A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  ‘How d’ya feel about lime?’ said the Australian accent at the other end of the phone.

  As we pulled into the warehouse at the back of UNOCA, I saw a brand-new Mitsubishi four-wheel drive that was not so much lime as dark green.

  Standing beside it was the Australian accent from the end of the phone. ‘G’day, I’m Terry. We managed to fix it up a bit for ya. Didn’t think ya’d wanna be drivin’ around Ka-bool in a spearmint car. Sign here.’

  After so many forms and so many phone calls, the final paperwork was a simple one-page receipt.

  The IRIN Radio project might have had a new green car, but life in The Bubble was still black and white or, rather, blue and white. The following day, Ismail was turned away from one of the UN compounds in the centre of town – because the UN guards wouldn’t let the green car in. Only UN cars were allowed into UN compounds. According to Ismail, the guards insisted the Big Green Car was not UN despite its pale blue numberplates clearly identifying it as such.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, grabbing my coat and scarf, ‘let’s see if they’ll let me in.’

  The new Afghanistan was a segregated society, one in which being white was more useful than being Hazara. Ismail started the car, nervous about might happen next. As we pulled up at the gate, the guards looked at me, looked at Ismail and barked something at him.

  ‘They are saying we have to park outside,’ Ismail translated, staring straight ahead at the pale blue gate.

  ‘Tell them this is a UN car and it’s a security risk for us to be sitting out here like this,’ I barked back. The UN compound was on a busy road near the centre of town. ‘Tell him to do it now or I will make a complaint.’ I felt like a memsahib in the time of the Raj.

  Ismail sat cringing, as he so often did at times like this, hoping that his three daughters didn’t turn out like me.

  By now, the line of cars behind us had started to snake its way down the street towards the intersection with Kabul Compound, the US military base. Horns were starting to blare and the guard was becoming agitated. Turning from me to the cars behind, he walked around and made a great show of checking our numberplate one more time before deciding it really was a UN plate. He nodded to his subordinates who dutifully lifted the boom and opened the gates. We drove through the concrete bollards, passed the bomb detection test before the Big Green Car pulled into a sea of white, the car park.

  ‘You go and do what you need to do and I’ll talk to security,’ I told Ismail. I was on a roll. It had taken six long months to get our green car and I wasn’t about to let UN colour blindness hold us back. I adjusted my headscarf, grabbed my bag and stomped up the stairs to the small security office.

  ‘Your car is green? Why?’ asked the Afghan at the desk, as if the only cars in the world were white.

  ‘Because we were told we could paint it.’

  ‘But why did you want to paint it?’

  ‘Because we didn’t want a white one.’

  ‘But why?’

  I felt like I was arguing with a seven-year-old.

  ‘It’s illegal,’ he said. ‘Illegal’ was the UN’s default position.

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  ‘Then you need a letter.’ Ah, the paperwork. He had me there.

  ‘Okay, I’ll make sure I have it next time I come here.’

  And with a flourish of my dark green headscarf, I walked out of the room, leaving my colour-blind colleagues at a loss as to why anyone would want to drive a car that wasn’t white.

  Because the original IRIN car was to stay with the news service, we were interviewing for a new driver for the new car. Qasim was a kind and gentle man but, despite sending him to English lessons, his language skills had not improved. As security deteriorated, I needed a driver who spoke good English and could react quickly. The advertising process produced two candidates and the interview panel was in place: Ismail, IRIN’s original driver; Pervez, a young man from IRIN’s Islamabad office who was in town assisting Ismail with paperwork; and me.

  Our first interviewee was a man named Nur, one of Kabul’s small army of taxi drivers. I knew Nur through friends who vouched for his passable English and his reliable driving. He once took an English friend to the Panjshir Valley, north of Kabul, without killing her, which, under the circumstances, I thought commendable. After establishing that Nur spoke good English and was in possession of a current driver’s licence, a rare thing in Kabul, we moved on to the second part of the interview: the driving test.

  Ismail, the self-proclaimed monitor of other people’s driving, sat in the front while Pervez and I took our places behind. Nur fired up the engine and we lurched forward and into the street outside. The Big Green Car was, as its name suggested, big, but that didn’t stop Nur hitting the road like the Kabul taxi driver he was. With the speed of a Formula One vehicle, we darted in and out of traffic in the car I had chosen because I wanted us to be discreet. I grabbed the handle above the window as we screeched around Abdul Haq roundabout and Nur launched the car into Jalalabad Road. No-one was talking. The sound of Nur honking the horn drowned out any chance of conversation. The only respite was when he used his spare hand to answer his phone and launched into an excited conversation with persons unknown. Perhaps he was telling them what a great time he was having. I glanced over at Pervez, usually the model of subcontinent propriety. He was cowering against the passenger door, clearly alarmed. When we eventually came to a screeching halt I thanked Nur for his time and told him we would be in touch.

  Our second candidate appeared half an hour later. His name was Mahmood and he worked as a driver mechanic at the Ministry of Transport where he earned the standard Afghan public service wage of forty US dollars a month. He was young and clean-shaven and wore a shirt and tie, a brown tweed jacket over his dark trousers. He was nervous and polite, and answered our questions with quiet deliberation before we headed outside for another driving test. ‘Please don’t let it be like the last one,’ I muttered to myself as I walked outside and found Mahmood slowly pacing around the car like a pilot inspecting his aircraft.

  There were no white knuckles on our ride. For the first time in my Kabul life, we drove along Jalalabad Road as if its endless contours of potholes and craters had suddenly been filled. Our new car had found its driver.

  23

  The Turkey Seller of Kabul

  I had been out of bed for fifteen minutes, enough for a quick – and chilly – trip to the bathroom, and a flick of the switch of my kettle. Kabul’s midsummer sun rose at 4.20 am but, as winter approached it failed to make an appearance until well after six. When my phone rang at six forty-five, I could barely manage a ‘hello’.

  ‘Sally Cooper?’ An American accent. Male.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve got your turkey.’ Quickly, tone hushed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The turkey you ordered. From Dubai?’

  Thanksgiving was rapidly approaching and, given the large number of Americans in the city, everyone was talking turkey. The voice identified itself as the UN’s unofficial turkey procurer. A few weeks earlier, an email had gone out asking anyone who was interested in getting hold of a turkey to put up their hand and a plan would be formulated.

  My friend Oliver was homesick. He had left the Karwan Sara and moved into a house belonging to the organisation he was working for. Oliver missed his wife in Washington and was keen to gather as many friends as he could for a Thanksgiving lunch at his new house in Baharistan, a small, moderately well-to-do suburb just west of the city. Taking pity on his holiday melancholy and reasonably sure I wasn’t the victim of a practical joke, I threw caution to the wind and replied to the email. My turkey was to be specially imported from the United States via Dubai.

  Getting hold of a turkey had become the number one challenge in Kabul. Thanksgiving may not have been a traditional Afghan holiday but that hadn’t stopped enterprising locals taking to the streets and hawking Afghanistan’s small turkey population. The previous week, I had seen
a bearded, shalwar kameezed man carrying half a dozen screeching birds over his shoulder, optimistically navigating his way towards the heavily guarded US embassy.

  Making sense of the early morning phone call proved easier than the task of collecting my bird. The turkey dealer worked at the Ministry of Public Works (MoPW). Many UN agencies provided expertise to Afghan ministries, in this case to the engineering projects at the MoPW. In the Ghan, anyone who worked for Development Inc. for long enough quickly forgot that most offices and even more homes had irregular electricity, inadequate heating and more than a few bullet holes in the walls. The MoPW was one of the many buildings that make up Macrorayon, a Soviet-built suburb that had been suitably ‘Afghaned’ over the years. To most Kabulis, Macrorayon had once been a very desirable address. With its medium-rise blocks of concrete apartment buildings, Macrorayon was Kabul’s Manhattan. But now, three years after the fall of the Taliban, almost every wall across the entire suburb seemed to be riddled with bullet holes. Semi-dislodged concrete blocks teetered from precipices and plastic sheets hung in place of windows.

  Mahmood had been with us one week and this was my first excursion alone with him. I had no idea where the MoPW was but Mahmood told me he had been there many times when he had worked for the Ministry of Transport. He remained silent as he drove, showing impeccable concentration on the traffic around him, no doubt hoping I wouldn’t start chatting. But I couldn’t help myself. I was curious and we were alone.

  ‘How is your family?’ I asked, always a good opener with Afghans.

  Mahmood paused for a moment and cleared his throat. ‘They are fine. They send their greetings to you.’

  ‘And your children? Your wife?’ I asked. My ‘husband’ was the subject of constant questioning from Afghans, his non-existence beyond their comprehension, so I figured I was entitled to ask the same questions back. Mahmood was Tajik so less likely to be fazed by what most Pashtuns would think an impertinent question.

  Again he paused, cleared his throat and smiled. ‘She is my fiancée,’ he told me, beaming shyly. ‘Her name is Safeena.’

  ‘What a lovely name. What does she do?’ I asked.

  ‘She works for Ariana.’

  ‘Really? What does she do for them?’ I was intrigued, wondering what on earth a woman would be allowed to do at an Afghan airline.

  ‘She is flight attendant.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said in awe. ‘What a great job.’

  ‘Yes, but when she is away, it is very terrible. I miss her too much.’

  Safeena regularly jetted off to Dubai, Frankfurt and Moscow, or wherever the Ariana plane happened to have the good fortune to land. It was an extraordinarily exciting and glamorous job for an Afghan woman. I liked to think that she and Mahmood were, like so many young people here, the vanguard of a new and more liberal culture. One where Afghans saw their country as part of a bigger world and where a woman wasn’t spat on for talking to a man who wasn’t her husband.

  The conversation petered out as we wove our way through the backstreets of Macrorayon. The suburb straddled the Kabul River and had seen some of the most destructive fighting of the mujahideen wars. Because of its notoriously bad traffic, I rarely came this way and stared agog at the string of bullet-splattered walls, made even more stark by the bare trees. I couldn’t figure out whether someone had been shooting the walls just for the hell of it or if there had once been people standing between the guns and the cold brown brick.

  True to his word, Mahmood pulled up at the gates of the MoPW. I spotted the UN sign and walked into a large concrete building only slightly less dilapidated than those around it. Somewhere a generator whirred. Like most Kabul houses, many Afghan ministries had no electricity, so Development Inc. brought its own. I climbed up the cold concrete stairs to the third floor. The corridor was lined with cheap green carpet and devoid of furniture. A noticeboard hung bare of papers and the pins with which to hang them. The building seemed deserted. Doors remained closed as I walked along looking for a sign of the turkey dealer. Then a door to my left suddenly snapped open and the head of a tall foreigner emerged. He was dressed in fawn trousers, a bright yellow and white checked shirt and walking boots. His hair was thinning, his face tanned. He eyed me quizzically through a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.

  ‘Are you Sally Cooper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He disappeared behind the door momentarily, emerging seconds later holding a large white supermarket shopping bag with the most enormous turkey I had ever seen. Like a character out of a John le Carré novel, I handed him the cash and he passed me the supermarket bag.

  ‘It came with its own cranberry sauce,’ said the turkey dealer. ‘Happy Thanksgiving.’

  The door slammed shut and I was once again alone.

  I walked outside. Mahmood had parked the car just beyond the MoPW gate and it was now surrounded by a huddle of Afghan children. Their faces were dirty and their clothes ragged. I opened the car door and scrambled inside before my guilt could kick in. I couldn’t tell Mahmood that I’d just paid thirty US dollars for an imported turkey – with its own cranberry sauce – and he was far too polite to inquire as to the contents of the large white bag I placed at my feet. The gaping chasm between the haves and the have-nots of Kabul was widening by the day, and I was carrying enough turkey to feed more than a few Afghan families for some time to come.

  24

  Moving to Mohammed

  ‘Ah, g’day. It’s Terry from UNOCA. It’s about ya office. It’s not quite ready.’

  ‘What does “not quite” mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Ya’d better come and have a look.’

  The UN guesthouse that was home to our office was closing. With the growing crisis in Darfur, the Development Inc. caravan was slowly beginning its move to Africa and the UN was consolidating its staff into its remaining guesthouses. IRIN needed to find a new home. Our choice was limited by our budget. The new office had to comply with The List, but security cost money and IRIN simply didn’t have the budget to rent its own premises. I’d done a deal with the powers that be at the ever-expanding UNOCA. There would be room for our studio but not for us all. IRIN news, a single journalist, Qasim and Farhad would have to find their own home in the centre of town.

  When I first returned to Kabul in April, UNOCA was a few sprawling, treeless hectares of dust, dotted with a handful of white buildings. As the UN presence in the Ghan grew, the buildings at UNOCA multiplied but there was still not a tree in sight.

  Mahmood, Ismail and I headed off down Jalalabad Road. ‘Not quite’ was a generous appraisal. The new building had no roof, no windows and no doors. Late autumn rain had slowed things down but the UN guesthouse we were in was closing in fourteen days and IRIN needed to move.

  ‘Tell ya what we can do,’ said the resourceful Terry. ‘We’ve got a couple o’ trailers out the back we’re not using. We can bung ’em down in the car park till this building’s finished. Whadyareckon?’

  Far from being the boxes on wheels that sold fairy floss and hotdogs at sporting grounds in most other parts of the world, the trailers were the narrow white rectangles most often found on building sites. They were a familiar sight in the Ghan, where many buildings had been destroyed and, as in the case of the US embassy, the pace of reconstruction struggled to meet demand. Each trailer had a window at either end and enough room for two desks, a few filing cabinets and two office chairs. As the trailers were too small to house all our gear, we would need to find storage space. Henk had left the Elections warehouse in the hands of a jolly Kenyan called Peter. With the presidential election a distant memory, my request was no problem. The warehouse was all but empty, in limbo, waiting for next year’s parliamentary elections to kick into gear.

  I asked Ismail to call Peter and arrange for the studio equipment to be taken to the warehouse. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for him to find the number.

  ‘Excuse me, Sally,’ he said, ‘What is Peter’s last name – is it Black?’ />
  ‘Ummm … I don’t think so.’ Afghans have a great deal of trouble dealing with a foreigner who isn’t white. For most, it just doesn’t compute that someone may be dark-skinned or, in the case of the Sudanese I’d seen working in Kabul, completely black. I was a little unsure how to approach Ismail’s faux pas when I remembered that some time ago Peter had given me his business card. I shuffled through the deck on my desk, found the card and handed it to Ismail. To be fair, he had been looking in the wrong phone directory and had actually come across a Peter Black. Fortunately Ismail, who was relatively broadminded, laughed when he realised the folly of his error and gave Peter a call.

  Moving office in the Ghan bore no resemblance to moving anywhere else in the world, at least nowhere I’d ever been, particularly when security was factored in. Ismail had hired a truck to carry our furniture down Jalalabad Road. This wasn’t a matter of looking in the Yellow Pages or calling up U-Haul. There were no telephone directories in the Ghan and hiring a truck meant simply going up to any truck in the street and asking how much.

  Unless we wanted to park the truck in the UNOCA visitors’ car park and carry our furniture in by hand, presumably negotiating the UNOCA metal detector on the way, the truck needed its own permit. More paperwork in a world increasingly run by ‘security’.

  The truck’s permit was valid for eight hours, but at 5 pm it would turn into a pumpkin and have to leave the UNOCA ball. Although our office was small, we needed to move fast, an alien concept in a country where time had long stood still.

  I stood in the small garden outside our office and watched seven Afghan men, with great discussion and argument, load five desks, a photocopier, three bookshelves and a small safe onto one medium-sized truck. I checked the time – so far it had taken three and a half hours. I estimated we had two more loads after this and it was now 11 am. I seriously believed that it wasn’t the great Afghan warriors who managed to ward off the Alexander the Great, the Russians, the British and all the other potential invaders of this harsh brown land – it was the sheer frustration of dealing with Afghan logic.