She put both palms on the counter and straightened her arms, locking her elbows. Enough feeling sorry for herself. She was lucky to have found love, to have experienced love at all. She could even have a fling if she felt like it. (Tommy and she had an unspoken pact: Do what you want with whom you want on your own time, just don’t talk about it, and never ever get emotionally involved.) She was lucky to have the coffeehouse and be living in this extraordinary place.
Tommy’s earnings, which they’d shared in the beginning, had enabled her to pay the first six months’ rent for the café, but her ingenuity and hard work had made it the success it was. She’d known that his money had been earned by killing, that he’d become a shooter, a paid mercenary fighting the Taliban in the south. But she’d figured that it was for a good cause. He was killing the bad guys.
Sometimes she felt that life in Kabul was like the Wild West, where bad guys were bad and the good guys were good, where the rule of law was as ephemeral as peace. She let out a sigh, took the clip out of her apron pocket, and wrapped her hair up into a bun. Life should be as easy as it was back then, as easy as putting your hair up, she thought. You love, you die, and in between you live as best you can.
“Daydreaming again, Miss Sunny?” asked Halajan. “Meanwhile the wolves eat your goats.”
Halajan was full of ancient Afghan wisdom. Whether Sunny wanted it or not.
Sunny looked at the old woman who owned the building and was the mother of Ahmet, with her long, low breasts that hung at her waist, unsupported by a bra, her clothes that looked like rags, and her open face. She answered, “I don’t have any goats.”
“Then they eat you,” Halajan said, as she came out from behind the counter and walked toward the back door. “I’m taking a break now.”
“Enjoy your smoke,” said Sunny.
Halajan turned and smiled at her. “You bet your ass,” she said in English.
Sunny laughed. Halajan was the only Afghan woman Sunny knew who spoke like that, who drank and smoked, a vestige of her life from the pre-Taliban days. How she must feel now, hearing the rumors of their return, Sunny could only guess.
A table of regulars called Sunny over, but they were pains in the butt, so she deliberately walked slowly to take their order. One wanted his eggs over easy, but not so easy. Another wanted his hash browns extra crispy but not burned like the last time. And another was upset that the bread hadn’t arrived yet. Sunny rolled her eyes and thought It’s going to be a long day.
She took the order to Bashir Hadi. “Crispy but not too crispy, okay? And watch those eggs.”
He smiled and said, “The customer is always right. Isn’t that the great American wisdom?”
Sunny smirked and took the cappuccino on the counter to the table where it belonged. There, a Western man wearing a traditional shalwaar kameez was reading the morning Kabul newspaper in Dari.
“And what about you, mister? You going to eat or just take up space?”
The man raised his face from his newspaper and looked at her with steel blue eyes. He was striking, his face lined with the wreckage of a hard life, his hair starting to gray and recede with age, his neck and waist thick with a few too many pounds, and yet his strong hands were almost graceful the way he folded his paper, laid it on the table. He reminded Sunny of movie stars from the forties, rugged types, not too handsome but handsome enough, with something special going on under the skin.
“Are we having a bad morning, ma’am?”
He talked like a man from the forties, too.
“How about it? You going to order?” Sunny replied.
“So, this is how it’s going to be, is it? All business?”
“And please don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ Ma’am is for old ladies. I left America because of ma’am.”
“Hmm, really?” He put on his reading glasses, perused the menu, and continued, “I heard you had to. They were on to you,” he said teasingly.
Sunny ignored him.
“I’ll have a three-egg omelet with cheese—not too runny—with hash browns, and can you be sure they’re cooked this time? I like ’em crispy. And some of that good French bread of yours.” He stopped to think. “And, correct me if I’m wrong, but I do believe I smell bacon. How’d you get your hands on bacon?”
“I have my ways. But there’s no French bread. The good old flat Afghan bread is what we’re offering this morning.”
He deliberated long and hard.
Sunny waited, one hand on her hip, a slight smile forming at the edges of her mouth.
“No French bread, huh?” he said, “Okay, I’ll forgo the bread, but since I’m eating alone and won’t offend one of my Afghan friends, I’ll have some bacon. And some mango. I like how you serve the mango.”
“Anything else, sir?” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“Another cappuccino.” He took a last slug from his cup and wiped the froth from his top lip with the back of his hand.
“We have things called ‘napkins’ for that very purpose,” Sunny said.
“But then I wouldn’t piss you off, would I?” he replied, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners. He took his napkin from his lap and dabbed his mouth delicately, a bemused look on his craggy face.
Sunny couldn’t stop herself from grinning as she turned back to the counter. “Jack wants the regular,” she called to Bashir Hadi.
“Watch out, you, ’cuz I’ll be back,” she said to Jack as he picked up his newspaper.
She was surprised at how much his presence instantly brightened her mood. He’d been gone for more than a month. His work, as a consultant for rural development, often took him to remote parts of the country where he worked with engineers and contractors to bring irrigation, paved roads, and electricity to impoverished, backward areas. Or something like that. Sunny learned long ago that “consultant” was the label in Kabul for anybody doing something they couldn’t talk about. Jack didn’t speak much about the NGOs that hired him or the specifics of his job. All Sunny knew for sure was that he was married, had a kid in high school back home, and liked his eggs cooked through. And that he was funny and made her laugh. What he was doing here, with his family over there, she wasn’t sure. Except maybe it was for the same reason 99.9 percent of the other foreigners were here: to make money. In Afghanistan, a guy who made forty, fifty thousand dollars a year back home could make ten times that just for “danger pay.” If you were willing to die, you could earn a shitload to live.
Tommy was proof of that, Sunny thought. The love of her life, her reason for coming to Kabul, left her every few weeks for more lucrative possibilities. And Sunny had adapted to life in this town alone. Life happens, was her motto. You adapt or you’re lost.
Look at Yazmina, Sunny thought, who was cleaning a table toward the back of the coffeehouse. Only a few weeks ago Sunny had brought her here and introduced her to indoor plumbing and electricity. When she’d turned on the light in her room for the first time, Yazmina jumped. Halajan had had to explain the use of the toilet, which made Sunny smile just remembering her crude explanation. But when Yazmina told Halajan that where she was from, you never did your dirty business in the house and that it was very primitive of them to do such business under the same roof where they ate and slept, Halajan folded over in laughter. When she’d shown Yazmina the shower, turning on first the cold and then the hot water, the young woman’s face lit up and she put her hand into the warm stream, felt it against her skin, and watched it flow down her arm. She looked as if she’d seen a miracle.
Yazmina was completely covered in the lavender chaderi that she’d worn when she’d first arrived. It certainly wasn’t as beautiful as the one Sunny had seen her in at the Women’s Ministry, with its handmade embroidery. But that one had been torn and ruined by her ordeal and now was kept folded and hidden under her pillow. Sunny had seen it one morning when she’d gone to Yazmina’s room to give her an extra blanket for the cold nights. She’d marveled at the chaderi’s beautiful work,
and though she would never let Yazmina know she’d seen it, she vowed to herself that one day soon, she’d take Yazmina for a handmade shalwaar kameez or two. Something bright and pretty to make her feel better about being here while her family was so far away. Something light and comfortable for her to grow into as her pregnancy was further along. She hadn’t mentioned to Yazmina that she knew, not wanting to embarrass her. But the day was coming when she’d have to, if only to get her a doctor and to help her feel more comfortable and prepare for the day the baby would be born.
“Yazmina,” Sunny said to her. “Sob bakhaer. Good morning. I hope you slept well,” she said slowly, in her halting Dari. “How are you feeling today?”
Yazmina stood there, nervously, obviously not understanding.
Sunny shook her head in frustration. Communication between them was still slow as they tried to find the Dari words they had in common.
Jack looked up from his nearby table and spoke Waigili, the language of the Nuristani people, so fluently that he might have been from Nuristan himself. “Don’t mind her. She’s trying. She’d like to know how you’re feeling today.”
Yazmina smiled, and answered in her language, “Very well, thank you, tashakur,” then nodded and walked to the counter. As she put on an apron over her chaderi, Bashir Hadi was rubbing the copper coffee machine with lime juice, the best way to make it glow like the moon on a winter night, he had told her.
The morning flew by. It wasn’t until the last customer had left, and Yazmina had swept the floors and left for her room to rest, that Bashir Hadi approached Sunny, who was at the counter on her laptop.
“May we speak, Miss Sunny?” asked Bashir Hadi.
Bashir was very serious, which worried her. “Of course,” she said, closing the computer and turning to face him.
Bashir pulled a stool behind him and sat. “I enjoy my job here and I thank you for the opportunity you have given me—”
“You’re not quitting, are you?” Sunny interrupted, her heart leaping into her throat. What would she do without Bashir? She’d come to rely on him so.
“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “But I am concerned. I know it was very busy today, but it won’t be busy this afternoon or tonight. Miss Sunny, we must talk about the money. The coffeehouse is falling behind, and—”
“We always make it, Bashir Hadi, don’t we?”
“But Miss Sunny, we need more money to keep the café safe. And you safe and your customers. You know what I’m talking about.”
She let out a breath and looked out the window over his shoulder. Yes, the suicide bombings were on the increase and the kidnappings, too, yes, she knew. Just last month, a young man—a boy, really, from all accounts—strapped with an IED, an improvised explosive device, had blown himself up, and everything around him, two streets away. The ground shook and the front windows were shattered. Six people were killed. Everyone said it was lucky there weren’t more.
Bashir Hadi continued, “We must deal with security issues. We need a safe room, a place for customers to hide, should we be attacked. We need to put up blast film on the windows so they don’t shatter and become weapons of their own. We were lucky last time. But what if the bomb had been only a little closer? We need to fortify the compound in every way. We need to stop putting guns in the closet and, instead, lock them up in storage at the entrance.”
Sunny hated how that sounded like preparing for battle, but she had to face the truth. “Yes,” she said, “but I can’t afford it.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. And maybe there is a way,” he said, raising his brows, a slight smile forming at the corners of his mouth.
She looked at him closely, this lovely, trustworthy man, with his large, slanted dark eyes and warm face, his narrow frame and immaculate clothing. And, of course, his hard work that had saved her and the café more times than she could remember. Besides his running the place, and besides his dealing with the damage from last month’s explosion, there was the time, last winter, when the pipes burst. The time when a power surge had killed a coffee machine because they had had only one overworked generator and had relied on the city’s electricity. Getting the two extra generators that cost an arm and a leg. Keeping the bohkari, the wood-burning stove, working throughout the winter. Or dealing with the mud that seeped in through every possible crack and crevice in the walls each spring when the snow melted.
“You going to tell me? Or am I supposed to guess?” asked Sunny, teasingly.
Bashir Hadi reached into the pocket of his kameez and pulled out a newspaper article, neatly folded. “Look,” he said, “we rebuild the wall. Then we get UN compliance and the UN people will come. Then we’ll be busy.”
He opened the article and spread it on the counter. Sunny skimmed it. The United Nations was encouraging restaurants, hotels, and hostels to build their walls to height and depth specifications to ensure the safety of UN employees, and then the UN would sanction their use. It could double their business.
Sunny looked out her front courtyard to the wall that sheltered the coffeehouse from the street. She could see the brightly painted turquoise gate with Ahmet’s guardhouse in front. She remembered when she first came to Kabul, riding in a taxi through the streets that were walled on both sides and reminded her of the narrow roads through the dense cornfields back home. The big difference was that these walls were rife with bullet holes instead of cornhusks. They separated one home from another and every home from the street, making it difficult for people to find where they were going or to know their neighbors. They insulated the city’s residents from harm but separated them from freedom. But they were usually only about seven feet high. To get UN compliance, they had to be four meters, or about thirteen feet high.
“It’s like one of those, what do you call it? A cycle. You need more money to make the coffeehouse safer, so you build a better wall and then you get more people and more money.”
“There’s only one problem,” said Sunny, thinking about her dwindling bank account. “We need money to build the wall higher in the first place.”
Bashir put his elbow on the counter and rested his chin in his hand. “So we do something to get enough people to come so that we can do what is necessary to get more people to come.”
“Hmm. Maybe a party?”
“Do you mean to sell liquor? I don’t like that. It’s too dangerous.”
Sunny shook her head. “And I didn’t come to Kabul to be a bartender. That’s the life I left back home.”
“Something else then. We’ll think of it. But we need to do something quickly. Something for Christmas, maybe. Because before you know it, it’ll be Easter, and the coffeehouse will move to outside. It must be safe by then.”
Her first year in Kabul, Sunny instituted a couple of new traditions in the coffeehouse. One was Christmas, when she decorated with a big plastic tree and decorations from Chicken Street, and the other was Easter, which the coffeehouse celebrated as a welcome to spring, when Sunny opened the outdoor patio and created a Shangri-la of hyacinth and fuchsia that climbed the open-walled tents she’d brought back from Dubai. Christmas was around the corner; Easter was in just a few months.
“We’ll make that our goal. Safe by Easter.”
He bowed slightly, raised his head, and said, “Until then we can pray for safety. Thanks to Muhammad for Easter.”
“Thanks to Muhammad for Easter!” Sunny concurred.
And they both smiled.
Halajan walked down the back hallway to the door that led to a small courtyard behind the café, where she could have some privacy and take off her hot, itchy scarf. It was the only way a woman could do such a brazen thing in Kabul these days and not be stoned. Ach, the stupid Talib idiots, she thought as her plastic shoes click-clacked on the marble-tiled floors, one of the many improvements Sunny made to her house. What little men they are, she thought, to put women back in the burqa. She’d gotten so used to the sun that she vowed she’d die before ever hiding in the
darkness again. Wearing a head scarf was one thing. She could almost understand it, if only because of tradition. But purdah—the full covering of women at all times in public—was another. The Taliban rigorously enforced it during their five-year rule. Only in the sanctuary of the household and only in front of husbands or other women could women bare their faces. This was a prison sentence for Halajan. This was death in life. Being as old as she was, almost sixty, she’d experienced life before the Taliban and life after, and now, with the renewed violence, their presence on the streets at night, and the rumors sweeping Kabul that they were plotting their comeback, the rules were growing stricter. Halajan was worried for what might come. The taste of freedom was a strong and delicious elixir that never left her mouth.
She pushed the door open and the cold air outdoors felt wonderful against her face after a busy morning in the café. She took a deep breath, sure she could feel her old bones creak as she gazed around the patio. A lone pomegranate tree poked out of a hole surrounded by concrete and the three generators hummed loudly. Ah, the beloved generators. When Sunny had wanted to move them to the rear of the coffeehouse, because they made conversation impossible on the front patio, Halajan had first said no. And she said no again and again for months, just to assert her authority, to let this annoying American newcomer know that she was the owner of the building and would make the decisions. But as she witnessed Sunny make one improvement after another, she, too, became frustrated with the complaints and inevitable empty tables, and agreed that the generators should be moved even though they took up room back here and valuable parking spots. Neighbors had become angry, but Sunny had bribed police to open up more parking areas on the street. There was no exaggerating the idiocy of those who ran Kabul.
A Cup of Friendship Page 3