The Taliban Shuffle

by Kim Barker

  This election was, perhaps, the most confusing ever held anywhere. Somehow, a voter in Kabul was supposed to pick one candidate out of 390. The ballot folded out into seven large pages, and each candidate had a photograph and a symbol, because many Afghans were illiterate. But creativity ran out, and symbols had to be reused. Candidates were identified as different objects, including a pair of scissors, one camel, two camels, three camels, two sets of barbells, mushrooms, two ice-cream cones, three corncobs, two tomatoes, stairs, a turkey, two turkeys, one eye, a pair of eyes, a tire, two tires, three tires—to name a few. The symbols were randomly drawn out of a box.

  The journalists struggled to make sense of the election, of the candidates, of the lack of interest back home. For me, the election was complicated by my inability to sleep. The Gandamack had welcomed me back and all was forgiven, especially after I repeatedly apologized for the Laundry Incident. I had loaned one of the Afghan women who ran the place a Pilates exercise DVD; the Afghan front-door guard, who lost one leg when he stepped on a land mine during the civil war, pumped my arm like it would deliver oil when I first returned. The Washington Post was there; the Guardian was there; the award-winning British TV journalist doing a documentary on female drivers was there; a photographer friend was there; a group of genial security contractors was there. But my personal life intruded. I had not yet ended my relationship with Chris—I wasn’t sure why, maybe because I was never home, maybe because I felt guilty, and maybe because, ultimately, I just didn’t want to be alone. Yet my boyfriend started sending me paranoid e-mails, or more paranoid than usual. I called him. He sounded paranoid.

  “There are men outside, watching me,” Chris told me.

  “It’s India. There are always men outside watching you.”

  “Yeah, but they also know what I’ve done. And they’re watching your computer.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Are you drunk?”

  “No. I was. Now I’m fine. I erased all the incriminating files on your computer.”

  “What files? What are you talking about? You did what?”

  “The proof,” he said. “They were watching me. They were scanning your computer.”

  “You erased my computer?”

  I was confused. Chris had never displayed any sign of mental illness before. He told me he had put up notes saying “Think of Kim” and “Remember Kim,” and that they were the only thing keeping him together. In other words, yellow Post-its were holding him in place. I told him to go to sleep, to get some rest. I called my office manager and asked her to check on him. This was getting messy. Then Chris called the U.S. embassy help line, asking for help. Someone called back and heard my work answering machine; someone else figured out my e-mail address and wrote me, asking what was going on.

  “He’s a friend,” I wrote back, embarrassed to have my personal life enter my professional one. “He’s off his medication.”

  I worried. For months, I had vacillated on whether to break up with Chris, but if anything happened to him, I would never forgive myself. He had never behaved like this before, but he had never spent this much time in India before, never been alone like this. India was a series of challenges wrapped in a mystical blanket covered in an existential quandary. I often thought that all the gods—maybe three, maybe three thousand in Hinduism—made it easier in India for there to be three thousand answers to a question that should have had only one. India was colorful, fabulous, energizing. India was a Chinese finger puzzle. India made you scream at people like a Hollywood diva for the smallest of reasons. India was a crazy football coach. It could break you if it didn’t make you stronger.

  Chris was broken. He wouldn’t leave India without seeing me. I couldn’t leave Afghanistan in the middle of an election. I tried to throw myself into work and to avoid thinking or talking about my boyfriend. The guilt I felt had actual weight—I felt the responsibility of him moving halfway around the world for me, of me failing him, of fears about what was happening to him. I cried in front of Farouq and Nasir on a road trip. Farouq worried.

  “I just want you to be happy,” he told me.

  “Too bad I don’t have an eligible cousin,” I said.

  Maybe the fortune-teller was right. An old friend, a photographer I hadn’t seen in more than a year, told me that I seemed angry and bitter. Overseas for longer than me and world-weary, she warned me that maybe it was time to move back to the States, that many things were more important than the parliamentary elections in Afghanistan. Night after night, I lay in the Gandamack room that smelled like my childhood because of the wild marijuana plants outside my window. Night after night, I couldn’t sleep.

  The construction next door didn’t help. Work started at 6 AM and often stopped at 1 AM. As with everything else in Afghanistan, no laws regulated noise or construction. Every night the pounding would be our dinner music. Every night the tenants of the Gandamack would try to make it stop.

  Sean, the British journalist who was working on a documentary about female Afghan drivers, was particularly annoyed. I had met Sean with Farouq months earlier, in the garden of the Gandamack. It was a sunny day, and we were sitting outside in the garden beneath a large umbrella. A man approached us, said hello to Farouq, and thanked him for his advice. He was expansive and obnoxious, attractive and repellant, all in one package. He sat down at another table. I introduced myself, slightly defensive, worried about the man’s familiarity with Farouq.

  “Call me sometime,” he said, handing me his phone number. I soon learned that Sean gave everyone his phone number.

  I didn’t call at first, but I couldn’t help running into him everywhere. Sean was a few years older than me, his hair was prematurely gray, his chin was slightly receding, and his nose balanced out his chin. Yet there was something about him. Sean was so funny, he was always the center of attention, the ironic self-deprecating smart aleck with glasses who sat in the corner surrounded by smart attractive women. Sean was Kabul’s version of a B-movie star. He was also a war junkie, having done time in Iraq, and that addiction went a long way toward explaining why he was separated from his wife. Sean and I became quick friends. He had taken me on my first social outing to a brothel in Kabul, and he had told me when his friends had decided to drop me off early because I was cramping their style. He told me when he wanted to copy my story about the first traffic light in Kabul, as part of his documentary. In fact, Sean told me pretty much everything, as he told everyone pretty much everything, even when he told something that was supposed to be secret. Everyone knew that Sean was going through a divorce. Everyone knew that Sean really wanted to stay with his wife. And everyone knew that the divorce was pretty much Sean’s fault—he was always on the road, bouncing between war zones, an ageless man-child. But of all the people I had met in Kabul so far, few were as good company as Sean.

  Now the construction next door stalked our days and nights. The Gandamack was a two-story guesthouse. The new project, allegedly another guesthouse, soon grew taller than the Gandamack, and the construction workers only seemed to stop working to leer at the female guests in the garden. Any silence was a kind of torture, filled with waiting for the pounding to start again. The hallways echoed with combinations of four-letter words I had never before heard. We tried various tactics to stop the banging at a reasonable hour. Someone found out who owned the land—a respected spiritual leader, a man I had interviewed. I called him one night in a panic.

  “Please, please, please, can you get them to stop working by eight?” I asked the holy man. “None of us can sleep. None of us can work. I think I’m losing my mind.”

  I even played the female card. “The construction workers are harassing the women living here. They’re looking at us. It’s against Islam.”

  The spiritual leader was kind, conciliatory.

  “Don’t worry, Kim, I will stop it. I understand. Don’t worry. It’s no problem.”

  I got off the phone. “He says he’ll stop it,” I told the others.


  But within an hour, the banging again sounded like war. I was reminded of what I already knew—any time I was told “no problem” in Afghanistan, the problem bit my head off. I again tried calling the spiritual leader, but the phone rang and rang. He never answered.

  The next night, at about eleven, Sean pounded on the upstairs door of one of the security contractors, already in bed, not sleeping.

  “Can I borrow your gun?” Sean asked the security guy. It’s possible Sean was drinking.

  The security guy gave him a toy BB assault rifle and a real gun laser. Sean took the gun and aimed it toward the construction workers. He trained the laser sight on a man’s chest. It took the other workers seconds to see the red laser point, then a few more seconds to look over at the Gandamack and the window where a crazed Brit clearly was pointing a remarkably real-looking gun at them. That was what finally stopped the pounding—not reasonable talk, not negotiations, not promises, but the threat of violence. Another Afghan lesson learned.

  Finally the election was held. The results were predictable—the warlords, drug lords, and fundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami candidates won their seats, along with a smattering of do-gooders, former civil servants, and women, who under the constitution were given one-quarter of the seats. Despite allegations of fraud and illegal militias, the international election-complaints commission could do little. When the commission reversed one of its only decisions to ban a warlord-linked woman from running, one of the commissioners quit.

  Even my first warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, was allowed to run for parliament, despite his recent résumé of running an illegal militia and fighting the Americans before being arrested in Pakistan and jailed for a time. The disarmament commission reported that Pacha Khan had not surrendered all the weapons necessary to run for parliament. But still, the election commission allowed him, under the more-the-merrier warlord free-for-all. He won a seat. Like everyone else, he was now respectable, the past forgiven.

  I stayed in Kabul for days after the election, the last visiting journalist in town. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to face Chris and what I knew I had to do. Finally an earthquake threw me out of bed, an earthquake that seemed to last for minutes and threatened to shake the Gandamack into powder. I flew back to India. The quake killed more than eighty thousand people, mostly on the Pakistani side of Kashmir. I spent barely a night with my fragile boyfriend before flying off to cover the earthquake. By the time I came back, Chris knew he needed to go home to Chicago. I also knew it—I couldn’t bear the responsibility.

  “I think I want to break up,” I said as soon as I walked in the front door.

  “I know,” he said.

  Later I told him he needed to leave. Soon.

  “But I want to stay for a while,” he said. “I want to be here for your birthday.”

  “Go home for my birthday.”

  I wasn’t trying to be cruel. The best gift he could give me was to get home safe. So I put my ex-boyfriend on a plane, threw away the Post-it notes bearing my name, and tried to forget about the lost files on my computer, which Chris had wiped clean. The next day I ran away again, back to Afghanistan, where life seemed simpler.

  CHAPTER 7

  MONKEY GONE TO HEAVEN

  I left India without telling my bosses. They knew I was going to Afghanistan—they just didn’t know when. Not only that—I flew into Kabul, and then almost immediately took another flight an hour west to Herat. Why? Yes, I had found a story that I knew my bosses would want, but I also flew there because a man had invited me. I had become interested in Jeremy earlier that month, just as my long-term relationship was falling apart. This potential fling, spurred on by a flurry of e-mails, would never last. We were both on the bounce. I had met Jeremy a few times during the past year at various parties. Over the summer, he and his long-term girlfriend had split. Jeremy was only twenty-nine, and he bore a strong resemblance to every man I had ever dated—he was artsy, handsome, and angsty; he played the bass guitar; he wore corduroy; and he liked the band Postal Service. I told him very little about my breakup. He invited me to Herat for a long weekend. Coincidentally, a weekend that included my thirty-fifth birthday.

  On that Thursday, a translator I found through Farouq picked me up at the airport. We started reporting a story on the largest parliamentary vote-winner in the province, which was near Iran and much more developed than most of Afghanistan. The top winner was a woman who won primarily because Afghan men thought the mother of six was hot. After interviewing a few men who had tacked up her election poster like some cheesecake pinup, I went to my hotel to wait for Jeremy to call. He was working on a U.S.-funded agriculture project, delivering wheat seeds to farmers in an attempt to discourage poppy cultivation. The opium trade had sprung back to life after an earlier Taliban crackdown, like a dried-out sponge dropped in water. Jeremy’s project was a well-intentioned idea but similar to fighting a hundred-year flood with a sandbag, if the sandbag were given out as a loan and had to be repaid at some point in the future. Jeremy was due back that afternoon from a meeting with farmers in Farah Province. I sat in my room, which was dubbed a “deluxe,” apparently because it had four single beds all crammed together, and waited. After an hour, Jeremy called.

  “I’m really sorry, there’s no way I can get there today,” he said. “My talk to the farmers ran long. It’s too dangerous to leave this late. My security says we can’t go by road.”

  “Oh. OK, I understand,” I said. I did, but I was disappointed. There I sat in Herat, after being invited to town by a guy who wasn’t even there. Lame.

  “I’ll get there tomorrow,” he assured me.

  Tomorrow was my birthday, but Jeremy didn’t know that. I wasn’t going to tell him. After all, I had already lied about my age for the first time in my life, without even thinking about it, inexplicably telling him that I was thirty-two. “You don’t look it,” he had told me.

  So it seemed to put far too much weight on this visit to tell Jeremy that I happened to be celebrating my birthday with him. Jeremy did show up that Friday, coming over to my hotel lobby about noon. I skipped down the stairs, wearing a new blue long-sleeved butt-covering loose shirt with baggy black pants and a black headscarf.

  “I like your shirt,” Jeremy said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “It shows off my figure.”

  We smiled awkwardly at each other and shook hands. This was like seventh grade. We went to see the famed Herat minarets, pockmarked by various artillery. We looked at the rubble surrounding them, including chipped pieces of blue tile that once decorated the minarets. We could not hold hands. We could not hug. I could not spend the night at his place nor stay too long in his room—too embarrassing for him and his staff, since he lived in his office. Everything in Afghanistan was about appearances, even for foreigners. Especially for the women—we were already considered loose and easy, just by our very existence.

  Jeremy and I ate dinner at a kebab joint that was shaped like a giant swan. I had been here before, on a trip with Karzai’s crew, when we sat on daybeds out back and were entertained by live music and a dancing boy. But now it was too cold for such fun. We ate dinner quietly because everyone was staring at us. We had no booze to help ease the jitters of an actual date.

  After dinner, at Jeremy’s office, I sat at his co-worker’s desk and checked my e-mail. My bank wanted me to call—they were concerned about fraud. So I called. My bank asked for my mother’s maiden name. I gave it. Then my bank asked for my date of birth.

  “Why do you need that?” I asked, glancing at Jeremy, who was sitting at the next desk.

  “For verification,” the bank woman said.

  “But I’m verified. I told you who I am. I gave you my mother’s maiden name. That’s enough, right?”

  “We need your date of birth. That’s the procedure.”

  “Um, I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  Jeremy looked at me, hearing only my side of the conversation, which in all likelihood s
ounded strange.

  “It is,” the woman said.

  I knew if I said my date of birth, my house of fraudulent age-faking cards would come crashing down. Plus Jeremy would know it was my birthday. He was not stupid. This was an I Love Lucy episode. I thought quickly.

  “Today,” I told her. I waited briefly, as if she were saying something on the other end of the line. “Yes. But a while ago. A long while ago.”

  “Oh, so it is,” the woman said. “I didn’t notice that before. Happy birthday. And what was the year?”

  “You need that?”

  “We need that.”

  “That’s a very good question,” I said. “In fact, I think the correct number you’re looking for is one, nine, seven, zero.”

  Smooth. It worked. Jeremy had no idea.

  The next day I continued to report my story. At the hot parliament member’s aerobics class, various Afghan women dressed in the same everyday long-sleeved shirts and baggy pants they wore underneath their burqas or black abayas. There was no such thing yet as workout gear for women in Afghanistan, although one standout young woman had somehow managed to get her hands on a sweatshirt. The power went out. The exercise routine made the Sit and Be Fit workout program for seniors in the United States look extreme.