An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (5 page)

At night I try my Dari words out on Abdul-Kareem. This makes him laugh. It is clear that I need more formal instruction. He says that it will “all be arranged if only I am patient.”

This waiting is hard for me. Words mean everything to me. I love to talk and to be understood. I love to understand what people are saying. Such exchanges are my lifeline. Here I am never alone—yet I feel like I am in isolation as well as under house arrest.

My situation: More than a week has passed, and I am still in purdah. My belly is bloated with tea, my tongue is shriveled from the delicious salted pistachio nuts.

I’ve watched the servants cook and clean, beat clothes and wash them in the garden stream, and make what will become the most wonderful yoghurt: They put the processed milky cheese into a pouch and hang it outside on a tree branch. It is delicious when eaten with pilau or chilau. Even now I usually ask for yoghurt to accompany the rice dishes in Turkish, Persian, Indian, and Afghan restaurants in America.

I’ve sat through hours of conversation among the women that I don’t quite understand. I’ve listened to radio programs from India and China. One night I enjoyed a concert of classical Indian music—live—from New Delhi. I’ve already mastered the art of sitting politely for hours without understanding what people are saying. I’ve learned how to sit and not move. I am learning some Eastern-style patience, something that requires the practitioner to enter into a state of relaxed passivity and receptivity.

My true and only joy, reading, is seen as an act of despair or as a traitorous activity. Whenever I close my door and settle down with a book, I am invariably interrupted.

“Sister-in-law, are you unhappy? Do you want to play cards?” asks Rafi, one of my teenaged brothers-in-law, who is always home early from school.

Hassan’s Fawziya gently trails into my bedroom suite with her two small children in tow, sits down on the carpet, and starts her routine of smiling and conversation in French.

I am trying to read
War and Peace
and do not wish to be disturbed. I explain that I am perfectly happy—“
Choob, choob,
” “
Je suis joyeux, cette est très jolie por moi
”—that everyone in college reads books all the time, that Abdul-Kareem and I used to sit side by side and do all our
reading together, that even in high school—actually, since I was small—I have been reading books.

It is my delight and my salvation.

But here everything is done together: There is no such thing as privacy. This means that no one—absolutely no one—is shut out. Children and old people are all included in everything. But private activities—reading, wanting to spend time alone with one’s husband—are seen as strange and suspicious acts. If someone chooses to stay alone, she must either be unhappy or untrustworthy. Who knows what she might be thinking or even plotting?

Night after night, sitting at the table (well, cross-legged on the floor), my nerves are worn thin with boredom and hunger. I say so. I say out loud for all to hear:

“I am really very hungry.”

A few members of the family express sympathy for my plight, but no one does anything.

Two weeks into my captivity and I have gone out only twice. Both times it was with a small entourage that accompanied me to the tailor, who considered my choice of Afghan materials an insult to his European training. He carpets his shop for me with yards of British, German, and French fabrics.

I want sari-like materials for some long stay-at-home dresses, and I want a long soft tunic and Turkish “bo-peep” pants, but, other than Bebegul, the women in my family do not dress like that. The sari silks, which would probably fetch exorbitant prices in Bergdorf’s or Bloomingdale’s, are never worn. My female relatives wear only the most expensive English and German wool, French chiffon, lace, and satin, and the finest American mixed fibers. And, if I am to accompany Abdul-Kareem to embassy dinners, or to dinners at the palace, then I must be properly attired.

I am bored. I am
so
bored. I am puzzled. I do not understand why Abdul-Kareem does not take me along with him into the city. When I ask him to do so, he accuses me of wanting to ruin it for him; his position is perilous, and one false move from me can ruin it for him forever. As it turns out, he was right—but at the time I experienced being shut out as an insult and a rejection.

I did not yet understand that women have absolutely no place in the public, all-male environment. Had Abdul-Kareem brought me along, that would have proved that he had become a Westerner, rejected Afghan tradition—and could not control his wife.

It is still summer. It is quite hot. I decide to sunbathe on the terrace that adjoins our bedroom. I remember my bikini to this day. I bought it on East 57th Street in Manhattan. Abdul-Kareem loved it. It was very, very skimpy.

So, here I am, lying on a low chaise lounge, wearing sunglasses, drinking an iced fruit drink, and reading my damned book, when suddenly I hear a loud commotion inside. It sounds like men are yelling at each other. Then more men are yelling.

Suddenly, and totally unexpectedly, Abdul-Kareem (who is always at the bank or at the office or at some ministry appointment during the day) bursts through the doors.

“What do you think you’re doing? You have managed to upset all of Kabul.”

I am glad to see him so early in the day.

“What are you talking about?”

It seems that some workmen who are building a house about a quarter of a mile away caught sight of what they thought was a naked woman and could no longer concentrate on their work. A delegation had descended upon our house to demand that all women, especially the woman on the roof (me), be properly dressed.

I start laughing.

Abdul-Kareem is gentle. He must be desperate.

He says, “Please, please just come in and put something on. In fact stay off the terrace for today. These are illiterate, uneducated, religious men with a peasant mentality. Rumors spread here quickly. By tonight they’ll be telling their friends that we are running a brothel.”

Oh, Dorothy. You are no longer in Kansas.

W
hat to do? Well, now that I’ve visited Bebegul steadily and exclusively for two weeks, I decide I can pay my respects to Tooba, the second wife. She lives far more modestly and goes to great lengths to serve me a European-style tea. She has two children, a son, Samir, and a daughter, Rabia.

I have been told that when she married Agha Jan, she lived with Bebegul at some point and that Bebegul treated her as badly as she treats her current crop of female servants. That means she cursed her, undoubtedly hit her, made nonstop demands, and then complained about her to my father-in-law.

The Scottish convert, Saira Shah, on her way to Mecca, describes a rather hellish Saudi Arabian harem, the rivalries between the fertile and
infertile wives, the mothers of sons versus those with none: “If a woman has no sons or has been disagreeable to her [the mother of the firstborn], she will taunt her in the hundreds of ways the flowery elasticity of the Arabic language allows.”

Why did Agha Jan marry a second time?

Bebegul and Ismail Mohammed (Agha Jan) are cousins. They are distant cousins, Abdul-Kareem tells me, but somehow I doubt this; I bet they are first or second cousins.

In any event Bebegul comes from a more well-to-do branch of the family. At one point her father had been the postmaster of Kabul. Abdul-Kareem told me that Bebegul would tell “stories about how they used to open letters [even in those days!] and censor the mail. She had seen her father and brothers do this.”

At first the newlyweds lived in Kabul, then in Herat, a city they came to love and where Agha Jan served as the revenue officer. In other words he was in charge of the treasury. Just to understand what life was like in the late 1920s, Abdul-Kareem tells me what his mother has told him: “‘There were no cars or trucks in those days. We had to travel on horseback from Kabul to get to my husband in Herat. Along the way, my mother (Abdul-Kareem’s maternal grandmother) died. We had to bury her by the roadside. Because we had children with us in our caravan, it took us thirty days to make the 1,200-mile journey.’”

After four years of marriage, during which two or three daughters had already been born, my father-in-law took a second wife. Many years after my time in Kabul, I ask Abdul-Kareem why his father remarried two more times.

First he says that he will not criticize his father.

Then he says that his father “felt sorry” for the second wife, who had fallen in love with him. She was a neighbor, and he was temporarily in Kabul but without his wife and children. Abdul-Kareem says that she tricked him into marriage.

“You must remember that at that time in Afghanistan it was very important for a man to have a son.”

Perhaps because Bebegul had had only daughters, and Ismail Mohammed was in search of a son, he dallied with the neighbor; perhaps she indeed became pregnant. But Bebegul soon gave birth to a boy. In fact both wives probably gave birth to sons at about the same time.

Why my father-in-law took a third wife remains shrouded in mystery. Over the years I have heard rumors, half-truths, and suspected truths about his motives.

Bebegul had been disobedient in some important way, and he married again to punish and humble her; surely her sons would blame her for the rest of her life for all the additional co-brothers. Ismail Mohammed married the third wife because she fit into his economic or political plans. He married again because he needed a much younger and fertile wife—he wanted more children.

Ismail Mohammed is a religious man. There is not much night life in Kabul or Herat. Upstanding religious men have to marry the woman with whom they wish to sleep.

T
he day after I visited Tooba, the second wife, I make my way over to the third, currently reigning, and still fertile third wife, Meena. I find the visit shocking and inexplicable.

A duplicate high-ceilinged, ballroom-like living room exists there. This is where Agha Jan entertains, takes his meals, and reads his newspapers and business reports. It is carpeted richly in maroon and has thick velvet curtains at every window. Low wicker, wood, and brass tea tables stand near each of the plush European couches.

One of his daughters, fourteen-year-old Zohra, brings him all his meals. She bows in and out as if she is his personal servant. She is. Ismail Mohammed prefers to eat alone.

However, his children, whom I visit next, sleep on urine-soaked mattresses in rooms that used to be the servant quarters. The children wear clothes that are too baggy or too skimpy. Some have heads that are too big, others are too skinny. All have chronic colds or eye, ear, or leg infections. One fourteen-year-old is disabled with rheumatism.

They seem to be afraid of their father. But they also dote on him. Their mother, Meena, the daughter of an important conservative mullah, smilingly presides over this considerable chaos. She is a buxom, good-natured woman who sports flashy gold earrings, even when she is wearing her at-home costume of a cheap flowered acetate housedress and bedroom slippers.

The juxtaposition of the visible luxury enjoyed by Agha Jan and the destitution and servility of his children shocks me. Later my youngest brothers-in-law tell me the following: Laughingly, triumphantly, they say that Agha Jan wanted to save time and money with Meena’s sons (their half-brothers), so he had four of his sons circumcised on the same day, when they were between the ages of eight and fourteen.

With contempt and giggles they tell me that these poor boys couldn’t sleep the night before—and that they had such bowel movements the
air practically turned green and the stink stayed for days. Why are they telling me this? To prove that Agha Jan loves them, the sons of the first wife, more than he loves the sons of his third wife? Are they saying that this love will translate into more of an inheritance for them or into better marriage matches?

Behind the walls of this family compound, what I view as cruelty is normalized and accepted. I tell Abdul-Kareem what I have witnessed.

He does not say that I’m imagining or exaggerating anything, but he will not discuss it. In fact he tells me only to keep my opinions to myself.

“How can your father treat his own children this way?” I ask. “And what about me: Can’t you see that I am miserable and really hungry, starving? Why can’t I cook for myself with Crisco? Why is the modern electric kitchen never used? Why can’t we buy food that I can eat? I’ll settle for tuna fish, Huntley and Palmer biscuits, anything in a can.”

“You can’t act differently. You have to fit in. They are watching us, waiting for us to make a mistake. Then it will be all over for me.”

He says: “For me.” He does not say: “For us.”

“Abdul-Kareem, you cannot force me to eat what I can’t eat. My adjustment to life in Kabul cannot be measured in digestive terms. It’s not humanly possible.”

He is quiet.

“Alright, tomorrow [this means I will have to wait until the evening, when he returns] I’ll try to pick up some food for you. I think I know where there are good tinned cheeses and packaged cakes. But please keep it all out of sight, and don’t eat it at meal times. It will only lead to a lot of talk.”

“This is too crazy for me. So the high walls here are meant to shut everyone in and shut everyone out. No one is meant to see what goes on behind these walls, and no woman is supposed to see anything on the outside.”

“Please don’t ruin it for me,” he says.

Again, he talks only about himself, as if
we
no longer exist, as if
he
means the two of us.

And now he sounds desperate.

“Look. This will all be changing. It has already begun to change. But, you, you are an American who has no patience and no perspective.”

When did I become “the American”? When did he start fearing and mistrusting the very country and woman he had claimed to love? He continues.

“I have news that will cheer you up. The family wants us to have a ‘real’ wedding.”

Well, I would love another feast cooked in Crisco. I would love a party. This time I will find foreigners who speak English to join us.