A Cup of Friendship (19 page)

I
t was early morning and Sunny was outside on the patio, wearing a leather jacket—happy to have shed her down coat—jeans, a scarf over her head and around her neck, sipping her coffee. She was sitting on a low stool at the wall, her knees wide apart, artist charcoal on the ground between them. It was cold, but not like the winter had been. She leaned her head back and breathed in. It even smelled different. It was warm enough that people were lighting fewer wood fires, but it was still cool enough that the open sewers didn’t overpower. She closed her eyes and could see the clean air scented with pines sweeping down from the Hindu Kush across the basin and into her front yard.

The wall had been rebuilt, again. The coffeehouse was one step toward becoming UN compliant. Now all they had left to do was to get the blast film on the windows, build a safe room, and mission accomplished. The coffeehouse would be put on the list of approved places for foreigners. Jack, if he ever returned, would be pleased.

Sunny picked up a piece of the charcoal, felt its lightness in her hand. The plan was to first get her feet wet by sketching the mural in charcoal, right on the wall, and then dive in with acrylics. This was the hard part, getting the images right, and having the discipline to finish before actually painting. It was going to be a jungle scene, after all, with tall grasses and foliage and exotic flowers, animals of all kinds—toucans and tigers, monkeys and macaws, snakes and lizards. She would paint it in bright colors, not realistically but more like the kind of mural found on school walls: simple and whimsical.

She was going to use cheap acrylics because that’s all that was available on Paint Street. She bought black, white, red, blue, and yellow and then would mix them on her palette to make other colors. She’d use the cheap, coarse brushes from the paint store, and save her better brushes, which she’d gotten in Dubai, for her canvas paintings.

Poppy stayed outside in the courtyard with her, sometimes chasing flies or barking at the wild dogs that often roamed the streets outside the gate, sometimes lying on her side, legs straight out in front of her, in the warmth of the sun. Sometimes Ahmet would even play catch with her. Sunny got a kick out of this new friendship and thought that maybe it was a portent of other changes going on in Ahmet. She’d noticed how he watched Yazmina, and spoke to her so tentatively, but how couldn’t he? She was so beautiful. Who knows what would happen when she had her baby, given Ahmet’s traditional disposition. Would he soften to the baby the way he had to Poppy? It was hard to predict; men were a proud and strange bunch, and Afghan men more complex than most.

Thank goodness she had this project or else she’d be frantic about Jack. She missed him like crazy, that last kiss still lingering on her lips, his taste still in her memory. She missed his wisecracks and friendship. She missed his being a solid, strong presence in this place that could be so chaotic. She missed how he made her laugh. She missed everything about him. And she was worried that he might never come back.

Why did the men in her life always leave? she thought as she drew the outline of a toucan’s beak. Her father, so many years before, when she was still a little girl, then Tommy, and now Jack. Her mother had told her when Sunny brought home her first boyfriend, after seeing his tattoos and hearing his so-called big plans to start a used-record store, that Sunny’s expectations for men were terribly low, just like hers had been.

Well, Mom
, she thought as she finished the toucan’s body, and then drew a huge leaf that covered half of it,
I proved you wrong
. Her expectations of men weren’t too low. Look at Jack. He was a wonderful pick. Apparently too wonderful for her.

She looked at what she’d drawn and did what she’d been doing every morning for a week. She picked up the damp cloth that sat at her side and erased the sketch from the wall, leaving it as she’d found it: blank, except for the dirty smear of charcoal.

Later that night, after all the customers had left, the coffeehouse was quiet, and Bashir Hadi had gone home, Halajan was watching an Indian soap opera, Yazmina was cleaning the floor, and Sunny was on her computer at the counter. You could smell a new wave of ammonia each time the wet and soapy mop hit the floor. Yazmina seemed distracted the way she was almost throwing the mop hard onto the floor and then back into the bucket, almost spilling it over each time. With each hit, Poppy would raise her head, look at Sunny to be sure she was okay, and then lay her head back down. The clock ticked, the mop slopped on the floor, and the day was almost done.

And then the door opened and closed with a slam.

Sunny assumed it was Ahmet, who came in every night to walk his mother safely up the outside stairs to her home, so she didn’t even look up.

Ahmet said, “Miss Sunny—”

And Halajan said, “
Ma khoda.
” Oh my God.

And Poppy barked and ran over to the door.

And then a man’s voice said, “Hey, babe.”

Only one man would dare call her that. Sunny was so startled that she knocked over her bottle of water. She stood and pushed her stool back so hard that it fell over with a loud bang onto the floor. She could have lit half of Kabul if her shock could’ve been converted to electricity.

“Miss me?” And there was that kilowatt smile that Sunny had fallen in love with so many years before.

She tried to answer but her throat was full. Her heart was beating so loudly she imagined everyone could hear it.

“Tommy” was all she could say.

“So you’re not dead, after all,” Sunny said to him later, when everyone had gone home. She sipped from her teacup of wine. She was calming down now and starting to feel pissed off. Perhaps stage two in the Seven Stages of Reaction When a Person You Love Returns After Months of No Contact, stage one being Shock, stage two Pissed Off, and she’d know the next stage when she got to it.

“You sound disappointed.”

“It’s been five months!”

“It was my
job
. I had no choice if I wanted to get paid.”

“You could’ve called, maybe. Sent an email, for Christ’s sake. Let me know you’re okay. Give me a hint about when you’d be back.”

“I’m not denying the money wasn’t terrific—unbelievable is the shit’s honest truth. But it was more than that. It was important. The first time in my life. I knew you’d underst—”

“It’s been five months!” She knew she’d said that already but she said it again anyway.

“But you sure look good,” he said with that smile of his. “Younger, even, than when I left. I like your hair longer.” He reached out to touch it. But Sunny backed away.

“You didn’t call, or email, or anything. What was I to think?”

“I couldn’t. Orders.”

“You sound as if you were on a CIA mission or something. Get over yourself.” She was angry now.

He was, too. “But if we had married like I’d wanted to—”

Sunny was doing everything in her power to not jump across the table and tear his eyes out. Not that it would be wrong. It would just give her feelings away, and she didn’t want to give him the pleasure of that. He didn’t deserve it.

“Are you telling me that if I had been your wife, you could’ve called? But because I was your girlfriend of a million years you couldn’t? That is so much bullshit.”

“Sunny, that’s the military. I couldn’t tell you. Had you married me when I asked, everything would have been different.”

“But I didn’t, and it’s not. Besides, you’re not in the military.”

“I was doing the military’s dirty work, okay? But I still had to follow their fucked-up rules. Like no girlfriends. But it can be different now. I’m back. Here, for you.” He paused, looking at her. “That is, if you still want me.”

Sunny stood up. She could hardly look at him, he was still so gorgeous. His blondish hair long over his eyes, those startling blue eyes, his skin tanned, and his body lean and long, and she had to look away. “You think you can go away for so long, not tell me where you’ve gone, not communicate in any way, come back and everything will be the same?”

“Yeah. Why not? This wasn’t so much longer than usual. I love you, you love me—or you did. At least I think you did.”

She turned back to him. “You know I did. But for some reason this time it felt longer. It felt different.”

“Why? Why this time?”

She looked away.

“Oh, Jesus, is there someone else?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, which was the truth. And then she added, “There’s no one else,” which wasn’t. She sat back down. “But so much has happened.”

“You don’t know, huh?” He looked around the coffeehouse. “Well, it looks better in here. You’ve done some work, right? You’re painting the wall—hey, and you made it higher, going after those UN rights, huh? You’ve got a new Afghan woman working. You have a dog! Come here, boy!”

Poppy didn’t move from her bed.

“It’s a
female.
”

“Then come here,
girl,
” he said. But Poppy stayed where she was. Tommy laughed and sat back in his chair, tilted it back on its rear legs, crossed his arms over his chest. “I knew you’d be fine. I never had to worry about Sunny.”

He reached over and put his hand on hers. His shirt was rolled up to the elbows and his forearms looked strong, his hands beautiful. She could barely breathe.

But she stood again. She was not going to let this happen. “It’s late. You gotta go.”

“What do you mean, go? I live here—”

She shook her head. “It’s too much. You’re here one minute. Then you’re gone for three months. Then you’re gone for five. Next time … who knows? And you don’t
live
here. You’ve
stayed
here between going everywhere else. I think you have one shirt here. Maybe.”

Now Tommy stood up. “But I’m here now, Sunny. I want to stay.” He went to her, held her firmly by her arms, pulled her to him, and kissed her hard and long.

She didn’t even try to pull away. She had waited so long for this moment to come. They went to her room, where the Kabul moon shone through the windows. He kissed her again, he unbuttoned her shirt, he put his hands on her breasts, between her legs. It was almost as if nothing between them had changed after all this time, except for one big thing: Tommy was here with her, but her mind was somewhere else, with someone else. And so she pulled away, kissed him on the cheek, and showed him to the door.

I
sabel had to let her eyes adjust to the darkness before she could make out the long corridor of small cells with blue-painted bars. In the dank Pul-e Charkhi prison, lighting was poor, the ceilings were low, the windows had no glass, there was no electricity, the food was sometimes only two pieces of flatbread a day—and yet it sat right near Chicken Street, across from shops of souvenirs, blue lapis, and leather jackets. There were at least eight women in a cell, along with their children. Isabel could hear a baby crying. She could smell urine and unwashed bodies.

She’d gotten inside Pul-e Charkhi with the help of Sunny, who’d introduced her to the women’s minister and then helped her bribe the warden. Past the barbed wire and the heavily guarded front entrance, she’d been taken inside, where she was searched for guns and weapons and told to leave her bag in the front room. There were to be no pencils or pens, no cameras. She was provided with a “guide,” a large woman with huge, sagging breasts and a gray, dull face.

It was difficult to see their faces, even those without burqas. They wore heavy, crudely woven head scarves, but the faces she could see were dirty, and they pulled their scarves low to hide them in embarrassment. Isabel could see their eyes, boring through her like a laser. There were several women who suffered from leishmaniasis, the sores on their faces scabbing and oozing; others looked as gaunt as the concentration camp victims her mother had showed her photos of when she was a girl; one was nursing her baby, which was screaming, unable to satisfy itself with the meager milk the mother’s breasts provided; and others just stared, hollow-eyed and pleading.

But among the faces, Isabel did not see the woman who was beaten at the poppy farm. She hadn’t really believed she’d find her, if she were even still alive. But her journalistic training compelled her to keep searching for the story that was bigger than one woman’s disappearance, certainly bigger than the story about the spraying of the poppies. So, from Kabul, she planned to fly north to Mazar-e Sharif and even to Lashkar Gah, the capital of the Taliban-controlled Helmand province, where their prisons held hundreds of women.

She felt a tug on her
kameez
and looked down. A young woman, a girl, dirty, quite thin and pale, who’d obviously been a beauty, was sitting at the bars of her cell, looking up at her, her hand stretched out. She said something inaudible. Isabel squatted to hear her.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please help me.”

The girl knew English. But her guide and the other women did not, so she and the girl could speak freely.

“Why are you here?”

“I was sold.” She turned her face away, embarrassed.

“It’s okay. You can tell me. Were you sold to be a—?”

The woman couldn’t speak. But tears welled in her eyes, and then, as Isabel watched, they spilled over her black lashes onto her cheeks.

Finally the girl said, “For men. I was sold for men.”

“Then why are you here? What happened?”

“One day I … I just couldn’t … any longer, I—” She put her face in her hands.

But Isabel pressed on. “How long have you been here?”

“Six Ramadans,” she said.

Isabel fought not to raise her voice. “Six years? You can’t be more than eighteen!”

“I am nineteen now.”

“Is anyone helping you? Has anyone been here?”

The girl nodded. “A foreign lawyer comes, but the only thing that gets you out is money. I am an orphan. I have no one.” She looked away, and then directly at Isabel, and she pleaded desperately, “Please. We are hungry. We have no clean water. They hurt us, they do things—”

The guide then pushed Isabel’s shoulder, urging her to move on.

But she turned to look back at the young woman. Her black eyes spoke centuries of pain.

“Please help me,” she said, which made Isabel’s whole body shudder under the weight of responsibility and the desire to act on her behalf, right here, right now.

But again, she felt the nudge on her back and heard the guide’s angry voice telling her to move.

So Isabel left the young woman with a nod and a strong clasp of her hand in hers and a whisper, “I will try. I promise.”

In another room, there were several women with older children, one holding a three-year-old who, the mother showed her, was unable to walk. “Look around,” the mother said in Dari.

The combination of Isabel’s limited knowledge of Dari and the woman’s gestures helped Isabel understand what came next.

“Do you see a place for a child to move? But what choice do I have? I have no family. I have no one.”

Isabel had heard of women who jumped into the river, drowning themselves and their children, rather than be imprisoned. Only now did she understand. It was better to live on the streets begging.

Isabel left shortly after. Knowing that trying to find her woman at another prison was bloody futile, she returned to the poppy fields where she’d first seen her and was told that she and her baby were both gone, though nobody knew where. But the look from the man who’d hit the woman told Isabel everything she needed to know: The woman was probably dead; the baby, if it was a boy, would be taken care of until it could be trained to fight for the Taliban and then die as a martyr. If it was a girl, she’d be dead already, or sold to become a sex slave within a few years.

Now Isabel had a story to write. It wasn’t about poppies or spraying or the collusion of the government and drug lords, or the corruption of drug enforcement officials, or the billions of dollars made in opium production. It was about the women held for years behind bars for refusing sex, for being victims of rape or of abusive husbands, or for becoming opium addicts. It was a story about the children being raised behind bars with them. The story was summed up in one young woman’s three simple words:
Please help me
.