Kabul Beauty School (29 page)

You would think that other Afghan women would be full of sympathy for Robina and her sisters, but you’d be wrong. Even
my
girls, who were themselves breaking so many barriers by going to school and becoming breadwinners, even they looked coldly at Robina when they heard that she and her sisters lived alone. Then Robina made it worse by breaking another taboo: she went out on a couple of dates with a Western man. That was enough to make all the rest of my girls shun her as if she had the avian flu.

This wasn’t the only time there had been divisions among the girls, although I was often clueless about these tensions as they were going on. In a way, I had deliberately worsened these divisions by making sure each class was diverse. Back when I was struggling just to keep the beauty school running, I hadn’t even known that it
wasn’t
diverse. Then Sam walked in one day when the third class was in session, looked around, and scowled. “Why is everyone in the school Hazara?” he asked. I didn’t realize that they were, but it turned out that two of my teachers were Hazara, and they had helped me select a class that was all Hazara. From that point on, Sam sat in on all the interviews and helped me make sure that I wasn’t inadvertently favoring one ethnic group over another. We balanced each class not only by ethnicity but also by religion and region. But the ancient conflicts among these groups sometimes spilled over into the school and salon. Then I’d have to stand in front of the students and give them a Rodney King lecture.

“Can’t we all just get along?” I would plead with them. “How is Afghanistan going to prosper if those of us in this one little place can’t put our differences aside?”

I didn’t notice how the others slighted Robina until Laila pointed it out to me. How they would suddenly dart into the lunchroom and leave her behind. How they would be whispering in another room while Robina was reading a book, trying to ignore them. Sometimes I didn’t even need Laila to tell me when things were amiss. I’d find Robina sobbing in the back room. Things had to be pretty bad for her to drop her highly polished, professional demeanor.

The tension inside the salon finally eased for Robina, at least a little. Maybe it was because Laila decided to throw her bantamweight ferocity in Robina’s corner. Laila was the only other unmarried woman working for me. She also had progressive parents, who wanted her to continue her studies and weren’t going to force her to marry anyone she didn’t want. But unlike Robina, Laila hadn’t grown up in comfort. During the wars, her family had fled to Pakistan, where life was tooth-and-nail tough. There Laila was a wage earner even as a tiny child. She spent five hours a day weaving carpets that paid the family’s monthly rent. Now Laila was living with her parents in Kabul, but she knew how tough it was to be a single woman out on the streets every day. To keep the men from bothering her, she fixed a glare on her face as she headed out her parents’ door every morning and maintained it until she got to my compound. Sometimes it took a while for her face to relax into a smile. She was a formidable ally for Robina.

Still, Robina needed bigger guns to protect her and her sister outside the salon. They had chosen what seemed to be a perfect apartment. It was in a secure location—right next to the Ministry of Agriculture—with a locked entrance and a nice landlord. But the landlord became less and less nice as he realized that no father or brother or husband was coming to take his rightful place in their household.

Robina had been telling me every day of the landlord’s escalating unfriendliness. Then the phone rang one morning when the salon was closed and school was getting ready to start. I was clamping mannequin heads to the countertops, and I didn’t even recognize the voice at the other end of the phone. “They push me,” the voice gasped. “They push me down the stairs!”

“Robina?”

She had woken up that morning to find that there was no water coming into the house. Robina was famously clean—she came to the salon every day with her own mug wrapped in foil—so the thought of not being able to wash was intolerable to her. She knocked on one of her neighbors’ doors to ask if they had water, which they did. She went to see the landlord to ask why the neighbors had water and she did not. He shrugged in a sullen way. She asked if the water valve to their apartment had somehow been shut off, because this is often what landlords do when they want to harass a tenant. Then he exploded with rage, calling her and her sisters whores and donkeys—the latter because he was Pashtun and they were Hazaras. His whole family poured out of their apartment and pushed her until she fell down the stairs.

Sam and I went right over. I took some bandages and ointment and a package of Wet Ones that I saved for emergencies. Sam went to yell at the landlord. We had brought Zilgai along with us, and he turned the water back on. Sam later went back to see the landlord with a friend who is a general, who told the landlord that Robina was a distant cousin and that he wanted the landlord to look out for her. Generals carry a lot of weight around here. Better to come with a general than to come with a policeman.

Things were better for a while, but the fact was that Robina and her sister were in mortal danger. They didn’t belong in Afghanistan, even though it should have been their country as much as anyone else’s. There are many kinds of terrorism, and Robina and her sister had to brave the persistent daily kind aimed at women who break away from the social order. Maybe all the different kinds of terrorism are, in their essence, the same. I don’t know. All I know is that every time the phone rang when Robina wasn’t in the salon, I was afraid someone had come after her and her sister again. I was afraid they’d been raped or murdered or both.

M
aryam the cook hadn’t come to work for the second day in a row. As lunchtime drew near, I could see some of the students looking longingly at the door of the manicure-pedicure room, where Maryam usually set out their food. They’d been doing spiral perms on our long-haired mannequin heads for a good two hours now, winding twenty-inch strands of hair in hundreds of small lavender perm rods, taking care not to twist or crimp the ends of the hair, making sure that each curled strand had the exact same tension and angle. Some of the students were so tired that they looked as if they needed to put their arms in slings. I knew they had to take a lunch break, so I gave up on Maryam once again. I called Achmed Zia and told him to go out and buy Kabul burgers—nan wrapped around salad, fried potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and some kind of meat—for all of us.

Topekai and Baseera were sitting next to each other on green plastic lawn chairs, momentarily oblivious to the hour as well as to the crush of students around them. Topekai held both hands in front of her and turned them as if she were steering a large, unwieldy rocket ship through space. Her eyes widened with horror and then clamped shut as she described the scene to Baseera in rapid Dari. She squealed and shuddered with pretend impact, and the two of them laughed. The students stared, and I wondered for a second if they thought this demonstration had anything to do with spiral perms. Then I remembered that—unlike me—the students could actually understand everything being said, even if they weren’t yet familiar with the situation. Topekai and her husband had purchased a car. She was learning to drive and had smashed into something.

I had asked Topekai and Baseera to come and teach class since one of my regular teachers was sick. I also thought it would be great for the students to get to know two successful Afghan hairdressers. “Tell them about giving your husband money,” I instructed Baseera, wanting to distract the students until Achmed Zia returned with the food. So she told them how she used to have to beg her husband for as little as twenty afghanis. Sometimes he wouldn’t give it to her, and sometimes he couldn’t. After she graduated from beauty school and started to work for me, she stopped asking him for money. Not only that, she realized that he sometimes had no money. So she had started to leave the equivalent of twenty dollars in his pocket every now and then. She never outright gave him the money, because that would shame him. Still, he knew she made more money than he did and he seemed to appreciate it. In fact, they were also pooling their money to buy a car. Both Baseera and Topekai had more freedom than most Afghan women. They worked as late as they had to every day and shared the chores of child rearing and housekeeping with their husbands. Topekai had always been a strong woman, but in the three years that I’d known Baseera, she’d also become strong.

I wasn’t sure how much Baseera told the students about her new life, but they looked impressed. Some looked disbelieving as well. Three of them had just moved back to Afghanistan after spending most of their lives as refugees in Pakistan. They had grown up hearing stories about the wonders of Afghanistan from their parents, but they were finding their homeland harsh and unyielding. Back in Pakistan, there was electricity all day and all night long, as well as reliably running water, decent roads, and good schools. They didn’t have to cover their heads and account for their every move outside the home. But Pakistan had started to crack down on Afghan refugees and make it harder for them to find jobs, so their fathers and husbands had insisted that the girls accompany them back to Kabul. There was 40 percent unemployment in Kabul, but at least no one was telling the men that they couldn’t apply for jobs just because they were Afghan. For these girls, though, the move was a cruel step backward. They had told me that the beauty school was the one thing that gave them hope.

Achmed Zia finally returned with the Kabul burgers. The girls rushed into the manicure-pedicure room, once again cheerful and chatty. As I trailed along after them, I saw that the floor in the lobby hadn’t been swept yet. Shaz hadn’t swept it yesterday, either, and there was already so much dust on the floor that I could see where the girls had disturbed it in their dash to lunch. “Where is Shaz?” I asked Topekai and Baseera. “I know she came in today, but why hasn’t she done anything with this floor?”

I saw a look pass between them, and I groaned. “Not out meeting Farooq, is she?”

“Nai, Debbie,” Baseera said quickly. “I think she works in your private rooms now.” She pointed to the house in the compound next to the beauty school, where Sam and I had moved our quarters. The beauty school and the salon took up all the space in the original house now.

“Folding scarves again?” It seemed as though every time I went looking for Shaz these days, she was sitting on the floor of my closet folding my scarves or my underwear. “Why does she fuss so much with my damn scarves?”

Again I saw a look pass between them. I set off to find Shaz, resolving to talk to her about Farooq one more time.

About four months earlier, I had noticed what seemed like a positive change in Shaz. She came into work one morning wearing lipstick, a touch of kohl, and a pretty new green paisley scarf. When she removed it, I saw that her short, dark hair had been brushed carefully and arranged with two sparkly combs. I called all the beauticians over to exclaim about how nice she looked. She didn’t exactly look pretty—her skin was pitted from hardships I couldn’t even imagine, her eyes and mouth were too small for the fullness of her face, and she had the body of a rugby player. Still, there is something alluring about the care that a woman takes to make herself look nicer. Maybe it’s the attention to detail, or maybe it’s the hopefulness implied by the act of enhancing what you already have. In any case, I was touched and charmed by Shaz’s new look. I thought it showed that she cared a little bit more about herself. Foolishly, I congratulated myself for having had something to do with it.

Usually all the staff left together at the end of the day, and Achmed Zia would drive them home in our van. A few months later, I went into the salon one day after I thought everyone had gone home and found Shaz still working on her hair. “Did Achmed Zia leave without you?”

I was ready to fly into battle on her account. I thought I’d seen the other girls act a little snippy toward her in the last few weeks. Sometimes hostilities among the girls were expressed beneath the threshold of my limited Dari; sometimes all I caught was a haughty look or a mean tone of voice that somehow made it through the clamor. Sometimes I’d talk one of the girls into telling me what was going on. More often, they kept these rivalries and tensions to themselves. They never complained to me about one another, even if the grievance was legitimate. Even if it somehow affected me or the beauty school.

“Why didn’t they wait for you?” I demanded.

“No problem, Debbie,” she said, blushing. She put on her coat and scarf, patted me on the arm, and walked out to the gate. Something about the way she patted my arm—as if she were telling me to stay behind—made me suspicious, so I followed her. She heard me kick a pebble across the driveway and rushed back to pat me on the arm again. “No problem,” she repeated anxiously. She backed toward the gate smiling and waving at me, but I kept following her. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What don’t you want me to see?”

Finally, she turned and dashed through the gate. Outside the compound walls, a battered black sedan was shuddering into gear. She climbed into the backseat and pulled her scarf over her face. Before the car drove off, the driver turned to look at me in a familiar way and gave me a little wave. He was as battered as his car, with a broken nose and a heavy mustache made crooked by a scar on his lip. He nodded his head and then sped away.

The next morning, I grabbed Laila as soon as she walked in the gate. “Who was that man picking up Shaz last night?”

Laila was still scowling from her walk past the bad neighbors’ house. She pulled off her head scarf and regarded me coolly. “He is her boyfriend, Debbie. His name is Farooq.”

I remembered having heard the name. “I thought he was her cousin!”

“Cousin can be boyfriend, too,” she reminded me. “But he is not even cousin.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“I don’t know. Long time, maybe.”

“Why didn’t you guys tell me?”

She just shrugged as she folded her scarf into a neat, tightly pinched little rectangle.

Since Shaz was married, this was a serious breach of decorum—the kind that could get her killed. If her husband found out, he could bring charges against her and have her stoned to death. I was furious at Shaz for being so stupid. I planted myself near the gate so I could talk with her as soon as she arrived. I was planning to tell her that she had to choose between Farooq and her job. But when she slipped in the gate, I felt so bad for her that I burst out crying. She was still wearing her jaunty little bit of makeup, but it couldn’t disguise her sadness. I knew how it felt to be trapped in a bad marriage; I knew how one can yearn so terribly for love.

I could see a few of the other girls watching us from the window, so I pulled Shaz to the back of the compound. I didn’t want to shame her any more by having them watch or Laila translate for me. Laila and the others were sometimes very uncompromising in their judgment of women who stepped outside the sexual boundaries, no matter how much they liked to joke about sex. If this weren’t Afghanistan, I would probably have been happy that poor, homely Shaz—stuck with a grasping, old husband in another city—had found a boyfriend. But it was Afghanistan, and I didn’t want to risk losing her to a mob. “No Farooq!” I whispered to her. I picked up a stone from the ground and pantomimed it bashing my head in. “No car with Farooq, no phone with Farooq. Too dangerous!”

She nodded and walked to my house wearily. She removed her pretty green paisley scarf and wrapped a gray rag over her hair to protect it from the dust that she would raise shaking out carpets. The other girls looked at me as I entered the salon but knew enough not to say anything critical of her.

Of course, my pantomime with the stone didn’t change things. Although I made sure that Shaz joined the others in the van for a few days, I didn’t have time to do this every day. Besides, she managed to see Farooq even when she did ride in the van. Achmed Zia came to tell me one day that she had asked him to let her off at a new location. When he looked in his rearview mirror, he saw her getting into Farooq’s car. And she talked to Farooq on her cell phone whenever she could. I’d often catch her hiding in an empty corner of the house talking to him, her face lit with guilty pleasure. I even caught her once using my cell phone to talk to him because the battery on hers was dead. “No Farooq!” I shouted, but I saved the number so that I would know if she ever tried to call him again on my phone.

As I walked upstairs to my closet, I expected to find Shaz talking to Farooq. But she was sitting on the floor with a dreamy look on her face. She had emptied out the contents of my scarf box and my underwear drawer and was folding everything up into neat little piles. “Didn’t you just do that yesterday?” I asked.

She stared at me as if she was trying to remember who I was. “Nai.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

She still looked confused.

“Do you need some tea?”

“Nai.”

“Come downstairs and sweep the floor when you’re finished here.” I pantomimed this, and she nodded. She started to get up, then sank back down again. Then she picked up a red sheer scarf and stretched it out languidly. She held it up in the sunlight, then fluttered it down to the floor and stroked it with her fingers. “Shaz, hurry up. I’d rather have you sweep the floor.”

I walked downstairs feeling as though I were missing something and nearly collided with Maryam as I walked into the lobby of the beauty school and salon. She looked as if she were in mourning. Her eyes were puffy and raw, and she was tightly wrapped in a big, black shawl. Maryam was always the most lighthearted, sweet-tempered person in either compound. She sang when she peeled vegetables. She sang when she plucked chickens. She sang when she washed dishes. She had a good marriage, a good family, a good job. The only time I’d ever seen her unhappy was once when everyone left the houses for one reason or another, leaving her alone in the kitchen. She panicked when she discovered that she was alone and cried when we returned. Now she looked as though she had been crying for the last two days. “Where’s Laila?” I shouted at the closed door to the salon. I knew that I needed help to understand this, whatever it was.