Åsne Seierstad - The Bookseller of Kabul

When the Taliban’s art executioners left the bombed-out museum building – it had also been a frontline target during the civil war – the guards were left standing amongst the debris. Laboriously they gathered up the bits and swept up the dust. They put the bits in boxes and labelled them. Some of the pieces were still identifiable: a hand off one statue, a wavy lock of hair from another. The boxes were put in the basement in the hope that sometime in the future the statues could be restored.

Six months before the Taliban fell the enormous Buddha statues in Bamiyan were blown up. They were close to two thousand years old and Afghanistan ’s greatest cultural heritage. The dynamite was so powerful that there were no bits left to gather up.

It was against the backdrop of this regime that Sultan Khan tried to save parts of Afghanistan ’s culture. Following the book pyre at the roundabout he bribed someone to get out of prison, and the same day he broke open the seal on the shop. Standing amongst the remnants of his treasures, he cried. He painted big black lines and squiggles over the living creatures in the books the soldiers had overlooked. That was preferable to them being burnt. Then he thought of a better idea – he pasted his business cards over the pictures. Thus he covered the pictures but could just as easily uncover them. At the same time he put his own stamp on the works. It might one day be possible to remove the cards.

But the regime turned relentlessly more ruthless. As the years passed it adhered more and more rigorously to the puritanical line and its goal of living ever more closely by the rules from the era of Muhammad. Once again the Minister for Culture called Sultan in. ‘Someone is out to get you,’ he said, ‘and I cannot protect you.’

That was when, in the summer of 2001, he decided to leave the country. He applied for a visa for himself, his two wives, sons and daughter to settle in Canada. His wives and children lived at that time in Pakistan and loathed the refugee existence. But Sultan knew he could not give up his books. He now owned three bookshops in Kabul. One shop was run by his younger brother, another by his sixteen-year-old son Mansur, and the third he ran himself.

Only a fraction of his books were displayed on the shelves. The majority, about ten thousand, were hidden away in attics all over Kabul. He could not allow this collection, which he had built up over a period of thirty years, to be lost. He could not allow the Taliban, or other aggressors, to destroy even more of the Afghan soul. Anyhow, he had a secret plan, a dream, for his collection. When the Taliban had gone and a reliable government returned to Afghanistan, he promised himself that he would donate the complete book collection to the looted public library in town, where once hundreds of thousands of books had adorned the shelves.

Owing to the death-threat Sultan Khan and his family were granted a visa to Canada. But he never went. While his wives packed and prepared for the journey, he invented all sorts of excuses to delay. He was expecting some books, the bookshop was threatened, or a relative had died. Something always got in the way.

Then came September 11. When the bombs started to rain down over Afghanistan, Sultan left for Pakistan. He commanded Yunus, one of his younger, unmarried brothers, to stay behind in Kabul and look after the shops.

When the Taliban fell, two months after the terrorist attack on the USA, Sultan was one of the first to arrive back in Kabul. At last he could stock up his shelves with all the books he wanted. The history books with black lines and squiggles he could now sell to foreigners as curiosities, and he could remove the business cards that had been glued over pictures of living creatures. He could once more show off Queen Soraya’s white arms and King Amanullah’s chest, plastered with decorations.

One morning he was in his shop, drinking a cup of steaming tea, watching Kabul wake up. He laid plans for how to realise his dream and thought of a quotation by his favourite poet Ferdusi. ‘To succeed you must sometimes be a wolf and sometimes a lamb.’ The time has come to be a wolf, thought Sultan.

Sharifa, the pensioned-off wife, is waiting in Peshawar. She has no peace. She knows that Sultan will turn up one of these days, but he can never be bothered to tell her exactly when he is leaving Kabul, so Sharifa expects him home every hour for days on end.

Every meal is prepared in case her husband shows up: a plump chicken, the spinach he loves, the green homemade chilli sauce. On the bed are clean, freshly ironed clothes; letters lie orderly in a box.

The hours pass. The chicken is wrapped up, the spinach can be reheated and the chilli sauce is put back in the cupboard. Sharifa sweeps the floors, washes curtains, busies herself with the perpetual dusting, sits down, sighs, sheds a few tears. It’s not that she misses him. But she misses the life she once had as the wife of an enterprising bookseller, respected and esteemed, the mother of his sons and daughters; the anointed.

Sometimes she hates him for having ruined her life, taken away her children, shamed her in the eyes of the world.

Eighteen years have passed since Sultan and Sharifa got married and two years since he got himself wife number two. Sharifa lives like a divorced woman, but without the freedom granted divorced women. Sultan is still her master. He has decided that she must live in Pakistan in order to look after the house where he keeps his most precious books. Here is the computer, a telephone. From this address he can send off book parcels to clients, receive emails – everything which is impossible in Kabul where post, telephone and computers won’t function. She lives in Pakistan because it suits Sultan.

Divorce is not an alternative. If a woman demands divorce she loses virtually all her rights and privileges. The husband is awarded the children and can even refuse the wife access to them. She is a disgrace to her family, often ostracised, and all property falls to the husband. Sharifa would have to move to the home of one of her brothers.

During the civil war early in the nineties, and for some years under the Taliban, the whole family lived in Peshawar, in the district called Hayatabad, where nine out of ten inhabitants are Afghans. But one by one they moved back to Kabul, the brothers, sisters, Sultan, Sonya, the sons; first sixteen-year-old Mansur, then twelve-year-old Aimal and lastly Eqbal who was fourteen. Only Sharifa and her youngest daughter Shabnam stay behind. They keep hoping that Sultan will take them back to Kabul, to family and friends, and he keeps promising, but something always gets in the way. The tumbledown house in Peshawar, which was meant as a temporary shelter against the bullets and grenades of Kabul, has now become her prison. She cannot move without permission from her husband.

The first year following Sultan’s second marriage, Sharifa lived together with him and the new wife. In Sharifa’s eyes, Sonya was not only stupid but lazy too. Maybe she wasn’t lazy, but Sultan never let her lift a finger. Sharifa cooked, served, washed and made the beds. At first Sultan would lock himself and Sonya into the bedroom for days on end, only occasionally demanding tea or water. Sharifa heard whispering and laughter commingling with sounds that cut her to the heart.