An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

  I send word through a servant that I want to see Ismail Mohammed. He comes almost immediately. Once the household knows that we are in my bedroom together, Bebegul and her servants barge right in. Someone sends for Abdul-Kareem.

  It is time for the afternoon prayer. Ismail Mohammed prostrates himself on the bedroom floor; afterward he tells me that he has prayed to Allah for my recovery. Then he asks the servants, Fawziya, and Bebegul to leave. He totally surprises me when he takes out a hidden cup of milk custard and proceeds to tenderly spoon-feed me.

  I do not even have to raise the issue. He knows exactly why I’ve asked for him. Softly he opens the conversation.

  “I know about your little plan with the German woman. I think it will be best if you leave with our approval on an Afghan passport, which I have obtained for you. You have been granted a six-month visa for reasons of health.”

  And he gave it to me on the spot: passport #17384. I have it still. The Kingdom of Afghanistan passport has retained its bright orange color, just as the nargileh, the “hubble-bubble,” or water pipe, that I brought out with me has retained its turquoise glaze.

  Ismail Mohammed also handed me a plane ticket. “We will see you off. It is better this way.”

  Abdul-Kareem curses me. Then he orders me to stay—after which he makes wild operatic promises: We will live alone. We will move right into the only hotel in town. He will allow me to get a job—and if I want to live in the country, he will become a farmer and work from dawn to dusk to support us.

  My mind is made up. I want to live. I want no more of his promises and lies. I want my own life back.

  By now Kabul is buried in snow. I fall asleep every night with my feet under the sandali—a low bench covered by a thick blanket under which a brazier keeps you warm, often all night.

  I have missed another period. I will take any flight out, going anywhere.

  The next plane out is an Aeroflot—the Russian airline which is returning Russian engineers from Cairo to Moscow with a stop in Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek Republic.

  I weigh about ninety-five pounds and have to hide my jaundiced eyes with dark glasses. As weak as I am, I am excited about seeing Moscow. I have only one hundred dollars with me. I am obviously expected to return straight home on a flight from Moscow to Copenhagen and from Copenhagen to New York City. Clearly, I am expected to return to my parents who are, in turn, expected to support me.

  Abdul-Kareem calls me a bitch and a whore. He hits me—and then he hits me again—but I calmly continue to pack my clothes. He orders me to return. He says that he will be held accountable if I do not return; I am an Afghan citizen, traveling on an Afghan passport.

  “I demand that you return as soon as you are well. You may finish your damn last semester at college, but that’s it. You have responsibilities here.”

  For the next three years Abdul-Kareem will continue to make this demand. I do not yet understand that his government will actually hold him liable for my escape and will expect him to return my actual physical passport to the authorities.

  Afghan officials never return my American passport. I do not return my Afghan passport.

  I am sorry if Abdul-Kareem’s government held him accountable for my nonreturn—and for the nonreturn of my Afghan passport. But it was either my life or his way of life. I allowed my culture and my family to have their way, just as he allowed his culture and family to have their way. We both chose survival on our own culture’s terms rather than a tragic Romeo and Juliet ending.

  A ridiculously large crowd of relatives dutifully accompanies me to the Kabul airport. Abdul-Kareem behaves solicitously, but he is only acting. In reality he is furious. He has been defeated. He feels defeated by his father more than by me.

  The plane takes off. At first my feelings are as frozen as the temperature, as cold as the mountain air and the frozen fields of ice over which we fly.

  Then I am filled with more fierce joy than my body can contain. I feel incredibly light, I am free, I have a second chance, I am going to live, I will be able to start over.

  I get out. And I never return.

  1959–1960. And so it began, Abdul-Kareem and I are two college students, very much in love.

  1959–1960. Here is a rather romantic photo of the two of us in the American countryside.

  1959–1960. That same day, long ago.

  1961. Abdul-Kareem photographed me aboard the ship Le Flandre as we began our voyage to Europe.

  This is the Afghan passport that allowed me to reenter the United States on a six-month visa. It has retained its bright orange cover.

  Here is my Afghan passport, given to me after my American passport was taken from me. Please note: My nationality is listed here as “Afghan.”

  1961. I purchased this photo as I stood looking at this lovely little mosque, known as the Blue Mosque, on the Kabul River.

  This photo depicts musicians who were hired for a celebration in Kabul. The image was on a postcard, which caught my fancy in the bazaar. I have kept these genial gentlemen nearby ever since.

  A young Kuchi girl—clearly one who posed for the photographer. “Kuchi” means “those who move” and refers to the Afghan nomads.

  Two bare-faced Kuchi women and a girl posing on camels. Nomad women usually walk.

  Section Two

  In America

  Eight

  Home in America

  Lord God, here I am—free at last 30,000 feet above the good green earth. I am pregnant, I am ill, I have no way to support myself, but here I am: joyful and unafraid.

  In Tashkent two nurses board the plane to inoculate passengers against typhoid. When we land in Moscow, an Intourist guide escorts me to a room in a dark and shabby hotel that I share with a roommate. They give all tourists roommates. They are all probably spies.

  A Soviet agent sits in the hallway day and night. I have several books with me, including Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. I tell my roommate, who is an English-speaking Russian, to look at it while she can. She asks to keep it. I hope this does not get her into trouble.

  I visit the Kremlin, Red Square, and the surrounding area with two German architects who were also on the flight from Kabul and who are staying in the same horrible hotel. We find a restaurant and order the most delicious borsht in the world. I am too weak to visit any museums. It is cold and still snowing. The architects invite me to join them for the New Year holidays in Germany. Luckily they insist on paying for everything.

  En route to Copenhagen I talk with another German man, who tells me that he managed a hotel in Kabul. His life story spans two world wars, a youth spent in China, and a five-year stint in a Japanese prison camp. I am once again struck by what appears to be a strong German presence in Afghanistan.

  I sit at a table in the brightly lit Copenhagen airport. I drink some good coffee. I buy a white cable-knit sweater with my dwindling cash.

  Another man, a British diplomat who was also on the flight from Moscow, sits down, starts a conversation, and promptly asks me to join him for the New Year holidays.

  If you are young, female, and even mildly attractive, men are all over you.

  I have ten dollars in my pocket when the plane lands in New York. I literally kiss the ground at Idlewild, now John F. Kennedy International Airport. I call my parents and rather nonchalantly say, “Guess who is back?”

  My parents tell me to wait—they are on their way to get me. Did they think they were never going to see me again? My mother is guarded, suspicious, unusually silent. My father just hugs me. He is glad to see me. I think my mother is relieved, even overjoyed, that her prodigal daughter, her “little girl,” has been returned to her.

  I feel as though I belong nowhere. I now weigh less than one hundred pounds. And I have
to tell my parents that I am pregnant. Our family doctor tells me that nearly every organ in my body is infected and that my pregnancy should be terminated on medical grounds. I agonize over whether to have an abortion.

  Should I have this Jewish Muslim child—the tragic fruit of a love affair gone wrong? Will this child really be mine? How will I be able to raise a child on my own while I work and attend graduate school?

  Yes, this unborn child also has a father and an extended Afghan family who can help—but not if I remain in America, and I will not condemn my child to be raised without me in Afghanistan.

  In the end my body makes the decision for me. I suffer a painful miscarriage.

  I mourn my unborn child.

  Then I rush past any anguish and throw myself into my work. I have to finish my final semester of college, find a job, and apply to graduate school.

  I started reading Freud when I was fifteen years old. I loved his way of thinking. So I decide to become what I call a Viennese witch doctor, a psychoanalyst. This should allow me the ability to work at home and to write at least half of every day.

  But for now I dive back into French literature. My half-written thesis is on the French author Stendhal. As usual I find great solace in literature.

  Stendhal writes: “I do not know myself, whether I am good or bad, smart or stupid.”

  He is speaking directly to me, describing me. I no longer know who I am. I thought I was invulnerable, forever healthy. I see that I am all-too-vulnerable, and that I’ve already been touched, marked, changed.

  I also turn to my professors for advice. The eminent philosopher Dr. Heinrich Bluecher, who is married to Hannah Arendt, tells me to have an affair. My thesis adviser, the ever-wry, kind, and wise Dr. Elizabeth Stambler, simply tells me to get on with my Stendhal project.

  I try to tell some college friends what it was really like in Kabul. In response they ask me, “Aren’t you some kind of a princess now?” “You had many servants, didn’t you?” “Did you live in a palace?” “Did you meet the king?”

  They seem to think that living in purdah, in a harem, is a bit naughty, like living in a brothel. They do not want to understand anything.

  I tell people that I’ve seen women shunted to the back of the bus and forced to walk around wearing body bags. I say that I’d seen servants who were treated like slaves and that I’d lived under conditions of gender apartheid.

  No one at college seems to understand what I am talking about.

  Looking back, I realize that I was in Kabul before the struggles against Jim Crow in America and racial apartheid in South Africa got underway. How could my friends have understood? I suddenly feel much older than my peers.

  My college mates and professors make me feel a bit like Peachy Carnehan, the main character in Rudyard Kipling’s unforgettable novella, The Man Who Would Be King. Carnehan and his companion, Daniel Dravot, are “wanderers and vagabonds.” They decide to leave British India and go to Kafiristan (which is now called Nuristan) in Afghanistan to become kings. The pagan Kafiris decide that Dravot is indeed a god and declare him their king.

  The story does not end well. Ultimately the Kafiris drop Dravot from a great height and they crucify Carnehan—but because Carnehan is still alive after twenty-four hours, the Kafiris turn him loose. They give him a present: Dravot’s head, still wearing its crown. Carnehan, physically broken and half mad, flees and returns to India in tatters. He tells his story to Kipling’s narrator (a journalist and Kipling’s alter ego) and then almost immediately dies of sunstroke in an asylum.

  Reader: I do not die, nor do I go mad. But I feel as if part of me, my innocent, ignorant, trusting self, has partly died. Like poor old Peachy Carnehan, I also have a tale of Afghanistan to tell; unlike him I have no one who will listen to me.

  For now I am grateful to be home again in the land of libraries and liberty. I have been given a second chance.

  Immediately after I return, Abdul-Kareem begins a letter-writing campaign to win me back. He writes almost every week. He calls me his darling. He professes his undying love, which makes me feel monstrous because I do not want to see him or talk to him or even write to him.

  Only days after I leave, Abdul-Kareem writes to tell me that “everyone misses you a great deal. . . . It is silly to assume that you are homesick for Kabul and your husband’s shabby existence.” He continues by promising that he will buy me expensive gold and lapis lazuli jewelry.

  Does he honestly believe that jewels are more important to me than my freedom? The sweet girl he once married died in Afghanistan, and mere baubles will not persuade me to give up my reclaimed independence.

  Abdul-Kareem chides me for giving up so quickly on our marriage and tries hard to make me feel guilty for having left him. He alternates between telling me I am irresponsible and childish and insisting that I am the only one who can rescue him, who understands him, who can inspire him to do “great work.”

  His tone is ironic, sarcastic, self-pitying, pompous, and utterly heartbreaking. He is also relentless.

  In my diary I write:

  My God! Do I still love Abdul-Kareem? Is that even possible? He is the only man with whom I have ever lived. I shared part of my youth with him. I am used to his kisses. But his love and insistence that I visit Afghanistan nearly killed me. His overly solicitous letters are completely out of touch with my reality.

  In the next letter Abdul-Kareem writes that he has “paid too dear a price for this damned career. I have lost you. How can I want it now?”

  These are fine false words because Abdul-Kareem also begins to steadily boast about his upcoming trips to India, Italy, and France and about how well his first play was received in Kabul.

  He does not once ask about my college thesis.

  His campaign continues. In letter after letter Abdul-Kareem reminds me that I have a duty to our marriage and to his country. I am intended to be part of an effort to help it. He needs me—and apparently so does his country, which is still “young and growing.”

  Abdul-Kareem refers to Kabul as my “real home” and suggests that I bring my mother over for a visit when I return. Oh dear desperate madman! My mother is an Orthodox Jew. She would just as soon fly to the moon as go to Kabul.

  Rereading Abdul-Kareem’s letters fifty years later is painful, tragic, hilarious, and educational. In his next letter Abdul-Kareem writes: “You seem to have cut yourself off altogether from me, my life, and future, but I still consider you the dearest part of me, my life and my future.”

  Abdul-Kareem tells me that I have embarrassed him before his entire family. Nevertheless he denies that he wants me to return only so that he can save face. He admits that he deceived and wronged me but castigates me for refusing to forgive him.

  “If you come back, you’ll give me a new life; if you don’t, you’ll end the one I have.”

  Is he writing to me or is he writing a play?

  My first letter to Abdul-Kareem illustrates the emergence of a different sort of woman than the one who left New York, a woman I can recognize as myself.

  I shudder, and wonder at the same time, that you still cannot understand what a shock and insult, what an unbelievable horror and threat the entire marriage was to me. I was a virtual prisoner in Kabul, starving, lonely, cut off from all decent human contact, cut off from all escapes, without the possibility of any hope.

  If you cannot understand this, then rejoice! Your conflict is over, for you are a true Afghan and have returned home. My life in Kabul nearly killed me. Whether or not we loved each other, our marriage was an irresponsible mistake. How can you write to me so righteously, so indignantly that “marriage cannot be treated lightly” and that you “do not believe in divorce”?

  Well, do you believe in hitting your wife? Do you believe in . . . unwanted pregnancies? You really are a man of your country because y
ou obviously expect that I sacrifice myself—no, annihilate myself—just because I am a woman.

  He responds: “Your accusations are partly true and partly the obsessions of a troubled mind.”

  He insists, “I cannot be the artist I want to be without you by my side. Wouldn’t it be much better if we wrote about how much we miss each other, love each other, and how we are preparing for our reunion in the near future?”

  Does this man honestly believe that I would ever return to Kabul?

  My experience has rendered me quite wary about traveling to Central Asia ever again.

  In the 1970s I became friendly with a number of Muslim artists and political dissidents. One, Reza Baraheni, was the head of Students Against the Shah. Reza would describe in grisly detail how he was tortured by the Shah’s men. We were together during the first great electrical blackout in New York City, and he clutched at my hand, terrified.

  “Reza,” I said, “it’s going to be fixed. Calm down.”

  “But you don’t understand,” he said. “If I don’t call a certain number by a certain time every day, it will be assumed that I’ve been kidnapped and the wheels will start turning.”

  Years later Ayatollah Khomeini arrested my dear friend Kate Millett right after she had delivered a speech in Teheran on International Women’s Day 1980. Reza was the one who had invited her. The following year he invited me to speak in Teheran for the same occasion. He said, “Phyllis, you understand the Muslim soul. Come, be with us.”

  “Reza,” I said, “the next time I visit Teheran or Kabul it will be with the Marines and with NATO forces. Even then I might not come.”