Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

‘You’re just lucky that the Big Juice is on leave. Otherwise we’d be in all sorts of bother,’ Hamish exclaimed.

  I adored the Big Juice—she was one of my best friends in Kabul—but, being bureau chief, the buck always stopped with her. If she ever found out the truth about my misadventure, she’d fret about any possible liability issues and agonise over whether she should report the incident to her superiors in the motherland. Hamish’s only concern was that they might fill in his lovely new pool.

  I can’t remember now why I wasn’t allowed to have simply slipped over in the shower (I suspect that scenario was rejected in order to inflict maximum humiliation on me for my predicament). With the thoroughness of a CSI unit, they decided that the location of my accident should be at the most obvious scene of the crime—I must have fallen down the stairs when I was leaving Gandamak.

  Now I had actually seen people fall down the stairs leaving Gandamak. They were typically inebriated to the point where they were unable to talk and certainly had no business walking. Great.

  The next day being a public holiday, there were no medical centres open. I could have risked a public hospital, but Fred reasoned that I might very well emerge from there in worse shape than when I went in. So the blessed man spent the morning putting out feelers all over town, even trying to get me on to the International Security Assistance Force base to see a doctor, but it was a no-go. He made do with sterilising the wound, re-dressing it and assuring me that it was already healing nicely.

  When I finally did get to see a doctor, about thirty-two hours after the initial fall, she admired Fred’s handiwork before admitting that, apart from giving me a tetanus injection, there was really nothing more she could do. It was certainly a big gash but, because I had scraped away most of the skin around it, she couldn’t stitch it closed. She simply shaved off a section of hair, patched me up and prescribed antiseptic lotion, gauze pads and bandages, with instructions to change the dressing every morning. She then advised me that I would have to keep the wound completely covered for the next month—I couldn’t expose it to the putrid Kabul air or even wash my hair, for fear of infection.

  ‘Oh no! Are you sure?’ I wailed.

  She gently smiled, patted my hand and promised me that it would all be okay. She was certain that, given a month . . . or maybe a little longer . . . the cut would be nicely healed. I wasn’t to worry—I was actually lucky that it hadn’t been worse.

  In vain I pleaded with her to come up with an alternative treatment. I claimed that I would be happy to live with a hole in my head for the next year, if only I could get my hair dyed and done for the fabulous television awards ceremony I was attending at the end of August!! This probably wasn’t the most appropriate response to give to a doctor in Afghanistan, who had undoubtedly seen her share of horrors. She didn’t look overly impressed.

  Muffy then spent the next month playing nursie—coming to my room each day just after breakfast to apply the yellow sticky solution to the cut, followed by the gauze, then wrapping a bandage around my head. It was the only time since arriving in the country that I had really appreciated the headscarf; I took to wearing it tied in a knot at the base of my skull à la ‘funky gypsy’.

  And I spent the month trying to convince people that I wasn’t thoroughly smashed when I descended the steps of Kabul’s most popular bar.

  A week before leaving for Seoul the wound, although having sealed, was still rather jelly-like and watery; the hair around it was a matted, amber mess. Muffy thought that the cut needed to get out a bit more, so at night she’d release it from its crepey bondage and I’d sit alone in my room, hoping that the air I was exposing it to was simply drying it out and not turning it septic.

  These evening outings seemed to do the trick and, the day before I left for Dubai, I returned to the doctor for her prognosis. She probed the wound for a while before finally deadpanning that she was sure the crusty dent in my head could withstand a little bleach, as long as my hairdresser was careful.

  I purchased three tops, two skirts and a dress in Dubai but in the end opted to wear a floor-length gown that Tiggy had left behind, together with a silver Afghan necklace Muffy had picked out for me in Chicken Street. The young Korean make-up artists styled my newly dyed hair to perfection; however, the bronze glitter they liberally brushed all over my dial left me looking like the over-tanned old bird from There’s Something About Mary. I raced back to my room and spent a good half-hour, pressed up to the bathroom mirror, frantically trying to wipe it off before the limousine arrived to ferry me to the ceremony.

  I had learnt my thirty-second acceptance speech off by heart, but still my voice trembled as I delivered it. It wasn’t nerves kicking in—it was pure, raw emotion. I was so indescribably proud of our tough little team and I could barely find my way off the stage because of the tears welling in my eyes.

  The ceremony was followed by a salubrious after-party, which ended quite early, so a group of us headed back to the bar in our hotel. A British producer, a Brazilian director, an executive producer from New Zealand, a Chinese actor . . . all of them as excited as me about the success of their respective shows. And I wandered off to my room in the wee hours of the following day, shoes in hand and promising to stay in touch with my new-found global posse.

  I awoke around noon. I knew in an instant that I didn’t have the trophy. I remembered bringing it back with me—my darling interpreter had carefully placed it in my hands before we boarded our bus to the hotel—but a manic forage around my room confirmed that it was no longer in my possession.

  I raced to the bar and explained my distressing problem to the manager. He understood completely and led me to a table. Here there were four blue velvet boxes laid out; each was waiting to be claimed. It seems I wasn’t the only reveller who had become careless in my euphoria! I quickly found my baby and briefly considered adopting another foundling, just in case I lapsed into negligent mothering again somewhere between Korea and Kabul.

  And so, arriving back to work that August day with Muffy after my trip to Korea, I gave my camera and the trophy to Merzad, informing my crew that they had two hours to have their photo taken with the award before it was relegated to the display cabinet outside the office of the CEO. There were dozens and dozens of photos taken—kids posed for the camera, some holding the trophy high, some of them people who weren’t even working for the company when the series was made. But nobody seemed to care. In a country where there is usually so little to celebrate, this recognition of our show was something we were all happy to share.

  I lost count of the number of bombings I went through in Kabul. The Indian Embassy, the Safi Landmark Hotel, a UN guest house, ISAF headquarters . . . Soft targets, hard targets; but inevitably the results were always the same—overwhelmingly it was innocent Afghans who were killed in these attacks.

  More often than not, it was a distant boom that alerted you to the danger. If you were with other people, it would be followed by a collective intake of breath, a palpable silence and a quiet ‘I don’t like the sound of that’ from someone in the group. The subsequent wail of sirens confirmed the worst.

  If the attack happened across town, it would be a text message, or a tweet or an email from another expat that put you in the loop. When a suicide bomber detonated outside the Heetal Hotel three blocks away from work, the noise was thunderous. My office shook, a window cracked and I initially thought that a new studio being constructed next to our building had collapsed.

  But there was no mistaking the attack on the US Embassy on 13 September 2011. It felt like it was happening all around me, and seemed like it would never end.

  There had been intel for days of an imminent strike. UN security had issued a ‘confidential’ email to their staff that had found its way into the inboxes of every expat in Kabul; it warned of attacks on, amongst other targets, western guest houses in Wazir Akbar Khan. I lived in a western guest house in Wazir Akbar Khan. The security consisted of Afghan guards who were typically eith
er stoned or sleeping, backed up by a low metal fence trimmed with a feeble brush of barbed wire, and a rusting iron gate that was constantly left unlocked. And my first-floor room with its glass frontage offered a clear target for any sniper who may have wanted to take a pot-shot at a foreigner. Muffy was in the US making a documentary and my journo mates were so concerned about my security (or lack thereof) that they insisted I stay at their compound for a few nights.

  That morning I’d woken early at their home and, realising I had run out of clean work clothes, decided to head back to my guest house. Not wanting to wake my mates’ driver, who was on call 24/7, and knowing that I couldn’t spring a random 6.30am pickup on my guys, I wrapped myself up tightly, lowered my head and bustled the two blocks back to my house. I trailed behind a garbage collector, with his cart and donkey and his rhythmic cries of ‘Rubbish!’, which I imagined would afford me some anonymity.

  Soon after showering, I made the decision to work from home. I had a deadline on some script outlines looming and the circus atmosphere of my office afforded me little headspace for writing. I called Merzad, to let him know my plan; he assured me not to worry—the department was safe in his trustworthy hands.

  At 1.30pm I heard an explosion nearby. Some gunfire. I was drawn to my balcony by the sounds of yelling and cars tearing along the street. I stood and watched as people raced up my road, and vehicles vied with one another to turn into the side lane opposite.

  I texted my journo friends—even in the midst of gathering intelligence and filing reports, they never failed to respond. Their reply was dark: ‘Get to a safe room. Gunmen at the end of your street.’ With no safe room and gunfire hammering all around, I made my way out into the corridor where Bela, the Croatian manager of our guest house (a feisty, salty woman, who could love and hate you in the space of thirty seconds) was herding all the residents to the ground-floor restaurant.

  I tried calling Merzad on my way downstairs, but there was no network coverage; our office was only three blocks away, so I knew they were close to it as well. In the restaurant, Croats, Russians, Afghans, a Frenchman and I all sat and watched the local news. My heart raced as I saw police officers running along the route I had taken home earlier that day.

  The restaurant refugees had no common language—all we could do was look at one another and shake our heads in disbelief. Then one of the Russians reached into his backpack and produced two huge bottles of scotch. He looked around the group and asked ‘Whisky?’ A universal ‘Yes!’ in four different languages was the reply.

  By that stage I had managed to contact Merzad and all our people were accounted for. But, because there were no safe rooms at work either, they were simply sitting at their desks or huddled together in basements. To my utter astonishment, he and some of the other boys were in the outdoor cafeteria drinking tea! I could hear guns popping down the phone as he excitedly described watching a mortar hit the rooftop of our radio station.

  I ordered him to get everyone inside. He coolly countered that Ali had an upset stomach and needed fresh air, so he and the others would be staying outside to keep him company. I replied that I didn’t care if Ali vomited all over the office floor for the next four hours, they were to immediately get indoors. He laughed. I yelled—something I rarely do. He clearly sensed that Mum was going off, and I didn’t need to tell him that he’d be facing more than the whacking bat if I found out he’d defied me.

  We stayed in the restaurant for the next six hours. At some point, on the pretext of going to the toilet, I conducted a quick recce of the guest house, looking for a hiding spot. Despite the whisky-fuelled camaraderie, I knew that if things got serious, I would be on my own. I finally found a space underneath the stairwell where I could conceal myself behind some storage boxes and an old mattress.

  I had lived in seven different houses in Kabul and, apart from The Den, none of them had safe rooms. So with each move a new escape plan had to be formulated. I had been told by various security mates that most of my creative little survival schemes were ludicrous, dangerous and, quite frankly, useless. No doubt, but inventing them gave me some sense of control over my personal safety.

  In most of the houses I’d lived in, I’d been lodged on upper floors, which presented a whole unique set of problems. Could I really make the leap from my balcony to the kitchen roof? Would I seriously have the presence of mind to grab my doona for the climb over the neighbours’ barbed-wire fence? And would their horse of a guard dog, which I was compelled to watch humping a deck chair as I smoked my morning cigarette each day, eat me if I actually made it over? Or try to mount me at the very least? Edging along a narrow ledge to a tree I could climb down sounded good in theory, but would I be able to do it after a few drinks?

  My Plan Bs in such situations involved hiding. Actually my personal all-time favourite amongst these was where I would secrete myself away on the top shelf of my cupboard, cover myself with a large garbage bag and then use a wire coat-hanger to pull the cupboard door closed behind me.

  It was a decidedly better plan than my housemate Rick’s, who, at six foot two, couldn’t even entertain the cupboard option. His elaborate strategy entailed placing a chair marked with a grubby footprint below his open bathroom window and then hiding behind his lounge. He thought it was ingenious, until I broke it to him that you could clearly see the top of his head as soon as you entered the room and that the Taliban would no doubt blow it off before they ever got to see the clever decoy chair.

  They evacuated the office that day at 3pm and I finally went back to my room at 7.30pm. The fourteen shots of whisky had calmed me considerably and I figured that an open-plan restaurant without a door, a gate or an iron grille offered up little more protection than my first-floor abode. But by then the battle was clearly raging elsewhere. Any gunmen who may have been lurking nearby earlier in the day had long since been dealt with and it was a small group of insurgents, bunkered down in a half-built high-rise, that were keeping up the fight.

  I called home as soon as I closed the door. It was early morning back in Australia, but insurgent attacks still managed to make headlines and I wanted my family to know I was safe. My sister-in-law, Lisa, answered the phone and the mere sound of her voice burst the levee banks of an emotional flood that I had sandbagged all day with alcohol and bravado. The firmness—which had seen me be so stern with Merzad, which had compelled me to conduct a thorough reconnaissance of the guest house and to make breezy assurances to the frightened young Russian girls in the restaurant that we’d all be okay—instantly dissolved in a rush of fragile tears.

  The crackle of war and a generous half-Valium lulled me to sleep, but I awoke the next morning with the thumping of choppers and distant gunfire still audible. Twenty hours after the attack began, Afghan and coalition forces shot and killed the last of the insurgents.

  I had rancid whisky breath that day—a harsh, heavy taste that all the mouthwash on the planet couldn’t possibly disguise. I had never really been a fan of whisky, but I was thinking that, going forward, it would most certainly be my preferred tipple in times of crisis.

  During my time in Afghanistan, my job presented me with problems and situations that I never imagined having to contend with. I comforted hysterical young women who were being forced to marry some distant cousin—my hugs and kisses were all I could offer because the marriage was inevitable. I broke up fistfights between angry men; I intervened in heated squabbles between spirited, headstrong girls and confused boys who were unaccustomed to this new-fangled ‘female empowerment’ thing. I tactfully sucked up to difficult actresses who weren’t happy about having to hug their on-screen husbands; I even roared at an actor who held a gun to Aleem’s head.

  I once had to issue a formal warning to one of my lovely writers because Hamid had reported that she was continually late delivering her scripts and that the work she usually handed over to him was typically riddled with mistakes. About an hour later I found her downstairs, crying on the phone. I waited for her to
finish the call before approaching her and giving her a hug. I told her that I was sorry I had upset her, but she wasn’t to worry—she was an excellent writer and I was certain that, with a little more effort, her work would improve. She just stared at me for a moment before revealing the true source of her grief—her brother had just been kidnapped and his detainees were asking US$30,000 for his release. The police rescued him the following day and it turned out that her uncle had masterminded the abduction.

  But nothing could have prepared me for Scarfgate.

  Khalid was hired as a make-up artist on our soap Secrets of this House. I was initially resistant to taking him on—having a man in such close contact with women was a definite no-no and I doubted that our female actresses would tolerate it. But Shakila and Merzad assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem, because Khalid was a boy–girl. It took a fair bit of back-and-forth, and a considerable amount of wrist flapping from Merzad (clearly the universal gesture to denote homosexuality), to convey to me that they meant gay. And, after meeting Khalid, I was thoroughly convinced that this assessment of his sexuality was spot-on.

  He literally minced into my office, greeting me in his limited English with a pronounced lisp. He was blinged to the hilt and, in a country where shiny pastel satin shirts, bejewelled jeans and chunky silver bracelets are normal male attire, that’s quite a claim. Khalid was hired on the spot and everyone was happy. Shakila was the only make-up artist on our all-female team whose parents allowed her to do night shoots, and she now had someone to share the load.

  I loved Khalid from the get-go and I so admired his courage and daring. I had been told by numerous expats that most Afghan men have their first sexual encounter with another male; I had witnessed police officers standing at their checkpoints holding hands. When Hamish did a report on the Afghan army, he stumbled into their barracks to discover a hash-fuelled orgy taking place. And yet being openly gay in Afghanistan is a dangerous proposition. It is against Islam; it is a sickness. It’s up there with a woman being out in public with her arms and legs exposed—it can get you killed. Yet a giggling Khalid assured me that he had no shortage of boyfriends.