Kabul Beauty School (20 page)

“It is not possible.”

“So I can’t ever go to the mandai?”

“I give you my car. Maybe you take Roshanna.”

Sam made good on his promise to turn his car over to me. I was a little nervous about driving it by myself, so my first time on the road was with a bunch of visiting foreigners. We followed a van all over the city because I had no idea how to get around. The van bounced through crowded streets, and we all screamed as I just barely navigated us around the wagons and donkeys and pedestrians. I attracted plenty of attention as a woman driver, too—there were women in other cars, but they almost never drove or even sat in the front seat. Men were falling off their bicycles! They were screaming at me, “I love you, mister!” The first time I heard someone say that, I thought that, despite the eyeliner and earrings and head scarf, someone thought I was a man. Then someone told me that Dari doesn’t have words that make gender distinctions;
he, she,
and
it
are all the same word. That explained Sam’s pronoun confusion! I quickly got used to people addressing me as “mister” or referring to me as “him.”

Even though driving in Kabul was as scary as anything I’d ever done—like being on a roller coaster that shot off its track—I got a little bit better at it. I started to feel pretty cool about being one of the few women behind a wheel. The policeman who directed traffic at the rotary got used to seeing me and would hold up his hand to stop all the other cars as I passed through. Once he walked up to my car window and waved at me to stop. Then he asked if I wanted to share some of the tea he had in a thermos over on the sidewalk. I had to laugh. The traffic was backed up for a mile and getting worse by the second because of me, but this police officer was ready to pour me some tea. That’s one of the things I love about Afghans. There’s always time for tea.

The novelty of driving wore off pretty quickly, though. You couldn’t relax for a minute, and besides, I always liked to drive with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. My cell phone often rang, too, and I’d have to grab it. A call usually meant that there was chaos at the school or the guesthouse, or that a customer had managed to make her way through the city and was waiting, desperate for me to touch up her roots before she left on vacation. One day I was managing the cell phone, coffee, and cigarette, and I just missed running into the back of a water buffalo. I decided to give up driving in Kabul.

So I asked Sam to line up a driver for me whenever I wanted to go out. I was dying to go back to the mandai, but I didn’t want to go by myself. All sorts of people had told me it wasn’t completely safe for me to go alone, and I didn’t know enough Dari to bargain with the vendors. I wanted Afghan prices, not the high prices that I’d get as a foreigner. If Ali had been in town, I would have asked him to take me, but he was traveling. Little Hama would have been happy to come, but she hardly spoke any English and couldn’t help me bargain. Finally, I convinced Roshanna—who, when she wasn’t helping me teach, was trying to start her own salon—to come with me. I wore my longest, darkest skirt and dark shoes and even a burqa, hoping that no one would spot me as a foreigner.

The driver parked near the river. This is an area, by the way, where the mujahideen factions had battled it out so fiercely that the buildings on either side of the Kabul were riddled with holes. I didn’t know how some of them were still standing. Roshanna and I set off arm in arm. The driver followed about twenty feet behind, making sure we were safe. We crossed a narrow bridge over the stinking river, where a few people crouched to wash their clothes. Once we reached the other side, the mandai began.

People were selling stuff from tables, from blankets spread on the ground, from wagons and wheelbarrows, from stalls and stores. Even from their own bodies—there was one guy who had key chains hanging all over his sweater. I think some of these vendors must have been there illegally because a police officer walked around with a stick, swatting at little boys selling a few ashtrays on a towel and a man with a half-dozen lacy bras hanging from his arm. These people would dart away through the crowd, then set up somewhere else. I wanted to stop and look at everything, but Roshanna kept urging me on. “Better to move quickly,” she said.

But it was impossible for me to move quickly. There were so many people that it seemed as if a huge parade had just broken up. There was so much stuff that it seemed as if an enormous warehouse had exploded and rained products. Since the burqa didn’t offer much in the way of peripheral vision, I had to keep stopping so that I could turn around to see everything. Different kinds of goods were roughly grouped together. Roshanna pulled me into a side street and showed me a courtyard surrounded by three stories of shops that sold fake flowers—giant roses, long garlands of poppies, even plastic Christmas trees. We passed a row of stores that sold treadle sewing machines, all with beautiful gilded designs on the sides. We passed a row of stores that sold nothing but knives and scissors, and then a row of stores that sold nothing but baby cleanup products. Of course, there was a huge area that sold nothing but scarves.

As we were walking past a stand that had long strings of dried dates hanging from a wooden frame, I felt something poke me in the butt. I didn’t think anything of it. I figured the mandai was so crowded that someone had just bumped into me by mistake. I sped up a little, but then I felt it again—this time, more like someone helping himself to a handful. “I think someone just grabbed my ass,” I whispered to Roshanna. She tugged me ahead.

But then I felt it again. Definitely, someone was groping me. I turned to look behind me and saw this big, ugly man who was nearly walking on my heels. I glared at him through my little burqa window and figured that he would take this as a warning not to do it again. But as soon as I turned back around, he reached out and grabbed me again. Then I whirled around, flipped up my burqa, and punched him full in the face.

Roshanna’s eyes nearly rolled back in her head. The vendors in the shops around us ran into the street in a panic. I was screaming at the top of my lungs in my best bad Dari that this guy was grabbing my ass and I wasn’t going to stand for it. The guy had fallen to the ground, and everyone was crowding around trying to figure out what the problem was. I could hear Roshanna telling them in Dari that the man had been pulling my sleeve.

“He wasn’t pulling my sleeve!” I said. “He was grabbing my ass, Roshanna.” But it was too shameful for her to say this, so she just kept telling everyone that he was pulling my sleeve. Then she dragged me away.

“This happens often in the mandai,” she told me. “Please calm down and we will go home soon.”

“I thought they were forbidden to touch women who aren’t their wives.”

“Yes, but they do.”

“You don’t do anything when it happens?”

She shook her head. “Too embarrassed.”

We walked for a few more minutes in silence. I was too angry now to take an interest in the carnival of goods around me. I was outraged that Roshanna and all these other women had to put up with men grabbing them in the mandai. I remembered all those women in prison who had dared to challenge the sexual order by having a boyfriend or running away from a bad husband. Why was it that the men in the market could break the rules so easily? I remembered the scars on Nahida’s back and felt a new surge of rage on her behalf.

Roshanna and I stopped to buy toilet paper, and I felt a hand on my ass again. I turned around and saw that the same ugly guy had followed us there. I also saw a police officer at the edge of the crowd, so I grabbed the guy by the shirt and started to haul him over to the cop—again shouting in my bad Dari that he had grabbed my ass. The officer listened for a few seconds, then took out his stick and began to beat the guy. I watched with satisfaction, as if this one little bit of payback helped balance the scales between the men and the women. But Roshanna laid hold of my arm and marched me back toward the car.

“I’m sorry, Debbie, but I will never come to the mandai with you again,” she said. No matter how often I asked her to come with me, she refused—sweetly, graciously, but emphatically refused.

SHAZ—MY GOLD-TOOTHED HOUSEKEEPER—
and I were kneeling in the bathroom near the
bokari,
a wood-burning stove that kind of looks like a fancy metal garbage can. This one heated both the bathroom and the water, and I had filled the upstairs of the guesthouse with smoke trying to set myself up with a hot bath. Shaz cracked the window to let the smoke out, then she opened the little door in front of the bokari, stuffed more newspaper around the wood, and squirted some gasoline inside. I retreated to the far wall while she tossed in a lit match, then came closer as I saw the fire blaze. Smoke started to leak out again through a curve in the metal pipe that vented the bokari outside, but Shaz had a solution to that, too. She ran out of the bathroom, then came back with strips of damp cloth. She wrapped the curve of the hot pipe with the cloth, where it sizzled and then adhered over the fissures in the metal. In a few minutes, the smoke had cleared. I could take a bath without coughing to death.

This was the kind of heroic effort that kept me from giving up on Shaz. Not that she didn’t work hard. She worked like an industrial machine when it came to scrubbing the floors but, still, a faulty machine—she’d scrub some parts of the floor nearly down to the foundation and miss others entirely. She’d rush through the guesthouse and leave a trail of broken cups or sometimes lamps in her wake. She was supposed to iron our clothes, but she often just seemed to forget to do it. Maybe she didn’t even understand why people did such things, since she herself was so unkempt. Sam would reach into his closet and pull out one rumpled shirt after another, then ask me why we couldn’t find a better cleaner. And Shaz was always, always supposed to clean up the bathrooms in the school and salon every morning. No matter how many times I told her this, I’d still see customers coming out of the bathroom with politely displeased looks on their faces.

I decided one of the problems might be that Shaz just had too much work. When we’d first moved into the Peacock Manor, her biggest job was to keep the guesthouse clean. But as the beauty school got going, the amount of work escalated. I didn’t see how she could get it all done, so I told Sam to let her know that we’d try to find her an assistant. The next day Shaz showed up with an older woman who looked so much like her that I told Sam to ask if the older woman was a sister or cousin.

After a brief discussion, he turned back to me. “This his mother.”

I was shocked. The other woman looked only a few years older than Shaz. “How old is she?” I gestured to Shaz.

“Twenty-five,” he said.

Here I had assumed Shaz was at least fifty—older than I! “I want to know more!” I told Sam as I saw him move toward the door. “I want the whole story.”

“You need ask Roshanna,” he said. “Shaz not tell man all the sexy details you want to know.”

So I had to wait until Roshanna stopped by the Peacock Manor later on that afternoon. Then I pulled the two of them into my room.

Shaz and her mother were Hazaras. The Taliban, who were largely Pashtun, had special contempt for Hazaras, dismissing them as ignorant folk—not much better than donkeys, meant only for the most menial jobs. While Shaz’s family had stuck it out in Kabul during most of the war, they fled to the mountains when the Taliban arrived because it was rumored that the new rulers planned to massacre all the Hazaras. Shaz and her family lived in a mountain cave for a year, foraging and even stealing from farms so that they had enough to eat.

As Shaz related this part of the story, I was surprised to see her smile. It turned out that she was married to a good man then, someone she loved deeply. Her memories of those years were happy ones despite the hardships. Then her husband stumbled across a group of Taliban one day, and they killed him. When she and her family heard that the Taliban were gone, they ventured down from the mountain and found relatives who helped them for a little while. Shaz’s family soon decided to marry her off to a man whose first wife had not yet borne him a son. But Shaz was never able to conceive with this man, and he divorced her. Then her family married her off to a third man, who was living in the city of Kunduz, north of Kabul, with another wife. He didn’t want her to move into his house with the other wife, so she continued to live with her mother. Still, he hoped Shaz would bear him a son, and he made infrequent visits to Kabul for sex. He also tried to get her to give him money. She solved this problem by going to Gold Street and turning her savings into rings and bracelets that he overlooked. Shaz had not yet been able to conceive a child with this man, either. She dabbed at her eyes with her dirty hands as she told Roshanna that she was afraid he, too, would divorce her.

So I resolved to keep Shaz on, no matter what. After all, I was running a program that was supposed to be helping women, and I didn’t want to help just the beauticians. I wanted to help poor, less-skilled women like Shaz, too, if I could.