It was 4.30pm. We didn’t open for another thirty minutes and so I hurried to the bar, steeling myself to eject some menacing interloper who was threatening to violate my manager in a most unsavoury and sadistic manner. I arrived to see a huge, hulking, bearded fellow, undoubtedly a Knuckle Dragger, holding Tamim in a headlock. But Tamim was laughing, and the other boys who had gathered to watch the spectacle all looked highly amused.
Then, without releasing his grip, the early-bird assailant turned to me and smiled. He had one of those smiles that are impossible to resist—killer, incongruously cute and all-consuming. It radiated from the tips of his size-seventeen feet to the top of his faraway head.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Al. You must be Trudi.’
He let Tamim go and swivelled his full frame to face me. It was like staring up a mountain and I had no doubt that he could indeed snap his best friend’s hips if that was his bent. He made an obvious show of looking me up and down.
‘Nice. You got a boyfriend?’
‘Umm . . . yeah. He’s back in Australia.’
‘What a waste. Welcome to hell, gorgeous. You need anything, just come to me.’
He reached across and grasped my hand in his massive paw, switching on that excessively brilliant smile again. I was hooked. I instinctively knew then that Al would become my best friend too.
I wonder now how I would have managed those first few weeks without him. Al turned up every afternoon at four-thirty. He took his usual spot at the end of the bar and didn’t leave until closing time. He drank all night but never seemed to get drunk, and it was only in recounting his horrendous hangovers that he gave himself away.
‘Took some Koreans up in a Black Hawk today. I was so twisted, I was hurling chunks inside my flak jacket.’
He was a Knuckle Dragger and served in the US army for twelve years before moving into private security. He was making an obscene amount of money and couldn’t comprehend why I’d chosen to come to Afghanistan to manage a bar. Still, he was immensely happy that I had and was pleased that I wasn’t a Do-Gooder. ‘Those stuck-up bitches are happy for me to guard their lives during the day, but completely brush me off if they see me out at night.’
He wasn’t exaggerating; I watched it happen. One evening a group of gorgeous, well-groomed girls turned up to the bar demanding cocktails. Al recognised two of them from a job he had recently done and, after a couple of bracing beers, bounded up to the ladies to say hello. He was, in fact, quite charming—polite as he greeted them, with that smile just so. He took a seat at the edge of the group and engaged in some banter with the two women he knew . . . before they both resolutely turned their backs on him and continued chatting with their friends. He stared into his beer for a few minutes as Tamim and I struggled to contain our mirth, then he got up, casually made his way back to the bar and threatened to set us both on fire if we ever mentioned the matter again.
Paul was also rather underwhelmed by my new buddy and was at a loss to fathom my friendship with the ‘big, loud, scary guy’. I simply would reply that he was a good man. Al only served to reinforce my refusal to see the world in black and white: I was perfectly happy to float in the silty, grey waters, where a steroid-abusing man carrying a gun was the sweetest person I knew.
Al spoke excellent Dari (the most widely spoken language in Afghanistan) and the staff all loved him. He gave them lifts home from work, regularly hung out with Tamim after closing time, and spotted them cash when they were short. Their devotion to him was only marginally eclipsed by the adoration of the kids who lived or lingered in our neighbourhood. There was a handful of them who begged outside the bar each night, haranguing rich foreigners for loose change, and others who resided in the rundown mud houses on the edge of the suburb. My bedroom was at the front of our building and, if I wasn’t otherwise occupied, I’d station myself at the window to watch his arrival.
Kids would emerge from everywhere, calling his name as they raced towards him. He spoke to them in Dari so I didn’t really know what he was saying as he squatted down beside them in the dirt, but they listened to him like he was a prophet, edging closer and closer until he disappeared inside a ring of tiny, lice-riddled heads.
One day he turned up in his jeep. On cue the kids came running and he piled them all into his car before speeding away. When I asked Tamim about it, he told me Al was taking them to buy new shoes. Apparently he regularly bought clothes for the kids; also he dragged them home if they were still begging outside at midnight and had negotiated with many of their parents to pay for their schooling. He was a one-man aid agency, but when I tried to talk to him about it, he just shrugged it off and asked me when I was going to finally give in and fuck him like a porn star.
Al was a complex jumble of contradictions. He’d expose me to photos of his robustly erect penis on the pretext of showing me pictures of his pet monkey then, ten minutes later, confide in me across the bar about wanting to find true love, get married and have a dozen children. Sometimes he left the bar without saying goodbye because I had rebuffed one of his exceedingly lewd advances, but would text me an apology the very next morning with assurances that I was his best girl and that he would always be there for me.
He could be menacing and threatening (particularly to expat men who took to wearing the salwar kameez—a traditional Afghan outfit of loose pants and a long tunic), but his concern for me, his innate need to protect me, was genuine and touching.
My first Thursday night in charge of The Den was enormous and overwhelming. Patrons stood four deep at the bar as they waited to be served and we struggled to keep up with the endless cries for drinks. One very drunk man started hurling abuse from the back of the pack—just general venom about the standard of our service. I ignored him, but to little effect; then, when he started up again, Al drew himself up to his full height before turning to address him.
‘Hey buddy. You keep that up and I swear I will follow you out of here, hunt you down and blow your fucken head off!’
Al turned to me and winked, but I was too stunned to respond. I was genuinely horrified by this brutal declaration, but oddly moved by the sentiment that drove him to make it.
On another night, a first-time patron turned up, perched himself on a bar stool and downed two shots of vodka before slowly lowering his head and promptly passing out. Tamim was surprised that the guy had got drunk so quickly, but I figured he had more than booze running through his veins, and Al confirmed my suspicions.
‘He’s a smackie, gorgeous. Works for a security company down the road. If the police catch him in here like this, you’ll be in all sorts of trouble.’
He revived him with a couple of slaps around the face before dragging him back to his compound. Once there, Al demanded to see the guy’s boss and threatened to go to the police if he didn’t take charge of his junkie employee and sort him out.
‘It’s people like that who fuck it up for the rest of us,’ he later explained as I handed him a complimentary Corona by way of thanks. He looked warily at it—‘I fucken hate that shit’—before downing half of it in a single swig.
Once, when Colin got stuck in Kandahar, Al escorted me on the grog run. He had broken up fights, warned off lecherous men and showed stumbling drunks the door when they refused to accept it was closing time. But his finest moment came one evening when the police showed up at The Den.
I had no warning that they had even arrived. Using the staff entrance, two Afghan men in suits and two uniformed officers had sauntered into the bar and taken a table at the back of the room. Tamim quickly conferred with our sheepish security guard, who had trailed them inside before hurrying over to speak with them. I quietly implored Al to tell me what to do.
‘Do nothing. The guy with the beard is the local commander, but it’s obviously not a raid. He’s probably just trying to rattle you, hoping you might pay him to clear off.’
‘Shouldn’t I go and talk with him?’
‘No. In fact, don’t even make eye contact with him
. Just keep doing what you’re doing.’
What I was doing was completely freaking out so I chose to wipe down the counter instead. Tamim hurried back to retrieve cans of Red Bull.
‘You right, buddy?’ Al asked him.
‘I think so.’
‘Just relax, brother. They’ll get bored and soon leave.’
But they didn’t leave. They just sat in stony silence as most of our customers quietly slipped away. Tamim was seated with them. I tried to call Abdullah, but his phone was switched off, so, when Tamim came back to fetch another round of energy drinks, Al stepped up.
‘Here, let me carry those for you, brother.’
As he deposited the cans on their table, Al amped up the smile. Hand to his chest, he bowed and introduced himself, and they all actually stood to make his acquaintance. Al then settled himself into their sombre circle and proceeded to hold the floor.
I have no idea what tales he was telling that night, but the laughter never stopped; the commander continually gripped Al’s shoulder in an obvious show of appreciation. Finally they took their leave and as they stopped briefly at the bar to hug and kiss their new friend, the commander handed Al his business card. I poured myself a generous voddy and ensured there was a beer waiting for my saviour when he returned from the gate.
‘That old commander, Shakib, offered me a job. Can you believe that shit?’ Al laughed as he guzzled back his reward.
The kitchen boys would start arriving soon and I was still in bed, dozing off the morning’s dog-whistling wake-up call and last night’s late bedtime.
Al had been determined to take me out; I hadn’t been anywhere since my arrival and he figured that I needed a taste of Kabul nightlife beyond The Den. I’d resisted his overtures all evening but, after cashing up and locking the takings away in the safe, I discovered that he and Wayne—his new buddy, who had just started working with him—were still seated at the bar and waiting for me.
Tamim agreed that I should go, but he felt obliged to issue a few kindly instructions to Al before we jumped into the taxi.
‘You be a good man tonight, Al. Don’t start fighting and getting yourself into trouble. I am trusting you to look after my Trudi.’
‘My Trudi, buddy.’
‘You wish, Al.’
We headed to a Do-Gooder bar across town and the difference in clientele was markedly noticeable. Slight, fresh-faced fellows sipped on spirits and talked earnestly about their work, while posses of pretty young things gossiped and giggled and strenuously avoided making eye contact with the male members of my troupe. I was out on the ran-tan with my mates and my new life finally felt normal . . . But then it all turned a tad sideways.
On our way out, a French guy sporting a salwar kameez attempted to steal our taxi. Al grabbed him by the arm.
‘Listen here, you French fucker. I have to get this lady safely home. So you either back away from the taxi or I will crush your windpipe until your fucking eyes pop.’
As the poor bewildered chap scuttled back inside the bar, Al made an elaborate show of opening the car door and ushering me inside. He lowered his eyes and smiled like a child, expecting a pat on the head for his remarkable gallantry.
I thumped him on the arm instead, but still thanked him. Grey is grey is grey . . . and I’d accepted I couldn’t have him any other way.
I felt like the oldest person in the world. Just four weeks into my new life in Afghanistan, Paul came good on his promise of television work and I was now spending my days surrounded by youngsters, barely out of their teens, who positively skipped and giggled as they went about creating and producing some of the most successful shows on Afghan TV. If it weren’t for Paul’s greying sideburns, offering me some assurance that I wasn’t hopelessly out of place in this land of relentless youth, I would have most certainly considered high-tailing it home again, where I would take to a rocking chair and find contentment by boring all and sundry with my fabulous tales of managing a bar in Kabul.
I was now working for the country’s largest and most successful media company, Moby Media Group, established in 2003 by the Mohseni family. The three brothers and one sister who owned and primarily ran the business had no background in media and all had had successful careers in other fields back in Australia, before returning to Afghanistan soon after the fall of the Taliban with a view to helping rebuild their homeland.
I could only marvel at the balls and bravado it must have taken for these people to enter into a market where television had been banned for a solid decade and create their company from scratch. They started with a solitary radio station and now boasted two television channels, catering to both their Pashto- and Dari-speaking audiences (Pashto and Dari being the two official languages of Afghanistan), plus two radio stations, a production company, an IT company and some print media.
The first time I met Jahid Mohseni, the CEO, he was perched on top of a six-metre-high rickety bamboo ladder, adjusting the lights in the news studio—he was instant-crush material. I would label it a schoolgirl crush, but at 38 years old even he was younger than me.
There was a head office in Dubai but, from what I could gather, all the action happened here in Kabul. Jahid regularly worked sixteen-hour days, only returning to Dubai on the weekends to spend precious time with his family, while his brothers, Saad and Zaid, regularly flew in and out to help run the operation.
Paul told me tales of the death threats and government intimidation they endured for maintaining their progressive brand of television. When a young woman dared to let her headscarf slip and chanced a slight bum wiggle during an episode of Afghan Star (a singing show loosely based on the Idol franchise) there was a terrific uproar—conservative Afghans demanded that she die for her sins and the poor girl was forced to go into hiding. Journalists had been beaten and kidnapped; actresses were harassed in the streets. The Mohseni family’s worthy vision of a free and unfettered media landscape came at a high and terrifying price.
There were around a dozen expats working here for their enterprise and most of them were in business development. Paul, Jose and I constituted the production contingent and the remaining few were scattered across IT, finance and technical services. We represented a tiny foreign drop in an ocean of close to a thousand Afghan employees, with an average age of just twenty-four.
I had been hired to write an eight-part drama serial that was being funded by a foreign embassy. There were a lot of people interested in ‘changing the hearts and minds’ of the population through the media. Various embassies, the US State Department, aid agencies, ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force, the official name for the NATO-led mission), different arms of the UN and the Afghan government all used radio and television to preach about—amongst other things—corruption, good governance, reconciliation, security, insurgency, education, democracy, health and women’s rights.
This new serial, called Salam, was a vehicle for counter-narcotics messaging. A basic narrative had been written: in it a young man, addicted to heroin, was unwittingly used to blow up a bus and so killed his sister. He did a runner to his father’s home village and, with the guidance of a mystical, all-knowing elder, found redemption. But that was as far as the original writer ever got with it. When I came on board the project was lagging just a little—in truth it should have been broadcast six months before. During the weeks when I was transitioning from working at The Den to working at Moby, Paul and I developed the storyline further, spending our evenings plotting out the serial on large pieces of paper taped to our living-room wall. I was now on board full time, and had roughly one month to script the entire show or we risked losing our funding altogether.
To me, Kabul appeared to be held together with sticky-tape, spit and string. There were brassy, glassed-in office blocks here and there and the odd paved road. There were even a couple of sets of traffic lights that I never saw working; but by and large it was a ramshackle, crumbling, red-hot mess. For some reason I expected the country’s premier televis
ion broadcaster to have a little more shine, a tad more finesse. But I was sorely mistaken.
On my first day of work I shared a car with Paul and Jose. As our jeep idled at the boom gate and we waited for the security guards to allow us through, I tried to figure out exactly what I was looking at. I was staring down a short, potholed street lined with rundown buildings. Armed guards buzzed around everywhere and armies of kids, who looked just out of high school, alighted from HiAce vans, chatting and laughing as they ambled in to work.
‘Is . . . Is . . . Is . . . Is this it?’ I managed with a newly acquired stammer.
Jose giggled.
‘Oh darls, you haven’t seen anything yet!’ Paul offered as we rumbled along the road.
There was no formal orientation, no meet-and-greet. Instead, after having my bag searched by a smiling, moustachioed guard—and my camera, perfume and USB stick confiscated—Paul guided me along a labyrinth of uneven pathways, past grubby, paint-flaked buildings, to a tiny office that would normally be regarded as rather snug, even for a single person.
There were two Afghan men already stationed on the right with their backs against the wall—Raouf, the Pashto-language channel manager and Rashid, the Dari-language channel manager. Paul’s desk was wedged into the left-hand back corner of the room, positioned at a slight angle so he could slip in behind it, and he laughed as he indicated that my official workstation was at one end of it, so that the back of my chair was jammed up against Raouf’s desk.
Paul also took great delight in informing me that I had to share his laptop. For security reasons I couldn’t bring in my own personal computer, but he assured me that he would be running around for most of the day, overseeing various productions and the construction of our soon-to-be state-of-the-art news studio. This meant there would be joyous hours at a time when I could embrace the full length and width of our joint desk and indulge in uninterrupted scripting. Jose was closeted next door with around twenty other producers, sharing a handful of bulky beige PCs of a circa 1997 vintage, so I felt quite privileged.
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 2