Kabul Beauty School (12 page)

And suddenly, one of the students got an aha! look on her face. This was Topekai, a young woman with dark, intelligent eyes and a quick, decisive manner. I pulled Anisa closer and asked Topekai one question after another to make sure she really understood. I was so excited that I kissed her on both cheeks—twice—and led her back to the rest of the class, hugging her so tightly that she could hardly walk.

“Tell her to teach them,” I told Anisa. “She’ll know how to put it in the words that they’ll all understand.” I explained the contributing color concept again, and Anisa translated. Topekai—blushing with pride but speaking in a strong, clear voice—explained it in her own words. Then another two girls said they understood. I broke the class into small groups so that those three students could work with the rest of them. Finally, everyone got it. After that, the color class was a huge success. I’d whip questions at them—like “You’ve got a woman who’s a natural level four and she wants to be a warm eight, so what do you do?”—and they’d whip the answers right back at me. When we got to the foiling part of the class—my own Achilles’ heel—I gave them a demonstration, then left to have a cigarette. When I came back, they had their mannequins perfectly foiled. Each little folded packet was like origami, a work of art.

After that, it was pure joy for me to come to the school every day and work with the students. Their diligence amazed me. I knew that most were juggling children and often abusive husbands and mothers-in-law, that they lived in homes without water or electricity or any of the amenities Westerners take for granted, that they braved sneers and skepticism from people who believed women should stay at home. But they showed up on time every day, incredibly focused on making better lives for themselves. Their skills progressed rapidly, and I knew they’d leave at the end of the term with everything they needed to run successful businesses.

It was also a joy to be there because I could see that they were having fun gossiping and giggling and fussing with one another’s hair. At the end of the day, they’d often turn on a tiny radio and try to find some music. If they did, they’d show me how they danced at weddings. Some of them told me this was the first time they’d really had fun in years. The beauty school and salon were like a hothouse, and these girls were like flowers that had been stunted and stepped on—but still, never broken. Now they were bursting into bloom before my eyes. It was fun to be around them. And as they talked and either Roshanna or a translator told me what they were saying, I learned even more about Afghanistan—sad stuff as well as funny stuff. One day, Topekai and two of the other girls were talking back and forth as they were practicing on their mannequins with perm rods. I wasn’t really listening since I still didn’t speak much Dari, but I kept hearing odd English-sounding words. Had they really said “
Titanic
” and “Leonardo DiCaprio”?

Finally, I asked Roshanna what they were laughing about. “We were remembering how the Taliban weren’t just hard on beauticians,” she said. “Sometimes barbers got in trouble, too!”

It seemed that, even though such things were strictly forbidden, foreign movies still made their way into Afghanistan under the Taliban’s radar. The movie
Titanic
was an especially big hit on this underground circuit, and the Afghans were quite smitten with its stars. The men coveted the look of Leonardo DiCaprio’s hair in that movie. As I recall, it was sort of long on top and hung to the middle of his cheeks. However, that style ran counter to the look that the Taliban had decreed proper for a Muslim man—short hair, long beard. Finally, one cagey barber figured out how to profit from the new trend. He popularized a cut that had some of the DiCaprio length on top but not so much that it couldn’t be tucked under a prayer cap. One of his customers blew it, though—he took off his prayer cap, his long, DiCaprio locks fell out, and someone ratted to the Taliban. They started checking under other prayer caps to see if there were any more blasphemous haircuts in Kabul, then traced it all back to the barber. They threw him in jail for a few days. Truly a prisoner of fashion!

WE STOOD ON THE STREET
outside the red door, sniffing the air. “It doesn’t smell like a restaurant to me,” I said.

“Two people swore to me that they served food,” Val said. “Let’s go in and find out. If they offer us a massage instead of wonton soup, we’ll leave.”

The sign on the building said that this was a Chinese restaurant, but that meant nothing. Most restaurants that catered to Westerners—meaning they sold alcohol and had mixed-gender dining—didn’t put up signs for fear of drawing hostile attention. Many of the places that claimed to be Chinese restaurants were actually brothels. But Val and Suraya and I had a craving for Chinese food, so we pushed the door open and went in. There were actually tables inside with people sitting at them. This was a good sign, even though the waitresses were serving drinks in skirts that were slit all the way up to their thighs. This is just not a look one sees in Kabul. Someone at another table leaned over and told us that they used to wear miniskirts but it caused too much of a ruckus outside, with Afghan men crowding around trying to look into the door. “Men were falling off bicycles!” the person at the next table said. This is the way people in Kabul always seem to describe the public reaction to women who stand out too much.

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.