A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  As we pulled into the driveway, I spotted Dr Faisal walking out. Dr Faisal was Dr Martin’s right-hand man, a surgeon from Ali Abad Hospital whom Martin was working with as he trained Afghanistan’s small band of gastroenterological surgeons. Martin, the white-maned doctor who was a long-time Karwan Sara resident, had returned from Germany the week before. It was great to have him back. Dr Faisal was walking fast, his face grave.

  The guesthouse gates were open and I spotted an ambulance backed into the corner of the small concrete expanse generously referred to as the car park. I couldn’t recall seeing an ambulance in Kabul before. The van was new, quite possibly German, painted vibrant red and bold green, the word ambulance emblazoned across its front in English, though not in Dari. It was parked at an angle, as if waiting for something to happen.

  As Mahmood eased the car to a halt, Sameem rushed over. His face was pale, his eyes distressed.

  ‘Miss Sally –’ he began. He flapped his hands, English yielding to Dari as words tumbled out. The only thing I understood was ‘Dr Martin’. Sameem turned and pointed to the ambulance.

  I looked at it again. Something had happened. I needed Mahmood to translate, but when I turned to him, his face had fallen. He paused and cleared his throat.

  ‘The old man has had an accident,’ he said slowly.

  Before Mahmood could go on, Sameem blurted out the one English word he remembered. ‘Dead.’

  I stared at him. Sameem’s face was contorted with pain. In a reflex action that transcended the culture I was living in, I grabbed Mahmood’s arm, my other hand flying up to my mouth. ‘What?’ I was hoping Sameem had made a mistake – but his face didn’t lie.

  Mahmood’s slow, gentle voice continued. ‘There was an accident with his bike. The ambulance came but he is dead.’

  My head pounded. This couldn’t be true. I’d had breakfast with Martin that morning. Muesli and omelettes. He was happy to be back. We talked about his trip home, my problems with the Matriarch. He went to work. It was all as it should be.

  I looked across the car park and spotted Mujeeb and the boys inside Reception. I hadn’t noticed them when I first came in, now I saw they were huddled together. Heads down. Silent. Trying to absorb what had happened.

  Sameem was watching me, tears streaking down his cheeks. I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t know what to do. I turned and told Mahmood, who had quietly taken repossession of his arm, that he should go home.

  ‘Are you okay, Miss Sally?’

  Where Ismail, Faheem and Mirwais had long dropped the ‘Miss’ from the ‘Sally’, Mahmood rarely addressed me by my name. He usually called me ‘boss’ or ‘chief’. I told him I was fine but he knew I was lying. There was nothing he or anyone else could do. He said goodbye to me and to Sameem and walked off down the silent laneway.

  Sameem was inconsolable. I wanted to reach out and hug him but this was Afghanistan and all I could do was thank him. I picked up my bag, turned around and slowly walked up the steps to my room.

  I opened the door, glancing across the hall to the doorway that still bore the sign Henk and Mathilde. Where were they now? And Jennifer? Oliver? What would I tell them? I walked into my room, dropped my bag and wondered what to do. It was like a gust of wind had swept in and blown my friends and memories away. This room, this guesthouse, these people had been my home and now it was empty and lifeless, a place I didn’t recognise.

  I remembered Peter had said he would come by for supper. I was grateful that I wouldn’t have to be alone. Peter had also known Dr Martin – he needed to know what had happened before he walked through the gate and saw the ambulance.

  I rescued my phone from the chaos of my bag. There was no easy way to say it.

  ‘Peter. There’s been an accident. Martin is dead.’ I could barely hear my own voice.

  ‘My God.’ Silence.

  ‘I don’t know what happened but he either fell or was knocked off his bike.’ I was babbling like Sameem, trying to fill the void with information, any information, hoping that it would help it all make sense.

  ‘Ahhh, I came back on the plane from Frankfurt with him last week …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll be there soon.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I sat on my bed, staring out the window as the evening shadows began to fall across TV Mountain, and the tears fell silently. The sun was setting and the Karwan Sara was completely still. Drawing a deep breath, I went into the bathroom, washed my face and stepped outside onto the verandah. The spring weather had hastened the return of Hashem, the Karwan Sara’s owner, and I was grateful he was back, today of all days. Martin’s death would require organisation and diplomacy far beyond the ability of the hapless Mujeeb.

  Seeing me, Hashem walked slowly up the steps. Although Afghan, his years in London had made him Western enough to reach out and place an arm around my shoulders. The tears started again as he pulled a neatly ironed handkerchief from deep within the pocket of his shalwar kameez.

  ‘It happened outside the Ministry of Interior,’ he told me gently. ‘A car came speeding out of the driveway and knocked him down. They brought him in here and I took him to the hospital right away but … there was nothing anyone could do. We are waiting for the people from the German embassy. If you will excuse me, I have to clean the driveway.’ I thought it an odd thing to do until I looked down and saw a trail of blood. I hadn’t noticed it before. ‘I can’t ask any of them to do it,’ Hashem said, casting his eye towards the pack of hunched shoulders inside Reception.

  I sat alone on the verandah, at the table where Jennifer, Henk, Mathilde, Peter, Cole and Oliver had so often gathered for our evening get-togethers. Sometimes, when he had a spare moment, Martin had joined us. The verandah’s height distanced me from the grief below. It was after six, and even the birds were subdued. Peter arrived and we sat in silence for much of the evening, occasionally swapping Martin stories. At 9 pm, the German consul arrived with the paperwork that makes death official. One by one figures rose in the darkness – Hashem, Sameem, Mujeeb, the cook, the guards, the gardener, Peter and me – as the ambulance slowly began its journey down the driveway and Dr Martin left the Karwan Sara for the last time.

  Martin Weinberg was sixty-eight years old. He was blessed with an aura of kindness and goodwill. Things annoyed him from time to time, including the Karwan Sara, but he never lost his cool or his faith in humanity. He never distinguished between Afghan and foreigner. On days, of which there were many, when I would come home and wonder what I was doing here, I’d only have to see Martin riding home up the driveway on that bicycle and everything would be better. I’d smile when I heard him down in the courtyard banging the dust and mud from his shoes before their nightly polish. I’d see him emptying the soot from his bukhari, walking across the garden towards the rubbish pile, dressed, as always, in his suit.

  Climbing into bed that evening, I lifted the curtain of the rear window of my room. With Martin’s return from Germany, I had taken comfort in seeing the light from his room above, knowing that sanity had once again returned to the Karwan Sara. His window was now dark. I took my hand away and closed my eyes.

  I awoke the next morning to thoughts of Martin and the world closed in. The Karwan Sara lads were devastated. They spent the day knocking on my door and telling me, in jumbled English and Dari, how sad they were, yet they were Afghan and so much more used to dealing with death than me. It all took a while to sink in and life at my guesthouse would never be the same. But Martin died doing something he loved and he’d have hated all the fuss.

  In the following days, Peter and Cole organised a book of condolence for Martin’s wife. All who knew him, Afghan and foreigner, contributed to its pages. I emailed long-departed guests and the words came flooding in. I printed them out and pasted them into the book. The morning before Peter delivered it to the German embassy, who would send it on to Martin’s wife, I flicked through the pages. There were pictures of garden festivities – my birthday
, a farewell, Martin on his bike. The gardener, a wizened old man with a kind smile, had carefully glued in one of the Karwan Sara’s roses. Beautiful words from Oliver and Jennifer, visiting journalists whose lives Martin had touched. Dr Faisal wrote of his ‘teacher’, one of the greatest compliments an Afghan can pay. Mohammed’s scratchy penmanship was followed by Cole’s simple prose. Dari, English, German and Dutch, the book was full of words and wonderful memories of a man whose kindness and simple humanity had touched all who met him. Age shall never weary the gentle white-maned doctor from Dusseldorf.

  32

  Ordinary Afghans

  I had given up walking in Kabul – not because The Bubble told me I couldn’t or I feared being kidnapped, but because I found it exhausting. There was only so much stone throwing, harassment and groping a girl could take. Twelve months ago, congratulatory shouts of ‘belly good’ were the love song of the Afghan male, but, on my brief winter forays, the tune had regressed to the more puerile ‘fucky fucky’ or ‘fuck you’. Sometimes, if I was really lucky, I got both. If I walked with another woman, it happened less. If I walked with a man, Afghan or foreigner, it didn’t happen at all.

  But something about Martin’s death made it important to get out, to go beyond the high walls of a foreigner guesthouse and The Bubble, and back into Afghanistan. This morning, I once again took to the streets. It was time to complete a few long-neglected errands.

  The Safi Drycleaners was a small, glass-fronted shop sandwiched into a street full of stationers. Kabul was a city of quarters: meat was bought in Butcher Street and flowers were bought in Flower Street. In a city of prodigious illiteracy, Kabul’s stationers were few and traditionally had no quarter of their own, but in the years since the fall of the Taliban, they had multiplied along the busy street outside the Mustafa Hotel, fuelled by the paperwork required to realise the new Afghanistan.

  As I walked through the door, the young Hazara shop assistant rose from behind the counter. The shop was sparsely furnished. A wooden counter held nothing more than a vase of plastic roses and a calendar advertising Ariana, the Afghan national airline. The shop was painted white and furnished with a stool and two neat racks of freshly cleaned coats, suits and shalwar kameez, all carefully wrapped in clear plastic and placed on wire hangers. The engine room of the drycleaners lay beyond the large grey metal door at the rear of the shop.

  Like all transactions in the Ghan, even the cleaning of my sweater required multiple smiles and questions about my health before business could begin. By now the routine was fixed despite my speaking almost no Dari and the young clerk speaking no English. He passed me the receipt book which, in deference to the store’s large foreign clientele, was written in both languages. I filled in my name. In the interests of keeping the transaction as simple as possible, I wrote Sally – no Cooper, no Miss – and ticked the box marked sweater. I left him to fill in the rest – the price and the date of collection – which he did with painstaking care. The price was always the same, one hundred Afghanis or two US dollars. The date was a bit trickier. The Afghan calendar begins with all things Mohammed, so depending on which side of the ledger you wrote on, it was either 2005 or 1384.

  ‘Dushanbe?’ He looked up.

  Dushanbe (Monday) was one of the few Dari words I knew, if for no other reason than it was also the capital of neighbouring Tajikistan.

  ‘Bale,’ I nodded in reply.

  The transaction completed, there was one final formality.

  ‘Chai?’ asked the clerk.

  At the end of every exchange, whether it was a rigorous carpet-buying session, long-winded debate or a bloodthirsty battle, there was always the offer of tea. I had never been able to tell if the most polite thing to do was to accept or decline.

  ‘Tashakoor.’ I shook my head, opting for the latter. Thanking him for his kindness, I wished him a good day, adjusted my headscarf and took off down the street.

  My next stop was around the corner at the DHL office. I had a parcel to send to friends in Australia and, while the Afghan postal system might have been up, I could not be certain that it was running, at least not as far as Australia. The box of goodies contained some small birthday gifts and, as a bonus, three series’ worth of Sex and the City.

  ‘What are you sending?’ asked the polite woman at the counter. She was dressed in the colours of the DHL livery. Even her scarf matched the yellow and red of her thigh-length sweater.

  ‘I can show you. Some gifts and some DVDs,’ I replied as she set to work opening the small box I placed on the counter. It was at times like this that I wondered what ordinary Afghans really thought of we foreigners. We drove around in fancy cars, came and went on fancy holidays, lived in expensive guesthouses and worked in relatively luxurious offices … but what did we actually do with our time?

  ‘What are these?’ she said with something more than curiosity as she lifted out the boxed DVD sets. She eyed me with the kind of suspicion reserved for criminals and other social deviants. It would have been a bad time to add that I worked for the UN.

  ‘I bought them in Flower Street,’ I said, not even wanting to know what she might be thinking.

  ‘Ajmal … AJMAAAL!’ she shouted. A young beardless youth stepped forward. She said something in Dari, and whatever it was made him lunge enthusiastically for the box.

  While DVDs of the latest films could be found on Flower Street, and non-stop Eastern European pornography could easily be viewed via any of the satellite dishes that pockmarked the roofs of the city, this didn’t stop Ajmal pawing all over my DVDs and leering at me as if I was some kind of freelance porn producer.

  ‘It’s an American television program … it’s very famous,’ I added wanly.

  Before I came to the Ghan, I’d never thought much about the title of Sex and the City. The DVDs’ covers showed scantily dressed women eyeing handsome young men. Ajmal had obviously seen his fair share of Eastern European television and decided this might just be one of the programs he’d missed. But he eventually put the DVDs back in the box and shrugged, perhaps making a mental note for future purchases next time he was in Flower Street. He slunk back to his post like a disappointed Quasimodo.

  As she wrote my receipt, the polite woman told me my parcel must first pass through customs. Possibly as a sign of my perceived deviancy, she made no offer of tea and I walked out into the spring sunshine, pondering a visit from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and a stint in Pul-i-Charkhi prison for ‘exporting pornography’.

  By now it was nine thirty, the city was awake and the traffic was humming. The footpath outside DHL was a sea of turbans and burqas. The turbans stared and the burqas cocked their heads in my direction, angling the small nettings that covered their eyes for a better view of the lone foreigner walking down the street towards the high compound walls of her enclave.

  33

  Bless this Burqa

  We were six days into a workshop with a group of trainees from Kunar, a province in the far east of the country, high in the mountains that straddled the border with Pakistan. Kunar had long been home to sundry Talibs and anti-government elements, and was often described as ‘restive’. So instead of going there myself, the workshop was taking place within the heavily secured confines of our studio in Kabul.

  It had been an eventful week – even before the arrival of the boys from Kunar. They’re just three little words – ‘break, break, break’ – but every time I heard them from my two-way radio, with their accompanying tone of urgency, I knew that Something Had Happened – and that the Something would have some kind of impact on what I did, where I went and how I got there.

  The Thursday evening before, UN security issued an advisory warning of a kidnap targeting foreigners and advised all staff to take care when travelling in Taimani and Qali Fatullah, two residential districts not far from the Karwan Sara that were favoured by expats. Like many in Kabul that night, I didn’t hear of it because it was issued via email and not announc
ed in the usual way, on my two-way radio.

  On a Thursday night, Kabul’s expats collectively switch off their computers and wind down. After a long week, many head to the handful of expat bars and restaurants dotted around the city. Forty-five minutes after the alert was issued, three foreigners travelling in a World Bank car were stopped in a Qali Fatullah street by a car full of masked gunmen. Anticipating what may have been about to happen, their Afghan driver reversed and sped off safely in the opposite direction. Still oblivious to all of this, I wandered off the following morning for Friday brunch with a friend. On Saturday afternoon, I went shopping for carpets with an acquaintance who was in town on a short working visit.

  The warning didn’t reach me until I sat down at my desk on Sunday morning, the first day of my working week. Faheem and Mirwais had gone to collect the trainees from Kunar – all men – so I had time for a quick flick through my email. ‘Quick’ was possibly a little ambitious. My inbox was crammed with missives from the security office. I read the report of the attempted kidnapping with scepticism, unsure if it had been a real attempt or if Kabul-whispers had assumed the worst. Ever since the kidnapping of the three Elections staff the previous October, security had issued regular warnings of similar incidents, reducing their effect and making everyone either complacent or, depending on their position in The Bubble, paranoid.

  The next email announced that all UN international staff must now travel in a two-car convoy.

  I groaned. Ismail looked up from his morning cup of tea.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  Not even Ismail could solve this one. Two-car convoys were fine if you worked for a large agency with its own fleet of cars. With the IRIN news service now housed across town and its car in constant use, Radio had only one vehicle, the Big Green Car with no UN markings other than its pale blue UN numberplate. To my way of thinking, two cars made you twice as conspicuous. I closed my laptop and went into the studio to await the arrival of Faheem and the boys from Kunar.