The Afghan Queen: A True Story of an American Woman in Afghanistan (4 page)

“By the early 1960s, every leftist organization enjoyed a substantial increase in funding and membership. The FBI virtually kept these organizations afloat, especially the Communist Party. Without FBI and U.S. taxpayer support, many leftist groups would have wound up on the trash heap of history.”

Spring, 1975—The Sannyasin overland caravan to Kabul was a marvelous adventure for Lela. The caravan consisted of six vehicles: a bus carrying Lela and most of the travelers, four large off-road campers, and a strange tiger-striped duplex camper. A young Sannyasin couple built the
Tiger Bahn
(road tiger) on their farm outside of Zurich.

Tiger Bahn, Tiger-striped duplex camper at Swiss Farm Starting Point

It was the most unique of the six vehicles in the caravan and was the show-stopper throughout the trip. Most of the travelers were from wealthy European families. The exceptions were Lela and Kit.

Lela and Kit were closer to each other than to any other travelers. Most of the others were Sannyasin. They acted like hippie flower children. Lela and Kit were the only serious business travelers as well as politically savvy leftists. They were like den mothers to the happy campers.

Kit said little about herself. In addition to being a nurse-practitioner, she was also a journalist and consultant to the Kalq government on health issues. After completing her training as a registered nurse, Kit went on to medical college completing her doctorate in Public Health.

The ministry of health planned hundreds of store-front clinics throughout Afghanistan, starting with a 100-mile radius around Kabul. Her medical team was Afghan, except for Kit. The team would visit each of 50 towns to negotiate with their leaders and administrators.

The team planned to establish combination medicalnursing-dental-public health clinics, as well as a national health sciences university and research center in Kabul. Kit was in the process of writing a series of articles and books on this experience, “Afghan Public Health, Past, Present and Future.” She had already written a number of newspaper and magazine articles on related subjects.

IN LELA’S WORDS:

One day while waiting for another bus repair, I went to a real Turkish bath, my first. It was in the provincial town of Site, on the southwest coast of Turkey. The bathhouse had a tour marker outside the doorway. It said something about it being an ancient Greek temple of Poseidon, refitted by the Romans into the Temple of Neptune. Romans were so practical, combining religion with a bathhouse.

Bath chamber walls, floors and pools were lined with pastel marble. The marble floors were worn to extremes, with large shallow
melts
, filled in with beautiful flower planters. The entire bathhouse-temple was covered with a great dome, dotted with thick portholes of colored glass, admitting great shafts of tinted sunlight. Rooms were, in actuality, six-foot partitions.

The multicolored light shafts filtered through the bathhouse steam to create an extraordinary rainbow effect, suggesting a heavenly light-show. A number of marble basins lined the walls with hot and cold running water. The water in the basins and pools provided magical light reflections.

The staff and bathers were little more than four-feet tall. In the baths, we were all completely naked. These little pear-shaped women looked like their bodies were stunted, with bloated stomachs and floppy pancake breasts.

Bath attendants covered their bottoms with ragged towels and beckoned me to undress and follow them into a prepping partition. They let me luxuriate in a warm, perfumed pool for 15 minutes and then motioned me out. An assistant helped me onto a warm marble slab, rubbing my entire body with her palms and almond-scented gel soap. It was wonderfully relaxing.

While my body felt like silly putty, they rubbed me with pumice, and then rinsed me with large sponges and warm water from copper watering cans. I imagined myself on a bed of marigolds watered by a warm spring rain. I glowed cherry pink from head to toe. Another attendant shampooed my head and all my other hairy body parts.

The stress and strain, as well as the dirt from the trip was washed, steamed and rubbed out of me. Bath attendants were divided into different guilds, based on their skills. For each bath function there was another pair of skilled hands.

After the pumicing, soap massaging and shampooing, other attendants rinsed me again, then another dip for ten minutes in a warmer pool. This was followed by a lie-down on a cool marble slab, and more gel soap massaging. This time it was a cooling mint gel. Had I really been that dirt-encrusted? How much more mellow could I get?

Another little pear-person scrubbed me all over, yet again, but gave me the towel to wash my genitals. This was the weekly bath ritual for Muslim women. The ritual bath is thorough, and, actually, it felt exhaustive to me as a newbie. It is mercifully infrequent, as our skin just does not grow back that fast.

I had brought my razor to shave my legs, and an attendant motioned me to shave off all my pubic hair as Muslim women do. Our bathhouse communications were mostly hand signals and a few phrases my Turkish relatives taught me. My complexion looked great, and I felt like I was in a new body for almost a week after this first Turkish bath. The entire bath experience cost $3.

As did the Turkish women, I covered my head with a silk scarf, at least until I reached the security of the bus. While Turkey is a secular nation, in the outlying areas body covering varies according to tribal custom. In the metropolitan areas, such as Istanbul and Ankara, the established practice is to look and dress in the European style. Turkey strives for recognition as a European nation.

Weeks before in Iran, we learned about following the local customs and covering up the hard way. One of the Englishmen on the bus waded into a village stream and was stoned for wearing shorts. We bus people learned to keep bodies, arms and legs fully covered when not on the bus. That meant no shorts, halters, tank tops, T-shirts, or anything that did not cover arms and legs.

My bus buddy, Kit, insisted that all caravan women wear head and face scarves in public. She suggested that we walk in groups of two or more with one man in each group. She said that among Islamic people it would be safer if we just conformed to their customs, and that, otherwise, we would be asking for trouble.

KABUL ARRIVAL:

It felt great to finally reach my destination, and I shared a second floor hotel room with Kit. We both felt as if the hundreds of miles of road grime had tattooed our bodies, from head to toe.

Kit suggested an excellent Turkish bath at the corner of Chicken Street. “I guarantee we will feel reborn when they finish with us.” It was a women only bath. The men’s bath was at the other end of the street. I loved the idea of another Turkish bath. It had been weeks since my first bath experience, and I felt the need of another body rebirth.

We had an early supper at a café Kit suggested. That first meal in Afghanistan featured deboned chicken baked in yogurt, cumin and garlic, topped with scallions and spinach between layers of phyla crust. Similar dishes were available with lamb or goat meat. Large bowls of curried rice, humus and locally grown melon were served along with Afghan chi.

Kit said the chicken was disjointed and boiled in saltwater first before deboning. After deboning, the chicken was cubed and mixed with crushed olives, onions, garlic cloves, lemon slices, cumin and curry, to cure overnight. The mix could then be combined with beaten eggs to make pancakes, omelets or quiches. I took notes to try this at home.

After the meal, Kit introduced me to a merchant friend on Chicken Street, and then excused herself to attend to her own commitments. Mike, the merchant, was also an Afghan civil engineer and government official with a vast network of tribal relations.

Mike spoke excellent English and had studied economics at Cambridge and civil engineering in Moscow. He and I became fast friends. Mike had two wives and children, with the first wife living in a distant town. Gen, his second wife, was a government minister in Kabul.
^vi

Mike introduced me to his cousin Nick, who managed the engineer’s shop when Mike was away. Mike explained that in two days he was going on an extended engineering trip. He needed to plot new roads between major towns and link them to Kabul. I was invited to come with him, and he told me we would be staying with relatives who were also merchants.

I asked Mike to meet me for breakfast in the morning back at the hotel, as he had business to attend that evening. I then remained with his cousin, picking out jewelry and other collectibles. In the back of the barn-sized storage building, Mike’s cousin showed me stacks of large metal coffin-size containers. He explained that it was customary to ship goods all over the world in such trunks, and that if I wished; he could do that for me.

Nick added that wherever I went in Afghanistan, I could address my purchases to the shop and he would store my goods in trunks in preparation for shipping. I agreed and thought this was an excellent arrangement. That day I nearly filled one trunk with all the goods I selected in the shop. These were mostly coin silver jewelry with lapis or turquoise stone settings.

I also picked out hand painted and beautiful embroidered wall hangings, as well as some hand worked brass bowls. Nick said he would wrap the jewelry in paper and nest it in the brass bowls and wall hangings. When I asked about the prices of the goods I’d selected, Nick advised waiting for Mike to give the prices and terms. He added, “In any case, you will be happy with the prices, I promise you.”

The hand-painted wall hangings held a special charm. These were crafted by tribal artisans using brilliant water-based inks. The artisans were not Muslim as the paintings depicted animals, trees and even helicopters. There was a certain artful naivety about the paintings.

Muslim artisans would only craft geometric designs as they do on rugs and kilems. Occasionally, rugs might have goats or sheep woven in a distinctly geometric form. As handcrafted weaving does not lend itself easily to curves, all the patterns are geometrical. It was the perspective, or lack of it, that held something of a spiritual quality, somewhat like ancient church icons. The paintings had a medieval look, an appealing one dimensional quality.

The objects on the paintings looked like they were ironed on. The background was the light tan of the unembellished cloth. For some strange reason, the painted objects had an insect-like quality. Helicopters resembled dragon flies and kangaroos had a grass-hopper quality. Perhaps the objects they painted were relatively new to the tribal artisans. Their mind’seye may have reflected on the artists’ closest experience, perhaps with insects or a traveling carnival. The urban cloth paintings were more sophisticated but lacked charm.

I spent the next two days visiting local merchants and was able to locate some beautiful tribal crafts. Talking to Kabul merchants over endless cups of tea, each contact led to another. Each merchant set aside my selections, mostly jewelry of far better quality than anything my American supplier had ever provided in the States.

Before the trip with Mike, I asked if he could help me get a good price on the goods I’d selected with the various merchants. He was willing and haggled artfully with the merchants while I smiled coyly. They all knew him as a Kalq government official and he gave me excellent prices.