The Bookseller of Kabul

Author:Asne Seierstad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

The three boys have been driving for a couple of hours when they catch up with the backlog of pilgrims. The queue is immovable. It has started to snow. Fog rolls in, the car starts to slide. Said is not carrying chains. ‘You don’t need chains with a four-wheel drive,’ he assures them.

An increasing number of cars start spinning in the deep, icy and snow-filled ruts. When one car stops they all stop. The road is too narrow to overtake. Today the traffic is all from south to north, from Kabul to Mazar. Next day it will be the opposite. The mountain road doesn’t have the capacity to take cars driving in both directions. The 450-kilometre road from Kabul to Mazar takes at least twelve hours to travel, sometimes twice or even four times as long.

‘Many of the cars that have been taken by snowstorms and avalanches are only dug out in the summer. Most of them disappear in the spring,’ Akbar teases.

They pass the bus that has caused the queue; it has been pushed right on to the side, while its passengers on their way to Ali’s tomb thumb lifts with cars that snail past. Mansur smiles when he sees what is written on the side of the bus: ‘“Hmbork-Frankfork-Landan-Kabal”,’ he reads, and shrieks with laughter when he sees the lettering on the windscreen: ‘Wellcam! Kaing of Road’ is written in fresh red paint. ‘What a regal tour,’ he screams. They do not pick up any passengers from the Kabal-express. Said, Mansur and Akbar are wrapped up in their own little world.

They drive into the first gallery - solid concrete pillars covered by a roof to protect the road from avalanches. But the galleries too are difficult to negotiate. Because they are open to the elements they are full of snow, which has blown in and turned to ice. Deep frozen ruts are a challenge to a car without chains.

The Salang tunnel, 3,400 metres above sea level, and the galleries, some of them up to 5,000 metres above sea level, were a gift to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union tried to turn the country into a satellite state. Work was started by Soviet engineers in 1956, and completed in 1964. The Russians also started tarmacking the first roads in the country in the fifties. During Zahir Shah’s reign Afghanistan was considered a friendly country. The liberal King was forced to turn to the Soviet Union, because neither the US nor Europe were interested in investing in his mountainous country. The King needed money and expertise and chose to ignore the fact that ties with the Communist superpower were becoming increasingly tighter.

The tunnel was strategically important in the resistance against the Taliban. At the end of the nineties it was blown up by the Mujahedeen hero Massoud, in a desperate bid to stop the Taliban’s advance to the north. They got so far, but no further.

It is completely dark, or completely grey. The car slides, gets stuck in the snow, wedged in the deep ruts.

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