Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  I’ve asked if my conspirator could be moved to more salubrious company but the hospital is full to overflowing. They certainly didn’t have room for poor Mahnaz’s mum. It was as she predicted, a broken wrist didn’t warrant an extended stay. Mahnaz and I agreed to meet at her home for tea this afternoon.

  David has been prowling around my house – there is a heap of squished-out cigarette butts behind the street tree – so much for his giving up smoking. I’ve rung Lexie and, yes, he’s been out to the storage place demanding to see the pictures. Lexie has been sensible enough to have her husband send him away. David is cowed by big men and baritones, but actually, being tall and plain-speaking, Lexie might have frightened him herself. My landline was ringing when I went home after seeing Stella. I could tell it was David by the angry tone it made. I’m doing my best on my mobile in the meantime so the others don’t lose touch with me, but I’m not very competent with it and in this state of nerves, I can’t seem to use it properly.

  Mahnaz lives in unfamiliar territory and I took a few wrong turns, not being map-headed. Three U-turns later on the same stretch of road and I found the proper entrance to her street. At the number she’d given me, I found a driveway for about six cars in front of the grand portals to a McMansion.

  I pushed the buzzer and, thinking that it didn’t look like the sort of house where I’d expect to find someone like Mahnaz and maybe I’d read the address wrongly, I was delving in my bag when the door was flung open and there stood, not Mahnaz, but a woman as short as I am, with high cheekbones, avid light-brown eyes and a shock of grey frizz standing up on her handsome head. I felt sure I’d seen her somewhere before.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for…’

  ‘Mahnaz,’ she crooned in a ripe voice and started nodding. ‘Come in.’

  ‘I’m…’

  ‘Your name is Isobel.’ She had a knowingly quizzical expression on her face. ‘I used to see you at the university.’

  ‘Ah, that’s where…’

  ‘You worked with the genes and immunology people. We shared the same lift.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. I remember now. Your name’s…’

  ‘Meetra.’

  ‘That’s right, Meetra,’ I said, thinking to myself that she’d do very well on a reaction time test. ‘What a small world we live in! Are you visiting Mahnaz, too?’

  ‘No, no,’ she smiled. ‘I live here. It’s my house, too.’

  ‘But aren’t you…’

  ‘Professor of Pharmacology. Yes.’

  ‘That’s right! Your department used to be above ours. We couldn’t wait to get rid of you and when you moved over to the medical building, we took over your space in about half a day and we were still overcrowded. Gosh, that was a long time ago. But aren’t you Polish? I thought from your accent you were Polish.’

  ‘No. I’m not Polish. I come from Afghanistan.’

  ‘Re-ally!’

  ‘Somebody has to come from Afghanistan. I do.’

  ‘Really? My God! And Mahnaz…’

  ‘Afghan, like me. Mahni is my sister.’

  ‘Well, Allah-u Akbar!’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t tell me where she came from.’

  She cackled in an electric kind of way and cocked her head. ‘She don’t like to say.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Mahni like to be an Australian. You met her at the hospital?’

  ‘I did. Our mothers broke bones at the same time.’

  I’ve got a hide! I thought that Mahnaz’s sister was bound to be a cleaner or a secretary or a canteen worker. I thought refugee? She probably had to take what she was given. I never imagined it would turn out to be someone like Meetra. And what a snob I am! I never realised I was such a snob. It shouldn’t matter what work Mahnaz’s sister does! It shouldn’t make any difference to how I interact with Mahnaz. At least, not objectively. But subjectively it does – because if Mahnaz had an uneducated, hard-working sister, that would signify a different kind of family from this one. But here I am and I am the guest here and this is not my house and if it were a different type of house, my situation would be the same, I would still be searching for an appropriate way to react with Mahnaz in her day-to-day ambience. There, I’ve given myself a lecture in Sociology 1.

  Meetra has ushered me into a large, light-filled sitting room, set with chairs and sofas enough for twenty people. It isn’t the norm in Australia to have such rooms in middle-class homes. The sofas and chairs are arranged in a square around low tables, much more formal, and larger than the type of room I’m used to. It evokes the atmosphere of a respectful meeting – such as one might have when presenting a small, but not frivolous, petition to a politician. I wonder what the history is behind this style? Is it a buffer between the formal anonymity of the street and the intimacy of home life? Perhaps formal life intrudes further into Afghan homes than it does into Australian ones.

  I guess the whole social arrangement is different. Afghanistan! I can hardly credit it. I thought Mahnaz was Middle Eastern, certainly, but Afghan didn’t cross my mind. I thought maybe Egyptian or Lebanese…

  For a moment or two I find myself doing battle with a giddy feeling of surprise, but after all, I have come here to see Mahnaz and I am not going to be put off or intimidated by something I simply hadn’t anticipated. I guess that Anglo-Celtic-Italians are either inside (down halls in the womb) or outside their homes and that they reserve formal set-ups for offices and institutions.

  I decide to sit down, bottom pushed well to the back of a stiff sofa well within the room and immediately I feel more in command for not having teetered at edges. Meetra sits down beside me. ‘Mahni!’ she calls and I can’t understand what follows. I ask what language it is and she answers, ‘Dari’.

  ‘Oh. This may sound odd, but my son speaks Dari.’

  ‘Really? What he’s doing speaking Dari?’

  ‘He’s a journalist.’

  ‘Oh la-la. He works for a paper, TV?’

  ‘No, not exactly. He’s a freelancer with Reporters Without Borders. He started his career in your part of the world, actually, in Pakistan. He became enthralled by the Edhi Foundation and its work providing ambulances and shelters. He…’

  ‘But I know of this Edhi. He is a good man.’

  ‘He certainly is.’

  ‘And is your son still there?’

  ‘Well, he’s supposed to be in Afghanistan right now.’

  ‘Afghanistan?’ Her eyes widen in surprise. She pronounces it Off-gone-istan.

  ‘Yes. But I haven’t heard from him for a while. I don’t know if he’s still there or even if he got there. I’m actually terribly worried about him.’

  ‘Oh, Off-gone-istan. It depends where he is. If he’s in Helmand Province or Paktika or Paktia, or Khost or Ghazni or Kandahar, you are right to be worried. The Taliban are there.’

  ‘Well, I know that he goes to some very dangerous places. He’s just had a year back here but now he’s gone again. For the last few years, he has been trying to help set up local television in country areas and he’s been trying to protect women journalists from the terrible consequences that can come from showing their faces in public. There are women who’ve been attacked with acid or been murdered by their own family members – fathers and brothers. One poor woman was assassinated in front of her children. My son is trying to help change attitudes at the same time as keeping up an information flow about what is happening in the reconstruction. His reports have been on Tolo TV, that’s a pretty big TV channel, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s the biggest. Everyone in Kabul watches Tolo.’

  ‘Well, as I said, Eli speaks fluent Dari and looks the part. They call him Elias Jan, I believe.’

  ‘I haven’t heard of him. But I will look out for the name next time I am in Kabul.’

  ‘Oh really? You go sometimes, do you?’

  ‘Of course. I am Afghan. It is my home.’

  ‘Really? Well, my son’s real name is Eli. He’s worried that when t
he NATO troops withdraw, there’ll be a reactionary bloodbath and any of the progress made will be forfeited…’

  ‘I know it!’ says Meetra, nodding in earnest, her eyes flashing. ‘I am working in an organisation. I go to Kabul twice a year to do the administration. We train teachers and we teach life skills. In fact, I’m going to Kabul in April.’

  ‘Well, I must say that when I came to visit Mahnaz I never thought I’d find myself sitting up talking to someone who regularly visits Afghanistan.’

  ‘Well, I can try to find your son if you want it. I have contacts in the Afghan Embassy. They don’t issue visas to everyone. They will know if he has one for there, and if so, they’ll have his itinerary…’

  ‘Are you sure? To tell you the truth, the police are looking for him over an incident that happened at the place where he was living before he left. It’s been months now and they haven’t come up with anything. He wasn’t on any of the passenger lists bound for Afghanistan…’

  She nods appraisingly, then says, ‘They are so lazy these people. Passenger lists are not the place to look. You have to go to the Embassy.’

  ‘I believe they have the Department of Foreign Affairs looking into it.’

  ‘Hoh! They probably give it to an official who wants to take his holidays…Leave it to me. I’ll find out for you today! But first, here’s Mahni with the coffee…’

  ‘You’ll be able to find out today!’

  ‘Tea, Mitty,’ says Mahnaz. ‘She said she wanted tea and so tea I have made.’ And Mahnaz, dressed in a beautiful green gown with a matching scarf pulled over her hair, puts down an immaculately prepared tray on the low table and in the blossoming fragrance of cardamom I am able to draw breath and realise who I am – an honoured guest – and where I am – in the heart of the house.

  ‘You look lovely, Mahnaz. And what a lovely tray you’ve prepared.’

  ‘Is nothing.’

  ‘Is everything.’

  Meetra flaps her hand. ‘Muslims have to be sociable,’ she says. ‘It’s our law.’

  ‘Well, it’s a good law.’

  Mahnaz hands me a plate my mother would be proud to own – a proper piece of bone china. I put it on the table in front of me and look around the room. There is a large, no doubt Afghan, rug covering the floor. The hard, straight-backed sofas and chairs are upholstered in material that you would never find gracing the chairs of the middle-class Melbourne sitting/lounge room, it being way too declarative in brown and gold. No paintings on display but the curving wall that divides us from the rest of the house is only waist high. It displays such things as a tall brass teapot, lapis lazuli boxes, silver carrying baskets, which, when she sees me staring, Mahnaz starts to explain, ‘You take your…’

  ‘It’s for when a girl visits her mother-in-law,’ Meetra interrupts. ‘She takes her soap and everything in one of those.’ Mahnaz pours the tea and hands it to me, resignedly. Obviously, ‘Mitty’ is a force. ‘Mitty’ is someone to be reckoned with. Suddenly, ‘Mitty’ asks, ‘And what have you done with Ursula, Mahni? She was here a minute ago.’

  ‘She went to…oh, here she is, no need to tell you where she went.’

  And a large-framed, red-faced Caucasian woman comes rolling into our midst from the inner sanctum, brushing big white hands down her stomach and saying in an Aussie accent, ‘There, that’s better.’ She puts a hand out to me and says, ‘Ursula O’Connor. I’m doing the biography.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s time someone did it. This woman is amazing.’

  And it transpires that not only is Meetra a distinguished scientist, she has brought more than thirty Afghan families to Australia in as many years. She set up businesses for them to work in even before she qualified for citizenship herself. She was working in France when the Russians invaded Afghanistan and her brother was here on a training scholarship. ‘Eventually I caught up with him,’ Meetra says, ‘and together we decided that Australia would be a good place to bring the whole family, even though it’s very far from Afghanistan. So I came here. I got work and started to think of ways to bring out my family.’

  ‘And you brought out thirty-four families,’ says Ursula.

  ‘Gosh,’ say I, ‘all immediate relatives?’

  ‘Yes. Brothers, sisters, children, parents, cousins…thirty-four families.’

  ‘Gosh. There are only four people in my immediate family; five, if you count the littlest one.’

  ‘Afghans have lots of children. I have four sisters and six brothers. I am the second born, but the eldest girl.’

  Mahnaz ruffles her brow and cocks her head slightly as our eyes meet over a tray of sweets.

  ‘She’s just been telling me she was born in a snow drift…’ says Ursula.

  ‘Really?’

  Mahnaz’s mouth is doing the thing it did when we had our first conversation, turning down at the corners and twitching resignedly as Meetra takes up where she must have left off when Ursula went to the toilet. ‘The year I was born it was very cold in Afghanistan during the war. My mother, I don’t know why, decided to go outside. I was born suddenly in the middle of the courtyard. Because it was cold the windows were closed and at ten o’clock, all Afghan families they were listening to BBC radio for the news. My father was very busy listening to the news, and nobody heard my mother was crying, calling them and I stayed more than, say, thirty minutes inside of the snow with my mother. So they said, suddenly, “Oh, where is…?” and they looked and they searched and they called and they found her in the courtyard. They took my mother and called a doctor. The doctor came and he said that okay, the mother should rest. He gave something. He said, “We are not sure if the daughter survives or not.” Well, they wrapped me in a blanket and at four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning, my aunty turned the light on and said, “I’ll go and see if this girl… She doesn’t cry. Whether she survived or whether she died.” So, when she’s looking… apparently, I was sucking my thumb and I took it off and I smiled and my aunty, she was always telling me, she scared from me. “This girl has power,” she used to say.’

  ‘I was born in sunshine,’ says Mahnaz to me. ‘Sensible.’

  But Meetra has swung the subject away suddenly to a place near Herat that I’ve never heard of –

  ‘Churcher – ron,’ Ursula repeats.

  ‘No. Cheyrr-cheyrr-on. C. H. E. G. H. C. H. E. R. O. N. People would say because of the lack of water and the land situated at the skirt of the mountain that was the reason they were very poor…In nineteen-ninety the people had no money to eat. They were selling their children. But in two thousand five, I sent approximately thirty tonne in medical equipment because the French people, they built a hospital but without any furniture. So we sent a container of supplies to help them. And to an Afghan doctor that I met, I said, “I sent it to Cheghcheron,” and he said, “Oh, don’t need to send to Cheghcheron, because Cheghcheron got suddenly very rich.” I said, “How?” He said, “Growing drugs.” And they were all driving the four-wheel cars. I was surprised. I didn’t go to Cheghcheron, but all I know is helicopters come directly on the field, get everything and then they go. Where they go, nobody knows. But landlords, they get their money.’

  Ursula puts her cup down, knowingly. ‘Dubai. They used to go to Dubai. And Dubai to Germany and sometimes to the USA…’

  ‘Yes, maybe to Spain.’ Meetra narrows her eyes and points a finger.

  ‘I think there might have been a major pathway through Germany,’ says Ursula. ‘I know of some brothers who set up in Germany and Dubai in the “carpet business”. No doubt they were selling carpets but they also owned extensive poppy fields. Supposedly they were harvesting the stuff for the pharmaceutical industry in Germany, but if so, it was enough to keep the world in morphine.’ And she says to me, ‘One of the Taliban’s credos is to weaken the West by flooding the markets with Afghan drugs.’

  ‘Hoh!’ goes Meetra. ‘Propaganda. Taliban don’t like drugs.’

  ‘They do…’ says Ursula.
>
  ‘No they don’t, madame. Taliban are very religious. No stimulants. Nothing. It’s the Haqqani network, Al Qaeda, and the Westerners themselves. Why do you think the people in Cheghcheron grow suddenly rich? Through people who pay them lots of money for leasing their land to grow poppies.’

  So, what’s going on here? Maybe Meetra would sooner be definite than right. Or is she truly unaware that these days opium is a major source of income for the Pakistani Taliban? I’m about to say that it was once true that the Taliban were very straitlaced about drugs and dealing, but not now, when Mahnaz pipes up, ‘There’s a big drugs problem in Afghanistan. The carpet weavers sit smoking pipes – even their kids who work with them smoke hash pipes.’

  ‘For them it’s like aspirin,’ Meetra cuts in. ‘It comes out through their milk to the children. Those women need rehabilitation. I want some money to build centres for this. A place where they can stay for however long it takes. Six months, eight months, a year and they can do vocational training while they are there. Not carpet making, something different. Food technology, maybe. The carpets are beautiful bu-ut,’ she sings, ‘the work hurts them…and low returns. Better to use aid money properly in sustainable projects.’

  It’s obvious that Meetra is in charge of all the information around here and she has the propensity to moderate every word that’s said, but suddenly Mahnaz is laughing. ‘She never stop! Nothing too much!’

  Meetra pouts good-naturedly, flicks a hand and shrugs.

  ‘These baklava are delicious, Mahnaz. Did you make them?’ I ask with an eye to the sisterly relationship. Before she can answer, Meetra says, ‘Mahni is a good cook. She doesn’t cook sweets,’ as if cooking sweets were the sign of a bad cook. I can’t help liking Meetra for her eager, forthright ways but I’m beginning to remember what it was like being a younger sister. Everything you say gets qualified from above; you rarely have the right to be right.

  ‘I’ve heard about all the different ethnic groups in Afghanistan,’ I say to Mahnaz, ‘which one do you belong to?’