A Cup of Friendship

by Deborah Rodriguez

  The door clanged shut behind him and she leaned against it to get her bearings. What the hell was she supposed to do with that? She touched two fingers to her cheek. She knew what to do. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  Sunny was putting more than her usual maniacal effort into preparing for Christmas this season in order to distract herself from Jack. His completely innocuous kiss had seared into her cheek like a brand on the bulls back home. It was typical of her to make something big out of nothing, to obsess and worry and wonder. But this time, she knew she’d gone too far. So, she’d gotten the boxes from storage in the back closets and was opening them and beginning to organize and decorate with a frenzy. First she put a CD in the player and cranked up the volume. The Chipmunks were singing Christmas carols in their high-pitched whines.

  Christmas, Christmas time is here

  Time for toys and time for cheer …

  Bashir Hadi—who was hanging the twinkling little lights that Sunny adored on the wall of the patio, outlining the outside door, the inside door, where the ceiling met the walls of the café, along the countertop, zigzagged on the walls, and of course, throughout the huge plastic tree she’d had shipped from Dubai years before—stopped what he was doing, turned to Sunny, and tried to speak loudly enough to be heard.

  “Miss Sunny! Please. I don’t mind your Michael Jackson, singing ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,’ but I really cannot tolerate the Chipmunks. Please, I beg of you!”

  Sunny laughed and told him he could put on any Christmas CD he chose. The only rule: Christmas music from now until the party on Christmas Eve, in two weeks. She knew it was silly, but her patrons had come to expect it of her. She threw the best Christmas party in Kabul—a night of roasted turkey and cranberry sauce, of gifts under the tree, of elf costumes, and this year … Poppy dressed as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer! No need to borrow the neighbor’s goat!

  It had been a tradition for five years. There weren’t too many Christmas parties in Kabul, outside the embassy or the UN. Her party could accommodate forty people for dinner, and even though the price was a little steep, they’d sold out already. There was much to be done.

  As the car wove its way toward the Mondai-e, police and military clogged the streets along with the beggars.

  “What’s happened to us?” asked Halajan of her son, who she noticed had trimmed his beard and was wearing a crisp new shalwaar kameez. “Look at this. It’s disgusting. When did we stop taking care of one another?”

  “We’ve lost prayer, Mother. We’ve turned a deaf ear to the muezzin’s call.”

  Halajan clicked her tongue and watched a woman in a burqa crouching in the sewer, her arm out, a baby in her lap. She thought of Yazmina, confined to the café for the duration of her pregnancy, and became angry. “You think prayer will help her? So where is your mighty Allah? Have you prayed for these people? Either you’re praying for those nice new clothes you’re wearing or your prayers for these people have gone unheeded.”

  She saw the hurt on Ahmet’s face and realized she had spoken too harshly. They would never agree about the Koran or politics, but he was her son and she loved him. She didn’t want her words to drive a thicker wedge between them than the one already there.

  Finally they arrived at the river, which was dry except for a soft layer of snow from the night before. Halajan told Ahmet to wait there at the car and she’d be back in two hours.

  “Be careful, Mother,” said Ahmet. “I pray for you, but since nobody’s listening, you’re on your own.”

  She laughed at his humor, but, if she were to be honest, this time his words hurt. Halajan hurried across the dried riverbank to the Mondai-e and navigated its alleyways with assurance. In a matter of minutes she was at Rashif’s shop. She knocked on the door, and he came out wearing a coat and hat.

  “Halajan,” he said, slipping her an envelope. “Are you alone today?”

  “Ahmet drove me. He waits in the car.”

  “I will come to meet him!”

  “You cannot. All these years and you still can’t accept this world we live in? To outside eyes, my son runs my house. He makes the rules. And you don’t understand the mind of that one. With your past and his present, well, as Rumi says—”

  “My past? Ach,” he said with a grimace. “Those mullahs at the mosque poison any effort they haven’t conceived. Why don’t they teach from the heart of the Koran instead of from their own fears?”

  “As Rumi says—”

  “Stop with Rumi! Tell me what’s in your heart with your own words.”

  She was silent for a moment. “My son, he is of another generation. He will never accept you.”

  “We will help him grow younger.”

  Halajan noticed the light in Rashif’s eyes. She smiled. “Your heart is younger than his. I’m afraid for him that it’s too late.”

  “Our love will change him. I will talk to him. I will come to the café and—”

  “I will be off to do my Christmas shopping.” She turned to leave.

  “I will come to your party,” he called after her.

  “If you do, I will not speak to you.” She turned to him and smiled.

  “You do not write, you do not speak. I will be happy to be in the same room.”

  Halajan felt her knees weaken, but she held firm. “We’re sold out. We don’t have room for even one more.”

  He raised his brows and sighed with undue patience. “We’ll see, my Halajan. We will see.”

  “I will see you next Thursday, Inshallah.”

  “Inshallah, next Thursday. If not before.” He smiled at her, his dark eyes glistening.

  Halajan turned and made her way to the crowded, narrow alleyways of the market, worried that Rashif’s patience would end. She loved him dearly, but she loved her son, too. Whose heart should she break? Whose anger should she rile? As she shopped—for popcorn for stringing, dried pomegranate, and red ribbon for decorating the tree, and the other supplies on her list—she tried to enjoy it, but she was burdened by her thoughts. She was careful to get exactly what Sunny had asked for, because this holiday made Sunny a little crazier than usual, and who knew how she’d react if Halajan brought home the wrong cranberry sauce. At this time of year, every year, Sunny had a fire in her, and a sadness, which Halajan understood. Halajan felt the same way. She was excited by the preparations, and the anticipation alone made her feel lightheaded and silly, making her fingers tingle and her head feel as if it could burst. But her memories of the past and fears for the future made her heart heavy. Celebrations were a complicated mix, Halajan thought as she carried her bags back to the car. There was no way Rashif could come to Christmas Eve at the café. It was already complicated enough.

  Petr disappeared on the morning Isabel was scheduled to leave for the poppy fields. She woke up groggy and hungover from the night before to find him gone. She vaguely recalled a quick conversation they’d had, somewhere between shagging and the second (or was it the third?) glass of vodka, in which Petr said something about needing to vacate Kabul, that it had been fun and maybe they’d hook up again sometime. But he’d left no note, didn’t call or say good-bye. She wasn’t surprised. She’d known men like this before: He gave her what she needed in exchange for what he needed. It would sound frightfully cold if she were to try to explain it or say it out loud, but as a female journalist in a man’s country she did what she had to do. Only once had her strategy backfired, but that was history and something she vowed not to replay or use for self-pity.

  It had taken Petr several days to set up her trip—to get her into the poppy fields so she could talk to some people, and get her out. They’d spent those evenings at L’Atmo, getting pissed and partying, those late nights having sex, and the mornings sleeping it off. And last night was like any other, only, when she woke up, it was almost as if he’d never been there at all.

  It was the eight A.M. call that woke her. The driver Petr had arranged to take her to the airport was checking in to confirm her pickup
time. Her flight was at eleven and the entire trip would take several hours by plane and then car to get to the Badakshan province in the northeast, on the Tajikistan border. Mountainous and remote, Badakshan had become one of the largest areas of poppy production in Afghanistan because it contained the Wakhan Corridor, a viable trade route to Asia. Of course, the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar were even larger, but they were held by the Taliban and unsafe for travel even for Isabel, who had been to some of the world’s most dangerous places. Badakshan was not Talib, not yet. It was ruled by the Northern Alliance, a resistance group. Since 9/11 it had been supported by America and Britain and was now straining to keep out the Taliban.

  Afghanistan supplied from 92 to 95 percent of the world’s illegal opium poppies for heroin production, depending on the year, the weather, and how active the United States was in its eradication. President Karzai had encouraged American projects designed to help find the farmers another way to make a living. Money poured in—to improve irrigation and roads, to build clinics, and to farm food products, like potatoes and tomatoes. But workers were tortured, others murdered, and in the end it just wasn’t worth the battle with the drug lords and the other countries vested in Afghanistan’s poppy exports.

  And the corruption—the collusion between the government and the drug lords, the fact that politicians were the drug lords—was out of control. If you can think of it, they’re doing it, Petr had told her.

  She packed her small duffel bag with a few days’ worth of clothes, extra trousers for the mud and sweaters for the cold, clothes that provided the necessary cover for her, as a woman, and necessities like toilet paper and hand sanitizer, plus a few customary gifts she’d bought in the market: scarves for the women and nice prayer beads for the men. And, of course, she carried her cross-body canvas bag containing a notebook and pens, tape recorder, mobile, her newspaper ID, passport, and camera. She picked up her bags and left the comfort of her hotel for her car, a small SUV driven by a man named Mohammad, and left Kabul.

  The city was fantastic from a car, she thought. Since the driver couldn’t possibly go fast, she had the opportunity to see everything: what was directly in front of her eyes, and then what was behind that and what was behind that, as if the narrower the perspective, the more there was revealed. They passed two young boys playing ball in the street, barefoot in the sewage, right next to the car. Little boys were waving a tin can filled with spandi, a granule burned to ward off the evil eye or clean the bad spirits away, hoping for an afghani or two. Beyond them an old man crouched on his heels under a tent in his stall, his rear low to the ground, the way she’d seen her little nieces sit back home as she’d thought at the time only children could do. And he was cutting the hair of a man who was squatting in front of him. Two women bundled against the cold air were standing over them, heads together, chatting away. And behind them was a little store that sold mobiles, its sign falling down, its door off its hinges, two men walking out, arguing.

  She opened her window ever so slightly, knowing the danger of opening it fully, to experience the mingling of smells—the sewer, the diesel fumes, the grilled nuts, the animal dung. She could hear, too, the shouts of children playing, the hushed voices of the women, the shuffles of ill-fitting shoes on gravel, horns honking, men arguing over a bet, goats braying, and the muezzin singing.

  Sunny was right. Walking in Kabul provided too limited a vision. You missed the full depth of the city’s life.

  From her vantage point, she could see past the city walls to the green valley at the foothills of the Hindu Kush, to their snow-covered peaks. Then it started to snow. The flakes were small and silvery against the deep blue of the sky, and Isabel imagined a million Tinkerbell fairies, reminding her of her mother, who had read her Peter Pan so long ago. Her mother, who was only a child when her family escaped Nazi Germany. Her mother, whose passion for life couldn’t stop the hideous cancer that ultimately killed her before Isabel would realize how much she needed her, after the incident in Sierra Leone. The car rattled and bumped, the driver talked in Dari nonstop and so quickly into his mobile that she could barely make out a word he was saying, just like the drivers back home. Soon they arrived at the airport, the snow still falling but not sticking on the tarmac.

  On the flight, she fell into a fitful sleep. In those minutes of semiconsciousness, she saw what she always saw almost every sober sleep since then—the man with the knife at her throat, his face on hers, his pounding away on her body that left bruises much deeper than the physical kind. And she woke, as she always did, at the moment when he was done but before he got up and hit her with the butt of his rifle so hard it knocked her out, along with several teeth. Her breathing was fast and short, her heart racing, her anger raging, her shame for her weakness, her size, her inability to stop him. That’s why L’Atmo was good for her. Besides making the connection with Petr, all the drinking and partying gave her an escape from her own memory.

  She was met at the airport by a man Petr had hired to be her driver, guard, and translator. They arrived at the compound by late afternoon. To the right and to the left, in front and in back, were poppy fields, shrouded by the mountains behind them. It was off-season, so the seedpods lay fallow in the frozen earth. A tractor stood silent like a sentinel at the far side.

  Inside the stone walls of the compound, a few low mud buildings appeared straight ahead, where the road ended. The car pulled up beside several other vehicles that were parked there. Isabel got out of the SUV, faced the craggy mountain ridge that rose malevolently against the sky, and stretched.

  A voice behind her made her jump, and she turned to find a man in traditional clothes—white shalwaar kameez and sheepskin vest, wearing a pakul, the flat-topped hat, and sunglasses—with his hand on the automatic rifle that hung on his shoulder.

  She swallowed her fear and said, “Salaam alaikum,” and continued in English, with her driver translating into Dari, “I am Isabel Hughes, here to see Abdul Khan.” Petr had given her the name of the drug lord of this farm, which was the name of every drug lord who ran every poppy farm. He said he’d arranged for her to get a quick look and an interview.

  The man with the rifle motioned Isabel toward the door of the nearest building and told the driver to get back into his car where he was to wait for her. The driver argued in Dari, and Isabel suspected he was saying that he had to go with her to translate. But the man with the rifle was adamant. The driver looked at Isabel and shook his head in frustration. Isabel took a deep breath, swallowing her fear, and followed the man with the rifle, leaving the driver alone at his car.

  Inside was a large room, its floor covered with maroon and red rugs, filled with furniture of dark wood, gilt, and velvet. A man in a karakul, the hat made famous by President Karzai, sat on a thronelike chair at a huge desk with intricately carved legs. There was a laptop in front of him. At his side stood another man, perhaps his deputy.

  Abdul Khan stood, greeted Isabel warmly in Dari, and then the men escorted her to a table covered with small bowls of kish mish, the little goodies that Afghans served in their desire to be gracious even when they carried guns: sugared almonds, green raisins, dried chickpeas with pepper, and caramels wrapped in paper. The drug lord sat across from Isabel, smiling warmly, never taking his eyes off her. She was nervous, her heart beating hard in her ears, but she smiled back in an effort to pretend she was unafraid. The right-hand man left through a side doorway and immediately returned with a man who was to be their translator. Another man appeared with a teapot. And the drug lord welcomed Isabel to his farm.

  “In the spring there will be poppies as far as the eye can see,” he said with a proud, broad gesture of his arm. “This is a very successful farm. But the spraying will destroy everything we’ve worked so hard to attain.”

  Isabel took out her small handheld tape recorder and asked, “Is it all right if I tape our conversation?”

  “For now,” he said. Then he smiled. “When it’s not, I’ll let you kn
ow.”

  “Thank you,” Isabel said. “And for your generosity, for seeing me and giving me your time.” But she knew that drug lords, like all celebrities, liked to talk, loved the limelight.

  “Last year was an excellent year for us. Perfect weather and the market continued to be strong,” Abdul Khan said proudly. “Not like when we tried tomatoes. That was a tremendous mistake. Everyone growing tomatoes at the same time, no way to get them quickly enough to market, and even if we did, too many tomatoes! Very costly, no storage facilities. That was a stupid idea—some American bureaucrat’s idea of a better way to make a living. Poppies are the most viable crop. No storage issues and a guaranteed market. Everybody wins: the farmer in the field, the landowner, me”—his Cheshire-cat grin widened—“and Afghanistan, my country.” He stopped and exhaled. “And that is the problem, in a nutshell,” he said as he picked up an almond and popped it into his mouth. “It will all be gone come spring and the spraying, and we will have nothing. It is wrong. It is unjust punishment. The Americans say they will kill only the poppies. But it is a ploy. They will be killing everything. They will accomplish what they’re after: ridding Afghanistan of the Afghans.”

  “But what about Haram, going against the rules of Islam? Isn’t the Koran specific about rules against smoking, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs?”

  “It is you Westerners who misinterpret the Koran. It is Haram to smoke, drink, or use drugs, yes. But it is clearly written: If a man must do something to ensure his survival, it is not Haram. If I don’t produce poppies, my family will starve. And hundreds of other families will as well.”

  “Excuse me,” Isabel said, looking down as she spoke so as not to seem too provocative, “but why not build roads? Put in irrigation systems? Improve your country and your people’s lives? You’re a good businessman. You could get rich doing that. And not be responsible for creating a population of addicts.”