Julia didn’t stop him.
When he made contact his hand crushed down like a vise. Julia winced and bit down on her lip to keep from crying out. His grasp was amazingly strong.
She almost felt that she deserved this—that this was the price she must pay for having gotten Sayed killed.
As the boy’s other hand clamped down on her opposite breast, Julia willed her mind to leave her body. She wanted to travel as far away as possible.
She had made it to a small village in the south of France where she had vacationed after graduating medical school when the sound of the door being kicked open pulled her back to her tiny cell.
Standing in the doorway was the mentally challenged man who had been feeding her. In his hands he held the cardboard box he always carried. Slung over his shoulder was a rifle, its barrel covered with tape. On his feet was a pair of new basketball shoes.
Upon seeing the boys in the room, the man set down his box and unslung his rifle.
He pointed it at the boys, but it had no effect. They weren’t scared.
The man repeated a Pashtu phrase Julia was familiar with. “Lar sha. Lar sha!” Go away.
The boy gripping Julia’s breasts called the man over to the bed. He approached slowly and looked confused.
The boy let go of one of Julia’s breasts and motioned for the man to put his hand in its place. The man shuffled forward and Julia resigned herself to the fact that what was about to happen might turn out to be worse than she had imagined. Fighting back the nausea rising in her throat, she prepared her mind to return to the south of France.
The man studied the situation as the boy and the others behind him egged him on. The chant of whore, whore, whore in Pashtu was taken up again, and he looked at Julia with an emotion she couldn’t quite decipher. Then he lowered his rifle, and she closed her eyes for what would happen next.
But it didn’t happen. With amazing force, the man snapped his rifle straight up. There was a crack as the butt of the weapon connected with the boy’s jaw.
Spinning, the man raised the weapon as high as he could and began beating the other boys. They shouted curses at him and he shouted right back, but none of them raised a hand to strike him.
He hit them repeatedly against their backs and shoulders as they dragged their dazed friend from the room and ran.
Once they had gone, the man slung his rifle, reached down, and helped Julia up. He was incredibly strong for his small size. He helped her to the bed and took her chin in one of his rough hands.
He turned her face from side to side, examining her split lip, and then let her go.
Returning to his cardboard box, he unpacked her paltry meal and muttered to himself repeatedly the Pashtu word for bad.
Julia had never spoken to the man. Each time he had entered to bring her food, she had kept her eyes cast toward the floor. She had remained quiet, her goal to appear meek and unthreatening. The last thing she wanted was to draw the ire of her kidnappers.
But now that the local boys had made their intentions clear, she needed to make sure she was protected from them.
While far from the stereotypical knight in shining armor, the mentally challenged man had come to her rescue once. Would he do so again?
The man appeared to take his job very seriously—unceremoniously kicking her door in at all hours in some form of surprise inspection. She had no idea if the kicking was necessitated by a sticking door or if it was designed to keep her on edge. If it was the latter, it was working. Every time the door crashed open, Julia’s heart raced into the red zone. She never had any idea who was on the other side or what their intentions were. Were they coming to kill her? Beat her? Rape her? The not knowing had frayed the nerves of the normally cool and collected doctor right to their bitter ends.
“Stan a shukria,” she said. Thank you.
The man in the basketball shoes acted as if he didn’t hear her.
“Sta noom tse dai?” she asked. What’s your name? “My name is Julia,” she said. “I’m a doctor.”
Doctors were revered in Afghanistan and she hoped that if her kidnappers could see her as someone who could provide value to them, they might think twice about killing her. Though her Pashtu was limited, it was passable.
But despite her attempt to communicate, the man continued to mutter to himself.
After laying everything out, he gathered up his box, tucked it under his arm, and headed for the door.
“Stan a shukria,” Julia repeated.
As he reached the door, the man stopped. He then spun so quickly that he startled Julia, and she shrank into the corner.
He stepped quickly, almost violently across the room and shoved his hand into his pocket.
When he pulled it out, he held two Afghan sweets known as dashlama in his upturned palm. Suddenly very timid, like a little boy feeding an animal at a petting zoo, he offered them to Julia.
Slowly, she crept forward and reached her hand out to take the sweets.
The man watched and then motioned with his fingers to place them in her mouth.
Julia placed one of the candies on her tongue. The man smiled, but as soon as the smile appeared it was replaced by a frown.
He returned to muttering the Pashtu word for bad and left the room, slamming the door on the way out.