by Gwen Florio
Twenty-Eight
Liv paced Face the Future’s sad courtyard twice daily to work off a diet of fatty lamb and the inertia as a result of being prohibited from venturing on foot beyond the compound.
“Courtyard” being a generous term for the dusty half block of pounded earth, the house at one end, the office at another, enclosed by a high stucco wall topped by glittering shards of glass. A few rosebushes withered beneath the unrelenting sun. At first, Liv had dutifully poured the dirty dishwater around their roots, but it seemed not to matter. Their leaves remained dull and brittle, their blooms wizened and short-lived, and eventually she gave up. She knew she should be thankful for the spacious quarters and the compound’s location at the far edge of Wazir Akbar Khan, an upscale neighborhood in Kabul housing the presidential palace and most of the city’s diplomatic quarters.
Still, she couldn’t help noting the peeling paint, the suffocating dust, the unreliable electricity, the poisonous water. Philadelphia’s worst neighborhoods had better conditions than Kabul’s best, she often thought, even as she berated herself for her longing for first-world creature comforts. She undressed in haste at night, and showered beneath a tepid trickle just as quickly in the morning, to avoid the sight of her pale, soft belly, her widening thighs, the hair stubbling her calves. With the constant shortage of water, and the difficulty finding razor blades, it no longer made sense to shave her legs. She thought longingly of her tub at home, of her nightly soaks, of prodding the faucet with her toe to add more steaming water as the bath cooled.
She sweated through her shalwar kameez within moments of whatever ablutions she managed. These days, she went about in sturdy cotton garb in dull hues that survived even the most determined mishandling. The richly detailed silk sets the tailor had made for her in Islamabad stayed packed away, after one came back in tatters from a local laundry. Liv thought then of the women along the trash-strewn banks of the muddy ditch that was the Kabul River, draping sodden garments across boulders and pounding them with smaller rocks, and wondered if her favorite shalwar kameez had been given that same treatment. On her better days, she was able to laugh at the memory of having once considered the use of her washer and dryer a tiresome chore.
She made a final circuit of the compound’s packed-earth courtyard, trying to banish thoughts of a time when she walked freely down a street in light summer clothing, her face exposed, welcoming a sun that warmed without searing. When velvety nights brought the soothing chirp of crickets and the gurgle of spring peepers, the occasional susurration of tires on pavement dampened by lawn sprinklers. Nightfall in Kabul was heralded by hot winds skating down off the mountains, flinging grit against the windows and distorting the rattle of the gunfire that began at dusk, even as the last wavering notes of the muezzin’s final call to prayer hung in the air.
She tried to distract herself by writing home, short, cheery emails designed to reassure her mother, whose own notes barely concealed the panic beneath her stoicism. Each time she wrote, Liv sought to recapture the airy confidence with which she had arrived in Kabul. The trick, she thought, was to give a flavor of the place without letting too much reality intrude. Too often, she failed.
Just a week earlier, she’d begun an email she would never send. “The children are mischievous, darting between cars to get to you, their fingers in your pockets before you even know they’re there. This morning, as we interviewed refugees who had returned home from Pakistan, we could not work until we paid a man with a Kalashnikov to keep them away from us. Imagine, pointing a semiautomatic weapon at a group of eight-year-olds.” She paused, thinking that the sentence did not do justice to the surging mass of scab-faced children, their voracious cries, the way they clawed and fought to push closer to Liv and Farida. The man they’d hired waved the bayoneted gun at them, but they held their ground.
“We can’t work like this. Let’s go,” Liv had said.
“We can’t leave,” Farida protested. “They know us now. They’ll remember that they could make us leave. It will be even worse next time.”
“There won’t be a next time.” The children’s jeers echoed as they drove away. Farida pressed herself against the car door, as far away from Liv as possible. They traveled some blocks in this fashion, away from the refugee settlement and back among bombed-out, broken shells of buildings.
“Please,” Liv tried. “Why are you so upset?”
Two more blocks rolled past. Liv mentally noted the booksellers in their stalls, the occasional flicker of a black-and-white television in a shopwindow, and reminded herself that these things represented progress. Liv really didn’t expect an answer from Farida, so was startled when she lifted her burqa away from her face so that Liv could see the anger in her eyes.
“You just walked away.”
“You saw what it was like. We were never going to get through that crowd to talk to the mothers. We could accomplish nothing there.”
“That’s not why. It’s because you’re afraid.”
“I think it’s wise to be at least a little afraid, don’t you? If we are cautious, nothing bad will happen.”
“Nothing bad will happen to you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bad things will continue to happen to other people, just as they have always happened here.” Farida’s accent became even more clipped and British as her anger swelled. “But they can’t leave. All those women you talked to? Whose stories you took down so importantly in your notebook and then put into your reports? Do you think those reports will change anything for them?”
“Not for them, maybe. But perhaps for other women in their situation.”
“No. I am talking about these women, the very ones with whom we speak. The widows. We draw attention to them. Their neighbors see them talking to a foreigner. In a place like those refugee camps, that puts them above everyone else. People will assume we gave them money. If only they could get some of that money for themselves! What do you think happens to those women after we leave? Their houses, such as they are, are torn apart. And that’s the good scenario. Men see us visiting without a male escort. Maybe they think us prostitutes. And if these women consort with us, what does that make them?”
“Stop! So many of those women are widows.”
“Even better. Then it’s not like defiling a virgin, or dishonoring a man’s wife. And if a bad thing happens to them—if they are robbed, or worse—they can’t leave. They have to stay, living among the people who did those things to them and will do to them again. You’ll leave here someday. But they’ll never escape.”
“We will stay, too.” Liv lifted her chin, mentally thrusting aside her own secret, growing desire to go home, preferably on the next plane. “Our contract with the NGO is for two years. We will honor it.”
“Then the problem will continue. Because they know nothing of NGOs. The term is meaningless to them. All they know is foreigner, and foreigner means money. Always.”
Liv’s face grew hot. She thought of the way the children tore at one another over the pieces of candy she had foolishly handed out during her early visits to the refugees. They drew blood, scrabbling for stale gumdrops that left only a fleeting sensation of sweetness on the tongue. But it was a treat more exotic than they had ever known, and they were willing to gouge and punch and throw the smallest aside to get at it. Liv imagined adults doing the same thing to the exhausted, sagging widows she’d interviewed.
“Then why did you let me talk to them, if it was going to cause trouble for them later?” Liv had little time for her own accusation. Face the Future’s compound loomed at the end of the street.
“Because I am no better than you,” Farida said. She said something to the driver, and the car pulled to the curb and waited as she spoke. “I, too, was curious about them. They are my husband’s people. I didn’t realize, until recently, the danger we’ve put them in. I’m as much to blame as you. But I can’t leave, either. I have to stay and live with the problems I’ve caused.”
“That will be fine. I’ll explain to Martin. As to the other— Oh, Farida. You’ll leave, too. Surely, with all the issues here—the opium, the land mines, the—”
“The jihad.” Farida spoke so quietly that Liv had to lean forward to catch the word.
She started to repeat it, but Farida put out a hand to stop her.
“What do you mean?”
“Surely you have noticed the . . . incidents. They will only increase. You remind me of my sister. You value safety above everything. I will stay here. She will remain in Islamabad. You will go back to Amrika. Like the Russians before you, like the British before them.”
She reached across Liv to open the door, giving her no choice but to leave the cab, Farida sliding out behind her, joining her waiting husband and walking away, leaving Liv standing at the gate, cold despite the sun, unable to forget what she’d glimpsed before the blue cloth fell across Farida’s face—a hint of the same smile that, far more openly, flashed across the face of the driver.
* * *
None of this, of course, went in Liv’s missives home. Moments after writing about the troublesome children, she erased her initial sentences and began anew, mindful of the ease and confidence she strove to project.
“You should see the boys with their pots of incense,” she typed. “They swing tin cans on the end of sticks. Fragrant herbs burn inside the cans. For a single bill—I can never remember how much afghanis are worth, but it takes nearly a brick of them just to make one dollar—they’ll waft the smoke over you and thus ward away evil.”
She sent that note without adding just how often she furtively summoned such boys. It would not do for her mother, or for anyone, to realize that her existence had become so improbable as to make the use of evil-banishing smoke seem reasonable. She was sure the boys laughed at her. The longer she and Martin remained in Afghanistan, the more she was sure everyone there was laughing at them. Even the war widows, who keened pitifully outside the chaikhanas, their dirt-stiffened burqas thrown back to reveal seamed cheeks caved in over missing teeth, turned loud and insolent if those dining in the teahouses refused to give them money.
Nor did she mention that she and Martin no longer went to the chaikhanas but limited themselves to the few restaurants in town catering to foreigners. Other outings, even more rare, took place within the gated, heavily guarded compounds of various aid organizations, or in the towering concrete mass of the Intercontinental Hotel, on a hill overlooking the city. There, a broken elevator required her to switch on her headlamp—giving silent thanks to Kirstie Davidson, martinet of that long-ago training, for her foresight—for the walk up several flights of a pitch-black stairwell. Still, the journalists who often threw the parties felt the additional safety of the upper floors was worth the inconvenience. A few weeks earlier, a low-aimed rocket had torn away a balcony and most of a corner room at the Intercontinental. The room, like much of the hotel, had been empty.
“But why dwell on all of that?” asked their host one night, an agreeable Swiss television reporter, who thrust cold beers into their hands as they arrived, compliments of the Australians from down the hall. One thing Afghanistan had taught Liv: Finding booze was only as problematic as finding the resident Australians. “Drink up. There’s plenty where that came from. You should see their room. It’s a regular pub.”
Liv wondered why she and Martin were there. The parties they had attended in Islamabad had included a few journalists, but they were usually longtime foreign correspondents, adept at mingling with the embassy staffers and corporate executives. Martin had cautioned her to steer clear of them. This new fascination with journalists, most of them freelancers and new to Central Asia, baffled her. On this night, he left Liv—one of only three women at the party—alone almost immediately and huddled across the room with two young Italian reporters, their jeans low on slim hips, effortlessly handsome in the way of Italians, their looks enhanced by the same beards that looked so scruffy on Americans.
Liv sipped her beer and concentrated on the conversation among the others but found herself unable to follow the intricacies of the usual who-was-sleeping-with-whom NGO gossip, or the journalists’ fast-paced chatter about which particular warlord seemed ascendant. Both groups traded news of the most recent foreign casualties: the two aid workers in Mazar-i-Sharif; the ISAF contingent that hit one of the few effectively constructed roadside bombs; the reporter shot on the street in Kandahar, not a single witness among the dozens of people on that same street.
With each telling, people focused on the fatal errors. The reporter was walking alone. The aid workers had visited rival factions in succession. Members of the second group had assumed they were spies, so caught them and slit their throats, tossing their bodies outside the compound of the warlord who led the first faction. As for the soldiers, well, everyone knew ISAF was a constant target.
“So if we don’t walk alone, if we don’t visit different factions, if we’re not members of ISAF, then we’re safe, right?” Liv said into a lull. There was a ripple of nervous laughter, then one of the Australians raised his beer. “Right! If we don’t join ISAF, we’re safe.”
Someone turned up the volume on a boom box that a TV reporter must have brought into the country in one of the big equipment crates that now served as benches lining the room. Through the hubbub, Liv recognized Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Perfect. She wandered away from the others and tucked herself into a corner, behind a stack of sound equipment. Cords snaked across the room to a generator on the balcony, awaiting the inevitable power outage. She heard a little scream and looked up to see one of the women mock-slapping a German aid worker. He laughed and pulled back, but when she turned away, he put his arm back around her and cupped her breast. This time, she just shrugged his hand aside, smiling.
The Italian reporters fidgeted, glancing toward the women, as Martin’s questions persisted. “Better watch out, boys,” Liv said. “The Germans are marching on your territory.”
“How’s that?” It was the Australian who’d made the ISAF crack. He stood before her, blocking any escape from her cubbyhole, holding out another beer.
Liv shook her head. “I’d better not. I’m not used to drinking anymore. I’ve only had one, and already I’m talking to myself.”
He was a few years older than the others in the room, hair cut short, neat beard tinged gray. His denim shirt, while faded, looked freshly laundered and pressed, as were the quick-dry cargo pants that all the reporters wore. Liv looked him up and down and wondered how to make him go away. “You’re very clean. That’s quite a trick, in Kabul. What are you, a hotel reporter?”
It was the derogatory term for reporters who stayed in the luxury hotels inhabited by foreigners in third-world countries, doing most of their work by telephone, or from interviews in the lobby or restaurant. Well, the Intercontinental wasn’t lavish—Liv had noticed the buckets of water beside the toilet, a sign of problematic plumbing—but it was Kabul’s best. The man’s raised brow slid back into place. His eyes were kind. “I’m sorry,” Liv said. “That was rude. I’d like to blame it on the beer, but I don’t think you’d buy that.”
“I don’t.” He studied her so openly that Liv began to feel uncomfortable. In contrast to the increasing hilarity filling the rest of the room, his manner was markedly contained. Maybe it was because he didn’t fidget. Most people spooked easy after a while in Kabul, she’d noticed.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
She chose to misunderstand. “Only about an hour.” She took the beer from him and held its cool metal skin against her forehead.
He pried the can from her hand, popped the top, and gave it back to her.
“It works better if you drink it. How long have you been in Kabul? I’m Howard, by the way.”
“Liv.” She took a swallow of beer, savoring its cool bitterness, a change from the tepid, sugary Mirinda orangeades that inevitably appeared with her meals. “Just since April.”
“Then you should know by now that very small things matter a great deal. Cleanliness, for instance. Neatness.” He held out his arm, the motion forcing her to look at the knife crease along the sleeve. His cuffs were tightly rolled past his elbows, revealing muscled arms. His bulk was of the sturdy variety. She sneaked a look at Martin, at the sweaty blotch on his shirt that accentuated the slack paunch above his belt. “Beer matters, too. Especially cold.”
“I noticed.” Liv dragged her attention back to him. “How did you manage? I know for a fact that there’s not a single cube of ice in Kabul, let alone a whole bag of the stuff.”
His smile was so brief that Liv barely caught a glimpse of a broken front tooth. “When one has a generator and a refrigerator, then there is ice.”
“A refrigerator!” Liv tried to remember the last time she’d seen one.
“Just a small one. You’ve got to get to Tajikistan some weekend. Those old Soviet republics are full of stuff from the black-market days. Of course, the place you really want to go is Dubai. It’s just like shopping at home, only for twice the price. But stuff that good is wasted here. Go to Dushanbe in Tajikistan, get yourself a fridge, and leave it with your staff when you go home.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since October, back when you Yanks started bombing the place further into the Stone Age than it already was.”
“But after September eleventh . . .” Liv stopped. She’d had this discussion too many times to want to hear the inevitable lecture about how the Taliban hadn’t bombed the World Trade Center.
Howard gave an approving nod, the sort bestowed by a teacher upon a student who’d finally worked out the answer to a seemingly insoluble problem. He offered a bit of advice as her reward. “I leave every few weeks. You should, too. Don’t think you’re going to get used to it here. You won’t. You just have to find ways to make it bearable.”