An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (12 page)

I am horrified by the story, mostly by his humorous telling of it. And he’s the brother-in-law who once lived and studied in England. These customs do not amuse me. They frighten me.

I know that there are massive injustices in America. But the people I know back home are the ones who criticize such injustice. As Americans they do not laugh about tragic miscarriages of justice.

I know that my American understanding of due process has no place here. The mullahs and those who look up to them have the last say. I am definitely at the mercy of another kind of culture.

B
ebegul does not fire old Daw-Daw, at least not when I am there. But she does fire Fawziya’s young and heavily pregnant nursemaid and housekeeper. And she does so sadistically.

The nursemaid-housekeeper’s name is Madar Kamar (Kamar’s mother). She is a rural woman about my age, but she might be a year older than I am. We are about the same height. Her complexion is both ruddy and fair, but her hands are rough. She is up at dawn and retires only after everyone else is sleeping.

Madar Kamar is good natured; she has no malice in her—she laughs all the time and is kind. Madar Kamar is also bashful and shy; she covers
her face with her long veils when she laughs. She claps her hands with pleasure when I tell her about America: about our tall buildings, elevators, fast-moving crowded trains, and roads that run from sea to shining sea.

Madar Kamar is usually barefoot, and she keeps her hair in a long black braid. Like most servants she is on duty 24/7 and does not seem to have any days off. She sleeps on the floor, either across the threshold of Fawziya and Hassan’s quarters or on the floor right next to Fawziya’s two young children. Madar Kamar’s seven-year-old daughter (Kamar) sleeps right by her side.

This means that Madar Kamar was married when she was thirteen or fourteen and had become a mother at fifteen—when I was still in high school. Her husband is a servant in another family, and they see each other a few times every year. Madar Kamar has already suffered four miscarriages; she cries like a child each time she talks about this. But now, with Allah’s help, she is six or seven months pregnant.

We spend many hours of every day together. Both she and Fawziya help me learn the Dari word for whatever I point to.

Madar Kamar’s fate has weighed on my conscience and haunted me down the decades. I may have been responsible for her extreme humiliation and hardship. As I contemplate escape routes for myself, I imagine rescuing Madar Kamar at the same time. But even then I understood that she would have no place in my world and that she is firmly rooted in Afghanistan and in a particular family network that can never be replaced or replicated in America.

My mistake—my sin, my crime, is this: I lend Madar Kamar a heavy sweater. She is cold. I offer it to her. She refuses this kindness many times—and then gratefully accepts it. Bebegul routinely goes through all the servants’ things; she finds the sweater and concludes that Madar Kamar has stolen it from me.

I explain exactly what I’ve done. I take full responsibility. It makes no difference. Bebegul’s mind is made up. Some years later I wrote about what happened next:

One afternoon, Fawziya and I were finishing lunch upstairs. The sun was brilliant and flooded the thick carpets in the room. I felt drugged by the food, the sun and the hot tea. Someone put the radio on and the hypnotic whining of an Afghan singer floated in on globes of sunlight.

Madar Kamar brought fresh tea up. Cross-legged, she began to pour it for us. Her hand was shaking though, and soon hot tears splashed over the teapot.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” There was no answer, only she didn’t stop crying.

When she got up to return the dishes to the kitchen, we followed her out.

Bebegul was standing right outside the kitchen-house.

Seeing Madar Kamar, she laughed a malicious laugh and pointed her finger at her.

“Whore-daughter, bastard-carrier, I will tell your husband about the other men who visit you day and night. Yes, yes, I myself saw one creep out this morning. I will tell everyone. You are a thief. No one steals from Bebegul.”

Shocked, Fawziya ordered Madar Kamar back into the house. For the first time since I’d come, I saw Fawziya, a thin submissive daughter-in-law, fighting with Bebegul.

At dinner the men discussed the matter, taking care to gently chide Fawziya for fighting with Bebegul.

“Well,” Hassan concluded, “I told Madar Kamar’s husband to come for her tonight.”

And so he did. He looked old enough to be her father. Madar Kamar was crying when she left. She would be returning to her village to wait for the baby; this meant less food to eat and a cold winter in very primitive conditions.

We kissed goodbye. I urged her to return to the city and to the hospital to have her baby. Gently, I reminded her that her village midwife had already “delivered” a stillborn and that she’d had three miscarriages under her care.

A month later I heard she had prematurely delivered a healthy and very much longed for boy.

I cannot protect Madar Kamar, nor can Fawziya, who depends upon her. I cannot even protect myself.

Many years later, as lawsuits are successfully launched in America against wealthy couples from other countries who are, correctly, seen as enslaving their servants—I remember that in many parts of the world (Afghanistan, for instance) slave-like conditions for servants are the norm.

And I remember Madar Kamar and Daw-Daw and the family’s hearty male cook and gentle male gardener, and wonder how they are and what ever happened to them.

Six

Trapped

I
had hoped that I could get in and out of Kabul in no more than a few chapters. But now that I’m here again, I can’t seem to get out.

This time I am not trapped. I am choosing to linger. This will be my last time here—and writing about it is the only way I will be able to visit Afghanistan safely, especially the Afghanistan of the past. The Afghanistan I knew, the Afghanistan my husband and his family once knew, is now a vanished world.

My life there was indoors. My adventures were interpersonal. Although I gazed at the mountains every single day, I could only dream about walking or climbing them. I am now seeing the country as if for the first time. I peer at photographs and read old newspaper clippings. I read the works of those intrepid adventurers who hiked or rode into the Afghan mountains, into the pink, red, and beige deserts, to the edge of the sapphire-blue lakes. Many Western travelers cheerfully rode buses without brakes and trusted they would survive the thousand-foot drops on the incredibly narrow mountain roads.

These travelers, both men and women, crossed shaky bridges over roaring rivers, braved desert storms, walked enormous distances during frigid winters, and visited all the cities and provinces of the Silk Route. In 1960, the year before I arrived, two British mountain climbers, Joyce Dunsheath and Eleanor Baillie, set out to climb Mir Samir, a 19,882-foot mountain in the Hindu Kush. A snowstorm trapped them at 17,500 feet.
They write, “As far as our vision was concerned Mir Samir [the peak] was not there. . . . We made no plans—we sat back, trying to keep warm in our little tent, while the blizzard raged outside, and did crossword puzzles from the 7th
Daily Telegraph
book.”

Only the British can remain so calm and so eccentrically cozy as their very death stares them down.

At great risk to themselves, an Afghan soldier and porter who accompanied Dunsheath and Baillie on their expedition rescue them. The men inform the women that they are in “considerable danger . . . that [they] would be swept away tent and all.”

Oh, how I wish I could have climbed a mountain in Afghanistan! But although I have climbed mountains since, I am now only an armchair traveler who lives through Dunsheath and Baillie. Still, even the hardy Brits needed the Afghan equivalent of Everest’s Sherpa guides to save them.

The country can be deadly cold and inhospitable. I have never known such cold as I experienced in Kabul in my first and only winter there. And I was in a grand house, not in a wooden or mud hut perched on a mountainside where icy storms are as common as . . . ice storms. Abdul-Kareem never mentioned how extreme the weather is in Afghanistan, and I never independently investigated the matter. From afar, looking at exquisite photographs, one might conclude that deep snowdrifts are dreamy and that deadly desert storms are beautiful.

From 1965 to 1979 Roland and Sabrina Michaud visited Afghanistan and published a brief essay and ninety-eight spellbinding photos of twelve cities or provinces, including Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, Nimruz, Tashburghan, Balkh, the Wakhan Valley, Bamiyan, and Nuristan. These photos depict the Afghanistan I might have known had I been allowed to travel—a timeless, gracious, truly exotic, and, except for the Kuchis and female children, an almost womanless place but nevertheless a country alive with dervishes, blacksmiths, shepherds, camel drivers, shopkeepers, men in teahouses, armed Pushtuns—all the faces of humanity.

I visit these places now in photos and in books. I meet Afghanistan for the first time in precisely this way.

I am a child of the New World and am used to fast subway trains, supermarkets, and kitchen machines that make cooking an easy matter. Being in Afghanistan enables me to see how most people have lived for millennia—at a much slower pace, valuing that which is given, knowing that all outcomes are uncertain.

For years at college Abdul-Kareem talked to me about the glories of the Moghuls, the dazzling minarets, the Gandahara School of Art, the fields of red tulips, the exquisite gardens that each conqueror and every Afghan emperor, shah, emir, or king has tenderly created. I am eager to see it all.

“Let’s visit the Baala Hissar” (the High Fort), I suggest. “It’s right in town. Are there tour guides in Kabul?”

The Baala Hissar is the fortress and palace that has been the home of many Afghan kings, beginning with the Moghul emperor Akbar. Abdul-Kareem is annoyed.

“This is now your home. In time you will see everything. Please don’t act like an American tourist.”

I want to see Bamiyan, which has been visited by many millions of people for two thousand years. In her book
Valley of the Giant Buddhas,
the Scottish Saira Shah, writing under the name Morag Murray Abdullah, describes the statues of Buddha that reside there: “[There are three] standing Buddha figures, the two largest 35 [113 feet] and 53 metres [172 feet] high, are of such striking appearance that they far overshadow such sights as the Pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt, or the rose-red city of Petra in Jordan. Originally covered in red and gold . . . the draperies and ribbons, as well as the crowns and other decorations, point to a unique culture-mixing of Persian, Sassanid, and Greek.”

Now I will never see them; no one will. Over the centuries Muslim Afghans mutilated, shot at, and destroyed the faces, hands, and legs of the despised infidel idols; six months before 9/11 the Taliban finally blew them up entirely.

People are amazed when I tell them that Islam is merely the newest religion in Afghanistan, that Zoroastrianism, Greco-Roman paganism, and Hinduism but especially Buddhism preceded Islam by ten to twelve centuries and continued to flourish there until the fourteenth century.

In the seventh century CE the Chinese Buddhist monk Hsuan-Tang documented the thriving Buddhist culture in Bamiyan. He found one hundred monasteries with several thousand monks in Bamiyan alone. In addition, Hsuan-Tang visited the Buddhist monasteries near Balkh, Kabul, and Jalalabad.

In 1269 that other merchant of Venice, Marco Polo, undertook an arduous journey to the courts of Kublai Khan, emperor of the world’s largest land-based empire. Polo ventured eastward through Afghanistan and wrote about the Buddhist monks there. He found that they were soft-spoken, wore orange, shaved the crown of their heads, and spent
their time studying, praying, and chanting. Two thousand monks might be sheltered in one monastery. Polo described the Buddhist monks in Afghanistan this way: “They live more decently than the others for they keep themselves from . . . sensuality and improprieties. . . . They live in communities, observe strict abstinence in regard to eating, drinking, and the intercourse of the sexes, and refrain from every kind of sensual indulgence, in order that they may not give offence to the idols whom they worship. They have several monasteries, in which certain superiors exercise the functions of our abbots, and by the mass of the people they are held in great reverence.”

Had I stayed in Afghanistan, had I become Abdul-Kareem’s Afghan wife, I might have seen the Buddhas of Bamiyan and everything else as well: the Great Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif with its jeweled tile-work and arresting minarets, the mosque and tomb of Mirwais Baba in Kandahar. In photos the turquoise-blue domes of the mosques seem to melt into the sky. Instead, over the years I have read whatever has crossed my path about Afghanistan. I have spent hours looking at my worn copies of the
Afghanistan News,
a government magazine. I have twenty-nine of these magazines, which date from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. These magazines are now of immense historical value.

The magazine’s photos capture the country’s breathtaking natural beauty. The majestic snow-capped purple and blue mountains, the verdant valleys (the Panjsher, the Wygal), the shimmering deep blue lakes (the Bandi-i-Amir), the massive medieval minarets in Herat and Ghor—all the brightly bejeweled blue, turquoise, and green tiled mosques.

In 1959 the Afghan government publicly announced in the
Afghanistan News
that the “wearing of the veil is not part of Islam, the religion followed devoutly by the entire Afghan nation. . . . The Chadari [burqa], or veil, worn by townswomen in Afghanistan has no religious basis.” The government carefully notes that “it is not compulsory to go out with a chadari” and spells out the new clothing requirements. Women are required to wear “a scarf covering the head but leaving the face bare and a long-sleeved topcoat covering all the other garments, gloves, heavy stockings, and shoes.”

Thereafter the government magazine has a number of carefully posed photos of female students being graduated at Kabul University; they are bare faced and wearing mortarboards and smiling. I see graduating nurses who are also bare faced and wearing nurses’ caps. The mothers and sisters who have come to cheer them on are wearing long
headscarves and coats. I see Afghan airline attendants in snappy Western uniforms.

The country
was
on its way to modernization when the Soviet invasion and the fundamentalist reaction to it stopped all progress and sent the country hurtling backward into misery.

When I was in Kabul, Abdul-Kareem minimized the burqas, saw them as “on their way out,” became incensed if I criticized them. To this day Abdul-Kareem rails against the American choice of Hamid Karzai as Afghanistan’s president—and why?—because, among other things, Karzai does not allow his wife to appear in public.

But, oddly enough, Abdul-Kareem does not praise King Amanullah for having unveiled the women in the late 1920s. On the contrary, over the years Abdul-Kareem has condemned Amanullah as a bumbler, a fool, and a murderer. He believes that Amanullah murdered his own father. According to the American journalist Rhea Tally Stewart, in her massive work,
Fire in Afghanistan 1914–1929,
Amanullah became king in 1919 after a dramatic power struggle with his uncle, Nasrullah, who had probably conspired to murder his brother, King Habibullah, who was Amanullah’s father. Abdul-Kareem thinks that Amanullah and his mother, Ulya Hazrat, were behind the plot. Nasrullah immediately declared himself the rightful heir. According to Tally Stewart, “Nasrullah would have abolished all the existing aspects of modernity, which Amanullah ached to enlarge.”

As we know, this is a time-honored pattern among Afghans. Uncles vie with nephews; brothers and half-brothers kill each other for the throne.

Amanullah had grown up as the son of Habibullah’s most powerful wife—but he grew up in an imperial harem surrounded by many stepmothers (cowives) and step-siblings. Amanullah immediately liberated his father’s many wives when he became king—and he shared his vision of modernization and coeducation with his people.

He delivered public speeches about the importance of educating daughters as well as sons. According to Tally Stewart, in 1928 Amanullah called it shameful that Afghan women were not educated and compared them unfavorably to European women who worked and were active. In Amanullah’s opinion this was one of the main reasons Afghanistan was backward and Europe “more prosperous.” In another speech, mainly to Afghan women, Amanullah said, “In no Moslim country other than Afghanistan, not even Turkey or Persia, are women ‘buried alive.’ Veiling
has retarded your progress. . . . I want to see you disregard the wishes of your husbands in regard to veiling.”

In the fall of 1928 King Amanullah spent five days publicly describing his proposals to end bribery, reform the military, provide old-age pensions, institute coeducation, improve trade—and unveil the women. The tribes rebelled, and by January 1929 the bandit tribal leader Bacha Saquo had driven Amanullah into exile.

A
bdul-Kareem does not seem to like or trust his brothers. The brothers are all highly competitive, disdainful, and distrustful of each other.

These are brothers who would kill each other if they had the opportunity, especially if there were something substantial to gain.

Hassan, Agha Jan’s eldest son, is a good-looking, petty despot: close-shaven, well-dressed, short, and, in his view, cheated of his inheritance because his father had too many other sons.

He is furious that Abdul-Kareem and I have been given rooms in what he views as his home. Actually, this is Bebegul’s home but she had a fight with Hassan and either moved out or was forced into the redecorated servants’ quarters across the courtyard. Hassan is waiting impatiently to have a house of his own. One day, he explodes. He yells at me: “I’ve let you do whatever you do in my bathroom.” He makes it sound as if I use his bathroom to commit filthy, unspeakable crimes.

Abdul-Kareem’s two older brothers do not trust him at all. They don’t seem to like or trust each other; perhaps they cannot afford to be affectionate toward one another.

In a way the only man in the family is their father. This household has more than three wives. Ismail Mohammed’s
sons
are also married to their father. They talk about him incessantly. They watch his every move. They are starved for their father’s attention and affection—and of course are fixated on their inheritances. But they act like his wives. He is their main subject of discussion.

My brothers-in-law frequently make self-conscious jokes about their father’s virility and villainy. However, they still flush with pleasure when Ismail Mohammed openly favors or compliments one of them. They idealize, fear, and resent him. I believe that these sons long for their father’s attention and power. No mere woman can provide what such father-starved sons want. Sometimes my brothers-in-law adopt a
wildly humorous attitude toward their father’s inability to show fatherly affection. They tell me, “Sometime after the war, our father used to listen to the American radio broadcasts about family life in America. He was very impressed by the fact that many fathers would go to their children’s rooms and kiss them goodnight.”

They pause and we all laugh. The sight of that proud patriarch making the rounds of some fifteen- or twenty-odd beds in the greatest of discomfort but in all seriousness must have been pretty funny.

“It was impossible to keep up, though,” Reza concludes. “Father stopped and went back to accepting our kisses on his hand. The whole thing was rather silly anyway.”