The Bookseller of Kabul

The Dreary Room

Aimal is Sultan’s youngest son. He is twelve years old and works twelve hours a day. Every day, seven days a week, he is woken up at daybreak. He curls up again, until Leila or his mother forces him to get up. He washes his pale face, dresses, eats a fried egg with his fingers by dipping bits of bread into the yellow yolk and drinks tea.

At eight in the morning Aimal opens the door to a little booth in the dark lobby of one of Kabul ’s hotels. Here he sells chocolate, biscuits, soft drinks and chewing gum. He counts money and is bored. He calls the shop ‘the dreary room’. His heart bleeds and his tummy churns every time he opens the door. This is where he must sit until he is fetched at eight o’clock in the evening, when it is already dark outside. He goes straight home to eat supper and go to bed.

Immediately outside his door are three tubs. The receptionist tries desperately to collect all the water dripping from the ceiling. Regardless of how many tubs he puts out, there are always large puddles outside Aimal’s door and people avoid both them and the shop. The lobby is often blacked out. During the day the heavy curtains are pulled away from the windows, but the daylight cannot penetrate to the dark corners. In the evenings, if there is electricity, the lamps are turned on. If there is no electricity there are large kerosene lamps on the reception counter.

When the hotel was built in the 1960s it was the most up-to-date in Kabul. The foyer was bustling with men in elegant suits and women in short skirts and modern hairdos. Alcohol was served and western music played. Even the King came here, to participate in meetings and to eat dinner.

The sixties and seventies were characterised by Kabul’s most liberal regimes; first the reign of ‘man about town’ Zahir Shah, then that of his cousin Daoud, who cut down on political freedom and filled the prisons with political prisoners, but who at a superficial level allowed partying and western, modern ways. The building contained bars and nightclubs. When the country started to slide, so did the hotel. During the civil war it was completely destroyed. The rooms facing town were riddled by bullets, grenades landed on the balconies and rockets tore down the roof.

After the civil war, when the Taliban took over, the renovation work dragged on. There were few guests and so no need for the wrecked rooms. The reigning mullahs didn’t care about developing tourism; on the contrary, they wanted the smallest possible number of foreigners in the country. The roof fell in and the corridors buckled under the unstable framework.

Now that yet another regime wants to stamp its authority on Kabul, work has begun to fill in the holes and replace broken windowpanes. Aimal often watches the repair work or follows keenly the electricians’ furious battles with the generator when electricity is needed to supply important meetings with microphones and loudspeakers. The lobby is Aimal’s playground. He slides on the water, wanders around. But that, on the whole, is that. Completely boring, completely lonely.

Sometimes he talks to people in this gloomy hall: the men who sweep and wash, the receptionists, the door-man, the security people, a guest or two and the other stall-keepers. They rarely have customers. One man sells traditional Afghan jewellery from behind a counter. He too is bored all day. The demand amongst hotel customers for jewellery is not great. Someone else sells souvenirs, at a price that means no one buys anything or even returns to have a look.

Many shop windows are covered in dust, or covered by curtains or cardboard. ‘Ariana Airlines’ is written on a broken pane. Once upon a time Afghanistan ’s national airline owned many aircraft. Classy air-hostesses served the passengers; whisky and brandy were on the menu. Many planes were destroyed during the civil war, the remainder were bombed to bits by the Americans in their hunt for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. One plane alone escaped the bombs; it was standing at New Delhi airport on September 11. This is the plane that will resurrect Ariana; it still flies Kabul-New Delhi return. But one plane is not enough to reopen the hotel’s Ariana office.

At one end of the foyer lies the restaurant which serves Kabul ’s worst food, but which has the town’s nicest waiters. It is as though they must compensate for the tasteless rice, the dry chicken and the watery carrots.

In the centre of the lobby is a small enclosure; a couple of square metres. A low wooden fence marks the boundary between the lobby floor and the green carpet inside. Guests, ministers, caretakers, and waiters are constantly seen, side by side, squatting on the small rugs that lie on top of the green carpet. In prayer all are equal. There is also a larger prayer room in the basement, but most people make do with a few minutes on the carpet, in the middle of two groups of chairs and sofas.

All day long a TV, towering on a rickety table in the lobby, broadcasts noisy programmes. It is right outside Aimal’s chocolate stall, but he rarely stops to watch. Kabul TV, the one and only Afghan channel, has nothing interesting to report. There are religious programmes, long discussions, a few news bulletins, and lots of traditional music against a backdrop of stills of Afghan scenery. The channel employs female newsreaders, but no singers or dancers. ‘People are not ready yet,’ say the management. Sometimes Polish or Czech cartoons are shown. Aimal rushes out but is often disappointed. He has seen them before.

Outside the hotel lies what was once its pride – a swimming pool. It was inaugurated with drums beating and flags flying one fine summer’s day, and every Kabul citizen, or at least every male, was welcomed that first summer. The swimming pool met with a tragic end. The water quickly turned greyish brown; no one had thought of installing a filter system. As the pool got increasingly dirty, it was closed. Some people maintained they had contracted rashes and other skin diseases from the bathing. Rumours were that several had died. The pool was emptied and never used again.

Today a thick layer of dust covers the pale-blue bottom. Shrivelled rosebushes along the fence make a futile attempt to cover up the monstrosity. Next door is a tennis court. It is not in use either. The hotel’s telephone directory still lists the number of the tennis trainer. But he is lucky; he found another job. His services were not in great demand this first spring of the new Kabul.

Aimal’s days consist of restless wanderings between the shop, the restaurant and the shabby furniture. He is conscientious and keeps an eye on the shop in case someone should come. Once there was a run on the shop and items were flying off the shelves. When the Taliban fled town the corridors were heaving with journalists. The journalists had been living for months with the soldiers of the Northern Alliance, existing on rotten rice and green tea, and now they stuffed themselves with Aimal’s Snickers and Bounty bars, smuggled in from Pakistan. They bought water at the equivalent of £3 a bottle, little round cream cheeses at £9 a box and jars of olives at a fortune per olive.

The journalists didn’t mind about the prices. They had conquered Kabul and beaten the Taliban. They were dirty and bearded like guerrilla soldiers; the women were dressed like men and wore dirty boots. Many of them had yellow hair and pale-pink skin.

Sometimes Aimal stole away up to the roof where reporters were talking into large microphones in front of cameras. They no longer looked like guerrilla soldiers but had washed and combed their hair. The hall was full of funny types who joked and chatted with him. Aimal had learnt some English in Pakistan where he had lived as a refugee most of his life.

No one had asked him why he was not at school. None of the schools were operating anyhow. He counted dollars, used the calculator and dreamt of becoming a big businessman. Fazil was with him then and the two boys watched intently, wide-eyed, the extraordinary world that had invaded the hotel, while they raked in the money. But after a few weeks the journalists left the hotel, where many of them had slept in rooms without water, electricity or windows. The war was over, a leader had been installed and Afghanistan was no longer interesting.

When the journalists left, the newly elected Afghan ministers, their secretaries and aides moved in: dark Pashtoon from Kandahar, returned expatriates in tailor-made suits, and freshly shaven warlords from the steppes filled the sofas in the lobby. The hotel had become home to those who now ruled the country but who had no place to live in Kabul. None of them took any notice of Aimal or bought anything from his shop. They had never tasted a Bounty and they drank water from the tap. They would not dream of throwing away their money on Aimal’s imported goods. Italian olives, Weetabix and a French soft cheese called Kiri, past their sell-by date, were not tempting.

Once in a while some journalist or other would find himself in Afghanistan, in the hotel and the shop.

‘Are you still here? Why aren’t you at school?’ they would ask.

‘I go in the afternoon,’ Aimal would say if they came in the morning.

‘I go in the morning,’ he would say if they came in the afternoon.

He did not dare admit that he, like any other street urchin, did not go to school. Because Aimal is a rich little boy. His father is a rich bookseller, a father who is passionate about words and history, a father who has big dreams and big plans for his book emporium. But he is a father who trusts no one but his own sons to run the shops; a father who did not bother to register his sons when the schools in Kabul opened again after the New Year’s celebrations at the spring equinox. Aimal begged and pleaded but Sultan impressed on him: ‘You are going to be a businessman. The best place to learn that is in the shop.’

Aimal became increasingly unwell and unhappy. His face turned pale and his skin sallow. His young body stooped and lost its resilience. They called him ‘the sad boy’. When he returned home he fought and bickered with his brothers, the only way to use pent-up energy. He regarded his cousin Fazil with envy. He had got in to Esteqlal, a school supported by the French government. Fazil came home with exercise books, pencils, ruler, compass, pencil sharpener, mud all up his trousers and masses of funny stories.

‘The fatherless, poor Fazil can go to school,’ Aimal complained to Mansur, his older brother. ‘But I, I who have a father who has read all the books in the world, I have to work twelve hours a day. I should be playing football, have friends round,’ he complained.

Mansur agreed. He did not like Aimal standing in the dark shop all day. He too begged Sultan to send his youngest to school. ‘Later,’ said the father. ‘Later; now we must pull together. This is when we lay the foundations of our emporium.’

What can Aimal do? Run away? Refuse to get up in the morning?

When his father is away, Aimal ventures out of the lobby; he closes the shop and goes for a stroll round the car park. He’ll maybe find someone to talk to or someone with whom he can kick a stone around. One day a British aid worker turned up. He had suddenly spotted his car, which had been stolen by the Taliban. He walked into the hotel to check it out. A minister, who alleged he had bought it legally, now owned the car. The aid worker had sometimes dropped by Aimal’s shop since. Aimal always asked him how he was getting on with the car.

‘Well, can you believe it. It’s gone for good,’ said the man. ‘New crooks replacing the old ones.’

Very rarely something would break the monotony and the lobby would fill with people so the echo of his footsteps disappeared when he crept to the lavatory. Like the time the Minister for Aviation was killed. Like other out-of-town ministers, Abdur Rahman lived in the hotel. During the UN conference in Bonn, after the fall of the Taliban when Afghanistan ’s new government was being hurriedly assembled, Rahman commanded enough supporters to be named as the new minister. ‘A playboy and a charlatan,’ his opponents said of him.

The drama took place when thousands of hadji – pilgrims on their way to Mecca – were left standing at Kabul airport having been cheated by a tour operator. It had sold tickets for a non-existent plane. Ariana had chartered a shuttle plane to Mecca but there was not nearly room enough for everyone.

The pilgrims suddenly spotted an Ariana plane taxiing along the runway and they stormed it. But the plane was not going to Mecca; it was carrying the Minister of Aviation to New Delhi. The hadji in their white gowns were refused entry. In a raging mood, they knocked the pilot down and rushed into the plane, where they found the minister, who had made himself comfortable with some of his aides. The pilgrims pulled him into the aisle and beat him to death.

Aimal was one of the first to hear about the matter. The hotel lobby was teeming, people wanted details. ‘A minister who was beaten to death by pilgrims? Who was behind it?’

One conspiracy theory after another reached Aimal’s ears. ‘Is this the start of an armed rebellion? Is it an ethnic rebellion? Do the Tajiks want to kill the Pashtoon? Is it personal revenge? Or just desperate pilgrims?’

Suddenly the lobby was even more hideous than normal. Buzzing voices, serious faces, excited people. Aimal wanted to cry.

He returned to the dreary room, sat down behind the table, ate a Snickers. Over four hours to go.

The cleaning man swept the floor and emptied the waste-paper basket.

‘You look so sad, Aimal.’

‘Jigar khoon,’ said Aimal. ‘My heart bleeds.’

‘Did you know him?’ asked the cleaning man.

‘Who?’

‘The minister.’

‘No,’ said Aimal. ‘Or, yes. A little.’

It felt better that his heart bled for the dead minister than for his own lost childhood.