A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  6

  Fridays with Mohammed

  The Karwan Sara was home to a handful of permanent guests – or as permanent as the revolving door of Development Inc. made any foreigner in Kabul. Foreigners came and went, some staying for a few weeks, some a few months and some lost souls for a few years or longer. My housemates included a Dutch couple, Henk and Mathilde, who also worked for the UN and who had the unenviable task of providing the logistics for the forthcoming presidential election later that year; Jean-Luc, a retired auto-mechanic from France who was teaching physics and chemistry to Afghan high school teachers; Jennifer, a British woman working in media training; and Martin, a German doctor.

  Martin Weinbeck had retired as a gastrointestinal surgeon the previous year and travelled to Kabul from his native Germany. He felt he had a great deal to offer and there was no denying that a country that had barely trained a doctor in twenty years could put him to good use. But Development Inc. can be a contrary beast. No NGO seemed to want his services. He was either too old, too qualified or too unknown. In the end, he rustled up a small amount of money through various contacts at home and was now teaching surgeons in three of Kabul’s hospitals.

  Martin exuded enormous warmth, kindness and, that greatest of virtues in the Ghan, patience. He had no agenda apart from having lived an extraordinary life and having something to offer. He was as far removed from the ‘Land Cruiser brigade’ as could possibly be imagined. Each morning, he set off down the Karwan Sara’s dusty lane in his pristine suit and tie, riding his not-so-pristine bicycle through Kabul’s horrendous, though thankfully slow, traffic.

  The person I spent most of my time with, though, was Mohammed, the Karwan Sara waiter. It wasn’t that I sought out his company, but my need for breakfast and, on occasion, lunch and dinner meant Mohammed featured in my life more than just about anyone else. This was especially the case on Fridays, the Muslim holy day and the best time for a sleep-in and a leisurely breakfast.

  Breakfast at the Karwan Sara was served in the restaurant at the end of the garden. Like the main guesthouse, it was a colonial building that had somehow managed to survive the years of war and destruction. Inside, it was divided into two dining rooms. Depending on how athletic I felt, I could choose from either the room with the Western-style tables and chairs or the traditional Afghan-style dining room. Eating Afghan-style means removing your shoes and sitting on the floor, perched on toshaks (cushions) at a table no higher than your knees. In keeping with the Karwan Sara’s colonial flavour, the crockery was elegant blue and white china, and both dining rooms had been tastefully renovated with lush red Afghan carpets, an improvement on the plastic sheeting found in most chaikhanas (teahouses) around town.

  Breakfast at a Kabul guesthouse was a predictable event: juice from a carton, Alpen cereal, UHT milk and ‘omelettes’ – heavy on onion, light on cooking – that would reduce Martha Stewart to tears. The Karwan Sara breakfast held no surprises, though every morning, without fail, Mohammed forgot my orange juice.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Miss Sally,’ became the standard response, followed by a hand lifted to the forehead and the shaking of his head. On some mornings, my orange juice would follow me out to the car. However it made its way to me, it was always accompanied by a smile, which was an improvement on most waiters in Sydney.

  Mohammed was fifteen years old with a shock of unkempt brown hair. His face sported the usual mixture of underage facial hair and adolescent pimples, his body gangly and awkward. Mohammed wore the standard young Afghan male uniform of a tight cotton T-shirt and flared jeans. He ambled across the garden like a giraffe, usually carrying a tray of tea for Mujeeb. He told me he went to school but, as far as I could tell, he seemed to spend his day singing and riding his bike around the garden, sometimes on his own, sometimes with the other waiter, Yama, sitting on the handlebars. Yama spoke no English but in the strange logic of the Karwan Sara, he was the one who always remembered my orange juice.

  One morning Mohammed sidled up to me. ‘Miss Sally.’ He shook his head, his eyes falling to the floor. ‘Miss Sally, I am in love.’

  He wasn’t shy about letting anyone know. I’d heard him having the same conversation with Martin the morning before. The object of his affection was Marzia, who came to the tae kwan do classes in the recreation hall in the Karwan Sara garden. Tae kwan do was an unusual pursuit for Afghan schoolgirls but in the post-Taliban Ghan anything seemed possible. For reasons best known to themselves, Afghans were big fans of martial arts. There were tae kwan do and karate clubs scattered all over town, and Bruce Lee was almost as big as Sylvester Stallone in the DVD shops along Flower Street.

  Marzia was all of fourteen and, like all Afghan schoolgirls, wore a white headscarf with her loose fitting, neck-to-ankle gym uniform. I couldn’t figure out how Mohammed distinguished her from the pack whenever he stood on the edge of the garden forlornly waiting for a glimpse of her through the recreation hall’s flimsy curtains. According to Mohammed, Marzia had also expressed undying love for him.

  ‘She tell me many, many times,’ he assured me one morning as I waited – patiently – for my omelette. Presumably this happened in the stolen moments between the recreation hall and the school minivan, when Mohammed wandered by with a tray of tea. ‘Love’ was a dubious concept in a country where custom dictated that men and women rarely spoke to each other and almost all marriages were business arrangements between families. Twenty-first-century ideas of romantic love were, like the Afghans themselves, intensely dramatic, heavily borrowed from Bollywood movies and the film Titanic, whose enduring popularity in this landlocked country had managed to defy its prohibition by the Taliban.

  One Friday morning, Mohammed managed to bring all my breakfast at the same time. I had cereal, a remarkably sturdy omelette, coffee, even orange juice. Carefully placing each item on the table in front of me, he cleared his throat.

  ‘Miss Sally, you must do my English for me,’ he said with all the seriousness of a soldier on the eve of a battle.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said. I hadn’t yet caffeinated and little of the world, particularly the Afghan world, would make sense until I did.

  ‘My English … you should do it for me.’

  ‘What English?’ I frowned.

  ‘Maktab. For school. My homework is to write something in English.’

  ‘Don’t you think your teacher might notice the difference?’

  ‘No. We are many in the class. She only looks at her hair.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mohammed. That would be cheating. Why don’t you write something and I can correct it for you?’

  All I really wanted was my coffee. The usual Afghan discussion followed, a bit like a tennis match, the same lines backward and forward until one side relented.

  ‘But I think your English is better.’

  ‘Yes, but don’t you think your teacher will notice?’

  ‘Your English, it is better.’

  ‘Yes, it is, but I think your teacher might notice you didn’t write it.’

  Over and over and over again. Mohammed finally conceded that he would ‘probably’ write it and I would ‘probably’ help. Happy with that outcome, he jumped up and told me he was going to pray.

  The next morning, after serving my cereal, my omelette, my coffee and, eventually, my juice, Mohammed sat down beside me and we had exactly the same discussion until he finally realised that the chances of my doing his English homework were indeed slim.

  Later that day he came back with a few lines on the history of Afghanistan and how it had been fought over for the last few hundred years by nasty foreigners. At least he didn’t say infidels, I thought. I corrected his spelling and fixed a bit of the sentence structure, taking care not to make it too good, and told him to write another paragraph for me and I would do the same for him tomorrow.

  ‘Yama. He a good boy. He like to learn some more English too …’

  Since Yama could barely muster a ‘good morning’, I wondered
if this was the time to correct Mohammed’s use of the word ‘more’. Between the IRIN office and the Karwan Sara, I seemed to be fast-tracking myself towards a career in English teaching. Perversely, I wondered if my language instruction would have more of an impact than anything I hoped to achieve officially.

  7

  Adventures with Jean-Luc

  The menu at the Karwan Sara may have been extensive but that didn’t mean diners got the pasta, roast beef or schnitzel of their choice. Most nights, guests sat cross-legged on the cushions of its traditional Afghan-style dining room and navigated their way through a list of items Mohammed seemed never to have heard of. The dishes had either finished for the evening or they had never begun.

  ‘Humph,’ said Jean-Luc with the kind of disgust only ever elicited from the French. ‘Tomorrow mange outside, a la restaurant indien.’

  Jean-Luc was a portly man on the other side of sixty, quite probably closer to the end of that decade than his demeanour suggested. He spoke minimal English and no Dari but his shock of white hair and the twinkle in his eye more than made up for his lack of language skills. I wasn’t entirely sure but I suspected Jean-Luc had just invited me out to dinner.

  When I first arrived in Kabul, there were only one or two restaurants in town that served more than pilau, kebab and Pepsi. As more foreigners arrived, more restaurants opened with the choice now expanding to Indian, Chinese and European fare. The common denominator in all such establishments was alcohol, which was served at vastly inflated prices.

  Kabul’s sun was setting when Jean-Luc and I trotted down the Karwan Sara’s laneway the following evening.

  ‘We taxee,’ he told me, waving his hand in the air for extra emphasis.

  Reaching the main road, Jean-Luc accosted a passing driver. Kabul’s official taxis are yellow and white but anyone would give you a ride for a negotiated fee. Doors creaked, if they opened at all, and engines had always seen better days, coughing to life after a quick, mumbled prayer. Inside, the upholstery was usually red or black. Pictures of the ubiquitous Swiss Alpine scenes lined the doors, as if to take the passenger away from the dusty brown chaos just beyond the window. Our driver spoke neither French nor English, but we nonetheless managed to navigate our way through the darkened streets of Kabul in a rusty Corolla that seemed older than Jean-Luc himself.

  Our destination was an in-vogue Indian restaurant favoured by Kabul’s international community. Like all such restaurants, Anaar was noted for its maximum guards and minimal Afghans. A tantalising aroma of spices greeted our arrival, a far cry from the smell of day-old socks that perpetually embraced the dining room of the Karwan Sara. Jean-Luc and I stumbled through dinner, his Frenglish proving more useful than my French. I left the ordering to him and watched while the perplexed Afghan waiter, too polite to ask, wrote down each item in Afghanised Frenglish. Whatever would ultimately reach our table would be better than the vegetable soup, chicken kebab and crusty schnitzel of the Karwan Sara. In Kabul’s embryonic restaurant industry, one’s meal rarely matched one’s order and, at the end of a day of many similar miscommunications, Kabul’s expats rarely complained.

  Over dinner, I asked Jean-Luc how he came to be in Kabul. If I understood him correctly, and I wasn’t entirely sure I did, he had retired a few years earlier. His wife had died and he had become bored with life in his small provincial town some distance from Paris. Although he’d been an auto-mechanic for almost all his life, he came to Kabul as part of a teacher exchange – though I doubted many Afghan teachers were heading to France. Still, in the post-Taliban Ghan, one man’s auto-mechanic can easily, and unwittingly, become another man’s chemistry professor. Jean-Luc had arrived at the end of winter and was leaving in a month. He had rarely travelled outside France and viewed his trip to Kabul as a great adventure.

  After devouring our chicken tikka and rogan josh, which Jean-Luc assured me was exactly what he had ordered, it was time to find our way home. Foreigners were rarely seen walking down the street during the daytime, let alone at night. Armed with Jean-Luc’s unreliable torch, we sidestepped Kabul’s springtime puddles, making our way to the main road where he optimistically waved the beam at any passing vehicle. If there were few people out at night, there were even fewer cars. Kabul is a city of limited entertainment opportunities. Afghans headed home at sunset and stayed there.

  After five minutes, a taxi pulled up. The driver was so thrilled to have two foreigners in his car he refused to accept any payment when he deposited us safely at the gates of the Karwan Sara.

  A few weeks later Jean-Luc’s students – all of whom were male – invited him to a ‘pique-nique in zee eels’ to farewell him before he returned to France. ‘You would like to come also?’ he asked me over breakfast one Thursday morning. Although a mental picture of swimming among eels briefly flashed in front of my eyes, I was reasonably confident he was suggesting we go on a picnic in the hills outside Kabul.

  An Afghan picnic was a predictable event, the players well rehearsed and the scenery rarely changing. Needless to say, women, Afghan or foreign, were seldom invited. There weren’t a lot of places to go so every Friday Kabul’s picnickers headed to Paghman, a small town that had been home to the country estates of Kabul’s rich and powerful. Its once-fabulous gardens and fine colonial buildings were virtually destroyed but the trees remained, making it every picnicker’s destination of choice.

  Convoys of cars, each weighed down with as many passengers as could be jammed in, snaked their way up into the hills. One of the great treats of a picnic to Paghman were the fruit stands that lined the route, usually no more than a few rocks piled together and staffed by a small boy. Cars pulled up, everyone piled out. Watermelons were fondled, checked for their colour, their size and, with the flick of the kind of knife only an Afghan would carry, their flavour. Satisfied that they had chosen what could only be the best, prices were agreed, passengers piled back into cars and everyone was on their way.

  With so many cars, so many fruit stands and so little roadway, the inevitable result was a traffic jam of monumental proportions. I was told there were road rules in Afghanistan though I doubted anyone knew what they were. The number one rule for all Afghan drivers was to get there, whatever it took. It would be an understatement to call Afghans competitive. If there was no room on the road, drivers would veer up onto the embankment and overtake as many cars as necessary to get where they needed to go.

  For those whose nerves may have been made of something less than steel and who arrived in Paghman towards the end of the traffic jam, much of the day was spent searching for an acceptable picnic spot. Top of the list was anywhere that would provide shelter from the unrelenting sun and the punishing dust. Afghanistan is by no means an overcrowded country but personal space isn’t highly prized and it’s far from a social faux pas to set oneself down a metre or two from one’s neighbours. For entertainment, cars were parked as close to picnickers as possible so all could share in the delights of blaring Hindi pop music. When the last of the kebab was wiped from the plate and the final melon pips spat, revellers dozed on blankets or drove into the river to wash their cars.

  Jean-Luc’s students were older than I had imagined, some surpassing middle age. They collected us from the Karwan Sara and, in the decrepit taxi they had hired for the occasion, joined the tail end of the Paghman traffic jam. After the requisite melon stop, we cleared the traffic, parked the car and found a spare tree.

  We were a long way from Paghman but no-one seemed to mind. The tranquillity of Kabul’s hills more than made up for it. In the absence of picnic tables or blankets and in honour of his foreign guests, the driver grabbed his ‘tool kit’ – a spanner and a wrench – and valiantly removed the back seat of his taxi and placed it beneath a nearby tree for Jean-Luc and I to sit on.

  The melon was sliced and handed around while I listened to Jean-Luc’s prattle with his students, whose grasp of Frenglish seemed far superior to my own. As a woman, I had been invisible for most of the day
. Because Jean-Luc was a foreigner and my friend, it was okay for me to sit sandwiched between him and the door for the taxi ride to the hills. To sit so closely to an Afghan man would be most improper. Aside from our initial greetings, I wasn’t included in the conversation unless specifically addressed by Jean-Luc. In this context, our Afghan hosts saw me as something between a child and a chattel, in both cases seen and not heard. I had been in the Ghan long enough not to take offence and left it to Jean-Luc to deal with the conversation.

  For a rare few hours, I could relax, perched on a hillside above Kabul, amid the trees, the birds and the spent bullet shells. I wondered what Jean-Luc made of his few months in Kabul – and what Kabul made of him. Afghan society views its young people as inexperienced and lacking the wisdom of the elders – the ‘beards’ – in whom it places great faith. The Ghan was what the UN called a ‘non-family duty station’, which translated into a young and predominantly single workforce across the whole of Development Inc. I wasn’t sure what Afghans thought of all the young Westerners and their arsenal of laptops and palm pilots, advising bearded locals on the rebuilding of their country. Regardless of what Jean-Luc had come here to do, he was probably regarded with far more respect by the Afghans than those whose hair was less white even if their degrees were more numerous.

  8

  America, God Shed His Grace on Thee

  If Development Inc. was a defining feature of post-Taliban Kabul, so too were the ‘security guys’. ‘Security guys’ came in many forms, usually from the ever-increasing pool of British or American private security companies. The War on Terror had produced a new world order, one in which private security companies (latter day mercenaries in as much as their services are available for a price) slipped easily into the void previously filled by old-style armies and traditional ‘security’ firms – from the contract to provide the guard force for the US embassy to a couple of men, and the occasional woman, babysitting foreign dignitaries. For former soldiers, particularly those from white Africa, it was a high-paying alternative to crop farming or, in the case of Zimbabweans, farm eviction. It was an equally attractive alternative to America’s increasing number of Iraq veterans, easily identified by their chewing tobacco and their goatees. The private security industry had flourished but it had also gone unchecked. The general rule around town was the longer the goatee, the greater the cause for alarm.