Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “And there was something else important that I also realized.” Now he turned toward Kat. “I had begun to come to terms with the things that had happened earlier in my life, here. I learned that although we cannot deny that wrong was done, that people commit terrible injustices upon others in the name of protecting what they hold most precious, we cannot put blame on an entire country and all of its people. This country is a part of who I am, and I’m proud of that. But not until I faced the demons of my past, and stared them straight in their ugly eyes, did I feel truly comfortable in my own skin. And so here we are.”

  “I get it. You brought us here to teach us something, didn’t you?” Kat stood up from the bench.

  “Smart girl, but wait and let me finish.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out an envelope that he slowly opened as she and Sunny waited in silence. “Airplane tickets,” he said, handing a fluttering piece of paper to each of them. “Round trip. To Kabul and back.”

  “But—” they both responded in unison.

  “You will accompany Layla back home. No objections, no excuses, no arguments. You are both going, whether you like it or not. After all, you wouldn’t want to disappoint an old man, would you?” He smiled, feeling very pleased with himself.

  38

  Despite the incessant banging coming from two flights below, Sunny could taste the calm with every sip of warm tea that passed through her lips. That first whiff of cardamom drifting up from the cup had been enough to erase the years she’d been away. Even with everything that had gone on between then and now, the coffeehouse rooftop remained her favorite place on earth. Up here, under the golden blush of the slowly setting sun, she could breathe.

  Downstairs, behind the heavy curtains that had been hung in every window, it was a hive of activity. On one side of the wall that Ahmet and Rashif were erecting, Yazmina and Halajan were busy placing thick carpets across the marble floor, and arranging the toshaks and pillows that would serve as beds at night. Sunny had left Bashir Hadi behind the counter in the kitchen—not before nabbing one of his chocolate chip cookies—where he was taking an inventory of the dishes and utensils, to make sure there would be enough to accommodate everyone should they reach full capacity. On the other side of the new wall, in a smaller area, Layla and Kat were working side by side, with some dubious help from little Najama, unpacking the boxes of toys and games and crayons and paper Yaz had asked Sunny to bring from the States, without explaining why.

  They had waited until they were face to face with Sunny to break the news. At first she thought they were kidding, but it wasn’t long before she saw how it all made perfect sense. Of course it had been Candace who was the mastermind behind turning the former coffeehouse into a safe house for endangered women and girls, a place for them to remain hidden from vengeful families seeking to rid themselves of shame by beating, maiming, or even killing their own daughters and sisters and nieces. There, the women—some with their children—would be protected until they were secreted away to another, more distant destination in the underground network of shelters that dotted the country. It would be the only hope for many of those unjustly accused of committing so-called moral crimes: adultery, sex out of wedlock, running away to escape the fate of an unwanted arranged marriage—basically the crimes of falling in love with the wrong man or being a victim of an abusive or violent one. And now, with support from the international community drying up, and with so many foreign aid workers leaving the country, their commitment to this cause was needed more than ever. Forming an Afghan-run NGO had been Ahmet’s idea. Candace was teaching him all she knew about how to set up, and grow, the organization, and had raised enough funding from her connections to get them started. He was already deep into the business end of things, and had changed his major at the university to Enterprise Management. But right now they were all hurrying to have everything ready for their first two girls, who would be arriving with Candace in the morning. One, they’d been told, had been punished for running away after being raped by an uncle and was now carrying his child. The other had been charged with intent to commit adultery after fleeing her drug-addict husband.

  But the news about the shelter wasn’t Sunny’s first surprise. It was Halajan, standing there next to the old brown Mercedes all by herself, welcoming them to Kabul with open arms after the three of them had completed their journey from the plane, through the brand-new international terminal, through passport control and registration, to baggage claim and X-ray scans, and finally out onto the hilly sidewalk. There they’d pushed their carts up and down and through a barrage of security checkpoints for the half-mile it took to reach the parking lot, the closest distance to the terminal a car was allowed. The whole family had wanted to come, Halajan explained as they loaded their luggage into the car, but there clearly wouldn’t have been enough room. Sunny was left momentarily speechless as she watched her old friend slide in behind the wheel without a blink of an eye.

  “Well, get in!” Halajan ordered. “We don’t have all day.”

  “Since when—”

  “I am a good driver, right?” Halajan grinned at the girls’ reflection in the rearview mirror as she merged confidently onto the road leading into the city. “I am even thinking of starting my own taxi company,” she said with pride. “But do not tell Ahmet,” she quickly added.

  Sunny rolled up her window against the dust and diesel that hung in the air, and twisted around to check on the girls. Layla sat back against the seat with her eyes closed, clearly exhausted from the long journey, but with a tiny smile on her lips. Kat, on the other hand, was wide awake, the silk scarf she had reluctantly accepted from Sunny—after a woman in the terminal had berated them for being bare-headed—slipping off the back of her head and onto her neck. “What do you think?” Sunny asked. “Does it feel at all familiar?”

  “Not really,” Kat answered with a shrug of her shoulders, but Sunny couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t quite the usual Kat I’m blowing you off shrug. Sunny was relieved. Kat had at first reacted like a bull on the end of a leash to Joe’s plan, until Sky somehow convinced her how good it would be for her to connect with her roots, to have a chance to come to terms with her past, and probably how good that would all be for their relationship, no doubt. Now the girl seemed actually a little bit curious, staring out the window through the mass of cars choking the roads to get a glimpse of the passing scenery.

  It was funny, Sunny thought. In some ways the city didn’t seem so familiar to her, either. Sure, the buildings that had survived decades of war were still surviving, and the hilltops continued to push their way through the same blanket of smog that was right there where Sunny left it, and the streets seemed as crowded and lively as ever—only with fewer donkeys and more people—but as they approached the city on roads that were surprisingly smoother than the crater-pocked menaces she remembered so well, there was an undeniable change in the air.

  “Padar naalat!” Halajan cursed as a mini-convoy of bulletproofed Toyotas cut in front of her like a pack of wild boars, the foreigners inside crowded together under helmets and body armor. These were not the huge armored trucks Sunny was used to seeing everywhere. In fact, she realized, so far she hadn’t felt at all as if she were in a city under foreign military occupation.

  They drove past the embassies in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood, where the sidewalks, once sprinkled with chokidors lined up like toy soldiers in front of their guardhouses, were now littered with the motionless heaps of the hungry homeless, steeling themselves for the long winter ahead.

  “They are the poor souls who came to Kabul for work,” Halajan explained, “when there was work to be done. Now there is nothing, and nobody, left to help them. Even if they had money, they could not afford much, with the prices from parsley to plumbers becoming so high.”

  “It’s really that bad?” Sunny asked, remembering a time when foreign money could make an Afghan man rich overnight.

  “It is,” Halajan answe
red, pushing back her head scarf in order to check the lane beside her. “There are people who are buying just enough rice for each day, instead of the usual fifty-kilogram bags, because they are hoping for the prices to come down. Rashif has told me that it is all because people are worried that Karzai will not agree to any deal about security with the West. Nobody knows what is going to happen, so everyone is trying to make or save the money to run away if they have to.”

  Sunny’s eyes darted around in a frenzy as she attempted to take in every single detail in her sight. She felt like pinching herself, it seemed so unreal to be back. But there was no mistaking where she was, not with the mountains of vibrant fruit piled atop the roadside carts, the clusters of blue-burqa’d women gossiping on every street corner, the wiry boys on bicycles weaving in and out of traffic. Through the glass of a car window was the absolute best way to experience life in Kabul, she always said. The only way to fully capture the depth and color of the city, in her opinion. It was like watching a movie made up of fleeting, intricate frames assembled exclusively for you.

  “Look!” Halajan pointed with her chin as they approached a shiny new storefront. “Cherry Berry yogurt shop. My favorite.” She lowered the window to wave at a man in a red jacket sweeping the sidewalk. “Delicious. I will have to take you there.”

  As they turned into the streets of the Sherpur district, Sunny pointed out to Kat a row of Kabul’s infamous poppy palaces, showy mansions built from laundered money and foreign aid that had landed in private pockets. Now a surprising number of them wore battered “For rent” signs. Any Afghan with that kind of money these days, Sunny knew, would have sent it and probably themselves as well off to Dubai or some other country for safekeeping. And with so few foreigners left to pay the exorbitant rents those places commanded, many were standing empty, their garish paint fading and peeling under the Kabul sun.

  “Take me by Chicken Street, Hala, please? I want to see if Sunil, that man I used to buy my furniture from, is still there with his son.” But when they got there, Sunny almost didn’t recognize the place. The shops she remembered so well had all been torn down, replaced by new construction, and a brand-new shopping mall rose like a phoenix at the far end of the street.

  “You should see the size of the stores in there,” Halajan crowed. “And they have places to park the car under the ground.” Sunny marveled at the number of new high-rise apartment buildings that had sprung up since she left, although the one topped with two giant concrete pomegranates towering over the street did make her cringe. And the streets themselves! The sight of men in overalls actually picking up trash was a shock to Sunny’s jet-lagged eyes.

  Kabul had changed. Not really for the better or the worse, Sunny thought now as she looked out over the city from the coffeehouse roof. It was just different, and she was thrilled to be back. She reached down to scratch Poppy’s neck right at the spot behind her ears that Jack had shown her so very long ago, it seemed. When she arrived at the coffeehouse with Halajan and the girls, Poppy had greeted Sunny the same way she always had, as if she had never left. Or at least she had tried to. Now the poor thing no longer had the strength to reach her paws to Sunny’s chest, so Sunny had to bend down for the usual lick of the chin. It was probably her imagination, but Sunny could have sworn that Poppy had been looking behind her for Jack to show up. “I miss him too,” she now said to the dog curled up at her feet. Poppy groaned and stretched and rolled over onto her back for a belly rub. Sunny could almost hear Jack’s laugh booming across the rooftops and, to her own surprise, that made her smile.

  She picked up her cup and took it downstairs, placed it in the sink, and headed past Ahmet and Rashif and their soon-to-be wall to the spot where Layla and Kat were at work. The toys were lined up neatly on a low shelf, and Layla was wiping down the screen of the TV Sunny had purchased for the coffeehouse years ago. “To keep the children of the women busy,” Layla explained.

  “Now let’s get you busy,” Kat said to a giggling Najama as she tickled the wriggling little girl in her lap. Sunny was in awe of how quickly Kat had adjusted to being here. At first she had seemed so awkward, taken aback by the overwhelming warmth of the family, and at the same time walking on eggshells, so careful not to say or do anything that might be considered wrong. But then not even twenty-four hours had passed before Sunny spied her out in the back courtyard with Halajan, the two of them laughing and sharing a smoke. What she would have given to be a fly on the wall for that conversation.

  Back on the other side of the nearly finished partition, Halajan and Yazmina were sorting the boxes of toothpaste and bars of soap and little bottles of shampoo that Candace had sweet-talked her way into getting as a donation for the shelter, along with three dozen pairs of plastic shoes and an enormous supply of hairbrushes that had appeared at their door. Sunny pried the top off a carton and dived in to help, depositing one of each item into a small handmade tin box that would be given to an empty-handed woman to call her own. Like a little treasure chest, Sunny thought. The three of them chatted away as they worked, Sunny describing her life on the island, sharing the story of Rick and his deceit, telling them about Joe and his acts of kindness.

  “And this young man, this Sky, what is his story?” Yazmina asked in a worried whisper, her eyes darting to Ahmet, who was still concentrating on the wall.

  “No worries, Yaz.” Sunny had to laugh at herself, answering the way Sky would have answered himself. “He’s a nice kid, who helps with the grapes. A friend of Kat’s,” she added for good measure, to truly put Yazmina’s mind at ease.

  “A friend of Kat’s,” Yaz repeated, struggling to wrap her brain around the concept.

  Sunny had been relieved when she finally forced a conversation about Sky with Layla, something she knew she had to do before they headed back to Kabul. Layla had been so obviously struggling with her emotions, but Sunny carefully explained how normal those feelings were, that they were nothing to be ashamed of. But none of this was anything Yazmina or Ahmet needed to know, and Layla and Sunny had agreed to keep the conversation between themselves, forever. Layla also claimed to have accepted things between Kat and Sky. But just as Yaz was now wrestling with the thought of a boy being an Afghan girl’s friend, Sunny knew Layla was not quite used to the whole idea of Kat and Sky being so casual with their relationship. No matter how much some things had changed in this country, Sunny knew, there were other things, things so deeply rooted in culture and tradition, that perhaps never would.

  But matters like these didn’t seem to be what was really worrying anyone around the coffeehouse these days. When Yazmina excused herself to go upstairs to tend to the hungry baby slung across her body, Halajan seized the opportunity to pour out her fears to Sunny. “How can you call it progress, when it goes backward?” she asked, shaking her head. “Of course,” she added, “things are better than when women could not work or wear white shoes or use fingernail polish or laugh out loud, when the Taliban kept us locked in our homes like prisoners. And yes, it is true that—for now—there are more girls in school than ever before, and that there are even women who have been elected to parliament. But already we can feel the darkness returning, with brave women who dare to have jobs like men, as police or lawyers, being threatened or sometimes even killed.”

  “What are you bothering Sunny with now, maadar? Let her be. She is our guest.” Ahmet shook his head at his mother and stood back to admire his wall.

  “It is only the truth, Ahmet. Even you yourself have spoken of your fears of a return to the past. After all, why did we all agree that what we are doing here is so important? Somebody has to step into the shoes of those who we are trying to help, those who no longer have the money or the courage to stay and help the women of this country. As you have said, Ahmet, it is our duty as Afghans to keep up the battle.”

  “But I worry about you,” Sunny said. “Where is your money, and your courage, going to come from?”

  Ahmet dropped down onto a chair and wiped his brow.
“The courage, that is easy. How can we not have the courage to do something to keep our country from losing what small gains we have made, to show those who are offended by the thought that a woman can make her own decisions and should have protection from her own family, who hear a threat in the idea that men might not control all things, that many of us want another way?”

  “Why, Ahmet. You sound like a feminist if I ever heard one.” Sunny’s eyes went from mother to son and back again, catching Halajan chuckling to herself behind her sleeve.

  “Some are blaming the West, saying this kind of thinking is an attack on our Afghan culture,” Ahmet continued. “And we have been warned that those who continue to help women will become even more of a target than they are today, but we cannot just sit here and wait for others to tell us all how to live our lives, as has happened too many times before in our history. It’s time for Afghans to be the ones to influence Afghanistan.” He stood and picked up his hammer. “So, courage? That is no problem. Now money, that is another question.”

  “I still have my shop,” Rashif chimed in, “and as long as there are men who will pay to have clothes that fit, I will be able to bring some money home, inshallah. Although there do seem to be fewer of those kind of people these days.”

  “I have hope that my efforts to raise money will someday bear fruit. And in the meantime, our friend Candace has promised to keep pulling the leg of the people she knows,” Ahmet added.