The soldiers behind the barrier warning “Military Zone No Pictures Allowed” looked bored. They gestured towards me and yelled something that sounded menacing. Hanif went over and introduced himself, I guess explaining who we were and what we were doing. There was an unusually long and cheerful exchange of greetings, shaking of hands and excited laughter. Hanif walked back to where Imo and I were standing.
“They want you to take their photo. They said they want me to be in the picture with them.”
“Oh, okay. Sure.”
“They see me on TV. Some of them also know me from the quiz show on Tuesday night,” he added shyly.
I moved behind Hanif towards the soldiers. They all seemed very young, barely in their twenties. I moved my hands quickly, pointing at the position they should take in order to get the right lighting. They giggled among themselves, exchanging jokes as they shuffled. Maybe they were excited by the presence of a Western woman, maybe they found it exhilarating that a woman would tell them what to do. I changed the lens, put in a 35 mm film and pointed the camera at the men. Their expressions changed immediately, the laughter and the smiles giving way to grave, serious faces. They stiffened and puffed up their chests, holding on to their guns. Hanif stood in the midst of them like a general among his troops.
“Okay, Hanif, what’s the best restaurant in Kabul?” Imo asked when we got back in the car. “I want to splurge on real Afghan food.”
Hanif laughed and nodded.
“The best? Sure. The best. Okay, I will take you there.”
Imo’s extravagance amused him but also daunted him. Her self-assurance, the way she moved as if she owned the place, had made him uneasy from the start. I watched him roll down the window and speak with an obsequious expression to a guard who had pulled us over for an inspection. The man asked him questions while unabashedly checking me and Imo out, the tip of his gun brushing Hanif’s moustache. In spite of his current status as a star, there was a mix of courtesy and fear in Hanif’s eyes whenever he had to deal with authority, like a dog that’s been beaten in the past and fears it could happen again, at the snap of a finger, without any warning.
The restaurant had no atmosphere whatsoever. It was vast, with very high ceilings, and badly lit. Long tables and plastic chairs were scattered about as in a factory cafeteria, and every sound reverberated with an echo. The few customers looked like Afghan politicians or businessmen shrouded in woolen shawls. There was also a long table of what seemed to be a group of aid workers lunching with their Afghan colleagues. At the head of the table sat a blond man in a beret, constantly talking on his cell phone.
Imo took out her glasses and studied the menu with great concentration while Hanif explained every dish in detail. Finally we settled on a very elaborate platter of grilled meat and chicken, Kabuli rice with pistachio nuts, cashews and saffron, and curd.
“But will that be enough for the three of us?” Imo asked. “I’m starved, aren’t you?”
Hanif confessed he was on a diet and he was going to eat very little.
“Oh, come on!” Imo nearly shrieked with laughter. “Why on earth do you want to lose weight? You look very good like this, you shouldn’t be any thinner.”
Hanif blushed at the compliment and patted his belly.
“My wife, she says I should lose a bit…”
“Really? Well, then, if your wife says so. She’s the one you should please.”
Hanif laughed and nodded.
“Tell us a bit about your wife.” Imo lowered her glasses on the ridge of her nose and smiled at Hanif.
“She is very young,” he admitted with a touch of embarrassment, his cheeks pinkening, as if he, a big-nosed forty-year-old with a few extra pounds to shed, had received an unhoped-for gift from heaven he felt unworthy of.
“She is pregnant, almost seven months,” he said radiantly. “My first child.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful. Is your wife beautiful?” Imo asked.
“Very beautiful.” Again, Hanif seemed to blush.
“Show us a photo. You’ve got a photo of your wife, haven’t you?” Imo pressed him.
“No, no photos, sorry.”
A waiter arrived, smiled and greeted Hanif, whom he either knew or recognized—I couldn’t be sure—and Hanif proceeded to order.
“See? They don’t do that here,” I said under my breath while Hanif was talking to the waiter.
“Do what?”
“Carry photos of their wives in their wallets. It’s not done, to show your wife’s face to strangers, you see? If Hanif, who works as a television presenter, doesn’t like to show her picture, just imagine what it’s going to be like for us in the villages.”
“He just doesn’t carry a photo with him, that’s all. Don’t get neurotic about this, Maria, I beg of you. You’re making me nervous.”
The food came. It was a feast, but Hanif placed only a bowl of spiced yogurt in front of him.
“This is very good for the digestion. It’s the secret for longevity.” He laughed. “Had it not been for the war, Afghans would reach a very old age thanks to this.”
Imo poked me with her elbow.
“Look at that group photo session. So much for that not being done here.”
Then I saw the French aid worker with the beret and all his coworkers posing in front of a woman taking a snapshot. None of the Afghan girls were wearing headscarves. They were all laughing and had their arms around one another. I felt ridiculous and wished I had kept my mouth shut.
Before he dropped us off at the hotel that evening, Hanif had revealed with a certain amount of pride that his quiz show was going on the air at seven p.m., as it did every Tuesday night.
“Everyone wants to win the prize!” he said. “A Japanese racing bike, brand-new.”
Imo and I told him we would watch it for sure. After dinner we asked one of the waiters to show us where the TV was. He knew right away what we were after.
“Mr. Hanif?”
“Yes!” Imo immediately replied. “Would you like to watch it with us?”
I wasn’t sure he understood any English, but he nodded vehemently and we followed him into a small room on the first floor where there was a couch and a few chairs. There were full ashtrays and empty beer bottles everywere, a pile of DVDs on top of the TV. The waiter fumbled with the antenna and the remote control till Hanif came into focus.
Imo slumped on the couch, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one.
“I love it. Here’s our Hanif. Look at that. Amazing.”
“I never knew you were a smoker,” I said.
“I didn’t either. But, you know, just one to unwind at the end of the day.”
Hanif was reading from a sheet of paper, standing up. The studio was very basic, just a dark blue background without any props, only the racing bike right behind him, which glittered under a spotlight like a totem. Two young men with slicked-back hair and Western clothes were sitting at a small table, their hands ready to press the buttons. The setup was weird: it didn’t look like a quiz show, but more like an examination or a job interview. There was no music, no audience, and Hanif didn’t look anything like a presenter of a variety show. He looked more like a bureaucrat. Yet, despite the awkwardness, one felt that this timid beginning of consumerism—variety shows, prizes and glitter after years of Taliban restrictions—was the most exciting thing that had penetrated any Afghan household that could afford a TV set. The waiter seemed entranced.
“What is he saying?” Imo asked, pointing at Hanif.
“Yes, yes.” The waiter nodded, excited. He grabbed a chair and sat only a few inches away from the screen.
“Is it good?”
“Yes. Very good.”
Just then the door opened and General Dynamics came in with the Blond and the Dark One, followed by another two men I’d never seen before. The Dark One stood in front of the screen, obscuring the image, fumbled with the DVD jackets till he found what he was looking for and slid it in the player.
Imo stood up and pointed to the screen.
“We were actually trying to watch this TV show, if you don’t mind.”
The men sat down and lit their cigarettes, ignoring her comment. Jarhead’s title credits appeared on the screen.
Imo opened her arms and rolled her eyes to the ceiling.
“I don’t fucking believe this,” she said loudly.
Nobody reacted. The Dark One turned up the volume and swiftly plopped down in Imo’s place on the couch with a sigh of satisfaction. Someone switched off the main light and the room sank into the dark.
The next morning we were sitting in the sun on a lumpy old sofa in the open courtyard of the office of an NGO that supported women’s rights. A kitten was rubbing up against my ankles and purring. A French girl with a headscarf and shalwar kameez had received us—not too effusively, actually—and told us, in a heavily accented English, to wait. There was an important meeting going on, she said, and Roshana Habib, the person in charge, would be with us as soon as she could. She’d pointed to the old sofa, plunked in the middle of the courtyard, and disappeared without asking if we’d care for some tea. Imo was scribbling notes in her Moleskine notebook and looked grumpy. Perhaps she hadn’t been pleased with the French girl’s reception, or maybe she construed the wait as a mark of disrespect.
“If there’s one thing I simply cannot stand it’s European women in Afghan clothes and headscarf,” she grumbled without lifting her eyes from her notebook.
“Maybe they feel more comfortable walking around like that because they blend in more?” I offered. “In fact, didn’t you say we needed to blend—”
“As if people on the street didn’t know they’re Westerners. No, it spells ‘Don’t fuck with me, I’m a local,’ not to the Afghans, of course, just to other foreigners. It’s so smug.”
I was beginning to see what were the things that infuriated Imo the most. The presence of other Westerners, seen as potential competitors, was one.
“How’s your tummy?” she asked me.
“What? It’s all right, I think. Why?”
“Mmm. I’ve got the squitters. If you ask me, that meat we had yesterday at the restaurant was off. Had to run to the bathroom all night long.”
“I don’t know, for the moment I don’t feel any—”
“I was running to the bathroom in the dark and I bumped into that blond guy, the tall one who never talks? He was completely naked.”
“Oh no.”
“Yep. And he had a hard-on.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I swear. He slammed into me as I came out of the bathroom, and he didn’t even bother to say ‘sorry,’ like, you know, he owned the place. Just like yesterday in the TV room, as if we didn’t exist. Those two are such pigs, they totally disgust me. They never bother to clean the toilet bowl, have you noticed?”
The idea of the Blond, crossing the landing stark naked terrified me as much as the idea of a nighttime attack of diarrhea that would force me to encounter him.
We saw a woman cross the courtyard and come in our direction. It was Roshana Habib, a minute, handsome Afghan woman in her forties with stern eyes. She smiled at us as she shook our hands and apologized for making us wait, but kept a formal, almost suspicious, distance.
She asked without smiling, “I’m sorry, could you just remind me which newspaper you are from? We get so many journalists in here…I’m afraid I forgot.”
Imo told her it was the Observer from London and made a reference to the e-mail exchange they had had in the previous week about the women’s self-immolations.
“Yes, yes, of course. Now I remember.” Roshana sat down on the sofa. “I’m sorry but unfortunately I only have half an hour. Today there’s an ongoing meeting which I need to return to.”
She wore a bulky man’s watch around her wrist, a touch of lipstick, a heavy sweater over a long skirt and a scarf over her head. Her English accent was almost flawless, her vocabulary extremely refined. She answered Imo’s questions without hesitation, reeling off numbers and statistics like a lesson she’d learned by heart, while Imo took notes. Her cell phone rang a couple of times and she apologized again for having to answer—it was a crazy day, she repeated. She gave quick, to-the-point instructions in Dari to the person at the other end and shut the phone with relief.
Imo was looking for evidence of the theory she had put out to me back in London.
“Would you say these suicides have increased in the last couple of years? Is it true that women who have more access to outside information have become more aware of their situation and—”
Roshana shook her head. “I don’t know that there’s a connection. I’ve read something about it, but I think it’s just one of those stories journalists come up with. In the rural villages of Afghanistan nothing has ever really changed. Not before, not during and not after the Taliban. Women are sold as slaves by their families and have been since the beginning of time.”
Most of the self-immolation cases occurred in the Helmand Province, and it was true that numbers were growing every day, she conceded.
“It may be just because there’s more communication than before, that’s why we come to know about the deaths whereas before we wouldn’t even hear of them,” Roshana acknowledged.
She strongly advised us it wasn’t wise to travel there. The security situation was critical. Only a few days before, there had been heavy fighting between the U.S.-led coalition forces and Taliban militants; suicide bombings and small-arms attacks had increased exponentially since the reprisal of the insurgence.
“You also have to consider there is a strong social stigma attached to suicide in Afghanistan, and many families are reluctant to seek help for victims of self-immolation or talk about the reasons behind the attempt. You’ll see. It’s going to be hard to get people to talk about that.”
“We’ll find a way,” Imo said. But I could tell she was disappointed by how unimpressed Roshana seemed by our project.
“May I ask you what is it exactly you intend to do?” Roshana asked.
Imo sighed.
“I’d like to go a hospital and talk to the women who have attempted to burn themselves. I was wondering whether you had any contact with doctors or families who’d be prepared to talk to us. And then I’d like to get some pictures of wedding preparations, the part of the ceremony that takes place in the women’s quarters.”
Roshana nodded, but something in her expression seemed, if not hostile, skeptical. The kitten had come back and jumped on my lap. I scratched him behind the ears as he kept purring.
“So sweet,” I said, to lighten up the atmosphere. “What’s his name?”
Roshana looked at me and shrugged as if I had asked the dumbest question.
“I’ve no idea.” She then turned to Imo. “And how long are you planning to be here?”
“A week, ten days. It depends.”
“Ah. Then I don’t think it will be possible.”
“What?”
“To go to hospitals, photograph women, shoot wedding ceremonies. This is a country where until a few years ago photographs of human beings were outlawed.”
“I know, I know. But this article is precisely intended to—”
“Of course,” Roshana agreed. “But I’ll tell you right now that in the rural areas no woman with a father or husband will let you take her photo without the veil. As you probably know, they live in a very traditional way. And who would the photographer be?”
“Maria.”
Roshana shifted her gaze to me. She looked down at the camera I was holding. I gave her a friendly smile, to counteract the fact that I had been practically mute till then. Roshana turned back to Imo, unimpressed.
“That French girl who let you in, Florence, she’s a photographer too.”
“Oh. Is she?” Imo started tapping her pen on the Moleskine.
“Yes. To give you an idea, she’s been working on your same story for…let’s see…four years now. She lived in Herat Province, where our organization has a branch, and she’s spent months and months just earning the trust of these women and of the village chiefs, explaining what the photographs would be used for, et cetera, et cetera. All in keeping with the work our organization has been doing over this territory for a very long time. She still hasn’t finished, and she’s been working on it for four years.”
“Unfortunately we don’t have four years, so we’ll have to manage,” Imo said, somewhat icily.
The sun had disappeared behind the building and it was getting cold outside in the courtyard. I wished Roshana would ask us to continue the conversation inside. But obviously there was a far more important meeting going on in the office.
“And as far as the weddings are concerned,” Roshana went on, “the part of the ceremony that takes place in the women’s quarters is secret. No man has ever been allowed to see it and so that is also something that can’t be shown in photographs. Ours are very ancient traditions, Miss Glass.”
“Imo, please.”
“Sure. Imo. Not even Florence was able to do that.”
“I see.” Imo looked at her watch. We didn’t have to go anywhere in particular, but I could tell she was getting restless.
“Maybe you should speak to Florence. She might be able to give you some advice,” Roshana said.
End of Manners Page 11