“Let’s break his legs now,” I whispered, but Sam ignored me. He was right: Nahida was probably the one who would suffer for it in the end. So I went upstairs and found her trembling on her bed. I pulled her into my room, and we spent the night talking.
Nahida told me that her bad luck had started when she was born into a family with four girls and only one boy. For families in a country where the girls can’t get jobs, having a lot of daughters is considered a hardship. Her family never made her feel unwelcome, though. Her parents were loving if poor, and her childhood was a happy one. Then the Taliban came into power. Her family tried to keep their girls hidden, but a neighbor who wanted to curry favor whispered about their beautiful, unmarried daughters. So one day, this forty-five-year-old Talib policeman came and demanded that her parents give her to him. He wasn’t even offering a dowry, and this is considered out-and-out theft in Afghanistan. His only offer was that he wouldn’t kill Nahida’s father if he agreed to let her marry. Nahida was only sixteen and hated the Talib, but she wanted to protect her father. She agreed to the marriage.
When the Talib brought her back to his house after the wedding, she was surprised to find out that he already had another wife, an older woman who was enraged that this young woman had to become part of her home. The first wife had borne the Talib five daughters, but he wanted Nahida because he hoped she could produce a son. Sons are much valued in Afghanistan, because when they marry they continue to live with the parents and help support them. So Nahida became a slave not only to the Talib but also to the first wife. She was an unruly slave, as she would rather take a beating than do things she didn’t want to do. She refused sex with him for a while and was beaten for it every time.
“Here are the scars,” she said, as if she were showing me trophies. She reached behind her to pull up her tunic, then bent over. Her back was scribbled with marks of all sizes, some merely flat and discolored, some that were barely healed. She pointed out the cigarette burns on her feet and stomach, the places no one could see.
Nahida had hoped that the Talib would tire of her rebellion and divorce her. Even though divorce was considered to be the most shameful thing that could happen to a woman, she thought it far preferable to this marriage. Then she got pregnant and had a son. To her way of thinking, this was the worst thing that could happen. Suddenly she was his favored wife, and she knew he’d never let her go. She was so miserable that she wanted to kill herself. She even poured some gasoline on her clothes one day. Self-immolation was sort of a trend among Herat’s desperate housewives. But she saw her little boy staring at her and couldn’t go through with it.
Then Nahida discovered that she was able to parlay her new status to get a little more freedom. When the Taliban were driven out of power, she told her husband that she was going to get a job and that he couldn’t stop her. She wandered around Herat listening for the sound of foreigners. When she heard a group of people speaking English, she followed them and convinced them to help her. She said she knew that no Afghan was going to be able to help her. She was smart and soon became both computer literate and an English speaker. She managed to save a little money by embroidering things at home and selling them to the foreigners. All she wanted now was to get away from her husband.
“I’ve been raped by him over and over, beaten by him and his first wife, and their children spit on me,” she concluded, touching one of the scars on the bottom of her foot. “I am happy only when he’s smoking his opium. I pray every night that he will die.”
As that week went on, I was really afraid that Sam and I were failing the test. Nahida realized that I was hopeless in the kitchen, so she’d sneak in there and prepare a proper meal so I could carry it out and pretend I had made it. Regardless, the Talib husband was always angry about something. He quickly decided that he hated Sam, because he was a Pashtun and Sam was an Uzbek, and they had fought on opposite sides during the war. I tried everything I could think of to appease Nahida’s husband, knowing that he wouldn’t let her join my third class if he hated me. But nothing worked. He was always shouting at her or smoking his opium or pretending not to see me as he watched television.
Two nights before they left, I was in bed dreaming that I was falling down the stairs. I woke up because Sam was shaking me. When I opened my eyes, I saw that he was on the other side of the room looking for his gun, but I was still shaking. “Earthquake!” he said. “Get out now!” A pile of books on my nightstand slid to the floor, and the glass in the window broke with a loud pop. I screamed and clambered out of bed, more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. It was cold and dark, and the floor was shuddering under my feet. I could hear people outside shouting and crying, and I was sure the house was going to come crashing down on our heads any minute. I was already imagining us buried in the rubble with the weeping chowkidor trying to dig us out with a spoon. I rushed into the dark hallway and collided with someone, then slid down the steps and ran out the front door.
A group of us gathered in the front yard, waiting to see what would happen next. With a long, grinding moan and then a crash, a corner of the house next door collapsed. But as we waited and shivered and listened to the people shouting up and down the street, the shaking stopped. I managed to stop crying—I had been wailing, even though I had made it out safely—and gradually everyone started to laugh and talk, in the way that you do when you realize you’re not going to die. Then we looked at one another, and I almost died of embarrassment. Nahida and her husband were both fully dressed, up to his turban and her head scarf. Sam and I were standing there in our underwear, with miles of naked goose-bumped flesh glowing in the moonlight. I squealed and tried to cover myself.
The Talib graciously turned his head the other way, and Sam went running off to look for the chowkidor. The poor man was usually afraid of everything, but he ran back in the house and came out with an armload of sheets to cover us. I guess the sight of me nearly naked scared him more than the earthquake did. We didn’t want to go back in the house yet, and someone appeared with tea and biscuits. I don’t even remember who it was. We sat on the grass together until five in the morning.
Somehow, this changed everything. The Talib decided to trust us. When Nahida went to her class the next day, her husband went to work with Sam and ran errands for him. When they left, the Talib told me that he had decided to let Nahida come back in three months and go to the beauty school. She was bright with happiness. She took a little amethyst ring from her hand and slid it up one of my fingers.
“So that you will think about me until I get back,” she said as she kissed me good-bye.
ROSHANNA AND I STOOD on the right side of the mannequin head, and Topekai and the two other teachers stood on the left. Baseera, Hama, and the students sat demurely in green plastic lawn chairs in front of us. I made a circle with my fingers and settled it on the mannequin’s hairline, just over her forehead. “We call this the ‘front’ of the head,” I announced.
Roshanna translated this into Dari for Topekai and the teachers, and then they introduced the concept to the students in their own words. I continued moving the circle over the mannequin’s head to highlight the different parts of the head: the top, crown, back, nape, and left and right sides. “You have to know the parts of the head before we can move on to perms and styling. Later on, when I tell you to ‘part the hair from the crown to the nape on the right side,’ you’ll know what I’m talking about.”
I waited as Roshanna translated this for the teachers. Finally, Topekai flashed me a bright smile, then began putting the lesson in her own words, touching the parts of the mannequin head with her long, graceful hands. The other teachers added their comments, too. As the students nodded, I whispered to Roshanna that my plan was working. As I taught the second class, I was also training my brightest students from the first class to be teachers. It was as cumbersome as a three-legged sack race, but it was working. I could see that the curriculum was really coming alive for the students and their skills were p
rogressing rapidly. I figured that by the time we had our third or fourth class, Topekai and the other teachers might not need me and a translator at all.
All the students were paying close attention except Hama, who was looking at the cell phone in her pocket. “Leave your cell phone in your purse, please,” I told her, reminding myself not to allow any more fifteen-year-olds into the beauty school. Topekai shot Hama a scornful look. I figured she was thinking the same thing.
I also made other changes during the second class. I wanted my teachers to take some responsibility beyond teaching. I figured they would better develop business skills if they learned how to be managers as well. This meant that they needed to arrive at the school early enough to make sure there was sufficient gas to run the generator when there wasn’t any electricity. Since we rarely had more than four hours of city power each day, the generator was crucial. They also needed to make sure that enough water had been pumped up to the tank on the roof so we wouldn’t run out in the middle of class. It seemed that the taps always went dry when the girls were practicing shampoos and then had no way of rinsing off. If it was a cold day, we also needed enough wood to keep the fire going. If we ran out of gas, water, or wood in the middle of the day, I wanted the teachers to take care of getting more by themselves.
It took them a while to settle these and other responsibilities on their own shoulders, partly because most of them didn’t have much experience with making decisions. There were also cultural issues, which were hard for me to understand. It seemed to hurt their pride to have to think about mundane matters such as power and water or to make sure the floors around the stations and the product shelves were clean. They thought Shaz or some other lower-caste person should handle this. Besides, to get more gas, water, or wood, they had to go outside and talk to the chowkidor. They were embarrassed—even bright, self-assured Topekai was embarrassed—to have to talk to men outside their family. It took them a long time to decide who should be the one to go talk to him, then the person selected always had to have someone go with her. It was hard for me to be patient with them because my personality is so different. I hardly ever deliberate before taking action. I just do, occasionally with disastrous results.
One day I decided just to ignore the teachers when I knew the electricity was down. I sat in my room, drank my tea, even put on my headlamp and read a book. Topekai finally knocked on my door.
“Bakh niest, Debbie,” she said apologetically. “Cannot practice cut hair.”
“There hasn’t been any bakh for three hours,” I said. “Take care of it!”
She sighed, then pulled on her scarf and went outside to talk to the chowkidor.
By the time the third class came around that summer, the teachers had learned to keep the place running with enough gas, water, and wood. I decided they could take on even more responsibility, so I presented them with a chunk of money at the beginning of the term. They would be in charge of buying whatever the school needed, like hand soap or new towels. All I wanted them to do was keep track of the receipts. Their skills as managers continued to grow. When the fourth class began in the fall, I told them not to call me unless the building was burning down. I told them that they could handle everything else, and they did.
I also began changing the curriculum during the second class so that the graduates could better meet the needs of their Afghan clients. When we’d designed the original beauty school curriculum for the first class in 2002, we had two weeks set aside to teach proper makeup application. It didn’t take me long to see that Western ideas about makeup didn’t make any sense in Afghanistan. By Afghan standards, American women wore so little makeup that we looked pretty much like men—and homely men at that. When I’d have an American customer leave the salon with a preparty manicure, I’d hear my students muttering if she hadn’t let them fix her up with elaborate hair and makeup. Without those enhancements, they thought she looked little better than one of the village women who tend chickens.
So in the second class, I focused on helping them apply Afghan-style makeup better. Sure, all the brides would still want to look like drag queens, but I figured that they could at least be more attractive and unique drag queens. I showed the second class how to use makeup to enhance each bride’s best features. How to contour a chubby face and enhance the cheekbones, or how to make a big nose look smaller. How to lighten someone’s skin without making it look as if she had fallen into a bucket of flour. How to coordinate makeup with the color of a dress. I used Baseera as my model one day, showing how a more customized approach made her green eyes look like jade, her coppery hair look like fire, and her lips look tender and sweet instead of garish.
I also wanted my students to feel free to experiment and explore their own ideas about beauty, but that was really a stretch for them. They thought they had to give each bride the exact same hairstyle and makeup. I thought they could distinguish themselves as beauticians—and make more money—if they deviated from the formula. So I spent a day talking about creativity. I went online, printed out copies of paintings by famous artists, and showed how they had hugely different approaches to a portrait or a still life. I made the students watch videos of fashion shows, in which the women wore blouses trimmed with moon rocks and shoes made out of toilet plungers. Okay, maybe not that but other crazy stuff. I told them creativity was about going wild in their minds. I told them that they could always rein their imaginations in once they had let them gallop around the stars.
“You’re not just beauticians,” I told them. “You’re artists!” Then I gave each of them a “creativity” mannequin head. I told them I wanted them to fix up their mannequins with really creative—and not necessarily beautiful—makeup and hair. “I’m going to bring in a panel of judges to determine who made the most creative head,” I said. “That girl will get a special prize at graduation.” Roshanna translated this. The class dissolved into excited chatter before Topekai and the teachers had a chance to say anything more.
AS WE WALKED toward the market, I noticed that there were even more men staring at me than usual. Maybe I wasn’t dressed modestly enough, or maybe I was swinging my arms and looking around too much and didn’t appear sufficiently humble. It seemed that ragged men in turbans were lining up to scowl. Then I heard someone yelling from the archway of a building, “Fesha! Mordagaw!”
I didn’t know what those words meant, but Sam spun around as if someone had fired a dart at him. He caught sight of the men who were doing the yelling and flung himself through the crowd. One of them disappeared, but Sam grabbed the other and slammed him against the building. He punched him, and blood smeared across the wall. I stood in the middle of the crowd screaming at him to stop. When he finally let up, some men stepped forward to lead the beaten man away. Sam strode back to me, and the crowd parted to let him pass.
“We leave now,” he said, smoothing his hair back into place. He acted as if this brawl had been a minor annoyance.
“You almost knocked that guy’s head off!”
“This my job.” Sam scowled at the bruises welling up on his punching hand. “He call you a prostitute and me your pimp.”
Now it seemed as if everyone we passed was trying hard not to look at us. I watched Sam’s back as he strode toward the car and recalled the stories he had told me about his days and nights fighting the Russians. He had killed men, although the first time had upset him so much that he’d hung around the camp and asked if he could cook instead. It was months before he could venture out again. In our life together, I had never seen any evidence of violence in him. He was hospitable to strangers, kind to the poor and weak, and gentle with me. He loved the sappy Bollywood movies, in which the stars danced around on mountaintops and sang love songs to each other. He liked the Rambo movies, too—Sylvester Stallone has a passionate following in Afghanistan—and was fond of his machine gun, but I didn’t know many Afghans who didn’t have guns. One of my customers at the Peacock Manor salon was the educated, elegant wife of an Afghan di
plomat and politician. I knew she carried a pistol in her purse; I knew this because she shrieked one day when a student moved her purse from one station to another. “Watch out!” this woman said. “There’s a gun in there.” So I had never worried about Sam’s life as a warrior before, but now I was a bit alarmed. Even his appearance among all these men with turbans and sandals made him seem alarming: in his black Western suit and sunglasses, he looked like a bad guy in a movie.
He turned and regarded me impassively. “I can’t be at bazaar with you. Too many trouble, and maybe I have to kill someone.”
So much for shopping with the mujahideen. So much for any romantic notions I had that Sam and I would explore the city together. I was terribly busy running the second class and the guesthouse, but in the moments between the busyness, I was lonely and pined for a companion. I was also eager to get out and see more of the city. I had really wanted to go to the mandai—the huge outdoor market near the Kabul River that goes on for blocks and blocks—because it sounded like fun. I also needed supplies, and we were passing vendors who were selling things I needed. “Can’t we stop and pick up just a few things?”
“It is not possible.”
“So I can’t ever go to the mandai?”
“I give you my car. Maybe you take Roshanna.”
Sam made good on his promise to turn his car over to me. I was a little nervous about driving it by myself, so my first time on the road was with a bunch of visiting foreigners. We followed a van all over the city because I had no idea how to get around. The van bounced through crowded streets, and we all screamed as I just barely navigated us around the wagons and donkeys and pedestrians. I attracted plenty of attention as a woman driver, too—there were women in other cars, but they almost never drove or even sat in the front seat. Men were falling off their bicycles! They were screaming at me, “I love you, mister!” The first time I heard someone say that, I thought that, despite the eyeliner and earrings and head scarf, someone thought I was a man. Then someone told me that Dari doesn’t have words that make gender distinctions; he, she, and it are all the same word. That explained Sam’s pronoun confusion! I quickly got used to people addressing me as “mister” or referring to me as “him.”
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