Then Sam looked directly at me for the first time all night. “If you’re not serious about this, don’t play with my heart.”
“I just met you!” I said.
“You’re not serious?” he asked, through Suraya.
“I don’t know!”
He went upstairs to his room and came back with a package. It was a bolt of lavender silk with embroidered daisies and lots of sequins. This was a courtship ritual that I’d never heard of—I guess the groom’s family is supposed to give the bride’s family fabric for her wedding dress. But I hadn’t a clue about it then. I sat there with this god-awful gaudy stuff in my lap trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with it, but Suraya cried, “Mrs. Sam!”
A week later, Val, Suraya, and I decided we’d had it with the old man’s guesthouse. We had stomach problems all the time and thought it might have been the food the old man was serving us—probably kebabs fashioned from the goats who grazed the medical waste and other garbage outside the hospital every day. And Suraya had had a run-in with one of his chowkidors. The guesthouse did our laundry—that was part of the deal—but it was understood that the ladies would wash their own underwear. Suraya had all sorts of lacy underthings that she’d washed and hung outside to dry under a blanket, so that no one would see them. But she caught one of the chowkidors under the blanket, sniffing her stuff. When we mentioned to Sam that we wanted to leave—he was now hanging around the guesthouse every day—he invited us to move into the house he was renting. So Val and Suraya moved into one room, and I moved into another. And suddenly, Sam and I were nearly constant companions.
Not that we were able to spend much time alone. The whole concept of dating hadn’t hit Afghanistan yet. Maybe people dated back in the days of the king, but the practice seemed to have died along with that era. Sam and I were almost always surrounded by Suraya, Val, Ali, Noor, and a friendly diamond smuggler whom we’d met at the old man’s guesthouse. If I was seen alone with Sam or any man, people would assume that I was a prostitute. So we went on lots of picnics or out to the Turkish restaurant with Val and Suraya. And when we did, there was always this joking about Sam and me getting married. Val and Suraya pretended to be in ongoing negotiations, because the family of an Afghan bride usually spends months hammering down the details of the dowry. We had a lot of fun with these negotiations. I laughed so loud once when Suraya and Sam were haggling at the Turkish restaurant that Sam was embarrassed. He went over to a table full of staring Afghans and told them I was a general with the international peacekeeping forces, so they’d understand that I was supposed to act badly.
But everyone acted as if Sam and I were engaged, although I still wondered if they were serious. Every day, Sam would show up at the Women’s Ministry to visit me outside, under the chowkidors’ watchful eyes. Every evening, we’d be together but surrounded by the cast of characters who hung out at his place—he’d decided to turn it into a regular guesthouse, so there were more people who had rented rooms. Every once in a while we’d manage to sneak a few minutes alone, but it was sort of frustrating since he couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Dari. I’d creep into his office when no one was around, but lots of times I just wound up watching him play Spider Solitaire on his computer. I thought he was cute. I thought he must have a good sense of humor, because he had a hearty laugh and the Afghans all seemed to be laughing with him. I didn’t think there was a hidden ugly side to him, because I saw him both when he was out with friends and when he was doing business in his office. His mood didn’t seem to change much. I liked him more all the time, even if I wasn’t in love with him.
But everyone else talked as if we were getting married right away. I went along with it. One day, Ali told me he was starting the paperwork for us to get married, and he took me to a building to get my picture and fingerprints taken. A few days later, Val and Suraya told me to get dressed, that we were going to see the judge about the marriage. Sam dressed in a dark shalwar kameez. I was in a pink embroidered dress and pink shawl that Suraya had given me because she thought none of my clothes were nice enough. Ali came along, too. We all drove to a dirty, old three-story building and walked down a long hallway. It was dark inside, because the power wasn’t working that day. I peered into the rooms we were passing, and it seemed there were men drinking tea in all of them, some squatting on the floor. We finally got to the room with the judge and sat on a broken couch with so little stuffing that our butts almost touched the floor. A man with a gray turban and gray beard sat at a table—this was the judge, I gathered—and two men sat on either side of him drinking tea. They all darted curious looks at me.
When we finally walked up to the judge, he scanned each of the papers Ali set in front of him slowly, running his finger over the print as he read. He looked back and forth from me to the photograph we’d taken a few days earlier. He said something to one of the men sitting next to him, and that man shook his head. Then the judge said to me—through Suraya—“We’ve never had a foreigner here before.”
I nodded my head solemnly. I felt shockingly pink in this dark, drab room.
“You are single?”
“Yes.”
“How do we know you are single? You need to get a paper from the American Embassy saying that you’re single.”
“They have no idea whether or not I’m single!”
The judge fished a cigarette out of his pocket. “Well, we need some sort of proof.”
I had a thought and dug in my purse for my passport. I pointed to where my visa read “single entry,” meaning that I was allowed to enter the country once. “It says single right here.”
The judge confirmed this with Suraya, then tapped the table with his cigarette. “A woman cannot divorce a man in Afghanistan. Did you know that?”
“That’s not a problem,” I said. “If I don’t like him, I’ll just leave him.”
I don’t know if Suraya translated this properly, but the judge seemed to accept it. He said, “All right, then. Repeat this after me.”
And as I was repeating after him, I realized that he was reading the nika-khat—the legal document that made us man and wife. I wondered how it was possible that I was marrying someone to whom I couldn’t even talk, but I kept repeating the judge’s words anyway. In a few minutes, it was signed. There was nothing said about “Now you can kiss the bride.” Instead, Sam and I turned slowly to the long hallway outside the room, married only twenty days after we met. We had already planned a party that night to celebrate birthdays for Val, Suraya, and me—we were all born around the same date—so we stopped to buy the traditional candies that are handed out at a wedding. We also stopped at the school and told the students, who were thrilled. Roshanna hugged me with such force that she just about knocked me over. “Now, you are really Afghan.” Sam started referring to Val and Suraya as his father-and mother-in-law.
I was thinking, worst-case scenario: I’ll just go back to America and never tell anyone that I got married. The problem with that was that I’d never be able to return to Afghanistan.
I wanted to keep our marriage a secret, at least for a while. I didn’t want to tell my family or friends in Michigan that I had gotten married again, since most of my relationships didn’t have even the life span of a goldfish. And I didn’t want word to get around in Kabul. There were lots of reporters buzzing around because we were getting ready to graduate our first class from the beauty school. I certainly didn’t want my mother and grandmother and sons to read that I had gotten married in a newspaper or see it on television.
So things stayed pretty much as they were, at least on the outside. I shared a room with another woman, and Sam stayed in his room. When we’d get together with the whole group in his living room or out at a restaurant, we’d content ourselves with longing gazes. We met in his room a few times when the house was empty for delightfully furtive sex. But even though I was enjoying this precipitous plunge into marriage, I was still planning to go back to Michigan a month after the fi
rst class graduated. Now, however, I figured that I would return to Kabul more regularly, even when school was not in session. Maybe I’d alternate two months of Afghanistan—and marriage—with three months of my old life at home.
FRANKLY, I DIDN’T HAVE a lot of time to think about whether I had married another freak. Graduation was approaching. All of the beauty school organizers wanted to make it the biggest party for a group of women that Afghanistan had ever seen. I volunteered to plan it, figuring it wouldn’t take me much more than three days to set everything up.
Wrong.
It took me two full days to find a location that could handle two hundred people, including media. We wanted to invite every politician and dignitary in town, but these people wouldn’t go anywhere unless their security was assured. I inspected one place after another, but there was always a problem—too small, too dirty, bad neighborhood, or too expensive. I finally realized that the Turkish restaurant—the place where Val and Suraya had hammered out the details of my so-called dowry—might work. Sam and Suraya came along with me to negotiate things, and then all I had to do was invite people.
Back in Holland, Michigan, this wouldn’t have been a big deal. But back in Holland, Michigan, I wouldn’t have been inviting the president of the country to come to a party. We figured we’d invite all the most important people in the city, but I didn’t run in that crowd—I didn’t even know their names. So I made a guest list that looked something like this:
President Karzai and his people
Foreign affairs minister and his people
Women’s minister and people
Women’s hajj minister (the Islamic women’s minister—very important)
Transportation minister
Head of the U.S. international peacekeeping forces
American, British, Canadian, Dutch, German, and Turkish ambassadors and people
General Khatol Mohammed Zai, the only female general in Afghanistan’s army
If I were in Holland, Michigan, I would have tracked down the addresses of these people and mailed the invitations. But there was no postal system in Afghanistan; there wasn’t a way of looking up their addresses. Among Sam, Roshanna, and Suraya, we finally came up with a rough map of the city showing the compounds where most of these people might be contacted. So I set out one day, dressed in my most conservative clothes and wrapped as tightly as an overseas package, to deliver handwritten invitations. At each place, I was greeted by armed guards who wouldn’t consider letting me in without an appointment. And I must have seemed suspicious to them, since I didn’t even know the names of some of the dignitaries I was inviting. I left the invitations with the guards but at least thought to ask for the phone number of each dignitary’s assistant.
After three days, no one had called to RSVP. I called all the assistants and found out that none of them had received the invitations. So I wrapped myself up again and went out to redeliver them. Two days before the party, I tried calling around to find out who was coming, but the entire city’s phone system was down. So I had to go from compound to compound one more time, requesting quick meetings with the assistants to get a head count. I finally returned to the beauty school victorious. It seemed that we would have a tremendous turnout, with some of the biggest names in Kabul in attendance. The girls were so excited that I considered taking their scissors away from them.
On the big day, the beauty school was pandemonium, with all twenty students as well as the hairdressers getting ready for the party. Everyone was running around in pink and green curlers, doing one another’s makeup, settling their false eyelashes in place. Anytime new people walked in they could hardly breathe for the hair spray and powder. I did my own makeup quickly and ran out before the others, just to make sure everything was ready at the Turkish restaurant—and found that nothing was ready. So in my full party regalia—I’m talking a pink-and-gold Punjabi outfit, gold high heels, hair as tall as Marge Simpson’s, and eyelashes like butterflies—I started moving tables. I’d finally gotten them all into place when the security officer for the Dutch ambassador arrived. He took one look around and told me it was no good. The tables were too close to the windows, and important people don’t sit by windows because someone might take a shot at them. Even if I moved the tables to the other side of the room—which I did—he wasn’t happy with the place. There was no back entrance, in case the ambassadors and their party wanted a quick exit. The buildings on either side of the restaurant were too close and too high, making it too easy for a shooter to station himself above and wait for a good target to come along. And where were the security guards?
Well, where were the damn security guards? Sam arrived in time to find me screaming at the owner of the restaurant. I thought he had promised to bring in extra security for the event, but he thought I was doing it. And if the place wasn’t ringed with guards, none of the dignitaries would get out of their cars. Fortunately, Sam was a friend of the head of the Turkish peacekeeping forces, who obligingly sent over thirty soldiers. They arrived just minutes before the guests. The musicians started to play, we began to serve drinks—not with alcohol, of course—and just when I was starting to panic that the students had been kidnapped, they swept into the room looking like a parade of 1950s debutantes. It was a dazzling celebration. Halfway through, General Zai asked if she could make a speech. “My sisters, I salute you!” she cried from the center of the room. “Tonight I stand here proud to call you my sisters because through your hard work and perseverance, we can create a brighter, more beautiful future for Afghanistan!”
It was a wonderful night. As I looked around the room, I was particularly happy to see all these men and women mingling in this pleasant way. Outside the old man’s guesthouse, I hadn’t really seen any mixed-gender crowds. After about half the guests left, I felt like dancing. I pulled a few of the students by the hands and told them that we should dance to celebrate this great achievement, but they all backed away. And these were the ones who danced like harem girls after work at the beauty school! Finally, I took Topekai’s hands and asked her to dance.
Topekai had been my breakthrough student—the first one to grasp color concepts—and she was different from most of the women in that first class in other ways, too. Her family had been poor, and, like many others, they’d fled to Pakistan to get away from the wars. But her husband’s brother had emigrated earlier to America and was dutiful about sending money, so they never suffered the kind of grinding poverty that many of my other students had. When they returned to Afghanistan, her brother-in-law sent enough money for her husband to start a business selling wood for home heating. Topekai’s was a loving husband who helped out with the children and even washed the family’s clothes when she put in long hours at school. Topekai had always seemed so strong and calmly determined that I assumed she wasn’t as bound by the culture’s restrictions as the rest of them. When I asked her to dance, she looked at her husband gravely, and he nodded. So we danced, but modestly. Even so, a quiet circle of watchers formed around us and her cheeks grew pink.
If I’d known then what I know now, I never would have asked her to dance. It was a cultural faux pas. If Suraya had been standing nearby, she would have quickly told me I was stepping over a very substantial line. Topekai’s husband had not consented because he approved of his wife dancing in front of other men; in fact, he was terribly shamed by this. He had consented only because he didn’t want to embarrass me and because I had helped his wife gain the skills she needed to run a successful business at a time when his own business was struggling.
But I didn’t figure this out until much later. That night, I was only full of deliriously high hopes. I stayed late and did my best to charm all the dignitaries. The American Embassy had called earlier in the day to offer their regrets because there had been some sort of terrorist threat against Americans. I never gave a thought to my own safety. I kept exchanging glances with my handsome stranger of a husband. I looked forward to the next few days, when all the other Ameri
cans would go home, when the media would go away, when we could finally sample our new life together in privacy. I was so happy that I didn’t even realize my feet were bleeding until I got home and pried off my gold high heels.
I stepped through the doorway of the charred house, angling my shoulders to keep from getting soot all over my clothes. There were no interior walls, only shapes that were jagged and sharp against the gloom. The November air was cold and heavy with smoke. I shone the beam of a flashlight through a hole that went all the way to the attic. As I did, I stepped on something that crunched and then skidded from under my foot. My mother bent down to pick it up. It was one of my old dolls.
“Don’t worry, honey!” she said, as if I were still six years old. “We can probably get it cleaned up again.” She tried to rub the soot off its face, but I could see that its cheeks were cracked.
The destruction made me feel as if I were still in Afghanistan, not back in Michigan. Only a few weeks ago, I had gone with an Afghan-American friend to look at the house his family had abandoned during the wars. There were huge rocket holes, even in the interior walls, and rats skittered away from us in every room. It was hard to recognize it as a home—it could have been any old wrecked building—but my friend told me it had once been one of the finest houses in Kabul. As we moved from room to room, he pointed out where the dining room table had been where they had eaten their last meal together. He showed me where his father had kept a beautiful old cupboard from Nuristan to store his coin collection. It was all gone. I couldn’t imagine that kind of loss then, but now I was beginning to understand how you feel when your family home goes up in smoke. There weren’t even any visual clues of our old life together. Where was my father’s chair? He had died more than a year ago, but my mother always kept his chair in the same spot. Where was the cupboard where we stored the Christmas ornaments?
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