Making Soapies in Kabul

by Trudi-Ann Tierney

  The cousin had married four days ago, and Aleem and his family had all travelled to a small village in the east of the country for the wedding. It had been a huge affair, with hundreds of people in attendance; indeed, most of the village had been invited to celebrate the union. The morning after the big event, Aleem’s aunty and assorted interested women had gone to the marital bedroom to inspect the sheets for blood.

  The sheet inspection is still a widely practised custom in Afghanistan, as many Afghans believe that blood-stained bedding is the only certain proof that the bride was a virgin. When Muffy was producing her lifestyle show, she workshopped a segment on women’s health with her female producers that ultimately evolved into a discussion about S-E-X. When one of the producers, who was studying to be a doctor, tentatively asked Muffy what a tampon was, she took one from her bag and delicately explained what it was and how to use it. The girls were intrigued and thought it a great device for dealing with menstrual flow, but they unanimously acknowledged that they could never use one, for fear that it might prevent them from bleeding on the marital sheets.

  Aleem’s aunty and friends arrived at the honeymoon suite (no more than a curtained-off section in the family home) to discover the bride in tears and the sheets perfectly white. But any doubts as to the seventeen-year-old girl’s chastity were quickly dismissed when Aleem’s cousin admitted that he had failed to perform—an inopportune bout of erectile dysfunction had hit him and he hadn’t even come close to probing his bride’s virginity.

  There was outrage, of course, and savage declarations from the bride’s mother that the groom wasn’t a real man and had always been a hopeless, effeminate weakling. But the outrage wasn’t confined to the appointed bed inspectors; over the next few hours, husbands, brothers, sisters and cousins were all informed. Very soon the entire village knew about the poor man’s misfortune.

  The second night saw a similarly pitiable showing from the hapless hubby (not surprising, considering the enormous public pressure he was now under to deflower his wife) and it was communally decided that the local mullah should be consulted.

  The mullah had some interesting insights into the dilemma, declaring that the solution lay in the husband boiling an egg and then eating it with his wife. I wasn’t greatly surprised when Aleem informed me that the mystical cure had failed to do the trick.

  The utter shame of the third strike-out had compelled the family to falsely declare that the deed had been done. But the cousin was not in the clear—a disgrace to his entire family, he now turned to Aleem for advice.

  Over the phone, Aleem had questioned the mullah’s advice: ‘How can eating an egg make your “thing” work? You need to take off all your clothes, lie down beside each other and start kissing.’

  I had naively imagined that this would be the natural start to any such proceedings, but apparently not—Aleem was roundly berated by his cousin for being a shameful, shameful man and a very bad Muslim.

  ‘So what to do?’ Aleem asked me with upraised palms and a grave shake of the head.

  I shrugged my shoulders and shook my head too . . . until I realised that he and his brothers were genuinely looking to me for an answer. After gnawing on my bolani for an inordinate amount of time, I conceded that Aleem’s advice was as good as it got (privately harbouring my suspicions that the unfortunate fellow may, in fact, be gay) before venturing into territory that I was loath to explore. ‘There are tablets he can take. To help with sex. Have you ever heard of them?’

  Aleem admitted he knew something about it, while his brothers just stared at me, slack-jawed and mute.

  I took a deep breath. ‘Okay. The tablets are called Viagra and you can buy them at any pharmacy. My male friends here get them all the time.’

  ‘And what will they do?’ Aleem enquired.

  ‘Well, they will . . . make your cousin’s “thing” work.’

  The two brothers looked at each other and giggled, while Aleem tore a piece of paper from his nephew’s notebook and instructed me to write down the name of this wondrous drug. I was insistent that his cousin seek some kind of medical advice before embarking on this course of action. I was quietly wondering about the effectiveness of Viagra with a man who refused to disrobe to have sex, when Aleem’s mum entered the room.

  Our meeting was brief but moving. Using Aleem as our translator, we chatted like sisters. Mum-Number-One was younger than me, but raising six children and years of struggling with kidney and heart complications had taken their toll on her sweet-natured, delicate features.

  As our time together drew to a close, she presented me with a scarf. Then, with her eyes fixed firmly upon me, she spoke softly to Aleem for a very long time. She was thanking me for looking after ‘our’ son, for guiding him through his career and for helping our boy grow into a beautiful young man.

  As my eyes filled with tears, I noticed Aleem absent-mindedly fingering the piece of paper that he had hurriedly shoved into his top pocket when his mother had appeared. I hugged her tightly to me as we said our goodbyes, wondering what she would make of the motherly assistance I had given our son just that afternoon.

  I was sitting on a bus at Dubai Airport, being ferried to the plane that was finally taking me home. I looked like a strung-out junkie—bleary-eyed, dishevelled and coughing up the nasty remnants of a two-day surprise farewell party that, due to a nagging cold, I really hadn’t been fit enough to attend. Naturally I had, which is essentially why I’d missed my scheduled flight out of Kabul; instead, I’d taken to my bed, my lips wrapped around my asthma inhaler for most of the day.

  I could sense that my fellow business-class passengers were wondering why the hell I was here with them on the first bus to hit the tarmac. So was I really—the free upgrade had been granted to me just as we were boarding.

  The stewardess who informed me of this fortuitous turn of events looked puzzled too. She checked my boarding pass, consulted some list, scrutinised my passport, looked at my boarding pass again and then quietly conferred with a colleague before confirming that, yes, this wreck of a woman now leaning on the counter in order to stay upright was the ‘Trudi-Ann Tierney’ that the airline had deemed worthy of turning left as she entered the aircraft.

  And just to reinforce my clearly disturbed and fragile state, I was now crying as well. The exquisitely fragrant, perfectly groomed woman sitting next to me on the bus made an almost imperceptible move to the edge of the seat as I again read over the text I had just received from Dave, who was now living in Dubai. He and Sienna were getting married in New Zealand in a month and I was already booked in as best man. He had just messaged to tell me that Sienna was pregnant.

  My last days in Kabul were chaotic. So many goodbyes to be said, so many send-offs to attend—the endless tears and beers undoubtedly responsible for my state of extreme dehydration. And somewhere in the midst of all of this, I had to finalise transitioning my work duties to Merzad.

  Just that week we’d signed the contract with our client for a second season of Eagle Four. It had been in negotiation for two years, with endless plot rewrites as the funder grappled with what exactly it should be propagating to the Afghan populace.

  I, of course, wasn’t going be there to see it swing into production and Merzad was nervous about doing it without me. He’d asked me on a daily basis whether I could stay and see it through. I promised him that the team could pull it off and excused myself with talk of my failing health and needing to see my mum. But the truth was: I simply didn’t have the energy to take that ride again.

  Alka, Wassi, Ali, Sidique, Shakila, Ashraf . . . all of my kids had stolen a quiet moment in the past few weeks to ask me to stay. Khan and I looked at old photos from the Salam shoot and both of us cried. Raouf quite confidently told me that he could have the Attorney-General issue an order to stop me from leaving Afghanistan. And Farhad genuinely wanted to know what they had done wrong to make me go.

  It was Hakim, the boy who had never left Kabul, let alone the country, who fo
und the words to express the real meaning behind their despair. ‘I knew you would one day go, but then you kept on staying. So I thought it might never happen. And now you are going. Everyone will one day leave us. What will happen then? That is what I can’t stop thinking about.’

  I assured him that he’d be fine; that Afghanistan would thrive. That, with wonderful, intelligent people like him, determined to see the country progress, there wasn’t any need for us crazy foreigners to hang in there. But to be honest, I really didn’t know what would happen and much of my despair over leaving had been the constant, awful thought that in a few years’ time my young friends could be caught up in some kind of hell that would be beyond their control to change.

  Khalid had come by to visit. He’d heard that I was going for good and wanted to say goodbye. His English had improved considerably since I’d last seen him and he needed me to know that there were no hard feelings about his undignified exit from the company.

  He told me that he was now making a very good living from dressing as a woman and dancing at weddings. But he’d recently got into a scrape with the police when a brawl erupted at a reception and the cops turned up to find everyone drunk. He proudly informed me that he managed to avoid jail by ‘connecting’ with the arresting officers.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. And in truth, there had been as much joy as there had been despondency in my final days.

  When my girl posse from the office took me out to lunch, we played Spin the Bottle and the bloody bottle seemed to be constantly pointing at me.

  ‘So Trudi Jan,’ Alka began. ‘How many boys have you had?’

  ‘Do you mean boyfriends?’

  ‘Yes, boyfriends,’ she replied.

  ‘Boys who you have done “you-know-what” with. Real boyfriends,’ added Rukhsar (who, as a married woman with two children, had both the authority and confidence to venture into the ‘you-know-what’ territory).

  It all got a little complicated when I attempted to explain that ‘you-know-what’ boys didn’t necessarily constitute ‘boyfriends’. And my subsequent feeble attempt to count the ‘you-know-what’ boys on my fingers had them shrieking with shocked but delighted laughter.

  They would have happily probed my ‘love’ life all afternoon, but they had to go after a couple of hours to distribute pens and books at a girls’ school that their women’s group supports.

  There was an enchanting dawn excursion to Darulaman Palace on the outskirts of Kabul with two members of my expat chicks’ posse—Sal and Fran—and some sweet chap I still only know as Random Italian Dude. We were the last ones standing at a Thursday-night shindig when Sal decided that she wanted to take photos of the palace at sunrise. A huge, sprawling European-style building constructed in the 1920s, Darulaman was ravaged by fire during the communist coup in 1978 and almost completely destroyed by the Mujahideen at the end of the Soviet invasion. And, with its blown-out walls, its tangles of twisted metal hanging from the ceiling, and its crumbling marble floors, it is indescribably magnificent.

  The first blush of light was just staining the horizon when the taxi arrived that was going to take us there. As we raced out to meet it, I grabbed my terry-towelling dressing gown for warmth, Sal grabbed her camera, while Fran grabbed a bottle of vodka. Somewhere along the way, Random Italian Dude (RID) made us stop at a street stall to buy cigarettes and a soccer ball.

  The palace was surrounded by a wire fence and guarded by security, but it only took us ten dollars to gain admission for the grand tour. The soccer ball proved to be a genius move because, as RID and our heavily armed tour guide kicked it back and forth across the enormous reception area, we ladies climbed all over the place, marvelling at the shapes and shadows, sitting together sipping Stoli in the massive arched windows and watching the sunrise over Kabul. I had never loved the city as much as I did that morning.

  And my official farewell party—held a few weeks back so as to be a joint affair, since my good mate John was also leaving—was a riotous celebration that felt a little like an end-of-high-school do. We drank, danced and sang to our favourite summer songs of 2012. I indulged in emotional deep and meaningfuls with all my besties, before retreating to my room to make out with my good mate Mick. He was a man I had an impossible crush on, primarily because he was ten years younger than me and at that time, the most popular boy on the Kabul campus. Still, as queen of the prom, it was a fitting and deserved end to a glorious night.

  Just before I left I caught up with Jahid, the Mohseni brother who was CEO when I arrived. He hadn’t been to Kabul in months and we spent hours together talking about the ‘good old days’. We laughed about Salam, recounting all the hilarious mishaps and calamities we endured to get the show made and on air. When I thanked him for having such faith in me to manage the project, he sheepishly informed me that nobody else had been crazy enough to take the job on.

  Hiking off to the Badlands with a bag full of money and no idea was now just some notional, romantic relic. The stuff of nostalgia, of wistfully murmuring ‘Remember when . . .’ and ‘Can you believe . . . ?’ And I felt blessed for having been there, because I sensed I would never see days like these again.

  From: Hakim

  To: Trudi-Ann

  I’m fine, and everybody is doing well here.

  Oh, you’re great. I’m really happy hearing this.

  Thanks for my word too. I’m not in the office and unfortunately i can’t get any word for you now. Anyway, as i always get a good one on behalf of you, so if i were in the office, you’d definitely get JOY today. that is why i can ensure that your word of the day is JOY.

  I hope you don’t laugh very very loud.

  thanks,

  Hakim

  I don’t laugh very, very loud. I cry until my throat aches.

  In the weeks leading up to my departure, when I was barely holding it together and feeling such incredible guilt about abandoning my team, I was advised by an expat old-timer that, for the sake of my sanity, I needed to cut the cord as soon as I left Kabul. But I simply can’t. The adorable Hakim sends me a Word-of-the-Day each morning and I send him one in return. We’re six-and-a-half hours out in our timings, but it works for us.

  We have all stayed in touch, desperately holding on to one another via email, Facebook and phone. My Afghan friends’ need for constant contact is as acute as my own. There is expected baby news from Merzad and from Aleem’s cousin (it seems like the Viagra did the trick); there are engagements, weddings and office gossip. Truth is, I gather they are coping with the separation far better than me.

  I sit here now, shuffling through my pack of Word-of-the-Day cards searching for the good stuff and thinking about Hakim.

  During our last week together, I gave him one final job. My laptop had packed it in (something I took as yet another sign that it was truly time to go) and the cursor kept jumping all over the screen. I actually can’t touch-type and so I had to keep my eyes glued to the keyboard as I bashed away at it.

  So, in the difficult, dying days, when I felt that I still had so much to fix before I left, Hakim had to stand behind me and tell me every time the cursor moved. After thrashing out an exceptionally long email to management, with Hakim at my shoulder, I thanked him, hugged him and told him how wonderful he was.

  He lowered his head and, when he looked up, his eyes had turned to liquid brown. ‘There is a saying that you never realise what you have until you’ve lost it. But we know now, Trudi Jan. We already know.’

  And I think I know now too.

  On the streets of Kabul, shooting Salam with Tiggy and the team. We were always guaranteed to draw a crowd: ‘Quick everyone! There’s a crew and some old, foreign bird making a TV show in our street!’

  On the road with the boys in Jalalabad, about to shoot a car chase scene.

  The team at work on Salam in Jalalabad. We were filming in the grounds of our hotel as a security threat had closed down most of the city.

  Turning a blind eye to OH&S practices—our
cameramen were often forced to improvise to get the shot.

  A security guard on duty at my guest house. Guns are very handy for lots of reasons.

  A rather inventive and original solution for shooting on Salam.

  The infamous ‘boy-down-the-well’ shoot, with some of the child actors I forbade to go to school. Inset: The boy down the well.

  The glamour of making TV. On set, in a tiny, airless, mud hut in 37-degree heat. At least I didn’t have to ‘sleep’ under a woollen blanket, like our child actor.

  Shooting a scene for Salam in the village. A motorcycle, an actor who couldn’t ride it, excited children and a man leaping onto the road—yep, that looks safe.

  How to create a gunshot wound in Afghanistan. Not the way they normally do it.

  With the Salam crew, in the mountains of Nangarhar. I found out a few days later that the area we filmed in hadn’t yet been properly de-mined. Whoops.

  Setting up on my final day on the Salam shoot. Once again, flagrantly ignoring accepted OH&S practices (and child-labour laws).

  Filming our Army TV spots in Mazar-e-Sharif. I think the gun I’m posing with was unloaded.