Sam came back to the house to find the two of us sitting there weeping. He stood in the doorway and took in the scene with a look of utter shock on his face. I think he thought that something had happened to my sons or my mother. Then Roshanna took him aside. She spent about an hour with him explaining how hard both the country and this new marriage were on me. Then she came back with a basin of water. Next thing I knew, she was washing my face and combing my hair. She picked out an outfit and helped me put it on. Sam had given her money to take me to a nice restaurant, as well as the use of his car and driver. We went shopping for more head scarves, then we sat in the restaurant for hours. I realized that my biggest problem right then might not be Sam. Maybe I was missing the kind of company you can only have with a girlfriend. Roshanna and I had both been so busy—she with her new salon, I with the school and salon—that even though we worked together to train the teachers, we hadn’t had fun together in ages.
I still don’t know if Sam and I would have made it through this period of time if Val and Suraya, my friends from the guesthouse, hadn’t returned to Kabul. They stayed with us at the Peacock Manor, and gradually, Sam’s understanding of what it meant to be a Western-style husband started to improve. The four of us spent a lot of time together laughing and talking in the living room, and I noticed that Sam watched Val and imitated him. If Val rubbed Suraya’s shoulder, Sam would rub my shoulder. If Val held Suraya’s hand, then Sam would reach out for mine. We started to tease him about this, so he decided to get back at us by steadfastly ignoring whatever Val did one day. But when Suraya sat on Val’s lap, Sam stood up and then plopped himself into my lap.
Little by little, with the help of our friends, Sam relaxed with this outspoken, emotional, independent woman he had married. And as I grew to understand the sexual culture I had married into, I stopped taking his husbandly deficits so personally—or at least I tried. I learned to love him more and more, despite his brusque ways. And difficult as our marriage was, I also knew that I would never have been able to keep the beauty school going if it hadn’t been for Sam’s help. I had to remind myself of that every time I felt like throwing something at him. I had to remind myself of my students’ wretched pasts and of the pride and hope on their faces now. I had to remind myself that if I kept throwing things at him, we wouldn’t have anything left. Already, we had no working flashlights because I had flung them all at him. So the battle between us—what he called the Afghan-American war—died down, at least for a while. We became more like the partners, sexual and otherwise, that I’d hoped we would be back when Val and Suraya were arranging this marriage.
But when Sam told me his first wife was pregnant, I fell apart. I had wanted to be in total denial about this other woman. I hadn’t wanted to think about the possibility that he’d slept with her when I was in Michigan and he was back in Saudi Arabia. Now I felt as if he had cheated on me. I grabbed his mug and threw it at the wall, where it shattered into hundreds of tiny, toothlike shards. “How far along is she?” I asked him.
“Five months.”
I mentally counted ahead. That meant she would be having the baby in October. If we managed to stay married, we’d celebrate our first anniversary that month. My birthday was at the end of October, too. I hated the idea that she would ruin this month, full of dates that were important to me, with a new baby.
I slept in the living room for the next few nights. But somehow, Sam and I made it through this. I could finally see that it was difficult for him, too. We managed to create our own odd kind of happiness again, even though I couldn’t bear to think about October.
SOON ENOUGH I was reminded that you’re allowed only very brief periods of happiness in Afghanistan. This seems to be one of the conditions of life there, like the dust and the wind. Some new horror is always waiting to turn the corner just when you’ve slowed your pace to enjoy the view. I simply hadn’t a clue that the horror would be waiting for me in my own house.
One day I returned from the beauty school and found Sam sitting on our bed, his head resting in his hands. As for many of us, his command of a foreign language faltered when he had something really important to say. He blurted something about Ali and little Hama, but I had to keep asking him over and over what he was talking about.
“He kisses him,” Sam said. “Her. Ali kisses her.”
I couldn’t figure out why he was so upset about a kiss. “My uncle used to kiss me when I was a little girl. It was harmless.”
“Not uncle kiss!” He pushed me against the wall hard and put his mouth over mine, then pulled away. “This is like Ali kissing.”
He had walked into Ali’s room without knocking—he never knocks—and found them like this. If Sam had had any doubts about the nature of the kiss, they were swept aside by the way Ali had his hand up Hama’s shirt and by the look of terror on her face. Sam didn’t know how to say “breasts” in English—our little sexual code for mine was “apples and oranges.” He said something about Hama’s apples and oranges, but this time there was no playfulness about it.
I sat on the bed next to him, stunned. I had always been uncomfortable about the way Hama trailed Ali around the house, but that was because I didn’t want her alone in a room with his male visitors. So I’d try to keep her with me as much as possible. Ali didn’t stand in the way. He’d encourage Hama to stay with me and tell her that I was like her aunt. I actually felt more like her mother, because she’d cling to me as if she were a tiny child. Only at the beauty school did she relax.
“Did you tell him you’d kill him if he touches her again?”
He shook his head. “Ali is not family. Neither is Hama. I can make these orders only to family.”
I stormed out to look for Ali, but he wasn’t in his room. So I fixed myself up with a tumbler of whiskey, a pack of cigarettes, and plenty of magazines so that I could wait for him. He finally came in at around eleven o’clock, with Hama in tow. Her face brightened when she saw me on the couch, and she ran over to sit next to me. I ran my hand over her cheek. She was wearing bright red lipstick, heavy kohl, and eye shadow, all of it so harsh and unnecessary on her pretty little face that she almost looked like a child actor on vaudeville. I asked her to go into the kitchen and make some tea for us. She promptly skipped away.
“What are you doing with this little girl, Ali?” I demanded. “Are you really her uncle? Her uncle by blood?”
“Not by blood, no.” He began patting his pockets for a cigarette. I didn’t offer him one of mine. “I am a friend of the family.”
“You’re not her friend if you kiss her and touch her. You’ll only ruin her reputation, and she’ll never be able to get married.”
“But Debbie, listen.” He smiled and held his hands out. “I am going to marry Hama.”
I felt sick and, if possible, angrier than ever. I was sure that he was lying. “You’re at least thirty years older than she is, Ali. You’re too old. And even if you were going to marry her, you have no business touching her like Sam saw you doing, not until after you’re married. I might be a dumb American, but I know that much.”
His face reddened. “What I do with Hama, I do with her parents’ blessing.”
“I don’t want you to bring her in this house again. I don’t want her in your room or with your friends. After she finishes her day at the beauty school, I want her to go right back to her parents’ house.”
I could tell Ali was angry, but he didn’t argue with me. One of the other men who was renting a room came in right about then, and Ali whirled around and started shouting at him in Dari.
“Take her home.” I walked into the kitchen and saw that Hama was standing by the sink, frightened by the loud voices from the next room. I told her to go home and stay away from Ali. She probably couldn’t understand much of this, but she could see that I was upset. Then he shouted for her from the living room, and she ran out.
Sam and I decided that we had to find out more about Ali. Once we started asking around, the bad stories
about this guy just kept coming. I felt sick that we had been too busy—and too trusting—to find out more about him before now. There were all kinds of rumors about his nasty activities. This explained the mysterious side of Ali. Why he didn’t seem to have a job but always had money. Why he seemed to know well-connected Afghans all over Europe and the East.
But there wasn’t a lot we could do about Ali. He was our partner in the Peacock Manor guesthouse, and we were stuck with him until the lease ran out. I really couldn’t even insist that he stop bringing Hama into the house, but he did stop. I saw her at the school every day—I made sure she had a ride back and forth from her parents’ house—and she was always so affectionate, so happy to be around me. I once took her away from the others and asked Roshanna to translate for me. “Does Ali still touch you in bad places?” I asked.
She hid her face.
“Tell me, Hama. Tell me what he does.”
She started to cry. She pointed to her breasts and her pubic area.
“Don’t let him do this, even if he is a friend of your family!”
She nodded and threw her arms around my neck. When she went back to class, I told Roshanna not to tell the teachers or the other students about Hama.
“They know this already, Debbie,” she said. “They know she does bad things with this man.”
“How?”
“So many ways!” Roshanna began ticking them off on her fingers. “She stays out late at night with him. You even come to school telling us how Hama is at parties. Good girls don’t go to parties with men at night.”
“I guess I should have figured that out,” I muttered.
“She plucks her eyebrows,” Roshanna continued. “Only women do this. And he gives her a cell phone just so he can summon her. You see how she never buys minutes so that she can call anyone else. It is just for him, to find her.”
Ali still tried to charm me, but I avoided him. This made him furious. He never showed his anger to me, but I could hear him yelling at Sam—really, at anyone who crossed his path. He always seemed to be surrounded by a group of men who hung out in his room and in the living room. Then one day I noticed that they had brought a woman in with them. Ali introduced her as his fiancée, but I figured out after a while that she had to be a prostitute. Her cell phone rang about sixty times an hour, and it was always men calling. I knew this because she tossed her phone to me once and asked me to answer it for her while she was in the bathroom. I was glad he had this woman to keep him occupied—and away from Hama.
OUR SATELLITE PHONE RANG in the middle of the night. I heard Sam knock the phone to the floor and rustle around to try to find it. He finally answered in Uzbek, and then he switched to English. I sat up, my heart pounding. If my family had something so important to say that they ignored the nine-and-a-half-hour time difference, then it had to be bad.
“Hi, Mom,” my son Zachary said. “I’ve been having a hard time lately. I wondered if I could come and live with you.”
“Sure.” I yawned, falling back on my pillow. “Come to Afghanistan!”
I called him back in the morning to work out the details. I hoped that Afghanistan might affect him the way it had me: that he might forget about his own problems and start caring more about other people. So I booked him a flight and he was on his way. By this time, my family had found out about my marriage to Sam. As I’d feared, they had picked up a newspaper and read about it. I think my mother was actually relieved that I wasn’t there by myself. So Zach soon joined us in the Peacock Manor and started volunteering teaching art and English at an orphanage for boys. I forgot all about Hama for a while, basking in the sight of my sweet son with his big crown of soft brown curls. Zach wasn’t in Kabul for more than a day when boys his age started to show up and ask him to go out to games or movies or tea. I guess there weren’t many American boys his age there, and everyone was curious. Then, several nights after he arrived, he came to a party at the beauty school. It was unusual to have him there, since males generally weren’t allowed into the school or salon. After the party, Zach was talking with great animation about a pretty girl with red hair. I pulled out photos of the class, and he put his finger on Hama’s face.
I teased Hama about this at school the next day. I told her Zach thought she was beautiful. A few of the other girls teased her, too, but I saw Topekai whispering to Roshanna. “What is she saying?” I asked her in a low voice.
“She worries you don’t understand that Hama is not a girl.” Roshanna put her hand on my arm because she could already feel me bristling. “Not a girl, meaning not pure. She thinks you shouldn’t let your son take an interest in her.”
I looked across the room and saw Topekai watching us somberly. She frowned and shook her head. “Not good,” she called across the room. “Only trouble.”
Still, I could see that Hama was pleased by Zach’s interest. I thought it was important for her to know that other men found her pretty. I didn’t want her to think she was stuck with Ali or forever tainted by his actions.
But a few weeks later, Hama slunk into school with a black eye and a cut lip. She put her hands over her face and whispered through her fingers that Ali had heard about Zach and beaten her. A tiny woman wrapped in a big blue scarf followed her into the school. It was Hama’s mother. As she pushed her scarf back, I could see that she’d probably had a pretty face once, but she had aged poorly. Like so many Afghan women, she looked twice her age. She had come to beg me to save her daughter from Ali, who had been giving her greedy husband money for the girl over the last year. The mother said she didn’t know how the family would survive if Ali stopped giving them the money, but she knew that he was an evil man and she wanted to break her daughter away from him. Weeping, she took me by the hands and asked if I would have my son marry Hama and take her out of the country.
How do you tell a brokenhearted mother that you just don’t do things that way where you come from? That you don’t arrange marriages for your sons; you don’t even do it to save a girl you love from being molested by a monster? I couldn’t promise my son to her, but I did promise that I would always look out for Hama.
When Sam heard about this, however, he decided that marriage to Hama would be just the ticket for Zach. He already thought my son needed toughening—he thought all American boys did—and he figured that taking on a wife would be good for him. After all, he had been steered into an arranged marriage when he was about Zach’s age. He felt it had made a man of him.
“You marry Hama,” he told Zach. “She make good Afghan wife for you. Already, she has progressive Western ideas.”
I could see my son weighing it in his mind for a day or so, then he sat down next to me and Sam when we were eating dinner. “I’ll marry her,” he said.
I wasn’t terribly surprised that bighearted Zach went for this idea. He hadn’t decided to marry Hama because he felt he needed to become a man in Sam’s eyes. Rather, he was haunted by the thought of sweet little Hama being sold to Ali by her father. He hadn’t been in Afghanistan long enough to know how often this happened. He didn’t know that there were thousands—hundreds of thousands—of sweet little girls who had been sold to brutal men. He couldn’t marry them all.
Ali didn’t stop beating Hama when Zach said he would marry her. If anything, the beatings got worse. Every day Hama would come into the school with a new bruise or cut, all tokens of Ali’s jealous affection. Zach was getting frantic. Here he had made the noble gesture of saying he would marry Hama, but it had wound up making her suffering worse. We were all still living in the guesthouse together, and Ali strolled in every night looking as smooth and urbane as ever, sometimes with a group of men, sometimes with the men and a few hard-looking women. I couldn’t remember why I had ever found him charming or even handsome.
Then I had an idea that I thought might save Hama, one not quite as drastic as marriage. My friend Karen had been following Hama’s story from Michigan through my e-mail updates. She had a lot of sympathy for Hama, since she he
rself had been in an abusive relationship with an older man when she was a young girl. So we worked out a plan for Hama to fly back to the States and live with Karen. We’d pool our money to cover her expenses and even start a college fund for her.
I sat Hama down after school one day and told her the news, and she jumped up and danced around the room. “I am American girl!” she sang. She picked up one of the fashion magazines lying on a table, held a picture of a girl in skimpy clothes to her chest, and struck a pouty pose like one of the models. She looked like a little girl playing paper dolls, only she herself was the doll. I told her not to tell anyone, especially not Ali. And I told her to stay away from him, to drop the cell phone he had given her down a well and never let him summon her again.
IT WAS AS PRETTY A DAY as I’d ever seen in Kabul. Above my head, a green-and-blue canopy fluttered. My students’ children wandered around the yard nibbling cookies and staring up at a forest of sunflowers. It seemed as if there were a million sunflowers, as if we were surrounded by a golden glow. The setting matched the glow in my heart. It was graduation day.
When it was time for the second class to graduate, in July, I was exhausted but happy. Against all odds, the Kabul Beauty School had survived to prepare yet another group of women for solid careers as beauticians. If anything, I believed the changes I had made to the curriculum were going to help this group be even more successful—and all this had been done at a fraction of the cost of the first class. In the final weeks of school, the girls had been working hard on their mannequin heads, hoping to win the “Most Creative” award. They went off in groups to the big outdoor market and came back with sequins, feathers, beads, ribbons, and all sorts of other materials to decorate their mannequins. After the girls went home for the day, I’d walk around and admire what they’d done. It was like being in the middle of a Mardi Gras parade—one where all the marchers had been cut off at the neck, but still.
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