Veiled Freedom (16 page)

“I am pleased to meet you,” Soraya murmured, her gaze cool as she leaned forward to kiss Amy—left, right, left—as though rebuking these foreigners for the paucity of their welcome.

“Soraya just finished her master's in defense law at Kabul University,” Debby announced. “She was one of only three women. Finally some new women's lawyers here.”

“But I will not work as a lawyer,” Soraya stated.

Debby stared at her in dismay. “Why not?”

Soraya's shoulders rose and fell. “The Women's Ministry offers perhaps fifty euros a month. Far less than a translator. My family is accustomed to my earning a higher wage. And there is no other call in Kabul for women lawyers.”

“Isn't that the way it always is,” Debby muttered. “We invest money on training, and the graduates still all end up working for NGOs because they're the only ones who can afford a decent wage.”

Catching a flash in Soraya's dark eyes, Amy spoke up quickly. “You speak very good English, Soraya.”

Soraya turned an unreadable gaze on Amy. “Yes, I studied in the university before the Taliban came. And I have been working for foreign companies since they left. I speak Dari and Urdu and French as well as Pashto and English.”

Which explained the proud lift of the head and air of authority. Afghanistan's small professional class lived on a different planet from its illiterate peasant majority.

“In time things will change,” Alisha Chan said. “Afghan women will be able to hire their own lawyers. Meanwhile, I'm thankful you've been available to me these last months.”

Soraya said nothing as Debby steered their party across a plank footbridge laid over a trench to the green door.

Amy looked back along the tall wall, any number of buildings visible above the concertina wire. “All this is a woman's prison?”

“Thank goodness, no,” Debby said quickly. “The Welayat includes a good part of the judicial system—courts, legal offices, administration, and the men's prison. We're just this wing.”

Debby knocked on the green door. It swung open, a small, round woman, head wrapped in a bright red shawl, peering out. Suspicious eyes and hard expression dissolved to a smile at the sight of her visitors.

“Geeti, so nice to see you again,” Debby effused. To Amy, she added, “Geeti is the women's warden.”

The warden led her visitors down a dark corridor and through another metal door. As they emerged back into daylight, Debby demanded, “What happened to the electricity? It was working the other day.”

“The lighting tubes are burned out,” Soraya translated Geeti's indifferent shrug. “They have been switching them from other rooms, but now there are no more. Besides, the electricity only comes a few hours a day.”

The women's prison was laid out like the New Hope compound, if on a much bigger scale, three wings around a central courtyard. Green paint was peeling and dirty, but walls and roof tiles had been recently patched.

“That wing belongs to the guards,” Debby pointed out as they followed Geeti across the courtyard. “That one's offices. The prisoners are over here.”

Amy hadn't needed that final identification. All windows had shutters and bars, but where Debby gestured, the bars were newly painted and set solidly in fresh concrete. The courtyard was empty, but behind those bars, silent, draped shapes stood watching the newcomers. Amy spotted a small, pale face pressed up to one window. At Geeti's irate shout, the face abruptly disappeared.

“Why don't we see the children first? That's Alisha's USAID project,” Debby explained to Amy. Then her glance moved past Amy, and she frowned. “Great. What's he doing here?”

Najibullah had stayed outside with the vehicles, but Jamil had followed on Amy's heels as automatically and noiselessly as always. Her shadow, Amy was beginning to think of him.

“I should have warned you to leave him outside. Male visitors are hardly appropriate in here.”

“Oh, nonsense.” Alisha waved a dismissive hand. “I bring male reporters and State Department personnel through here all the time. The prison officials have never said anything.”

“Yeah, well, I'll bet they never asked the women. With everything else, the last thing they should have to endure is a bunch of men traipsing through staring at them. Anyway, no big deal.” Debby turned to Jamil. “You can stay with the kids while we visit the women.”

They'd reached the other side of the courtyard. Geeti lifted a heavy key ring from her waist to unlock a metal door. Another unlit corridor led to a large room that was bright and cheerful, daylight streaming through open shutters to reflect from daffodil yellow walls, green matting alleviating the chill of concrete underfoot. A curious decorative pattern to shoulder height proved on closer examination to be the dirty prints of myriad small hands.

On the matting, several dozen children sat cross-legged, chanting as an elderly Afghan woman tapped a series of swirls and dots on a blackboard. The Dari alphabet. One small body clad in a pale pink tunic stood against the far wall, hands clasped behind her back. Amy recognized the face at the window.

“These are the school-age children,” Alisha explained. “We offer a kinder-level class in the mornings with a locally hired teacher. They're all pretty well on that level, regardless of age.”

Amy had already noted the students' wide age span from preschool up through eleven or twelve. “So how many kids are in the jail altogether?”

“About seventy or eighty. Almost as many as the women prisoners. Though only half are old enough for classes.”

The single teacher had maintained admirable control of such a large class—until the children spotted their visitors. They surrounded the newcomers, hugging, patting, tugging. The small girl from the window chose this moment to overcome bashfulness, rushing forward to throw her arms around Amy. There was time for a hug before the teacher scolded and shooed the children away. The girl in the pink tunic burst into tears, holding out her arms to Amy as she was led away.

“Sorry about that,” Alisha said. “They do that with any visitors. Inexperienced aid workers are always amazed the kids seem so loving. In reality, it's not a good sign. An emotionally healthy child doesn't offer affection to random strangers. That's what parents are for. Most of these kids get so little emotional support; they crave human touch from anyone.”

The small girl's wails wrung Amy's heart. The destroying of a childhood was perhaps the worst evil for which a place like this had to answer. Still, the kids looked better fed than the waifs Amy had seen begging on street corners and probably lived better than a good percentage of Kabul's poor. Amy had been bracing herself for much worse and was beginning to wonder why Debby had dragged her here. However much sympathy she felt, New Hope wasn't in the market for a project another NGO was clearly doing well.

Alisha stepped away to talk with the children's teacher, Soraya at her side to translate.

Debby's own Dari was enough to manage a simple exchange with Geeti. Then she beckoned to Amy. “While they're busy, let me introduce you to some of the prisoners. Oh, and tell that driver of yours to stay here. We'll be back soon.”

Jamil rested his shoulders against a wall as Amy followed Debby. The room into which Geeti led next was as gloomy as the schoolroom had been cheerful. It took Amy a moment to puzzle out that this wasn't due to the furnishings. The walls were painted the same hand-printed yellow. Green matting was lined neatly with
tushaks
, the flat cushions Afghans used for both sofa and bed. Open shutters let in a dusty breeze, the window bars laying a striped pattern of light and dark across the floor.

Gloom came from mounds of cloth huddled silently against the wall on each tushak. Only when a mound stirred, a head turning to reveal eyes glittering above a tightly drawn scarf, did Amy recognize that each mound was a woman. A hook above each cushion held a bag. The prisoners' personal belongings.

Gloom came too from the smell. A depressing stench of unwashed bodies and urine and illness. Even more, of hopelessness and despair. Amy was beginning to understand Debby's fervor. Even the worst criminal deserved better than this.

“So what are they all in for?”

A few women raised their heads and turned their eyes to the visitors. Others hadn't moved. The closest to Amy clutched a tight-wrapped bundle, its surface rising and falling in gentle rhythm. A sleeping child.

“
Zina
, mostly. That means unlawful sexual contact.”

“Prostitution, you mean?”

“Actually, it could mean anything from adultery to simply sitting down next to a man unrelated by blood. Or on the flip side, defying male authority, especially in connection to marriage. Take Meetra here, for instance.”

Lowering to a crouch beside the woman with the sleeping bundle, Debby dug into a large handbag and produced a handful of Baggies filled with dried fruits. She offered one first to Geeti, who snatched it, before turning to the prisoner. “Salaam aleykum.

“At fourteen Meetra was married off to her cousin in Pakistan. She had a son and was pregnant with her daughter when a neighbor kidnapped her and sold her over the border to an Afghan. She's never seen her son since. Her new husband abused her. When the baby was two, he got so enraged, he beat the little girl to death. Meetra was brave—or heartbroken—enough to go to the authorities. The man ended up going to prison for murder. But Meetra was handed a six-year sentence for adultery, even though she was a kidnap victim. By then she was pregnant again. Her son was born here in the prison. The man who killed her daughter has already paid his fine and will be out before she is.”

Meetra had shown no reaction to Debby's gift, so the New Yorker laid the dried fruit beside the woman. Her eyes, all Amy could see above a shawl pulled across her face, were beautiful, dark and long-lashed, but they held a blankness that didn't see the dirty yellow of the wall in front of them.

“Then there's Farah.”

Unlike her neighbor, Farah had straightened up immediately at the intrusion of visitors. Her scarf hung free to reveal a fair-skinned teenager with blue green eyes and a mass of brown curls spilling over her shoulders as she snagged Debby's offering.

“Salaam aleykum, Farah.” Debby looked over her shoulder to Amy. “They get enough food of sorts these days, but I still like to bring them a treat. Something they can eat before the guards walk off with it.”

The teenager munched the fruit as Debby continued. “Farah was thirteen when her guardian sold her off to a sixty-year-old neighbor in settlement for a gambling debt. The man had already beaten one of his other wives to death. She's got some real spunk, so she pilfered a few afghanis for bus fare, dressed as a boy, and almost made it to Iran before she was found out. She's been in here almost three years.

“Zaira didn't have the gumption to run away when her husband and his mother and sisters beat her, so she did what many women here do to escape. She set herself on fire with kerosene.”

Zaira's scarf slipped as she reached for her treat, and Amy saw that her face was a mass of burn tissue.

“When she survived, she was arrested for defacing her husband's property—herself. As for Aryana over there—”

Most of the women were now roused, hands outstretched. But not even Debby's gentle greeting raised the head of an olive-skinned Pashtun girl with a toddler curled up on her lap.

“Aryana was married off to a distant cousin at fourteen. The guy seems to have been pretty decent from what she says. But when her son was two months old, her husband died and her brothers-in-law accused her of poisoning him. No autopsy and no trial. But some judge wrote up a guilty verdict, and she was arrested for murder. Aryana's husband was the oldest brother, so there may have been some family inheritance at stake.

“Najeeda's mother-in-law started passing her around for money. When she got pregnant, the husband couldn't be sure whose child it was, so he beat her badly. When she still didn't lose the baby, he accused her of adultery. She's been here almost seven years. Her six-year-old son is in here with her. She'll be twenty this summer.”

Najeeda would have been pretty, except that a broken nose had healed crooked and all but a few teeth were missing.

The kindergarten class must have finished, because just then the door banged open. As a dozen children rushed in, the room came to life. A small, thin boy climbed onto Najeeda's lap, and she hugged him tight, murmuring against his hair.

“Theoretically, the boys have to leave the women's prison when they turn six, the girls when they turn twelve, but if they have no place to go, even the hard-nosed prison officials haven't yet tossed them out. Now Roya is probably the only woman who'd be considered a criminal back home. Ironically, here no one figures she should be in prison. She's only in as a gesture to the Americans.”

Perhaps what appalled Amy most of that horrible biographical litany was the youth of the prisoners. Most were far younger than Amy. The Pashtun woman snatching the last bag from Debby's hand was an exception. Thin, stooped, with work-worn features, she might be anywhere from forty to eighty. Probably closer to forty, Amy amended, considering that the life expectancy for women here wasn't much beyond that.

“Roya was caught scraping opium gum in the poppy fields. On her husband's orders, of course. Around here, that's little more than weeding potatoes. But they're supposed to be getting tough on drugs, and since the big landlords who actually own the poppy fields are off-limits, they grabbed a bunch of peasant labor. Roya hoped her husband would buy her freedom. But just last week she found out he's divorced her and married a sixteen-year-old cousin of theirs. It was cheaper. Her two younger daughters live here with her.”

By the time Amy and Debby reached the end of the room, Amy could no longer look at one more silent mound or beseeching hand. Stepping thankfully into the corridor, she drew in a shuddering breath. It wasn't that Amy hadn't read the reports, even known of such happenings Debby had been describing. But putting dry statistics to those hopeless faces and despairing eyes was worse than anything she'd encountered since arriving in Kabul.