[AGL] Rory Stewart 's diary, the man who walked across Afghanistan and Iran, insightful

[globe at zipcon.net]

 His book the places in between and the Prince of the Marshes are very 
insightful.  He repeats complicated anecdotes but has a simple good solution to 
Iraq
 Carolyn

Diary
      Rory Stewart 
      All afternoon I watched three shadows moving beneath us. Mine in front,
Akbar's at the rear and between us the mule's: its shadow legs, twenty feet
long, jerking like a spider's over the glowing thorn scrub. I felt happiest in
the afternoons. The flat glare of noon had gone but the day was not yet over.
Staring at that shadow image of our motion and our isolation on the 7000-foot
ridgeline, I said: 'Isn't it beautiful?'

      'Not for me.'

      'Why?'

      Akbar did not reply. He often didn't reply.

      I hadn't imagined that I would have Akbar with me when I crossed Iran. I
planned to walk around the world, a journey which seemed to me to be very
simple. I was able to explain it to my five-year-old godson and he said he
would follow me on a map. I left my job and travelled on three dollars a day,
like a backpacker. But I thought that my slow pace and physical contact with
the ground would help me understand the Asian landscape better. Since I would
be moving at an archaic speed on old pilgrimage and trade routes, or passes
used by Alexander, and sleeping in remote villages, often inaccessible to cars,
I hoped to develop a different view of local cultures from other travellers. I
was also interested in what two years walking on my own would do to the way I
thought.

      An Iranian official met me at the Turkish border and said: 'It is
forbidden to walk across Iran.'

      'But you can hitchhike, ride or cycle.'

      'Yes, but you cannot walk.'

      We debated the subject for a week and they finally agreed that I could
walk, on condition that I took a Government escort. Akbar is older than me. He
is half a civil servant and half a climber: he has reached the summit of
Everest. But he was not a guide because he did not know the way and he was not
quite a companion because he walked a hundred yards in front of or behind me. I
suspect he hated the walk. His Iranian gym shoes, with the label 'Nike by Ralph
Lauren', rubbed his feet raw. He never complained but in the evenings I saw him
trying various homeopathic remedies. He soaked his feet in henna until they were
dyed purple. I can only guess why the Government wanted him with me but we spent
every night together and he shaped my understanding of the journey. He often
repeated the phrase: 'Iranians are famous for their hospitality and
generosity.'

      In the course of three months we were differently mistrusted almost every
night in every village. Villagers assumed that, as strangers on foot, we were
dangerous men. So did the police. Sometimes we concealed Akbar's Government
credentials, sometimes we emphasised them, but neither approach seemed to
overcome the hostility. People often said that his identity card and my
passport were forgeries. Nobody believed I was a foreigner. They thought I was
only pretending to speak bad Farsi. Their fears are a reflection of the
violence of the Iranian countryside. A man from the north-east told us that
four hundred Afghans with automatic weapons had kidnapped his father from his
village a few months before and only released him for a ransom of a thousand
dollars.

      Many villagers assumed that we were smuggling drugs. One man, who offered
us opium before dinner, said that in his village 70 per cent of the men and
women smoked between two and twelve grams a day. He blamed the problem on
British sales of opium in the 19th century. The more aggressive aspects of the
Government's anti-narcotics campaign have terrified villagers and some would
not sell us bread because they were afraid they would be arrested for aiding
drug-smugglers.

      What we were accused of most often was digging for archaeological
treasures on a nearby tumulus, or in the village cemetery. A week after we left
one village our host was arrested and charged with helping us look for ancient
bronzes. This is a common activity. The last grave robbers in his village had
turned up in police uniform. South of Lake Ormieh we climbed through a cave in
which a Tehran gangster was found dead from methane asphyxiation earlier in the
year. He had been tunnelling in secret for ten months, hoping to find Scythian
gold.

      In one cemetery we visited, every gravestone had been smashed. Among the
mounds of earth were large stone rams and tigers, lying on their sides. One of
the rams had a bow and a quiver of arrows carved on its back. 'These probably
date from before Islam,' I said to Akbar. There was a rifle carved on the other
side.

      A group of four men had been slowly walking towards us and, as they
reached us, the leader, eyes heavy with opium, shouted in Farsi: 'You have come
here to rob the graves. You are grave robbers. I will not let you take this
gold. It is for us. If anyone digs here it is us. I will call the police. Give
me your ID card.'

      We ignored them and went back to get the mule before leaving the village.
The men followed us shouting for a hundred yards and then disappeared. As we
walked up the mud-slurry of the village streets, people stopped talking. I saw
women staring at us through half-closed courtyard doors. One by one, they
slammed the metal gates shut as we approached. A group of young men, pressing
themselves against a wall as the mule and the saddlebags squeezed past, stared
into my eyes unblinking. When I was ten yards down the street one muttered:
'Kurdish smugglers, bringing things from Iraq.'

      It is not the pessimism of these assumptions, or even what follows from
them, that I found unsettling. It is particularly hard to define yourself when
you have no fixed relationships. To be an Afghan drug dealer one day and a
Kurdish freedom fighter the next (not just in idle fantasy but all the way to
the police station) troubled me.

      Akbar told me not to speak when we arrived in a village. He concealed the
fact that he is a Kurd and Sunni. He would bring out his mobile phone. A
reticent man, he would be forced by the situation to say, while pulling out a
pile of substantiating documents: 'We are mountain climbers. I am an official
of the Ministry of Islamic Guidance, studying for an MA in Tehran, and I have
climbed to the summit of Everest.'

      He did not want to be thought a smuggler. He was enraged to find that no
one believed he was an official. He was sure that if we lost the mule and
changed our clothing our walking would be accepted as a modern sport. Dress was
the key because, he said, villagers see 'proper' clothes as proof of good
character. He made me buy new clothes every fortnight and after two months of
argument I agreed to dispose of my hat and stick ('villagers have seen that
kind of stick in films - it looks very sinister'). Akbar believed the ideal
appearance was his own clean-shaven face over a bright blue Gore-Tex jacket and
jeans. With this he hoped to pre-empt the roles which others might assign him.
The clothing did have some effect. I twice saw him pulled out of crowds for
police questioning, while I and others like me in drabber clothes were ignored.
But no costume provoked a favourable reaction from the villagers.

      Perhaps our objective was confused by our aspirations: travellers in
disguise often choose the role they have always wanted to play - when Lawrence
dressed as an Arab he wore prince's clothes. The arguments Akbar used to
justify disposing of the mule were the same as I used to justify walking in an
Islamic cloak with a tall staff. I no longer believe that anything stops
villagers being suspicious of strangers on foot.

      I felt anchored to the journey when I had the mule's reins in my hand. I
had become aware of his vulnerability when in the cold rain I had to tighten
the slippery leather of his girth strap or, in the desert, when he drank three
gallons from the bucket then looked up at me, dribbling the last water onto the
sand. Calming him when the approach of wolves sent him into a frenzy at night,
or checking his feet in the morning, often felt like a spectacle put on for the
large village audience, but it was necessary. And finding slopes through the
mountains which I could drag him up, unloading him when he sank up to his hocks
on the salt flats, having him as a marker to return to when forced to take a
side-trip by police car, had all added a sense of seriousness to the route. He
linked me to the ancient caravan paths and to the historical travellers who
could not go long distances in winter without a pack animal.

      For Akbar, however, the mule was an unnecessary, incongruous and
embarrassing companion and a troublesome responsibility. Once, when we had just
climbed out of a gorge where the leaves of the willows and walnut and birch were
all different shades of yellow, we saw, ahead of us on the path, a broad comb
and arching spine glistening in the sunlight - the branch of a coconut palm,
you might have thought. It was the neck and ribcage of a donkey. A yard further
on, two of its hooves were laid neatly beside each other, attached to most of
its hide. I put my arm round the mule's neck to calm him, but he seemed quite
unperturbed, only sighing grumpily at the gradient. We followed the wolf's
prints (deep and widely spaced, they suggested he was a big animal) up to the
scentless air of the ridgeline.

      As I was admiring our long shadows Akbar said: 'The mule is a big problem
for us. The mule makes problems with the police . . . He is like a centipede:
every evening the centipede takes off his two hundred shoes to go to bed, and
when he has finished, he has to start putting them on again for the morning.
Loading and unloading the mule is like that centipede . . . In the desert we
cannot find food and water for him. The villagers say that white mark on his
nose will bring bad luck. It will make us die.'

      'But you are not superstitious.'

      'No I'm not. We will be more free without the mule. You do not understand
Iran. If people see us without the mule, they will treat us better.'

      We saw a man coming towards us, leading a donkey to which he had tied two
thin trees.

      'You're going the wrong way,' the man said. 'You're two hours off your
path. What are you selling?'

      'Nothing, we're walking for fun.'

      He laughed. 'With a mule? You're smuggling from Iraq - what have you got
in the saddlebags?'

      We gave the mule away a week later. Perhaps it was the loss of the mule
that later made me feel so insubstantial: the routines of walking, the
repetitive diet, the hours without interruption, underscored by the steady beat
of my feet, seemed to emphasise the fragile, unstable and irregular changes in
my thoughts and muscles. I was without books, and unable to write or talk for
eight hours a day, since Akbar preferred to walk in silence. My thoughts
meandered in daydreams.

      I wondered what different impressions Akbar, as an Iranian, had of the
landscape and the villages. In the desert there are no trees to deliver variety
of height and colour and texture. Gravel and sand do not alter with the seasons
but emphasise the marks made by humans on the landscape. The only vertical
lines are formed by pylons or houses. The only animals, apart from the drab
eagles and the sparrows on the electricity wires, are domesticated flocks. The
only marks in the soil are made by the plough. I find things so obvious and so
uniform difficult to interpret.

      When we walked into the village of Goz Hasle by the Turkish border and had
spent half an hour answering the familiar questions we were invited into
Masawali's house. As we sat down on the acrylic blankets a dust storm rose and
Masawali closed the window through which the chickens had just been chased. The
flies seemed to congregate around my dark jacket. I could smell the cow-dung
which had been piled up to dry for winter fuel and through the doorway I could
see the shadows of veiled women moving in the kitchen. Masawali left us alone
to go and organise some food.

      The only piece of furniture in the room was a glass-fronted television
cabinet, containing a porcelain blonde princess, a gnome and some china
teacups. But we were drinking tea from glasses and there was no television. We
sat on a woollen rug, woven by Masawali's mother on a narrow nomad's loom, and
on a machine-made acrylic blanket with a red tiger pattern. There was a small
photograph of our host on the wall and a chubby blonde doll in a short skirt
hung by her neck from the ceiling.

      An old man came in and we stood up to greet him. Instead of wearing
European trousers, a form of dress obligatory under the Shah's modernisation
campaign and still almost universal, he had on a pair of Kurdish bell-bottoms.
Akbar addressed him in Kurdish, but they spoke quite different dialects and
could not understand each other. The man left and we sat down again. Something
uncomfortable was lodged behind my cushion. I reached back and pulled out a
dirty single-barrelled shotgun, its butt bound with yellow tape, and a
bandolier of empty cartridges. Masawali came back in.

      'Goz Hasle is a very old village, God be praised,' he said, sitting down
and refusing to take the place of precedence furthest from the door. 'My father
was born here and my grandfather was born here. We were always here.'

      'What does Goz Hasle mean?' I asked.

      'It means "cross-wearing girl".'

      'So it was an Armenian Christian village?'

      'No. My grandparents did not live alongside Armenians. The Armenians left
a very, very long time ago.'

      'When?'

      'When my father was a child.'

      Faced with these contradictions I assumed, perhaps unfairly, that his
family had helped the Ottomans drive the Armenians out.

      'Where was the Armenian church?'

      'I don't know.'

      Masawali's stable was a long building with a vast door, a base of neatly
dressed masonry and a wooden roof that soared thirty feet high. In the south
side was the trace of an arched window.

      Three hundred miles further on, we stayed with Ali Reza in Sefid Han.
'This is a very poor home,' Akbar said to me when we reached the unlit sloping
courtyard. Two goats were kept in an old cave beneath the house.

      Ali Reza took us into a small white-washed room. Here, too, the only piece
of furniture was a television cabinet. Again, there was no television. Again, we
sat on folded acrylic blankets with red tiger patterns, looking at a blonde doll
suspended from the ceiling. Ali Reza was due to play his mandolin that evening
at a wedding ceremony so he sat with his old nine-string instrument on his lap,
sticking strips of gold paper over the mother of pearl inlay. He talked to Akbar
in Turkish rather than Farsi and I couldn't follow.

      'Please ask him about the history of the village,' I said to Akbar.

      'He doesn't know.'

      'Please ask him.'

      Akbar asked. 'He says this is the oldest village in the region, that there
is a very old graveyard on the hill, that when a tractor was working in the
next-door field, it turned up three levels of settlement going back thousands
of years. That the villagers have got very rich from gold they have found in
the grave-mounds. There was an inscribed stone stele on the graveyard hill,
which they broke up for building material.'

      'What else did he say?'

      'I don't care.'

      The architectural traces of an Armenian past and the trousers of the Kurd
were the only things that seemed visibly to differentiate Masawali's house at
Goz Hasle from Ali Reza's house at Sefid Han. One man was a Kurd, the other a
Shahsevan Turk, one spoke an Indo-European language, the other an Altaic
language. But Masawali's house had the same television cabinet, with the same
stickers, saying 'Sony', stuck on the glass, the same clock ('Sieko Quarts')
with plastic flowers in its case and a photograph of the host. Both families
were weaving $2000 carpets to a Tabriz design for the Saudi market. Inside
sixty village houses belonging to different ethnic groups (Bakhtiari, Qashgai,
Kurd, Azeri-Turk, Lur and Fars) spread over a thousand-mile area, I observed a
bewildering similarity in manners, clothing, interior decoration and food. This
was not my experience of walking in Pakistan, Indonesia or China.

      In every house people were very concerned with who entered first and who
sat furthest from the door and with standing up when a man entered but not when
a woman came in. Every host served bread in the same way from a folded
tablecloth on the ground and was thanked with precisely the same expressions
translated word for word into Farsi, Kurdish and Turkish: 'Strength to your
arm, God be praised, long life to you, may you not be tired.'

      I can't explain this uniformity. I assume that blonde dolls may be popular
as decoration because they are the only available legal depiction of unveiled
women. (Though I'm not certain that the doll's short skirt is more significant
than the noose round her neck.) In a middle-class house I saw a poster
depicting houris reclining on tiger skins, and wondered if the tiger on the
acrylic blankets was a reference to the archetypal rug, long after the last
Caspian tiger had been shot. That repetitive spartan interiors could be the
result of the combined pressures of mass production, a closed economy, pastoral
migrations, poverty, religious distaste for ostentation and social conformity
was conceivable. But nothing quite explained that particular glass-fronted
plastic television cabinet.

      I found it stranger still that so much was made of differences between
local popular cultures in Iran. President Khatami claims to be fighting
American influences to preserve them. This is in part why pop music, Hollywood
films and McDonald's are banned. (So too, until recently, were billiards and
Nietzsche.) The current rulers are opposed to their predecessors' enthusiasm
for alien cultural forms. It's as though Iran's most significant frontier is
with America. A country marked by its physical centrality has turned into one
of the most marginalised in the world: diplomatically, culturally and
economically.

      Kurdish villages around Goz Hasle, despite their superficial resemblance
to the Azeri villages, do have very different religious and political
attitudes. Many Sunni Kurds did not fight in the Iran-Iraq war (a war that
played a key part in creating the new political culture) and continue to fight
the state and Azeri militia. They are poorer. The Government does not give them
substantial subsidies or senior jobs and they are not provided with automatic
weapons such as the Kalashnikov I found behind a cushion in an Azeri village
near Hamadan. My host was the weapons instructor for the village militia, which
had fought for the Government in Iraq and Kurdistan. The state repaid his
loyalty with subsidies and investment in the village and senior positions for
Azeris in business and the civil service.

      After two months we reached Gilli, a hundred miles north-west of Isfahan.
We had been following pylons through the desert, carrying everything ourselves.
The fog was so low that we couldn't see the cables and we were cold and tired. I
was hoping to be welcomed, to meet some people over a meal, to find a safe place
to sleep.

      Just before dusk we walked down an avenue of bare, pollarded willows. Two
women were staring at us over a mud wall.

      'Salaam aleikum,' we shouted. They did not reply.

      We turned down empty lanes between blank courtyard walls. It was a small
village. We found the mosque unlocked and went in, leaving our boots at the
door, dragging our backpacks with us. Five old men in woollen hats were warming
themselves at a big iron stove and we walked over to sit beside them on the
carpet. One man shook our hands. His were wet from religious ablutions. To my
surprise he did not say anything. The others ignored us entirely and continued
to discuss the price of sheep. Akbar and I waited in silence. Occasionally I
saw one of them glance in our direction. Along the gallery was a row of black
and white photographs of young men. They had all died fighting in the Iraq war
and they were numbered from one to 26. Among them was a ten-year-old boy.

      'Excuse me. Who was that boy?' I said to the man with wet hands.

      'My nephew. He wasn't that age when he died - it was just the last picture
we had of him.'

      'How old was he when he was killed?'

      'Fourteen. Excuse me.'

      The sun had set and the call to evening prayers began. The men moved away
from the stove. There were now about thirty old men in the mosque and they all
began to pray, but not in unison, kneeling and standing-up again, grumbling and
whispering. An eighty-year-old was studying us sideways between his
prostrations. He was looking at two men in wet clothes, with stinking feet and
large, clumsy rucksacks beside them, leaning their backs against the wall to
recover from the last hurried miles. But when he stood, he kept his eyes
forward, his chin up and his shoulders back as though he were standing to
attention at a remembrance parade. Through the thin green curtain of the
women's section I watched the silent white shrouds, rising and falling. For the
next half-hour no one spoke to us.

      But when the old man had finished his prayers, he came over, shook our
hands and said: 'Hello. May God bless you. I hope you are well. Where have you
come from?'

      We started to explain about the journey. There was a pause, then the man
sounded more troubled: 'Why have you come here? . . . Where are you going? . .
. How did you come here? . . . But why don't you have a car? . . . Have you
spoken to the police?' He seemed hardly to hear our answers. A crowd gathered
round him, whispering. From the medley of muttered words, I could hear: 'grave
robbers', 'PKK', 'walking to avoid the checkpoints on the roads',
'drug-dealers', 'rape', 'whisky'.

      Men pressed forward and shouted questions that we had already answered.
For half an hour we said the same things over and over again, showing our
documents to different people. We kept telling them we were walking across Iran
as tourists. Nobody believed us. To have walked two thousand miles sounded
absurd to them.

      'You cannot sleep here,' the old man concluded.

      'Where can we sleep?'

      'Anywhere except here.'

      The headman entered. He was wearing a rust-stained yellow jumper beneath
his jacket and his pinstripe trousers were torn at the thigh. He held Akbar's
Government identity card in front of him while a teenager read out what it
said. 'What is your name?' the head man asked when the boy had finished.

      'Isn't it written on my identity card?' Akbar asked.

      'No.'

      'Are you sure?'

      'You must go to the police.'

      We refused.

      A little later a Government pick-up truck was driven fast into the square.
One policeman remained in the car revving the engine, the other ran to the
doorway and shouted at us to come to the station. In the superintendent's
overheated office, listening to his loud jokes, I half-admired the clear image
that the policemen seemed to have of themselves. They had entered the police
station as though they were humming the theme tune of a cop film and jumped
down the front steps as if just abreast of a crisis. When the superintendent
tired of us he let us go.

      By day, I sometimes experienced a fragile coincidence of mind, landscape
and muscle which made me feel more substantial. I might look back at a peak I
had crossed three days before. My footsteps left prints in the earth behind me,
stretching back over the thousand miles I had walked in the past months. The
lack of music, sex, conversation, literature, alcohol, or much food beyond
bread and goat's cheese, seemed irrelevant or even beneficial. I was aware of
the breadth of the sky, the angle of the ridges falling away. I looked at the
geometry of a desert thorn curling in on itself like a wicker ball, or the
trace of bright cobbles beneath the white salt surface of the soil. Akbar was
forgotten. Inaccessibility and solitude became a delight. My vast, vague shadow
on a desolate Iranian hillside seemed almost to resemble that of a hero. But
that conceit vanished by the mosque stove. There, questions began that
expressed and refined the roles that others gave me - roles that were never
heroic. Spending a lot of time on my own, I was unsettled by the inconsistency
and instability of the identities which others gave me. As a stranger,
confronting this every evening, I worried that the only way to compensate for
the narratives that other people created for me was to invent my own. Perhaps
this is why travel writers always lie.

      Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between describes his walk across Afghanistan
in 2001. He has worked for the British government in Indonesia, the Balkans and
Iraq, and is now a fellow of the Carr Centre at Harvard.

      From the LRB letters page: [ 20 September 2001 ] Bachman Reza [ 18 October
2001 ] Robert Wilson.
        

      Other articles available from the 6 September 2001 issue

      Oh, Andrea Dworkin
      Jenny Diski on Misogyny: The Male Malady by David Gilmore

      Nuremberg Rally, Invasion of Poland, Dunkirk . . .
      James Meek considers the never-ending wish to write about the Second World
War

      At the Musée Galliera
      Peter Campbell : Children's clothes

      Short Cuts
      John Sturrock at the Test Match



      From the archive

      Bitter Chill of Winter
      Tariq Ali : Kashmir

      The 'People's War'
      Pankaj Mishra on the Maoists of Nepal

      Japan goes Dutch
      Murray Sayle on Japan's economic troubles

      Out of the Hadhramaut
      Michael Gilsenan on Being 'Arab'

      In North Korea
      Jon Cannon visits the Chinese - North Korean border

      'Comrade Jiang Zemin does indeed seem a proper choice'
      Jasper Becker : Tiananmen Square


      
            

      Other articles by this contributor:

      Degrees of Not Knowing
      Rory Stewart: Does anyone know how to govern Iraq?
      
        
     
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