Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  Saad also asked me to rethink the matter, assuring me that any fears I might have about being surreptitiously shuffled out of my position or the organisation were entirely misplaced. He talked about how hard my team would take the news and his certainty that Afghanistan was now in my blood and would be impossible to shake. He was, of course, right. About everything. But I had seen mates leave Afghanistan so burnt out and deranged that they could barely function; I wanted to exit while I was still laughing every day.

  So many factors figured in my decision to move on. Losing Muffy was a terrible blow that I didn’t ever fully recover from. Results from a recent medical check-up I’d had in Dubai reported that ‘clinically significant amounts of mycoplasma pneumonia antibodies were detected’—I wasn’t entirely sure what that all meant but I was a little anxious about spending another winter in Kabul.

  I guess my most significant concern was my mum—she had turned eighty-two, had continuing health problems and needed her girl closer to home.

  A few weeks before, she had again been bedridden with some strange muscle virus that took her out every few months and had first attacked her in October 2011. It had been five o’clock on a Friday morning when my brother phoned me from Sydney to say that Mum was sick. I had just spent the evening at yet another farewell party and was rounding off the night (or more precisely, the very early morning) back at my mate Tahir’s house—sipping red wine and yarning about films. My brother had woken that morning to discover Mum still in bed and unable to move. She was immediately taken by ambulance to hospital and the initial diagnosis was that she had probably suffered a stroke.

  As I cried and fretted over mum, darling Tahir (who himself hadn’t slept for twenty-three hours) got straight online to find me a flight home. With the internet going on and off all the time and site pages constantly timing out, it took him most of the day to get me the ticket that would ferry me via Kuala Lumpur and on to Sydney. Tahir was a saint but, to his splendid credit, Christof sorted out and paid for my flight from Kabul to Dubai.

  News of my dilemma spread fairly quickly and I spent much of the day fielding phone calls from friends wanting to know whether there was anything they could do to help. Then at around 4pm, with my travel plans only having just been settled, the Big Juice called, demanding to know where I was. When I told her I was still with Tahir, and hadn’t even thought about preparing for my 7am flight the following day, she immediately came and picked me up. We went back to my guest house, where I hastily packed a bag, and then she took me home with her—for dinner, a Valium and my first sleep in thirty-eight hours.

  BJ had one of her producers going out on the same flight as me from Kabul; once we got on the plane, the wonderful woman swapped her boarding pass with me so that I could grab a snooze in the comfort of her business-class seat.

  I had a six-hour stopover in Dubai and passed out near the Malaysian Airlines counter, feeling relaxed after the staff there assured me that somebody would wake me up when it was time to check in. They did.

  I was feeling kind of human by the time I hit KL. I fell asleep while getting a back massage at the airport, only to spring awake again when I realised that the male masseur had his hands on my bosoms. It shames me to say that I’m not entirely sure how long he’d been lingering there, as I had incorporated the sordid scenario into a rather rude dream.

  My good friend Maree had arranged for my lovely mate Alman to pick me up from the airport at Sydney and take me straight to the hospital. By then I knew that Mum hadn’t suffered a stroke, but she was clearly weak and unwell. However, one look at me after twenty-nine hours of travelling had her more concerned about my well-being than hers.

  I stayed at my brother’s home that night. I walked in the door, headed straight for the bathroom and had the longest shower I think I have ever taken. I barely found the strength to unzip my suitcase but, upon examining its contents, thought it a thoroughly adequate representation of the previous few days’ madness—I had packed precisely nine pairs of undies, two bangles and one belt.

  Saad understood all my reasons for needing to leave. He was pleased to know that I had faith in my kids to go it alone, and was relieved that I would stay on for a few more months to facilitate the handover. He ended our discussion by advising me to go back to Australia and take a nice, long break.

  ‘Trudes, we’ll have you back next week, next month, next year. Your job will be waiting for you whenever you decide to return. We all love you.’

  And then came the tears. The awful man.

  I was ambling along Main Street on a mid-October morning when one of our security guards, Mukhtar, spotted me and jogged up the road to meet me. He looked worried and at first I thought he was going to deliver some bad news about his two-year-old daughter, who’d recently had surgery on her nose. He spoke very little English but in our own way, and with a great deal of gesturing and facial antics, we generally got one another. However, his concerned expression had nothing at all to do with his daughter.

  ‘Al Qaeda . . . ?’ And he motioned with his hand to indicate a plane taking off. He had evidently just found out that I was leaving. I sadly nodded my head and he simply lowered his, shook it slowly and said: ‘This no good.’

  I started to cry (something I was doing with increasing regularity at that time) and he squeezed his eyelids with his fingertips to hold back his own tears.

  We stood like that for a moment before he again muttered, ‘This no good.’

  He quickly turned and walked away.

  Out of all the Afghans that I worked with and loved, my personal security guards probably knew me the best. They were the people who escorted me in the car to bars and parties, and who knew when I turned up to work the next day wearing the same clothes I went out in.

  They took me to the doctor when I was sick, ensuring that the driver went slowly and carefully along the bumpy roads, and followed me around the supermarket as I shopped. They had a fleeting but rare insight into my life that my staff weren’t privy to, and for the past three-and-a-half years they had been literally guarding my life.

  I’d scored the nickname Al Qaeda after my stint on Salam. Al Qaeda operatives were usually Pashtun, so when I arrived back in Kabul after the Salam shoot with a smattering of Pashto words and phrases under my belt, the security guards and drivers all thought it was hilarious. Many of them were Pashtun themselves but, for some reason, I became the evil insurgent. They called Muffy ‘Malaka’, which translates to ‘Princess’, so I felt rather ripped off in the nickname department.

  Whenever there was a terrorist attack, they jokingly wagged their fingers at me, muttering something along the lines of: ‘Al Qaeda. Bad. Boom!’

  I simply winked, smiled conspiratorially and nodded my head. Yes, it was entirely logical that I would mastermind a bombing that I was caught up in the middle of.

  If we arrived at a police checkpoint, they would turn to me and, by way of indicating that they were about to expose me, whisper something like: ‘Police, Al Qaeda. You . . .’ Before feigning tossing me out the car door.

  They chased me down Main Street hurling imaginary grenades in my direction; we drew pretend guns and staged bloody shoot-outs.

  They accelerated towards me in the parking area, and grabbed me when we were crossing the road and teased at throwing me into the traffic. And once, on a routine trip from work to home, I was driven through the backstreets and up and around an isolated hill as I half-jokingly enquired whether I was actually being kidnapped.

  The games were a little twisted, but we played them every day and it always made us laugh. And when I finally returned to Australia, many of my happiest memories would be courtesy of these brave, mad men who were some of the lowest-paid workers in the company and who routinely lived away from their families for weeks at a time to look after me.

  Usually, if an expat has security in Afghanistan, it will be of the western variety—highly paid professionals, typically ex-army, who wear body armour and carry nifty little Ru
ssian pistols. With the exception of a Brit, who earlier that year had been appointed as our head of security and who operated out of Dubai, our entire security detail was comprised of Afghans.

  There were security guards who spent their days (and nights) at the office, perched on rooftops with machine guns trained on the streets below. There were others who manned the boom gates on Main Street and a handful, both male and female, who guarded the various entrances to all the different sections of our huge, sprawling compound. The latter did body searches on local staff and visitors, checked bags and confiscated contraband—anything from USB sticks to aerosol cans.

  Then there were around ten men who worked on rotation and provided personal security for expat staff. They occupied the front passenger seat whenever we were being ferried around town, and one or two—sometimes more—would accompany us on our shoots. The first security guard I really got to know was Zarhawar and I just adored him. After Tiggy and Jose left Afghanistan, there were a good few weeks of just me and my shadow while we finished filming Salam. Zarhawar would carry my bag around for me; he would guard the bushes (at a discreet distance) where I’d hidden to relieve myself, and sit alone with me in rooms the size of broom closets, shielded from the men, when we ate at local restaurants. Barely a word ever passed between us; but we rubbed along together like an old, married couple until he finally delivered me safely back home to Kabul.

  There was the wonderful Omar, who still laughs with me about our treacherous bus trip to Mazar.

  Then there was Naveed, a fit, young guy who, in between trailing expats around, could generally be found working out in the makeshift gym behind the CEO’s office. I heard from the others that he was particularly handy with a gun; however, his powers of observation were a little lacking.

  On our army shoot in Jalalabad, Nilu and I had decided to play a trick on him whereby I snuck away, lay down behind a sand dune, and waited for him to panic when he discovered I was missing. After thirty-five minutes, Nilu called for me to come out.

  Parched and covered in sand, I crawled away from my hiding place to see Naveed wrestling with the producer. He was blissfully oblivious to the fact that he was one man down and that an unaccounted-for expat might, at that very moment, be holed up in a cave somewhere, waving her wedding band around and rehearsing the answer to her ‘proof of life’ question.

  Still, I was mad about the man and our bonding moment came over a game of golf.

  Allie, one of my Moby housemates, had organised a group of us to play at the Kabul Golf Club on a muggy, hot Friday. Despite the fact that there were western security contractors in our party packing pistols, our company insisted we take along one of our own guards. Naveed volunteered to escort us and was actually quite happy to tag along, as he had never seen a game of golf played before.

  I’m not much of a golfer myself—I think I’ve played a handful of games in my entire life—but even I could see that calling the ditch-riddled piece of dirt we were playing on a ‘golf course’ was a stretch. There were bumps and lumps everywhere, and clumps of bushes and big, nasty thistles plagued the landscape. I blame my lack of knowledge about the game for imagining that rubber thongs would make appropriate golfing shoes.

  The first hole was a hoot. I swung three times before I actually hit the ball; but, when I finally connected, I managed to send it high into the sky and was delighted when I saw it hit the ground in a puff of dust away in the distance. However, it was walking to where the ball had landed that did me in.

  As the others strode off in their fancy, closed-in footwear, I gingerly picked my way along the course, where prickly chunks of flora latched onto the sides of my feet. The thistles were so fierce that they actually embedded themselves into the flimsy soles of my thongs, each step bringing them closer to my flesh. Naveed dutifully sauntered along beside me, no doubt envisaging a rather dull afternoon of having to lag behind with the dim-witted western woman who couldn’t even dress properly for golf, let alone play it.

  At the second hole, I hit the ball about a metre and pretended to admire a tree as a grinning Naveed picked it up and hurled it further down the ‘fairway’. As we slowly set off in pursuit of it, I turned to him, laughed and shook my head in unmistakable defeat. He hesitated for the briefest of moments, before pointing to his back and indicating that I should jump on.

  For my part, there was no wavering—I happily got on board and also gladly let him finish playing the remainder of the round for me. Piggy-backing me for eight holes didn’t seem to affect his game at all, and he actually ended up coming in third.

  Ayub was a relatively recent recruit to the security-guard fraternity, but he had very quickly become one of my favourites. He was the chief instigator of the Al Qaeda bomb-hurling-and-finger-blasting battles, and thought that I was genuinely crazy.

  Our friendship was sealed over an ATM at a western supermarket. He had just received his very first debit card and indicated to me that he needed to use it to withdraw his pay. He was driving to his village that same night and wanted to give money to his family.

  When the machine asked which language we’d like to use, I instantly hit Dari. He was surprisingly reluctant to enter his own PIN—I assumed it was just beginner’s nerves—and so I took to the keypad myself. Ayub didn’t speak English and, to my great shame, I had only managed to master one to five in his native language, so figuring out his PIN became a great charade of holding up fingers and vigorous head nodding.

  PIN safely settled, I stood back so he could select the transaction. He just looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I pointed at the various options on offer and indicated that he should choose one. Still nothing. It was then that I realised that Ayub was illiterate—the squiggly writing on the screen meant as much to him as it did to me.

  There were two Indian guys standing behind us by this stage; as Ayub and I started all over again in English, I apologised to them for the delay. We were going great guns until we had to decide on the amount of money he wanted to withdraw. There were upraised digits all over the place, with the machine eventually tiring of our antics and cancelling the transaction.

  We retreated to the back of the lengthening queue, giggling and snorting and maniacally gesticulating at one another. Until we had to give up. I slipped him some money from my wallet instead, and we finally withdrew his cash a week later with the assistance of an English-speaking driver.

  Despite being young enough to be my son, Ayub hovered over me like a protective father. He could sense when I was having a bad day and didn’t feel like playing, fussed over me when I was sick, and wouldn’t leave my side if he was assigned to me.

  A few months before I left, we had a meeting with a US colonel at a commando training base and he gave us free rein to try out the obstacle course before we left. Ayub followed me up ladders; he held up netting as I crawled along the sand underneath it and lifted me up so I could take on the climbing bars . . . before we both retreated to separate simulated bunkers and had the mother of all simulated shoot-outs.

  The day I met Mukhtar out in the street and confirmed to him that I was leaving, he appeared again that afternoon in front of my desk. I assumed he was after some form of painkiller. Our office had become the workplace pharmacy; people regularly popped in and presented with headaches, stomach ailments, body aches and abrasions. If we didn’t have anything on hand to dispense, we went to the western supermarket to pick something up.

  Early on, Muffy and I had learnt to be very careful to get our diagnoses correct. I once gave one of our drivers a cream that I understood was needed for a sore shoulder muscle. It took me two days to discover that the poor man had been regularly rubbing an anti-inflammatory gel into a very nasty cut.

  But that afternoon Mukhtar was healthy and, through Merzad, told me that he was very sad that I was leaving. He was also worried that he wouldn’t be able to repay me the money I gave him for his daughter’s surgery before I left Afghanistan for good. I told him that I didn’t want the money, but
he argued that, if he had to repay me, then I would have to return one day to collect it.

  I laughed through more tears and assured him that I would come back. How could I leave Afghanistan forever?

  Finally I was meeting Aleem’s mum. The meeting had been coming forever, but shamefully it was only in my final week that I found time to make it happen. Aleem would have liked it to be an entire afternoon’s worth of catching up at his family home, but I had so little time to spare that, instead, we opted for a quick lunch at his married sister’s apartment close to work.

  Aleem had always called me his second mother. Mum-Number-One and I had constantly communicated over the years through our shared son—sending greetings back and forth, hopes from my side that her ailing health had improved, enquiries from her as to the well-being of my family in Australia.

  I was greeted at the apartment by a giggling gaggle of children, all dressed in their Friday best and shyly shaking my hand as I greeted them in Dari. Aleem’s two twenty-something brothers were there, also scrubbed shiny and fresh; his sister made a fleeting appearance early on, self-consciously tucking her hair under her scarf and barely able to raise her eyes to meet mine, before scuttling back to the kitchen.

  Despite the fact that I was ostensibly there to meet Aleem’s mother, she failed to appear so, as I sat on the floor with her three sons, I asked Aleem where she was. He told me that she was cooking our lunch and I would meet her later. The food arrived, and Aleem’s nieces and nephews carefully laid down plates of oily, hot bolani before us on the floor. I told Aleem to go and get his mum from the kitchen, but he was adamant that she wouldn’t come out; it was her job to feed the men and the western woman, but she would be sure to join us once we’d had our fill.

  I had been in this position before and on other occasions I had made my way to the kitchen, to smilingly coax the womenfolk out to join us to eat. But Aleem was from conservative Pashtun stock and so I didn’t feel comfortable pressing the point. It was probably for the best anyway, as Aleem was anxious to update me on his cousin’s marital situation and, despite knowing that his mother didn’t speak a lick of English, I didn’t think I’d be entirely comfortable discussing the rather delicate subject in front of her.