Kabul Beauty School

by Deborah Rodriguez

  But a few weeks later, Mina came into work sobbing again. This time she had a bruise that covered almost half her face and finger marks all up and down her arms. Once again she was caught in the crossfire between the men in her family.

  An uncle who lived near Tajikistan—not the mean one from her childhood—had come to Kabul to visit the family. He especially wanted to see Mina. So she and her husband and child were invited to dinner at her parents’ house. Shortly after they arrived, her husband started to fume because her father and uncle were drinking, and he told Mina that he wanted to leave. The uncle asked him to reconsider; he wanted to spend some time with his favorite niece. Mina put her hand on her husband’s arm and begged to stay. This made her husband furious. He grabbed her by the hair, pulled her out of her father’s house, then started to beat her right in her father’s front yard. Her father stormed out of the house and ordered the husband away. He wasn’t incensed because his daughter was being beaten; he knew that Mina’s husband often beat her. No, he was mad because he wasn’t the one doing the beating. A girl may be beaten by her father in his house but never by someone else in her father’s house. So the husband stalked away in a sullen rage, taking their little boy with him. The hysterical Mina had spent the night with her parents.

  I put my arms around her. “You can live with me. Or you can leave your husband and live with your parents again!”

  She only sobbed harder. “If she does this, she will lose her son,” Laila explained. “She can only have her son if she goes back to her husband. But now her father is threatening to dissolve the marriage. It is his right to do this, since the dowry was never paid.” Even though Mina didn’t want to go back to her old, ugly husband, she knew she’d lose her son if the marriage was dissolved. But once again she had no choice in the matter. Her father was the only one who could decide, just as he was the one who had decided that she had to marry this man.

  So Sam talked to the father and the husband a second time. He somehow convinced the father not to force a dissolution. He wasn’t related to the husband, so he told him that he would kill him if he ever beat Mina again. She and her son wound up staying with her parents for a week. At the end of that week, the husband came and begged mercy from the father, who gave Mina back to him.

  She was still so very unhappy and frightened, even after things went back to normal. I knew Mina wanted to go to beauty school, and I saw that she was naturally gifted at hairdressing, but she had never asked me to let her into the school. So one day I invited her to have tea with me and Sam. “I have a surprise for you,” I told her, anticipating the light that would come back into her eyes. “I’m putting you on the roster for my next class.”

  Sam translated, but Mina only shook her head sadly. “He says cannot do,” Sam said. “Husband is not working. They need her housekeeper money.”

  “I have that all figured out,” I exclaimed. “She can still work a few hours a day as a housekeeper, and I’ll pay her a full salary. She can pay me back by working in the salon for a few hours every day after she graduates.”

  “You make her work for free later?” Sam asked incredulously.

  “No, I’m only saying that because I don’t want her to feel like a charity case! Tell her that if she works hard and is one of the top students in her class, I’ll hire her as a full-time hairdresser.”

  When Sam translated this, Mina smiled again. She cried a little, too, but then was quickly skipping through the compound as if she were a carefree little girl again.

  She joined my fifth class, and I immediately became anxious about my promise. I wasn’t sure Mina could settle down long enough to learn the craft of hairdressing. She had some natural talent, but she was in a class with a lot of very competitive women who had both talent and drive. I knew that if Mina didn’t emerge on the top and join my staff, I’d have not only her disappointment but also Sam’s angry family, all the way from Saudi Arabia, to contend with. My teachers were the ones who were going to select the top students, and I couldn’t interfere with their decision. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the girls. But as the class started to wind down their work and move into the testing phase, I became more and more anxious about it. Mina herself was a streak of exuberant energy. A few days before the graduation, she was arranging with my girls in the salon to take still pictures and videos of her during the ceremony. She wanted to send copies to relatives all over Afghanistan.

  “I’m so happy!” she exclaimed. “I’ve never achieved anything before.”

  Graduation was held on a sunny winter day in the Cleopatra room of the school-salon building. My students started arriving hours early, and how splendid they looked! There were enough rhinestones, sequins, seed pearls, lengths of gold braid, flecks of glitter, and chunks of flashy jewelry in that room to light up the dark side of the moon. My students wore fabulous outfits that they had most likely made themselves, along with some of the pointiest shoes I had ever seen. Mina wasn’t wearing bling, but she was wearing breasts—or rather, a pileup of four padded bras underneath her sweater to give the impression of big breasts. My teachers, my Oasis hairdressers, and some of my former students were there, too, sitting in folding chairs along the side of the room like sensible matrons. This was the day for the new graduates to shine, and it seemed that no one else wanted to detract from their luster.

  There was going to be dancing, so all the men were banned from the compound and the gate to the street was bolted. The girls brought their favorite CDs and danced for an hour or more, slinking and swaying and shaking around the floor in pairs as the rest clapped and sang along. They wouldn’t let anyone sit—I was pulled to the middle of the floor, the teachers were pulled to the middle of the floor, some Western guests were pulled to the middle of the floor. All of this dancing was deeply sensual. As always, I loved watching how the music brought out another side of these girls. It was often the really quiet girls dressed in somber clothes who turned out to be the most provocative dancers. On that day the formula held true: it was the tall, slender girl in a plain white tunic and white pants with her head tightly covered in a white scarf—even indoors—who had the most intense hip movements and suggestively fluttering hands.

  We had to let a few men into the salon, but only for a moment. It was just Sam and Achmed Zia, rolling in a huge cake on one of the curler carts. The dancing stopped, and all the girls crowded forward to admire the cake’s creamy white icing and real yellow roses. Then I stood in the middle of the room to make my speech.

  “I’m so proud of you all.” I tried to blink back the tears that would surely ruin my makeup and maybe even my silk dress. “Nothing in the world gives me as much joy as helping you become beauticians. I have never been around a group of women who work so hard to learn and become successful. You have changed my life by allowing me to be your teacher, and I know you will change Afghanistan for the better.”

  I say this to every class, and it is always true. Their determination always takes my breath away.

  Then the girls crowded together and held hands as I got ready to announce the four best students. This is the hardest moment of the day, because they all want this distinction so much. If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be any “best” students, but the girls insist on making the class competitive. I looked around at all the faces that had become so dear to me—and read the names from the list that the teachers had given me.

  “Shukria!” I said, and the girl with long black hair threaded with sequins shrieked and took her place next to me.

  “Mazari!” The slender girl in white stepped forward.

  “Tordai!” A quiet girl with short, curly hair joined us in the center of the room.

  The other students pressed against one another with agonized faces. I drew a deep breath, then shouted, “Mina!” She jumped up and down, making it hard for the girls who were videotaping her to do their job. I kissed each of the winning students and handed them their prizes: top-quality scissors and thinning shears. Then I handed out g
ift bags to all the students, my “salons in a box” that would enable them to work as beauticians anywhere: two towels, a blow dryer, large and small curling irons, a mannequin head, five cutting combs, two pick combs, two foiling combs, one styling comb, two hairbrushes, large and small round metal brushes, one washing cape, one cutting cape, one styling cape, one children’s cape, one box of foils, one box of gloves, one set of rollers, one set of perm rods, one mirror, and a huge pile of other great stuff for doing hair, nails, and feet. These girls had probably never received such huge gifts in their lives. They shrieked so loudly as they went through their bags that my ears tingled.

  Mina did her first pedicure on a paying customer just a few days later. She dipped the woman’s feet in and out of the warm water as if they were rare artifacts, with Bahar crouched next to her whispering encouragement. She did a nice job, too, and danced around later with her very first tip money in her pocket. She was radiantly happy. I had to assume her crummy husband was pleased with the money that she was bringing home.

  But one day I found her sobbing in the back of the salon again. Her mother-in-law had moved into the house and was angry at Mina for working. She had riled up her son on the subject, and he was beating her again. Mina was bent over with pain from the beatings and what was probably an ulcer from all the stress. She was desperate to go back and live with her mother, but once again, she knew she would lose her son if her father dissolved her marriage. I decided that, since she was a full-time employee, she was entitled to sick leave, so I sent her to her parents’ house. I convinced her husband to let her take her son with her for a two-week break. And I prayed that somehow things would work out for her, because I didn’t know what else I could do.

  One night in late spring 2005, I was looking out our bedroom window. It had been an unusually dusty day in Kabul, and the sky was a solid gray. There wasn’t a sign of stars or even the moon. It made me feel claustrophobic, as if the air was so crowded with dust that I couldn’t catch a breath. Then I saw something sparkle across the sky.

  “Look, Sam,” I called across the room to him. “Shooting stars!”

  Sam came and stood beside me at the window, then patted me on the shoulder. “No shooting star, Debbie,” he said. “Is missiles.

  Someone is fighting again.”

  The warm weather was bringing the bad guys out of their winter hibernation. Not long after graduation, Afghanistan and even our own little neighborhood in Kabul were rocked by savagery. There was an attempted kidnapping on my street. Our local Internet café was blown up. A young woman who was working for a new Afghan television station was murdered in her front yard. Everyone suspected her brother of doing it because she was on TV without any head covering. An Italian aid worker named Clementina Cantoni was kidnapped in Kabul as she left her yoga class. There was rioting after news reports that American interrogators at the Guantánamo detention center had flushed a copy of the Koran down the toilet. In the most hideous incident of all, three Afghan women who worked for foreign NGOs were raped, strangled, and then dumped by the side of the road. A note attached to them said that this was what would happen to traitors and whores.

  Everyone tried to keep their spirits up and carry on, even though the news was about as depressing as it had ever been. I put an advertisement about the salon in a little Kabul magazine geared to foreigners, and still more customers came, both Westerners and westernized Afghans. I like to say that Afghanistan is a place for mercenaries, missionaries, misfits, and the brokenhearted, and all of these came to my salon for pampering and gossip. I’d have five or six women at a time inside, and it almost seemed as if there was a contest to see who had the most amazing story. I don’t think any beautician in the world has a more interesting clientele. These women were doing remarkable things under the most difficult circumstances. One was monitoring the health of pregnant women in villages so remote that she could reach them only by horseback. Another was helping traffic cops figure out how to enable children to navigate Kabul’s streets safely. Another was working with Afghan journalists to build a news bureau. I thought what I was doing was important—I was preparing women to prosper in one of the best careers they could have in Afghanistan—and I still do. But sometimes when I listened to my customers talk about their work, I was truly humbled. And I was always happy to see all the business cards that changed hands. I felt that I was giving these women not only a place to relax but also a place to get to know others and maybe even to find partners for some of their projects.

  And in the afternoons, after my girls went home, I continued to offer services for Western men. Some of them were the unlikeliest salon customers one could imagine—big, beefy hulks who had been hired to protect the important people in town. People commonly called them “shooters” or “Rambo wannabes,” and some of my customers weren’t allowed to go anywhere without one or two of these guys at their sides. That was how the shooters wound up as customers. One day I saw a shooter standing by my chowkidor hut, staring down the street, his muscles so huge that he couldn’t even fold his arms. He wore something like a thick leather utility belt, except that this one was studded with weapons and ammo. “You want to come and wait in the lobby?” I called out the window.

  He turned and shook his head. “Got to keep an eye out for the troublemakers.” He had a nice smile that was nearly overshadowed by scruffy, lopsided sideburns.

  “Come back when you’re off duty. I’ll trim up those sideburns for free!”

  So he came back after all the beauticians left, and he brought a friend. Soon lots of shooters were showing up after business hours. Some evenings the scene inside the salon was just too funny. Two or three of these guys would come in, lay their guns down near the trays of curlers, and sink into my salon chairs so I could feather their hair, trim their cuticles, or maybe even slather facial masks on them. The fact that my salon capes were pink and featured pictures of Marilyn Monroe completed the picture. Sam loved these evenings. I’d call to tell him when his favorite shooters were in the salon. He’d rush right home so they could swap stories and compare guns.

  As the weather got warmer, many of the Westerners started to hang around the salon after hours, and we roared right into outdoor party season. It turned out that Zilgai the plumber was the best party boy in town. When the music got going, he and his friends would leap to the middle of the yard and treat everyone to some wild Afghan dancing. The Westerners loved these parties because many of them were stuck so much of the time in their own compounds that they never got out into the real Kabul. This wasn’t exactly the real Kabul, either, but it was closer than anything they had experienced. I’d hire Afghan bands and have Maryam make Afghan food; Sam would invite his Afghan friends over, and we’d dance into the night. If the Westerners had visitors who’d come to town for a few days to work or consult or whatever, they’d call to ask if the party was on that night.

  At one of these parties, I introduced Sam to a guy who was working in the opium poppy eradication program. “He’s one of the poppy killers,” I said.

  “Poppy killers?” Sam’s eyes widened. He almost shuddered as he looked at the guy. “Debbie, I thought you loved dogs!”

  THERE WAS A WRITHING KNOT of men just outside my gate. They had come running from all over the street to watch the man with the long black beard berate Achmed Zia, my chowkidor. Even the goats who were pawing through the pile of garbage down the street wandered over to see what was going on. Achmed Zia shot me a worried look. I could see that the bearded guy had been drinking, but I didn’t think he was particularly dangerous, just stupid. “What’s he making such a fuss about?” I asked Laila.

  She cocked her head at the man, then shrugged distastefully. “He is saying that he will kill Achmed Zia.”

  “Why does he want to kill Achmed Zia?”

  “Because you have moved the chowkidor hut from one side of our gate to the other. He says that it is his wall on the other side of the gate.”

  I pushed through the men and stood n
ext to Achmed Zia. “Tell him it is not his wall!”

  Laila barely came up to his shoulder, but she lit right into the man. It was like seeing a Kewpie doll—not only a Kewpie doll but one wearing five-inch-high, toeless heels in order to show off her pink, opalescent toes—launch an assault. The black-bearded man frowned at her, then started yelling again. Laila turned back to me. “He says that he will kill you, Debbie, and the rest of the foreigners who came to your house.”

  “Well, you tell him I’m going to report him to the police!”

  We had been going back and forth like this for a while—he was going to kill us, we were going to bring the law down on him—when one of his brothers arrived. He was a scrawny, sallow guy with a misshapen ear. He just looked at me grimly and pulled his drunken brother back into their compound.

  We already knew that these neighbors were trouble. All the rest of our neighbors were friendly and decent, but these two were from a family that was notorious up and down the block. The vegetable dealer around the corner had told me that they would snatch up a handful of beans or a head of cauliflower and just walk off, snickering when he’d protest. The guy who had a little dry goods store at the end of the street—we called him Karzai, because he always wore the same kind of fetal lambskin hat that the president of Afghanistan wore—had complained about them stealing from him, too. Karzai smoked hash all day in his store and was always wreathed in smoke, but these guys were capable of spoiling even his cheerful buzz. My girls had also complained that these neighbors made offensive comments if they passed them on the street.

  Sam and I had had our first run-in with these guys a few weeks before. We weren’t getting enough electricity, and our lights were so dim at night that it was hard to see anything. We called the city about it, but the guy on the phone kept saying “tomorrow” every time we called. We finally had one of Sam’s uncles put in a bigger cable from the main power box to our house. I don’t know how he wasn’t electrocuted, but lots of things in Kabul are fixed this way. If you can call it fixed: we had brighter lights at night, but there were also flames shooting out of my outlets. Anyway, the bad neighbors were outraged. They stood on the ground shouting at Sam’s uncle as he stood there on top of the building wrestling with live wires. We figured they just didn’t want him to be able to look down into their compound and see their women.