Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  While I understand that this story is widespread, Edris is a great romancer and, like most romancers, he implicitly believes what he says. At one point he got carried away with his own inventiveness and told me his solution to global warming. ‘Wrap the ice and snow in aluminium foil,’ was his advice, his brown eyes earnest, his small fine hand making pointing gestures at the air and his equally small, fine right foot waggling with invention over the knee of his left leg. How he would love to come to Australia! How he would love to spend five years in a country that wasn’t war-torn! He would develop solar energy in Australia. He’d lived all his life in circumstances of war. He was far from his loved ones. He wanted to be married.

  ‘You would need a bright companion, Edris Jan,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, but I am engaged to my brother’s wife’s best friend. All I have to do is go to Karachi and marry her.’

  ‘What sort of work does she do, Edris Jan?’

  ‘Oh, she is a student.’

  ‘And how old?’

  ‘Oh she is…’ and here his foot wiggled around a good deal on the chair where he sat in Meetra’s formal sitting room drinking tea with me after the others had gone to bed, ‘twenty-four.’

  ‘And what do you wish for in your companion?’

  ‘Oh, she should cook for me and clean my house and look after me and have my children…’

  ‘But you would need an equal partner with whom to share your ideas and dreams.’

  ‘Oh she is equal. I will need her to tell me where I am wrong, where I have gone off track, how I could make myself a better person. She will teach me to be good.’

  ‘How will she know?’

  ‘Oh, she will know. She’s read the Quran.’

  ‘Will she have to be good?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I see. And what will her work be, when she graduates?’

  Here his eyes darted around and his handsome mouth fell open as if trying to taste the degree for which his prospective wife was studying…‘Oh, she will be…She will be…Home Science.’

  ‘And she is in Karachi?’

  ‘Yes. She is living in my mother’s house. All I have to do is find time to go and marry her.’

  ‘I see. Your mother has chosen her?’

  ‘She is…my brother’s wife’s friend. She helps my brother’s wife look after our mother and my brother’s little children.’

  ‘And your brother is Haroon, who is the project manager here?’

  ‘Yes. Haroon.’

  ‘Would it be out of the question for your mother and the women to come to Kabul?’

  ‘Oh, we have a father. He is there, too.’

  ‘Does he work in Karachi?’

  ‘No, he is a retired engineer.’

  ‘But he’s Afghan and so is your mother. Couldn’t they all come to Kabul?’

  ‘My mother is an invalid. They can’t treat her here.’

  ‘May I ask what’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She has diabetes.’

  ‘Oh? Type one or type two?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Well, then, she doesn’t need injections. She needs a special diet and medication. It isn’t such a problem.’

  But it seemed his mother didn’t want to come to Kabul and that was the stumbling block. ‘I want to live in a country without war,’ said Edris Jan to me again before we went to bed.

  In the morning, I wrote to Mick.

  In Kabul, buildings are going up everywhere. They don’t use metal scaffolding in this part of the world; instead, they’re chopping down the forests of Tajikistan to realise the childlike dreams of those coming home from Pakistan. The enormous floors are held apart by tree trunks.

  No doubt there will be entertainment rooms on a grand scale, remote controls and recliners and much to boast about to those with a lesser share of the great narcotics trade. Edris tells me it’s very expensive to build in Kabul; it’s one of his excuses for not organising to bring his family here. Poor man, he probably wants to keep the door open to flee back to Pakistan if the reform of the civil society fails here. He wants to come to Australia, but what would he do for a living if he did? Drive a taxi probably, certainly nothing as productive as what he is doing now. He’s a romancer but he’s brave and works hard. His younger brother Haroon, who is a very handsome boy, misses his wife and children terribly. He shows me photos of them all the time. His wife is lovely to look at, but she had a very glum expression on her face during her wedding ceremony. The photos of her with her children are delightful and she’s full of smiles there – but there are also pictures of Edris’s intended bride playing with the children and although Edris says she is twenty-four, she looks like a little girl to me! They speak to each other on Skype. Once I went into the office to use the copier and Haroon’s wife and mother and children and Edris’s fiancé – fifteen years old at most – were all dancing in real time on the screen. So what’s the story? Who knows? Meetra says Haroon and Edris have sisters in Australia but the sisters have husbands who won’t sponsor them. She tells them, ‘If you want to go to Australia, apply.’ But of course, it’s then a question of waiting, waiting, waiting because the processing takes years and you might grow old in the meantime. People’s chances just slip away.

  It’s all right for the wealthy ones; they can move around as they please and have always been able to, but for those without the funds, it can be a lifetime spent in futile hope. No wonder people seek asylum. How much better it would be if refugees had hope of a better life inside their own country.

  What’s the answer, Mick?

  I suppose there is no answer and when there is no answer, people turn to religion, or sit it out, watching history unfold on the telly. Meetra and I watch the Turkish soaps on Tolo TV after dinner. There is a lot of staring between former lovers across crowded rooms. During the flashbacks to happier days, the woman starts to make little grunts, like a bear cub in training. The gent generally has a moustache and a tired, jaded expression, as if life has been hard on him since the days of fresh true love. The plots are simple enough to follow, even if you don’t speak the language. Large groups of sympathetic women surround the saintly heroine, who knows he’s a cad but loves him all the same. He has betrayed her, she has become frail and ill and her father is boiling with anger. The teeth grinding and eye rolling of the father are handled extremely well on Tolo: Stella could take lessons from the chaps who play the dads. In general, the dad stabs the cad in the stomach for dishonouring his daughter. The stabbing happens on a white marble staircase in one of the elaborate marriage palaces popular in the Muslim world and it happens alongside the new wife who has been arranged for the cad by his mother. Lots of lovely strawberry syrup on her pavlova gown with its pixilated neckline, but none on the stairs, as we don’t want the producers having to fork out to get stains out of marble. The cad looks dead at the end of the episode where we leave him in his very best clobber in the shape of a swastika in a bed of petunias.

  At the beginning of the next night’s entertainment, the cad is on life support and the father has honourably given himself up to the cops.

  The women are quite often streaked with blood from stabbed stomachs in Turkish soaps. They do a good line in being kicked. Bad girls, often English or American, have evil laughs. The saintly heroine may well have miscarried after having been booted in the guts by her avenging dad before he stopped seeing red after the announcement of her pregnancy, but she is still loving and pleases everybody by accepting the proposal of a clean-shaven, very upright soap-and-scent manufacturer. This means that her amazingly chinless mother and her budding beauty of a younger sister – the genetics of it are enthralling – can look forward to the release of the avenging fat little dad with his red face and the steam coming out of his ears. Bliss is on the cards for the soap-and-scent manufacturer and a life of grunting revision is guaranteed for the heroine.

  On my first day here, I was hustled past a real woman, a mother in a blue burqa carrying a small, very dirty c
hild, whose poor little fist was poking out of the bundle of her arms, palm upward, while the mother said, ‘Very hard, very hard. Difficult. Please, please.’ Lines she had learned from who knows where. My heart was wrung. I would have given money, but Meetra said, ‘Hoh!’ And I surmised that if I did place money in that pathetic little hand, I’d very soon be swamped by a legion of other little hands.

  The woman and child haunted me but I soon got used to it and was soon to learn that the street beggars were probably better off than the displaced folk in the camps in and around Kabul. The poverty in the camps is abysmal. Anything in the shape of a sheet is thrown over string or cord stretched between posts or trees on ground that most people would disdain. The rubbish around the tents is not nearly as thick and complex as it was in the tips where Dadda would take Allegra and me to escape our mother’s fits of rage, but that the areas are tips can’t be doubted; rubbish is heaped up everywhere and people, especially children who are too small to go begging, spend their lives sorting it. We drive past such places almost every day. Edris has shown me pictures of the camps in winter after blizzards with snow mounted up the tent walls to the top. At least somebody supplies what look like army tents for the winter, nevertheless, each year several women and children die of cold. There’s slush in the spring and everyone goes around wet. The summers are joyless and toyless, roasting under canvas at temperatures of forty in the shade. In the areas where the displaced people come from, the landmines might not have been cleared or there are military operations going on or the damage is so bad that no one can live there. Foreign aid organisations might erect a brick building for them in anticipation of their return, but they’ll fail to do the job thoroughly. They’ll omit a fence. They will not have ensured access to clean drinking water and certainly not to electricity and so the buildings are unlivable and start disintegrating before they can be used. It seems that in rural Afghanistan, Allah takes care of those who put up the buildings, but not of the people they are intended to house, just as in town the Great One takes care of those who build grand hospitals but don’t equip or staff them, while He looks less kindly on those who would create the staff and the technicians. It seems that Allah likes show: it’s attractive and covers over the deficiencies.

  Meetra does a lot of shopping for things that she takes home and resells to raise money for her organisation. (She doesn’t seem to care for the things that catch my eye, like Kuchi jewellery.) On one of our expeditions, I saw an ancient woman in a black burqa who was almost prone in the street, holding herself up on a staff made from the branch of a sapling as though she had just slumped beside the gutter. Inevitably, a brown hand was out, begging. I felt sick and had to steel myself as Meetra whisked me by. We turned off the main street and began picking our way over puddles from recent rain in some back streets. We were arranging with a Hazara in a carpet shop for the delivery of the splendid carpet I’d bought showing all the different styles of weaving in Afghanistan and with the Tajik jeweller for an assortment of filigreed silver, Panjshir emeralds, lapis, carnelian and aquamarine necklaces, earrings and bangles for Meetra’s fundraising; we’d started back up the lane with its treacherous craterfuls of water and, as usual, Meetra rocketed on ahead, but I stopped to photograph a comical old umbrella outside an uncongenial room off the street and as I did so, who should climb the stairs and open the door but the same black-burqa’d crone I’d seen lying dramatically in the street. She turned her aged face to me with its crags and toothless grin and, as the door opened, I saw inside, beggars around a table, drinking tea from a tall aluminium samovar and watching the daytime run of the same Turkish soap we’d been watching the night before. There were the rolling eyes of the red-faced dad behind the metal mesh of the prison; there was the palm of the hard-done-by heroine pressed to the glass of the prison meeting room as she announced her intentions to marry the soap-and-scent guy. The tears, the are-you-sure-you’re-doing-theright-thing from the dad who kicked her guts out…

  Dear Mick, I’ve done another Blondie – a fabulous dress: the dress of a Kuchi nomad, grey with a red front panel with mirrors embroidered into it. The front panel is all embroidered and it serves as a great big pocket – after all, they don’t have handbags in this part of the world. A Hazara carpet dealer tried to tell me it was a fake. You see, I bought it from a Pashtun across the way from him. The Hazara was dropping off my carpet and he said that the Pashtun had faked the antiquity of the dress by sewing some bits and pieces together. After he left, I checked the seams and the little drawstrings it has under the arms to gather in the top and they were all of the same stitch and material. There’s been no resewing anywhere; it isn’t a fake.

  Kuchis are a subclan of the Pashtuns. The Hazara dislike them intensely and believe they encroach on their lands in Hazarajat, but as things stand, the Kuchi have grazing rights in Hazarajat and they need to pasture their flocks there in the good weather. It’s an old dispute, dating back over a century to when the Afghan monarch, Abdul Rahman Khan, dispossessed the Hazaras of the region because of their Shi’ite faith. Twenty years later, his successor, Amanullah Khan, reinstated Hazara ownership and instituted Kuchi grazing rights in place of land tenure. These days, with the cream of the Kuchi now settled and wealthy and the Hazaras very prominent, firmly entrenched and with their religious practices enshrined in the constitution, it suits the Kuchi parliamentarians to have the dispute continue, as money keeps flowing their way which is meant to go towards bridge building and peacemaking. They line their pockets while the Hazaras accuse the Kuchis of supplying the Taliban, running their guns and providing men for their militia, so justifying the blasting of the Kuchi off their lands and causing misery, as ever, to poor people on both sides.

  That amazing necklace-cum-breastplate I saw in the jeweller’s was Kuchi jewellery. I think I can live without it, but you never know, it could come home with the dress. I imagine when the herder’s caravan passes, it might advertise itself with a richly dressed girl on the elaborate saddle of some beast of burden, her mirrors flashing, her bells tinkling… ‘Come trade with me. My tribe is rich. I am beauty. I am what you do not have. I am mystery.’ How do you think it would go down in the streets of Melbourne? We could hire a camel…

  Back came an email pronto: Stop spending, Blondie. Your mother has now been settled back at Redeemer, but unfortunately we have had to opt for the nursing-home section as she is too weak now to cope in the hostel. I’m afraid she’s moved from her cosy room to a four-bed ward. Nin is writing to tell you about it.

  Don’t forget that, according to your mother, I’m only after you for your money, so don’t spend all of it or I’ll have to go shopping elsewhere. We are now back in Melbourne and Nin has found a place for Daniel in child care. The pregnancy progresses well. She’s sending you a snap of her belly. They’ve decided not to find out the gender but it’s due early November.

  We haven’t been attacked lately, but that probably won’t last. Wendy has made an excellent piranha; Stella dreads the sight of her, but that’s okay because Audra has turned up in the meantime and she dreads the sight of Audra more than she dreads the sight of Wendy. She and Wendy even played a game of Bingo together the other day. Stella’s so blind she has to use milk-bottle lids for her counters and they’ve made her a specially large number sheet. Wendy thought it was a hoot.

  Love you,

  Mick

  We’re all enjoying your emails. No sign of Eli yet?

  No. No sign of Eli. My eyes are glued to the TV whenever possible for a glimpse of Elias Jan on the news but he isn’t there. This evening, we had a very congenial table. Some German friends have joined us, along with the Afghans of the house and another Australian, working for Oxfam. We’ve eaten very well, qima kebab and bolani. I told my tale of the beggar and one of the Germans said that her brother had been visiting and had given a very handicapped beggar a generous donation only to see him around the corner some short time later, counting a fat wad of money such as an ordinary Afghan wouldn’
t earn in a month – presumably it was one day’s takings.

  I’ve just watched for Eli again on Tolo news and failed to find him and now, on the screen in front of me, a gun has failed to go off at the temple of a star-crossed judge whose blonde English wife has just run off with a billionaire, but everything’s all right, because his former Turkish wife is back, grunting, and the child of their loins is bringing tea at a trot. The judge is having his chin washed.

  I’m glad the beggars of Kabul have a culture. I was once very broke and frightened myself – on my own with Eli in Sydney – and the best asset in our street was a kleptomaniac who worked in the kitchen at St Vincent’s Hospital around the corner. Every now and then, the street scored half a lamb and we no longer had to choose between food and cigarettes. We knew we’d struck it lucky when our thief would come running down the street, crying ‘Klepsi, klepsi, klepsi!’ wielding a carpet bag with a sheep shin sticking out of it.

  But just as the plot has moved on in my life and I’m still a single mother but this time searching for her adult son in Afghanistan, the plot has moved on, on Tolo TV. Yet another hero lies fighting for his life in a hospital bed after being stabbed in strawberry and spread-eagled in swastika in a bed of petunias. A beautiful, thwarted brunette is grunting at his door. I hope the beggars are also being enthralled by the pixilated décolleté and calves of our heroine as she opens the door and begins that fixed gaze so beloved of Tolo, for who knows what tomorrow will bring?

  Today we are having a holiday. We are joining some dignitaries on an excursion to Panjshir to visit Massoud’s tomb. This morning Hafiz let an SUV into the drive. Hurtling along, two steps ahead of me as usual, Meetra was out the door and down the front steps before I had my shoelaces tied. I arrived behind her, panting, still pulling on my headscarf. She was already in the back of the SUV, patting the seat beside her; on her other side was our German friend, Helga, whose brother was duped by the beggar. Helga is a teacher trainer. In front, one of the men I met on my first evening here when he stopped by for arthritis tablets: yet another engineer, whom we call Engineer Asraf – half the world here seems to be engineers. To drive us was one of Meetra’s carpentry instructors, a nice, plump man called Abdullah who had dangling from his rear-vision mirror a heart-shaped silken talisman with something from the Quran embroidered on it.