A Burqa and a Hard Place

by Sally Cooper

  In Kabul, you could be anyone you wanted to be. There was no before and no after, just the present, a life suspended in time and, for some, in reality. Attracted by the dollars and the adrenaline, Kabul’s expat community was made up almost entirely of young, single foreigners who lived life like it was a bad episode of Beverly Hills 90210. In a city of strangers, a true friend was a rare commodity. Nick Casey was one. I enjoyed the ease of his company and the depth of his kindness. He was an expert cook who specialised in Thai curries and sizzling stirfries. He had arrived in Kabul with his wife the previous summer, both teaching novice journalists at universities around the country. His wife had since returned to the UK to take up a position with a London daily, the opportunity of a lifetime, and Nick missed her terribly.

  We picked him up outside a Chinese restaurant where he’d stopped for a bootleg six-pack of beer. He stood on the footpath, or what was left of the footpath, in dusty jeans and a Hawaiian shirt from his seemingly bottomless collection. Over his shoulder was the faded brown satchel he carried everywhere he went. He had dark brown hair and a thick beard that would have been the envy of every Talib this side of the Hindu Kush. The car pulled up and Nick squeezed into the front seat as we trundled off down the road sagging like a gypsy caravan.

  Nick lived, somewhat reluctantly, in Taimani, in a house belonging to the organisation for which he worked. It was, at best, a dorm for a group of twenty-something French men and women who were barely out of university and who hadn’t quite got the knack of housework.

  While I could stay a night on Nick’s sofa, I needed somewhere permanent, so I called a friend who lived at the Chez Ana, the small guesthouse around the corner from the Karwan Sara that Ismail and I had looked at in our initial explorations fourteen months ago. It had been full then, but this time I was in luck; there would be a room free the next day.

  I knew the Chez Ana wasn’t UN approved but that was the least of my worries. I couldn’t do my job without my sanity and my sanity would be all but lost behind the high walls of a UN guesthouse.

  ‘I already feel like it’s time to go on leave again,’ I commented later that night over green curry and illicit beers.

  ‘How long did you plan to be here?’ asked Nick.

  ‘I never really gave it much thought,’ I replied, contemplating the energy required for another year of bombs, kidnappings, security alerts and avoiding the Kool-Aid. In between, Mirwais, Faheem and I still had to train IRIN’s quota of journalists. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, a fat lady was warming up her vocal cords. I downed the last of my beer and opened a fresh one.

  36

  The Chez Ana

  The Chez Ana was just off Passport Lane in Shahre Naw. The lane took its name from the national Passport Office that stood at its north-eastern entrance. It was a narrow, dusty thoroughfare between Ministry of Interior Road and Salang Watt, the highway that carried traffic north from the capital though the Salang Tunnel to Mazar-e-Sharif and beyond. The lane was home to a handful of guesthouses, including the Gandamack, the grand dame of Kabul lodges.

  The entrance to the Chez Ana was a discreet gate beside a small guardhouse, no bigger than two telephone booths jammed together. Inside the gate was a house of indiscriminate age. It was of a 1960s design, a time when King Zahir Shah had set his country on a controversial path to modernity, building the country’s first university, where women wore short skirts and headscarves were optional. The path ended comprehensively in the 1973 coup led by the king’s cousin, Mohammed Daud. Thus began the decades of war and turmoil from which the Ghan was slowly beginning to emerge. Now the Chez Ana’s pale yellow paint had faded under the glare of Kabul’s unrelenting sun, and its front door was sheltered by trees. To the left of the entrance hall was a grey-carpeted staircase to the rooms above and, at the end of the small passageway beyond the stairs, a large kitchen. Ahead was a dining room with a long wooden table for communal meals, and a lounge room with a television, bookshelves, a sofa and a handful of comfortable-looking chairs. Reception was a small desk at the rear of the dining room. With its high counter and mirrored shelving, it looked like it may once have been a bar.

  The afternoon sun was streaming in the side window of the lounge room when I walked in. Sitting at a table in the corner, hunched over a laptop, was my friend Jane. I had first met Jane, a New Zealander, the previous summer when, like me, she had come to Kabul for a short stint as a media trainer. She had since moved on to better things and now worked for a large international think-tank, producing insightful reports on the state of affairs in the new Afghanistan. I was pleased to see her.

  She rose to greet me. Jane was almost six feet tall, with dark questioning eyes and short fair hair. She wore a pair of faded jeans with a loose blue cotton tunic that extended to her knees. ‘Let me introduce you to Imran.’

  Jane disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, reappearing a few minutes later with a short, dark-haired man.

  ‘Hello, Sally. Welcome to the Chez Ana. I am Imran, the manager.’ He offered his hand.

  At last, someone who didn’t automatically call me ‘Miss’. I didn’t need to ask – by his name and his manner, I knew instantly that Imran was Pakistani. His receding hairline and dark moustache made him look a little older than he really was, around his late twenties; old enough to know how to run a guesthouse, I hoped.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Imran,’ I said, shaking his hand.

  ‘Come, I’ll show you to your room.’

  The Chez Ana had only eleven rooms, making it a lot more intimate than the anonymous warren of the Karwan Sara. There was one tiny bedroom off the lounge room downstairs and six more rooms, an assortment of former garages and servants’ quarters, dotted around a small backyard. Straddled across the lawn was a badminton net, underneath which sat a medium-sized brown and white dog.

  ‘You have a dog?’ I asked Imran.

  ‘Yes, that’s Kuchi. He lives here.’

  I wondered if Kuchi ever visited his canine friends who’d taken up residence in the Karwan Sara garden.

  Living in a Kabul guesthouse was a bit like Lord of the Flies. The distribution of rooms was usually determined by pecking order – those who had been around the longest got the best. For reasons that I would never know, and made a point never to ask, Imran took a key off the hook behind him and led me up the stairs. I knew that the four rooms upstairs were by far the best, spacious and airy with enormous windows looking down onto the garden below. Imran unlocked the door to Room 3. It had a large double bed, a desk and a chair, and built-in cupboards lined one wall. ‘Dinner is at seven,’ he told me, shutting the door on his way out.

  I began to reassemble my portable life, unpacking toiletries and books, clothes and shoes. My life in recent years had involved endless packing and unpacking: Australia, Uganda, Kenya, Uganda, Kenya, Australia, Kenya, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Kenya, Afghanistan. I had it down to a thirty-minute routine. I carried little from ‘home’ since I no longer seemed to have one. My shortwave radio, a half-empty jar of Vegemite, a small metal teapot, a Big Apple fridge magnet. And books, always plenty of books, though I never seemed to have time to read them.

  I joined my new housemates for supper around the dining room table. My housemates crossed the Kabul expat spectrum from visiting film-makers to long-term project managers, civil society ‘educators’ to researchers whose work took them into the far reaches of the most restive provinces. In its dying days, the Karwan Sara had been almost abandoned, bereft of guests, and it felt good to once again be part of something.

  37

  Life During Wartime –

  or Similar

  Life at the Chez Ana was a vast improvement on the chaos of the Karwan Sara. Imran ran a tight ship. The generator worked, the water supply was constant and the omelettes never runny. An ancient gardener, his eyes showing the rheumy signs of cataracts, tended the small garden. A gaggle of Hazara women cleaned the rooms and punished the laundry. The cook, Majid, prepared large, tasty m
eals, more often than not drawing on recipes from a pile of Australian Women’s Weekly cookbooks he kept on the kitchen window ledge.

  It was now July, the height of summer, and this one seemed hotter than most. After the ritual cold beer and pistachios on the back verandah, my housemates and I sat down to dinner. I went to bed early, the heat having comprehensively drained me of energy for anything but sleeping. I left the windows wide open in the hope of catching any semblance of a late-night breeze.

  A loud bang resonated through the darkness. I opened my eyes and jumped out of bed. My room was pitch-black. I scrambled for the light switch, pulling aside the curtain. The noise had come from nearby. Even before my eyes could adjust to the darkness, I saw a geyser of steam shooting high into the air from the compound next door.

  I threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, grabbed my torch and scrambled downstairs. The hissing of the steam followed me through the darkened lounge room. Flinging open the back door, I was greeted by a reeking wall of stench – one hundred per cent pure ammonia. Jane and Bella, a documentary filmmaker from New York, had rooms out the back, so I bolted across the garden, banging on doors. ‘Ammonia. Ammonia,’ I gasped before the toxic stench sent me running back inside.

  Jane and Bella emerged from their rooms, and coughed and spluttered their way into the main house. There were five of us at home, four women and one man. As the ammonia permeated, we crowded upstairs into the last remaining clear room.

  Sitting on the bed, we considered our options.

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘I can’t breathe.’

  ‘Did you hear it?’

  ‘Was it a rocket?’

  ‘Who do we call?’

  ‘I don’t know. The UN?’ They looked at me.

  ‘And tell them what exactly?’ was my response. I had never had to call on the UN security office before and I wasn’t about to now. Nothing in the previous fourteen months had made me think they were capable of anything, except maybe giving me a hard time.

  ‘I’ll call our security guy,’ said Ingrid, a young Australian woman working for an American NGO.

  But there was no answer.

  ‘We just need to get away from this air,’ I said as I lay back on the bed, wishing I could go back to sleep.

  Ingrid and Tim, who worked for the same NGO, suggested we head to their office. It was only a few blocks away, but far enough from the stench.

  ‘How will we get there?’

  ‘Imran has a car.’

  ‘Call him.’

  Difficult though it was to believe, the Chez Ana manager, who had a small room on the other side of the house, had slept through the excitement. He had, however, left his phone on, and Ingrid’s call roused him from his slumber.

  ‘He’ll be at the front gate in five minutes.’

  I went back to my room. My two-way radio was silent but I threw it into my bag anyway. Uniform November Base shut down at night but, like my headscarf, I took the radio with me as much out of habit as necessity. I covered my mouth with my scarf and made a run for it, down the stairs, through the front door and out the gate. By the time I got out to the laneway, the ammonia was unbearable, sending me into teary paroxysms of heaving coughs.

  I stumbled into the car, squeezing into the back seat with Jane, Bella and Ingrid. Tim took the front. Imran was hunched, bleary-eyed, in the driver’s seat, his pyjamas peeking out from underneath his hastily donned jeans and long-sleeved cotton shirt. Just as Imran started the engine, what could only be a security guy emerged through the odd yellow haze of the lone streetlight on the corner. Distinguishable by his large size, his confident gait and, most significantly, his bulletproof vest and his enormous gun, he had come from the direction of the Gandamack.

  He leaned into the car and surveyed the scene. Six people, crammed into a darkened Corolla, stared back at him.

  ‘Are you all okay?’ he asked in a polite British accent.

  ‘Yeees,’ we chorused, like children.

  ‘How many are you?’

  ‘Six.

  ‘Go to the ISAF clinic,’ he ordered and then strode off down the laneway, turned right and disappeared into the darkness beyond.

  Because he was bigger than us and because he sounded like he knew what he was doing, we did as he said. Imran backed the car down the lane. We began to breathe easier, driving out onto the main road, through the darkened streets of the city.

  ISAF is the International Security Assistance Force, whose job is to keep the peace in Kabul. It was under the command of NATO, which sounded very reassuring at 3.30 am – until we arrived at the front gate. Because the ISAF compound was in the same heavily guarded street as the US embassy, Imran dropped us at the security barriers, turned the car around and drove back to the Chez Ana, declining our invitation to join us. The Chez Ana, even when it was doused in ammonia, was a better bet for a Pakistani than the gates of the ISAF compound.

  We were a motley crew. Jane and Bella were dressed in nightgowns with parts of the Chez Ana sofa covers draped modestly around key body parts. The rest of us had thrown on whatever we could lay our hands on. Item number one in everyone’s security manual was the Go Bag. A Go Bag was a small bag of everything you’ll need if you have to get out fast, and should always include money, passport and a change of clothes. The list made no mention of the stylish sunglasses, iPod and mascara rattling around the inside of the bag that I’d thrown over my shoulder in my dash out the door. None of us had a Go Bag, but we’d gone anyway.

  The soldiers on guard duty were Italian. Sleepy and Italian. As we approached the front gate, they regarded us more with amused curiosity than suspicion – and they didn’t speak English.

  ‘Hospital. Doctor.’

  ‘Accident.’

  ‘Ammonia. AMMONIA!’

  I could tell they were sceptical; none of us was gagging for breath and we all looked far too healthy to be really ill. They were probably wondering if this was some kind of crazy guesthouse practical joke. But eventually the message got through and one of the soldiers disappeared inside the guardhouse to make a call.

  We sat on a wooden bench by the wall and waited. The Italians were clueless – but very sweet. One reappeared a few minutes later with packets of biscuits and bottles of water. It was 4 am by now, and the horizon was beginning to turn the faintest shade of pink. I was tired and this was starting to get very silly. I felt fine and wished I could go back to my bed at the Chez Ana.

  The soldier returned from his phone call and, using a combination of broken English and better sign language, told us that, at 4 am, the clinic was not open. Just as we were beginning to ponder the wisdom of walking back to the Chez Ana, a pair of headlights appeared behind us, quickly followed by another.

  It was the British security guy, with a two-car convoy loaded with Gandamack residents.

  ‘They’re not wearing nightgowns,’ said Jane enviously.

  ‘I think the woman in the front seat is wearing lipstick,’ said Tim.

  Security Guy, whose Italian was no better than ours, went through a similar routine with the ISAF guards with the same degree of success.

  ‘I give up,’ he mumbled. ‘Grazie,’ he nodded at the Italians. ‘Come with me,’ he barked over his shoulder in our direction. We followed obediently, squeezing into the back of the sleek silver Land Cruisers. We were doing what all of us did in moments of great uncertainty, though we refused to admit it – we headed for the Americans.

  Kabul Compound, the small military base in the centre of town, had recently been renamed Camp Eggers, in honour of a US soldier killed in Kandahar. After being given a thorough security check we had to ‘sign in’. I had nothing but my UN ID tag, which was grudgingly accepted in lieu of anything deemed more useful. I hadn’t told the security office of my recent relocation and I definitely didn’t want the UN to hear about this adventure. If they found out I lived at the Chez Ana, an unapproved guesthouse, I’d be forced to move.

  I sidled up to Security Guy. ‘P
lease don’t tell anyone I work for the UN,’ I whispered.

  His piercing blue eyes looked at me as if I had just grown an extra head.

  ‘Okay,’ he whispered conspiratorially, clearly thinking me mad to be worrying about such things at a time like this.

  Just as I moved away, my two-way radio, stashed at the bottom of my bag, began to bleat.

  ‘Uniform November Base. Do we have any call signs living in Passport Lane?’

  I froze. Was I about to be busted?

  I clutched my radio to my ear. Static. The question was repeated.

  Then, Bing’s voice. ‘Negative. There are no Uniform November call signs currently living in Passport Lane.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  We were shuffled into Camp Eggers like refugees from a cyclone and taken to the clinic, a small building in a narrow ‘street’, staffed by a fatherly white-haired doctor who was assisted by two young men with the kind of haircuts I’d only ever seen in Blackhawk Down.

  ‘Y’all just sit down here and we’ll be right with ya,’ said the doctor.

  With the arrival of the guests from the Gandamack, our numbers had swelled. We were now thirteen and, as the clinic was small, we were to be treated outside, by the side of the small road. Chairs were placed on the asphalt and stretchers laid out by the doorway.

  ‘Is this really necessary?’ I whispered to Jane, who rolled her eyes and once again adjusted her nightgown.

  But there was no escaping and one by one we had our eyes and airways flushed, and were given a brief lecture on the perils of ammonia.

  ‘Now, I hear y’all have to wait here till ya git the all-clear,’ said the doctor, flicking off his surgical gloves. ‘Ah’d like to invite y’all to breakfast in our mess hall. The praavit will escort you.’