Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  Meetra’s high, proud profile, against the light of the opposite window, makes a bold steady shape as the horizon adjusts against the silver sky.

  And then – now – we are down on the earth and slowing and the tail of the plane next to us says Ariana, the name of the airline that flew bin Laden and his operatives around during the Taliban’s time in power. For a moment I have a queasy little feeling that perhaps the chap I chatted with in Dubai airport, who asked me if I was Iranian, is on his mobile right now, telling them that a plump, ripe little Australian bourgeois is on her way into the country as he speaks. Meetra warned me to be careful and told me he was lying when he said he was Saudi Arabian. ‘He look like Jew, no? Likely from Paktika. Come to Kabul to sell things and too mean to pay money to stay in hotel, so he sleeps over in the airport.’

  I find myself saying to her now, ‘I didn’t think that man at the airport looked Jewish at all. I don’t think you can look Jewish really. I thought that you were Jewish for a long time. I thought you were a Polish Jew.’ I hope she catches my indignation, but everything is happening too quickly now and I’m talking about something that happened two hours ago as she pushes me towards the customs man, who flicks me through after a cursory glance. I don’t even rank an explosives check, when I usually do at Australian airports (maybe because I look as guilty as I feel).

  The Dari language squishes around me on sneakers as people juggle their hand luggage while holding their chadors between their teeth to stop them falling off. I’ve been told off for saying ‘hijab’ – it’s ‘chador’ in Afghanistan. Whatever they’re called they’re a bloody nuisance and mine keeps slipping down or flopping over my eyes.

  I arrive some distance ahead of Meetra in the clearance hall and take a seat – on principle – opposite the most exotic-looking people I can see, a kind of a pasha in a black turban and his fourteen wives – only there appear to be four wives and another man, an old one with a grizzled beard, someone I have picked as the family tutor, who is in humbler garb, white with a sandy waistcoat and a tweed jacket, who is chasing around after four young boys and a girl. The ‘wives’, if such they be, are head to toe in black, with veils across and one of them, the youngest, maybe seventeen, is sipping a can of Coke from under hers. Another, maybe twenty, is wearing huge, expensive sunglasses and is having difficulty sitting them on her veiled nose. Their clothes fall like proper wool crepe you might have seen for sale tumbling from an upright bolt on a pedestal in the days when women in Australia made their own evening clothes. One of the veils is fringed in fine gold braid and another in the kind of lace my aunt used for her low-slung necklines. These are not inexpensive garments. There is a fine gold bracelet on one of the wrists. All four women could be the mothers of the children.

  Meetra is a while catching up with me and, just as I see her coming, a man beckons her back from the gate beside the passenger race. ‘He wants your passport,’ she says to me, coming over. ‘Something they forgot to check.’ So I hand her my passport, fearing that maybe she was right and the bloke I spoke to in Dubai was a plant…

  But I’ve told myself not to be neurotic. And I will not be neurotic. I will sit here and watch the pasha and his family as if I shared his culture. What would it be like? I wouldn’t want to sleep with him – he looks as if he’s been perfumed and then dressed by an attendant in a Turkish bath – he’s far too grand for me – you know from experience that men can’t be as grand as he’s pretending to be, that it’s all posturing, this strolling around the premises with a silver shoehorn in his hand. Remarkable how a man can imagine that a simple silver shoehorn can grant him distinction. It’s more or less the way he holds it, lassoed to his wrist by a leather thong, upward in his palm, like a fop would hold a handkerchief. And the children: the eldest is a boy of about ten, who seems to be in charge of the youngest two, also boys, about five years and a toddler. The girl is the middle child, about seven. Her head is uncovered; she is wearing a plain green smock over leggings and she is following the boys around as they dash from place to place. The eldest boy will plead with the tutor and the youngest two will dash off, the second boy, eight or nine, sticks with the tutor while the eldest has to round the youngest up and the girl follows him, lamely, as if she’s been told that she should stick with her eldest brother at all costs. I’d like to live with this family for half a day – in an exalted position, of course, some kind of senior woman, maybe a begum, who is deferred to – just to see how it works. But I don’t think any woman would be deferred to. They’d all be hidden away, paraded on occasions, like Stella showing Audra the hallmarks on the silverware. No, however hard I try, I could not imagine myself as part of this man’s retinue or even culture. I’m not. I don’t belong. And that’s the point. It’s why I can’t see these people as anything other than exotic, belonging to Delacroix and Ingres and Bunny, but not to me. To me, they’re Chador Barbies and the pasha’s an over-aged boy who collects dolls.

  Then Meetra is beside me. ‘Hoh!’

  ‘Hoh, yourself. What was all that about?’

  ‘Aw, just forgot to do something. Why you sit here?’

  ‘Just to look at that man and his wives.’

  ‘Hoh! Hazara, rich one!’

  ‘I didn’t think they had any rich ones? We only ever hear about the poor asylum seekers.’

  ‘Hoh! Lot of rich Hazara in Kabul. Carpets, TV – even airline belong to them.’

  I’m formulating a castigation for racism, but… CRACK!

  Oh no!

  Oh what now?

  Dive under seats, what?

  No.

  Not dive under seats.

  Rain is pouring on the roof of the terminal and lightning flashing outside. Right when I was thinking…What was I thinking? We’re off, it seems. Yes, off. Yes, the luggage is out to be collected. Meetra is charging towards…where? I’ve no idea where she’s going, but that I must follow her is obvious. And suddenly we’re in a room with an ancient luggage race that’s beginning to creak into action.

  ‘Hoh!’ goes Meetra and pushes her way through a thick gaggle of touting men in shalwar kameez who are sidling up and offering to collect stuff. ‘Bah!’ And we’re beside the race, which is moving now and every so often has a large puddle on it…I suppose it comes from the cloud break but we’re indoors and it’s stopped raining now and there are an awful lot of puddles. The first bag appears and a young tout tries to push in, in front of Meetra. ‘Hoh!’ she goes, prods the chap fiercely in the arm and makes him step back – and what do you know, he’s the pasha’s tout. Meetra is very quick to spot it and gives the pasha a piece of her mind. Just as I am thinking we could be murdered here, the pasha flips his shoehorn, puts it in his pocket and resumes his place in the queue. The wives are sitting off to one side, in a row, conspicuous in their black among the white of those who’ve been on the Hajj to Jeddah. ‘No, not Jeddah,’ Meetra tells me. ‘They have been to Mecca. Only come back through Jeddah.’ Suitcases start to come, wrapped in cling wrap. Acres and acres of cling wrap, just the handles sticking out for grabbing and then, my God, plastic jerry cans, plastered all over with yellow stickers. ‘What are they?’ I ask as hands reach in and grab and grab and grab again. ‘Water,’ says Meetra.

  ‘So that’s what’s leaving the puddles. Why?’

  ‘One of the prophet’s wives, her son gets thirsty. She runs all over Mecca looking for water. The son keeps getting thirstier. She doesn’t find water. God sends his angel, the angel strikes the ground, the water flows. It still flows. Miracle.’

  ‘God! Holy water! The last time I saw holy water was when the neighbours’ aunty brought home five ml of it from Lourdes. My sister dared me to drink some.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I sneaked a sip. Didn’t make any difference. This lot must bathe in it!’

  ‘They do. They wash their head, their face, their feet, everything. They put it on sick people. Here it comes!’ Meetra’s thumbs start to fidget with anticipation. Our baggage at last. We
haul, we grab, we fend off the touts from the trolleys and we barge for the exit. For a woman of her age, Meetra zips along like a skateboarder.

  Portraits of Ahmad Shah Massoud beam down on us, reminding me that he is the poster boy around here. I hadn’t realised that he would occupy such a prominent position in Kabul but I do remember Eli saying that his following was very strong in the north of Afghanistan. Oh, I wish Eli would turn up…

  Here.

  Now.

  And Be With Me.

  ‘Here’ the word I have loved ever since Arnie left me, the word that means ‘beside me’. I’ve been waiting my whole life for people who have delayed their coming – my mother’s dead brothers, my father, my lover, my sister, my son…But it’s hurry on, quickly, what seems like miles and miles of it, past the domestic terminal, through milling soldiers, slung around with guns. How silly and small I seem to be! A mother, looking for her son in hideously stricken Afghanistan!

  And then there are gay umbrellas, green and white and advertising something – God knows what, May His Name Be Praised and men with more guns and walkie-talkies and people forging this way and that and Meetra, like greased lightning into every gap until I’m reminded of getting out of Flemington Racecourse after the Melbourne Cup: the running for the cars! The honking of the horns! The grass and the dirt tracks underfoot. And being charged on all sides by men – wanting to get through the turnstiles first at Flemington but here wanting to take us in their taxis for a fee! Till at last, we seem to be getting near the exit…I suppose it is the exit, barbed wire, a kind of pillbox and some sort of missile, pointed at the air, and Meetra has stopped. Phew! She’s stopped. She’s haggling with a bloke beside a taxi cab.

  We have the maximum amount of luggage. My case is stuffed with kids’ shoes, collected from friends, and clothing of many origins. In my backpack, some changes of underwear, one change of clothes, my medication and a comb. In Australia a taxi driver would have demanded a forklift, but there was Mick to drive us to the airport. Dear Mick, without whose help, none…

  We have stuffed what we can into the boot and what we can’t in beside us; we have slammed the doors and right away there is another cloudburst, a serious one this time to add to the torrents of Zamzam water (for I believe that’s what the holy water is called) that came in with us on the plane. The taxi driver starts up. Forwards he goes. Into a gap. No. Backwards he goes because a little policeman in a drenched uniform has held up a thing the size of a child’s ping-pong bat with a little red circle on it. God what a crush! And while we’re in it, I notice that the entire inside of this cab is carpeted, seats, floors, dashboard, in rather nice Persian-looking carpets. ‘No. Afghan,’ says Meetra. And now I remember her bit of racial prejudice against Hazaras in the airport. ‘Oh, sold to him by a rich Hazara, no doubt!’

  ‘Bah!’ she goes. ‘I stand for ALL Afghans. Hazara, Paktia, Paktika, Kuchi, I don’t care. You know what’s happening here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Karzai is travelling somewhere. So everybody is carrying guns and walkie-talkie. So important. Ordinary people, they not so important. They can wait.’

  ‘Don’t you like Karzai?’

  ‘Better than Taliban.’

  ‘Is he Hazara?’

  ‘Pashtun. I’m for everybody, Ms Coretti. Doesn’t matter. Some people drive me crazy. Selfish. Stupid. Corrupt. Want everything while others have nothing.’

  And back we go, honking. Into an impossibly small space. If I tried to get into a space like that – then, across our bows… I shield my eyes but it’s our turn to honk. And we go forwards an inch. It’s like square dancing in primary school. ‘Allemande left with your left hand and dosey doe and a half sashay.’ It almost has a rhythm and I’m almost clicking my fingers by the time we reach the gate and pass under the nuclear warhead pointed at the sky. (Who knows if it’s a nuclear warhead?) Then, whoosh! It’s off down a main street like a nuclear warhead ourselves, feeling on the wrong side of the road but I suppose it’s right and the wipers clicking. Raindrops to the left and raindrops to the right and high street walls on either side. And metres and metres and metres of razor wire strewn along the tops of them.

  Stop. First blue burqa; hand at the window, up for a tip, but it’s windows shut and on we plough now, zip, zip, zip. Zamzam. God, I wonder why we learned square dancing at primary school. And the polka ‘with Anatol and Olga, slim’: I thought it was her surname, like Sir William Slim. Impossibly drenched people nuzzling up to walls and gates…Gates everywhere, some of them elaborate, most double, most shabby, mudbrick walls and the occasional tree poking budding branches through the razors. Hard to think of an enemy getting this far into the heart of a major city…Until the view is being steamed out by our breath.

  ‘Ministry of Public Health,’ goes Meetra, just as I think I’m going to suffocate and the window goes down and the diesel fumes come in and I realise she’s been pointing out landmarks to me. Another policeman, this time in a yellow cape, holding up his little red lollipop on a stick as we pass the Children’s Hospital and then a maimed man, up near the window, and there’s the Emergency Hospital, run by the Italians…and more razor wire. And it occurs to me that we are very high up and maybe I’m feeling the altitude. Because I feel quite mad.

  And I begin to wonder what I’m doing here. Why would I find Eli here? How will I find Eli, since Meetra has no better idea of where to find him than I do?

  No, she has no better idea than I have, but she’s braver than I am, she grabs hold of life before it flips away from her. She holds on.

  We sprayed expensive perfumes onto cards in Dubai and now they have all mingled and are making my bedroom, right up the top of this high square house, smell of mothers’ armpits. Lingering armpits under broken old maternal arms are what I hold on to, while Meetra holds on to hope.

  We have swapped situations, Meetra and I, my hometown for hers. The suburb of her childhood, once salubrious, is now war-ravaged, broken worse than any aged arm – and it has been overrun. As we drove in here yesterday afternoon, its roads were chock-a-block with cars and every nook and cranny was stuffed with people trying to escape the rain. So many nooks and crannies! I think they are meant to be shopfronts, barely as wide as an eye.

  Kabul still has some houses like Meetra’s: big and square and plain and built sometime ago, but the hectic palaces of the newly returned rich are rising like sponge cakes amid the mud pies of the poor, forcing poverty further and further up the mountainous hillsides that ring the city. History has stamped with a pitted foot over what used to be.

  The house belonged to Meetra’s parents. Her father was a Tajik named after Babur, the Moghul emperor who thought the gardens of Kabul were as close to Paradise as earth allowed. The same Babur repudiated vows of abstinence rather than the sins of inebriation and liked to practise his sexual proclivities with the harem out-of-doors, rounding off with a bout of sunstroke – or so says Wikipedia, which I’ve just been searching at Meetra’s desk in her office, where I am now. Yes, even this city of poppy palaces, open drains, SUVs and donkey carts is on the World Wide Web – although it has no postal service in the postman sense of the word.

  I feel like a high commissioner at Meetra’s grand desk with the Australian and the Afghan flags side by side. I have to say that the Australian flag was made in China and has a wooden stick to hold it up, whereas the Afghan flag is made locally of silk; it has a fringe and its pedestal is a fine thing to behold, being in the rococo plastic taste of the Middle East. The house, with no number, is down a very potholed side street with no name. It occupies a site equivalent to a ‘double-fronted Californian bungalow with off-street parking’ in suburban Melbourne, but this house is in the form of a compound. It has the usual high wall on the street side and a distinctive entry gate – but not so distinctive as to be unmistakable, and this has to be a good thing in a city where people are targeted once they are known.

  Babur hung on in Kabul long after the rest of his family had fled –
until every time he went out to the mosque or to shop, another article would disappear – a carpet, his refrigerator, his television, his radio…he was not a man to lock up, believing, in the face of contrary evidence, that his compatriots were honest. The Russians had just been driven out and everything was being looted amid the shelling of the city by the brawling warlords. There were thieves everywhere but Babur didn’t want to recognise it. Once he caught a man coming out of his gate with a full sack. ‘Hey, what you got in there?’ he asked. ‘Oh nothing, brother, just some food for mujahedeen.’ Babur pointed out that the mujahedeen were hiding out in the mountains in Panjshir. ‘Give me my food back. I want to live,’ he said. But the man just laughed and went away, so Babur decided to go to Paris to his oldest son.

  He found that he liked Paris, where he’d never been before. He developed a taste for French cuisine and breathed his last in the comfort of a hospital in a banlieue, where big houses and extended families were definitely not the norm and there was peace and quiet and no Sultana to hector him.

  Meetra’s employees live in a bungalow abutting the road wall. There are four or five dapper young men and an older man, of whom they make fun, who is the guard. Between the bungalow and the main house is a very green lawn. Without being prompted, Meetra’s deputy, Edris, the dapperest of the young men, told me –just after I stepped out of the car into a lull in the rainstorm yesterday – that the grass comes from the steppes and stays green even under snow. It seemed an odd greeting but Edris is obviously proud of the courtyard. Since Meetra was last here, he has planted it with two apple trees, a pear, a cherry and a mulberry. He’s placed them less than three metres apart in a squarish kind of arrangement so that if they all survive there’ll be an arboreal punch-up for room to hang out the fruit.