Tooba shows me Samir’s room. It is like stepping into a luxurious miniature engraving. Light silk curtains fall on either side of the window. The bed occupies an alcove and is covered with a brilliant electric turquoise spread. A small tapestry hangs over the bed, and a lovely prayer rug is rolled up nearby. His is a beautiful, really perfect, room. No pretentious East-West clutter here, no heavy Germanic fireplaces, no heavy velvet drapes.
Instead of the expensive Western-style leather bedroom slippers that most wealthy Afghan men wear, a pair of comfortable Persian-style slippers stands near Samir’s bed. Some magazines are arranged on the floor near the window. They carry illustrated stories of some of Samir’s favorite places: a hotel overlooking the Nile, a garden in Shiraz, a folk festival in Uzbekistan.
Samir rubs one hand in the other, embarrassed and pleased at my obvious pleasure. He offers me more tea and “perhaps some fruit”?
How he must suffer, I think!
I am going crazy with boredom and loneliness. My sister-in-law Fawziya, Hassan’s wife, tells me: “Pretend you are an Afghan woman. Forget that you were ever American. It’s the only way you’ll survive.”
In Edward Hunter’s book about Afghan women in purdah, he describes a “pattern of depression, weeping spells, and cruelty” among Afghan women, who were not raised as Americans. He quotes an unnamed informant who describes women crying, sobbing, and slapping themselves: “These poor, pent-up creatures have nobody else whose face they can slap. Except the faces of other females who must submit to them, a daughter-in-law perhaps, or a daughter. Outsiders simply cannot conceive how dreadful the feeling of isolation from life can be in purdah.”
At the time everyone, including Abdul-Kareem, treats what I view as my captivity as a spoiled American woman’s overly dramatic reaction to how things simply . . . are.
Hassan barely speaks to Fawziya. Once, right in front of her, Hassan asks me what I think of his wife: “If ten is the rating for beauty, what number would you give her? A two?”
Fawziya keeps smiling brightly. I am sure she understands his question.
I hug her. I tell Hassan that I would rate her far beyond a ten.
“Maybe Fawziya is a twenty. What do you think you are, Hassan?”
I do not like this vain and arrogant brother-in-law, who is so heartless toward his gentle wife.
Everyone in Abdul-Kareem’s family has submitted to an arranged marriage. Only Abdul-Kareem has married a woman without any Afghan ancestors. He has not expanded his family’s social or economic reach. He has married selfishly, for love. It is a scandal. Given what I now understand, I believe that his family was as warm and welcoming to me as they could be. But they are starving me. I am always hungry. I cannot persuade Bebegul or Abdul-Kareem to allow the cook to use Crisco.
I still find this impossible to believe. In all the years I was with Abdul-Kareem in America, he cooked for me so tenderly. I love all his Afghan dishes. I considered myself lucky to have had such a brilliant personal chef. Yet here in Kabul he does not seem to care that I am hungry but unable to eat the food.
Years later, in 1978, Aziz, one of Abdul-Kareem’s younger half-brothers, comes to visit me in Manhattan. Aziz reminds me that I used to slip across to the home of his mother, Meena (she is the third wife), and politely ask for some food. Their cook used Crisco. The food was always gone but Aziz, who was ten at the time, would promise me that “next time” he’d save something for me. He never managed it.
I hear that a new restaurant, an American-style cafeteria, has opened in town. I decide that this would be a perfect opportunity for me to get some much-needed nutrition and for Abdul-Kareem and me to have some time alone together.
I have meat loaf, mashed potatoes, string beans, and apple pie. I am thrilled. Abdul-Kareem looks miserable the entire time. His mouth is turned down; he does not eat with me. He steers me to a far corner of the room “where people won’t be able to see us making fools of ourselves.”
Who is this man? My life is in the hands of a stranger.
“Abdul-Kareem, let’s just move out. Can’t we live at the Kabul hotel? Or, better still, why don’t we travel a bit, see the country? Or can we at least rent a furnished home?”
He sneers at me. “You are a child. Do you mean to ruin me before I’ve even begun? News of this little meal of yours is going to land on some minister’s desk, and it will be used against me. When will you understand that Afghans do not dine out in restaurants? It is not done.”
“Excuse me, Mr. Afghan,” I respond. “I see men in choi chanas (teahouses) sitting on raised platforms and drinking, eating, and smoking all over town. Don’t you mean that women are not supposed to eat out or be seen in public?”
“I will not dignify that with a response. I will not talk about this.”
He continues more softly: “The problem, Phyllis dear, is that you do not know how to run a proper Afghan household. You do not speak the language; the servants will take advantage of you. They will steal everything. And you—you would ruin us with your parties and liquor and dancing and music—”
“Wait a minute. I am the one who reads books. I am not a party girl. You are the one who likes to party.”
“Don’t you understand that I am being closely watched?”
“Are we living in Soviet Russia? Is this a totalitarian regime?”
“Phyllis, I beg you. Please lower your voice. People are not used to an Afghan couple living alone. They would not understand it. It would be seen as disrespectful to my family. No one is used to having his wife run around town on her own to sightsee. People would talk.”
“Abdul-Kareem, I can’t remain locked up with your mother, who I believe hates me. Even Fawziya is afraid of her.”
Pro forma, Abdul-Kareem denies that I am in purdah. He insists that the women in his family and in his country are far happier and far more fulfilled than neurotic American women are. But he also takes his other standard tack.
“Things are going to change here. We can be a part of this. But until then I will have to be very careful. One scandal, one slip, and it can all be over for me. If you don’t ruin things, you will have many things to do by my side. You won’t have time to be ‘locked up,’ as you put it. I am going to be an important man here. Please trust me. So far, no one else will.”
The man is cunning. First he tries to cut me down to size, then he insults my country and my culture, then he dangles the carrot.
Everyone knows that I’m at a loose and desperate end.
Thus I am beginning to get out a bit more but only under carefully supervised conditions. I see the longed-for sites as we pass them by on our way to visit someone. I see the beautiful tomb of Emir
Abdur Rahman (1880–1901) in Kabul—but from afar. It seems graceful, like something from a fairy tale, like the Taj Mahal. I see Amanullah’s half-built palace, the Darul Aman (or Dar-al-Aman) palace, which commands an extraordinary view.
I see the old British fort. Whenever we pass it by, Abdul-Kareem and every other Afghan is sure to remind me that the Afghans drove the mighty British Empire out. In point of fact the British had agreed to withdraw, and the Afghans proceeded to massacre 4,500 mainly Indian soldiers commanded by British officers, as well as nearly 12,000 camp followers, which means women and children. Only one British man, Dr. William Brydon, managed to reach Jalalabad alive. He was the sole eyewitness to what is known as the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839–42).
I come to love the Blue Mosque of Kabul. It is a small mosque near the Kabul River in the center of town. Its dome is azure blue, sky blue, a heavenly color.
The family has homes and properties in Istalif, Paghman, Jalalabad, and Herat. Paghman is a summer resort just outside Kabul. After I suffer several bouts of truly wretched dysentery, Abdul-Kareem, his brothers, sisters, and their spouses take me on a visit to Paghman. It is an act of enormou
s kindness, an all-out effort to cheer me up and perhaps to impress me as well. I am duly impressed and grateful.
Shahs, emirs, and kings made this their summer home, and their courtiers quickly followed. At the start of the fifteenth century, when
Babur the Great conquered Kabul, he found that exquisite gardens already existed in Paghman. In the late nineteenth century Emir Abdur Rahman established his summer court here.
In addition to the Bala-Bagh (upper garden) palace, an ornate Afghan version of a European Victorian-era gingerbread house, there are other villas, a vast Versailles-like garden, showy statuary, fountains, fountain geysers, gazebos, waterfalls, lakes, flowers, trees—so many trees, and more greenery than I have ever seen.
There is even an arch built by King Amanullah in imitation of the Arc de Triomphe. This one commemorates the Afghan victory over the British.
This is not an example of simple and overt Western colonialism. This is an example of the Eastern appropriation of Western architecture and landscaping. In a culturally Eurocentric world, everyone, including wealthy Afghans, wanted a little bit of European culture at home.
This is ironic, since so many Western travelers to the East want to go native—wear turbans, ride camels, dine and sleep in tents or at least on carpeted floors, drinking tea and coffee flavored with cardamom.
Rosanne Klass, in Land of the High Flags: Afghanistan When the Going Was Good, explains it this way: The Afghans were in isolation for so long that when they emerged, “they realized they had been left aside in a changing world . . . so they rushed to accumulate what the world had in the meantime stamped as accepted goods, in arts and elsewhere.”
We visit Paghman sometime in mid- or late October. The family’s European-style villa is not in use. The furniture is covered with white muslin sheets. It feels ghostly, uninhabited, but still grand. Does Ismail Mohammed travel there with his third wife, or does he use it only to entertain foreign business contacts? Does he come here at all?
We remove the sheets from the couches. What an attempt at goodwill! My sisters-in-law and my brothers-in-law tell jokes to cheer me up—and Abdul-Kareem translates for me. They try so hard to please me. We had hoped to have a picnic but it is too cold, almost blustery. The way Afghans, Persians, and Turks organize picnics has been honed to a high art. The meal is meant to be unhurried, the conversations leisurely. One is expected to dine, doze, take a walk, fly kites. Being in nature is paramount. Abdul-Kareem and his Afghan friends took me on many such picnics in New York City, and the slow and courtly pace seemed to take place outside time.
On this precious day in Paghman we dine indoors but picnic style. (Actually every meal is picnic style since we always dine on the carpeted floor.)
The Afghans and Persians have a great reputation for both writing and reciting poetry aloud. Although the great Persian poet Firdausi, who wrote the Shahnamah, established himself in Ghazni, and the mystic poet Rumi once lived in Balkh, none of my well-meaning relatives recited any poetry that day in Paghman.
Afterward we tour Paghman. Slowly we walk through lush green gardens surrounded by emerald trees and rushing streams; the air is filled with the sweet songs of birds. I can still remember a young boy by a stream: such large beautiful eyes. I remember the smell of his skewered ready-to-eat kebobs and the taste of his sticky candies. We bought luscious melons from another young boy.
By then I thought nothing of child workers. They were everywhere. Families used their young children to help with cooking, shopping, gathering wood, babysitting, tending ailing grandparents. Children would feed the donkey or the chickens, herd the sheep, milk the cow, plant and harvest, and earn money in any way possible.
Businesses in Kabul routinely used young boys for errands and pouring tea. Fruit and vegetable vendors, butchers, tailors, kebob stands, bakeries all had boys as young as nine working with them full time, boys who were happy to be earning some money, perhaps learning a trade, or making lifelong contacts.
Afghanistan has been literally reduced to dust many times over. According to military historian Stephen Tanner, “In 1221 [many sources say 1219], the Mongol army descended on Afghanistan like a force of nature, or in [Louis] Dupree’s words, ‘the atom bomb of its day.’ Many communities in Afghanistan never regained their former stature. . . . Towns and farms based on centuries-old cultivation techniques lay naked in the path of the Mongol hordes.”
The people of Herat rebelled and murdered their Mongol governor. Mongol forces launched a siege against the city.
“Herat held out for six months,” Tanner continues, “but in the end its walls were breached and the people were lined up for massacre—a process that took seven days. Afterward a Mongol detachment raced back to surprise anyone who had emerged from hiding. It found two thousand more victims to add to the stupefying piles of bodies. Balkh, too, rebelled. . . . This time the massacre was so complete that a Chinese visitor who passed by the city’s ruins a few years later could only hear the sounds of dogs barking.”
As Rhea Talley Stewart describes it, the Mongols destroyed, “along with the people, the irrigation systems they had created. . . . Irrigation means life. . . . It turned [to] salt. Of all the places destroyed . . . only Herat, because it is in a fertile valley, really rebuilt itself.”
On the subject of what has been lost, in Land of the High Flags, Rosanne Klass writes, “Ghazni is now little more than a village, which was once a gorgeous court. Balkh, the Mother of Cities, is a heap of rubble. . . . The scholars are gone, the poets, the heroes, the kings were gone, the land was stripped of life, the fields were ruined and barren.”
As for the gardens and villas of Paghman, now they too are no more—they are gone, all gone. In my lifetime the Soviets reduced them to dust, debris. Now Old Paghman exists only in old photographs and in living memory.
Last night I viewed a series of old photos online taken in Paghman. I became quite melancholy. One of the early photos is in black and white and is labeled Royal Hunting Party. The royal residence may be seen both in sepia and in black and white. One photo is of Emir (King) Amanullah mounted on a camel. There are photos of men having a meeting “between the trees” (there is no other way to describe it). There they sit, on chairs, with small tables nearby, Russian style perhaps, framed—no, hidden—by the great trees that surround them.
Our visit to Paghman is one of my happiest days in Afghanistan.
But such days are too few. Winter is here early. Already the nights are cold. I do not understand how Afghans without indoor heating can endure the howling blizzards, shoulder-high snowdrifts, the icy frozen winters—yet they do. They are made of sturdy stock. They are as implacable as Nature here. Otherwise they could not survive.
Seven
Escape
I am determined to escape. But how? At home I am watched constantly. I am not allowed out by myself. When we go out, Abdul-Kareem stands right next to me and either drives the conversation or monitors what I say. So far I have not socialized with a single other American.
I am absolutely alone, without a single sympathetic ally or confidante. I have no money. The phone barely works—but who would I call?
I have already gone secretly to the American embassy.
I return a second time. A nice man tells me that he cannot help me because I am now an Afghan citizen and the wife of an Afghan citizen. He asks one of the Marine guards to escort me home. I did not understand that by marrying Abdul-Kareem, I was divorcing my country and revoking my citizenship. I am still flabbergasted that the embassy refused to aid an American.
Even if I could make a run for the airport, I have no passport and no way of paying for my seat. Perhaps I could convince an American or British pilot to take me anyway, but how would I know when a foreign flight would be waiting on the tarmac—and how would I get past the Afghan bureaucrats?
I am heartsick and frightened and ca
n trust no one, not even myself. After all I am the fool who came here of her own free will, the naive dreamer who believed that she could have a grand, fairy-tale-like adventure without paying some terrible, unknown price. I—the bookish one, the sexy one—believed that being a woman would protect me. Well, I learned a valuable lesson: Quite the opposite is true.
Abdul-Kareem and his family can keep me locked up forever. They can do whatever it takes to break my spirit, place me under house arrest until I turn pliant, grateful for any social life at all. If I misbehave—I will be back in solitary. And I am hungry all the time. Since no one cares about this but me, I fear that I will grow too weak to make an escape.
While I am angry at myself, I am also angry at Abdul-Kareem. He pretended he was someone he is not, and lured me here under false pretenses.
I constantly think to myself: Can I simply walk out of Kabul along with the nomads? How long would I last on foot on the muddy or dusty roads and mountain rocks? Can I trust them not to return me for money and not marry me off to one of their own?
Can I turn to one of the foreign wives to help me obtain a fake foreign passport? Will she also lend me the money for a ticket and trust that I’d repay her?
Or should I write to my parents, have them wire the money to whomever my foreign benefactor turns out to be, and proceed from there?
Should I approach my father-in-law? He has remained aloof but has been courtly, gentlemanly, friendly toward me. As a matter of fact I have never seen him treat any adult woman unkindly.
He does not speak to Bebegul; true, he has three wives; true, his children all cringe as they bow and kiss his hand each time they see him; true, his young daughter is only a servant to him—yet his manner is dignified, benevolent, authoritative, and always slightly amused.
I decide to approach a foreign wife who is married to an Afghan. No foreign diplomat will allow his wife to get involved, lest it compromise his career and his country’s relationship to Afghanistan.
An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir Page 12