Kabul Beauty School
This was only a few days after the graduation and a week after my marriage to Sam. We had hardly had time to get to know each other as husband and wife when I received my mother’s e-mail about the fire and left for Michigan the next day.
My mother had already moved into the cottage on the shore of Lake Macatawa that I’d rented after my divorce from the preacher. This was my dream house, a little blue bungalow with a front porch and a view of ducks paddling by. All it lacked was a white picket fence. It was a perfect place for my mother and sons and me to put ourselves together again after the trauma of the fire. My mother was especially fragile. I went back to work with her in a few days, and I could see it was all she could do not to cry in front of the customers. She jumped every time there was a loud noise and kept forgetting what she was doing. The fire had burned up all her pretty clothes, and she trudged around in other people’s bulky sweaters and pants for weeks.
Even though I hardly knew Sam at this point, I missed him terribly. He and I would call each other and use up all the words we knew in each other’s language in about a minute. Hello, I love you, I miss you, good-bye, see you soon! When we had to say more than that, I’d call Suraya, she’d call Sam, and we’d work out a three-way call with translation. It seemed that Sam missed me as much as I missed him. He had gone back to Saudi Arabia to work out some problems in his family’s business. By the time he finished with that it was hajj season, the time of year when hundreds of thousands of devout Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca. It was impossible for him to get a plane back to Kabul then, because all of the flights had been booked for months. He was stuck with his family—his parents, his brothers and their families, and his other wife and children.
Through Suraya, he told me he thought about me all the time. “I’ve never loved a woman before,” he said. “This love thing is very bad. It gives me a pain in the chest.” But sometimes during these calls, I could hear children crying in the background. Sometimes I could hear a woman shouting. It made me nervous all over again that I had married a man with another wife and children. It made me feel like his mistress, not his wife. It was not a good feeling.
He hadn’t yet told his family about me, Sam explained. I was a combination of three things his parents hated: American, Christian, and a hairdresser. And he didn’t want to make life any worse for his first wife than it was. His parents thought she was worthless because she hadn’t produced a son for him, and they treated her like a servant. They might be even crueler to her if they started to hope that a second wife might bear him a son. Already, he said that his family was suspicious about the phone calls. They could hear my voice coming over the line from across the room. Sam told them he was carrying on some kind of negotiation with the American Embassy back in Kabul.
My mother was getting a little suspicious about all the phone calls, too. Once, a friend of Sam’s who spoke pretty good English called and left a message that I should call my husband the next morning. “What’s he talking about?” my mother asked.
I cast about for a reasonable-sounding lie. “The words for ‘husband’ and ‘friend’ are the same in Dari,” I said. “So Afghans usually think they’re the same in English, too.”
I could have told her all about the marriage right then, but I didn’t. I still didn’t want anyone to know about it. I wasn’t sure if I had made the greatest mistake of my life—or rather, yet another greatest mistake of my life—by marrying him. And besides, I was starting to feel pretty comfortable back in Michigan. I missed Sam, but it was great to be around my family and friends again. My kids were doing well, and I was living in my dream house. My customers had started returning to the salon in droves when they heard I was back, so I had money. I asked my customers how long I could be away without them giving up on me and finding a new stylist. They told me they could manage without me for about two months. Before I knew it, three months went by. I thought this was the perfect arrangement: three months in the States with my cottage and my loved ones, two months in Afghanistan with my secret husband and continued involvement with the beauty school.
But toward the end of my stay, I started to get anxious about going back to Afghanistan. If one of the beauty school organizers didn’t return soon, I was afraid that all our hard work to raise money, build the school, and stock it with products would help only the twenty girls who had just graduated. I knew there were hundreds more who wanted to attend our school. They had been hanging around and begging for a spot in the next class. I also knew that nice new buildings in Kabul didn’t stay unoccupied long, no matter whom they belonged to. Noor was telling me that there was no money left in Kabul for our expenses and that there was some grumbling inside the Women’s Ministry about unpaid bills. The other organizers were telling me there was no more money in New York. Someone had to go back and make sure we held on to the school until we found more funding. It seemed obvious that that someone was going to be me. I finally broke the news to my mother, who just smiled. “We all figured you were going to go back right away,” she said.
So I put a FOR SALE sign on my car and struck a deal with my ex-husband to get paid for my portion of our house. With that money plus donations from customers, I went on a shopping spree for the beauty school. I bought a lot of the items that we would need for the second class, like more color, peroxide, perm rods, combs and brushes, spray bottles, foils, and a few mannequin heads. I packed nearly one whole suitcase with the kind of stuff I had pined for in Kabul, like deodorant, tampons, Wet Ones, and duct tape. I packed another suitcase full of wax—forty-five pounds of it—knowing it would be a big hit among Afghan brides and Westerners who wanted to go hairless. I was hoping we could do enough business in the school salon during after-class hours to keep the bills paid, at least until other funding came through. Most of my old clothes weren’t suitably modest for Afghanistan, where women’s clothes have to cover butts and arms, so I left them behind. I packed the collection of stuffed frogs that my dad had given me over the years, as well as my favorite pillow, a couple of bottles of tequila, and some margarita mix. All the essentials.
I GOT OFF THE PLANE in Islamabad, Pakistan, and faced a familiar sea of humanity. It was a dark sea, as it seemed to be mostly men with dark jackets, capped here and there by off-white turbans and some white prayer caps. After some jostling, the crowd funneled into long lines going through customs. I emerged on the other side, enlisted two men to grab my six suitcases, then proceeded into the waiting area. I scanned lots of bearded faces, then finally found the one I was looking for. It was the friendly diamond smuggler from the nasty old man’s guesthouse in Kabul, waiting for me with a book of poetry tucked under his arm.
It might seem odd for me to have become pals with a smuggler, but in the war years lots of Afghans were smuggling one thing or another, just to survive. Neither Sam nor I had known him long, but we had grown very fond of him during my last stay in Kabul. He had been a rich diamond smuggler then. He would come to the guesthouse with a cake and expensive whiskey at least once a week to celebrate his birthday. After a few glasses of whiskey, he’d croon Afghan love ballads all night. Val and Suraya had briefly considered marrying me off to him, but he already had three wives and didn’t speak a lick of English. He had two houses in Pakistan—one in Islamabad and one in Peshawar—but he was otherwise reduced in circumstances now because one of his diamond shipments had been confiscated in Iran. Still, he was lavish in his attentiveness while I stayed in Islamabad. He was the typical Afghan host, who treats a guest—and especially the wife of a friend—like a cherished sister. He took me to a beautiful old guesthouse, insisted upon paying all the bills. He assigned a handsome man who spoke English to be my babysitter until I decided how I was going to get to Kabul. I don’t think Fahim, my babysitter, had spent much time alone with a woman before, and he became sort of smitten with me. He still calls me after he’s had a few drinks.
After a few days of checking out airfares to Kabul, I decided to go by land. Even though I had sold my car—
I wouldn’t get the money from the house for a while—I didn’t have much money left after having bought my plane ticket to Pakistan and all the supplies for the beauty school. In fact, I had a mere three hundred dollars to get me to Kabul. I had gotten a plane ticket into Islamabad, thinking it would be cheaper to fly there and then take one of the special flights for people working with NGOs into Kabul. This would cost only one hundred dollars, and I qualified as a volunteer for PARSA, which was registered as an NGO. But then I found out that I could take only forty-four pounds of luggage on the NGO flight. I had at least ten times that amount. It would cost me hundreds of dollars to take a regular flight and hundreds more to pay for overweight luggage. I finally realized the only way I could get me, my wax, my curlers, my stuffed frogs, and my tequila to Kabul was by car.
Driving from Pakistan to Afghanistan might sound easy, but it meant that I had to travel over the Khyber Pass. This is a narrow groove through the Hindu Kush mountains that has been used by travelers for centuries, but it’s so far from the centers of government in any country that it has always had a reputation for being wild and lawless. It can be dangerous for anyone to travel the pass, but especially so for an American woman traveling without a husband. The diamond smuggler spent several days lining up an escort for me. While he was in Peshawar taking care of this, Fahim—my handsome babysitter—escorted me out for shopping and lunch. One day when we were sitting in a restaurant, Fahim got a call on his cell phone. After a few minutes of conversation, he told me that the diamond smuggler—he called him Hajji, the honorary title for anyone who had made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca—said that we had to hurry up and leave.
“Did he find someone to take me to the pass?”
Fahim shook his head. “Hajji’s wife needs grapes. We must go to the market.”
I turned this over in my head. I had met a few of Hajji’s wives, and there were a number of other women living in the house, too. Solid, able-bodied women. “What, are their legs broken?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, no, no. They must not leave the house.”
I was stunned by this. Here I had traveled halfway around the world by myself and was getting ready to make my way through the Khyber Pass, which is widely considered one of the most dangerous places in the world. Yet Hajji’s wife called him all the way in Peshawar and then he called Fahim all the way back in Islamabad to go to the market to get her some grapes. I wondered what these people must think of me.
The diamond smuggler finally drove me to Peshawar, which is about thirty-five miles from the border of Afghanistan. He left me in the care of someone I truly loathed, an old Talib I had had the displeasure of meeting back in Kabul. He distinguished himself by groping both women and men whenever he could. If Sam and I wanted to mess with any of our friends, we’d make sure they wound up standing next to him at a party. Not only was he promiscuous in Kabul, but he drank like a fish, too. But here in Peshawar, he was pious and strict with everyone in his household. He welcomed me into his mansion, which was one of the biggest houses I’ve ever seen. Then he pointed to a woman wrapped in a dark shawl who was hovering in the background. “Look at my old wife,” he said, stroking his beard. He always stroked his beard in a creepy sort of way. “I need nice young one, maybe American like you.”
I stood in the living room awkwardly and removed my head scarf. As soon as he left the room, one of his wives came and threw it back over my head. I’d never been in a home where the women had to be covered even while they were inside.
I was hoping to leave the next day, but every day the old Talib kept saying, “Tomorrow, tomorrow.” So I wound up spending a lot of time with the women of the house. Some of them were as creepy as the old man. His sister kept snatching things out of my suitcase and pretending that they were gifts for her. She got my travel reading light and a pair of shoes that way. But the rest of the women were just sad. Their lives were so boring: they’d cook, clean, and spend the rest of their time sitting in the women’s section of the house and painting their hands and feet with henna. By the time I left, I was covered with so much henna that I felt like a circus freak. When they thought no one could hear them, they’d ask me how they could get out of Pakistan. One of his daughters told me she had been forced to marry a man who lived in London and came back to see her only every two years, just to get her pregnant. Another daughter told me how much she wanted to continue her education, just like her brother. If her father didn’t force her to marry, she had hopes of getting a medical degree. But even if she got the degree, she said, he’d never let her leave the house. It made me sick that she already knew she had no future other than the inside of a house.
One of the old man’s pompous brothers was always trying to get me into a debate about Eastern versus Western culture. “Our women are happy,” he insisted. “Look at them. They have no stress, no tension like women in the West.”
This was the only time someone had ever tried to argue this kind of issue with me. I didn’t want to challenge him in his family’s house. But I thought to myself, Hey, buddy, your wife just put a note in my pocket telling me how miserable she is! The only reason she stays is that you keep her in a gilded cage.
Finally, the old man told me he had arranged my trip through the Khyber Pass. He said his son-in-law would take me, but at a fairly steep price. I wanted to call Sam and ask if the price was fair or if I should bargain with them, but the old man wouldn’t let me. I had a feeling that he didn’t want me talking to Sam, who would be furious at this most un-Afghan-like treatment of a guest. Even the down-on-his-luck diamond smuggler on his worst day wouldn’t have thought of charging me. So I told the old man this arrangement would be fine, because I would have done just about anything to get out of his house.
The next day the son-in-law drove a big white car to the front of the house and shouted for the servants to load my six suitcases. They took them from my room before I was able to pack my favorite pillow, so I came outside with it tucked under my arm. He told me to wear my black veil ninja-style, with only my eyes showing, and warned me not to speak for the next eight hours. I wasn’t to let anyone see that I was a foreigner. So we started toward the Khyber Pass. The traffic got thicker and the roads steeper and bumpier, and the mountains seemed to glower around us.
We passed one of the brightly painted jingle trucks that I so loved. These are semis that are more like ice-cream trucks, with every surface painted, mirrored, tasseled, and embellished in one way or another so that they can deliver their sheets of insulation or boom boxes or whatever with a sort of carnival style. This one was turned over on the side of the road. The son-in-law was sweating, even though the snow was swirling outside. “Don’t talk,” he said. “Don’t even look at anyone. This is where the Taliban is protected, where the opium sellers are protected, where the bandits live. There is no law here. Not Afghan law, not Pakistani law.” We drove through a place where the pass narrowed to about forty feet, then eased into a crowded section of the road that was lined with stores. I saw machine guns hanging in one window, grenades lined up in another. I figured you could probably buy a nuclear bomb there if you had enough money. And then we came to the actual border.
I had been anticipating something that looked like the border between the United States and Canada—a nice booth where they ask you what your business is and how long you plan to stay. But I’d never seen anything like this border aside from disaster movies, in which people are fleeing a flood or volcanic eruption with everything they own on their backs or on the backs of the donkeys they’ve got tied to their waists. We had to park the car and get out. As I sank into the mud in my high heels—because no one had told me I was going to have to walk—a tiny boy with a wheelbarrow made his way to us through the crowd. We put all my suitcases in the wheelbarrow, and then the boy tied ropes around them to keep them in place. The son-in-law strode ahead of me, and I had to work hard to keep up, still clutching my pillow. With every step, my feet sank up to my ankles. I had to really tug to ge
t them loose, hoping all the while that my shoes didn’t fall off. I was afraid that if I bent down to pick up a shoe, the crowd would trample me. I was also afraid that, if I took my eyes off the son-in-law, I’d lose him among all the dark jackets and turbans.
Finally, we came to a checkpoint, where an officer asked for my passport. I handed it over silently, and he raised his eyebrows when he looked at it. “You are not allowed to come here without an armed guard!” he announced. “It is very dangerous.”
“But I’m already here.”
“You should have an armed guard.”
“Pardon me.” I kept my eyes down. “Next time, I will observe the rules.”
He waved the passport at me. “Is this really you?”
I nodded, still covered in a black veil with only my eyes showing. He stamped my passport, and I stumbled forward into Afghanistan.
The son-in-law had disappeared, but I managed to find a taxi to take me down to Kabul. It already had three men in it, but the driver obligingly loaded up my suitcases and told the men in the back to move over. I leaned into the car door with my head and face covered for the next five hours, never saying a word. I was dying to go to the bathroom, too, and gestured to the driver that I had to pull over. He finally stopped at a miserable roadside facility. Aside from a little collision with another car, the trip proceeded uneventfully. No bandits, no snipers, no Taliban hunting us in their white jeeps. As we drove into Kabul and I started to see some things that were familiar to me, I whipped off my veil and lit a cigarette. The looks on those men’s faces! I just had to laugh.
The taxi dropped me off at Sam’s guesthouse. I wasn’t sure who would be there, but soon Ali appeared in the doorway, dressed just like a casual-Fridays professional in the United States. He came rushing out to help me with my bags. Afghan men are not used to women throwing their arms around them, but I figured Ali was pretty well westernized. After my ordeal on the pass, I couldn’t help it. But he returned my hug, then helped me get settled. He went into the kitchen and made me tea, then came out with the tea and an assortment of biscuits on one of the beautiful turquoise plates from the tiny village of Istalif, high above Kabul. We sat and talked until the sun started to set.