It took time to contact our colleague. We left a note inviting him to meet us for dinner. He did not respond. Eventually we bumped into him in the lobby. He said he had assumed that prostitutes had written the note, so he did not reply. He told us about reports of unrest in southern Tajikistan, near the Afghan border. An Islamic-democratic coalition currently held power. Reports said that the Russian army backed a pro-Communist tribal alliance to challenge the government. Nothing had happened yet, but we thought that we should travel south and investigate.
We approached taxi drivers in the market. No driver would make the trip. I felt uneasy after the Tiraspol experience.
One driver whom we approached suggested that we try a market vendor who sold car parts. The driver said this man had an apartment in a southern city called Qurgonteppa, not far from the Afghan border. We found the man and introduced ourselves. He immediately agreed to drive us to Qurgonteppa.
“There’s been some fighting there,” he said. “I’d like to see my apartment and make sure that it wasn’t damaged.” Relatives had told the man that the fighting had stopped.
The next morning, the driver met us at our hotel. A narrow ribbon of road comprised the main highway south. At first we encountered traffic typical of rural life. Men on bicycles drove a flock of sheep down the road. The sheep stretched across both lanes and moved slowly, so we inched along behind the flock until a shepherd guided it onto scrubby pasture land. For a while the traffic flowed well. We travelled behind boxy Ladas and trucks loaded with agricultural produce. Any scavenger who followed the trucks could assemble a good dinner of vegetables, grain or the odd chicken that fell off the backs.
Then things began to look not so normal. We passed a tractor pulled over on the opposite side of the road. We thought that a large gas canister on the tractor hood signified that the driver needed gas. His tractor pulled a trailer with walls made of mesh metal that was filled with children and bundles of clothes, instead of the usual load of cotton. We did not immediately register the significance. We continued down the highway.
Soon we saw a motorcycle on the opposite side of the road. A dozen passengers clung to a sidecar meant to carry one. No one would travel any significant distance like this for fun. Next came another tractor, with two cotton trailers hitched behind like a mini-train. Once again children, bundles and a few women filled the trailers — the driver was the only man on board. More and more passenger-laden agricultural vehicles that should have been used for the harvest inched up the road. I recorded two hundred. Then I stopped counting the exodus of refugees.
About three kilometres from Qurgonteppa, a truck driver who ferried women and children crammed in the open back flashed his lights at us. The truck had stopped on the other side of the road. Our taxi driver pulled over. Charlotte and I crossed the road and approached the truck. We could not understand what the women were saying. Some cried and many spoke at once. Eventually I thought they told us that tanks had just opened fire in Qurgonteppa and that some of their children had been killed. As the truck drove away, the women shouted, “Run, the tanks are coming.”
Despite having bad knees, we both sprinted back to the taxi and told the driver what we had learned. He did a sharp U-turn and raced up the road toward Dushanbe. In the backseat, I said to Charlotte, “But we haven’t really seen anything for ourselves. We didn’t actually see the tanks.” We noticed a small guardhouse by the side of the road and asked the driver to stop. We spoke with half a dozen armed men stationed there.
“Those look more like clarinets than guns,” Charlotte said. The guns had long barrels that flared into bell-shaped bottoms. When the bells tilted up, we saw rings of holes for bullets at the base.
“I think they’re using guns that we left behind in Afghanistan,” said Charlotte, referring to a time when the British fought there. “They must be a hundred years old.”
The men explained that an attack was under way in Qurgonteppa. They said the Russians had given tanks to the men’s enemies. The men prepared a defence in case the tanks broke through Qurgonteppa and tried to sweep up the highway to Dushanbe.
Charlotte had been commissioned to write a shopping feature, not a war story, and I was on holiday, with no clear objective in mind and no deadline to meet. Driven forward by journalistic habit, a need to see firsthand what would occur, Charlotte and I decided to try to reach Qurgonteppa.
I did not feel afraid. Charlotte and I left our driver behind and hitchhiked instead. We stood at the side of the road with our thumbs out. Soon a cotton truck stopped. The driver offered us a lift. A young couple already sat in the trailer. We joined them, all cross-legged, clutching the sides, as we rattled down the highway. We chatted briefly, but before long a car flashed its lights at us and the truck driver did a U-turn. He dropped us back at the opposition post. We stood by the road again with our thumbs out. This time a Lada carrying police officers stopped. They said they would travel through Qurgonteppa on their way to the Afghan border. We climbed into the car.
We continued down the road. Every vehicle that we passed flashed its lights at us. Then we heard the sound of what might have been a shell exploding. “Nazad,” I yelped and hoped, as instructed, that the driver would turn back. He took us to the opposition post. That sound scared me. I felt a rush of adrenaline and realized a fast return to Dushanbe now was the obvious choice. Our original driver had waited and remained loyal to strangers who took a big risk.
We joined the column of refugees that fled for safety. We glanced back at the guard post and saw some fighters running out, shouting, “What are we going to do?” What chance did clarinet guns have against tanks? We left with our driver, consumed with guilt, and felt certain the opposition fighters would be slaughtered when the tanks broke through.
In Dushanbe we picked up our shopping and kept an appointment at the American embassy. We had booked it for a background briefing. The political officer interrupted us once we told him what we had seen. He ran to file a report.
At the airport we found that all flights had been cancelled. We dragged our bags and looked for a taxi. One driver agreed on a fare to take us to the border. On the way, we stopped at a shop. Charlotte went in to try to buy water but came out with a plastic bag full of matches. I could not stop laughing.
“But we can’t get them in Kiev,” she said. I told her that she had turned into a Soviet person, carrying fifty match boxes across Central Asia.
When we reached the border, we paid our taxi driver and then joined hundreds of refugees who were crossing into Uzbekistan on foot. Weighed down with sacks of shopping, we faced a long walk. I felt guilty. Charlotte now struggled under the weight of packages that she had wanted to leave behind. We had no hands free to help refugees carry possessions from homes they had to leave.
All flights at the local airport on the Uzbek side of the border had also been cancelled. Several taxi drivers queued by the border post. We booked a car for Samarkand, the nearest Uzbek city with a sizeable airport that might have flights to Kiev. I thought of home, but we still faced a sixteen-hour trip by car and uncertainty at the airport.
As the hours passed, the landscape became dry and empty. We had entered the Qizilqum desert. We saw few other cars. We passed time by telling each other stories about our childhood summers. I longed for our family cottage, for a clear, clean lake that churned up whitecaps like a mini-sea on windy days. There was no sign of water here. Charlotte spoke of summers she had spent with her cousins at their castle in Scotland on windswept moors. Her story was interrupted by a guard who stopped us at a checkpoint.