Kabul Beauty School (30 page)

Maryam sat down on the stairs to sob, and Baseera and Mina came running out of the salon. Laila walked in from the porch. “Something is terribly wrong,” I told her. “Find out what it is.”

Laila bent down over Maryam, who spoke rapidly from behind clenched fists. Then Laila straightened up again. She and the beauticians talked back and forth for a few seconds. “We know part of the story already,” she said.

It seemed that, two days before, Achmed Zia had been driving Shaz and Maryam home when one of the van’s tires blew out. The spare was also flat, so he was going to leave the girls in the car while he went to get the spare repaired. Then Shaz offered to call Farooq and see if he could give the two of them a ride. She asked to use Maryam’s phone to make the call, claiming that she was out of minutes. So Farooq came, and soon they were hurtling along one of the dirt roads that led to the neighborhood where both Shaz and Maryam lived. All of a sudden, Farooq slowed down at a corner, and Shaz opened her door and jumped out. Farooq sped up again, driving down the streets so fast that Maryam couldn’t get out of the car. As he drove, he looked up at the frantic Maryam in the rearview mirror and told her that he was in love with her. He told her he had seen her when he was picking up Shaz outside the compound, and he knew he had to have her for himself. He wanted her to leave her husband and go off with him.

I interrupted. “Why would Shaz jump out of the car to let him be with another woman?”

“Farooq told her she must do this to prove that she loves him,” Laila asserted. “He tells her he is attracted to Maryam and asks Shaz to let them be together just this once.”

“Why would she go along with that?”

Laila grimaced. “Because she is crazy, Debbie. Crazy with love and crazy with the drugs.”

I grabbed the railing of the stairs and sat down next to Maryam. “What are you talking about? She smokes hash out there with the men?”

“She is an opium addict. She takes a little pill under her tongue every day, then she goes off by herself to fold your scarves. Farooq is the one who gets her the drugs.”

“But she’s such a hard worker! How could she be a drug addict and still work so hard?” I couldn’t make sense out of this.

Maryam lifted her head and spoke again to Laila. I would have never recognized her voice if I had heard her speaking on the phone. All the lightness and warmth was gone. Laila and the girls listened with looks of horror, then fixed their eyes on me expectantly. “There’s more? What else?” I asked.

Farooq had finally let the hysterical Maryam out of his car, and she’d walked home. She was late but told her husband that the van had broken down and that she hadn’t wanted to wait there alone while Achmed Zia got the spare fixed. She said she hadn’t been able to get a cab because she didn’t have enough money, and she hadn’t been able to call her husband because her cell phone couldn’t get a signal. The cell phone systems in the city were down so often that he didn’t bother to question this. He also didn’t wonder about his wife’s agitation, because he knew how easily she became frightened and that she didn’t like walking through the streets alone. But later that night he checked her cell phone to see if it was working again. There he found a long, lurid text message from Farooq saying how he wanted Maryam more than ever after their brief time together. Farooq said that he knew now she wanted him in the same way. Then Maryam’s husband threw her phone across the room and left the house, shouting that he would divorce her if she was spending time with another man.

Right about then, Shaz opened the lobby door. She was still looking a little bit dreamy, but she shrank back against the outside wall when she saw Maryam. Laila and Baseera shouted at her a few times, but she refused to come inside. Then Mina shrieked. She had been looking at Maryam’s cell phone and recognized Farooq’s number. She had been getting a lot of harassing calls on her own phone, and they were all from this same number. The last thing Mina’s husband needed was another reason to beat up on her, and she started to cry at the thought that Farooq could leave an incriminating text message on her phone. Laila and Baseera also pulled out their cell phones. They found the same number in their own phones, in the logs for both incoming and outgoing calls. Each remembered that Shaz had asked to use her phone in the last few days. It seemed that Shaz was delivering all the girls over to Farooq, so desperate to please him that she’d play the pimp. The lobby echoed with screaming and crying, and the few customers who were in the salon that day tiptoed past us warily. Achmed Zia finally came to the door and poked a worried head in.

Two days later I fired Shaz. I had tried to get her to take us to Farooq. Sam was ready to pay him a visit and threaten to kill him if he harassed any of my girls again. But Shaz wouldn’t do it. Her face closed up and she shook her head; she wouldn’t meet my eye. She sent piles of dust flying as she swept and beat carpets, trying so hard to show me that she was indispensable. She
was
nearly indispensable, and I loved her, but I couldn’t let her hungers endanger the rest of my girls. When she left, I felt as if a part of me went walking out the door.

I wanted to talk to someone about this, someone who could help me make sense of it. The first person who came to mind was Roshanna, of course—she had been my friend ever since I came to Afghanistan. She had helped me decipher each mystery that arose from my conflict with the culture and from my ignorance of what the Afghan women had been through. But I couldn’t ask Roshanna, because she was gone.

After the traumatic night of her engagement party and consummation, I had gone home and spent the day crying. Sam was out of town and hadn’t been able to come to the party with me, but I called him and told him what had happened. “She will be fine,” he assured me. “She marry nice Afghan man this time, go to country where there never was Taliban.”

So I told myself to stop worrying. The consummation had been a nightmare, but she would walk off into a new day with her husband. I cried a little more, though, knowing how much I would miss Roshanna.

Her husband left for Amsterdam three days after the engagement party, as planned. Within two months, Roshanna had a visa and was preparing to follow him there. Her family and I took her to the airport and sobbed amid the potholes as she disappeared inside.

She called her brother two weeks later in a panic. It turned out that when she arrived in Amsterdam, it was her mother-in-law who was waiting to greet her. The older woman explained that things were not quite as she had presented them back in Kabul. Roshanna’s new husband was not actually a successful engineer; he was just a clerk at a large Dutch company. Moreover, he didn’t live at his parents’ house full-time but would be around only twice a year. He was not at home then and would not be for another four months. Roshanna told her brother that she had been a virtual slave to the family those two weeks, scrubbing floors, cooking and serving meals, doing whatever her mother-in-law ordered. She had been banned from all forms of communication, as many Afghan brides are. They’re supposed to cut off contact with their families for several months so that they can adjust to their husbands’ families.

The brother was outraged and wanted to jump on a plane right away. But Roshanna’s family couldn’t track the new husband’s family and didn’t know how to find her. They didn’t have enough money to hire a detective, so they just waited. I waited along with them and worried every day about her.

Finally, after months had gone by, she called. She told her family that things had changed yet again. Her husband had come back. He took her by the hands and asked her if she loved him as her husband, even if he was just a lowly clerk and not an engineer, even if his family was not wealthy. And of course, being Roshanna, she said yes. Then he began to laugh. He told her that he really was an engineer and that his family really was wealthy. They had been testing her. Now that he saw how devoted she was to him, regardless of his position, he knew they would be a happy couple. She told her family that they could stop worrying about her. Her life was good.

I haven’t spoken to Roshanna since she left Kabul. I still wonder if she was telling her family the truth or just trying to save face. They tell me they don’t hear from her anymore, either. When I see them, we try to be cheerful for one another and pretend that she must be doing very well indeed away from the dust of Kabul.

In my darkest moments I wonder if I did Roshanna any good by spilling my blood on her consummation night. Sometimes I wonder if I’m doing much good at all here. There are many of us Westerners who want to help Afghan women, but our efforts don’t always help them in the ways that we hope they will. There are so many ties that bind these women and hold them back, and many of the ties aren’t even visible to the Western eye. It takes a long time to understand how the complexities of these women’s lives differ from the complexities of ours. Sometimes we can’t help, even when we understand these complexities. The culture is changing so much more slowly than their dreams are.

I SAW A REFLECTION
of the moon in my glass of wine and took a quick sip before it moved on to someone else’s glass. We were having a starlight picnic in our front yard with a small group of friends, both Afghan and foreign. It was a lovely night. We had dragged the living room rug outside, ringed it with toushaks and candles, and piled the middle of the rug with platters of fruit and cakes. I hadn’t bothered to hire a band, but music drifted out from a CD player propped in the window. Sometimes we sang along.

I was in the middle of a funny story. Sam had brought kebabs home for dinner the night before, and there had been a lot left over. In the middle of the day, he’d sent Achmed Zia to the door of the school to tell me that Sam was having a business meeting at his office and that he wanted to serve the leftover kebabs. But the girls and I had already eaten them, so I called Sam on my cell. I was watching one of the students attempt a fancy updo on her mannequin, so I didn’t want to talk too loudly. When he answered, I whispered, “We ate the meat.”

“Debbie? Debbie, is that you?” said the voice on the other end.

“Yeah, I wanted you to know the meat is gone.”

“What?”

“We ate the meat!”

There was silence on the other end of the line, then the voice said, “Debbie, you’re kind of scaring me. Is this some kind of code? Am I supposed to evacuate the city or something?”

“Sam?” Then I looked at the phone and saw that I had called one of my male customers by mistake. “Oh, my God, is this Viani?”

He and I laughed for about ten minutes. I called him later in the day and whispered, “We ate the meat,” again. He whispered back, “The eagle has landed! Abort mission! Abort!”

As I told our friends the story, they got it right away. Where else in the world would you hear someone whisper “We ate the meat” and assume right away that it’s a coded warning to get out of the city? Did this mean that we were all crazy to live here? We laughed and laughed. Then Sam’s cell phone rang, and he motioned for us to quiet down. My heart sank as he switched from Dari to Uzbek, because this probably meant his family was calling. Sam walked away to continue his conversation. When he came back, I could tell that he was upset.

“Is everything okay with your family?”

“Okay.” He picked up an apple and began cutting it into small pieces.

“Why did they call?”

“My father, he is right now at Saudi airport. He will be here in morning.”

“Is he going to be bothered that you live next door to a beauty salon?” asked one of our friends incredulously.

Sam groaned.

“Have you met him before?” another friend asked me.

“He not know about wedding,” Sam said. “Only mother know.”

“She didn’t tell him?” I asked. “He still doesn’t know about me?”

When Sam shook his head, all my happiness drained away. I had never been able to forgive him completely for not telling his parents about me on his own. Now I knew he had still been hiding me after nearly three years of marriage.

But I tried to make the best of it. The salon was open the next day, and there was no way that Sam could avoid it: you can get to our private compound only by walking through the beauty school compound. As the beauticians and customers arrived, I told them what was going on. When Sam called to tell me that he and his father were driving down the street, all of us dashed into the room where I stored the hair color products. We held our breath and clamped our hands over our mouths. I heard Sam and some men pass through the yard, then I heard him slam the gate between our home compound and the beauty compound. “It’s safe now,” I told everyone, acting as if I found all this drama great fun. “Papa Sam has landed.”

“Is his name Sam, too?” a customer asked.

“I don’t even know his real name.”

“This is so exciting,” said another customer. One half of her head was done up in neat foil packets; the other half bristled with an inch of gray roots. “I’m going to have to come back next week to see how it all turns out!”

I decided to let Sam have a quiet twenty-four hours with his father. I made my own dinner plans that night with friends, and he took his father out to a restaurant. Later on, he called me at my friends’ house and told me he had taken Papa Sam back to our house. He wanted to pick me up so that we would arrive at the house together. But as we pulled up to the gate, Achmed Zia walked over to the car. Some of Sam’s mujahideen friends had come over and were sitting in the yard with Papa Sam. “Stay here,” Sam told me. “Let me move Father into house.”