Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  I wonder if this was the courtyard where Meetra is supposed to have come into being, born into the snowdrift, with the competing forces of nature at war in her small, tough body.

  The routine here is similar to the one back in Melbourne, only it is the houseboy who polishes the banisters. The polish is not one that would be known to the nostrils of Stella Motte. Stella swore by Marveer, probably because it was the most expensive. She decried all other brands. She once gave me a sideboard in exchange for a loan she couldn’t repay and then insisted on sniffing out the Marveer just in case I was up to my old tricks and using Home Brand on a sacred surface. I told her she could have the sideboard back in exchange for the money but that only led to my being labelled a blackmailer.

  At breakfast, we ate flat bread with Vache Qui Rit and homemade plum jam with the stones still in it. Meetra sang the glories of Kabul flat bread to me but I’m a girl who has been spoilt by sourdough and breads of all varieties cooked regularly by Mick and I found it rather tough. There was yoghurt but Meetra ordered me off it, saying that her last guest became ill on the first day after eating the yoghurt. Nor did she allow me to drink tea until I’d finished eating. They drink tea all the time and I’m thirsting for coffee, the real coffee that Mick brews. Meetra has brought Nescafé with her, declaring that ‘her boys’ love Nescafé. I’m dismayed. Twenty years in Melbourne and Meetra hasn’t bothered with the coffee! It isn’t the smell of Marveer I’m going to miss; it’s the morning aroma of coffee.

  The names of Meetra’s staff were hard to catch as they padded up to my eardrums and knocked there with muffled fists. The language is soft, a little guttural and quietly delivered at an even pace. You wouldn’t think it was the language of warmongers. I don’t think you could issue a short, sharp command in it: Sultana’s orders back in Melbourne were long and crackle-topped rather than explosive. I feel I should be speaking it, but as yet, I don’t have the flavour of Dari in my mouth. In spite of that, I felt included in the company with Meetra at the head of the formal table, passing the food along with an almost non-stop stream of opinions and instructions.

  Everything gleams. The wooden furniture gleams, the marble floor gleams, the white crockery gleams, the windows gleam, the sky gleams. Yes, the sky gleams, but not with freshness – it would be closer to say the glare gleams.

  My watch says 8.48 a.m. and the computer on the desk in front of me says 10.12 p.m. – God knows what the time is. The sun is at about eleven o’clock so I’d say the computer is about twelve hours out. We must be south-facing in this hemisphere. The sun is deliciously warm at the windows above Edris’s courtyard – my shoulders are basking in it. Under me is a big basement that houses classrooms for students. It’s the place to go in the event of a terrorist attack, of which one is constantly reminded by the stout gates and heavily locked doors and barbed wire coiled along all the street walls and the balconies of the surrounding buildings.

  Meetra’s entanglements are rather conservative. Let’s hope she is fiercer than Babur, who these days might find the thieves in occupation of his house on coming home from the mosque.

  An email has come from Mick. He says that according to the schedule posted by the Kabul International Airport, our flight is yet to arrive. ‘You have disappeared down a black hole.’ Mick can be quite literal at times – when things don’t turn out as written in the textbooks, he’ll say, ‘They should,’ and look at me as if it’s my fault and I immediately feel guilty and respond, ‘Well, they haven’t this time,’ which probably means, ‘What do you expect me to do about it? Recombobulate the world?’

  Meetra’s guard has a peephole and he is under instructions to send away anyone carrying arms of any sort. Only unarmed people can enter. Unarmed, but not unwrapped. How do you tell what’s in a turban besides the head? Just before Meetra went out, two wrapped heads poked in around the door presenting themselves for spoils from Australia and went away happily with plastic jars tucked under their arms. Meetra brings fish oil capsules and glucosamine tablets to ease Afghan arthritis, and apparently they do, which is good news as plenty of folk in Australia mock the combination.

  It’s terribly quiet now. All I can hear is the occasional coo of the big fat pigeons I saw through the bathroom window, sitting on the aerial of the big pink poppy castle directly behind us.

  Meetra has gone looking for someone to fix her smart phone – we couldn’t use it in Dubai to tell the staff when we were arriving, but no one could have come to fetch us anyway because of Karzai’s traffic jam. I think it’s Thursday today but it seems like the day off – maybe it is a day off over here. All the blaring and shunting of yesterday has stopped.

  I’m alone in the house.

  I’d go out if it were Paris or London or Rome, but not here – not yet, anyway. I took a peep over the parapet on the roof earlier on and there was a mustard-coloured blimp in the glary sky; the hilltops bristle with all kinds of antennae. I understand there are loads of TV stations here – more than thirty. Meetra says that there are quite a number of female presenters on air but I also know from Eli that the mullahs in the government complain about it, saying that the morals of the young are being corrupted. Two poor things were murdered in recent years – both young – one for being too lively for the mullahs’ tastes and the other, a news anchor, was done in by her family supposedly because she had ideas about whom she wanted to marry.

  While I was up on the roof, I was thinking about these poor girls, one was twenty-three and the other twenty-two, when my ears were surprised by an unidentified musical instrument, possibly a flute, playing ‘Happy Birthday’! How weird of Kabul to be singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me while I was entertaining thoughts of the ghastly things my son has had to see and document here – an odd lure for a fat little foreigner whose birthday is still some months away…Wondering if I’d be shot at, I crept up to the roof parapet, head wrapped up well in a scarf, and stuck my eyes out far enough to look down into the street. What I saw, after all, was a conspiracy of place – a chap pushing a red ice-cream wagon along – it looked like a stunted little shoe on four wheels and while I was watching, the tune changed to Brahms’ Lullaby.

  Supposing I were in purdah, would there be anything to make of this existence? So peaceful, and someone else doing the housework. The houseboy, a young man of about twenty with one of the indecipherable names, is quietly cooking in the kitchen in a pressure cooker that looks like a spherical bouncing bomb of the sort the dam busters used in WWII. The scent of turmeric, preferable to and out-competing the polish, is suffusing the air. With the kitchen and the larder just across the hall I feel very comfortable in my patch of sun, even a little regal. I have asked for a Nescafé in spite of myself – ‘baa shir’ I have said, which means ‘with milk’.

  I am quite happy to be catered for on a little square portable stove by a chap who’s paid to do the job. I could be a begum after all. He comes in with the coffee, a little man in jeans and sneakers with a big smile. There is another young man here who looks very like Eli, except that his eyes are dark. It’s amazing how many of the young men I’ve seen on this trip look just like Eli; he seems to lurk behind every beard and under every beret but the eyes are never that blue/blue Arnie Russell/Isobel Coretti cross.

  It feels strange to be in a house from which others come and go but you stay put. Am I a privileged princess in a tower or an outsider wanting to get ‘in’ – which, in this case, is ‘out and normal’ among others on the street? When I was a child, I used to admire adult invalids – I thought they had it made with everyone else doing everything for them. It was a life of comfort, fresh linen and pretty bedspreads. It would have done me, I used to think, and I used to practise the situation by having days off school, but by the third or fourth morning dose of When a Girl Marries on the radio, I’d be wondering what my friends were up to and I didn’t need much prompting to go back to them.

  When Meetra bustled in from her unsuccessful expedition to find someone who could fix her phone, I
could smell the bustle on her and I was envious. She told me the time was 12.55 and lunch was on the table.

  Bread again. And a hot dish. The young men from the staff came in from their office and Edris tried practising his English with me. Oddly, his topic was Australia’s attitude to Japan after World War II! Perhaps he’s already sussed out my capacity for loopy explanations.

  ‘Well, my aunt kept a cyanide pill handy in case the Japanese invaded,’ I said. And I mentioned the uncle who was killed at the fall of Singapore and my aunt’s refusal to buy anything made in Japan and her avowal that she wouldn’t be seen dead driving a Japanese car, even when everyone else was driving them. ‘Things have changed since my aunt died, though. In the nineteen-eighties, we were selling them huge chunks of Australian soil. These days we’re selling it to the Chinese. It’s pushed the price of housing skyhigh and now our kids can’t afford to buy their own homes.’

  But that’s not what Edris wanted to hear. ‘There was no war fought on Australian soil,’ he said, like a schoolmaster correcting a wayward student.

  ‘Well, Darwin was bombed, but no. In World War II we might have lost a lot of men in the fighting, a lot of chaps from rural towns were lost and that was bad for a country that relied on agriculture, but Australia itself didn’t suffer the same damage as other places.’

  ‘And you took a lot of immigrants after the war.’

  ‘Yes, Edris, but only from Europe, and, to begin with, only from Northern Europe. It was supposed to be because those people would blend in with the population better. They wouldn’t be conspicuous.’

  ‘Now other people need immigration.’

  ‘Yes. But the Australian government only takes a quota from here.’

  ‘I would like to live in Australia. I only want to live there five years or so. Somewhere away from war.’

  ‘But you’re doing a wonderful job here. You’re needed here…’

  I was going to say that Australia might not be the panacea he was searching for, when ‘Hoh!’ went Meetra. ‘Hoh!’ isn’t necessarily just an expression of scorn; what she’s been saying all these weeks since I met her in Melbourne, is ‘Khob’ and that means ‘Yes’ or ‘Okay’.

  The Dari broke out again, with Meetra dominating the discourse, which was brisk and vigorous. It felt a bit like the captain and the vice-captain conversing combatively and by the time they’d finished, the table had been cleared away by the boy, whose name is easy enough, after all – it is Yar, and he was serving up tea in the sitting room.

  When I went back to Meetra’s computer after lunch, I realised I’d released a virus from my flash drive onto her screen: ‘Sexy’, it said and ‘Porn’. The Web will soon be reaching out to suck in the Afghans as well as the rest of the world. At least I haven’t brought over the woman with chickpea mash all over her face who comes to my computer with Facebook, advertising simple tricks to stop ageing, nor have I brought in Amy and Tina, the ‘Asian Ladies’ flashing their tits in the margins of serious content – so much for Asian immigration.

  How shall I tell Mick about this place? The bazaar opened this afternoon and Meetra took me shopping. What comes to mind in the way of comparison is the look and feel of abandoned drive-in picture theatres. So much is boarded up. Much of the plate glass is shattered from explosions and held together by metal studs. The streets are dusty where they are not caked in mud and the roadways are potholed. The city isn’t sewered and over the drains there are pull-up concrete slabs, or grilles, but mostly they are just open and full of putrid rubbish. Surely people must fall into them from time to time.

  It’s 7.30 p.m. and Allah is summoning the faithful from his tower as I write – the smells are strange: dust, shot through with diesel fumes and donkey shit and at ground level everything underscored by pungent, concentrated piss. There are some wretched people on the streets and some obviously middle class, but mainly it’s chaps in waistcoats and white shirts and chaps in dun colours and berets. Not so often: you see an Afghan karakul hat, like Karzai’s. Several shopkeepers know Meetra – we went to buy headscarfs – the one I brought from Australia kept falling off, it was too heavy. I bought a very pretty one, costing forty dollars Australian. Then we visited a jeweller, where I didn’t buy anything, but heard the tale of the shopowner, who lived in California during the Taliban, hated it and came back. He keeps a shop in San Francisco and another in Dubai but would rather live here. He let me try on a neck hanging-cum-breastplate of beaten tin that made me feel like a member of the marauding horde until I looked in the mirror and saw a pathetic Australian tourist in a twenty-dollar top from Katies wearing a nomad necklace – a pickle in a pavlova. Then to a shop to buy a couple of shirts and a gorgeous handwoven waistcoat for me – total cost forty-five dollars Australian.

  We peel off the banknotes and buy local money from the street vendors, who sit on stools or squat or sit cross-legged on the ground with their money in piles beside them or in fish tank–type arrangements or, then again, with long wallets like the ones you used to see in the days when bus conductors sold tickets. It’s not that they don’t have banks, they do, but people are reluctant to go into buildings where there are likely to be foreigners in numbers. A new shopping mall was blown up by a suicide bomber recently and now the entrance is boarded up and guarded by Afghan soldiery. You have to be searched before going in – not that we did but some people need to get to the businesses that are being reconstructed inside.

  Although I saw elaborate samovars in the streets and there were plenty of stalls selling hot food – kebabs cooked in windowsill gutters of hot coals mostly – I saw no restaurants, no cafes, no places where people might sit together and eat and converse. Obviously, it just isn’t the Afghan way.

  It feels uncomfortable to be buying stuff when the beggars on the street are so wretched, but I can see the point of supporting those who have set up businesses in Kabul – the whole of civil life needs strengthening here. Without shops there would be nothing to drive the economy, such as it is. I’ve no idea how Afghanistan imagines it will compete on the world market – it will have to have a commodities boom to do that because it certainly won’t happen with the small commercial trade that goes on now. I doubt if much besides carpets and jewellery is actually manufactured inside Afghanistan. Poor people: I wonder if they could have survived into modern times as they were in the days of the hippie trail? Even though they couldn’t read or write, they seem to have led much happier lives in the days when Westerners dropped in for a smoke, some rustic clothing and a meal. There were the isolated villages, the princelings and the visitors. I wonder if the women and the destitute were as badly treated then as they are now: there are no visible public places where women could get together. Oh well, times can’t recur, can they? Some things return, I suppose, but not with the ambience that accompanied them in the past.

  Meetra has a system whereby she leaves stuff with shopkeepers she knows and they pass it on to the beggars. She knows the beggars too – we were greeted by a number of them, one with crippled legs sitting on a skateboard at the entrance to the jeweller’s. He was maimed by a landmine in a village in Panjshir where Meetra’s group supplied the local school with water and electricity.

  In Panjshir, where most of the fighting against the Russians took place, Massoud’s mujahedeen laid mines across the roads to blow up the food convoys. They buried their fellow jihadists where they fell and then they’d disappear. The Russians could never find them. Sometimes they existed only on the kind of grass that Meetra has growing in her courtyard. Guess they were like the Viet Cong, the indigenous enemy – a contradiction in terms.

  Meetra got me to offer her guard, Hafiz, his pick of the children’s shoes I brought over with me. He has six kids and he took a few pairs – maybe I should have brought him some condoms. A funny story about him. He didn’t have a birth certificate – most people don’t – and as part of its drive to record its citizenry, the government wanted to register him, so they gave him an age-range to choose f
rom – he chose thirty-five and he’s stuck with that, ask him how old he is and he’ll say, ‘Thirty-five.’ He’s really about fifty.

  Hafiz is a gentle bloke with big brown eyes and he’s rather deferential, but Meetra’s deputy put tape on our doors when we went out to test whether Hafiz went into our rooms without our knowing it. It felt tacky to me to do something like that and I’m glad to say that Meetra didn’t think that was especially fair either. She’s told Hafiz not to take anything without asking, because it would ruin the trust she has in him. Like with the shoes – we give him first pick of the stuff we’ve brought with us and the rest Meetra will try to give to street children and widows. She has to be crafty in the way she gives out aid, because if she were seen to do it, she’d be mobbed. It’s better, she says, to keep an eye out for the people you can help directly – like if a child has inadequate footwear and you have something that would fit, you target that child and give directly in private, rather than giving to someone who would try to sell it on. Where there is poverty such as you see here, the poor exploit the poor.

  We met a little street boy on our trip to the market. He was trying to sell us chewing gum. He looked about five, but when he followed Meetra’s instructions and turned up at our door for a pair of the shoes, he said he was seven. We sat him down in a patch of sun in the driveway and I brought some shoes down. He fell in love with a pair of Toy Story high-rise gym boots that had been given to me by a mother whose child grew out of them at age four. They fitted and when I asked if he could do the laces up, he tied them in a knot and shoved them down under the tongue. We gave him cake and tea and a bagful of Crocs for his little sisters. He asked Meetra to come and visit his school. He was filthy and had travelled a long way to sell gum in the bazaar. I hope Meetra goes to his school.