The Underground Girls of Kabul (37 page)

Even so, he argues, the money he got was rarely enough for the sacrifice he has made: suffering questions and humiliation from others over how he could allow his wife such freedom—to work outside the house and to mingle with other men.

Most of his money is invested now, in a relative’s nut business,
and that money is his alone and she is never to question him about it. Over the years, his compensation has gradually increased, and rightfully so. What’s more, the relocation of the family to Kabul is saving Azita money, he points out. His bimonthly trips to the province to see his first wife and eldest girl were costly. But now, for her to just end those payments? It’s unacceptable, he tells her, and he will have none of her excuses.

Perhaps she is lying about the lack of money? She is hiding it, right? At first, it’s a question, but he soon says that he is actually sure of it: She has money saved somewhere. All parliamentarians do—he has seen how they live. Azita’s new washing machine shrinks next to their cars, villas, and vacations abroad. It must be that she prefers to keep the extra profits to herself instead of making good on their agreement. She can keep denying it, but he won’t be fooled. He may lack an education, but he knows
her
.

Azita finally protests, offended at the suggestion of deception. If she had the money, she truly would hand it over, she tells him. What he accuses her of—having money stashed away somewhere—is particularly insulting. She is not one of those corrupt politicians who takes kickbacks and bribes for passing on suggestions of who should get contracts, or what minister to support with a vote of confidence. Were she that person, Azita retorts, surely they, too, could have owned a house in Dubai by now, or even in a European capital? At least they could have owned something in Kabul. But they are renters. She worked for one of the poorest provinces in the country, so how dare he compare her to those who pillage and steal?

But the more Azita speaks, the more she infuriates her husband.

“Shut your mouth or I will make it silent,” he warns her. He will not hear of any more. He reminds her of how simple it would be for him to shame her, ending any of her political ambitions for good: “I will go to people and say you are not a good wife and that you have relations with other men.”

Azita has received variations on that threat before.

In the past, the solution was always straightforward: more money.
She would give him an even larger chunk of her salary. If she was planning a trip abroad, she would also give him an extra wad of cash to compensate for the time she would be gone.

Those trips always caused arguments—like the time her flight from Dubai was delayed and she was forced to spend a night at the airport. He had gone on for weeks about it. Sometimes accusations were combined: She is having an affair and she is hiding money from him. Or she is giving the money to the man she is having an affair with. With a mix of apologies, flattery, and, in the end, more money, Azita has usually managed to appease him. But now, when she has no money to offer, their argument cannot be easily resolved. What little she kept for herself she has already spent. There is no money, she tells him again.

Being accused of having an affair also disturbs her more than usual. After thirteen years, he should know better than that. When would she even have time for an affair? When she is not arguing with election officials, she is trying to find a job. Or cooking. Or taking care of the children.

How about if he offered some support, instead of repeating these same insulting accusations, she tosses back at her husband. As the mother of his children, she should at least be treated with some respect. Using veiled ways of saying she is a prostitute should be beneath him.

It’s not like he is perfect, either, Azita blurts out, suddenly losing her forced cool: “According to the Koran, a wife can leave her husband if he does not support her. I am still supporting you.”

She looks at him before she goes for what is meant to be the final line of their argument: “There is no husband here.”

He seems surprised when she says it. It is a graver insult than most things she has launched at him before: to call him something other than a man and a husband. When he responds, he parses each word: “You are nothing. I
made
you an MP.”

“So do it,” she tells him, still defiant. “I do not care. Destroy me if you want. Because it was never you. It was all me.”

That is when her face hits the wall.

Her eyes close as her knees fold. Covering her head with her arms and hands, she crouches on the floor below him, turning toward the wall, with only her neck exposed. It is where the blows fall next.

Now she has a choice: Beg him to stop. Or just stay silent until he tires. She tries to calculate where the children might be, and how much they can hear. They will see her later; there is nothing she can do about that. But it is better that they do not see or hear them in this exact moment.

Her husband’s voice from above is almost soothing. “I will support my family. In the village. In Badghis. When we go back there I will support you all. We will not have to worry about money.”

She knows what he means. He has mentioned it before: the bride price for their daughters. It will secure the family for years. If war returns, the girls will need to be married off sooner anyway. It’s not good for a family to have five daughters in the house. And, as he is fond of saying, she keeps forgetting that he is a simple man—all the luxuries of this Kabul existence are not for him anyway. They would all be better off in the province where a man can provide for his family. And get some respect at home.

“M
AYBE
I
SHOULD
just end this stupid life.”

It is a strange thing for Azita to say, even after spending another night with the wet towel on her forehead.

Her style has always been different from both Afghan men and women in this regard—she does not tell her stories with exaggerated dramatic flair, involving elements of potential death at each turn.

We are at a small Kabul café. With the turmoil at the house, I am no longer invited to visit, but we have carved out some time after another meeting for which she gained permission from her husband to attend. We are the only guests outside, in a dusty garden full of plastic chairs. Wearing “big makeup”—her code for covering bruises—has become a regular occurrence now.

Over the past two years, despite both her own and the country’s setbacks, Azita has been the constant optimist. But today she cries,
slowly, without much sound. Embarrassed, she turns her head away each time her eyes fill up with tears and she quickly wipes them away.

As always, when I don’t know what else to do, I try to sound matter-of-fact: “It is only a turn of phrase for you, right? ‘This stupid life’?”

She says nothing, which usually indicates there’s something she’s not saying—something contrary to the confident image she wants to project. It is hard enough to admit that domestic violence has returned to her family.

“Have you ever tried to kill yourself?” I ask.

Her eyes flicker and turn down to the table.

It was early in her marriage, in Badghis. She had panic attacks that developed into seizures, when she would go catatonic. They usually lasted only minutes, but sometimes longer. The first such episode came right after the wedding. It began with sharp chest pain, followed by shortness of breath. After that, her hands and feet would go cold, and she could not move them. Nor could she speak or move her head. With time, she found the attacks would subside when her feet and hands were rubbed. A doctor also gave her phenobarbital, an antiseizure medicine. She was newly pregnant with the twins, and, following instructions, she took two a day.

One day, she took twelve.

It was a watermelon that pushed her over the edge, or more accurately, the fantasy of one. She was locked inside the house, thinking of the watermelons in the field outside in the family’s plot. She could not stand most foods, but she craved that cool, crisp melon. But they were outside the locked door where she could not go. And none were for her, anyway; they were to be sold at the market.

The twelve tablets put her in a deep sleep for two hours.

When she woke up again she immediately apologized to everyone for mistakenly taking too much medicine. How stupid of her. She is still not sure why she took them; maybe it was indeed a mistake. But she never wants to revisit that low again. It was the weakest her spirit had ever been. That she was so close to abandoning her daughters before they had even been born is her greatest shame.

She looks up at me and apologizes for her initial remark—of course she does not want to end her life. She really does not. But it does feel as though there is something wrong with her mind these days. Where she used to be able to think of solutions, she now feels blocked. With the increased insecurity in Kabul, with the foreigners leaving, the parliament still in chaos: She always saw a way before, but it feels harder now. Or maybe she is getting older? The thought of Afghanistan descending into chaos after foreign troops leave is something she cannot even contemplate.

“I think maybe I should have left,” she suddenly says.

She has never said that before. Hardly even thought it, in a real way. Divorce was just never an option. Just like Shukria, Azita knows seeking a divorce would not be in her favor—especially not with the accusations of infidelity, which could land her in prison. And she would most likely lose her children.

But the “leaving” Azita refers to is of a different kind. Unlike for many of her colleagues in politics, the thought of living life abroad after the foreign troop withdrawal has never held much allure for her. The concept was almost unspeakable for an idealist who always swore she would stick by her country and its future.

“When I was an MP I had lots of friends and contacts. Visas were never a problem. I could have gone anywhere. The children could travel on my passport, even. Now I just have a tourist passport. I was so busy with my work. I feel so guilty for them now. I was so selfish. I was thinking of my country and its future. And my work. I should have only taken care of my family.”

In wanting to create a better future for her daughters she had always imagined it would be in an Afghanistan she had helped reform. Trying to teach her daughters resilience, strength, and pride for their country, she also wanted them to be proud of
her
for the effort. To then plan for a comfortable exit abroad like several of her colleagues seemed so … hypocritical.

Before leaving for campaign training in the United States a few years ago, she had joked with the twins about seeking asylum there. It was already a popular topic among her colleagues, back then. Several
of the other MPs had sent their children to study, or to apply for asylum in Europe, so they could eventually travel back and forth and get better educations. But Azita assured her daughters that she would, of course, always return to them, to Kabul and to their family. Besides, she had no dreams of America. Her dreams included only Afghanistan. She had felt pleased with herself after giving her daughters that speech, thinking she had taught them a little something about character and national pride.

But on one recent evening, Benafsha, the quieter of the twins, had suddenly spoken up after another suicide bombing not far from their house. She reminded Azita of the conversation about foreign countries and how she had said they would always stay in Afghanistan. “You made your choice, Mother,” Benafsha said. Now, none of them would ever leave.

It was in that moment when Azita’s image of herself as a selfless patriot began to shift, replacing it with that of a selfish careerist. A sense of shame came over her. She was someone who would choose her country over her daughters, and they had always known it. She had not seen it herself until it was too late. She had taken a chance on Afghanistan with the new foreigners and had believed that it could get better. She had reached for something impossible, and she had been a fool to do it. Maybe it had always been unrealistic that Afghanistan would change much in her lifetime, and she had gambled away the lives of her daughters on it.

“Are you still thinking of leaving?”

“No. Never. I could never leave them,” Azita says. “But maybe I was very stupid before.”

She must carry on for the sake of her parents, too. Her father’s decision to marry her off will stand in war or peace, whether she is in parliament or not, and regardless of her relationship with her husband.

“I would like to meet him,” I say. “The man who holds all this power, always and from the beginning. Do you think he would speak to me?”

“Probably no.”

Azita

N
O REGULAR AIRLINE
flies to Azita’s home province, and the roads snaking up to the northwestern corner of Afghanistan are known to be riddled with homemade explosives and criminal gangs.

Foreigners, on the other hand, can travel anywhere for free on UN flights that run on an ad hoc timetable based on when any of their more prominent officials need to take off. A ticket, or “travel authorization,” for Setareh, who holds an Afghan passport, comes at the price of my attending a half-day lecture at an air-conditioned UN office on the suffering of Afghan women. After that, we will spend the next day hanging around the United Nations’ private terminal at Kabul airport, a hangar filled with aid workers and diplomats where planes randomly take off outside.

The women waiting to fly somewhere all look foreign-born, and all are in the very distinctive ethnic war-chic resort style rarely seen outside fortified expatriate compounds and never on regular Afghan women. Long, flowing silk tunics in light colors are paired with delicate, embroidered head scarves, slightly slipped back, Benazir Bhutto–style, allowing strands of expertly blow-dried and highlighted hair to escape. Exquisite antique Kuchi-nomad silver jewelry
once made by hand for tribal weddings in the provinces clatters on wrists and necks. The standard male diplomat wardrobe is made up of different gradations of khaki. Some are are sockless in loafers and pair the pants with navy, gold-buttoned blazers. Most of the elegant foreigners carry small point-and-shoot cameras to document their work in the field. Their accompanying “body men” are about double the size of any diplomat, and carry German automatic weapons strapped onto their backs.