Kabul Beauty School (22 page)

“Why?”

“He needs go to doctor.”

“Your father?”

“No,
she.
She needs go to doctor.”

“Which she? Your mother, your sister, your daughter—”

“My wife.”

“Is she sick?” If I had to think of her, it was easier to think of her wasting away of a fatal illness and fading entirely from the periphery of my life.

He shook his head, then sighed again. “She is pregnant.”

I felt as if I had been dropped from an airplane.

I had been working so hard that spring—school in the mornings, salon customers in the afternoons—that I wobbled across the compound back to our room every evening, hoping my dear husband would dote on me a little. I learned quickly, though, that I pretty much had to pin him in a corner and put a choke hold on him to get any affection. And that, of course, wasn’t what I had in mind. To be fair to Sam, he was still having a terrible time with his business. But once the business began to improve, his behavior didn’t change that much. There were cultural differences between us that were as tricky to cross as the Hindu Kush mountains. And neither of us had any idea how to do it.

We fought a lot. In fact, one of Sam’s first new English words in those days was
dinosaur,
his pet name for me because he said I fought like one. Acts of affection—or rather, lack of—triggered one argument after another. For instance, we had many nights of yelling and tears because I’d come into our room and kiss him, and he’d pull away with a look of distress on his face. We finally got Roshanna to translate the problem. It turned out that I was kissing him after he’d performed his ritual cleansing for nightly prayer. He’d have to heat up some water and do it all over again.

But even when I’d remember to touch him before he cleaned up for prayer, he was pretty unresponsive. He didn’t understand why I wanted to hold hands or hug or kiss or touch. He hadn’t ever done any of that with his Afghan wife, and his father never did any of that with his mother. I don’t think Sam had ever seen an Afghan man behave like that with a woman. Afghan men walk around the streets of Kabul holding hands with each other. They often stand talking with their arms around each other or caressing each other’s arms, but you never see a man doing any of these things with a woman. Once when Sam and I were going somewhere in the car, I reached over and started to rub his arm. He reddened and pulled away. “Is not time for sex, Debbie!” he hissed.

“I don’t want to have sex right now,” I said, although who knows—maybe I would have if he hadn’t looked as if he wanted to jump out of the car. “I just want to snuggle.”

“What is this ‘snuggle’?” he asked, exasperated. He really didn’t get it.

And like most women, I wanted my husband to be a soul mate—not just physically affectionate but also interested in my deepest thoughts and feelings. This was pretty tough given the language barrier, but I was determined to try. I’d follow Sam around the compound with my Dari-English dictionary, trying to figure out how to say “I’m so depressed” or “I really miss my father at this time of year.” Sam would listen to my tortured sentences, then just stare at me, utterly lost. He finally decided that he needed to round up some foreigners to soak up my conversational excess. One of them was a young photographer named David, who rented a room at the Peacock Manor. Sam told David he’d pay him four dollars—about two hundred afghanis—per hour if he’d talk to me. I think the rate was even higher after sunset.

I was also going crazy because I felt so terribly confined at the Peacock Manor. At least when the school was at the Women’s Ministry, I’d had to walk back and forth to the other guesthouse. Now all my activities took place within the walls of our compound. I was desperate to see other places and other faces, but I didn’t really want to go out alone, either. I didn’t speak Dari or know my way around town, and there were all those security alerts. I pretty much knew hairdressers were in the “soft target” category, so I had to be cautious. But Sam was not only reluctant to go anywhere with me but also reluctant to have me spend any time with the Afghans who came to the guesthouse to visit him. He’d ask me to go sit in our bedroom until they left. This caused a lot of wailing. I was sure that he was ashamed to be seen with me. I finally wailed to Roshanna about this. She said, “Oh, no, Debbie! He loves you so much that he doesn’t want other men looking at you.”

But no matter how many times Roshanna would smooth things over, the fighting continued. Sam often treated me more like a servant than like a wife because that was the only model he knew. I felt I had to set him straight on this one right away. When he’d ask me to make him some tea or find his shoes, I’d shoot back, “Are your legs broken?” He told a group of our foreign friends once that it was easier to have a thousand Afghan wives than one American wife. “You tell a thousand Afghan wives to sit, and they sit,” he said. “You tell one American wife to sit and she says, ‘Bite my ass.’”

We could joke about these cultural differences—sometimes. And sometimes we’d yell at each other in our own tongues, and one of us would wind up sleeping in the living room. Sometimes I’d stomp outside the gates to get away—from him, from the guesthouse, from our cramped little bedroom, from Ali and David and the other guests, from everything. That was what I’d done in Holland, Michigan, if I had a fight with someone—take a nice, long walk under the stars to get my emotional equilibrium back. At least this got a strong reaction from Sam. The first time I did it, he ran after me in a panic. “Please understand this is not good place to be angry,” he said, tugging me back toward the guesthouse. “Karzai controls the day, but the Taliban still controls the night.”

One morning after sleeping in the living room, I decided I had had enough. I called Roshanna and told her that I was leaving Sam and asked if I could move in with her and her family. She rushed over to the guesthouse to find me packing all my stuff in my two suitcases and wrapping the things that wouldn’t fit in the suitcases in my head scarves. She started to laugh when she saw the mountain of bulging scarves, but I was sitting on the floor crying, so she sat down next to me. In a few minutes, she started to cry, too. This is another thing I love about Afghans—they never let you cry alone. She tried to comfort me, but I couldn’t be comforted. “I’m leaving,” I sobbed. “I’m leaving Sam and the school and Afghanistan, too. I want a hot bath, and damn it, I want some bacon!”

Sam came back to the house to find the two of us sitting there weeping. He stood in the doorway and took in the scene with a look of utter shock on his face. I think he thought that something had happened to my sons or my mother. Then Roshanna took him aside. She spent about an hour with him explaining how hard both the country and this new marriage were on me. Then she came back with a basin of water. Next thing I knew, she was washing my face and combing my hair. She picked out an outfit and helped me put it on. Sam had given her money to take me to a nice restaurant, as well as the use of his car and driver. We went shopping for more head scarves, then we sat in the restaurant for hours. I realized that my biggest problem right then might not be Sam. Maybe I was missing the kind of company you can only have with a girlfriend. Roshanna and I had both been so busy—she with her new salon, I with the school and salon—that even though we worked together to train the teachers, we hadn’t had fun together in ages.

I still don’t know if Sam and I would have made it through this period of time if Val and Suraya, my friends from the guesthouse, hadn’t returned to Kabul. They stayed with us at the Peacock Manor, and gradually, Sam’s understanding of what it meant to be a Western-style husband started to improve. The four of us spent a lot of time together laughing and talking in the living room, and I noticed that Sam watched Val and imitated him. If Val rubbed Suraya’s shoulder, Sam would rub my shoulder. If Val held Suraya’s hand, then Sam would reach out for mine. We started to tease him about this, so he decided to get back at us by steadfastly ignoring whatever Val did one day. But when Suraya sat on Val’s lap, Sam stood up and then plopped himself into my lap.

Little by little, with the help of our friends, Sam relaxed with this outspoken, emotional, independent woman he had married. And as I grew to understand the sexual culture I had married into, I stopped taking his husbandly deficits so personally—or at least I tried. I learned to love him more and more, despite his brusque ways. And difficult as our marriage was, I also knew that I would never have been able to keep the beauty school going if it hadn’t been for Sam’s help. I had to remind myself of that every time I felt like throwing something at him. I had to remind myself of my students’ wretched pasts and of the pride and hope on their faces now. I had to remind myself that if I kept throwing things at him, we wouldn’t have anything left. Already, we had no working flashlights because I had flung them all at him. So the battle between us—what he called the Afghan-American war—died down, at least for a while. We became more like the partners, sexual and otherwise, that I’d hoped we would be back when Val and Suraya were arranging this marriage.

But when Sam told me his first wife was pregnant, I fell apart. I had wanted to be in total denial about this other woman. I hadn’t wanted to think about the possibility that he’d slept with her when I was in Michigan and he was back in Saudi Arabia. Now I felt as if he had cheated on me. I grabbed his mug and threw it at the wall, where it shattered into hundreds of tiny, toothlike shards. “How far along is she?” I asked him.

“Five months.”

I mentally counted ahead. That meant she would be having the baby in October. If we managed to stay married, we’d celebrate our first anniversary that month. My birthday was at the end of October, too. I hated the idea that she would ruin this month, full of dates that were important to me, with a new baby.

I slept in the living room for the next few nights. But somehow, Sam and I made it through this. I could finally see that it was difficult for him, too. We managed to create our own odd kind of happiness again, even though I couldn’t bear to think about October.

SOON ENOUGH
I was reminded that you’re allowed only very brief periods of happiness in Afghanistan. This seems to be one of the conditions of life there, like the dust and the wind. Some new horror is always waiting to turn the corner just when you’ve slowed your pace to enjoy the view. I simply hadn’t a clue that the horror would be waiting for me in my own house.

One day I returned from the beauty school and found Sam sitting on our bed, his head resting in his hands. As for many of us, his command of a foreign language faltered when he had something really important to say. He blurted something about Ali and little Hama, but I had to keep asking him over and over what he was talking about.

“He kisses him,” Sam said. “
Her.
Ali kisses her.”

I couldn’t figure out why he was so upset about a kiss. “My uncle used to kiss me when I was a little girl. It was harmless.”

“Not uncle kiss!” He pushed me against the wall hard and put his mouth over mine, then pulled away. “This is like Ali kissing.”

He had walked into Ali’s room without knocking—he never knocks—and found them like this. If Sam had had any doubts about the nature of the kiss, they were swept aside by the way Ali had his hand up Hama’s shirt and by the look of terror on her face. Sam didn’t know how to say “breasts” in English—our little sexual code for mine was “apples and oranges.” He said something about Hama’s apples and oranges, but this time there was no playfulness about it.

I sat on the bed next to him, stunned. I had always been uncomfortable about the way Hama trailed Ali around the house, but that was because I didn’t want her alone in a room with his male visitors. So I’d try to keep her with me as much as possible. Ali didn’t stand in the way. He’d encourage Hama to stay with me and tell her that I was like her aunt. I actually felt more like her mother, because she’d cling to me as if she were a tiny child. Only at the beauty school did she relax.

“Did you tell him you’d kill him if he touches her again?”

He shook his head. “Ali is not family. Neither is Hama. I can make these orders only to family.”

I stormed out to look for Ali, but he wasn’t in his room. So I fixed myself up with a tumbler of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes, and plenty of magazines so that I could wait for him. He finally came in at around eleven o’clock, with Hama in tow. Her face brightened when she saw me on the couch, and she ran over to sit next to me. I ran my hand over her cheek. She was wearing bright red lipstick, heavy kohl, and eye shadow, all of it so harsh and unnecessary on her pretty little face that she almost looked like a child actor on vaudeville. I asked her to go into the kitchen and make some tea for us. She promptly skipped away.

“What are you doing with this little girl, Ali?” I demanded. “Are you really her uncle? Her uncle by blood?”

“Not by blood, no.” He began patting his pockets for a cigarette. I didn’t offer him one of mine. “I am a friend of the family.”

“You’re not her friend if you kiss her and touch her. You’ll only ruin her reputation, and she’ll never be able to get married.”