The Tajik 230
Sometimes you try to avoid unnecessary danger, only for it to reach you a moment later from a completely different direction.
Shortly after deciding not to travel through Afghanistan, where the Taliban had returned to power after the Americans left, I was stuck in a hostel in Dushanbe waiting for a plane. There was not much to see in Tajikistan's capital, so I found myself thinking about the events of the past few days.
The ride through the Wakhan Corridor had been a bizarre mixture of unrelated episodes. The Silk Road once ran through this valley, and Marco Polo probably passed this way on his journey to China. Today the corridor is a half-forgotten wasteland on the borderlands of China, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. For the first time, I slept directly on a bus together with the passengers and the driver. We looked a bit like a pack in the middle of winter. I visited a local wedding, but I was struck by how cold the groom was and how little he celebrated. Every day I watched armed Taliban fighters passing on the other side of the river, along with their pickups mounted with heavy machine guns. Whole groups of armed men were marching on the Tajik side too.
Even though I was a European in Central Asia, I found myself nostalgically agreeing with a local hotelier about how we had once belonged to the same Soviet empire. And I was not even born until after it collapsed. I hitchhiked with a Russian expedition that got me hopelessly drunk on vodka one evening. On the way back, for a change, I hitched a ride with the American ambassador, who took me to lunch and whose off-road vehicle even had heated seats in the back. But I did not dare enter Afghanistan, the nightmare of all tourists. Besides the risk of kidnapping, it also meant a bigger cash bribe and trudging around offices. I would fly over it instead and continue through Pakistan.
In my head I was calling myself a coward when someone in the hostel asked me to move a lamp aside. The moment I touched it, a strong vibration shot from my left hand to my right. For a few seconds I stared blankly and processed the fact that I had briefly become part of the local electrical grid. It was funny and at the same time a little depressing that nobody noticed anything and everyone simply went on with their business. Along with my hair standing on end came a feeling of heart arrhythmia and irregular breathing. Uncertainty and an unpleasant sensation took hold of me. I was not sure how serious it was. But I was leaving for the airport in an hour, so was I supposed to go looking for a doctor now?
In situations like this, I usually write to my friend Viktor. Most of the time we go to each other to whine after some girl rejects us. We called, but I did not really know what I wanted from him. Most likely just comfort and a bit of pity. He started reading out what the internet had found, so I got to listen to a list of catastrophic internal injuries to the heart, blood vessels, and nervous system. I told him I was going to the airport and, if necessary, I would die on the plane. We both laughed ironically and made fun of the situation. That calmed me down.
Out of concern for my safety, I had avoided the Taliban armed to the teeth, only to be almost killed by a lamp. Before the plane left the ground, the arrhythmia stopped, and I knew I could keep going.