Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  ‘Oh Hamish . . .’

  ‘Where was she going?’

  ‘To Finest. Oh God, Hamish—she was going to Finest!’

  ‘Just find her.’

  ‘I feel sick!’

  ‘Sweetheart, call your work and tell them that they have to find her. I’ve got to file a report, but let me know as soon as you hear anything.’

  My hands were trembling with such force that it was an effort to dial through to Akmal and I struggled to suppress a sob as I demanded that he track Muffy down. Then I waited.

  Even now, I find it difficult to fully relive that brief moment in time when I waited for news of Muffy. It was ten minutes, tops, but the overwhelming helplessness, the creeping sense of doom that threatened to swallow me as I paced around my room, was an acute and rare form of torture.

  When Akmal’s call finally came, I actually fumbled the phone and it fell to the floor. I was kneeling on the shag pile with my head to my knees when I received the news that Muffy was safe. She was out having a delightful lunch at the French bistro, but had accidentally left her phone in the car. It was one of our own guards who kept answering it.

  I called Hamish and then stayed on the ground for quite some time, relishing the wonderful feeling of relief that now washed over me. I then phoned my mum in Australia and cried to her for a solid half-hour.

  By the time Muffy arrived home, I was livid. When she airily tap-tap-tapped on my door, I yanked it open. I grabbed her by the shoulders and went nose to nose with the wretched woman.

  ‘DON’T YOU EVER, EVER, EVER LOSE YOUR FUCKING PHONE AGAIN!’

  She was genuinely confused. Despite having been driven home in a company car, she had been told nothing about the bombing, had no idea that she was apparently MIA, and had been enjoying a caesar salad while flicking through the latest issue of Vanity Fair as Hamish and I agonised over her fate.

  In our post-mortem we figured out that she had been at Finest fifteen minutes before the attack, but it took around four litres of wine that night to settle us into sleep.

  The next morning, I purchased a gaudy, jewel-studded phone pouch (the type that you hang around your neck) and made Muffy carry her mobile in it for the next two weeks. Ultimately it didn’t cure her of her phone-forgetfulness, but her constant whining about how the ugly little bag clashed with everything she wore was a righteous payback I felt fully justified in administering.

  Recounting the story over our final G & T that evening in May sent us both off to bed laughing, but I lay awake for a very long time thinking about Muffy’s departure and my imminent loss. Yet another friend was leaving; my best mate’s name would be erased for good from the Kabul expat chalkboard. By the time I finally closed my eyes, I knew that, for me, the dust from this deletion would never quite settle.

  Our make-up artist, Shakila, was losing her hair. It wasn’t a wholesale shedding—just a handful of tiny, bald patches scattered across her head. They had first started appearing months ago. On my last trip to Dubai I consulted with a pharmacist and had returned with some drops that need to be applied twice a day. And Merzad and I had taken on the task.

  He probably shouldn’t have even been looking at her hair, so we huddled together in a corner of our office and we locked the door so no one could burst in on us. As I gently brushed back the strands I watched his face crease in concentration as he carefully applied the drops and I wanted to weep. The act was so simple but done with great love, because he did love her and she loved him back, and, if they had been born somewhere in the western world, they would inevitably have been together.

  I’m not sure when I discovered that Shakila and Merzad were an item. There was nothing overt to really indicate they were a couple. Afghan men and women are typically not permitted to date, let alone hold hands in public or (God forbid) kiss, and our company had very strict policies about males and females fraternising.

  I guess I’d heard whispers, and watched them deep in conversations that I couldn’t comprehend. Or perhaps it was the day that we heard she’d fainted on set and a clearly panicked Merzad raced off in his car to rescue her. Whatever finally twigged me to it, I thought they were a perfect pair and, through my western-coloured glasses, I envisaged them one day getting married. The fact that Shakila was Hazara and Merzad was Tajik was blissfully lost on me.

  I knew that, in the beginning, they too imagined they could be together. Early on in their ‘relationship’—nothing more than incessant texting, lingering looks, secret chats on the phone at night—Shakila’s parents approached her with a prospective husband. He was a doctor in Germany—a worthy catch who would provide her passage out of Afghanistan.

  When Merzad found out, he begged her to refuse. Most Afghan women wouldn’t have had a choice, but Shakila’s parents were extraordinarily progressive—she was allowed to work, could stay out for night shoots and travel abroad unchaperoned. And, despite being disappointed that she was knocking back her chance of escape, they accepted her decision not to wed.

  I know that around that time Merzad made some kind of overture to his father about marrying Shakila, but his dad, a widower, had definitively shut him down. He would be marrying a Tajik girl, a relative no less, and there was no room for debate on the matter.

  I guess love made them believe they could work it out—that they would maybe one day run away to Iran, India or Pakistan, and live out their lives together. And I believed it as well. They had time on their hands and the whole world was changing around them. Perhaps Merzad’s father would change his mind too. At that stage, I couldn’t have foreseen the part I would play in cutting this time so cruelly short.

  In 2010, the company had announced that it would be granting scholarships for two employees to study in America. It was an eight-week film course and I was asked to select suitable candidates from my department. Muffy and I narrowed it down to six young men, all worthy of the accolade, before finally settling on Hamid and Merzad. They were thrilled with the news, but apparently their families failed to share their joy. Hamid’s wife wasn’t overly keen on being left with sole care of their newborn baby while he flitted off overseas, and Merzad’s father was worried that his son would do a runner.

  It’s quite common for Afghans to run away if they manage to get themselves out of the country. From our department alone, we had lost four people; when Muffy had gone to America to film a documentary the year before, she left with three crew members and returned with one.

  But I never saw Merzad as the running-away kind, especially not in the US, where he didn’t have any family or friends to run to. Still, in the weeks leading up to their departure, the thought that Merzad would fail to return haunted his dad, and he hounded him daily about going away. My assertion that Merzad should just put his foot down, and politely tell his father where to get off, was met with a look of surprise, even disapproval. It was his father—he couldn’t disrespect him like that.

  Then I received a text from Merzad one morning just a month before lift-off:

  Dear Trudi Jan. I will not come to the office today. There is some personal problem that I have. Sorry. Merzad.

  I texted back that I hoped he was okay and asked whether I could do anything to help. He didn’t reply.

  When Muffy and I arrived at work the next day, we found Merzad and Shakila sitting together at his desk. It was clear she’d been crying and that we were obviously intruding, so we left them to it, giving them time to sort themselves out while we wondered over coffee and cigarettes what could possibly be the matter.

  When we returned thirty minutes later, Shakila was gone and Merzad looked up at us and attempted a grin. ‘Well? Where is my treat? You should be giving me sweets—I’m going to get married.’

  We somehow guessed that it wasn’t to Shakila.

  Then he told us what had happened. In a final desperate bid to ensure that he would return, his father had yoked him to his cousin. Merzad had arrived home from work on the night in question to discover his family and relatives all
preparing for a party—his engagement party, more precisely. He confessed to us that he felt indifference towards the girl he was marrying—they had exchanged no more than a dozen words in the past five years—and now he was going to spend the rest of his life with her.

  My first feelings were entirely selfish. I felt guilt; I felt overwhelmingly responsible for what had occurred. In rewarding Merzad, I had ruined his life. Muffy asked whether there wasn’t something he could do to change his father’s mind, but it was all too late and too far gone. I boldly suggested that his father was a fool—surely, if anything, it was this that would encourage his son to stay in the States.

  But Merzad was adamant that wasn’t the case. If he failed to return, his cousin would be ‘shamed’ and no other man would want to marry her. Despite his lack of real affection for his fiancée, he would never subject her to that.

  Shakila’s initial despondency quickly gave way to rage. She was now certain that Merzad had never planned to marry her and that he knew all along his father would not allow him to wed a Hazara girl. For the next few weeks, our office became a battleground. Her work posse—a group of fiercely vocal females—also entered the fray, pulling Merzad aside for lectures and abuse whenever he ventured from the sanctuary of his desk.

  Merzad’s trip away gave us considerable respite and allowed Shakila some time to heal; when he returned they seemed to find their amiable groove again. There was an air of defeat about them both but, like the resilient Afghans that they are, they simply pulled themselves together and soldiered on.

  Once an engagement has gone down, Afghans don’t waste time mucking around, and Merzad’s father had decided that the wedding would be two months after his son’s return. Merzad struggled with this, as he wanted more time to get to know his wife. In all honesty, he wasn’t making much of an effort.

  ‘That was my fiancée. She texts me all the time!’ he’d announce after checking who was messaging him on his phone.

  ‘Well, are you going to text her back?’ I’d ask.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I have nothing to say to her. I hardly know her.’

  ‘Well, how are you going to get to know her if you refuse to communicate with her?’

  ‘What is there to talk about, when I don’t know her?’

  ‘Sweetie, you’re telling me that you are going to marry this girl and spend the rest of your life with her. So maybe you need to get to know her. Text her, talk to her on the phone.’

  And on it went. He and I talked in circles about the inevitability of his marriage, and his refusal to try to make it work.

  A month out from the wedding I was awoken at 6am by a text from Merzad. He could not come to work; he was again grappling with a personal problem. I rang him at 9am to find out what the deal was, given that the last ‘personal problem’ had been a doozy.

  He explained that he had fought with his father the previous night over delaying the wedding; he had begged to be allowed six months more to prepare himself. He didn’t yet love his fiancée and needed more time to take it all on board.

  It had raged on for hours, punctuated by long bouts of storming off to separate rooms and sulking; it finally ended when his father just walked out the door. He hadn’t returned and Merzad was frantically trying to track him down. His father’s phone was switched off and none of his family knew where he was.

  His dad had a heart condition and needed medication and Merzad was certain he had no money on him when he left. I was privately enraged that a seventy-year-old man would behave in such a way, but wished Merzad luck in his search and promised to keep in touch.

  His father hadn’t returned that evening and by the following morning, when he continued to be a no-show, Merzad feared the worst. It took forty hours for his father to finally emerge. He had gone to Mazar, a ten-hour bus trip from Kabul, to stay with some relatives and had ‘lost’ his phone on the journey there. I met Merzad across the road from work, to slip him some cash so he could go and fetch him. His eyes were raw, his skin was grey and he bubbled with remorse. He would never argue with his father again and in four weeks’ time he would be married.

  I’m not a huge fan of Afghan weddings. For starters, the men and women are usually segregated, a flimsy partition dividing the room. And while the chicks sit on one side, staring dumbly at one another because the music blaring from pastures greener is deafening, next door the men dance and whoop and make regular trips to the car park to swig back booze.

  Muffy and I had taken to smuggling in our own vodka supplies to keep us smiling and engaged, because there were usually around two hundred sets of eyes and a smattering of mobile phones set on ‘record’ continually pointed in the direction of the foreigners.

  At wedding receptions, the bride and groom are conspicuously absent for most of the evening since they eat in a completely separate room. They do a sullen walk-through about three hours into the evening, with the bride actually forbidden to smile because she’s meant to be in mourning over leaving her family; then they pose for some joyless photos on a gaudily dressed stage.

  The gloomy pall over Merzad’s nuptials had Muffy and me knocking back stiff drinks right up to the arrival of the car that was going to take us there. Despite loving Merzad, we had genuinely considered pulling out, but we knew that Shakila would be there and needed our support. She, in turn, was only going because she wanted to be there for her friend Merzad.

  The day before the wedding, I’d been mulling over some scripts when Shakila asked me why I wasn’t married. I began trotting out my pat answer—because I don’t have to be—when I looked up at her. The concern, the hint of fear, that I read in her eyes made me realise that my standard response would be plainly inadequate and entirely inconsiderate.

  At twenty-five years old (positively ancient in Afghan terms), she’d wanted to know whether I was truly happy, whether a woman could really be all right if she didn’t have a husband. I assured her that I was a very contented woman. She suspected as much, because I was always laughing, but she’d wanted some assurance that it could all be okay.

  Muffy and I arrived at the wedding more than a little cut, and oohed and aahed like proud mothers at the sight of Shakila. She looked beautiful, but possessed an air of fragility we had never seen before. I sat next to her and, when the bridal party swanned into the room, I gripped her hand under the table.

  ‘Oh Trudi, I think I am going to be sick . . .’ she whispered in my ear.

  I squeezed her hand as we dutifully smiled. After the bride and groom had swept by, we looked at each other for a very long time, before a tiny nod of her head and a blink of her eyes told me she was okay.

  In time, Shakila found another boyfriend. Merzad, although growing increasingly fond of his wife with every month that passed, still ignored the text messages she regularly sent him. Even Shakila joined in the cry for the hopeless man to make more of an effort.

  ‘Shakila and I love each other,’ Merzad explained to me one day. ‘But just like friends. People in our country don’t understand that men and women can just be friends.’

  I assured him that I, at least, understood.

  Merzad and I finished off the hair-growth ritual and, as I tenderly fluffed Shakila’s hair back into place, he unlocked the door. She asked me why I thought she was losing her hair. I told her that the pharmacist thought it could be due to stress or anxiety, and Merzad nodded his head knowingly.

  Shakila, whose grasp of English wasn’t as good as his, asked him to translate. He bent close to her ear as he explained it in Dari. She looked up from under her fringe, nodded her head and simply blinked her eyes at me. It would all be okay.

  There are many reasons why you don’t sleep well in the Ghan. It’s a noisy place for starters; then, with the local staff and neighbours rising for prayer at the first sign of sun, and the early-morning garbage guy wailing for refuse from the street outside, you can easily lose valuable, pristine snooze-time on a daily basis.

&n
bsp; If you live in a party compound, an impromptu mid-week knees-up may prove to be the culprit. In winter, you can be woken up prematurely, freezing because the power has gone out in the middle of the night. In summer, you are dragged from sleep in a lather of sweat because . . . well, the power has gone out in the middle of the night.

  It can be the noise of a gun battle nearby that has been going on for hours, or an argument between the couple in the next room that has been raging for half the night, or simply obsessive thoughts about how you are going to survive another stressful day at work.

  Most of my posse was on something to help them sleep. Alcohol was perhaps the chief enabler, followed closely by hash, and then prescription drugs bought over the counter—sans the prescription, cheap as chips. I myself started a little love affair with Valium.

  I had never taken any kind of sleeping medication in Australia and it was a good nine months before I dabbled in it in Kabul. I was at a party one night, talking to a security contractor who is an ex-army medic, complaining that I hadn’t properly slept in weeks.

  ‘You need to pay a visit to Mujeeb’s,’ he replied.

  ‘Who’s Mujeeb?’

  ‘It’s a chemist over in Shar-E-Naw. The guy’s got everything.’

  After he’d carefully talked me through the assortment of sleeping aids on offer, setting out their various pros and cons, we settled on Valium.

  ‘You don’t want anything stronger than that. You’re only a wee thing—I reckon half a tablet will knock you right out,’ he assured me.

  It took Muffy and me the entire week to build up the nerve to visit Mujeeb’s, primarily because, once news got out that we were doing a pharmacy run, people started popping up all over the place with personal orders to add to our single-item shopping list.

  Within days, we had instructions from housemates and friends to purchase everything from Tramadol to Viagra. What we were doing wasn’t illegal, just all rather sad, really. So, at 4pm one Thursday, we finally took the plunge.