Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

I awoke one morning to find my sheets a little worse-for-wear due to an unexpected head start on my menstrual cycle—it honestly looked like I’d been massacred in my sleep. I decided to save the poor laundry woman from having to deal with the mess and, instead, folded the sheets up. I placed them in a garbage bag in my wardrobe, with the intention of washing them myself that evening, and remade my bed.

  Muffy and I returned home that night to find a furious Bela stalking around my room. She had found the sheets in my wardrobe and wanted to know why I was ‘hoarding’ her bedding.

  Despite imagining that the situation was fairly obvious, I mumbled out embarrassed apologies and attempted to explain my intentions. I had just managed to reach my massacre analogy when Muffy boldly waded in; she demanded to know what Bela was doing going through my wardrobe in the first place. Did she go through our drawers as well? What gave her the right to be in our rooms at all? Bam! Bela half-heartedly attempted to blame it on the cleaner, but that backfired spectacularly. Muffy shot back by asking why the cleaner would need to be poking around in our things. This was all absolute bullshit, she declared. Wham!

  Backed solidly against the ropes, Bela folded and, I guess by way of apology, recounted all her woes around running the guest house. We comforted her and forgave her, and she left the room wearing my only pair of wedgie shoes, which she had evidently tried on earlier and believed would help her enormously with her aching back.

  But it wasn’t dear Bela who drove us to seek refuge at Bliss. I guess it started with the four Russian pilots who moved in on our floor and who left for work at five o’clock each morning, talking loudly and laughing in the corridor while they waited for their car to turn up. I had asked them politely over dinner one night to reduce their pre-dawn decibels; when that failed, I pleaded with Bela to have a word with them. I finally resorted to sticking my shameless bed-hair head out the door each day and bellowing at them to please shut up.

  Then there was the time when Bela went on holiday for three weeks and the owner’s nephew seized the opportunity to turn Reception into his own private playground. Every night he and his mates would take over the space, getting stoned and drunk and leering at us whenever we ventured from our rooms. The assistant chef, who was meant to be assuming Bela’s cooking duties, also took advantage of her absence and, after the fourth night in his new role, just stopped turning up.

  Then came the edict from the owner—enthusiastically enforced by his nephew, with Bela powerless to overrule it—that Muffy and I were not allowed to have any male visitors in our rooms. When Hamish dropped by one night on his way out to dinner, the nephew and a security guard came to Muffy’s room and demanded that he leave. We had a solid argument to counter his inference that we were up to no good (or, as one of my Afghan friends describes it, ‘touching his fuck’), but making a case based on our gentleman caller’s sexual orientation was neither wise nor safe.

  And finally, there was the great heist, when my brand-new iPod (still in its packaging), $400 (hidden between the pages of a book, inside a shoe box, under a pile of jackets at the back of my wardrobe) and my camera (which could no longer autofocus, so the thieves were sucked in there) all disappeared in the space of a day. Somewhat typically, the nephew claimed that I must have lost the lot when I was out ‘drinking alcohol’ or that one of my western friends had executed this brazen burglary.

  But I was beyond bothering to argue anymore. Instead, the next morning we begged Adiba to let us move into Bliss and she obligingly secured us the next available rooms, in the process skipping over two French UN workers, a German woman stationed at ISAF and an Italian advisor to the government.

  Communal living can be exacting, but Bliss felt like a real home. We already knew many of the seventeen people residing there, and Adiba managed to get Eugene into a room soon after. It operated like a collective: there were regular house meetings, where everybody got their time with the conch and where we voted on important, pressing issues such as whether we could smoke in the bar if it was snowing, what quantities of spirits, wine and beer we ought to order in our next grog purchase and whether we should spend our bar profits on a new barbecue.

  There was a tradition of holding tequila breakfasts when we were in lockdown (days when, due to some security threat or actual attack, we were forbidden to leave home) and, in accordance with the hippy connotations around the compound’s name, everyone pretty much slept with everyone else. Usually it was just an innocent crash out in a friend’s room—a snuggle and a cuddle on a lonely night—but at other times it was the real deal, with no shame or strings attached.

  We had pork-rib and lobster-tail barbecues; we wandered in and out of each other’s cribs at whim. It was a feel-good community and Adiba oversaw it all with a steady hand and a clear vision of what the ‘Bliss Vibe’ was truly about.

  Then in June 2012, Adiba accepted a job in Southeast Asia. Her partner, Pedro, who had just signed on for twelve months with a government ministry in Kabul, was appointed to manage Bliss until his contract expired.

  Pedro was a genuinely good bloke, and by all accounts he did an incredible job when it came to setting up systems for government departments. But running a guest house was just not his bag, and he was grateful when a jobless Dick joined the family a month later and offered to help him out.

  It seemed hardly surprising to us Blissers that the Beast that led to our downfall was alcohol. Over the previous six months there had been a government crackdown on indulging the foreigners; even restaurants that had legitimate licences to serve alcohol had now taken to serving wine and beer in teapots and teacups, fearing raids by local police.

  Booze was now harder to come by and more expensive to buy. Our last big delivery had come courtesy of an Italian diplomat who was leaving the country for good; but, with a household full of hardy drinkers, stocks didn’t last long and with each bottle drained we collectively grew a tad edgier.

  We always managed to get our hands on enough alcohol to stave off a drought. John in Room 7 shipped a case in from Germany each month and would miraculously produce a bottle of spirits just when we thought we were completely dry. Steve in Room 9 made weekly visits to the US Embassy (where alcohol was in plentiful supply) and always left there with a bottle or four of something. We had a friend at ISAF, a frequent visitor to the house, who somehow was always able to get his hands on cases of scotch and red wine. And an R & R trip to Dubai could deliver a fairly healthy bounty, so long as you were happy to risk being caught smuggling grog into the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

  The rules around bringing alcohol into the country were a little vague. The official line was that foreigners could bring in a ‘reasonable amount’, which was peculiarly subjective. I have known people to have a single litre of spirits confiscated at customs; others claimed to have swanned through with four or five bottles clearly on display.

  My personal strategy was to buy the permissible four litres of duty free on my way into Dubai, which I would then decant into water bottles and hide in my checked-in luggage. I would then purchase three litres of vodka on my way back out of the UAE and, in the unsavoury confines of a toilet cubicle at the airport, pour one litre into water bottles before placing them in the duty-free bag with my ‘official’ two litres.

  So far it had worked. I once had some cheeky, junior official chase me out of the Kabul terminal to tell me that his boss wanted me to hand over one of the legitimate bottles of vodka they had just allowed through. I politely informed him that if his boss wanted it then his boss could come and get it, before shooing him back inside and bolting to the car park.

  The latest sting entailed you getting safely through customs, but then being stopped by the police just as your car hit the road leading from the airport. More than one friend chose to smash the bottle on the ground rather than surrender it to some dodgy cop, who would either drink it himself or sell it on for a handsome profit.

  As a last resort, there was always Vodka Man—an enterprising young Afghan who
would deliver alcohol straight to your door. He had a false bottom in the back of his jeep but no doubt had some kind of deal going with the police at the various checkpoints he needed to pass through as he wound his way around the city.

  Vodka Man swore that his vodka was genuine Stoli and, at sixty bucks a bottle, you would have liked to believe him. But the skewed labels, complete with spelling mistakes, were a bit of a giveaway. Everyone knew it was Tajik vodka, and you always half-expected to go blind after your first couple of sips, but, mixed with a generous dose of pomegranate juice, it slid down a treat.

  At various times, but generally on a Wednesday, Vodka Man would flash up on your phone screen; when you answered his call, he would, in his halting English, hit you with a ‘very special deal, too special’. It may have been Johnny Walker Red, the ‘real stuff’ (naturally) at $100 a bottle. One week it was white and red wine at $480 a case. White wine is scarce in Kabul, so Eugene and I ordered a couple of cases. It was Russian (I think) and arrived in 600-millilitre Tetra Paks; they were four months past the use-by date that was clearly stamped on the side. We figured we could always arrive at a party with it, hide it at the back of the booze table and then drink someone else’s superior drop.

  Bizarrely, our domestic upheaval began with news that one of our new housemates was flying in a planeload of alcohol from Italy and that we could order whatever we liked. We quickly convened a house meeting to figure out how much cash we had in the bar kitty and to decide exactly what we wanted to purchase. Talk turned to each of us supplementing the bar fund, in order to buy more booze, before someone suggested that we should also each order individual supplies to imbibe at our own leisure.

  The discussion around this last proposal drifted on for an hour and, after a lot of symbolic conch-holding, almost everyone was in agreement that we should go that way. Pedro was the only person holding out. He argued that the bar was a communal area that encouraged housemates to mingle and socialise; he was concerned that personal stocks would result in seventeen sad, sorry people drinking alone in their rooms each night. He also reasoned that the bar fund—which bought us much-needed items, such as an above-ground swimming pool and a plastic jacuzzi that had fritzed out on its first run—would be severely depleted if we stopped buying from the house.

  We all assured him that his fears were unfounded—we enjoyed each other’s company and would personally pitch in for any luxury goods that we might decide to buy—and voted to try out the proposal for a month or two. Pedro responded the next day with an email stating that, as house manager, he was vetoing the decision.

  It was pretty much a declaration of war. Some of the more vocal house members accused Pedro of being a dictator, and worse. Night after night we sat on the terrace debating the issue—Pedro calmly repeating his two slim arguments and holding himself up as the only true champion of the Bliss Vibe, while others simply shouted him down.

  Dick, who was now officially the bar manager and who was struggling to straddle both camps, constantly appealed to Pedro to see good sense: ‘If 18,260 people are telling you the same thing, then maybe it’s time to listen,’ he reasoned.

  Factions were starting to form—some were pro-Pedro, some anti-Pedro, and then there was a handful of short-termers who couldn’t be arsed to get involved. Despairing over the constant confrontations, Dick called an official bar meeting to try and sort out the issue once and for all. He wrote up an agenda and people who couldn’t attend gave other house members their proxy votes.

  Then, on the day of the scheduled meeting, Pedro vetoed it. We held it anyway and wrote up a bar constitution, which he subsequently declared null and void.

  Dick was in constant contact with Adiba at this time, assuring her that he was doing everything he could to try and soothe house tensions:

  Subject: Chat with Adiba

  I am doing my best to right the ship and steer clear of the rocks.

  Adiba, it is all a bit wonky (to say the least) but I’ll get it as straight as possible and resolve to keep all in order to the best of my ability going forward. I’m good with people and can handle this joint (even the big egos Afghanistan seems to attract).

  I prefer peace and understanding and this is always my first approach, but I can ‘put on the face of the father’ when needed!

  When Pedro went on leave over Eid, we discovered that he had changed the lock on the liquor cabinet. Someone smashed down the door and, in a furious act of anarchy, we held a party and gave away our alcohol for free. A mannequin was burnt that night, a dressmaking doll that Dick had discovered in storage. It was outfitted in one of my corsets, so it was most certainly not an effigy of Pedro, but, as its synthetic body burst into flames, ignited by who knows who, it was Dick who hurled water onto it and extinguished the fire.

  Post-Eid saw the simmering feud erupt with alarming regularity and Dick finally appealed to Adiba to intervene in some way and resolve the matter. He had lost all patience by now and showed little restraint in describing the discord in the house. ‘There was a better “vibe” on the train to Auschwitz than there currently is at Bliss!’

  But Adiba was settling into her new job in Laos and, understandably, declined to enter the fray from such a distance.

  Then two nights later it all kicked off again. There was yet another debate on the terrace and I quickly retreated to my room like an overwrought littl’un, declaring that I simply couldn’t sit and listen to it anymore. The whole argument was now meaningless anyway as, due to the dwindling bar supplies, everyone had sourced their own alcohol. Dick didn’t like confrontation, and so settled himself into the lounge room to listen to music.

  Through my window I heard snippets of various contributions to the ‘discussion’.

  ‘Pedro, this household is made up of intelligent, responsible people. Can’t you at least try and understand our point of view?’

  ‘You, sir, are nothing more than a bloody tyrant! You are fucking up this house and you’ll have nobody living here in a month’s time!’

  ‘Pedro, dude, you have a serious psychological problem. You seem to like the fact that everyone is against you. That is some seriously fucked-up shit, man.’

  I drifted off to sleep somewhere in the middle of it. I only learnt of its bloody conclusion the next morning via an email Pedro had sent at 4.48am. In it, he informed all residents that due to Dick’s ‘threatening behaviour’, Pedro had ordered him leave the guest house by 4pm that same day and had banned him from visiting ever again.

  I went straight to Dick’s room. He hadn’t slept, and was clearly unhinged and honestly confused. He had just wanted to shut down the fighting and the noise. He had just wanted peace.

  Apparently the terrace discussion had raged on for hours, ironically fuelled by the last of our communal booze and becoming increasingly irrational and abusive. At some point, Dick snapped. He marched outside, grabbed Pedro by the collar and demanded—in his loud, menacing, Texan drawl—that the man see reason.

  As Pedro hollered for security, others stepped in to drag Dick away and he was quickly led off. Pedro declared that this behaviour constituted a ‘red-card infringement’, which he confirmed via an email to Dick as soon as he retreated to his room. I slept through the lot, but then again, I can sleep through bomb attacks.

  Dick didn’t make his 4pm deadline. By 2pm he had booked a flight out of Afghanistan, but he hadn’t found alternative accommodation for his remaining night in the country nor packed his bag. He was anxious, sleep-deprived and paranoid about the Afghan house manager, who he believed was spying on him. So I raced home early from work to supervise his departure.

  I helped him shove his scant possessions into his suitcase and finally found him a room in the guest house Muffy and I had most recently escaped from and which a pleasant English fellow was now managing.

  Dick was determined to leave Bliss with his head held high and, with encouragement from his former brothers-in-arms and a bottle of expensive tequila, courtesy of John, he got splendidly w
asted before Steve and I finally dragged him into a taxi and off to his new temporary home at 7pm.

  I masqueraded as Dick’s PA and went in ahead of him, to let the new manager there know that my ‘boss’ had indulged in a few drinks before his flight in from Pakistan and was a little fruity.

  ‘Not a problem, darling. I’ve seen it all before,’ he assured me.

  I’m sure he had. We all had.

  It shamed me at that moment to think that our idyllic, communal existence was being eroded away by alcohol; but that was the truth of it. We used it to compensate for the tedium of compound life and as a salve for the stresses of living in war. It helped mend broken hearts and took the edge off a hard day at work.

  And that night I would be cracking open a carton or two of rancid white wine, as we sat on the terrace to dissect Dick Willy’s demise and toast the angry peacemaker’s last goodbye.

  I had just come out of a meeting with Saad where the awful man made me cry. I was in such a state that, even after our get-together ended, I had to sit in his office and compose myself for a good five minutes as the last of my tears slowly drained away.

  It was 4 September 2012 and I had just officially resigned from Moby.

  It was a decision I had been wrestling with for months; in fact, I sent my original resignation letter to Christof and Shaikh (our head of HR in Dubai) at the start of August. I announced my intention to leave via an email sent at 2.30am, because it had taken me most of the evening to compose it and then a good two hours to find the guts to finally hit ‘Send’.

  They were having none of it. Christof professed that he couldn’t possibly carry on without his one remaining Drama Queen, and Shaikh confessed that he was too scared to pass the news on to the Mohsenis. They both counselled me to please reconsider my decision, but, after close to a month of conferring with expat colleagues, friends and family, I was determined to go. Saying it out loud to Saad in the meeting I’d just emerged from broke my heart.