Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  She called her brother two weeks later in a panic. It turned out that when she arrived in Amsterdam, it was her mother-in-law who was waiting to greet her. The older woman explained that things were not quite as she had presented them back in Kabul. Roshanna’s new husband was not actually a successful engineer; he was just a clerk at a large Dutch company. Moreover, he didn’t live at his parents’ house full-time but would be around only twice a year. He was not at home then and would not be for another four months. Roshanna told her brother that she had been a virtual slave to the family those two weeks, scrubbing floors, cooking and serving meals, doing whatever her mother-in-law ordered. She had been banned from all forms of communication, as many Afghan brides are. They’re supposed to cut off contact with their families for several months so that they can adjust to their husbands’ families.

  The brother was outraged and wanted to jump on a plane right away. But Roshanna’s family couldn’t track the new husband’s family and didn’t know how to find her. They didn’t have enough money to hire a detective, so they just waited. I waited along with them and worried every day about her.

  Finally, after months had gone by, she called. She told her family that things had changed yet again. Her husband had come back. He took her by the hands and asked her if she loved him as her husband, even if he was just a lowly clerk and not an engineer, even if his family was not wealthy. And of course, being Roshanna, she said yes. Then he began to laugh. He told her that he really was an engineer and that his family really was wealthy. They had been testing her. Now that he saw how devoted she was to him, regardless of his position, he knew they would be a happy couple. She told her family that they could stop worrying about her. Her life was good.

  I haven’t spoken to Roshanna since she left Kabul. I still wonder if she was telling her family the truth or just trying to save face. They tell me they don’t hear from her anymore, either. When I see them, we try to be cheerful for one another and pretend that she must be doing very well indeed away from the dust of Kabul.

  In my darkest moments I wonder if I did Roshanna any good by spilling my blood on her consummation night. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing much good at all here. There are many of us Westerners who want to help Afghan women, but our efforts don’t always help them in the ways that we hope they will. There are so many ties that bind these women and hold them back, and many of the ties aren’t even visible to the Western eye. It takes a long time to understand how the complexities of these women’s lives differ from the complexities of ours. Sometimes we can’t help, even when we understand these complexities. The culture is changing so much more slowly than their dreams are.

  I SAW A REFLECTION of the moon in my glass of wine and took a quick sip before it moved on to someone else’s glass. We were having a starlight picnic in our front yard with a small group of friends, both Afghan and foreign. It was a lovely night. We had dragged the living room rug outside, ringed it with toushaks and candles, and piled the middle of the rug with platters of fruit and cakes. I hadn’t bothered to hire a band, but music drifted out from a CD player propped in the window. Sometimes we sang along.

  I was in the middle of a funny story. Sam had brought kebabs home for dinner the night before, and there had been a lot left over. In the middle of the day, he’d sent Achmed Zia to the door of the school to tell me that Sam was having a business meeting at his office and that he wanted to serve the leftover kebabs. But the girls and I had already eaten them, so I called Sam on my cell. I was watching one of the students attempt a fancy updo on her mannequin, so I didn’t want to talk too loudly. When he answered, I whispered, “We ate the meat.”

  “Debbie? Debbie, is that you?” said the voice on the other end.

  “Yeah, I wanted you to know the meat is gone.”

  “What?”

  “We ate the meat!”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, then the voice said, “Debbie, you’re kind of scaring me. Is this some kind of code? Am I supposed to evacuate the city or something?”

  “Sam?” Then I looked at the phone and saw that I had called one of my male customers by mistake. “Oh, my God, is this Viani?”

  He and I laughed for about ten minutes. I called him later in the day and whispered, “We ate the meat,” again. He whispered back, “The eagle has landed! Abort mission! Abort!”

  As I told our friends the story, they got it right away. Where else in the world would you hear someone whisper “We ate the meat” and assume right away that it’s a coded warning to get out of the city? Did this mean that we were all crazy to live here? We laughed and laughed. Then Sam’s cell phone rang, and he motioned for us to quiet down. My heart sank as he switched from Dari to Uzbek, because this probably meant his family was calling. Sam walked away to continue his conversation. When he came back, I could tell that he was upset.

  “Is everything okay with your family?”

  “Okay.” He picked up an apple and began cutting it into small pieces.

  “Why did they call?”

  “My father, he is right now at Saudi airport. He will be here in morning.”

  “Is he going to be bothered that you live next door to a beauty salon?” asked one of our friends incredulously.

  Sam groaned.

  “Have you met him before?” another friend asked me.

  “He not know about wedding,” Sam said. “Only mother know.”

  “She didn’t tell him?” I asked. “He still doesn’t know about me?”

  When Sam shook his head, all my happiness drained away. I had never been able to forgive him completely for not telling his parents about me on his own. Now I knew he had still been hiding me after nearly three years of marriage.

  But I tried to make the best of it. The salon was open the next day, and there was no way that Sam could avoid it: you can get to our private compound only by walking through the beauty school compound. As the beauticians and customers arrived, I told them what was going on. When Sam called to tell me that he and his father were driving down the street, all of us dashed into the room where I stored the hair color products. We held our breath and clamped our hands over our mouths. I heard Sam and some men pass through the yard, then I heard him slam the gate between our home compound and the beauty compound. “It’s safe now,” I told everyone, acting as if I found all this drama great fun. “Papa Sam has landed.”

  “Is his name Sam, too?” a customer asked.

  “I don’t even know his real name.”

  “This is so exciting,” said another customer. One half of her head was done up in neat foil packets; the other half bristled with an inch of gray roots. “I’m going to have to come back next week to see how it all turns out!”

  I decided to let Sam have a quiet twenty-four hours with his father. I made my own dinner plans that night with friends, and he took his father out to a restaurant. Later on, he called me at my friends’ house and told me he had taken Papa Sam back to our house. He wanted to pick me up so that we would arrive at the house together. But as we pulled up to the gate, Achmed Zia walked over to the car. Some of Sam’s mujahideen friends had come over and were sitting in the yard with Papa Sam. “Stay here,” Sam told me. “Let me move Father into house.”

  “Are you going to introduce me to him then?”

  “Yes, but inside house. Not in front of crowd.”

  As soon as he left, the car started to fog up with my anger. If Papa Sam was like all other Afghans, I knew I’d be stuck waiting in the car for hours. There is no such thing in Afghanistan as simply saying good night to guests and going inside. Papa Sam would have to serve them tea or soft drinks, make sure they had biscuits and fruit, ask about their families and the villages where their grandfathers lived and their male children and so on. I figured that if Sam came back out at all, it would be to try to sneak me inside the house using an entrance from the alley where everyone kept their generators and garbage. After about ten minutes, I climbed into the driver’s seat and sped
away by myself. My phone started to ring, but I ignored it. I roared around the city for twenty minutes. When I returned, Sam was pacing outside the compound. Now he was in a rage.

  “You couldn’t wait?” he shouted.

  “Are you going to tell him about me? Make your choice: either I am or I am not your wife tonight!” I shouted right back.

  He pointed inside the car at my head scarf, which had slid down to the floor. “Put on scarf and come inside!”

  We walked into the yard. Papa Sam sat among a group of men, a round, toothless little man with a turban that was almost as big as he was. He didn’t rise to greet me; men in this culture don’t usually stand when women make an entrance. But several of the other men stood, greeted me warmly in English, and clasped my hands. They were all General Dostum’s men, whom Sam knew from his fighting days. They visited our house often. I had considered it a major turning point in our marriage when Sam had introduced me to them a year before, then invited me to sit and have tea with them in our living room. When an Afghan man entertains his friends, his wife usually stays closeted in another room until the men leave. I knew it was an honor when Sam introduced me to Dostum and his men, because Dostum was Sam’s hero. These men were like family to Sam. I figured that this was nearly as important as an introduction to his real family, that it was as good as declaring his love for me to the world.

  As the men settled down again and I took my place on a toushak, they switched back into speaking Uzbek. I couldn’t follow any of the conversation, and I couldn’t smoke with Papa Sam there, so I picked forlornly at a biscuit. I could tell that Sam was furious because his friends had probably overheard our quarrel and were assuming that he didn’t know how to control his wife. Well, fine, I thought: they should know that by now. I saw Papa Sam steal an occasional look at me, and I wondered if he recognized me. I had actually met him when Sam and I still lived in the Peacock Manor guesthouse. He had shown up for a surprise visit that time, too. Neither Sam nor I was ready to tell our families about our marriage, so we played an exhaustingly silly game of hide-and-seek for the few weeks that Papa Sam was there. We were constantly ducking in and out of rooms so that his father wouldn’t see us together. We told him that I was a visiting teacher working with the school, and he shook his head with alarm that I was living by myself. I almost blew my cover by making him breakfast one morning when the cook didn’t show up. If he remembered me, he was probably puzzled that I was still hanging around his son. I hoped he didn’t think I was a prostitute.

  It seemed that one of Dostum’s men had been talking for an hour straight. Old war stories, I thought to myself miserably. It was clear that Sam wasn’t going to suddenly stand up and introduce me as his wife tonight. Equally clear that all these men were probably going to ignore me for another three hours. All I wanted to do was crawl into my bed, but I didn’t know what kind of story Sam had concocted about me this time; I didn’t even know where I was supposed to sleep. I sighed, and Papa Sam looked at me quizzically. He said something to one of the other men, and the tenor of the conversation suddenly changed. All the men were looking at me and chiming in with comments. One of them pointed to Sam and then to me. Sam looked down at the grass, but Papa Sam smiled.

  “So now he knows,” one of Dostum’s men said with a big grin. “He says welcome to the family. He says he has always known, even two years ago, but he was waiting for Sam to tell him.”

  Sam turned bright red, and I started to cry. Then I walked over to Papa Sam’s toushak and dropped at his feet. I took his hand and kissed it, then placed it on my head. Sam had once told me that his children did this to greet him. “My own father died four years ago,” I told Papa Sam in my bad Dari. “I am hoping that you will be my father now. I have been wanting this ever since I married your son.”

  He put his hand on my hair and stroked it. I continued to cry, and when I looked up, I saw that he had tears running down his grizzled cheeks. I saw that Sam and even some of the scarred old mujahideen were wiping away tears. I was finally Sam’s wife. I was finally out of the closet.

  The next morning, Papa Sam was waiting for me in the living room. He had taken down all the pictures from the walls so that he could pray without having to look at haraam images of animate things. He must have shuddered when he took down my painting of naked cherubs. He was ready now for his son’s wife to make his morning tea. He told me that he had gold jewelry for me back in Saudi Arabia. He hoped I would come soon to meet the whole family, including the first wife and her eight children. Or maybe he could bring them all to Kabul to meet me and see the compound! He said he thought it was a good thing that Sam had taken a second wife, and he hoped I would bear him many sons.

  I drove Papa Sam to a local coffeehouse. The two of us sat down with our caramel-flavored lattes. He looked with interest at the people around us, but I didn’t notice them. I was contemplating all the joys and demands of being a true Afghan daughter-in-law with no small measure of terror.

  THE END ALMOST CAME a few weeks later. Not the end of my marriage; that drama continues on and on. But it was nearly the end of the Kabul Beauty School.

  We had a good-size crowd in the salon that day. All the girls had customers. Robina was blow-drying an American woman who had about ninety pounds of long blond hair. Mina was giving a pedicure to a French baker who had just moved to Kabul, and Bahar was giving a manicure to an Afghan-American woman who was working for the United Nations. Topekai was cutting the hair of a lawyer who was getting paid big bucks to suffer another summer in Kabul. Baseera was upstairs giving someone else a massage. I was trying to talk a missionary into highlights.

  Suddenly I heard footsteps pounding along the driveway and looked outside to see Sam flying by the windows. Then he was inside the beauty building and flung open the door. “They’re going to put us in jail!” he panted.

  All my beauticians and my customers stopped what they were doing to turn around. Sam was leaning against the doorframe, his cell phone crushed to his heart. His shirt was hanging out, and even his sunglasses were askew. I had been trimming the nape of the missionary’s neck. She pulled away from me slightly, as if she no longer trusted me with the razor.

  “What are you talking about?” I don’t think I’d ever seen Sam so upset.

  “They want you to pay twenty thousand dollars in back taxes.”

  “I don’t have to pay taxes,” I told him. “I’m an NGO.”

  “No taxes on beauty school.” He waved his arm at the room. “Taxes on salon!”

  “It’s all the same thing,” I explained. “I fund the school with money from the salon, which is a teaching salon anyway. There are no profits.”

  “They say you are enterprise.”

  “I’m a social enterprise. It’s in my NGO contract.”

  Topekai’s lawyer jumped into the conversation. “I’ll e-mail you a document about social-enterprise tax law. Sounds like you’re operating in accordance with it, though.”

  Sam ignored her. “Debbie, they say they stand outside watching everyone who goes in and out. They’re not playing.”

  It took a few days to figure out what was going on. I still don’t completely understand it. It seemed that some governmental entity had decided to assess me for what they claimed were thousands of dollars in yearly profits. This kind of shakedown happens every now and then in Afghanistan because laws and taxes and all the staples of government are pretty new. There is also widespread and growing distrust of foreign NGOs because the Afghans don’t understand why everything is still such a wreck when so much money is supposedly pouring into the country for reconstruction. Money wasn’t pouring into the beauty school, and I could show anyone who was interested a survey demonstrating that our students’ family incomes rose 400 percent after graduation. But even though the claim against us was bogus, it would still hurt. Sam and I would have to make an appearance at the same court that tried people who made false passports and counterfeit money. The beauty school would suddenly become the talk of
the town, but in a bad way. The damage to our reputation would reverberate even if we won our case. Fathers and husbands wouldn’t allow their daughters and wives to attend the beauty school anymore. And if we lost the case—because that was also a possibility, even though we were in full accordance with current tax law—I would go to jail for two years. Sam would go to jail for five years.

  I consulted with friends who were lawyers in Kabul. The consensus was that if we waited until we were formally charged, we would lose everything. So we took the time-honored legal recourse of a modest payment to someone who promised that the charges against us would make their way into an incinerator.

  I was able to breathe again, but only briefly.

  As I write this, in May 2006, both the Kabul Beauty School and the Oasis Salon are closed up tight. There have been widespread rioting, burning, and looting in the city following a tragic accident in which U.S. military vehicles crashed into civilian cars and killed several people. As an angry crowd gathered, U.S. troops and Afghan police fired—over the heads of the crowd, they said—but some civilians were killed and many more were injured. Some foreign NGOs were burned down. The Karzai government imposed a nightly curfew similar to the one in effect shortly after the Taliban were driven out. I haven’t seen the city this tense—or the residents this angry and frightened—in all my years here. Our compound is safe because General Dostum’s men arrived shortly after the rioting began. Their presence ensured that we wouldn’t be burned down or overrun, but it was hard to get used to the idea of bearded men and machine guns taking up the space that my beauty students usually occupy.

  I can only hope that calm will return and that all the people who want to help rebuild this country can continue doing just that. The Kabul Beauty School’s part in all this seems small in comparison with many of the other efforts, but it is nevertheless huge. I know how the lives of the women who have come to the school have changed. Whereas they were once dependent on men for money, they are now earning and sharing their wages. Whereas they were once household slaves, they are now respected decision makers. Not all of them, not all of the time. But enough to give them and so many other women here hope.