Kabul Beauty School (16 page)

“Did he find someone to take me to the pass?”

Fahim shook his head. “Hajji’s wife needs grapes. We must go to the market.”

I turned this over in my head. I had met a few of Hajji’s wives, and there were a number of other women living in the house, too. Solid, able-bodied women. “What, are their legs broken?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, no, no. They must not leave the house.”

I was stunned by this. Here I had traveled halfway around the world by myself and was getting ready to make my way through the Khyber Pass, which is widely considered one of the most dangerous places in the world. Yet Hajji’s wife called him all the way in Peshawar and then he called Fahim all the way back in Islamabad to go to the market to get her some grapes. I wondered what these people must think of me.

The diamond smuggler finally drove me to Peshawar, which is about thirty-five miles from the border of Afghanistan. He left me in the care of someone I truly loathed, an old Talib I had had the displeasure of meeting back in Kabul. He distinguished himself by groping both women and men whenever he could. If Sam and I wanted to mess with any of our friends, we’d make sure they wound up standing next to him at a party. Not only was he promiscuous in Kabul, but he drank like a fish, too. But here in Peshawar, he was pious and strict with everyone in his household. He welcomed me into his mansion, which was one of the biggest houses I’ve ever seen. Then he pointed to a woman wrapped in a dark shawl who was hovering in the background. “Look at my old wife,” he said, stroking his beard. He always stroked his beard in a creepy sort of way. “I need nice young one, maybe American like you.”

I stood in the living room awkwardly and removed my head scarf. As soon as he left the room, one of his wives came and threw it back over my head. I’d never been in a home where the women had to be covered even while they were inside.

I was hoping to leave the next day, but every day the old Talib kept saying, “Tomorrow, tomorrow.” So I wound up spending a lot of time with the women of the house. Some of them were as creepy as the old man. His sister kept snatching things out of my suitcase and pretending that they were gifts for her. She got my travel reading light and a pair of shoes that way. But the rest of the women were just sad. Their lives were so boring: they’d cook, clean, and spend the rest of their time sitting in the women’s section of the house and painting their hands and feet with henna. By the time I left, I was covered with so much henna that I felt like a circus freak. When they thought no one could hear them, they’d ask me how they could get out of Pakistan. One of his daughters told me she had been forced to marry a man who lived in London and came back to see her only every two years, just to get her pregnant. Another daughter told me how much she wanted to continue her education, just like her brother. If her father didn’t force her to marry, she had hopes of getting a medical degree. But even if she got the degree, she said, he’d never let her leave the house. It made me sick that she already knew she had no future other than the inside of a house.

One of the old man’s pompous brothers was always trying to get me into a debate about Eastern versus Western culture. “Our women are happy,” he insisted. “Look at them. They have no stress, no tension like women in the West.”

This was the only time someone had ever tried to argue this kind of issue with me. I didn’t want to challenge him in his family’s house. But I thought to myself, Hey, buddy, your wife just put a note in my pocket telling me how miserable she is! The only reason she stays is that you keep her in a gilded cage.

Finally, the old man told me he had arranged my trip through the Khyber Pass. He said his son-in-law would take me, but at a fairly steep price. I wanted to call Sam and ask if the price was fair or if I should bargain with them, but the old man wouldn’t let me. I had a feeling that he didn’t want me talking to Sam, who would be furious at this most un-Afghan-like treatment of a guest. Even the down-on-his-luck diamond smuggler on his worst day wouldn’t have thought of charging me. So I told the old man this arrangement would be fine, because I would have done just about anything to get out of his house.

The next day the son-in-law drove a big white car to the front of the house and shouted for the servants to load my six suitcases. They took them from my room before I was able to pack my favorite pillow, so I came outside with it tucked under my arm. He told me to wear my black veil ninja-style, with only my eyes showing, and warned me not to speak for the next eight hours. I wasn’t to let anyone see that I was a foreigner. So we started toward the Khyber Pass. The traffic got thicker and the roads steeper and bumpier, and the mountains seemed to glower around us.

We passed one of the brightly painted jingle trucks that I so loved. These are semis that are more like ice-cream trucks, with every surface painted, mirrored, tasseled, and embellished in one way or another so that they can deliver their sheets of insulation or boom boxes or whatever with a sort of carnival style. This one was turned over on the side of the road. The son-in-law was sweating, even though the snow was swirling outside. “Don’t talk,” he said. “Don’t even look at anyone. This is where the Taliban is protected, where the opium sellers are protected, where the bandits live. There is no law here. Not Afghan law, not Pakistani law.” We drove through a place where the pass narrowed to about forty feet, then eased into a crowded section of the road that was lined with stores. I saw machine guns hanging in one window, grenades lined up in another. I figured you could probably buy a nuclear bomb there if you had enough money. And then we came to the actual border.

I had been anticipating something that looked like the border between the United States and Canada—a nice booth where they ask you what your business is and how long you plan to stay. But I’d never seen anything like this border aside from disaster movies, in which people are fleeing a flood or volcanic eruption with everything they own on their backs or on the backs of the donkeys they’ve got tied to their waists. We had to park the car and get out. As I sank into the mud in my high heels—because no one had told me I was going to have to walk—a tiny boy with a wheelbarrow made his way to us through the crowd. We put all my suitcases in the wheelbarrow, and then the boy tied ropes around them to keep them in place. The son-in-law strode ahead of me, and I had to work hard to keep up, still clutching my pillow. With every step, my feet sank up to my ankles. I had to really tug to get them loose, hoping all the while that my shoes didn’t fall off. I was afraid that if I bent down to pick up a shoe, the crowd would trample me. I was also afraid that, if I took my eyes off the son-in-law, I’d lose him among all the dark jackets and turbans.

Finally, we came to a checkpoint, where an officer asked for my passport. I handed it over silently, and he raised his eyebrows when he looked at it. “You are not allowed to come here without an armed guard!” he announced. “It is very dangerous.”

“But I’m already here.”

“You should have an armed guard.”

“Pardon me.” I kept my eyes down. “Next time, I will observe the rules.”

He waved the passport at me. “Is this really you?”

I nodded, still covered in a black veil with only my eyes showing. He stamped my passport, and I stumbled forward into Afghanistan.

The son-in-law had disappeared, but I managed to find a taxi to take me down to Kabul. It already had three men in it, but the driver obligingly loaded up my suitcases and told the men in the back to move over. I leaned into the car door with my head and face covered for the next five hours, never saying a word. I was dying to go to the bathroom, too, and gestured to the driver that I had to pull over. He finally stopped at a miserable roadside facility. Aside from a little collision with another car, the trip proceeded uneventfully. No bandits, no snipers, no Taliban hunting us in their white jeeps. As we drove into Kabul and I started to see some things that were familiar to me, I whipped off my veil and lit a cigarette. The looks on those men’s faces! I just had to laugh.

The taxi dropped me off at Sam’s guesthouse. I wasn’t sure who would be there, but soon Ali appeared in the doorway, dressed just like a casual-Fridays professional in the United States. He came rushing out to help me with my bags. Afghan men are not used to women throwing their arms around them, but I figured Ali was pretty well westernized. After my ordeal on the pass, I couldn’t help it. But he returned my hug, then helped me get settled. He went into the kitchen and made me tea, then came out with the tea and an assortment of biscuits on one of the beautiful turquoise plates from the tiny village of Istalif, high above Kabul. We sat and talked until the sun started to set.

“It’s good that you’re back,” he said. The light brown of his eyes was very much like that of the tea warming my hand. “The house feels like a home now.”

I smiled. “It feels like home to me, too.”

“Would you like to call your husband?” He punched some numbers into his cell phone and then grinned as Sam answered. I couldn’t hear his actual words from across the room and wouldn’t have understood them anyway, but I heard Sam’s unmistakably jaunty tone. Ali handed me the cell phone and watched as Sam and I went through our list of words. Then I told Ali to ask Sam when he would be back. I heard a flurry of words at the other end, and Ali shook his head. Sam still hadn’t been able to book a flight back to Kabul, although he’d gone to the airport every day and stood in line, hoping that one of the pilgrims had opted to stay longer and give up his seat. But there were about thirty thousand hajjis trying to return and only one flight each day. His prospects of coming back to me soon were dim.

“SALAAM ALEICHEM!”
I said to a startled woman pounding the keys of an old typewriter. Then I handed her a sample of styling gel and made my way down the hall to the next office.

I made a point of circulating through the Women’s Ministry soon after my return, showing one and all that I was back and that I was getting ready to reopen the school. Then Noor and I spent two days interviewing women for the next class. One of the first to walk in the door was Baseera, still in her burqa. I didn’t recognize her until she folded it back over her hair and I saw those gorgeous green eyes. “Welcome back to Afghanistan,” she said in English, very proud of herself.

I was thrilled to see her again. I told Noor right away that I already knew her story. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s in this class,” I said.

The rest of the women who streamed in ranged in age from fourteen to forty-eight. I eliminated some of them immediately. There were a handful of really sweet girls under eighteen, but I told them right away that we wouldn’t even consider them. I said that they should go back to an academic school and get all the education they could. They all looked at me with huge, tragic, kohl-smeared eyes, and I kept begging Noor to explain that I was trying to do them a favor. I was ready to refuse an eighteen-year-old for the same reason, but she began sobbing. She started to tell her story, so shy that she talked with her veil held over her mouth. Her father had been killed by the Taliban, and her brother was in charge of the family, she told us. She couldn’t read or write because her brother hadn’t permitted her to go to regular school, but he had given her permission to go to beauty school. I decided right away that I would take her, even if she didn’t match the profile of the woman we had agreed would profit most from the school. I didn’t care if she had no skills going into this or if she turned out to be the worst hairdresser in town. It mattered only that she was breaking my heart, and that this was the sole way I had to help her.

There were so many compelling stories. There always are. The next girl was about twenty. Her mother was dead, and her father’s legs had been blown off by a land mine. She was now the sole support of her family. How could I not take her, too?

We finally picked twenty-seven women for the second class, which would begin in a month, at the end of March 2004. We told all the women we interviewed that we would put a list of names for the class on the door to the school. I figured I would be able to hide in the back of the school that day—there was lots of cleaning to do anyway—and would not have to face the disappointment of those who didn’t get in. But then Noor walked into the school, and all fifty women rushed in behind him. It was a crowd of strong emotions. Some of them were dancing with elation, and the others either wept or followed me around, still trying to make their cases in a language I couldn’t understand. I would have taken all of them if we’d had the money. They all clearly needed this opportunity. But I didn’t even know if we had enough money for the twenty-seven we had just picked.

I felt terrible by the time I finally got home that evening. Those sad faces haunted me. All I wanted to do was get in my bed with a book and a margarita or two. But when I opened the door, I saw a young girl—maybe fourteen years old—sitting on the couch. She jumped to her feet when I walked in, knocking over a cup of tea that had been balanced on the arm of the couch. She immediately bent down over the spill and swabbed it with her scarf. At the same time, Ali rushed downstairs. He looked uneasy for a second but then walked across the room to take the box I was carrying.