I did not yet understand that women have absolutely no place in the public, all-male environment. Had Abdul-Kareem brought me along, that would have proved that he had become a Westerner, rejected Afghan tradition—and could not control his wife.
It is still summer. It is quite hot. I decide to sunbathe on the terrace that adjoins our bedroom. I remember my bikini to this day. I bought it on East 57th Street in Manhattan. Abdul-Kareem loved it. It was very, very skimpy.
So, here I am, lying on a low chaise lounge, wearing sunglasses, drinking an iced fruit drink, and reading my damned book, when suddenly I hear a loud commotion inside. It sounds like men are yelling at each other. Then more men are yelling.
Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, Abdul-Kareem (who is always at the bank or at the office or at some ministry appointment during the day) bursts through the doors.
“What do you think you’re doing? You have managed to upset all of Kabul.”
I am glad to see him so early in the day.
“What are you talking about?”
It seems that some workmen who are building a house about a quarter of a mile away caught sight of what they thought was a naked woman and could no longer concentrate on their work. A delegation had descended upon our house to demand that all women, especially the woman on the roof (me), be properly dressed.
I start laughing.
Abdul-Kareem is gentle. He must be desperate.
He says, “Please, please just come in and put something on. In fact stay off the terrace for today. These are illiterate, uneducated, religious men with a peasant mentality. Rumors spread here quickly. By tonight they’ll be telling their friends that we are running a brothel.”
Oh, Dorothy. You are no longer in Kansas.
What to do? Well, now that I’ve visited Bebegul steadily and exclusively for two weeks, I decide I can pay my respects to Tooba, the second wife. She lives far more modestly and goes to great lengths to serve me a European-style tea. She has two children, a son, Samir, and a daughter, Rabia.
I have been told that when she married Agha Jan, she lived with Bebegul at some point and that Bebegul treated her as badly as she treats her current crop of female servants. That means she cursed her, undoubtedly hit her, made nonstop demands, and then complained about her to my father-in-law.
The Scottish convert, Saira Shah, on her way to Mecca, describes a rather hellish Saudi Arabian harem, the rivalries between the fertile and infertile wives, the mothers of sons versus those with none: “If a woman has no sons or has been disagreeable to her [the mother of the firstborn], she will taunt her in the hundreds of ways the flowery elasticity of the Arabic language allows.”
Why did Agha Jan marry a second time?
Bebegul and Ismail Mohammed (Agha Jan) are cousins. They are distant cousins, Abdul-Kareem tells me, but somehow I doubt this; I bet they are first or second cousins.
In any event Bebegul comes from a more well-to-do branch of the family. At one point her father had been the postmaster of Kabul. Abdul-Kareem told me that Bebegul would tell “stories about how they used to open letters [even in those days!] and censor the mail. She had seen her father and brothers do this.”
At first the newlyweds lived in Kabul, then in Herat, a city they came to love and where Agha Jan served as the revenue officer. In other words he was in charge of the treasury. Just to understand what life was like in the late 1920s, Abdul-Kareem tells me what his mother has told him: “‘There were no cars or trucks in those days. We had to travel on horseback from Kabul to get to my husband in Herat. Along the way, my mother (Abdul-Kareem’s maternal grandmother) died. We had to bury her by the roadside. Because we had children with us in our caravan, it took us thirty days to make the 1,200-mile journey.’”
After four years of marriage, during which two or three daughters had already been born, my father-in-law took a second wife. Many years after my time in Kabul, I ask Abdul-Kareem why his father remarried two more times.
First he says that he will not criticize his father.
Then he says that his father “felt sorry” for the second wife, who had fallen in love with him. She was a neighbor, and he was temporarily in Kabul but without his wife and children. Abdul-Kareem says that she tricked him into marriage.
“You must remember that at that time in Afghanistan it was very important for a man to have a son.”
Perhaps because Bebegul had had only daughters, and Ismail Mohammed was in search of a son, he dallied with the neighbor; perhaps she indeed became pregnant. But Bebegul soon gave birth to a boy. In fact both wives probably gave birth to sons at about the same time.
Why my father-in-law took a third wife remains shrouded in mystery. Over the years I have heard rumors, half-truths, and suspected truths about his motives.
Bebegul had been disobedient in some important way, and he married again to punish and humble her; surely her sons would blame her for the rest of her life for all the additional co-brothers. Ismail Mohammed married the third wife because she fit into his economic or political plans. He married again because he needed a much younger and fertile wife—he wanted more children.
Ismail Mohammed is a religious man. There is not much night life in Kabul or Herat. Upstanding religious men have to marry the woman with whom they wish to sleep.
The day after I visited Tooba, the second wife, I make my way over to the third, currently reigning, and still fertile third wife, Meena. I find the visit shocking and inexplicable.
A duplicate high-ceilinged, ballroom-like living room exists there. This is where Agha Jan entertains, takes his meals, and reads his newspapers and business reports. It is carpeted richly in maroon and has thick velvet curtains at every window. Low wicker, wood, and brass tea tables stand near each of the plush European couches.
One of his daughters, fourteen-year-old Zohra, brings him all his meals. She bows in and out as if she is his personal servant. She is. Ismail Mohammed prefers to eat alone.
However, his children, whom I visit next, sleep on urine-soaked mattresses in rooms that used to be the servant quarters. The children wear clothes that are too baggy or too skimpy. Some have heads that are too big, others are too skinny. All have chronic colds or eye, ear, or leg infections. One fourteen-year-old is disabled with rheumatism.
They seem to be afraid of their father. But they also dote on him. Their mother, Meena, the daughter of an important conservative mullah, smilingly presides over this considerable chaos. She is a buxom, good-natured woman who sports flashy gold earrings, even when she is wearing her at-home costume of a cheap flowered acetate housedress and bedroom slippers.
The juxtaposition of the visible luxury enjoyed by Agha Jan and the destitution and servility of his children shocks me. Later my youngest brothers-in-law tell me the following: Laughingly, triumphantly, they say that Agha Jan wanted to save time and money with Meena’s sons (their half-brothers), so he had four of his sons circumcised on the same day, when they were between the ages of eight and fourteen.
With contempt and giggles they tell me that these poor boys couldn’t sleep the night before—and that they had such bowel movements the air practically turned green and the stink stayed for days. Why are they telling me this? To prove that Agha Jan loves them, the sons of the first wife, more than he loves the sons of his third wife? Are they saying that this love will translate into more of an inheritance for them or into better marriage matches?
Behind the walls of this family compound, what I view as cruelty is normalized and accepted. I tell Abdul-Kareem what I have witnessed.
He does not say that I’m imagining or exaggerating anything, but he will not discuss it. In fact he tells me only to keep my opinions to myself.
“How can your father treat his own children this way?” I ask. “And what about me: Can’t you see that I am miserable and really hungry, starving?
Why can’t I cook for myself with Crisco? Why is the modern electric kitchen never used? Why can’t we buy food that I can eat? I’ll settle for tuna fish, Huntley and Palmer biscuits, anything in a can.”
“You can’t act differently. You have to fit in. They are watching us, waiting for us to make a mistake. Then it will be all over for me.”
He says: “For me.” He does not say: “For us.”
“Abdul-Kareem, you cannot force me to eat what I can’t eat. My adjustment to life in Kabul cannot be measured in digestive terms. It’s not humanly possible.”
He is quiet.
“Alright, tomorrow [this means I will have to wait until the evening, when he returns] I’ll try to pick up some food for you. I think I know where there are good tinned cheeses and packaged cakes. But please keep it all out of sight, and don’t eat it at meal times. It will only lead to a lot of talk.”
“This is too crazy for me. So the high walls here are meant to shut everyone in and shut everyone out. No one is meant to see what goes on behind these walls, and no woman is supposed to see anything on the outside.”
“Please don’t ruin it for me,” he says.
Again, he talks only about himself, as if we no longer exist, as if he means the two of us.
And now he sounds desperate.
“Look. This will all be changing. It has already begun to change. But, you, you are an American who has no patience and no perspective.”
When did I become “the American”? When did he start fearing and mistrusting the very country and woman he had claimed to love? He continues.
“I have news that will cheer you up. The family wants us to have a ‘real’ wedding.”
Well, I would love another feast cooked in Crisco. I would love a party. This time I will find foreigners who speak English to join us.
But what does a real wedding here mean? I will have no family and no Afghan ancestors or living relatives at my side. And who will perform this rite? A mullah? I am not a Muslim. Will I have to convert to Islam in order to obtain my next edible meal?
That’s what’s missing. There is no Jewish sense of humor here.
Three
Burqas
When I was in Kabul, I had no idea that I was living at the center of the universe—at least that’s what it was, back when the world was flat. I was at the crossroad where the East literally met the West. Traders traveled the Silk Road right through Afghanistan as they moved their precious gems, spices, skins, and silks back and forth between China, Russia, Persia, India, Turkey, and Europe.
Looking at the tattered diary that I began in Kabul, I am amazed by how much I understood at so young an age and by how carefully I observed everything around me. As a writer, I am also embarrassed by it. Sometimes I can’t even understand what I am trying to say.
One thing is clear: I was writing about the punishment of free thought and free speech in Afghanistan—almost twenty years before Khomeini’s Islamist revolution and more than forty years before critics of Islam—even Muslim critics, especially Muslim critics—would be demonized as Islamophobic, threatened with death, and censored. I used the word patriarchal long before feminism arose again in America. Now, fifty years later, I cannot imagine how or where I found this word. It certainly allowed me to accurately describe the treatment of women in Afghanistan.
Years later, back in America, I often wanted to say: “You think that we are oppressed by patriarchy here? Please allow me to describe the lives of Afghan women.” For a long time I never said this publicly. I am saying it now.
But I also want to add something: American women are far more privileged and much safer than Afghan women, but that does not mean that we do not live in a patriarchal culture. We do.
There. Now I have offended everybody.
I continued my little diary for nearly a decade, trying to make sense of what had happened in Kabul. Here I am, uncensored, the day after my twenty-first birthday. The title page looks like this:
A Record of Unhappy Events
Or
My Afghan Sojourn
Or
Marriage is for One
Or
Notes for a cynical novel to be written by a thirtyish woman impersonating a woman long since dead.
I am nearly seven thousand miles away from home and centuries backward in time. Afghanistan is conservative on the outside, corrupt on the inside. And Abdul-Kareem is drinking that cup of tea, the cup that never ends but that weighs the stomach down so that it need not raise itself up until tomorrow or the day after tomorrow (pas fardah) or the day after that.
The fabled dirt and dust are real. So is the unexpected elegance. But I am surrounded by grinding, deadening apathy and passivity. I do not think that anyone reads books. The servants are illiterate. My mother-in-law and brothers-in-law are cruel to others. They are also surprisingly vain and act as if they are superior to other living beings.
I have no freedom at all. No opportunity to meet anyone or go anywhere. His family watches me suspiciously. Am I getting paranoid? No, they are afraid that if I am not brought to heel, tamed, that I will ruin their family’s reputation. I was a fool to believe that I could have a cultural or intellectual life here. Maybe Abdul-Kareem, if he is allowed to travel, will have such a life. Not me. I am an Afghan wife now.
My two sisters-in-law are warm and charming and dress like Europeans. They always kiss me on both cheeks each and every time we see each other, even though we are living together.
But my mother-in-law, Bebegul, is very strange. Sometimes she just stares at me. It feels hostile, judgmental. Sometimes she barges in when I’m undressing or changing, as if the sight of my nakedness helps her live over in her imagination my—or perhaps her own—deflowering.
In our first real conversation (which we held partly in French, partly in English, partly in Farsi/Dari, partly in German, partly in pantomime, and with the help of an interpreter), Bebegul told me, over and over again, about her long friendship with the Sharbans.
Her point was that they are Jews and their leaving Afghanistan for Israel and America made her very sad. She cried out: “Sharban,” pointing at herself, then at me, smiling and mock-sighing to emphasize her feeling of loss.
She immediately followed up this information with a request that I convert to Islam. She told me:
“There is one God and Mohammed is his Prophet and Moses—
Moses is also his Prophet.”
This last sentence she offered up with such hope, such sudden mad friendship, that I impulsively told her I would think about it. She kissed me, then went and dragged her prayer rugs out, demanding that I choose one.
When I tell Abdul-Kareem that his mother has begun a conversion campaign he says nothing. He pretends not to hear me. He leaves the room.
It would be many decades before I would learn that a conversion to Islam is pro forma for any infidel woman who marries a Muslim.
In the years immediately following the First World War, the Afghan chieftain father of Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah refused to bless his marriage to the Scottish infidel Saira MacKenzie, unless she converted to Islam and could also “hold the fort if called upon.”
As the daughter of a Scottish Highlander, Saira knew how to use a rifle. And she had already “embraced the Muslim faith with its simple belief in the unity of God and the prophethood of Mohammed.” In the 1920s Saira had no problem with wearing a burqa. She made it sound like a regal, very princessy, thing to have to do.
When I was in Kabul, family members told me many times that in the past certain foreign wives had voluntarily taken to wearing the burqa. These wives were presented as great women: uncomplaining, self-sacrificing, and wise in the ways of what would please their Afghan families.
I will not even wear the lovely long chiffon headscarves discreetly laid out for me. I d
o not like hats or scarves. They are too establishment, too grown-up for me. My sisters-in-law wear fashionable European clothing. In terms of appearance I am also something of a disappointment to my brothers-in-law because I do not prize glamorous Western fashion.
I am judged only by my appearance. Next I will be judged on whether I can produce sons. As a dark-eyed, dark-haired Jew, I might have passed as exotic—in Sweden. Here, in the land of the thousand tribes, women (and men) have skins that range in color from brown to gold to olive to fair; hair that ranges in color from jet black to blonde and red; eyes that are green, gray, blue, and black liquid velvet.
Afghan faces are living testaments to the many immigrants and conquerors who have passed through the country. Here I am only a regular, nondescript, could-pass-for-Afghan woman.
Abdul-Kareem’s second-oldest brother, Reza, who has studied in England, tells me quite dispassionately, “I’ve asked Abdul-Kareem many times why he brought you here. Doesn’t he understand that a Western girl could never fit in?”
It is nearly two months without any freedom or privacy. My mother-in-law Bebegul is vicious towards her servants. My father-in-law treats his sons and daughters as servants. The sons all want their father’s money and attention. They are married to him, they are his truest wives. Hassan does not seem to talk to his wife, at least not when anyone else is there.
I blame myself. I fear that I have managed to find another dangerous family. And they keep promising a wedding for us.
I have written “Promised wedding” in the margin of the diary. Clearly, this must have meant something to me. But why would I even want a wedding when it is so clear that I do not belong here?
It is difficult to know the date not only because everyone follows a Muslim, not a Gregorian, calendar but because today is like yesterday, the days melt into each other—no, “melt” is too soft a word. Rather, the days shatter into each other like large rocks, one after the other, along the road of time. Am I dreaming? Am I awake? I am alone. I am lost in a large, dark cave. I cannot find the exit.
An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir Page 5
