An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (4 page)

My bedroom window on the second floor looks out on the Paghman Mountains, the foothills of the mighty Himalayas.

My second mother-in-law lives in her own house. A low fence or wall with a gate separates the first and second wives. Within the same enclosed property my father-in-law lives nearby with his younger third wife and their eight children.

Abdul-Kareem—who, I realize, has disappeared into a crowd of male relatives—manages to find me briefly to tell me that the family’s most beautiful house (and one that he covets for himself, for us) is nearby but is being rented by a foreign embassy. When I visit it, I see that the house has latticed, stained-glass windows, marble pillars in the living room, and a British-style library.

The house in which we will live is filled with people. They sit in a huge semicircle of liquid eyes. Abdul-Kareem must be related to all of Kabul, judging by the number of relatives who visit that first afternoon.

Holding my arm, Bebegul moves me around from one group of women to another. She is in a transport of joy and importance.

No conversations are private. This group is one body, one soul, one family, one clan. Whenever someone enters or leaves the room, everyone rises and chants, almost in unison: “
Salom aleikum, khoob hastain chitoor hastam
. . .
enshallah.
” (Greetings, peace be with you, are you well, are you good, as Allah wills it, so shall it be.) “
Bamanakhoodah, Hodahafez.
”
(Good-bye, God be with you.)

My brothers- and sisters-in-law, many in their thirties, execute quick, cringing half-bows as they grab Ismail Mohammed’s hand to kiss it. This strikes me as embarrassing and infantile.

How little I understand!

He is their patriarch, their leader, their father, their chieftain who provides sustenance and status. He can do no wrong. He can have them killed. Whatever opportunities they or their children have or will have, beginning with the relatively good lives they enjoy compared to 99.9 percent of the rest of the country, are all thanks to him and none other.

I am unprepared for my first-ever Muslim prayer service. Suddenly, effortlessly, all the men drop to the floor; they are down on all fours, prostrating themselves, placing their foreheads to the ground, facing Mecca, as they begin the midday prayer.

I have never seen Abdul-Kareem pray. He has never gone to a mosque. He does not have a prayer rug or
tasbeh
(prayer beads).

The unified prayer service in the living room is accomplished gracefully but in a masculine way. Their bodies, their minds, their voices, and their souls are all involved in this rather physical spiritual practice. I am so mesmerized, so taken over, that I do not really notice whether the women pray. I am later told that women do not go to the mosque. I learn that women pray at home, alone.

This religion seems very public. It assumes that everyone obeys the laws. Prayer takes place at the appointed hour at home, at work, at school, on the street—as well as in the mosque.

Somehow prayer in America seems more private, certainly for Jews who pray discreetly at home but mainly in synagogues. True, Christians in America begin meals with religious prayers and everyone swears on the Bible when they testify in a courtroom—but neither Abdul-Kareem nor I take religion very seriously. We do not know anyone who does. The major thinkers and artists whom we read and quote are atheists.

Hours pass. I do not see Abdul-Kareem anywhere.

I find myself surrounded by smiling, friendly women. The non-English speakers pat me in a warm and motherly way or simply hug me. This is nice. The French, English, and German speakers ask me what I think of Kabul (who knows? I have yet to see it), where
we shopped in Europe, and whether I miss my family.

I grow drowsy. It is a hot afternoon. The room has no air in it. Massive velvet drapes shield us from sunlight. I can’t remember anybody’s name. I sit quietly, half asleep and half awake. This seems to be quite alright.

The room continues to hum with greetings and tea sipping and comings and goings. After all the small talk has been exhausted, the women yawn, stretch, and look equally dazed. Some women have gone to relax in Bebegul’s quarters. They sit on their haunches, elbows on knees, smoking, spitting out nutshells, laughing, and gossiping.

I am only twenty years old, and I am now a member of this household, which consists of one patriarch, three wives, twenty-one children (who range in age from infancy to their thirties), two grandchildren, at least one son-in-law, one daughter-in-law, and an unknown number of servants and relatives.

Our first meal in Afghanistan is an unbelievable feast. As I will later learn, a special cook was hired for the occasion. It looks like every conceivable Afghan dish is on display. We eat on the floor, cross-legged, on lovely tablecloths placed over the carpets.

By now I am no stranger to this food. For two years, whenever Abdul-Kareem and his male countrymen would get homesick, they would cook traditional Afghan food for us. I have had my share of
pilaus
and
chilaus
(rice dishes) piled high, flavored with saffron or garlic, and eaten with yoghurt. From the moment we first met, Abdul-Kareem cooked for me, as did his friends, most of whom were unmarried or in New York City without their wives. They cooked hearty soups and
turned simple vegetables, like cauliflower and eggplant, into dishes fit for a sultan.

The parade of platters is impressive and never ending. There is shish kebob, which, I learn, is rarely served at home but can be bought all over Kabul. There are maybe six
different
kinds of white and yellow and brown rice dishes. Hidden in one pilau one might find a whole boiled chicken, a roasted duck—even a goose. Some dishes are flavored with fried onions and topped with almonds and grapes. There are platters of fried eggplant served with rich gobs of sour cream; juicy fat stuffed cabbage;
kofte
(meatballs) served with spicy salads; stuffed dumplings.

For dessert we have the most delicious fruit I have ever tasted: luscious grapes, hybrid melons, lemon-oranges, all of which are accompanied by cups of sweet custard topped with floating rose petals. Baklava, French pastries, and soft, sweet, and sticky candies end the meal.

And still, after all this, fresh offerings of pistachios are served, more tea is called for. We are also offered cold fruit juices.

At the appointed hour my father-in-law rises, and when he does, everyone else rises, too. He again embraces me and Abdul-Kareem and leaves with his third wife and their infant son. Not once have I seen him talk to Bebegul.

Thereafter the second wife and her set of children depart as well.

Bebegul’s own family remains: her sons, daughters, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, and grandchildren—all linger on. My new brothers- and sisters-in-law mimic Ismail Mohammed’s roving eye and crafty ways. I am captivated by their comic inventiveness. They put me at my ease by laughing about the three wives.

Abdul-Kareem has been talking nonstop in Dari (Afghan Persian) for at least ten hours now. Other than a few hurried whispers, we have not really spoken to each other or sat near each other. He is in his element. He seems happy to be with his family, happy that they have given him such a grand reception.

Finally we are alone in our rooms. The night is dark and almost completely silent. We are standing on what Abdul-Kareem tells me is “the roof of the world.” We are nearly 6,000 feet above sea level. The stars are clustered like golden grapes and literally seem within reach. We are too exhausted to speak. We fall asleep in our clothes.

When I awake the next morning, the sun is blazing into the room. I immediately look out the window—and there they still are: my white-peaked majestic mountains, part of the vast Himalayas.

Abdul-Kareem is gone. I am completely alone. I open the door and see that, hours ago, a servant left breakfast right outside the door. He is still sitting at the end of the hall, waiting for me to get up. I gesture: The tea is cold, and the bread is stiff. Can I have coffee? He smiles, rushes off, and returns bearing a new tray with warm flat bread (nan), coffee, a small pat of butter, and a selection of pastries from yesterday’s feast.

Life is good.

Two

The Imprisoned Bride

I
have put off writing about what comes next for a very long time.

Reluctantly I take out my old tattered diary with the brown plastic cover and look at what I wrote when I was twenty. More than half a century later, the writing embarrasses me. The contents are also heartbreaking. I am afraid that reading my diary, and writing about the events it briefly records, will force me to remember what I have spent years trying to forget. It happened, it’s over, I survived, let’s move on.

The psychotherapist in me knows that I am resisting. I do not want to be overwhelmed again by a clash of cultures, one that was unanticipated and for which I was totally unprepared. If only Abdul-Kareem had prepared me or acknowledged that the task before me would be difficult and frightening. He did not do so.

In 1920, when Saira Elizabeth Luiza MacKenzie Shah, aka Morag Murray Abdullah, and her Afghan husband, Sirdar Iqbal Ali Shah, were about to cross the border into the tribal no-man’s land between India and Afghanistan, she wrote:

I looked back at the last outpost of my own people and knew there would be no possibility of my return if the odds went against me. My husband I think sensed my feelings. “Welcome,” he said, “to the land of my fathers.”

It broke the spell. It reassured me. “Syed [Sirdar],” I said, “I trust you. You realize I am friendless here and have only you.”

Syed promised to protect her with his life. But then, as they “passed finally out of sight of the last British post,” Syed said, “There is still time to go back if you regret your decision. Time for
us
to go back.”

Abdul-Kareem made no such chivalrous proclamation. We never even discussed what my life might be like in Kabul, even on a temporary basis. I still had a semester of college to complete. I believed that the two of us would embark on adventures, like the explorers of a bygone era. Abdul-Kareem had allowed me to believe this.

But I had ignored each and every warning sign to the contrary: His distracted restlessness in Europe, his suddenly reduced budget, his obvious joy at being embraced by his family, his utter dependence upon his father and the government for money.

I expected to meet his family, but I also believed that we would travel across the entire country: forging rivers, crossing deserts, perhaps summiting mountains, memorizing Persian poetry beside campfires. Instead my time in Afghanistan was characterized by a lack of adventure and only a minimal exposure to the country.

This is how most Afghan women experience life—they don’t. Few rural women venture beyond their own village or garden plot or courtyard. The same is true for most city women—except if they are allowed to accompany their fathers abroad when they are young. Their subsequent adjustment to purdah and life beneath the burqa is also traumatic.

It’s not just what happened—or what didn’t happen—that matters. It is that Abdul-Kareem treated living in the tenth century as completely normal, in fact as somehow superior to life in America. His refusal to discuss my situation was maddening. But how could he? A discussion would force him to acknowledge that his country, where he hoped to make his mark, was medieval and that our lives—my life in particular—would be very different from what they would have been in America.

The excitement of our arrival took at least three days to wear off. More relatives kept coming in a steady stream. Essentially we sat around as if it were a wake. I found this was the Afghan way of socializing: to sit silently, attentively, unselfconsciously, happily, for two or three hours, rising every time someone new comes in, at which time one repeats the standard greetings.

The warm and friendly family faces, the inescapable mountains, the hovering heavens filled with brightly polished stars, the unexpected luxury of my surroundings, even the food, all confirmed that my grand adventure had begun.

On my first morning (it would never happen again), Bebegul and Fawziya, Hassan’s sweet and lovely wife, join me for breakfast. The immediate family has two, possibly three Fawziyas and multiple Mohammeds, much as an Italian family has many Johns.

In addition to the usual fare, the cook has prepared some eggs for me that Bebegul insists I eat. Fingering her prayer beads, she stares at me as I chew. She will often stare at me. It is disquieting. The eggs are a bow to the West. In Kabul women do not have eggs for breakfast. It is considered a European custom.

For two days I happily eat the leftovers from our feast. On the third day the household meals return to their normal fare. For me this is a disaster. The cook, like every Afghan cook, uses ghee, an evil-smelling, rancid clarified animal-fat butter that is left unrefrigerated. It is their cooking oil.

It is loved and considered to be a healthy local delicacy. No one would dream of using Crisco, which the specially hired chef had used for our first meal. Most foreigners, who have not grown up with ghee, abhor the taste of it, partly because ghee wreaks considerable havoc on soft foreign stomachs. The smell makes some foreigners nauseous; others throw up after a few mouthfuls. I literally could not eat anything cooked in ghee.

The daily routine is as follows: In the morning Abdul-Kareem and the men disappear and are gone all day. The women mainly stay at home. The servants clean and cook. Bebegul stays in her own quarters and sews and hums to herself. She orders her servants about, checks on their work, sits in the garden.

Every day I have lunch with Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, and her children in their family quarters. Sometimes, but only rarely, Bebegul joins us. The meals never vary. They consist of a rice-based dish with a spicy tomato-based sauce studded with chunks of lamb or chicken. I drink cup after cup of tea and devour the flat bread (nan). I live on nuts, dried fruits, and yoghurt.

If I can remain on such a wholesome diet, I might easily live to a ripe old age, just like the Hunzas nearby, in Shangri-La.

Abdul-Kareem’s older sister, also named Fawziya, is staying on for a while. She is fearfully elegant with a beehive hairdo and an aristocratically Semitic nose. She smokes cigarettes with an elaborate holder but “never in front of my father,” she assures me.

Bebegul’s daughter Fawziya can speak broken English and German. Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, and I speak in French and a little bit in English. She has been appointed to keep me company.

Every day I pace the garden, back and forth, forth and back; I visit every tree: the apricot tree, plum tree, apple tree, cherry tree. I visit the flowers. I ask everyone—the servants, the children, the wives—to tell me the name of each tree and flower in Dari. “
Chee-as?
” (What is this?)

Next I visit Bebegul and watch her sew.

Then I sit outside on the second-story terrace and read and read and read.

Finally on the fourth day I tell Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, that I have to go out.

And I get up to leave.

I am a young American girl used to getting out and doing things on my own. I have been taking public transportation by myself in New York City since I was ten years old. I am not used to having a driver. I am not used to staying at home. I am not used to being in the company of only women. But most of all I am not used to being without my constant companion and soul mate, who has become something of a husband missing in action.

“I must see the city, the people, the bazaar,” I explain in French.

She replies happily, “Oh, then we must go to the tailor and have some clothes made for you.”

She claps her hands, a servant appears—but no driver is available at the moment. Fawziya tells me that Abdul-Kareem will arrange everything for tomorrow.

“Why can’t I just take a walk? Why don’t you come with me? We’ll go together.”

Hassan’s Fawziya, a mild and gentle soul, looks confused and then a bit terrified. Finally she says, “Why not talk to your husband? Ask
him
to take you on a tour of the city.”

Thus I discover that upper-class Afghan women do not simply go out. Here “going out” means that a woman first dresses up and puts on a soft chiffon headscarf and a long but fashionable coat—she might even don gloves. Usually she does not spend time browsing in the bazaar the way foreign (
ferengi
) women do.

No matter how hot it is, she does not appear in public with her arms or legs bare. She makes a specific appointment, keeps it, the male driver waits for her, and then he returns her safely home. My female relatives never, ever do their own food shopping.

That is a job for male servants. Only poor and servantless women face shame and danger by having to wait in line amid rowdy and sexually aggressive male servants. As women they are often repeatedly kicked
to the back of the line as new male servants arrive. To avoid prying male eyes and leering attention, these women often prefer to wear burqas.

An Afghan woman who walks or shops alone is seen as proclaiming either her sexual availability or her husband’s and father’s poverty. A male servant and a female relative are the minimum requirements for any proper Afghan woman who shops in the bazaar.

Although Afghan women were emancipated from their ghostly, full-length burqas in 1958–59 (and, before that, in 1929), social custom still demands that they wear headscarves and coats at all times. Those who eschew these garments are yelled at and followed.

Some women who go out alone also wear the burqa as a way of shielding themselves from the dust and dirt—although their shoes still take the brunt of it. I suppose that some women enter this airless, claustrophobic, moveable prison (or sensory deprivation chamber) for what they believe are religious reasons or simply out of habit.

In 1960, only a year before I arrived, the British mountaineers Joyce Dunsheath and Eleanor Baillie wrote, “In the cities [in Afghanistan], strangely enough, the veiled woman is still the rule rather than the exception; only the young girl is usually in modern dress. The Afghan chaudris . . . are in soft colourings, blues, greens, rust, wine, grey, for instance, usually of silk. . . . Less than six months before our expedition started little girls had been killed in Kandahar in riots over the [chaudri] question, we heard.”

I heard that the government had to kill mullahs who were rioting over this issue in 1958–59. One hears things that cannot easily be substantiated.

To my Afghan relatives, so used to this way of life, I seem like an impatient, demanding, nervous, immoral, and potentially dangerous young woman. Why am I not content or at least resigned? From their point of view the women in their family are leading utterly enviable lives. They are never, ever hungry. In fact they are well nourished. They are not
servants—they
have
servants. They do not have to labor in the fields or at the loom. They do not have to take care of farm animals from dawn to dusk. They can retain something of their youth for a longer period of time.

They have access to doctors—if absolutely necessary, even doctors and private clinics out of the country. They have the best midwifery and obstetrical care the country can provide. True, they do not have advanced educations or independent careers. True, as I quickly discover, their marriages have been arranged, and they married when they were still quite young. This in no way seems to offend them.

Why should it? None of Ismail Mohammed’s daughters have been forced to marry illiterate or impoverished men. All their husbands are relatively well-to-do. No one’s husband is a polygamist. Ismail Mohammed’s sons have not taken second wives. My female relatives cannot imagine life without a husband and children. That would not be a life; that would be a living death.

One of Abdul-Kareem’s sisters has no children, but her husband will not divorce her, nor will he take a second wife. The family is a bit scandalized by this. Clearly they must love each other. It is considered unseemly.

My female relatives are enviable ladies of leisure who lead prestigious and busy social lives. They visit other female relatives and receive visits from them all the time. They drink tea, spit out the shells of nuts, eat little squares of ghee-soaked cakes.

I keep to myself, spend time alone in my room, look unhappy, and want something that women cannot have in Afghanistan. I want my freedom. I want to do things on my own, alone, or at least with my husband.

Five days into my “sentence,” I start visiting Bebegul regularly, twice a day. At least that’s a short walk from the main house. Oddly I have never seen her talk to her husband. Whenever he visits our house, which isn’t often, she keeps a reverent distance from him. Instead she embraces his third wife, Meena, and croons over Meena’s infant son, clapping every five minutes for a servant. Bebegul has nothing else to say to her husband. For his part he never even looks at her.

It will be a while before I start hearing versions of what happened between my mother-in-law and her husband. Sometimes when we are alone, Bebegul points quite suddenly to Meena’s house—which is some distance away. Dropping her prayer beads, Bebegul chants her husband’s name over and over again: “Agha Jan, Agha Jan, Agha Jan.” (Dear Father, Dear Father, Dear Father.)

I have no idea what she is trying to convey to me. Have her shame and humiliation driven her mad? Is she telling me that her husband is with another woman and that she absolutely cannot accept this? Is she laughing at him? Is she worshipping him?

I start trying to learn the language. I ask for a tutor. Until one arrives, Bebegul and Hassan’s wife, Fawziya, teach me Dari phrases and names for things. We walk around the house, and I point to something, and they tell me the name for it in Dari. I make a list of all these words in phonetic English. I still have that list. A face is a
roose.
Eyes are
cheesm.
A chin is
zanak.
A cow is a
jow.
A village is a
kor.
“It’s hot” is “
hawa garm ast.
” We live in or on Hojamullah, and the bazaar is in Jadai Maiwand.