An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (11 page)

In the harem where I live, I am horrified by the way in which our slave-like servants are treated. The way my mother-in-law treats her female servants is criminal, tragic, barbaric, unbelievable—but apparently entirely normal in Kabul, both among the elite and among the peasantry.

Bebegul takes all her frustrations out on her female servants—and they simply take it, often smiling gamely and shrugging their shoulders between their yelps and cries of pain. Bebegul curses them. She throws things at them. She beats them. The servants take it, they never quit; in fact, if anything, they are terrified of being fired.

Their pitiful wage—any wage at all—constitutes a fortune to these people from the provinces. They can both help their families and not burden them, which is all that matters to them. Married servant couples spend years living apart, working for different families in the city, hardly ever seeing each other, always at the beck and call of their overlords.

In the 1920s and 1930s the British traveler Rosita Forbes observed slave auctions, mainly of black African (“Abyssinian”) slaves on their way to the harems of Saudi Arabia. The boys were castrated and, if they survived, could one day become men of wealth and influence. The girls entered harems as concubines and domestic slaves.

At auction the female slaves remain face veiled but are otherwise displayed naked from the neck down. Forbes observes that female slaves
are routinely raped and beaten by their masters. She is shocked that they accept their fate so casually. And then she comes to understand that the slaves “are escaping the starvation of their hills or deserts for a land of plenty, where they will be able to eat as much as they like.” Forbes, with the help of an interpreter, questions one slave girl: “‘You didn’t mind leaving your people?’ I asked. I don’t know if she understood. The Arab translated her reply as: ‘She says she worked like a camel and was beaten like a dog. For her, slavery meant exchanging the mastership of a half-starving father, or husband, for that of a man who would give her food, clothing and a certainty of existence.’”

In our Kabul household the servants never starve or go to bed hungry. They eat the cold leftover food every day and consider themselves fortunate. They have all the tea, fruit, bread, rice, and yoghurt that their stomachs can hold.

The servants never complain that they have no days off. The one-room building where the servants sleep has no electricity or heat. They sleep on a packed mud floor. No one ever complains, not even when the winds howl and the freezing weather arrives. For them it is just like being at home.

No one, including Bebegul’s Western-educated sons, dares interfere with her reign of tyranny. One elderly female servant is named Daw-Daw. She looks ancient, at least eighty years old, which means that she is probably in her forties or fifties. Her face is weathered and lined, and she is practically toothless. Daw-Daw herds and milks our cows. She is on call at all times, seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. She is Bebegul’s all-purpose errand girl, sweeper, body servant, and scapegoat.

Bebegul is cruel, without mercy, when it comes to beating Daw-Daw. Some years later I described their relationship as follows:

Bebegul would hit Daw-Daw hard with her fist or with a steel pot, a broom—with just about anything she could lay her hands on. Bebegul would curse Daw-Daw, too. Poor Daw-Daw would try to protect herself from the blows, but she also tried to make light of them. She had no other place to go, no family, no village. This was her only home, her fate. And Bebegul had promised to bury her.

Such daily cruelty is shocking. Its normalization is even worse. I have just turned twenty-one. I have never had a servant in my home. I have been reading books about freedom and equality my entire life.

Of course I complain to Abdul-Kareem about it and when I do, he shuts me right up. He tells me that I am in no position to judge his family or his people or their customs because I come from a country with a history of institutionalized slavery.

“Wait a minute,” I would protest. “I am talking about the savage mistreatment of servants who are essentially indentured, very like slaves, right under your family’s roof. Why are you changing the subject?”

This kind of exchange is typical and would continue between us for the next half-century.

I am grateful for such conversations because they have prepared me for similar exchanges with others who also deny or minimize the cruelty and misogyny in the Islamic world. Many of my conversations have been with other Westerners who, in the name of antiracism, have insisted on seeing things from the misogynist’s point of view.

I
do not know it, but Bebegul has another agenda in mind for me. She either means to kill me—or to convert me to Islam. She is carrying on both agendas at the same time.

Here the women pray at home. Bebegul incorporates everything into her prayers. It is like a noisy, friendly Indian theater where entire families bring their dinner and their children and talk throughout the performance. For Bebegul life does not end where her rituals begin. Between
kalimahs
(declarations of faith) she curses the servants, orders tea for her guests, mutters shopping lists to herself.

Wherever she goes, Bebegul counts her prayer beads (
tasbeh
); always, everywhere, her eyes search for some sign of the Prophet’s mercy.

Day after day Bebegul walks with me arm in arm in the garden. Inexplicably she hugs me. She explains that Islam is similar to Judaism: Abraham and Moses are both important figures in the Qur’an. She takes me into her rooms and retrieves an illuminated Qur’an from atop her armoire. She cannot read Arabic but she chants the text for me, page after page.

The next day Bebegul delivers a prayer rug, thick and small, to my rooms. Another day she delivers prayer beads.

“I miss my Jewish friends, Sharban,” she intones. Then she urges me to convert to Islam.

If I don’t, will she continue her other campaign—the one to sicken and kill me?

The next day Bebegul storms into my bedroom, a female servant in tow, yelling and jeering and trying to find and confiscate my precious hoard of canned goods.

“Our food isn’t good enough for her—she eats from cans,” Bebegul would taunt.

I am sure that Bebegul considers herself my jailer and tutor in all things Afghan. My headstrong trip into town might have been considered her fault, her failure.

Bebegul also follows me about, from room to room, and mainly stares at me. Sometimes she will storm off. Other times she will suddenly laugh, turn friendly, and again suggest that I convert to Islam. She does this by unfolding her prayer rug, fingering her prayer beads, prostrating herself—then beckoning me to come and join her on my own rug.

Is she serious? Abdul-Kareem is not religious, but she is. She even made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Is this that important to her? If I say I will convert, even if I do not mean it, will it make my life here easier? Will she then allow the servants to boil my water and wash my fruits and vegetables in boiled water?

If I say I will convert, can I
reall
y do this without meaning it? Many Jews have chosen martyrdom over conversion. And many have converted in order to save their lives—and then returned to Judaism when it was safe to do so.

This is my situation: I am Bebegul’s captive, her prisoner; she, my jailer, might treat me more decently if I find ways to please her. It might even save my life.

This is difficult for me to write about. It is harder to admit that I was this foolish, this frightened, this alone that I would actually jettison the religion of my ancestors for another religion about which I knew absolutely nothing.

But I did it. I repeated what Bebegul had me say, a single sentence in Arabic, not in Farsi, and that was it:
la illah-ha illah allah, Muhammed
a-rasul Allah.
(There is one god, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.)

I am not expected to do anything further. No one hosts a welcome party. I attend no mosque and meet with no mullah.

I try to discuss this with Abdul-Kareem, my very secular husband. He turns away. He pretends I have not said anything.

This is not something I ever tell anyone. Nevertheless I have never forgiven myself.

Recently Maria, a divorced American woman, turned to me for help. She was trapped in Bahrain because, like Betty Mahmoody, who had been trapped in Iran, Maria was also a mother who would not leave without her daughter.

Maria had cleared customs and had gotten the girl on board a plane, but a young and extremely stupid American embassy official persuaded her to come back, just to answer a few questions.

The girl’s Bahraini father had remarried. He and his new wife, as well as their respective families, had already embarked on a successful alienation campaign against the stranded, unemployed, and friendless American mother. As I was talking to her, I asked her some routine questions about her birth and American citizenship.

“Are you a Christian?”

She was silent for a long while.

“Did you convert to Islam?”

Finally, and so softly I could barely hear her, she said, “Maybe. I think so. Yes.” She sounded ashamed, broken, as if she had sold her soul.

I could understand how she felt.

F
or a while Bebegul is pleased with me. She hugs me each time she sees me. She hums happy little tunes. She even stops beating Daw-Daw.

Then she begins to go out almost every day, perhaps to share the good news that she has converted her infidel Jewish daughter-in-law to Islam. I am one of them now, and her family has no reason to feel ashamed about a foreign bride or a love match. We are now all Muslims together.

And she, Bebegul, has accomplished this.

But it doesn’t matter. A private conversion between two women in their rooms could not temper Bebegul’s mad and permanent fury.

Within a week she begins screaming at me again. This time, and for the first time, she calls me Yahud (Jew) over and over again, and she spits at me.

So: She too does not believe that I have really converted. Still I am surprised. This is an unexpected insult that cuts me to the core. While she still misses her Afghan Jewish friends, the Sharbans, Bebegul really doesn’t want a Jew to join her faith. Maybe she does not believe that a Jew could be trusted to actually convert.

She is right.

Or perhaps she is just plain mean and mad and nothing that anyone does can ever please or change her. Since she keeps taunting me as a Yahud, I finally call her the only curse word I know that she will understand.

I call her a whore (
conchonee
).

Now I feel endangered as a Jew, as a woman, as an American, and as a foreigner.

I call Abdul-Kareem at his brother’s office and am crying incoherently: “Your mother keeps cursing and insulting me. If you don’t come home and get me out of this house right away, I’m walking back to America. I’ll join a band of nomads. I’ll do anything to get away. Why didn’t you tell me your mother was crazy? She follows me around everywhere, she never stops watching me. Do you know that she’s been doing this? How can you expect me to sit home all day and do nothing?”

Abdul-Kareem and I thrash things out again. He is not in the least bit understanding. He says that he does not have it easy either, that I could ruin it for him (that fear again). He refuses to help me if I refuse to make the necessary efforts.

Nothing changes. Nothing is happening. I have read all the books that I brought in with me. Abdul-Kareem is at home only at night, when he talks mainly to his brothers and always in Dari. I am trying to figure out how to make a long-distance call. I think the American embassy is nearby. Maybe I just have to throw myself on their mercy and on their very doorstep.

Abdul-Kareem is not working. But he insists that all his meetings with ministers and government officials, drinking tea with them, is actually work. He meets people at his father’s bank and at the family’s import-export company. He is in the bosom of his family. A top place will be found for him. Then he will be able to enjoy himself and start attending diplomatic functions, parties, feasts.

How can an American like me ever understand how dependent, how interdependent, Afghans are? I was raised with the belief that individuals can succeed if they work hard. Success and security come only from one’s own efforts. I am so naive. I do not understand that one’s family and friends—plus luck—are everything, not only in Afghanistan but everywhere.

I am someone who left home as soon as she could. Abdul-Kareem—to my surprise—seems to have no problem living with his mother and brothers and their families. What can I do except continue to try to escape? And to make the most of the parties I am allowed to attend?

I go to the American embassy and ask them to get me out of here. The Marine guards do not even let me in. My case must already be known. They explain that I no longer have any rights as an American
citizen—not unless I can produce my American passport. They escort me back home.

My British-educated brother-in-law, Reza, tries to impress or at least amuse me with a hair-raising tale about a man and a dog. It was told to him on his recent trip to Mazar-i-Sharif.

In the country Afghan hounds (hunters) are reared as sheep dogs. They are trained to attack everyone except the shepherd and his family. Some years ago a stranger bumped into a flock and was chased up a tree by the hound. The shepherd demanded that the man come down and fight the dog—otherwise the dog would become a coward and be of no further use. Understandably the man refused. The shepherd raised his rifle to shoot him down.

The stranger flung his quilted robe toward the shepherd, muffling the shot and confusing the dog, which promptly tore out his master’s throat. The local mullahs jailed the stranger when he told them the story. They couldn’t decide what to do with him. Undoubtedly he had violated some rule, some custom; they would figure it out over time at their council meetings.

“Now,” Reza laughs, “five years later, the man is still in jail, and the mullahs are still debating what to do with him.”