As we picked at our food, I was telling Val and Suraya that I thought the original Beauty Without Borders plan was flawed. We had planned to fly foreign hairdressers over to Afghanistan each time the school was in session, but doing so was really expensive. I think we had spent more than $25,000 on airfare alone for the first class, and who knew how long we’d be able to get funding? After my sputtering start at the beginning of the color class, I had also been thinking that it would be better if we trained Afghan hairdressers to be teachers, rather than bring in Westerners and go through all the complicated translations—sometimes having to explain terms for which there were no words in Dari. I had seen for myself that the Afghan hairdressers were able to put the important concepts into terms the other students understood. And while the Western hairdressers could show the Afghan students some snazzy new styles and techniques, the fact was that the Afghan clientele weren’t much interested in that kind of stuff. I also told them that I thought one person from the beauty school needed to be in Kabul all the time to maintain continuity with our local supporters and our hosts at the Women’s Ministry. That person couldn’t be Mary MacMakin, because she was too busy with other PARSA projects. And it couldn’t be Noor, because he couldn’t even walk inside the school when the students were there.
“Would you want to stay here all the time, then?” Suraya asked me.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” I said. “But it would be hard to be here on my own. And it would be hard being away from my mother and my kids all the time.”
“You need a husband.” Val said this as casually as if he were offering me another egg roll.
“I just got rid of a husband,” I reminded him. “I don’t think I want another one quite yet.”
“He’s right, Debbie! You do need a husband,” Suraya exclaimed. “It’s very hard for a woman to live alone here, even a Western woman. You need a husband to support you while you support the school.”
I rolled my eyes. “If you haven’t noticed, I’m not so good at picking husbands.”
“No problem,” Suraya said. “Marriages are arranged in this country. We’ll just have to find the right man for you.”
“I thought only first marriages were arranged.”
She smiled. “This will be your first marriage in Afghanistan.”
So then we had a long, silly discussion about the kind of man I should marry. We agreed it wouldn’t do to marry one of the Westerners. They either were in Afghanistan for a short period of time or were missionaries who had been here for twenty years with wives and children, or they were alcoholics working for one of the embassies or big NGOs. It would be hard to find the right kind of Afghan man, too, because most of them wanted a wife who would be subservient and make his dinners and serve him tea and rub his mother’s feet. We just couldn’t see any of that happening. But at the end of the night, Suraya vowed she was going to find me a husband. And even though it all seemed like a big joke, it also made a weird kind of sense to me. Afghanistan was great when I was with the students or my friends, but when they went home, I was lonely. It’s a very family-oriented culture, but I wasn’t part of a family. I wasn’t part of a big NGO, either, where people live together in big compounds and become sort of like family. I wanted to stay in Afghanistan, at least for a longer stretch of time than the few weeks when school was in session. But I wasn’t sure I could do it alone.
THE GIRL COULDN’T HAVE BEEN older than fifteen. She had a filthy blue scarf around her hair that dwindled into ragged shreds on her shoulders. She had an open sore on her cheek. She reached out to put her arms around my neck, and I forgot every warning I’d heard about the prisoners having lice. “Help me,” she whispered as she hugged me. “Please help me.”
I turned to Suraya. “Why is she here?” I asked.
After a brief conversation, Suraya translated. “She was married to an old man who beat her, and she ran away. Her parents reported her to the police for breaking her wedding vows.”
Oh my God, I thought. If I had been an Afghan woman, I would have been put in prison for leaving my abusive husband.
Suraya wanted to write an article about women in Afghan prisons. Because I had spent time working at a prison in the United States, the women’s minister had arranged for the two of us to visit the Kabul Welayat, a women’s prison. I had heard so many terrible stories about this place that I was a little nervous about going. I had ongoing struggles with my health—the “Kabul cough” that I always seemed to get from the dust, plus constant problems with my stomach—and people had warned me that I should be careful about picking up new ailments in the prison. I had thought about doing something with the women’s hair there, but then everyone warned me about lice. I couldn’t bear the idea of lice. So I packed up a big box of gift bags, which Paul Mitchell had donated months before. I had passed dozens of these bags out to my customers, as well as to church groups and schools back in Michigan. They had stuffed them with health and beauty samples, hair ribbons, and all sorts of fun, girlie stuff. I took enough for the guards, too, so that they would be less tempted to steal from the prisoners.
The prison guard who escorted us was a huge woman with breasts the size of watermelons. Before she took us inside, she pointed to my purse. I handed it over with a smile that I hoped would charm our way through another hour of bureaucratic hassles. She ignored me and turned my purse upside down, emptied it on a counter, then picked up two bottles of fingernail polish. She looked closely at them and set them on a shelf behind her. Soon, Suraya and I were following her down a hallway that became darker and danker with every step. When we stopped in a room to see the first group of prisoners, I gasped.
Despite how bad the stories about the prison had been, I was unprepared for the horror. It was one of the worst days of my life, and I’ve had some really bad ones. The prison was a dark, old building with long, damp hallways, and there were about five women crowded into each small cell. Robbers and murderers back at the prison where I’d worked in Michigan had better cells. Some of the women were trying to sew on old, broken-down machines. Some of them had their children living in the cells with them, dirty children who stared at us with eyes that had gone dead.
The big guard ordered the women to line up for the gift bags, which now seemed like a hideously bad joke. As each one stood in front of me, my heart broke all over again. They had sores and scratches on their skin, their hair was greasy and matted, and their eyes were as dull as those of dead animals. I’ll tell you, I have visited leper colonies in India where the people looked better. Suraya was taking notes and translating, and I kept asking her why each woman had been imprisoned.
One of them was there because she had been raped.
One was there because she had been raped and her husband had killed the rapist. He was also in prison, but her term was longer.
Several young girls were there because they had tried to run away with their boyfriends.
One was there because she became pregnant with her boyfriend before her parents were able to marry her off to someone else.
One was there because she had tried to kill her brother-in-law. Her husband had died, and she had remained in her father-in-law’s house with the rest of her husband’s family. But her brother-in-law beat her son and raped her. Finally, she poured gasoline over him while he slept and set him on fire, but he didn’t die. His father came to her in prison and asked why she had done this. When she told him, he went and shot his son dead in his hospital bed.
The stories were all horrible, but the young girl weeping in my ear—imprisoned because she had fled her abusive husband—did me in. I cried and cried, until I embarrassed Suraya.
When I got back to the school, I was still crying. All the students came crowding around. “What’s wrong, Debbie?” Roshanna said, throwing her arms around me. I told them that it was the brave women of Afghanistan—standing strong through wars and forced marriages and so many different forms of confinement—who had inspired me to leave my troubled marri
age back in Michigan. I told them that I owed my freedom to them. I told them that I would love them and Afghanistan forever for that. By the time I finished, many of them were crying, too. I think I actually became real to the students then. They didn’t just see me as another do-gooding American but rather as one of them.
The visit to the prison also showed me how rare and precious the beauty school was. Here our students, in their blue uniforms, with their new skills and growing professionalism, had hopes for the future. But they could just as easily have been suffering in prison, hidden and without hope. In fact, they could still wind up there. Women were still getting sent to prison for having boyfriends or leaving abusive husbands.
THINGS WERE GOING WELL at school, but life at the guesthouse was getting worse and worse. That stupid rooster I’d thought gave the place such a nice touch when I first moved in? He woke me up every damn morning, usually right after I had fallen back asleep after the mullah woke me up. I glared at the rooster every time I saw him. One day I had the guesthouse guards—called chowkidors—hold him down while I painted his toenails red. Also, the water never seemed to be hot at the guesthouse when I wanted to take a shower. I finally took my things over to the beauty school early one Saturday morning, when there was no one there but me and the ministry chowkidors, because I knew there would be hot water. But just as I was lathering up, I saw a scorpion in the shower and started to scream. One of the chowkidors came flying in the door with his machine gun ready, thinking that someone had attacked me. I was trying to cover myself with a towel while he was shouting in Dari and looking for my intruder—until he saw that it was a scorpion. He sank against the wall laughing. Then he picked up a bottle of shampoo and squashed the scorpion.
The cold water and the rooster were only minor annoyances, though. The man who ran the guesthouse was a nasty old guy who was forcing his fifteen-year-old daughter to marry a man in his forties. The groom-to-be was very rich. He had figured out how to skim a layer of fat from all the reconstruction money flowing into Afghanistan, and he was reputedly now worth millions. It was kind of like the Gold Rush in Kabul right then. If you had a good idea for gouging, you could make a fortune. The old man who owned the guesthouse was greedy and wanted to attach himself to this rich man, even though his plan was making his daughter miserable. I used to find her crying in the bathroom all the time, and she’d tell me that she wanted to go to school, not marry. It made me sick.
The guesthouse had also become party central for Afghans who had been living in the West, and that was getting old. There was always a crowd of people in the living room, dancing or eating or sitting on toushaks talking away, passing around platters of rice or chunks of hashish rolled in sugar. Most of them didn’t want to be bothered talking to me. That left me stuck with either the owner—and he was always trying to maneuver me or one of the other women into a corner—or one of his friends. And lots of them were as creepy as he was. One Friday night, there was an especially big bash. I dressed up and came downstairs. I tried to have fun—and mind you, I’m not usually the type who doesn’t know how to have fun. But the westernized Afghans were as cliquey as ever. The old man was drunk and even more disgusting than usual.
I talked for a while to his one friend who wasn’t as much of a pig as the rest of them. This was Ali, a sandy-haired Afghan in his mid-forties who had been living in Germany. I was never quite sure how he made a living, but he always had nice clothes and plenty of money. He seemed to know everyone in town—when I needed to figure out how to get something for the beauty school, Ali usually knew what to do. He was charming and handsome, but maybe a little too charming for my mood. I finally said good-bye to him, left the guesthouse, and took a taxi over to visit Roshanna. When I came back later that night, the party was still going. Val and Suraya had joined the throng, but I just waved to them as I stepped over a drunk Afghan man who was passed out near the stairs and went up to my room.
A week later, someone pounded on my door. I was in my pajamas and was reading in bed, so I just called out, “Who is it?”
“It’s us,” Suraya shouted. “We found you a husband!”
“Where?”
“We met him at the party last Friday and then we spent a day with him. Come on down!”
“He’s an Afghan?”
“Yes! Come and meet him.”
I put my book down. “He’d better not be that guy who was passed out at the bottom of the stairs.”
I could hear them whispering outside the door, and then Suraya laughed. “He might have been that guy, but he’s standing up now.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“He’s perfect for you,” Suraya insisted. “Put something sexy on and get out here!”
So I got out of bed and got dressed, then walked down the stairs to meet Samer Mohammad Abdul Khan.
I recognized him immediately as the guy who had been passed out near the stairs. He didn’t look much more appealing to me now that he was upright. He had black hair, a little black mustache, and a jagged scar on one cheek. With the scar and his dark, dark sunglasses, he looked like a member of the Colombian mafia. He was wearing a black shalwar kameez, too, and I wondered whether he could be a progressive thinker if he wore such traditional clothes. When Suraya announced that we were leaving, Samer—or Sam, as she called him—turned and walked out the door in front of me. I wasn’t impressed that he was leaving me in his wake, but at least it gave me a chance to check out his ass. It looked okay, but in those baggy clothes it was hard to tell.
I didn’t even get to say hello. We climbed into Sam’s car—also black—and Ali sat in the front with him, with Val and Suraya and me in the back. Suraya introduced me to Sam as his new wife; Ali introduced Sam to me as my new husband. They all laughed uproariously. It was as if I were in a car full of drunks. In about fifteen minutes, we arrived at a Turkish restaurant. Sam pointed to a table at the back of the restaurant and said something to the waiters; soon they came with wooden screens that they arranged around the table. All the marital conspirators shuffled chairs around and made sure I was sitting right across from Sam. He took off his sunglasses, and I suddenly had a flicker of interest. He had warm brown eyes that reminded me somehow of my dad’s. He kept his eyes averted from me. I suddenly realized he was shy.
And then the negotiations began.
“I’m standing in for Debbie’s mother,” Suraya said. “Sam, what are your thoughts about a dowry?”
He smiled and said something, but Suraya shook her head emphatically. “What did he say?” I asked Ali.
“He offers two camels.”
Suraya started to tear into Sam in Dari.
“What’s she saying now?” I asked.
“She is saying that you are her beloved daughter and she wants gold,” Ali replied. “Plenty of gold. Also a house and a car.”
Sam threw up his hands as if fending off a physical attack. The waiters arrived with pizza, and Sam handed a piece of pizza to Suraya. Then he went on for a long time in Dari. “He says he will give gold, land, and car, no problem,” Ali told me. Then he said something to Suraya and Sam. The whole table looked at me and laughed.
“What are you saying?” I shouted.
“Ali is a bad man.” Suraya patted my arm. “He said that I will have to settle for less because you are not a virgin.”
It went on like this for an hour. I got to know most of the essentials. Sam had a well-drilling business based in Kabul, but he and his family had been living in Saudi Arabia for the last twenty-seven years. He was one of the Uzbek mujahideen who had fought with General Dostum—an infamous Afghan warlord—against the Russian occupiers during the war. He spoke fluent Arabic, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, and Pashto, less fluent Hindi, and a smattering of Malaysian, Indonesian, and English. He’d gotten his start in business by selling pajamas to pilgrims in Mecca. He was ten years younger than I.
When we finished dinner, Sam asked if we wanted to come over for tea. So we all piled back in his car and went to his house
, where Sam sat on a toushak as far as possible away from me. The four of them kept going on and on with the negotiations for my dowry. No one was even asking me about what I wanted, and I decided to pipe in. “I don’t know if you know how marriages work in the West, but I wouldn’t have any other kind,” I told Sam. “I want a partner in business and life and a lover. I’m not going to stay in the house and serve you tea.”
“I see this kind of wife on television, and I want one,” Sam said through Suraya. “I don’t want a woman who doesn’t leave the house.”
“I’m not doing your laundry, and I’m not cooking or cleaning. I want to make enough money so that I can pay to have that kind of stuff done.”
“And I’m not going to go to the bazaar with you or run errands for you. I’ll hire someone to do that.”
“You better not want babies. That factory is closed.”
He winced. “How can I want babies when I have seven daughters?”
Suraya jumped in to explain that, oh yeah, he had a wife and seven children back in Saudi Arabia. In most places, that would be a pretty big deal breaker. “You’re nuts,” I told her, but then she gave me the rest of the story. It had been an arranged marriage to someone he’d never met. He didn’t even know her name until ten days after the wedding. He didn’t love her but couldn’t divorce her because she would be forever shamed and maybe even destitute, since wives who have been divorced usually can’t go back to their parents—and in that culture, she certainly couldn’t go out and get a job. She had refused to leave Saudi Arabia, where she lived with his parents. They had given him the go-ahead to pick up a second wife. To his way of thinking, he was available. To my way of thinking, another wife and seven children and a gun-toting past with a warlord was just a little too much baggage.