Kabul Beauty School (15 page)

But I didn’t figure this out until much later. That night, I was only full of deliriously high hopes. I stayed late and did my best to charm all the dignitaries. The American Embassy had called earlier in the day to offer their regrets because there had been some sort of terrorist threat against Americans. I never gave a thought to my own safety. I kept exchanging glances with my handsome stranger of a husband. I looked forward to the next few days, when all the other Americans would go home, when the media would go away, when we could finally sample our new life together in privacy. I was so happy that I didn’t even realize my feet were bleeding until I got home and pried off my gold high heels.

I
stepped through the doorway of the charred house, angling my shoulders to keep from getting soot all over my clothes. There were no interior walls, only shapes that were jagged and sharp against the gloom. The November air was cold and heavy with smoke. I shone the beam of a flashlight through a hole that went all the way to the attic. As I did, I stepped on something that crunched and then skidded from under my foot. My mother bent down to pick it up. It was one of my old dolls.

“Don’t worry, honey!” she said, as if I were still six years old. “We can probably get it cleaned up again.” She tried to rub the soot off its face, but I could see that its cheeks were cracked.

The destruction made me feel as if I were still in Afghanistan, not back in Michigan. Only a few weeks ago, I had gone with an Afghan-American friend to look at the house his family had abandoned during the wars. There were huge rocket holes, even in the interior walls, and rats skittered away from us in every room. It was hard to recognize it as a home—it could have been any old wrecked building—but my friend told me it had once been one of the finest houses in Kabul. As we moved from room to room, he pointed out where the dining room table had been where they had eaten their last meal together. He showed me where his father had kept a beautiful old cupboard from Nuristan to store his coin collection. It was all gone. I couldn’t imagine that kind of loss then, but now I was beginning to understand how you feel when your family home goes up in smoke. There weren’t even any visual clues of our old life together. Where was my father’s chair? He had died more than a year ago, but my mother always kept his chair in the same spot. Where was the cupboard where we stored the Christmas ornaments?

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.