The Darling of Kandahar

by Felicia Mihali

  Y

  In the afternoon, I got another message from Yannis:

  Re: Taliban.

  As we are talking about people, I know what your next question will be. I know you are dying to learn more about the Taliban’s bravery, if these turbaned men are as cruel and savage as people in the West believe. I have a day off, so I will go ahead of your curiosity.

  People tell the most incredible legends of the Afghan warriors’ bravery, while for me their endurance is just a form of survival. They are as resistant as camels: able to fast an entire week so that they can then wolf down ten meals at once when they can afford it. What drives me crazy is not knowing much about the guy who is crawling along walls or blind fences. Who is Communist and who is Taliban among them? What regime did he serve? Or what faction of what regime? What characterizes this country is that within the same government there are as many rivals as tribes. We kid ourselves that we can reconcile them to one another, for what they hate most is the idea of living in peace with people in the next village or the nearby valley. Our efforts are just another big game that nobody takes seriously.

  Communism, Capitalism, Islamism. Every doctrine loses its strength in these places, as every time people embrace new ideals it’s only by necessity, not by conviction. Moderates are rare, as when these people embrace faith, they go to extremes. Among the villagers, there are veterans from all the wars, from all the conflicts that have devastated this place over the past quarter of a century.

  There are people who believed and fought for Communism, then afterwards changed sides to fight with the mujahedeen chasing away the Soviets, alongside the Pakistanis. Later on, it was the Taliban’s turn. When religious students from Pakistani madrassas arrived, people quickly joined their ranks, as the fundamentalists were able to deliver them from the cruel mujahedeen who were raping and killing women in the middle of the street within sight of everyone. Men let their beards grow and put black turbans on their heads. Nevertheless, the charm did not last long. The rapes stopped, but the new masters started whipping women whenever they saw the top of their shoes.

  After the defeat of the Taliban, men shaved their beards and started learning English to do business with strangers. We are surrounded by friends and traitors. The worst thing is we can neither hate them nor chase them away, as they do nothing wrong. They act according to their nature and their customs. Tomorrow, my friend Rasul will betray me for sure. He will deliberately tell the Taliban the hour and the route taken by our convoy. And if I have a slight chance to escape alive, I cannot even be angry with him.

  Finally, we are not here to crush the Taliban, and there are not any Taliban who would defeat us. It is this country that bests us, as no foreign government can rule it. We hold temporary control over their towns, while the rest of the territory remains under the authority of locals obeying ancestral laws that transcend any foreign domination. This hostile land is ungovernable. Within their different tribes nobody thinks it important to live and build together. Life is so difficult that mere survival is the greatest achievement. Nationality and identity have no great value. What matters is to eat and be warm.

  The Taliban are a vivid incarnation of this country, which was never a colony, despite the fact that Europe was always present at its borders. Because of the spirit that governs people like these, who are all too normal here, strangers have always been depicted as stupid, from generation to generation, as they returned to their own countries with their tails between their legs. Today, we are the stupid ones, defeated by mountains, by cold, by the desert.

  Y

  At university, things were getting worse each day. My fame was the problem, especially since Maclear’s had suggested I go to Afghanistan to encourage the Canadian troops. My classmates realized this story was getting serious, and I had to agree.

  The news did make me realize how much I wanted to see Yannis. The distance that kept us far from each other and the time before he got to come home on leave had become unbearable. I wanted to see this man, look him in the eyes, and tell him about myself. Everything that happened so far seemed so fake: I was ashamed and I wished all this would stop once and for all. I was longing to talk about myself, as he was able to talk about himself at war. I had had enough of being a pin-up girl. I wanted to become a woman loved by a soldier. The fact that Maclear’s took the initiative was maybe a good sign.

  When I showed my mother the item in the magazine, her face changed on the spot. She said, “Tell Yannis about this. I think the magazine gets there almost at once.”

  I did what my mother suggested. His two days of silence were not due to a mission but because he was feeling bitter. My mother had figured that out. In a very short message he asked me if I wanted to become today’s Marilyn Monroe, the sweetheart of the Canadian troops.

  My mother wasn’t surprised by his reaction. “He feels abandoned. You belong to him. He’s jealous but he doesn’t have the courage to accept it, as he thinks you will make fun of him. At war, men are much more possessive, as they are fighting for values prized by everybody in the world: peace and family. Have you ever heard of a soldier pinning up photographs of his wife for all his comrades to see?”

  For the first time in my life, I regretted not having a woman friend. Talking to someone of your own kind becomes urgent in these moments of doubt. I wanted to listen to my own voice telling someone I love Yannis, that I want to touch him so much or just rub the collar of his shirt. For the first time, I could not share my thoughts with my mother, as what she always told me was just, “Wait for him to come back.”

  I replied to Yannis that the Maclear’s story was not my idea, and I had no intention of parading in front of the Canadian army, dressed up in a miniskirt. I told him to forget this incident and instead, to tell me if he had any friends among the locals.

  Re: Friends?

  Yes, I have a friend, if I can call him that. The reason he is interested in me remains mysterious if not scary to me. I presume his curiosity about a foreign soldier hides intentions other than those he articulates. This small man, with evasive eyes, seems to me to be different from one day to the next. His attitude towards me is probably modified by secret events that happen in his village during the night, in the back of shadowy, unfurnished rooms. We are far from understanding what happens in his family or his neighborhood, what their fears are, and what they know about the Taliban, who continuously harass and threaten them.

  Why do I still hesitate to call him a friend despite our daily conversations and the warmth he shows me? Because in a friendship the two people have to be equal. Wine is not the same as water or oil. And we are those different elements with different colours and densities which try to mix and make a drinkable beverage. What is unbearable to Rasul is that, in his opinion, I have no God. If I do not trust Allah, I should hurry to find out my own divinity, as quickly as possible – Buddha, Jesus, whoever. He is convinced that those small gods exist for real, but they are not his own.

  Rasul is 22 years old. The day I met him for the first time, I told myself he looked a little bit like a fool, a cruel fool. His gestures were supple, like those of a panther, and his apparent stillness was a trick to hide the moment when he would attack me. In his placid eyes I could read what he was going to tell me one day about one of his friends, a mujahedeen veteran: “He washed his hands in the blood of our invader.”

  What disturbs Rasul most is my overseas life. He wants to know what else a human being could do, if he does not take care of animals, work in the fields, or feed a brood of kids. For him, what Westerners are good at is devoting their lives to manufacturing cars. Does this make them happy? Not necessarily, I assure him each time he asks me. And he agrees with this, as he believes people cannot be happy in big cities. The West is evil; he is convinced of this. I acknowledge that in the city where I live people tell very good lies. This confidence creates peace between us for a while.


  What I appreciate most is his apparent modesty, even knowing that this attitude is entirely fake. I am simply not used to a man openly manifesting his ignorance, his shame of not knowing things, and his desire to improve himself. Unfortunately, language is a big barrier between us, as the few words he has learned from Canadian soldiers are not enough to allow him to express his ideas properly or ask questions. In his attitude I see how he has made peace with his life as it is, so hopeless and lacking in comfort. His face, still young, loses its human brilliance to acquire instead the pallor of an inanimate object. Sometimes, under the cruel light of the sun, his cheeks look like snakeskin, while at other times they are more like dry tree bark.

  I have to go now.

  Y

  I was grateful that he was saying no more about Maclear’s blunder. I knew, though, that Yannis was terribly hurt, and that jealousy bit into his soul. Despite my denial, I think he still believed I was the one who had initiated this idea. And he was right to doubt my sincerity, as even my mother looked at me suspiciously.

  Would I have agreed to march in front of Canadian soldiers who had only had pictures of naked women to look for months past? He surely knew that every woman’s mind is dominated by the desire to see a herd of males around her, fighting for her charms. In nature, females always choose among those who battle one another for the right to get them pregnant. Why have people reduced a woman’s chance of selecting the most handsome man? Yannis was right to mistrust me.

  What about him though? Did he not have any secret admirers around? I did not wait for him to continue his account about his friend Rasul. I asked him instead to tell me stories about Afghan women.

  Re: Women

  In our garrison people often talk about cases involving women mutilated by their husbands. Why do you think this kind of story occupies a soldier’s mind more than others? Because in this kind of tragedy, repeated for the benefit of every new recruit, there is a secret desire for them to save the Beauty and to deliver her from the Beast. Their imagination makes up this soap opera in which they play the charming prince, buckled under the weight of their ammunition. They dream of taking these desperate beauties out of the hands of their bearded and primitive aggressors.

  In their stories, though, the lascivious women’s bodies are hardly dressed, or they wear some Scheherazade-like transparent veil. They voluntarily forget the precarious life they lead, the worn burkas and dusty dresses they put on every day, as what this country most lacks is water. I have read that the Afghan people are very clean and that they like washing several times a day, but I wonder how and when, as water is as rare as gold, and it is difficult to get it even to cook.

  You can guess that I am not innocent either of this fantasizing. The desert and the mountains feed these sick imaginings, as our minds try to annihilate a frightening reality.

  In spite of all, I think we are here for Afghan women. As for concrete stories, believe me I know nobody personally. I can only reproduce what my friend Rasul tells me on this matter. And for sure he tells me some exaggerated versions to amuse me, to exchange information with me, and to practice his English. However, what is normal for Rasul is dark and unbearable to me. What I understand from my friend is that there is really no comparison between our two worlds. This is why sometimes I feel we are here just for these women. From all I see around me, it is their life that seems the most horrible. What they undergo every day makes me violent and ready to provide a weak justification for each new murder my lads commit.

  The harsh reality is that we came from afar just to watch them through sunglasses, as we can do nothing. And the truth is that women must liberate themselves before they can free themselves from the tyranny of man.

  I’m going to tell you Hamid’s story, one of my other local acquaintances. He is a driver for some foreigners here. This does not prevent him from doing all kinds of other jobs in order to make ends meet. He often comes to offer me Afghan jewellery weighing more than a kilo, as it’s made of raw lapis lazuli. He lives alone as his wife is in jail. He married her when she was 14, but after a year she was imprisoned for adultery. He does not want to provide any other details, except the few English words he knows best: “Women, bad, very bad.”

  Rasul however knows more of this story, and he tells me the truth is quite different. He says that Hamid’s family, his father and two other brothers, have lived off their women’s prostitution. This started a long time ago, under the Soviet period, when his mother was raped by a mujahedeen commander during a raid against the Red army. This tragic event, however, prompted the father to get into the sex trade before he was killed by another mujahedeen. The boys had to carry on this business in order to survive the famine.

  When Hamid got married, he asked his wife to replace his mother, who was now too old to attract men. Instead of obeying him, she called the police and denounced him. The Taliban, who were by now in control, arrested Hamid and imprisoned him, but they later freed him. Things were much worse for his little wife. Publicly whipped and stoned for having stood up to her family, she too was thrown into jail. After the Taliban’s defeat and departure, prisoners were released, but no one knew what had become of Hamid’s wife.

  I think he would very much like to find his wife, but only to punish her in his own way. Prisons are never a solution for women, and everybody avoids putting them in jail, as this serves nobody. Women are punished here for what seems to be the worst sin, zina, which implies sex in all possible versions. Be it broken marriages, violence, prostitution – everything comes under the umbrella of zina, for which any woman can be repudiated or killed without due process.

  When it comes to sex, women are never in the right when they’re up against men. And if a woman has sinned, why put her in jail, where nobody can reach and punish her as she deserves? An ordeal does not have to be individual but is sometimes collective, as this is the only way of reestablishing the social order. A woman who is not within a man’s reach does not really pay for her mistakes.

  Despite what she has suffered, Hamid considers his wife remains unpunished. Her own version of the facts does not matter at all, and everybody agrees she should have stayed in the village regardless. Hamid cannot bear to feel humiliated, which is why he always tells the story of adultery, which absolves him and saves him from providing some of the other details.

  Hamid does not seem a bad man and, though everybody knows his story, nobody hates him. In fact, what right do you have hating or despising anyone here? People barricade themselves behind the fact that these are local customs, and no one goes any farther. My buddy Simon is the only one who dares ask Hamid for details, but this curiosity about sordid things angers Hamid. Despite his interest in maintaining good relationships with us, he shouts at Simon, “Dirty, Dirty.” They do things, but at least they do not talk about them. They hide their shame, if any, under silence. They try to heal themselves by keeping quiet.

  In our garrison we don’t have much to say about women whose life is made hell by other women within their own family, such as sisters, aunts, mothers-in-law and even mothers. The harm women inflict on each other is unthinkable. What shocked me was the story Rasul told me one day about one of his sisters-in-law, aged 16, who had just given birth. In fact, he wanted to impress me with his relative’s heroism, especially as she had delivered a boy: if she had had a girl, her suffering would not have warranted the same admiration. The fact that his brother was now father to a boy was reassuring. Rasul hoped this would help end his arguments with his wife.

  He told me admiringly about this young woman’s pain. For me this was in fact an unappealing picture of hospitals, of the doctors and nurses working there, because sometimes they offer no assistance to women who struggle alone like animals, under other future mothers’ eyes, waiting their turn to give birth.

  When a woman is considered bad, like Hamid’s wife, there is even less compassion: and often young brides only
ten years old die during miscarriages with no one at their side. Few women pity their unfortunate sisters who are beaten and obliged to immolate themselves to escape violence. They too believe that only bad women have a bad destiny.

  Fathers are not to blame when they pay their family’s debts by selling their daughters or when they marry them off to men twice their age or to men who are already married. Once the dice are thrown and a woman’s destiny is settled, what happens next – plotting, violence, suicide – is all her own fault. Older women share the same conviction as their husbands that young girls are sexually insatiable, tempting men and inciting them to sin. They too would tell you that that is the rule in their country and everybody should respect it. No wonder the government uses foreign aid to build more prisons, bigger than the older ones. If there is any progress here it is that nowadays women are put into jail instead of delivering them to tribal mercy.

  Rasul told me his own cousin Latifa’s story. He asked me if in my country women have to bleed during their first night with their husband. Bluntly put, is it mandatory for a bride to be a virgin? He already knew the answer, but he wanted to show me, comparatively, how morals are purer here. How could a man be content with somebody else’s leftovers? Obviously, a woman’s hymen is a warrant for moral purity.

  So, his cousin Latifa was married at 12 years of age. The auspices were good as her future husband was quite young, not yet married, neither ugly nor too violent. Nevertheless, Latifa had the bad luck not to bleed during her deflowering. As it happens, one of the doctors temporarily working in the village tried to convince the two men in the family that this act sometimes happens without causing bleeding. He even explained to them that there were seven types of vagina and in two cases out of seven women do not bleed during their first sexual act. Rasul was astonished by this doctor trying to trick the father and the groom. Obviously the two men were not that stupid as to believe this nonsense about seven vaginas. Lately, people had had enough bad experiences with doctors educated abroad, encouraged by foreigners to encroach upon their traditions.