The Underground Girls of Kabul (38 page)

A mid-level foreign aid worker can take in a salary of $15,000 per month, tax free. Plus various bonuses for “hardship,” which a posting like Afghanistan is considered to be. But the enthusiastic caravan that has rolled into Afghanistan in the past decade is not all about money, although that has certainly drawn more than a few. Many are young idealists looking for adventure. Others are seasoned bureaucrats who have seen every war of the past three decades and signed up for yet another tour.

There is the Balkan gang and those who used to dine together in Baghdad. They demonstrate their status by sharing stories of wars past with the brand-new Afghanistan experts from elite universities on the American East Coast. Just as the European colonialists before them, these current-day explorers live well before they return home with exotic tales of foreign lands.

Decor inside the embassy compounds, air-conditioned by powerful military-grade generators, aims to showcase the best of each country’s culture and design. A Dane will recline on exquisite Scandinavian midcentury classics that were bubble-wrapped and shipped in secure containers from Copenhagen. The British offer the best-stocked bar in town at the queen’s outpost in Kabul, named “The Inn Fidel.” They are also known for some of the most elaborate costume parties, where in a favorite tradition of both historical and current-day European aristocracy, guests are thrilled to pose as someone else for an evening. American embassy workers can swim in a beautiful lap pool with a barbecue hut close by, where a trusted Afghan in a white chef’s hat will cook anything to country club perfection.
Americans there will sometimes proudly proclaim that they haven’t set foot outside the compound since they were picked up at Kabul airport and won’t again until it’s time to return home. No need for that. The U.S. Embassy seems to be constantly expanding, and the grass truly is greener in the green zone, where water is never scarce. The dust inside the perimeter is swept away so diligently that the air feels easier to breathe than in the rest of Kabul, where thousands of children die each year from respiratory ailments caused by garbage bonfires, cars burning cheap gasoline, and the microbes spewing from open sewers.

The benefits of being a foreigner in Afghanistan are well-known to those who get drunk together on Thursday nights around Kabul. No matter who they were in the outside world, or what social class they belonged to, in Kabul a foreigner instantly becomes a member of an upper, ruling class. Like any war zone, this is a place for personal reinvention, where a new, improved persona can be crafted, the past temporarily erased, as demands and social codes of the outside world are put on hold. Joining the expatriate set in Afghanistan is an effective disguise, and one that brings power and access.

A
FTER A DAY
and a half spent waiting at this
karavan serai
, as an irritated Setareh dubs the hangar scene, I have tried everything from the kiosk of foreign and Afghan delicacies, and she has refused most of it. We conclude that we are not on anyone’s preferred passenger list, and that if we are to ever meet Azita’s father, we must concede defeat and make our own way to Badghis.

So we fly to Herat on one of Afghanistan’s own local airlines and eventually, with some help by both Azita’s and Setareh’s relatives, we find an Afghan army helicopter crew willing to take us further into the land. As we arrive at the base in a faux-fur-lined taxi, we are met with a breakfast that appeals more to Setareh: sweet tea, chewy flatbread, and mulberry jam. The local commander cautions us that while he can take us into Badghis, we may not get out, since he is not
planning on sending anyone back there for a while. But Setareh has already plotted our exit by road: She has gone out and bought two light blue burkas and tucked them into her black wheeled carry-on, smirking at my backpack once again. For our planned stay in Badghis, which is close to Iran, we have also gone shopping for some more black; Setareh is in what we come to translate as “Herati dress,” a very large sheet of dark fabric swept around her head that reaches all the way down to her shoes, making her look like a little friendly ghost with a serious face. I have opted for the full hijab, “Iranian style.” In the black head-to-toe cloak and tightly pinned black head scarf, plus sunglasses, I am all mind and no body. If even that.

I
N THE HELICOPTER
we are seated on the floor in the glass bulb next to the pilots, with the earth moving underneath us.

First pilot Azizi trained under the Russians. The Cyrillic letters inside the cockpit are an issue for the constant rotations of young Americans who arrive on the base to advance Azizi’s skills. After too many jumbled conversations over the radio, the Americans now allow him to be mostly silent on the radio once he is up in the air. They have provided him with a brand-new portable GPS to navigate; he proudly wears it strapped to his leg. As we hover over burned-yellow wheat fields and clusters of pistachio forests, he makes a point of not looking at it. He knows where he is going.

Like Zahra’s pilot father, he is also a fan of the Americans. They are decent people. Their names are simple to pronounce, too: Bill. Joe. Hank. They trade stories about their kids and their families. Most are younger than Azizi, but he has made a few new friends. He is useful to them: He translates the Cyrillic letters on the dashboards inside the sturdy and reasonably reliable helicopters his division flies. He has tried to teach them the Russian technical terms he knows. They, in turn, try to teach him some in English. But many times, they have found that sounds and letters have no equivalent in the other language, so Afghan-American military partnership gets by using mostly “Ringlish” (Russian via Persian English) and “Pinglish”
(the closest possible English versions of Persian words in Azizi’s Dari dialect).

Americans have a different way of expressing themselves beyond words, too, Azizi has found. They are direct, detailed, and insistent with their ideas. Afghans prefer to be indirect. Bad news or an opinion that differs is seldom presented without some tiptoeing first—or is just left unspoken for each person to figure out on their own. By now, Azizi has learned how to behave when the Americans ask for something impossible. He does not want to seem uncollaborative, and he gathers Americans eventually find out what is possible or not anyway. So he always says yes. And “no problem.”

As long as they let him get up in the air, he doesn’t really care who they are. He got along fine with the Russians; it just annoyed him slightly that they were always trying to push their political beliefs on him. You needed to be a party member to get ahead. Like most Afghans I have asked, he declines to say whether he actually joined the Communist party back then; it was a long time ago. He thinks he likes the Americans better though; they don’t try to talk politics with him. “They are just soldiers, like me.”

When the Americans leave, he will fly for whoever comes next. The electrical sockets were changed in the hangar from two-pronged to three-pronged when the Americans came. If they are changed again, it doesn’t matter much to him. He can adapt.

If not for the landscape moving below, he would seem to be making conversation at afternoon tea. As we slowly make our weightless way across the dried-out land that resembles the cracked heel of a foot, he steers straight toward every steep mountainside that rises up before us until the rotor blades are almost close enough to touch it. Only then, with just a minimal flick of the wrist, will he force his machine to rise up horizontally along the mountainside. Each time, he rewards himself with a wide grin as we reach an open sky.

BIENVENIDO A QALA-E-NAW. The greeting is spray-painted across the sandbags, where we slowly descend into a swirl of dust.
This is northwest Afghanistan, bordering on Iran, with its own elected Afghan governor. But it was the Spanish military who fixed up the modest airfield when they were assigned the Badghis province. They installed their “reconstruction team” in the small capital and unfurled the dark blue NATO flags alongside Spain’s yellow and red. No pole was left for the black, red, and green flag of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

The helicopter finally lands about as elegantly as an overweight water bug. Our fellow passengers, all Afghan military officers in desert camouflage, with well-tended black mustaches, climb out. This is the desert land, complete with sand dunes and a few pine trees surrounding the mud houses leading into the city, with a cupcake-like turquoise mosque at its center.

Before 2001, this could not even be called a city, says the governor’s aide who greets us carrying under his arm a pink notebook with pigtail cartoon characters. You take what you can get in terms of office supplies here.

There are no hotels, but he has agreed to host us in the governor’s guesthouse on the condition that we do not move around too much or let anyone know that women are staying there. As we drive into Qala-e-Naw, it still looks like more of a village, with scattered mud houses surrounded by low walls. Everything is small and brown, tone on tone with the desert itself. The main street counts six shops on each side, in one- or two-story buildings. There is a women’s market, where fully veiled or burka-clad women can shop in the company of other women only, while the men wait on the other side.

On the men’s side, such items as spare car parts, used cell phones, and carpets are for sale. The women’s area mostly consists of vendors selling dry goods, children’s clothing, and wedding supplies. Brightly hued garlands of paper and nylon fabric hang outside in the sweeping dust-wind. Even though Iran is closer, almost everything is imported from Pakistan. The foreign American-led troops are stingy about letting Iranian imports through wherever they control the border. Here, the language I have come to know as Dari is called “Kabuli,”
and a different, more Iranian-sounding Persian dialect, closer to Farsi, is spoken.

Several UN agencies and the U.S. Agency for International Development have helped build what the governor calls a “very modern” place compared to how it looked ten years ago. Most people still get their drinking water from wells, but at least the wells are no longer contaminated. And most women still give birth at home, but at least the city has one midwife-in-training available for those who would welcome her. Tuberculosis, malaria, and diphtheria are still rampant in the province despite major improvements by the Spanish on garbage disposal and sanitation. Now, there are some small schools, a few clinics, and even a sewage system created by the Spanish equivalent of the army corps of engineers, who dug canals underground.

T
HE GOVERNOR
’
S GUESTHOUSE
is pink, and with its peach-colored curtains and soft carpets, it’s the most luxurious accommodation in town. Spotty electricity arrives for a few hours every day, and there are indoor bathrooms, albeit without running water. We are given a small room, littered with the belongings of two male guests who, by gender discrimination in our favor, are told to get out and sleep on the roof instead. On top of the makeshift beds are mattresses with the manufacturer’s plastic wrapping still intact. Setareh fishes out her shiny blue burka and spreads it out over the bed before she lies down, bouncing right back up again after inhaling the odor left by previous guests who have slept in the 100-degree summer.

We will spend days waiting in this little room with pink walls and a peach glow through the curtains.

Everybody seems to know of Azita’s father, as he is still one of the very few residents of this province with a university degree. But we are informed that he is old and tired, and has no interest in discussing times past.

In the meantime, our efforts to lie low and dress appropriately—Setareh in her sheet and I in my black cloak, hair completely covered
and my eyes darkened with kohl that no amount of baby wipes will remove at night—render some unexpected praise from our housemates. After a few days, Setareh overhears the men staying in the room next to us. Forgoing all courtesy phrases and looking down as we pass them, at all times entirely mute and with most of our faces covered, we seem to have met their approval. “The Iranian and the Hazara,” they conclude, “are very good girls. Very covered, and very shy.”

Our modesty has appealed so much to one man that he decides he likes us both “very much.” For a moment, he ponders whether to ask each of us to pose for a cell phone picture with him. But it would probably be too forward, he tells his friend, and not something the good and proper girls would ever agree to.

After translating the mumblings next door, Setareh and I declare success for my efforts to become a woman. After removing my body, my voice, and most of my face, I have finally arrived.

T
HE VILLAGE WHERE
Azita’s mother-in-law still lives is about ten minutes by car from the city center, on a small road where a group of Kuchi nomads—a mostly Pashtun minority—have settled, their red and green fabric tents shaking in the wind, and small children herding bony goats. A narrow bridge sprouts from a hillside, which Azita is credited with convincing the Spanish military to help reinforce. The village is said to have a thousand houses, but we do not count more than a few dozen on the small hill. There are a few small fields of green where farmer families live in tents or under tarps with UNICEF logos and where, when we pass, the women turn away and hide their faces with their large
chadori
sheets. Those tarps are for sale at the market, just like the seeds handed out to women by another NGO. Eggplants are budding in one field, where Afghan pop music unexpectedly streams out from a transistor radio. Two boys play naked in a small water stream.

Our driver, who has on enough cologne to kill the entire population of the backseat, takes us to a metal gate. The scent wafting from
the car competes with the stench from an open sewer that hits as soon as we enter the small compound.

This is what poverty looks like.

Small barefoot girls in synthetic dresses flock around us. Two teenage girls are holding babies whose faces are spotted with lazy flies. They are the grown-ups. One girl looks at me from under a mass of tousled dirty hair and remains silent. She may be around six, but she acts like an older sister to the others. For the next two hours, she will just keep looking at us, the whites of her eyes contrasting with her darkly tanned skin.