Kabul Beauty School (31 page)

“Are you going to introduce me to him then?”

“Yes, but inside house. Not in front of crowd.”

As soon as he left, the car started to fog up with my anger. If Papa Sam was like all other Afghans, I knew I’d be stuck waiting in the car for hours. There is no such thing in Afghanistan as simply saying good night to guests and going inside. Papa Sam would have to serve them tea or soft drinks, make sure they had biscuits and fruit, ask about their families and the villages where their grandfathers lived and their male children and so on. I figured that if Sam came back out at all, it would be to try to sneak me inside the house using an entrance from the alley where everyone kept their generators and garbage. After about ten minutes, I climbed into the driver’s seat and sped away by myself. My phone started to ring, but I ignored it. I roared around the city for twenty minutes. When I returned, Sam was pacing outside the compound. Now he was in a rage.

“You couldn’t wait?” he shouted.

“Are you going to tell him about me? Make your choice: either I am or I am not your wife tonight!” I shouted right back.

He pointed inside the car at my head scarf, which had slid down to the floor. “Put on scarf and come inside!”

We walked into the yard. Papa Sam sat among a group of men, a round, toothless little man with a turban that was almost as big as he was. He didn’t rise to greet me; men in this culture don’t usually stand when women make an entrance. But several of the other men stood, greeted me warmly in English, and clasped my hands. They were all General Dostum’s men, whom Sam knew from his fighting days. They visited our house often. I had considered it a major turning point in our marriage when Sam had introduced me to them a year before, then invited me to sit and have tea with them in our living room. When an Afghan man entertains his friends, his wife usually stays closeted in another room until the men leave. I knew it was an honor when Sam introduced me to Dostum and his men, because Dostum was Sam’s hero. These men were like family to Sam. I figured that this was nearly as important as an introduction to his real family, that it was as good as declaring his love for me to the world.

As the men settled down again and I took my place on a toushak, they switched back into speaking Uzbek. I couldn’t follow any of the conversation, and I couldn’t smoke with Papa Sam there, so I picked forlornly at a biscuit. I could tell that Sam was furious because his friends had probably overheard our quarrel and were assuming that he didn’t know how to control his wife. Well, fine, I thought: they should know that by now. I saw Papa Sam steal an occasional look at me, and I wondered if he recognized me. I had actually met him when Sam and I still lived in the Peacock Manor guesthouse. He had shown up for a surprise visit that time, too. Neither Sam nor I was ready to tell our families about our marriage, so we played an exhaustingly silly game of hide-and-seek for the few weeks that Papa Sam was there. We were constantly ducking in and out of rooms so that his father wouldn’t see us together. We told him that I was a visiting teacher working with the school, and he shook his head with alarm that I was living by myself. I almost blew my cover by making him breakfast one morning when the cook didn’t show up. If he remembered me, he was probably puzzled that I was still hanging around his son. I hoped he didn’t think I was a prostitute.

It seemed that one of Dostum’s men had been talking for an hour straight. Old war stories, I thought to myself miserably. It was clear that Sam wasn’t going to suddenly stand up and introduce me as his wife tonight. Equally clear that all these men were probably going to ignore me for another three hours. All I wanted to do was crawl into my bed, but I didn’t know what kind of story Sam had concocted about me this time; I didn’t even know where I was supposed to sleep. I sighed, and Papa Sam looked at me quizzically. He said something to one of the other men, and the tenor of the conversation suddenly changed. All the men were looking at me and chiming in with comments. One of them pointed to Sam and then to me. Sam looked down at the grass, but Papa Sam smiled.

“So now he knows,” one of Dostum’s men said with a big grin. “He says welcome to the family. He says he has always known, even two years ago, but he was waiting for Sam to tell him.”

Sam turned bright red, and I started to cry. Then I walked over to Papa Sam’s toushak and dropped at his feet. I took his hand and kissed it, then placed it on my head. Sam had once told me that his children did this to greet him. “My own father died four years ago,” I told Papa Sam in my bad Dari. “I am hoping that you will be my father now. I have been wanting this ever since I married your son.”

He put his hand on my hair and stroked it. I continued to cry, and when I looked up, I saw that he had tears running down his grizzled cheeks. I saw that Sam and even some of the scarred old mujahideen were wiping away tears. I was finally Sam’s wife. I was finally out of the closet.

The next morning, Papa Sam was waiting for me in the living room. He had taken down all the pictures from the walls so that he could pray without having to look at
haraam
images of animate things. He must have shuddered when he took down my painting of naked cherubs. He was ready now for his son’s wife to make his morning tea. He told me that he had gold jewelry for me back in Saudi Arabia. He hoped I would come soon to meet the whole family, including the first wife and her eight children. Or maybe he could bring them all to Kabul to meet me and see the compound! He said he thought it was a good thing that Sam had taken a second wife, and he hoped I would bear him many sons.

I drove Papa Sam to a local coffeehouse. The two of us sat down with our caramel-flavored lattes. He looked with interest at the people around us, but I didn’t notice them. I was contemplating all the joys and demands of being a true Afghan daughter-in-law with no small measure of terror.

THE END ALMOST CAME
a few weeks later. Not the end of my marriage; that drama continues on and on. But it was nearly the end of the Kabul Beauty School.

We had a good-size crowd in the salon that day. All the girls had customers. Robina was blow-drying an American woman who had about ninety pounds of long blond hair. Mina was giving a pedicure to a French baker who had just moved to Kabul, and Bahar was giving a manicure to an Afghan-American woman who was working for the United Nations. Topekai was cutting the hair of a lawyer who was getting paid big bucks to suffer another summer in Kabul. Baseera was upstairs giving someone else a massage. I was trying to talk a missionary into highlights.

Suddenly I heard footsteps pounding along the driveway and looked outside to see Sam flying by the windows. Then he was inside the beauty building and flung open the door. “They’re going to put us in jail!” he panted.

All my beauticians and my customers stopped what they were doing to turn around. Sam was leaning against the doorframe, his cell phone crushed to his heart. His shirt was hanging out, and even his sunglasses were askew. I had been trimming the nape of the missionary’s neck. She pulled away from me slightly, as if she no longer trusted me with the razor.

“What are you talking about?” I don’t think I’d ever seen Sam so upset.

“They want you to pay twenty thousand dollars in back taxes.”

“I don’t have to pay taxes,” I told him. “I’m an NGO.”

“No taxes on beauty school.” He waved his arm at the room. “Taxes on salon!”

“It’s all the same thing,” I explained. “I fund the school with money from the salon, which is a teaching salon anyway. There are no profits.”

“They say you are enterprise.”

“I’m a
social
enterprise. It’s in my NGO contract.”

Topekai’s lawyer jumped into the conversation. “I’ll e-mail you a document about social-enterprise tax law. Sounds like you’re operating in accordance with it, though.”

Sam ignored her. “Debbie, they say they stand outside watching everyone who goes in and out. They’re not playing.”

It took a few days to figure out what was going on. I still don’t completely understand it. It seemed that some governmental entity had decided to assess me for what they claimed were thousands of dollars in yearly profits. This kind of shakedown happens every now and then in Afghanistan because laws and taxes and all the staples of government are pretty new. There is also widespread and growing distrust of foreign NGOs because the Afghans don’t understand why everything is still such a wreck when so much money is supposedly pouring into the country for reconstruction. Money wasn’t pouring into the beauty school, and I could show anyone who was interested a survey demonstrating that our students’ family incomes rose 400 percent after graduation. But even though the claim against us was bogus, it would still hurt. Sam and I would have to make an appearance at the same court that tried people who made false passports and counterfeit money. The beauty school would suddenly become the talk of the town, but in a bad way. The damage to our reputation would reverberate even if we won our case. Fathers and husbands wouldn’t allow their daughters and wives to attend the beauty school anymore. And if we lost the case—because that was also a possibility, even though we were in full accordance with current tax law—I would go to jail for two years. Sam would go to jail for five years.

I consulted with friends who were lawyers in Kabul. The consensus was that if we waited until we were formally charged, we would lose everything. So we took the time-honored legal recourse of a modest payment to someone who promised that the charges against us would make their way into an incinerator.

I was able to breathe again, but only briefly.

As I write this, in May 2006, both the Kabul Beauty School and the Oasis Salon are closed up tight. There have been widespread rioting, burning, and looting in the city following a tragic accident in which U.S. military vehicles crashed into civilian cars and killed several people. As an angry crowd gathered, U.S. troops and Afghan police fired—over the heads of the crowd, they said—but some civilians were killed and many more were injured. Some foreign NGOs were burned down. The Karzai government imposed a nightly curfew similar to the one in effect shortly after the Taliban were driven out. I haven’t seen the city this tense—or the residents this angry and frightened—in all my years here. Our compound is safe because General Dostum’s men arrived shortly after the rioting began. Their presence ensured that we wouldn’t be burned down or overrun, but it was hard to get used to the idea of bearded men and machine guns taking up the space that my beauty students usually occupy.

I can only hope that calm will return and that all the people who want to help rebuild this country can continue doing just that. The Kabul Beauty School’s part in all this seems small in comparison with many of the other efforts, but it is nevertheless huge. I know how the lives of the women who have come to the school have changed. Whereas they were once dependent on men for money, they are now earning and sharing their wages. Whereas they were once household slaves, they are now respected decision makers. Not all of them, not all of the time. But enough to give them and so many other women here hope.

Here’s a funny story. People often send product donations to the Kabul Beauty School, and I dutifully open every box and distribute the contents. Sometimes the donations are salon products. Those are always welcome, because we run through that stuff quickly—it’s not even easy to replenish our stock of good shampoo here. Sometimes the donations are intended for the girls themselves. We’ve gotten handbags, bolts of fabric, and knitted scarves, and the girls have appreciated all these gifts. But one day I let Laila open one of the boxes, and she carried it over to me with a perplexed look on her face.

“What are these things?” she asked as my other girls gathered around.

So I looked inside the box and saw—thongs! Lacy thongs, leather thongs, satin thongs, thongs with embroidered flowers. I bent over the box and laughed for a few minutes before trying to answer. “Knickers,” I finally said. “What ladies wear under their clothes.”

Laila translated for the others, and they all frowned. “No, Debbie,” Baseera said. “These can’t be knickers.”

“Yes, some women like to wear these. They think they look sexy.”

Topekai picked up a pair of the thongs and dangled them in the air. “They don’t cover anything.”

“That’s kind of the point. There’s a little coverage in front, but the back is thin like this so you don’t have panty lines under your clothes.”

“This part goes between—?” Mina patted her bottom, and I nodded.

They hooted about those thongs for weeks. They threw them at one another and occasionally pulled them over their heads when they were feeling really silly. I think the housekeeper finally threw them in the fire. Now, that’s an example of a wrongheaded attempt to help Afghan women.

But not too long ago I went with a group of friends to Istalif, the village in the mountains where they make the beautiful turquoiseglazed porcelain. We wandered around looking at mugs and platters and pitchers, and each of us bought a few things from the merchants who sit in the sun and wait for visitors. We stopped at one of the old warlord palaces nearby and visited a greenhouse full of geraniums where the gardener posed for a photograph between a huge poster of Ahmed Shah Massoud and a red heart that had been painted on the wall. We wandered near a spring that Sam claimed had healing properties, and he scooped up a jug of its water to take home.