A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  ‘Hello. I’m Peter.’ He stood and offered his hand as I walked up the steps.

  ‘Hello, I’m Sally.’

  ‘I saw you this morning.’

  ‘Were you off to play tennis?’

  ‘Yes. I play at the courts at the German Club.’

  ‘Really? Are there many tennis players in Kabul?’

  ‘Fridays yes but not so much on weekdays. This morning I played the tennis coach. His name is Ali and –’ he smiled the genuine smile of someone engaged by all he saw – ‘I don’t think he’s had much practice. I beat him.’

  Peter was an architect by trade and, among other things, taught a few days a week in the engineering faculty at Kabul University. He was fascinated by Kabul’s post-Taliban urban ‘planning’ and said he was keen to start a competition to name the city’s ugliest building, possibly an unfair challenge. Much of Kabul’s rebuilding was in the form of ‘poppy palaces’, block after block of enormous multi-storey mansions, as extravagant in decor as in size. With mirrored verandahs, garish cornices, giant concrete eagles soaring over roofs, they were funded by the Ghan’s skyrocketing opium production and galactic levels of corruption.

  Peter carried his small notebook everywhere he went, gathering information, sketching, writing notes. Each afternoon, he sat on the verandah and showed me pieces of his students’ work, sketches of buildings he had spotted that day, and a rough map of the city he was drawing which he hoped he would one day be able to reproduce. There were almost no decent maps of Kabul in English so few of the city’s foreigners ever really knew exactly where they were. Afghans tended not to use maps, relying on memory or, more often than not, flimsy directions in order to get where they needed to go, which made for a lot of lost drivers. I’d sent Ismail on an errand a few weeks earlier. The NGO in question had recently moved and Ismail had yet to visit the new office so I drew him a rough map. He and Qasim drove around for three quarters of an hour before he called me and told me he couldn’t find the compound. A good map, in any language, would be useful.

  I was envious of Peter’s explorations. He was fascinated by the minutiae of Afghan life, from the local kebab stand to the architecture of the nearby Haji Yaqoob mosque, one of the most famous in Kabul. There but for the grace of my job and my gender went I. The combination of UN security and Afghan male harassment had, by now, stifled my curiosity and pretty much put an end to my wanderings. But the mornings were getting cold and my thin suede jacket was no longer up to the task.

  ‘I need a winter coat,’ I lamented one Friday.

  ‘A coat? I saw a great place for Afghan coats the other day. It’s not far from here, just along this road,’ said Peter.

  ‘Afghan coats?’ I asked, my Bubbled head conjuring up hybrid images of Mongolian sheepskins and tie-dyed jackets. My antipodean genes were looking for a substantial coat for what I anticipated would be a substantial winter and it went without saying that my coat also needed to be fashionable. I had long held that living in a war zone was no excuse for dressing badly.

  ‘Very good coats. I’ll take you there tomorrow.’

  On Saturday morning, after Mohammed had served our runny omelettes, Peter and I took to the street. Walking with a man beside you, Afghan or foreigner, made life infinitely easier. Barely an eyelid was raised in my direction; it was obvious to all that I was the property of someone else, making me off-limits to even the most covert of glances.

  We walked out the Karwan Sara gate and turned left onto Ministry of Interior Road. A hundred metres from the front gate of our guesthouse and across the road from the Indian embassy was a small arcade that specialised in coats, jackets and winter vests. I had barely noticed it before now. In summertime, its entrance had been shielded by the leafy trees that lined the road outside. The trees were now bare, exposing an entrance to a warren of ateliers and artisans. Winter coats hung from every hook. The collection covered the spectrum from full-length suede with colourful embroidered motifs to thick furs, quite possibly endangered, and leather bomber jackets with shoulders so high they’d last been seen in Dynasty.

  As we walked through the dim arcade, the shopkeepers rose to greet Peter. He’d been here before.

  ‘Come, I’ll show you the place I mean,’ he said, leading me towards the rear of the building. There, hanging on a peg beside a small wooden doorway covered with a thick black curtain, I spotted a deep brown suede coat. It was calf length, delicately cut and topped with a smart fur-lined hood. Above the doorway was a small handpainted sign in English: Ali M. Famous Jan Agha – Every Kind Of Order And Excepted.

  Peter pulled the curtain aside and we stepped into a small, dark workroom. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the light – or lack of it. The interior was stuffy. The walls were lined with cuts of suede, leather and fur, each standing in neat piles a metre high or more. Along the rear wall hung coats of all shapes and sizes from a smart sheepskin vest to a coat that appeared to be made entirely from the skin of a single cow. A television, silenced by the lack of electricity, stood on a dusty shelf next to a thermos, a bowl of sugar and a set of teacups.

  In the middle of the shop stood an old man with grey hair and a short white beard. He was dressed in a thick winter shalwar kameez and tailored woollen vest. He had a large ruby ring on his right hand, which he held out, greeting us in a mixture of Dari and English, spoken softly through a grid of half-absent teeth.

  ‘You like tea?’ he asked Peter, who declined on behalf of us both.

  Another bonus in being with a man on occasions such as this was that, as a woman, I was largely ignored, leaving me to rifle through the Coatmaker’s wares while Peter folded his lengthy frame onto the cushions and talked to him about his work.

  The Coatmaker rummaged among the piles of uncut fur, through the dust of ancient toshaks, and pulled out a small folder. In the turmoil and dislocation of war, most Afghan’s life histories had been reduced to a bundle of miscellaneous papers: a fading photograph of a grandparent, an invitation to a long-ago wedding party, the title deed to a house since destroyed.

  Pictures of human beings were, of course, frowned upon by the Taliban and, like music and the sound of a woman’s heels walking along the street, were certain to fast-track their subjects to jail. As with the clandestine girls’ schools and the illicit music recordings, the photo industry went underground. Whenever the subject of the Taliban and photography came up, the IRIN lads would dive into their bags and produce a single grainy photograph of themselves in their turbans. Only one picture was ever taken, usually behind a wall or in the safety of their homes. Faheem was in his teens at the time his was taken, yet he looked like an old man; his face was smiling but his eyes were dull, staring frozen into the camera. In Mirwais’s photo, he was sitting in an office with two other men. His eyes were focused on something to the left of the camera. He looked nervous, as if any second the religious police would burst through the door and drag him off to jail.

  The Coatmaker’s faded cardboard folder was his scrap-book, each item carefully placed inside a plastic pocket. He showed us a picture of himself as a young man, a photograph of a coat he had made for a member of the Afghan royal family, recommendations in Dari from clients long gone, a certificate from an educational institution long destroyed and a handful of pictures clipped from magazines, inspiration for coat patterns past, present and, quite possibly, future. The Coatmaker had been making coats for over forty years. From the time of the king and all through the turbulent years of civil war, he had maintained a craft handed down to him by his father.

  There were few old people in the Ghan and even fewer old artisans. Thirty years ago, the world turned upside down and it still wasn’t upright. In the new Afghanistan, a driver was once a university lecturer, a clerk was once a pharmacist.

  I came from a generation whose clothes were manufactured in the sweatshops of Asia. I told the Coatmaker how much I liked the coat hanging in the front door.

  ‘Tashakoor.’ He nodded politely. ‘You try. Ple
ase.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, perhaps too eagerly for someone hoping for a good price.

  The coat was lined with a thick brown faux sheepskin that made it both snug and very heavy. Despite the cracks of the Coatmaker’s fading mirror, the coat looked smart, stylish and beautifully detailed.

  ‘What is the price?’ I asked, instantly committing myself to a round of intense haggling.

  The Coatmaker stroked his beard. ‘Mmm.’ He shrugged. ‘One hundred and twenty dollars.’ His English bypassed the need for the calculator.

  ‘Oh, that’s a lot,’ I frowned, though by Western standards, it was anything but. Haggling was a time-honoured way of buying anything and everything in the Ghan, from carpets and furniture to cars, coats and wives. Not to haggle was very bad form indeed, as was giving in too early. Like all things Afghan, haggling was a competition and there could only ever be one winner. In this instance, it was always going to be the Coatmaker. I had far too much respect for his skills so my efforts were, at best, half-hearted. Once we had agreed on a price that suited both of us, the deal was closed in an equally time-honoured way – over tea – before Peter and I emerged from behind the dark curtain, an hour later, back into the new Afghanistan.

  20

  Pale Rider

  It was 6 am and the sun was beginning to filter through the curtains of my room. I lay under the covers contemplating getting out of bed while I watched the condensation of my breath hit the chilly morning air. Ever since the Dyncorps bomb three months earlier, I’d been taking advantage of the lack of early morning traffic and the car now collected me at 7 am.

  With the cooler weather and the dark nights, Mohammed and Sameem slept over in the warm Karwan Sara kitchen. I’d find them in the morning, bundled together on the floor, wrapped head to toe in thick grey blankets. It was difficult to tell which was which, even more so when heads failed to emerge. Both seemed to have the same morning issues as me so I’d given up on the runny omelette and bought myself a kettle in order to expedite my coffee addiction within the warmth of my room.

  At the sound of a car engine, I grabbed my bag and walked outside where, instead of the IRIN car, I came face to face with a fully armed American Humvee. I momentarily wondered if something had gone horribly wrong during the night, though my two-way radio was silent. The Humvee was painted light brown, its name emblazoned across its rear. I was in the presence of Pale Rider.

  Just as I was about to return to my room, the IRIN car drove through the gates. Qasim, Faheem and Ismail’s mouths were agape, their necks straining for a better view as I opened the door and climbed inside.

  ‘Why are they here?’ asked Ismail, ever suspicious.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I muttered.

  ‘What is Pale Rider?’ asked Faheem.

  ‘I don’t know that either.’ I thought Faheem far too young for such detail. Any soldier, no matter his provenance, was the preferred target in a country where the list of marks was both long and distinguished. A Humvee-full sitting in the car park of my guesthouse was a cause for great concern.

  That evening, I took my place on the Karwan Sara verandah. It had been a long day and Pale Rider had receded from my mind. After eight months, the late afternoon gathering of the Karwan Sara’s residents had seen old friends leave and new arrivals join in. Most expats stayed in the Ghan for six months to a year. After Dr Martin, I was now the longest resident at the Karwan Sara and, although it seemed only a short time since my arrival, I was now up to my second generation of friends. Jennifer, Henk and Mathilde had been replaced by Peter the architect, Oliver, a reporter from Washington mentoring beginner print journalists at a start-up Afghan news agency, and Cole, an Oregon farmer and old hand at Development Inc. Cole had worked on agricultural projects in the Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa and was currently charged with the considerable task of reviving the Ghan’s dormant, if not comatose, dairy industry.

  The talk was all about Pale Rider. As we compared notes on what we’d seen, it didn’t take long to establish that one of the GI Joes had spent the night in Room 5, a few metres from where were sitting.

  ‘Why would he want to do that?’ I asked, thinking he may have been looking for a respite from the rigours of his military life. My male companions looked at me and rolled their eyes.

  ‘Well, I think they told Mohammed she was his wife,’ chuckled Cole. He had white hair, a short white beard and twinkling brown eyes.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Uzbek.’

  ‘What Uzbek?’ I had spent the day helping Mirwais edit a long and wordy interview and my brain had pretty much shut down for the day.

  ‘The one in the miniskirt. I wonder what Mohammed thought of that,’ laughed Peter.

  ‘What Uzbek in the miniskirt?’

  ‘The one in Room 5.’

  As the penny slowly began to drop, I realised that my shambolic, dysfunctional guesthouse was also being used as a bordello. The Uzbek in question had recently been spotted arriving at Kabul airport.

  All was quiet when I left the next morning; Pale Rider and its band of merry men were nowhere in sight.

  ‘What about the Americans?’ asked Ismail, whose standard format for introducing a new topic into the conversation was to begin a sentence with ‘What about …’

  ‘I don’t know,’ was as diplomatic a reply as I could muster.

  In a country where nobody talked about sex, not officially at least, how would I, a woman, ever begin to explain the presence of the Uzbek?

  I arrived home from work that evening and discovered that the Uzbek was still in residence and that Pale Rider had made a repeat appearance. Suggestions to Mujeeb, the Karwan Sara’s manager, that she be removed went unheeded.

  ‘But what can I do?’ he shrugged. ‘She is a guest of the American embassy.’

  The soldiers had told Mujeeb that Mrs Joe was in Kabul on official embassy business and that this was an embassy arrangement. They had made no secret of their weaponry as they related this fact to the somewhat bewildered and more than slightly intimidated Karwan Sara staff. While Mujeeb may not have been the most effective guesthouse manager, he knew just as well as we did that Mrs Joe’s mission was anything but diplomatic.

  Pale Rider had now appeared two nights in a row and my fellow guests and I were running short on ideas about what to do. The presence of heavily armed soldiers was bad enough but using our home as a brothel just wouldn’t do. Tempting though it was, no-one thought it wise to tell anyone beyond our walls. Seven months after the Abu Ghraib scandal, another story about American military excess would be ill-advised, tarring all foreigners with the same sordid brush.

  That night, Cole and I were sitting on the cushions of the Karwan Sara dining room, contemplating our options over a plate of chicken kebabs, when the peace was shattered by the rev of a distant engine. A set of headlights flashed across the garden and through the restaurant window. Pale Rider rolled in with the ominous aura of a bad character in a Stephen King movie. Cole and I looked at each other. Without exchanging a word, we jumped up. We had no plan but I followed him out the door and along the pathway that ran through the garden towards the car park. Others fell in behind as we passed. GI Joe jumped out the passenger door just as a small army of seven foreigners dressed in fleeces and down jackets descended on his vehicle.

  ‘Hi y’all,’ he nodded in our direction, striding into Reception. His Humvee and his gun made him oblivious to who we were and why we might be standing there. He was tall and thin, his body moved with all the awkwardness of a young boy from the prairies. He wore the standard uniform of his kind – khakis, a bulletproof vest and calf-length lace-up boots.

  In a rare moment out from the guardhouse and away from its non-stop television, Mujeeb was standing at the front desk. Taking his cue from the band of angry foreigners standing just beyond the glass, the Karwan Sara manager stood up straight and thrust out his chest. He greeted GI Joe, asked after his health and politely requested him to pay his ‘wife’s’ bill
and leave. Just as Joe was about to explain one more time in his laconic Midwestern drawl, in case Mujeeb wasn’t quite on the page, that this was ‘embassy business’, a movement beyond the glass caught his eye.

  Our small army had silently gathered around his vehicle. I ran my fingers along the front of its bonnet and, leaning against the front bumper bar, peered inside, as if into a dark tank in the depths of an aquarium. Through the gloom, a smattering of eyes stared blankly back at me. I couldn’t tell how many men were inside. There was movement in the rear and a helmeted head emerged from the roof. It was followed by a pair of khaki shoulders, a bulletproof vest and a pair of hands that wrapped themselves around the Humvee’s rooftop gun while their owner stared down at the seven people below.

  The silence was broken by an American accent. ‘Smile … and make sure you say cheese!’

  All eyes turned to Cole, who was standing a short distance from the Humvee. He had his camera in his hands.

  GI Joe marched out of Reception.

  ‘Sir,’ he said politely. ‘Sir. Sir! This is US military property and you are not permitted to photograph it.’

  ‘But I’m an American taxpayer,’ replied Cole. ‘I want a picture of what my money’s buying and it’s a great photo for my kids. Now get on into the picture and say cheese.’

  GI Joe stood with his hands on his hips and his mouth agape. He was in a no-win situation, a long way off base, in a place he shouldn’t be.

  ‘Sir – sir,’ he stuttered, ‘you are not permitted to photograph my equipment,’ as we gathered at the front and posed for the photograph.

  The Karwan Sara guards joined in the fun, posing for the souvenir snaps of a lifetime.

  Mujeeb turned to GI Joe. ‘I think it is time for you to leave,’ he said quietly.

  GI Joe sighed and shook his head. He disappeared inside the building and returned a few minutes later with the Uzbek, modestly dressed in jeans and a coat and wrapped from head to buttock in a black woollen scarf. The door was barely closed when Pale Rider’s wheels started to spin.