Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  It took Khalid only two weeks before he was back in my office with a problem. Using Merzad as his translator, he explained that the production team and the crew were teasing him. The sound man was impersonating him on set; the assistant director referred to him as a ‘girl’; everyone was generally taunting him because of his sexual orientation.

  Muffy immediately pulled the production team together and told them that this type of behaviour would not be tolerated in our department. They were to leave their personal feelings regarding homosexuality at home and anyone caught persecuting Khalid would be disciplined. The boys promised that they would no longer tease him, and Muffy and I walked away from the episode feeling particularly proud of our superior management skills.

  Khalid continued to be the butt of a variety of jokes and pranks, but they were based on his limited English skills rather than his sexuality. He appeared in my office one day asking for a tablet, because he had a little ‘poo-poo’. It didn’t take me long to figure out that his ‘poo-poo’ was, in fact, a ‘headache’ and that Ali had coached him on what to say. When he turned up to work sporting a stringy hairpiece glued to his prematurely balding pate, he proudly stroked it and asked Muffy whether she liked his new ‘balls’—again a translation kindly provided by one of the producers. We could only laugh at their cheek—after all, by instructing them to respect Khalid’s sexuality, we had taught them an important life lesson in tolerance that went way beyond harmless shenanigans.

  But a few weeks later, two of the producers, Wassi and Farhad, were back in my office looking grim-faced and serious. Farhad, a gorgeous young boy with jade-green eyes, did the talking. They had been shooting at a hospital that day and something terrible had happened. The cleaner who had witnessed this ‘very bad thing’ had told the director of the hospital, and my team was told never to return. Wassi had eventually managed to sort it out, but the situation was far from good.

  I quickly established that the issue concerned Khalid, but getting to the core of the problem took some digging. It centred on a toilet . . . Khalid . . . a male extra . . . and ‘connecting’. My continual queries about the ‘connecting’ part were met with an abundance of head shaking and constant repetition of the term in question. Muffy and AK (an American director who was working with us at the time) snorted back giggles as I soberly enquired whether the connecting involved a penis . . . or perhaps two. Apparently it did.

  Khalid was summonsed to the office and Farhad did the translating. Khalid tried to convince me that he was only hugging the extra—a friend he hadn’t seen in months—but I confidently replied that, in a country where men habitually hug, kiss one another on the lips and massage each other’s shoulders, I doubted very much that a little bit of cuddling in a cubicle would have caused such a scandal.

  Khalid knew he was nailed. I explained to him the seriousness of the offence, the damage it could cause to the company’s reputation and my fears for his own personal safety. He lowered his eyes and nodded his head. It was Farhad who asked that I spare Khalid his job—he came from a poor family and, on his $400 per month wage, was the only breadwinner in his home. We all agreed to keep it under wraps and not inform Christof, but Khalid was to be on probation for the next month and, if I got wind of any more ‘connecting’ at work, I’d have to take the matter further.

  They were all back in my office two weeks later. Khalid was the first to arrive, with another tale of persecution—Farhad’s scarf was wet and everyone was blaming him. I was busy and distracted; I sent him on his way with the kind of sensible advice my mother administered when, from the ages of ten to twelve, I sported a wart on the end of my nose and was nicknamed ‘Witchypoo’. If you just ignore them, my mother counselled me, they will get sick of teasing you and leave you alone.

  Wassi and Farhad were the next to arrive, and now the water-on-the-scarf story took a sinister turn. Most of the team had been out on a shoot all morning, with Wassi and Khalid the only ones remaining in the producers’ room. Wassi claimed that Khalid had been looking at some ‘very bad photos’ on the internet at the time. Wassi then left to go to the editing suite, leaving Khalid alone in the room for a good twenty minutes; when Farhad returned with the team, he found his scarf shoved at the back of his desk drawer and mysteriously wet. It seems that Khalid had connected again, this time with the beautiful Farhad’s scarf.

  In fairness to Khalid, I did thoroughly investigate the matter and all parties were questioned. IT tracked down the ‘very bad photos’—Facebook pictures of some of Khalid’s friends. A shirtless German chap, kneeling on the grass, his frayed, denim shorts revealing well-toned thighs; a UK bartender wearing an outrageously tiny thong on a Goa beach; a blue-eyed Dutch fellow, reclining in a chair and looking seductively at the camera. At AK’s suggestion, the vital piece of evidence (which had since been thrown in the garbage bin) was produced. The fact that the scarf peeled apart when Khalid unfolded it said it all, really.

  Khalid was dispatched to double-bag the scarf and throw it into the outside bin and Farhad was called back to see me. I apologised for what had happened, while Muffy’s offer to buy him a new scarf was met with a grunt of disgust. I explained to him that I would be taking the matter up with Christof and that Khalid would probably lose his job.

  Farhad sadly shook his head. He reminded me of Khalid’s precarious financial position, but finally conceded it was probably for the best as Khalid had been sexually harassing him for weeks—sending him dirty text messages, brushing up against him on set, and calling him late at night to lisp obscenities down the phone. Wassi was called in to back up Farhad’s claims that he had been harassing other members of staff as well. Our male actors were all refusing to work with him and one crew member had threatened to shoot him when Khalid admired his belt buckle and allowed his hands to wander.

  I was astounded by their admissions and wanted to know why they hadn’t told me any of this. They were equally perplexed—they explained that we had told them to tolerate Khalid’s sexuality and thought that they couldn’t complain. Needless to say, there were meetings to follow—discussions on acceptance versus abuse as Muffy and I attempted to shore up the gaping rents in our cloak of ‘superior management’.

  Happy Christmas to me. I was spending it in a public hospital in Sydney, where one of the non-nursing staff, wearing a facemask, gloves and gown, together with a decidedly limp Santa hat, had just delivered my Christmas lunch. It consisted of a piece of processed ham plonked on a plate, plus a slice of round white meat, which was some poor facsimile of either turkey or pork, and a sticky ball of mashed potato and some colourless string beans.

  I took a photo on my phone and cried for only the second time since arriving there four days ago. I had no right to feel sorry for myself—the pneumonia that I’d been diagnosed with had been creeping up on me for weeks now, but I deliberately dismissed the persistent cough, the rattling chest and the aching back as trifling so I could celebrate the festive season with my friends.

  I first felt a tad off when I attended an early Christmas soiree at a friend’s house at the start of December. The fumes from her bukhari (a traditional Afghan wood-burning heater) made my chest feel tight; I actually went home quite early for a change, and for the next few days struggled to draw in deep breaths.

  I hauled myself off to the Christmas markets at the British Embassy a week before I left Kabul. It’s an annual event where Afghan stallholders sell clothes, jewellery and various crafty knick-knacks that are guaranteed to impress family and friends when presented as Christmas gifts. I sat outside in the cold that afternoon chatting with my mates, eating barbecued bratwurst and drinking spiced wine, dissolving into unpleasant fits of coughing every time I laughed.

  I seriously considered attending the yuletide carols at Gandamak the night before I flew out, but, having left work early and taken to my bed for the entire afternoon, I wisely decided against it. Muffy rubbed my aching back before leaving for the festivities, while my friend Eugene (a work colleague
and a lovely new buddy) went to collect an asthma inhaler from one of our housemates. I spent the night shivering uncontrollably, freezing under my heavy doona despite my room being more than adequately heated.

  If I hadn’t flown when I did—a sweating, pain-ridden, phlegm-filled mess (benevolently upgraded to business class for the seventeen-hour flight)—I don’t think I would have had the strength to get out of there.

  I spent my first night in Sydney bent over on my knees in the middle of the lounge-room floor, two pillows supporting my tummy, trying to find some relief from the pain in my back. When my dear friend and housemate, Maree, came down in the morning to find me struggling to breathe she ordered me to go straight to a doctor.

  I didn’t, chiefly because I’m an idiot. Instead, I dragged myself off to a meeting with a production company to discuss their possible interest in a show idea that Muffy and I had been floating for years. The man I met with spent most of the twenty minutes he had so generously allocated to me taking phone calls, and was far more interested in discussing his own projects than talking about ours.

  As I stood hunched over in the street trying to hail a taxi back to my house, I finally gave in. I called my brother and asked him to please come and collect me, as I feared I was quite ill. I was admitted into hospital within a matter of hours and the first hit of morphine administered to me in the emergency department was an exquisite release that I doubt I will ever forget.

  And so there I was, receiving top-rate medical treatment for free. I even had a private room, because there were fears that I may have contracted tuberculosis. While back in Kabul, twenty-two street kids had died so far that winter. No, any self-pity would be an extravagance and one that I most certainly did not deserve to indulge in.

  I had had other health scares during my time in Afghanistan. The regular bouts of diarrhoea are nothing more than annoying—everyone gets it and discussions around stool consistency are commonplace. The typhoid was a bit of a worry, particularly as I had been vaccinated against it. The intestinal parasites, chest infections and asthma were inevitable by-products of living in Kabul, considered to be one of the most polluted cities in the world. Open sewers line the streets. Diesel-powered generators, old cars running on dirty fuel and the dust from unpaved roads all conspire to strangle the life out of the air.

  My specialist was a gentle, softly spoken man with a kind, round face like a kewpie doll. In my mind I had taken to calling him Doctor Baby Head. He had already examined me that morning, accompanied by a team of young interns, all of them genuinely fascinated by the weird old chick in Room 9 who earned her crust making soapies in Kabul.

  On his return visit, he sat down in the chair beside my bed and told me that so far they’d been unable to identify the specific cause of my pneumonia. Apparently that wasn’t unusual and I had nothing to be worried about. It seemed I was still not in the clear with the TB and would need to stay in hospital for a few more days, coughing up sputum into little plastic cups for further testing, before they could rule that out.

  He then told me that he had been doing some research into Kabul. He had been alarmed by the levels of air pollution and had noted that the winter was particularly harsh. The bottom line was that he didn’t want me to go back there until I had returned to full health. Even if the TB was nothing more than a scare, I could be stranded in Australia for anywhere up to six weeks.

  I initially took the news surprisingly well. After he left, wishing me a Merry Christmas as he headed out the door, I settled down into my bed, quite shocked by my sense of relief. On previous occasions when I had been back in Australia, my feet had grown itchy within a week or two of touching the ground, and I had begun counting down the days until I could return to my friends, my workmates, my job . . . my ‘home’.

  I reasoned that being unwell had a lot to do with my mood that Christmas Eve, but it wasn’t just that. I honestly felt tired and old. I realised that my six-day working week was taking its toll, and that my ‘leisure time’—almost exclusively confined to house parties, bars or hanging out in my room watching DVDs—was seldom rejuvenating or restful.

  There was the lack of good food; the constant moving house; the need to have a security guard trail me around the supermarket as I searched for sanitary products. Then I remembered the incredible friends I had made, and who had now left me behind. The mud, the snow, the dust, the heat . . . I was suddenly so angry and under-whelmed by my life that I burst into tears. The rage ebbed away after a minute or two, but I continued to cry for a very long time as I considered whether my love affair with Afghanistan was finally starting to wane.

  But all that was on Christmas Eve. I woke up on Christmas morning and shooed those thoughts away. I looked at the big, beautiful flower arrangements sent to me by Eugene and the Mohseni family. I recalled the phone call from Muffy, with all the work kids in the background screaming out their well wishes. I re-read the text message from Aleem, where he told his ‘second mother’ how much he loved me and was praying for me to get better.

  And by the time my Christmas lunch arrived, I knew with certainty that my time in Kabul was far from done.

  I replaced the cover on my untouched Chrissie feast, knowing that very soon my wonderful friend Natasha would be there. She was bringing my mum, along with a Christmas tree, presents and leftovers from lunch. Then more friends and family were expected throughout the afternoon.

  I was surrounded by love; I had a life in Australia that offered me comfort, safety and freedom. And, unlike my cherished Kabul kids, I could leave Afghanistan whenever I wanted.

  ‘But not yet,’ I thought. ‘Not just yet.’

  I woke up in bed one February morning with three men, all of us spooning one another against the raging blizzard outdoors. It’s tempting to spin this as some tantalising tale of Expats-Gone-Wild, but two of the men, Hamish and Bruce (who was in Kabul short-term consulting at an embassy), were gay. And Eugene was like a little brother to me. The unconventional sleeping arrangement was purely convenient.

  We had spent the previous evening doing the expat party circuit and, when the last venue had shuffled us out, we drifted back here to raid my healthy stash of duty-free alcohol recently smuggled in from Dubai following my five-week convalescence in Australia. Despite my best intentions, the brush with pneumonia had done little to curb my lifestyle. When the weather turned woolly around 4am (with Eugene returning from a quick inspection of the snowstorm announcing that, according to his iPhone app, the temperature outside had dropped to minus thirteen degrees Celsius), my cohorts decided that finding their way home was simply beyond them. So we all bunked down in my king-sized bed to snatch some sleep.

  I was grateful for their companionship; it had been a god-awful week, due to Aleem being forced to resign from the company. The circumstances that led to his sudden departure were convoluted, but essentially he had been accused of siphoning off company funds while working on Salam 2. He was facing not only the axe but also, according to Christof, possible criminal charges. Despite suggestions from certain expat mates that I was perhaps being naive and blinded by ‘motherly’ love, I simply refused to believe it was true.

  Corruption is so commonplace in Afghanistan as to be an accepted part of everyday life. Teachers take bribes to pass students; patients pay doctors on the sly for preferential treatment; public servants think nothing of topping up their salaries with a little extra compensation. It isn’t something confined to the high end of town or urban areas—right across the country, billions of dollars by way of bribes change hands every year.

  I paid my first ‘bribe’ to a police officer on Season One of Salam; he was one of three men tasked with ensuring our security in Jalalabad. We had been shooting all day and had scheduled a shot of our hero striding along a mountain ridge as the last set-up.

  I wanted to film it during ‘magic hour’—the last hour of daylight, when the sun sits low on the horizon before disappearing behind it. At this time, the light is warm and soft and the colo
urs are magnificent. We were running a little behind, so it was going to be a mad dash to pack up in the village, race across the river and get to the top of the mountain in time. Just as we were about to drive off, Sidique hurried over to inform me that the police weren’t coming with us—it was 4.30 and they had decided to knock off for the day.

  I got out of the car, marched over to the officers and, through Sidique, demanded to know what was going on—the mountains could be dangerous, particularly after dark, and besides, their commander had assured me that they would stay with us until we wrapped. Two of them turned their backs on me while the third man simply shrugged his shoulders and grinned.

  ‘Tell him I’ll call his commander,’ I barked. But my threat merely elicited the same blasé response.

  It was getting late and I was desperate to get moving. ‘Sidique, what do we do?’ I asked.

  He led me away from the infuriating little man and lowered his voice. ‘I think he wants money.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think, if you give him some money, they will come with us.’

  ‘This is absolute bullshit!’

  ‘This is the way it is done.’

  The sun was truly sinking now and I didn’t have time to argue. ‘How much?’ I enquired, before running to the car to grab my wallet.

  By the time I’d returned, they’d agreed on ten dollars. I only had a twenty, and literally threw it in the guy’s face before screaming at him to get into his jeep and follow us to the location.

  On Muffy and Aleem’s first props-buying expedition for Eagle Four, the shopkeeper angrily haggled with Aleem over the price of a clock for a good five minutes. After they left the store, Aleem translated the gist of the debate. ‘He kept saying to me, “She’s just a foreigner, brother! Why are you arguing with me? Let me just charge her three times the price and I’ll cut you in on the profit.’’’