A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  The going rate in 2001 was anything from four to eight thousand US dollars, depending on the availability of ‘shipping’ and the urgency of the client. Ahmed Shah paid six thousand. Like a package holiday from a travel agent, the deal included all meals, accommodation and sundry expenses. It also guaranteed him ‘three tries’: if he was deported back to Pakistan from Indonesia, the process would start again. There were no refunds.

  Ismail, the self-appointed commentator on the activities of ‘the people’, turned to me. ‘This sounds like a very difficult procedure,’ he said, shaking his head. Ahmed Shah’s Quetta contact travelled with him to the port city of Karachi, where he passed his client on to a man who travelled with him as far as Jakarta. Another smuggler met Ahmed Shah there and saw him off on a rickety boat heading to Christmas Island.

  The more he told of his story, the faster Ahmed Shah talked and the more cigarettes he smoked. He was becoming agitated and his answers were long-winded. Ismail was too polite to interrupt and I knew I wasn’t getting complete translations. Outside the sky was darkening as the sun began to set.

  ‘He says he had never heard of Naro,’ said Ismail.

  ‘Nauru?’

  ‘Yes, Nauru.’

  ‘We didn’t know if it was big or small, a country or a district,’ continued Ahmed Shah. ‘Someone said it was in Norway but one of the educated people said it wasn’t.’

  The ‘educated people’ became the spokesmen for the group.

  ‘I didn’t like Nauru. There was nothing to do. We had to wait in queues for everything … for a very long time. I wasn’t happy.’

  Ahmed Shah’s bid for asylum was rejected. After three unsuccessful appeals, he gave up and decided to take up the Australian government’s offer and return to Kabul. ‘When we landed at Kabul airport, everyone was very, very happy. I kissed the ground.’

  After staying in Kabul a week, Ahmed Shah went back to his village. He had been away more than three years. When he walked through the door of his parents’ house, they stared at him in disbelief. A single phone call to a brother in Iran had passed the message on to them that he was alive, but beyond that there had been no news.

  The baby daughter he left behind had died. His wife barely welcomed him back. ‘But we are still married …’ he said wistfully, as if this most conservative of cultures allowed him a choice.

  ‘I have no regrets about what I did but I always thought that Australia was a country that held human rights in high regard. I thought they looked after people but John Howard and Philip Ruddock, their behaviour was very bad.’

  Of the new Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah remained uncertain. ‘We tried to push back the Russians but there are too many countries here now. We have a difficult future in Afghanistan. The governments of Afghanistan have always been under the control of the foreigners and that’s what’s happening now. It’s the same like all the other times.’

  My tape was running out and the battery light was flashing red. Beyond the window, Kabul was in darkness. Headlights glided past on the busy highway and I could see the condensation from my breath. We gave Ahmed Shah a lift to a busy intersection where he said he would get a bus to his home, far beyond the outskirts of Kabul. It was all he could afford. He thanked me for listening to his story, opened the car door and disappeared into the night.

  On the way home, I asked Ismail what he thought of Ahmed Shah’s story. Ismail started his UN life after fleeing the Taliban to Pakistan. He was a self-made man who recognised the value of opportunity and the importance of education. Ismail arrived at the office in a clean suit every day. His shoes were polished and, following a recent trip to the bazaar, he now carried a smart briefcase in his hand.

  He sighed and shook his head. ‘There is no doubt that the Australian government’s behaviour was not good. They kept them in jail for two years. Two years! There’s no need to do that. But the people, why are they going there? Who invited them to come to Australia? But … there was no business here then apart from Taliban business. For two reasons these people left – to stay alive and for better life.’

  By the time I got back to the Chez Ana, it was after eight thirty. I walked into the kitchen and found my dinner warming in the oven where Majid had left it. As I tucked into the homemade chicken casserole, I thought of Ahmed Shah, scraping out whatever living he could. Man shall live forever more – as long as he didn’t do it in John Howard’s Australia.

  I resented the heavy-handed nannying of the UN security office but it could be worse – I could be Afghan. One plane ride and my reality was easily substituted for another. ‘It is difficult for Afghan people to go anywhere,’ he had said to me. ‘The world thinks all Afghans are murderers. If they are Muslim, they must be killers.’ For Ahmed Shah, this was his life.

  44

  Seven Days of Solitude

  The Chez Ana was all but vacant. Jane had gone home for the holidays and Tim and Ingrid’s contracts had ended. They were now taking a well-earned holiday in south-east Asia, with good food, deep blue oceans and no radio checks. If The Things They Carried was a modern classic for the Vietnam War generation, The Things They Left Behind would be the Kabul aid workers’ equivalent. Over the course of my Kabul life, I’d been bequeathed MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), syringes, diarrhoea tablets, power bars, kitchen knives, rolls of aluminium foil, toiletries, tampons, duct tape, DVDs, books, shirts, sweaters, jeans, trousers, shoes, washing powder, an ironing board, enough alcohol to set up my own bar and a National Geographic map of the world – in case I ever forgot where I was. With Tim and Ingrid’s departure, I scored the most coveted prize of all, a Christmas gift beyond anything imaginable; they had left me their supply of soft white toilet paper.

  Although I was now in possession of some very fine toilet paper, the same couldn’t be said for the Chez Ana’s upstairs toilet. Some weeks earlier, three men had appeared, each carrying a sledgehammer; the door was shut and the renovations begun. That the three men looked like they had come from the far reaches of the furthest provinces, and hadn’t had much experience with the Western definition of ‘bathroom’ was cause for concern.

  Three weeks later the bathroom was ready, completely remodelled, newly tiled and, at long last, with a lock on the door. Sadly, and possibly due to their lack of familiarity with the concept of flushing toilets, the renovators had neglected one crucial factor – the plumbing. With every flush, the drain gurgled and burped, overflowing with the sum total of every user’s breakfast, lunch and, quite possibly, the previous night’s dinner. With nowhere else to go, the effluent seeped into the floor, ran along the electrical wiring on the ceiling below before dripping onto the unsuspecting head of anyone who had the great misfortune to be walking through the front door at the time. The three ‘renovators’ reappeared, once again locking themselves in the bathroom and starting again. With an empty guesthouse and a choice of bathrooms, I felt like Goldilocks, though I took great care when walking through the front door.

  I was now outnumbered by the Chez Ana staff: Imran, Majid, the two chowkidors, the half-blind gardener who gave me a sloppy hug each morning if I wasn’t quick enough to get out of his way, the small army of Hazara cleaning ladies, and the hapless Mohib. They each took a proprietary interest in my wellbeing.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to come out for dinner with my friends?’ asked Imran one evening.

  ‘Miss Sally, oil?’ the tall chowkidor now appeared twice a day with the can of oil to top up my bukhari.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ announced Mohib when he brought me my breakfast on New Year’s Eve.

  But my favourite was Majid. Each morning he would ask me what I wanted for dinner. ‘Mashed potato,’ was my standard reply. Why stand on ceremony when it comes to the treats of the Women’s Weekly cookbook? Each evening, having dispensed with the formalities of the dining room table, Majid would lay out roast chicken, mashed potato and slice, lamb chops, mashed potato and slice or, my favourite, lasagne, mashed potato and slice so I could sit on the Che
z Ana sofa and watch DVDs. There were no locks on the Chez Ana’s doors but I was ably protected by Kuchi the dog and the elusive and nameless turtle now hibernating in its purpose-built winter villa at the foot of the verandah.

  The last day of December isn’t an auspicious day in the Ghan. Naw Roz (New Year) starts with a bang, often literally, on 21 March, celebrating not only the beginning of a new year but the end of a long winter. Besides, for Afghans, it was still 1385; 2006 wouldn’t roll around for another six hundred and twenty-one years.

  The choices for entertainment this New Year’s Eve were mind-boggling. The Dyncorps New Year’s Eve party, the Gandamack New Year’s Eve party or … staying at home by a warm fire. A female expat, who may have stayed a little too long, once wrote of Kabul’s ‘smorgasbord of men’. In truth it was more like the caked tuna and limp lettuce at the buffet from hell. Both of tonight’s parties would offer the same thing: geographic bachelors with prize goatees, proudly displaying their weaponry and waxing lyrical of their days in the Special Forces. The number of alleged ex-Special Forces running around Kabul suggested the Special Forces were very, very big – and not very special. Pending better offers, it would be an early night at the Chez Ana. A warm fire and a good bottle of red outweighed a room full of mercenaries any day.

  Expatriate necessity had long been the mother of Kabul invention and it manifested itself brilliantly in the form of Safetrip. Safetrip was a feat of remarkable entrepreneurship, started by a Frenchman and run by Afghans. It was a cab service of sorts. For a set fee, Safetrip carried expats in unmarked cars anywhere in Kabul between 6 pm and 1 am, thus defying all UN and NGO security rules and any irritating curfews. Needless to say, Safetrip had expanded rapidly since it came into being eight months earlier. According to one of my drivers, almost all of its customers were UN.

  As my interest in mashed potato eventually receded in favour of more exotic fare, a few nights into the New Year I met some friends for dinner at Kabul’s only French restaurant. In the summertime, L’Atmosphere, with its cheap alcohol and its leafy garden surrounding a busy swimming pool full of bikinis, embodied all the bleary eyed hedonism for which Kabul’s expats were becoming famous. On a chilly winter’s night, the restaurant was quiet and casual, the Pimm’s and fake tans being replenished on ski slopes and beaches far away from the Ghan.

  Somewhere during the course of the evening, I lost my wallet. I may have left it in the cab, it may have dropped on the ground when I opened my bag for its mandatory security inspection before walking into the restaurant. Either way, when it came to paying for the foie gras, the beef bourguignon, the cheese platter and the Bordeaux, we came up short.

  But this is Kabul, a city where no-one will ever have to wash the dishes if they can’t pay their two-hundred-dollar restaurant bill.

  ‘Er,’ I said, when the waiter came to collect two-thirds of the bill, ‘we don’t seem to have enough money.’

  ‘No problem. Just pay us next time?’ he said with the usual Afghan shrug.

  ‘But how do you know we will?’

  ‘This is Afghanistan!’

  In a city awash with greenbacks, an ancient and extraordinary code of credit still applied – and was faithfully honoured by Afghan and foreigner alike. Much of IRIN’s office supplies were bought on the ‘take now, pay later’ scheme, though I doubted the UN was aware.

  While the Afghans showed remarkable flexibility, UN security didn’t. In addition to the cash, my wallet also contained my UN ID card.

  ‘Agh!’ I said, the following morning as we were halfway down Jalalabad Road. ‘I don’t have my ID card.’

  I couldn’t get into the UNOCA compound without it, so Mahmood turned the car around and I headed back to the Chez Ana for my passport. The security office recommended I carry my passport everywhere I went – but then I’d lose it in the back of a Safetrip cab and that would never do.

  Having proven that I was who I said I was, to the same guards who had let me through the same gates of the same compound for well over a year, I arrived at the office. Losing an ID card was bordering on a major crime, requiring as penance the completion of a million and one forms in order to receive a replacement. But that was why the gods invented Ismail. By now, he was no stranger to my out-of-office activities. We were standing next to his desk talking in hushed tones, plotting our assault on the security office, when my phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number on its small dusty screen.

  ‘Hello?’

  A male voice fired off a string of Dari. Wrong numbers were a frequent occurrence in the Afghan telephone system, though it was usually only discovered after a minute or two’s worth of greetings – which must have made up the bulk of the revenue of the Ghan’s two mobile phone companies. Just when I was about to tell the voice ‘wrong number’, the word ‘Safetrip’ connected with my ear.

  I passed the phone to Ismail. Ismail didn’t know this man but he asked after his health, the health of his family and, quite possibly, everyone else in Kabul before the two got down to business. There was much nodding and baleing. After the requisite number of tashakoors and wishes of good health, the conversation finally drew to a close.

  ‘Excuse me, but that was the man from Safetrip,’ reported Ismail. ‘He has your wallet. He will bring it to the Chez Ana at six o’clock tonight.’

  True to his word, the driver appeared at 6 pm at the front gate of my guesthouse. He handed me my wallet – complete with cash and my ID card – and a smile. One of the things I truly loved about the Ghan was the fact that you could get blown up into a million tiny pieces but no-one would ever steal your wallet. I rewarded him for his kindness and his honesty. As always, it took three tries before he accepted, wished me a pleasant evening and disappeared into the night.

  45

  Leaps and Bounds?

  In the Ghan, my days were generally divided in two: there were days when I sat beside Mahmood in the front seat of the IRIN car and those when I sat behind. As my time in the Ghan drew to a close, there were a lot of ‘sitting behind’ days.

  Early one morning, two Nepalis working for a security company were kidnapped as they walked to work. They were said to be armed at the time. No-one was sure why they were taken and little had been heard of them since. At the news of another kidnapping, my stomach lurched.

  The following day, one UN office went into overdrive, putting its foreign staff into a lockdown based on an unsubstantiated rumour that two more expats had been dragged from their car. Just when I thought the ratchet could climb no further, another security warning was issued the next day. When driving on Jalalabad Road, all ‘international’ female staff were required to travel in two-car convoys at all times and always with a male international in the car. I took some security advisories with a grain of salt, some with a whole salt mine. After a few phone calls, I established that the rumour was all over town. According to the Kabul grapevine, al-Qaeda had placed a bounty on the heads of foreign women, offering a good price to anyone who could kidnap at least one.

  Someone had recently asked me – someone new to the Ghan – how I dealt with constant warnings of suicide bombs and kidnappings. When the first warnings of suicide bombers appeared in June 2004, my stomach turned every time anyone approached our car as we waited, helpless, in yet another Kabul traffic jam. Almost two years and several hundred warnings later, I made a mental adjustment and got on with my business – it was the only way I could continue to function in an environment such as this. The same couldn’t be said for the German doctor at the only decent clinic in town. With the issuing of yet another kidnap warning in December last year, she had promptly left, leaving the rest of us to be kidnapped, blown up or die of maladies untreated.

  I was in the home stretch and I could see the finish line. I was tired of constantly having to duck and weave between old rules and new edicts. Our office was made up of me and four male Afghan staff. There was no second car and no international males. Besides, I knew without question that Ismail and the lads woul
d do more to protect me than a ‘male international’ stuffed in the car to satisfy a security edict. But most of all, there was no way, after all this time, that I could possibly tell security I only had one car.

  At six thirty the next morning, I stood behind the front gate of the Chez Ana. My phone rang. It was Mahmood.

  ‘Good morning, chief. How are you? I am now in Passport Lane.’

  ‘Okay, see you in a minute.’ It felt like an episode of Get Smart, though I didn’t know which one of us was Max and which was 99.

  I heard the engine of the Big Green Car as it backed up the laneway and quickly walked outside. Mahmood stopped just long enough for me to jump inside. Butch and Sundance would have been proud.

  Although it was only February, Kabul was already welcoming spring, and a balmy spring at that. I’d dispensed with my winter coat and, dressed in an oversized male cardigan with a beanie on my head, I sat in the front seat beside Mahmood as if I were a man. On the way home, amid the glances of prying eyes, when it was light enough to see that I was clearly a woman, I sat right behind him where I was less visible. Over the next few days, the ever creative Mahmood adapted accordingly. On the way to UNOCA, we would circle Abdul Haq roundabout at the entrance to Jalalabad Road until we spotted a UN car, of which there were plenty, and latch on. On the way home, we sped down Jalalabad Road until we caught up with the next UN car and sat on its tail until we cleared the roundabout and headed into town.

  It was at times like this that I missed the Gandamack, home to more weaponry than any compound outside an official military base. Ever since the fall of the Taliban and the subsequent invasion of Development Inc., Kabul rents had skyrocketed. Following yet another hike, in December the Gandamack had moved – literally lock, stock and barrel – to new premises on the other side of Shahre Naw. Aside from Passport Lane being much darker at night, the presence of so much weaponry and foreign men who knew how to use it was always a safety net in a city where many aid organisations provided almost none. In the Ghan, a second car and a ‘male international’ is no match for a man with a gun.