A short stroll towards Afghanistan
by Stefan Tobler
[ places - june 07 ]
Thursday 20th July
Wycombe to Beaconsfield.
I'm starting from Wycombe's municipal cemetery. Don't look for symbolism, it's just a nicer walk than straight up the busy Amersham Rd out of town. Green woodpeckers hopping, pigeons gliding between yew trees, parents walking back along the espaliered path after taking their young children to school.
I see the grave of Maria Noemia Stacey, Born June 12th 1928 in Pernambuco Brasil. And of Thomas Ingram, A Beloved Husband, Father and Opa (an Englishman who became a German Opa, a grandpa). And stones for many Poles, who came during World War II and couldn't return, and Muslim graves in separate ground. There are no doubt Afghans in Wycombe too, perhaps not in the cemetery yet. I don't know how to find them though, and what would they think of a stranger?
Sitting at my desk translating Roger Willemsen's An Afghan Journey for several weeks, I became increasingly restless.
Willemsen travelled to Afghanistan in November 2005 with a development NGO, talked to all kinds of people. But who will read his book? People who are big readers, who type 'Afghan' into Amazon's search engine? But can I take the book out of its cosy armchair, leave it where anyone can stumble over it, where it can trip people up a little, pull them up short?
I'm going to walk through the Chiltern Hills, through Bucks, the county that flushes blue at every election, home to horsy Tory people and RAF Strike Command and Chequers. Not a place for soapbox antics, I'll leave a trail of excerpts from An Afghan Journey.
Walking has a habit of releasing timely thoughts from the static. On the path through the cemetery I realize where to leave the postcards onto which I've glued passages from the book: on any bench I find. That's where people have time to read. I leave one nearby.
A motorbike, a horse-drawn cart, sometimes a herd appear in the distance from between the dunes - which is also to say, from between the villages, which nestle on the far side of the hills, invisible from the road. Sometimes funeral processions come over the hills, or a group of mourners stands in a forest of flags that even from a distance we recognize as a cemetery. Once only ten people gathered there. Mirwais explains laconically, "They were burying a child. Everybody comes for the old. Children are too young to have known many people."
The day is scorching. I'm heading towards Penn. The trees around the pond will be a good, breezy place to shelter from the midday sun. The heat wave has turned this place into another country. Arriving in Wycombe yesterday I got a free bus ride: the ticket machine had packed in because of the heat. Flowers in hanging baskets outside a pub were so tindery that two baskets had started to smoke and needed to be hosed down.
In Terriers Park a Muslim man in a white gown is pushing his child on a swing.
"Does the footpath go along here to Kingswood?" I ask. He hesitates.
"Yes, up there I think," he says, pointing along the edge of the park.
I thank him and carry on, realizing too late that there had been a bench in the playground. I wonder about going back, but I don't want to go backwards, and he's still there - it's a bit odd to be peddling a few words when you've got someone there face to face.
Most of the way to Penn I have the shade of Kingswood. Tall beech trees, bramble patches where pale red blackberries are ripening, butterflies over the path, a burnt out car. A perfect playground for local kids. Strange that this wood, just a mile from a place I lived for a few years, is so unknown to me. I take the wrong paths. But the odd wrong turn doesn't bother me, I'm exhilarated, hopes are high, the sky deep blue behind green leaves.
I veer towards the wood's north side. A matt-coated man crunches down his drive towards a glossy 4x4 BMW. He glances over, to check who I am. Yes, I'm scouting out the area, turn around and I'll nick your car and your wife's jewellery, mate. Then my path brushes Micklefield Estate, where a few hot summers ago 'youths' barricaded a road, smashed into a bus with iron poles and robbed it. A man of about forty and his mongrel enter the woods from the estate, for a lazy midmorning walk and a smoke. He drops his fag butt. I tut mentally. With my Millets rucksack, my stick a sword to swipe at nettles and my Ordnance Survey map, I stride past with a smile and a hello, very Tunbridge Wells, very Beaconsfield, perhaps lost but with an air of purposefulness.
We find ourselves in the nearness and distance to those around us, always re-triangulating our own position.
After several hills of yellowing fields and a heating head, a short detour leads me to Knotty Green's Royal Standard, 'England's Oldest Free House' as the chalkboard sign outside proclaims. Freedom and brewing have long gone together in this country. Beer before democracy, intoxication rather than discussion, a nagging hangover throbbing over the country's temples. I shift along the garden bench gradually, keeping my tipple and Basho's The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton in the shifting shade. By the end of the bench I'm opposite a side entrance to the pub, written in white on the crossbeam is Welcome Pilgrim. The cathedrals might be empty, but there'll always be pilgrims here.
I arrive at the Armstrongs' in good time, I'll stay at theirs tonight.
"Welcome, traveller!" Patrick greets me with a big smile. He must be just in from work, but it doesn't show. He starts to quiz me immediately, curious, itching to tease a little. I start to explain that I want to walk to London and meet Afghans in Heathrow and in Southall, where there's an Afghan restaurant.
"Sounds like you'll be giving M15 something to watch, anyway!" An ordinary joking comment, it's the sort of vague thought hovering around nowadays, but quite different from the way my friend Kamel will voice it the next day.
I fetch the English translations from my rucksack, hoping for a first reader, but they don't interest him now, we haven't seen each other for a long time, we have things to chat about. A travelling salesman can't let indifference get to him, particularly not a salesman who's stinking with sweat and whose shirt has a purple-green stain from a hairy caterpillar that he unwittingly squashed between shirt and rucksack strap.
Friday 21st July
Beaconsfield to Slough.
Harder going today. South of Beaconsfield and the properties get bigger, which means their hedges and fences get uglier, the footpaths between them squeezed into narrow no man's lands. Paths unused and crisscrossed by thick bramble branches. Behind barbed wire topped fences the signs nailed to trees say 'PRIVATE. PLEASE KEEP OUT', 'SHOOTING IN PROGRESS'. Shooting whom? At the end of the road there's a single house with a perfect lawn (a little yellowed perhaps). A pile of logs and a cartwheel adorn its whitewashed front. It is set thirty yards back from its gate, on which I read the rather diminutive name Hornbeam Cottage, and two more signs: 'PLEASE SOUND YOUR HORN', 'BEWARE OF THE DOG'. I take a photo of this - a house you can only visit by car. Movement sensors nearby. A feeling of guilt. The house and its fortifications accuse me.
I meet Kamel in the centre of town, I'll stay at his place tonight. We used to work together in the French team of an international company. He drives us to his house in Langley where we sit in the garden. He pours peanuts into a bowl and brings out a carton of orange juice. When I ask for a Paracetemol he brings me a whole packet, says I can keep it. We talk about people we used to work with, who has news from whom, and how we're doing. He waters the garden as we chat and I see to my blisters. The new grass he has sown is pale and stunted. He asks about my walk, I try to explain it again.
"What?! You working for M15 or something?!" The same joke as Patrick's, but different. To Kamel I'm the insider, MI5 material, foreigners like him are the outsiders. Like the Algerian pilot in London who was arrested after 11th September, and scapegoated as the terrorists' flying instructor. When he was freed months later his wife had given birth to their child.
I show him the postcards I've been leaving behind me, including this one:
To cultivate atmosphere you don't ask for or request anything, you don't get straight to the point, you encircle it, you adorn it, you unroll a carpet, take a few nuts and some dried fruit, convey a feeling of ease and a willingness to spend a lifetime in the presence of those around you.
Saturday 22nd July
Slough to Southall.
Not far out from Langley along the old Bath Road is Colnbrook village, with The Ostrich, The Third Oldest Inn in England, c.1106. Soon the village gives way to brick hotel blocks, then the windowless metal walls of warehouses, business parks. A road sign's arrows are marked only 'M25', 'M4', 'A4' - a road leading to roads. Over the M25, past televisions and bin bags dumped in a lay-by, I reach Longford. I need to shelter from this sun, 11am is too hot to be out walking, even with a dank sweaty T-shirt as turban. I see the Kings Arms, but it doesn't look that welcoming. A moustachioed potbellied man, wearing a big gold chain, is walking towards me, (Arabic possibly?). I ask him if there is another pub in the village, nicer than this one. He makes a helpless gesture (yes, perhaps he can't drink for religious reasons). "Sorry, I'm German." (So, a business visitor off the plane at Heathrow and staying nearby?). I reply in German, and his tale of woe comes out.
It's a "Kaa-taa-stro-phe" he tells me. A 26-hour bus journey to start a family holiday in London, and then ending up here, in the middle of nowhere. And what's worse, they had to wait one and a half hours before they could get into their rooms. A kaa-taa-stro-phe. Obviously in shock, he drifts off.
I walk on, and leave a postcard on a red plastic strip of a bench at a nearby bus stop:
Inside the children are having a lesson about mines. As the teacher's pointer passes from one object to the next, they name all the deadly weapons.
"And which of you have already seen a real mine?"
Many hands shoot up. Children's faces beam, proud that they have too. Out on the fields white stones mark where mines have been cleared, red stones mark the areas that are still mined. Now the snow has turned everything white.
Soon an old white house appears: The White Horse. Stepping down into the low, murky bar I order a bitter shandy and take it outside to read Arberry's English interpretation of the Koran in the shade and breeze. Basho lies over my pint to keep wasps away. He gazes from the cover at the deep blue sky.
What do I know about the Koran? Very little. Reading it I'm surprised by its acceptance of human weakness, its rules aren't as hard and fast as the Christian ones I'd been brought up with. Exceptions are part of life, divorce isn't shameful, and the weak and travelling aren't expected to fast during Ramadan. The Muslim God, as it says again and again, is the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate.
Reaching the northern edge of Heathrow airport, the regular signs have me a little worried. I want to reach the airport on foot, I want to see everything at walking pace. But the signs say "there is no Public Right of Way over the lands known as Heathrow Airport".
But there's a pavement beside a road that enters the airport. I take it. Further in I see the familiar blue disc with a white bike outlined in its top half and a white parent and child below. I've made it, into Heathrow, an official path! Except that the road I'm walking along only takes me round the edge of the airport. Between me and the central terminals are the runways, and a red sign saying that there's no pedestrian access to the terminals. The pavement only leads to two places: all the way round to the exit, or to the police compound. So I wait 20 minutes for a bus to the airport.
Once there the pressing question is where to find Afghans, how to know them and approach them. I see that BA's intercontinental flights leave from Terminal 4, so I follow the signs to it. It's considered too far to walk, I have to board the Heathrow Express train to get there. I walk around, leaving some more postcards. I go to a café, buy an espresso, take it to a table and get out Basho. Within minutes a waiter is at my table. He picks up the self-service tray, the saucer and - under orders to keep a steady flow of customers - reaches for my cup too.
"No, I haven't finished." He hesitates. There are only brown dregs at the bottom of the white cup. I drank quickly. But I haven't finished.
He wavers, says, "OK", and leaves. Over my shoulder at the edge of the counter he joins a flock of waiters, all watching, waiting to scavenge from tables, to herd people out, towards their checks and gates.
Scanning the arrivals and departures screens I don't see any flights to Kabul or Kandahar. I ask at the information desk which airline flies to Afghanistan. The man looks at me silently, suffering me.
"None."
The bus out of Heathrow gets me to Southall in minutes. I find the spot I've aimed for: Kabul Restaurant, on the first floor of a small shopping centre, with an Asian clothes shop below. I order Mantu Gosht, pasta capped dollops of minced lamb, swimming in oil, sprinkled with chilli powder, crushed mint leaves and topped with cool yoghurt. I eat one dollop at a time, in no hurry. When I do finish, no one takes my plate away, or even asks if I'd like anything else. A family with a veiled woman here, a group of men there. The young slick-haired manager sits near the front, two mobile phones in front of him, watching a Bollywood channel's music videos. Z Movies, its slogan is "Movies - Masti – Magic". When I signal to a waiter, he comes immediately, suggests the kulfi ice cream - pistachio, cardamon. A group of young British Asians come in, mini skirted, laden with shopping bags, looking around the restaurant curiously, at the people, at its photos of Afghanistan.
The waiter is reserved. I want to mention my book. Risking looking like an idiot, I tell him what brings me to the restaurant, that I'd like to see what an Afghan thinks of this book about Afghanistan. He calls the manager.
The manager switches off Z Movies and comes over. I show him the texts. A worry nags at me that he might be offended by something, by the ex-Taliban minister being given a voice, by the woman teacher, by who knows what, the country has become so divided that he could react in any way. He reads the postcard about greeting people:
Afghans don't shake your hand, they barely even press it. Instead they clasp your hand with both of their hands, they shelter it, bury it close to them. Then they let it go and put their own right hand on their heart, so that you know that their gesture comes from the heart and wants to reach a heart.
He nods, agrees enthusiastically, "That's Afghanistan." He reads another. "It's really gripping!" he says, nods again. He asks if these sections are from the beginning of the book, because they provide an introduction to what Afghans are like. He even asks to have the twenty pages I have with me, he'd like to read them later. I ask him if he writes. He laughs, suggests he once may have. I dig, and find out he once started an English-Dari dictionary, unhappy with the English-Persian dictionaries he had to use. But he was doing a law access course at college in London too, he didn't have the time to get far into A. We talk about the restaurant and the Afghan music shop opposite, how he's been left with his brother to keep them going while his wife goes back to Afghanistan for a visit.
"Women!" he says laughing.
"What do you most miss about your country?"
"My family!"
We exchange email addresses, happy to have met, and shake hands, warmly.
After. Late August 2006
Norwich.
By the time I write this up from my notes, 10th August has passed. Anti-terrorist squads have raided houses in London, Birmingham and Wycombe - one house in Walton Drive (near the playground I passed in Terriers Park) and another in Micklefield Road. We've heard airliners were going to be blown up. Every day the news flashes up pictures of Kingswood, where I entered it by the Dolphin pub. The wide, dog-crap dappled way into Kingswood, with a blue and white police cordon over the path. The wood off bounds now, guarded by vans and vans of officers, and others are combing it. Britain's fears concentrated here; dogs will have to crap elsewhere.
It would have been good to leave a postcard on that playground bench near Walton Drive. No illusions about the effect of one gesture, but if words and encounters have turned us into 'us' and 'them', can't they turn us back into us?
