Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “It’s good that you’re back,” he said. The light brown of his eyes was very much like that of the tea warming my hand. “The house feels like a home now.”

  I smiled. “It feels like home to me, too.”

  “Would you like to call your husband?” He punched some numbers into his cell phone and then grinned as Sam answered. I couldn’t hear his actual words from across the room and wouldn’t have understood them anyway, but I heard Sam’s unmistakably jaunty tone. Ali handed me the cell phone and watched as Sam and I went through our list of words. Then I told Ali to ask Sam when he would be back. I heard a flurry of words at the other end, and Ali shook his head. Sam still hadn’t been able to book a flight back to Kabul, although he’d gone to the airport every day and stood in line, hoping that one of the pilgrims had opted to stay longer and give up his seat. But there were about thirty thousand hajjis trying to return and only one flight each day. His prospects of coming back to me soon were dim.

  “SALAAM ALEICHEM!” I said to a startled woman pounding the keys of an old typewriter. Then I handed her a sample of styling gel and made my way down the hall to the next office.

  I made a point of circulating through the Women’s Ministry soon after my return, showing one and all that I was back and that I was getting ready to reopen the school. Then Noor and I spent two days interviewing women for the next class. One of the first to walk in the door was Baseera, still in her burqa. I didn’t recognize her until she folded it back over her hair and I saw those gorgeous green eyes. “Welcome back to Afghanistan,” she said in English, very proud of herself.

  I was thrilled to see her again. I told Noor right away that I already knew her story. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s in this class,” I said.

  The rest of the women who streamed in ranged in age from fourteen to forty-eight. I eliminated some of them immediately. There were a handful of really sweet girls under eighteen, but I told them right away that we wouldn’t even consider them. I said that they should go back to an academic school and get all the education they could. They all looked at me with huge, tragic, kohl-smeared eyes, and I kept begging Noor to explain that I was trying to do them a favor. I was ready to refuse an eighteen-year-old for the same reason, but she began sobbing. She started to tell her story, so shy that she talked with her veil held over her mouth. Her father had been killed by the Taliban, and her brother was in charge of the family, she told us. She couldn’t read or write because her brother hadn’t permitted her to go to regular school, but he had given her permission to go to beauty school. I decided right away that I would take her, even if she didn’t match the profile of the woman we had agreed would profit most from the school. I didn’t care if she had no skills going into this or if she turned out to be the worst hairdresser in town. It mattered only that she was breaking my heart, and that this was the sole way I had to help her.

  There were so many compelling stories. There always are. The next girl was about twenty. Her mother was dead, and her father’s legs had been blown off by a land mine. She was now the sole support of her family. How could I not take her, too?

  We finally picked twenty-seven women for the second class, which would begin in a month, at the end of March 2004. We told all the women we interviewed that we would put a list of names for the class on the door to the school. I figured I would be able to hide in the back of the school that day—there was lots of cleaning to do anyway—and would not have to face the disappointment of those who didn’t get in. But then Noor walked into the school, and all fifty women rushed in behind him. It was a crowd of strong emotions. Some of them were dancing with elation, and the others either wept or followed me around, still trying to make their cases in a language I couldn’t understand. I would have taken all of them if we’d had the money. They all clearly needed this opportunity. But I didn’t even know if we had enough money for the twenty-seven we had just picked.

  I felt terrible by the time I finally got home that evening. Those sad faces haunted me. All I wanted to do was get in my bed with a book and a margarita or two. But when I opened the door, I saw a young girl—maybe fourteen years old—sitting on the couch. She jumped to her feet when I walked in, knocking over a cup of tea that had been balanced on the arm of the couch. She immediately bent down over the spill and swabbed it with her scarf. At the same time, Ali rushed downstairs. He looked uneasy for a second but then walked across the room to take the box I was carrying.

  “This is my niece,” he said. “This is Hama.”

  “Tell her not to worry about the tea.”

  “Come,” he called to the girl. She walked over and stood next to him, her head slightly bent and her pretty chestnut hair falling out of a barrette into her face. She peered up at me through the curls and smiled, then reached out and shook my hand. She was tiny, and her hand was tiny, too, with fingernails the size of teardrops.

  “Let me paint those nails!” I pretended to stroke a brush over her fingernails, and she laughed.

  “She wanted to join your class, but you didn’t accept her,” Ali said reproachfully. “I told you she would be coming to the interview day.”

  I didn’t remember that, but I shook my head anyway. “She’s too young, Ali. She should be in school.”

  “She’s twenty years old,” he said. “Her father is too sick to work, and her mother is sick, too. I’ve been looking out for her, but she wants to go to your school.”

  “She’s not twenty!”

  “Yes, twenty,” he said, but he wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  I held the girl’s chin in my hand. “How old?” I asked. I had learned at least this much Dari doing the interviews for the school.

  Hama stretched out the five fingers of one hand, then the other, then the first again. I shook my head. “Fifteen is too young, Ali. Tell her to go to school.”

  She looked back and forth between us, then grabbed my hand. Her bright little face crumpled up, and she started to cry. “Please,” she said. “Please beauty school.”

  I ran my fingers through her hair and straightened her barrette, then dabbed the tears away with my wrist. She was so young that I wouldn’t have been surprised if she still played with dolls, if she had such things. Still, I couldn’t insist that she spend three more years growing up. She seemed so desperate that I wondered if three more years of being young were even an option for her.

  So I told her, “Maybe.”

  AFTER I LIT MY CIGARETTE, I waved the match around in the air to put it out, but it continued to flame. So I touched it to a bead of sweat that had formed on the side of my margarita glass and watched it fizzle. I lifted the glass to nibble a crust of salt from the edge, then caught sight of Sam looking at me from across the room. The contempt in his eyes was unmistakable.

  “Don’t think I’m going to give up my cocktails just because you went and got religion,” I muttered to myself as he strode from the room.

  Sam had finally returned to Kabul. He had argued so energetically at the airport in Saudi Arabia that they’d decided to let him ride in the cockpit. We had a joyful reunion, but the stress of the next few weeks all but destroyed that joy. First of all, he had come back from Saudi Arabia different from the man I had married. He was a party guy when I met him, always the first to hoist a glass and crack a joke. But he had been overexposed to all those pilgrims back in Mecca. He was now praying five times a day and scowling if he saw me drink or smoke. It was kind of scary, but Roshanna assured me that all the hajjis came back like this and that it wouldn’t last long. Then there were other, huge problems. While he was gone, his partner in the well-drilling business had drained the money out of their checking account and left the country. Thieves had stolen some of his construction equipment, and three of his workers had been kidnapped. He was trying to salvage his business at the same time that I was trying to reopen the school. The cultural expectations each of us had brought into the marriage soon became huge hurdles. I knew we were going to be able to work through these diffe
ring expectations only with a lot of patience, but neither of us had much. We were expending our patience elsewhere.

  I had really been looking forward to having Sam as an ally while I struggled to prepare for the second class. He had always been a staunch supporter of the school but was now so testy that he wasn’t much help. And it was getting harder and harder to go to the Women’s Ministry every day. The minister’s assistant kept asking me if my funding had arrived. I kept assuring her that it was coming any day now. She questioned why it was taking so long, but fortunately, she didn’t push me too hard. In the meantime, Topekai and three of my best students from the first class came every day to help me. I was grateful for their assistance and their companionship, but I also felt terrible that I couldn’t pay them. They kept saying, “No problem, no problem,” but I knew they were all desperate for a salary. I intended to hire them as teachers once I got funding, but there was still no word from New York about new donations—and no money, either.

  In desperation, I asked one of the Western women who worked for an NGO in Kabul to spread the word that I was doing hair in the beauty school salon. Customers started to straggle in. That helped me give a little money to Topekai and the girls, but it certainly wouldn’t be enough to run the school once the new class started. The girls could see that I was worried, and I could often hear them talk about me in soft voices. One day they all came into the school carrying big, overstuffed bags and wearing proud looks on their faces. They sat me down at one of the styling stations, then started pulling out beautifully embroidered napkins, aprons, and pillowcases—all their own work, which they did at home in the evenings. “You sell these,” Topekai said. “Use the money for the beauty school.” I started to cry. Here I had come to Afghanistan to help them, but I was so poor that they were selling their needlework to help me.

  My only consolation in this difficult time was Hama, who always seemed to be hanging around the house when I got home from work. She was the only one there with a smile for me, because Sam was still frantic about his business and the kidnapped workers. Their relatives showed up at the house every couple of days to see if we had heard anything, but we hadn’t. Sam called all sorts of officials, but no one really seemed to care about these men. The house was also full of other people, and it was starting to make me crazy. Ali had a room there and had somehow assumed responsibility for renting out the other rooms. He even had a family of seven in one of them. The rest were men who partied into the night. I didn’t like the way they looked at Hama. She didn’t like it, either. When the men started drinking, she clung to my side—I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without her coming along. I’d finally take her into my room to get her away from the men. She’d sit on my lap and put her arms around my neck, as if she were a tiny, frightened child. She even smelled like fear. I’d coax her off my lap, and we’d play games and paint our toenails, anything to forget the men.

  But it was hard to forget the men. When I wasn’t inside the beauty school, all I saw were men. Since this was the first time that I wasn’t living with Westerners—and particularly Western women—I was starting to feel painfully isolated. I’d walk to the Women’s Ministry every day, aware that I was one of the few women on the street. It seemed as if the other women who were outside were like leaves, blowing quickly without notice. Topekai and the other girls always got rides to work, and they’d leave promptly at 3:30, well before sunset. I’d often stay longer to cut someone’s hair or to clean up. If I left when it was starting to get dark, I’d soon realize that I was the only woman on the streets. The men noticed pretty quickly, too, and they’d stare at me as I passed.

  I grumbled about this in the mornings to Topekai. “I’m starting to think of this place as Manistan, not Afghanistan,” I told her. “There’s way too much testosterone in the air.”

  She peered at me with her dark, keen eyes. “Don’t understand.”

  “This—” I waved my arms at the world outside our doors. “This is Manistan, not Afghanistan.”

  “Yes!” Comprehension broke over her face like light spilling in the window. “Very much Manistan!”

  Then one night I said good night to the Women’s Ministry chowkidors, walked half a block, and was surrounded by five young men. They tried a few words in French, then English, but I just ignored them and kept walking with my head down. Then two of them grabbed my arms, and they all crowded in closer. I looked around to see if there was anyone to help me, but no one else was on the sidewalks just then. There were only cars, the beams from their headlights wide and fuzzy in the dust. No one was going to come to my rescue. Still, this was the kind of situation I had trained for at the prison back in the States, and I broke their holds pretty easily. Then they started to shout and push me toward one of the compound gates, and I knew I had to act quickly or I’d be in real trouble. I sent all my anger down my arm and into my fist, and I punched one of them in the solar plexus and sent him sprawling. And I yelled—I yelled all the bad words in Dari that my students liked to teach me. My attackers backed away and then stopped. One of them laughed. I didn’t want to give them time to regroup, so I barreled toward them. They turned and ran around the corner, missing the sight of me tripping over a loose stone and falling into the sewer.

  When I got home, Sam and Ali looked at my torn skirt and the bruise on my face and the shit on my shoes and asked what had happened. Then they grabbed their guns—they all had guns—and bolted out the door. I think it might have been therapeutic for Sam to have a target for all his frustration, but I was relieved that they never found the guys.

  Then, all of a sudden, the funding for the beauty school fell into place. A journalist came to interview me, and after I told her about my money woes, she suggested that I try a German NGO that funded educational projects for women. They responded right away, offering to fund the next two classes. Not only was it enough to pay for the teachers’ salaries as well as meals and transportation for them and the students, but it also provided each student a stipend while she attended.

  I ran to Sam’s office, where he was sitting at his desk, holding his cell phone in his fist. “I’ve got the money!” I said. But his phone rang, and he turned his back to me while he yelled at someone in Arabic. So I went into the living room, where Hama was looking at one of my salon magazines, and I danced her around the room.

  THERE WAS A BIG NOTICE taped across the main door to the beauty school, blocking my entry. I leaned forward to read it, but it was written in Dari. As I started to straighten up, I felt something at the back of my head and turned slowly to see the Women’s Ministry chowkidor with his machine gun pointed right at me. He lowered the gun a little and licked his lips. He was only about nineteen, a sweet boy who had always been eager to try out his few words of English when I passed by. Now he couldn’t remember any of them and stammered out a few sentences in Dari.

  “He says that he is sorry, but he will have to shoot you if you go into the school,” said one of my new students who spoke English. All the other students and teachers were standing together with doleful faces, as if they were waiting for a funeral. Baseera was peeking out of her burqa crying. Only Hama stayed by my side.

  “Tell him I have to get my stuff out of there.” I folded my arms and dug my high heels into the sod.

  Then someone from the ministry shouted across the compound, and the student translated. “They say you may leave now.”

  “I’m not leaving until I get my stuff.”

  “They say that everything inside belongs to the ministry.”

  “These things were donated to the beauty school, and I am not going to leave them here!” I shouted across the compound. A crowd started to gather. Other ministry employees, people who were just walking down the sidewalk, the woman who usually sat on the street in the middle of traffic begging—everyone wanted to get a look at this American woman who was causing such a commotion. Then they all became silent as a door opened at the far end of the courtyard and the minister’s assistant started
to make her way toward me.

  I was actually prepared for this showdown. The day after I had found out about my new funding, Roshanna and I had gone to the Women’s Ministry to tell the minister’s assistant the good news. I watched her face as Roshanna talked, expecting it to brighten up a little. Instead, she responded sharply and at length. Roshanna’s smile trembled. “The minister is upset that it has taken you five months to begin the second class,” Roshanna translated.

  There was another flurry of sharp words from the assistant, then Roshanna nodded. “The minister doesn’t understand why there has been a problem with money, since the beauty school received so much publicity.”

  Another flurry, and then Roshanna took a deep breath. “And the minister has received complaints that there was too much laughing inside the school. Also, people have complained that they have been able to look inside and see the women without their head scarves.”

  I had tried to breach this gulf over the next few weeks. I stopped in three times to tell the minister’s assistant that we had some extra room in the class. I suggested that if the ministry had any girls in mind for the school, we’d be happy to put them right into the next class. I also offered to do hair for everyone in the ministry for free. Roshanna came with me the last time. I saw her eyes widen as she caught sight of a paper on the assistant’s desk. When we got outside, she whispered, “They’re going to evict you! The paper said they are going to take the building back and keep all of your products!”