Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  “Tell him that I am bad, tell him that I shame him by working outside the home, tell him to divorce me because I only cause trouble for him,” Nahida implored her.

  “I will try,” the first wife promised.

  The first wife began to whisper these things in the Talib’s ear. She pointed out Nahida’s many failings as a wife and how people in their neighborhood laughed at him because he couldn’t control her. She told him that she herself couldn’t bear to live in the same house with this disrespectful upstart. The Talib took heed of what his first wife was saying. He beat Nahida even more to try to force her to become a fitting wife.

  But finally, to keep peace with the first wife, he agreed to divorce Nahida. He even agreed to let Nahida take their son—“the spawn of that evil woman,” according to the first wife’s whispers—even though fathers almost always get to keep the children in a divorce. Nahida moved back into her parents’ house, and they were overjoyed by her return. Now she has her own salon, with several employees. She exports handicrafts from the provinces, works as a translator, and speaks at women’s conferences. She tells me she doesn’t care if she ever marries again, and what’s more, she doesn’t have to.

  In late spring, I suddenly lost half my funding from the German NGO that had pledged to pay for the second and third classes. The NGO was sponsored by the German government, and its own funding had been cut, so the bad news rolled downhill to me. I had already accepted twenty-five girls for the next class but now had funding for only twelve and a half of them. I’m not a fund-raiser. I’m clueless about how to write up grant proposals and do all the stuff that gets projects funded. So I fell back on the only way I know how to make money. I decided that I would build up the salon business and ask Topekai and a few bright students like Baseera to put in more hours after school with our paying customers. I figured I could bankroll the next class with the salon profits, since there are precious few luxuries for Westerners living in Kabul, and they were eager for some pampering.

  I put together flyers about the salon and left them in places that foreigners frequent, like the Western restaurants and the store where they buy alcohol. I also asked the customers who came in to take flyers with them and spread the word in their compounds. Lots of new people started calling to make appointments. Now I had the challenge of telling them how to get to the Peacock Manor in the absence of street signs and addresses. So my directions went something like this:

  Go to the Internet café near the rotary in Shar-e-Now, the one near the emergency hospital with the red and white paint on the wall. Take a right, and you’ll then be on the main street in Shar-e-Now. Before you get to the bombed-out movie theater you’ll see a bright yellow building. Turn right there, then drive past the street with all the dead cows. Continue past the old warlord house, then go left at the next street. You will see a blue-and-white-striped box and a sign that says ASSA in black letters. Just ahead, there’s a gray building with a lot of Afghan men hanging out in front, a tailor shop, a compound with a blue gate, and a hand-pump well on the corner. My guesthouse is the one with the blue gate. If you tell me when you’re coming, I’ll be the foreign woman with a yellow scarf standing on the well and talking on her cell phone. There will probably be a small crowd gathered around me.

  Lots more people started to come to the salon, meaning that Topekai, Baseera, and Bahar—another bright student from the second class—were exposed to a wide range of foreigners. At first, it seemed that every Westerner who came to the salon did something to shock them.

  One young woman came in and wanted a bikini wax. “She is bride?” Topekai asked me, erroneously assuming that Americans also went in for prenuptial hairlessness.

  I shook my head. “She’s going off for a week in Cyprus with her boyfriend.”

  Another woman came in the door and made a big show of unwrapping her head scarf and struggling out of her long coat. Then she pulled her shirt tightly over her belly, so that we could all see a tiny bulge. “I’m pregnant!” she shrieked joyfully.

  Bahar beamed. “You husband, he is happy?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m not married,” the woman replied. “I’m going it alone.”

  Another woman came in and introduced herself as someone on the diplomatic staff at one of the embassies. When she took off her coat, all the Afghan beauticians glanced at one another and then ducked their heads to keep from laughing. The woman was wearing a blouse that revealed her chubby midriff and a hideous miniskirt that just barely managed to stretch over her very ample bottom. Even I was shocked! As I cut this woman’s hair, I could hear my girls laughing in one of the back rooms. When she left, I poked my head in the room to see what all the hilarity was about. There was Baseera with her skirt pulled up around her thighs and a pile of towels stuffed in her underwear, strutting back and forth. “I am diplomat!” she said as she sashayed around the room. “I am big diplomat!”

  Little by little, though, my beauticians became accustomed to the foreigners’ odd ways and learned to maintain straight faces and a professional demeanor. I knew this was a good thing, because if they learned to cater to the foreign crowd, they’d really be able to make good money.

  However, I occasionally found myself in the awkward position of having to turn customers away because I was the only beautician they trusted to do their cuts and color, and I didn’t have enough time to take care of all of them. In the States, girls go to beauty school for an entire year. Then they often work at a quick-cut place for several years before they get a job at a nice salon. They work for a few months there as shampoo girls or assistants to the experienced stylists before they have their own customers. My Afghan beauticians got only twelve weeks of beauty school and a few hours apprenticing in the salon, meaning that they weren’t yet prepared to give Western customers the quality they expected. But I knew they could do a good job if they got more practice because they were highly motivated. So I really focused on making them more marketable. If a customer came in wanting a cut and highlights, I’d tell her that I’d do the cut but that I would have Bahar do the foiling—that she did it better than I did, which was true. I also decided to add more services. I had discovered an ob-gyn table way in the back of the shipping container, where I was still making weekly visits to get more supplies. I had no idea why the table was there but realized I could use it for massages, facials, and even pedicures. A Canadian massage therapist had been training Topekai and Baseera, so this was perfect. I started telling customers that we were doing massages and pedicures. The pampering side of the salon—especially the pedicures—really began to boom. In one two-week period, we worked on feet that hailed from Bosnia, Australia, London, the United States, Germany, France, Switzerland, Russia, and the Philippines.

  We also started to dabble in the Afghan bride business. This was a surprising development, as I had never anticipated doing bridal makeup. That was what I was training my students to do, and the drag-queen look just wasn’t my specialty anyway. But it turned out that there were a number of Afghan women who had been living in the West for years, returned to the country, and gotten engaged here. Their parents wanted them to go through the traditional Afghan engagement and wedding routine, but these girls were gagging at the idea of extreme makeup and mile-high hair. The first Westernized Afghan woman who found herself in this fix pleaded with me to do her wedding. I agreed, but I set the price high, charging $300 for her makeup and $10 for each member of her bridal party. The going rate for an Afghan bride was about $100 to $160, but I wanted to set my prices so that there would be no danger of my salon competing with those of my students. This first bride came in with all her relatives and friends, and I worked on her makeup for about five hours. I could have done it in two, but it seems that the traditional approach is to stretch it out over five hours and make it an event. At her wedding the bride told everyone that I had done her makeup, so I started to get a lot of calls from other brides in the same predicament.

  Even with this extra business, I still was
n’t making enough to pay all the expenses for the school. I had been getting lots of calls from men who wanted to come in but had turned them all down because men simply were not allowed inside beauty salons in Afghanistan. But I ran into so many foreign men who begged me for haircuts and even manicures that I started to feel sorry for them. Afghanistan can be really intense for foreigners who are here a long time. They’re locked up in their embassy or NGO compounds all the time, and when they leave their walls to do some outside work, they never know if their vehicle is the one that will attract a bomb. Whenever I’m out in my car and see one of the four-wheel drives belonging to a big NGO or a tank from one of the peacekeeping forces, I tell my driver to drop back a few hundred feet just in case they’re targeted. So I felt sorry for these men who needed a little luxury in their lives. I also knew they could provide a good income stream. I started working on them in the late afternoons and evenings, after both the school and the regular salon were closed and all my girls had gone home.

  But just as all these efforts to expand the salon business began to work, Kabul’s security situation became really bad. It was election season again, only this time the stakes were even higher. Afghan men and women would be voting by secret ballot for a new president in October. There were nearly twenty candidates running, and there was a lot of strife among the different factions putting up candidates. There was also an undercurrent of suspicion in some areas that the United States was going to rig the election to create a victory for its favorite candidate, the current president, Hamid Karzai. And of course, the Taliban was opposed to the elections no matter who won. There had been an increase in kidnappings and bombings and overall violence, and the American Embassy was telling Americans to keep a low profile.

  The United Nations had an alert system that applied to its own employees, but most of the NGOs and embassies in town followed their lead. Green City meant you could go just about anywhere, White City meant you could go only to a few highly secure sites outside the compound, and Red City basically meant you should figure out how to evacuate. The United Nations was on White City most of the time in those months. Even though the Peacock Manor didn’t have White City security features—no concertina barbed wire on top of the compound walls, no bomb-filmed windows, no rocket barricade on top of the building—some of the foreigners still managed to sneak out to my salon.

  I ignored the alerts myself. It didn’t seem to me that so much fear was warranted as long as you were cautious and respected the culture. My strongest reaction to the White City alerts was annoyance, because they were bad for business. But many of my customers couldn’t manage to maneuver around the White City restrictions. They called to cancel their appointments and wail that they were stuck inside their compounds. After I got a number of these calls, I had a bright idea.

  “How about if we come to you?” I asked. “If you can line us up a bunch of customers, I’ll take Sam’s car and fill the trunk with products. Then the girls and I can do hair in your compound for an afternoon.”

  Before long we were making regular forays to the different NGO compounds around town. Our customers were so grateful—and so happy for the diversion—that they were giving great tips. After one of these trips, the girls were bouncing in their seats because they had made so much money in tips—and that was on top of what I would be paying them for the work they had done. I asked Baseera how much she had gotten in tips.

  “Fifty dollars!” Her green eyes glowed. “My husband not make so many in two weeks!”

  SAM KEPT LOOKING AT ME while I was trying to read a book. We were in our room and the television was on, but he wasn’t following the Bollywood drama. He was staring at me whenever he had the chance, even though he’d deny it when I’d catch him at it.

  “What is it?” I said for about the fifth time. “Why are you looking at me?”

  He sighed and tapped his pen against his mug of tea, as if it were an egg that he was trying to crack. “I need send money home,” he finally said.

  “Why?”

  “He needs go to doctor.”

  “Your father?”

  “No, she. She needs go to doctor.”

  “Which she? Your mother, your sister, your daughter—”

  “My wife.”

  “Is she sick?” If I had to think of her, it was easier to think of her wasting away of a fatal illness and fading entirely from the periphery of my life.

  He shook his head, then sighed again. “She is pregnant.”

  I felt as if I had been dropped from an airplane.

  I had been working so hard that spring—school in the mornings, salon customers in the afternoons—that I wobbled across the compound back to our room every evening, hoping my dear husband would dote on me a little. I learned quickly, though, that I pretty much had to pin him in a corner and put a choke hold on him to get any affection. And that, of course, wasn’t what I had in mind. To be fair to Sam, he was still having a terrible time with his business. But once the business began to improve, his behavior didn’t change that much. There were cultural differences between us that were as tricky to cross as the Hindu Kush mountains. And neither of us had any idea how to do it.

  We fought a lot. In fact, one of Sam’s first new English words in those days was dinosaur, his pet name for me because he said I fought like one. Acts of affection—or rather, lack of—triggered one argument after another. For instance, we had many nights of yelling and tears because I’d come into our room and kiss him, and he’d pull away with a look of distress on his face. We finally got Roshanna to translate the problem. It turned out that I was kissing him after he’d performed his ritual cleansing for nightly prayer. He’d have to heat up some water and do it all over again.

  But even when I’d remember to touch him before he cleaned up for prayer, he was pretty unresponsive. He didn’t understand why I wanted to hold hands or hug or kiss or touch. He hadn’t ever done any of that with his Afghan wife, and his father never did any of that with his mother. I don’t think Sam had ever seen an Afghan man behave like that with a woman. Afghan men walk around the streets of Kabul holding hands with each other. They often stand talking with their arms around each other or caressing each other’s arms, but you never see a man doing any of these things with a woman. Once when Sam and I were going somewhere in the car, I reached over and started to rub his arm. He reddened and pulled away. “Is not time for sex, Debbie!” he hissed.

  “I don’t want to have sex right now,” I said, although who knows—maybe I would have if he hadn’t looked as if he wanted to jump out of the car. “I just want to snuggle.”

  “What is this ‘snuggle’?” he asked, exasperated. He really didn’t get it.

  And like most women, I wanted my husband to be a soul mate—not just physically affectionate but also interested in my deepest thoughts and feelings. This was pretty tough given the language barrier, but I was determined to try. I’d follow Sam around the compound with my Dari-English dictionary, trying to figure out how to say “I’m so depressed” or “I really miss my father at this time of year.” Sam would listen to my tortured sentences, then just stare at me, utterly lost. He finally decided that he needed to round up some foreigners to soak up my conversational excess. One of them was a young photographer named David, who rented a room at the Peacock Manor. Sam told David he’d pay him four dollars—about two hundred afghanis—per hour if he’d talk to me. I think the rate was even higher after sunset.

  I was also going crazy because I felt so terribly confined at the Peacock Manor. At least when the school was at the Women’s Ministry, I’d had to walk back and forth to the other guesthouse. Now all my activities took place within the walls of our compound. I was desperate to see other places and other faces, but I didn’t really want to go out alone, either. I didn’t speak Dari or know my way around town, and there were all those security alerts. I pretty much knew hairdressers were in the “soft target” category, so I had to be cautious. But Sam was not only reluctant to go anywher
e with me but also reluctant to have me spend any time with the Afghans who came to the guesthouse to visit him. He’d ask me to go sit in our bedroom until they left. This caused a lot of wailing. I was sure that he was ashamed to be seen with me. I finally wailed to Roshanna about this. She said, “Oh, no, Debbie! He loves you so much that he doesn’t want other men looking at you.”

  But no matter how many times Roshanna would smooth things over, the fighting continued. Sam often treated me more like a servant than like a wife because that was the only model he knew. I felt I had to set him straight on this one right away. When he’d ask me to make him some tea or find his shoes, I’d shoot back, “Are your legs broken?” He told a group of our foreign friends once that it was easier to have a thousand Afghan wives than one American wife. “You tell a thousand Afghan wives to sit, and they sit,” he said. “You tell one American wife to sit and she says, ‘Bite my ass.’”

  We could joke about these cultural differences—sometimes. And sometimes we’d yell at each other in our own tongues, and one of us would wind up sleeping in the living room. Sometimes I’d stomp outside the gates to get away—from him, from the guesthouse, from our cramped little bedroom, from Ali and David and the other guests, from everything. That was what I’d done in Holland, Michigan, if I had a fight with someone—take a nice, long walk under the stars to get my emotional equilibrium back. At least this got a strong reaction from Sam. The first time I did it, he ran after me in a panic. “Please understand this is not good place to be angry,” he said, tugging me back toward the guesthouse. “Karzai controls the day, but the Taliban still controls the night.”

  One morning after sleeping in the living room, I decided I had had enough. I called Roshanna and told her that I was leaving Sam and asked if I could move in with her and her family. She rushed over to the guesthouse to find me packing all my stuff in my two suitcases and wrapping the things that wouldn’t fit in the suitcases in my head scarves. She started to laugh when she saw the mountain of bulging scarves, but I was sitting on the floor crying, so she sat down next to me. In a few minutes, she started to cry, too. This is another thing I love about Afghans—they never let you cry alone. She tried to comfort me, but I couldn’t be comforted. “I’m leaving,” I sobbed. “I’m leaving Sam and the school and Afghanistan, too. I want a hot bath, and damn it, I want some bacon!”