The Afghan Queen: A True Story of an American Woman in Afghanistan (16 page)

Looking back over the years, I see my early business efforts as clumsy steps along my path. Yet, I can’t think of anything I could or would have done differently. On the first overland trip every minor mishap was inflated by my naiveté and inexperience into major disasters. I laugh now when I think how upset I got over every near collision on a mountain road, a blow-out on a rainy night or the recurring cracked windshield.

We made better time after crossing the Iran border. Only a few minor repairs were needed, so little time was lost. We were all intent on getting our act together and wanted to get out of Iran as rapidly as possible.

We entered Miraneh, Iran in the morning just as the sun was coming up. Pushing harder, we reached a campsite at the edge of Tehran the same evening. Now I understood why Dharma was pushing the caravan so hard. The Tehran campgrounds had hot showers and modern washing machines, a rarity in this part of the world. It is one of the few modernizations by the Shah that we appreciated.

There was a shower on the Unimark van, and the day before I had traded a copy of Paul’s new book for a shower, using the last of the shower water. The Unimark people were not happy about this trade and told me so. I said that they will be happy when they read the book. Besides, I filled their water tank again when we got to the camp grounds, so all was forgiven.

I figured I would be so sparkling clean that my fellow trekkers would discover the shower thief and heap their wrath upon me, but no one seemed to notice or at least say anything.

Most of our group has not properly showered since Istanbul, and we were quite ripe by the time we reached Tehran. Smelling bad does not seem to bother Middle Easterners as much as Europeans and Americans. Probably this is the result of water being in such short supply in the Middle East.

As each fellow traveler walked by, the odor made me side step a bit. We all became so rancid that only I, the shower traitor, could smell the difference. Not that I was that clean, but in the land of the odorous, the least odorous is queen. A week later I told this story around the campfire. The women howled with laughter, and Dharma began calling me the Afghan Queen.

We were a sticky, gritty lot by the time we reached the showers at the Tehran campgrounds. Having had little else but jam, honey, and flatbread for three days added to our general discomfort. Everything we touched got smeared and sticky. The bus windows looked like the targets of a food fight.

There were no napkins on board so people used their clothes, sleeves, or whatever was handy to wipe the goo off, much as my kids do. The food had gotten into our hair, clothes, and just about everything. We wound up spending an entire day washing clothes, vehicles, and ourselves. The bus windows took the most time. Inside and outside windows needed multiple cleanings.

The Shah was attempting to transform Iran into an American colony as rapidly as possible. This included the transformation of family farms into cash crop farming factories. Some of the produce that would ordinarily be available locally was transported to large urban centers. The bulk of farming produce was shipped abroad where prices were much higher.

We heard stories of fishing cooperatives that could not afford to eat their own fish, of livestock growers who could not eat their own meat. This led to a vast scheme of bribing produce inspectors to declare a substantial amount of farm produce as unfit for human consumption. This resulted in a black market that raised prices far beyond the grasp of most families.

As might be expected, sturgeon production was all but destroyed by overfishing. Fortunately, the Soviet Union, sharing the sturgeon fisheries with Iran, imposed military discipline on sturgeon fishing in the Caspian Sea. Most importantly, 90% of the world’s sturgeon and caviar is produced in the Caspian.

Since the early 1970s these developments had severely stressed the Iranians, and, as their anger grew, they acted out against Westerners with increasing hostility, unfortunately for us. Few deprivations are as anger provoking as food, or the lack thereof.

One particular assault greatly heightened my awareness. Four of us went into Tehran to search the bazaars for unique crafts and stopped at a busy little café suggested by a friendly merchant. It was midday, and it was crowded with local merchants.

After we were seated, an arrogant waiter took our order. As he served us, his hands passed my place setting and he abruptly fondled my breasts and started to walk away with a smirk on his face. At first I was so shocked that I could not believe this had really happened. The three other women howled in rage, while I was speechless.

From the corner of my eye I could see a couple of other waiters in the alcove grandly celebrating their comrade’s triumph as he slowly swaggered back in that direction. I realized immediately that this little scenario had been planned.

They were about to suffer the wrath of a Red Hook Shark. My rage grew so strong and so fast that before the little rat had strutted halfway across the dining room, I popped out of my chair, raced behind him, and pounded with all my strength on his neck. My attacker fell flat on his face at the feet of his shocked conspirators.

They looked like deer caught in the headlights as they dragged him into the kitchen. By this time my companions had raced to my side, and I somehow managed to push them out the front door, the four of us running as fast as we could.

The shouting behind us was frightening. As I herded my lambs before me, I thought we would be cut down by knives. Fortunately, we melted into the bazaar crowd without further problem. From what we learned later, this type of assault was to be expected in Iran.

That was my last ‘up close’ encounter with Iranians. After that assault, we were much more cautious in our dealings. The few remaining outings in Iran were for provisions only. We all, women and men both, were sure to cover ourselves from head to foot.

The events of the late 1970s have since proven that behind the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic were decades of suffering and repressed anger. Much of the hatred was directed at the Shah, as the creature of American corporate interests.

It’s as if every nation forced to endure rapid and rabid corporate modernization ends in revolution. The global corporate cabal must expand or perish, like a cancer. Corporate greed acts like a social-economic cancer infecting the entire world.

My anger is not with revolution, but with the virulent hostility toward women. Our experience with Iranian hostility made us far less venturesome in Iran. As a result, we spent most of our time close to campsites and exited Iran as rapidly as possible.

As a result of our stressful experience in Iran, we were getting more edgy with each other. Most of our caravan had experienced some type of unpleasantness. Fortunately, we had avoided serious injuries. The further east we traveled, the more obvious grew the stress outside and inside the caravan.

Each day, though, we made a greater effort to be pleasant and kind to each other. We anticipated the Afghan border with increasing anxiety. One morning I suggested a game to the bus travelers. I’d been driving for two hours and we pulled over so Versant could take the next shift as bus driver.

Someone found a bag of blank lottery slips. After some discussion we hit on a typically French game. Everyone on the bus would write their most secret fantasy regarding someone in the caravan. No names were included. Later that evening at the campgrounds, each person would draw one lottery slip from a hat and follow the directions. This game and the preparations it entailed managed to distract us from the reality we were rapidly leaving behind.

That evening everyone insisted that I pick the first slip, since it was I who had organized the game. My instructions directed me to pick two others for a raw egg race on all fours, with spoons in our mouths holding the eggs. What could be more innocent? The winner could decide the penalty. The need for distraction brought our secret desires anonymously to light.

The same night we met another bus at the campgrounds. A dozen people from Finland were aboard and invited us in to see how they had arranged their living space. It was an inviting and comfortable arrangement. The seats were replaced with wall-to-wall mattresses. The interior décor was in soft gold and orange, providing a warm and mellow womb.

The Finns traveled with a beautiful three-year-old girl. The child was a delight to watch and her angelic antics easily upstaged the adults. She was the focal point of attention and affection. Rosette was the first child I’d seen in the Middle East who acted like a child, and she was a delight.

Most of the children I’d seen acted like little old people. I’d learned that, from an early age, Middle East children are apprenticed to merchants in the bazaars or assist artisans, if they are fortunate. People, especially children, seem to age faster. Is it the stress, the environment, or what?

We spent a few hours with the Finns in their bus. They’d gotten together through a newspaper ad and had been strangers prior to this trip. It was a large bus with two toilet closets in the back corners. Lots of pillows were arranged against the walls. Every few feet mesh net bags were attached to the bus walls with Velcro. As with our bus, there were large bins under the bus.

After passing some joints, a sense of gemütlichkeit (wellbeing) set in. It was like hanging out with old friends. After this visit, our tension evaporated. The Finns were just the tonic I needed, since the night before a migraine had denied me sleep. I had been irritable all day until the Finns rescued us.

The campground outside of Tehran was our home for a few days. We had some medical problems among us that needed attention. Satya had a bad leg infection and needed antibiotics and Doris’s uterine coil was causing her pain. I promised to find medical help for them.

Migraine headaches have been a periodic problem for me ever since my periods began. Philip, the Englishman, I’ll call him “English,” kept me distracted from my pounding head while I sipped valerian and chamomile tea. Philip devised an alphabetic psychological code that enabled him to project the personality of an individual from the letters in the person’s name.

English worked with all the names in our family, mine, Paul’s and the boys. These psycho-alphabetic projections were provocative. One projection concerned our oldest son who was seventeen at the time. English suggested that Erik preferred his second name “Josef.” That’s because he couldn’t live up to the strength and power of a name like Erik, the ‘Er’ and ‘k’ sounds being much too harsh for him to handle comfortably. Our last name was also strong.

Josef was a preferable name for him because it sounded softer and came across more gently. English thought it interesting that I had taken the name Lela as it suited my personality better than my American name, Beverly. The name Beverly, he suggested, was a terrible jumble of consonants, providing an almost haughty and pretentious sound.

Lela, on the other hand, had a melodic and earthy quality much better suited to my nature. English told me that I couldn’t escape being an Earth Mother or, in fact, being the mother of everyone on the bus. He suggested that it was a natural role for me to assume.

October 7th was my birthday and English was in charge of birthday celebrations. In fact, every event required a celebration. That was one of the caravan rules. Whenever we got the blues, which were rampant in Iran, someone would look for an excuse to celebrate something or other. English was the most persistent of these promoters.

My birthday celebration began on our return from an opera in Tehran. It was a pathetic parody of western culture providing a ludicrous rendition of the
Barber of Seville
. Nine of us packed into the Unimark like sardines. We returned to camp near midnight and sang an obscene rendition of
Happy Birthday
in my honor.

Every time I think about how muddled and off the wall we are in today’s world, I just recall the people on the bus and still feel they were the most
wasted
of any people I’ve met. A celebration could, and often did, start anytime day or night, and any excuse would do.

I realize these “sparks of life,” as Satya called them, were really desperate, last-ditch efforts to ward off tediousness, restlessness and depression. One 4 a.m. I awoke to one of these sparks of life, and, after some back-and-forth bitching, called it a mini riot without spark or life, just noise. That hurt English. It took two days to make it up with him.

A few days later, we made camp outside of Sari, near the Caspian Sea. The road followed the border, with Soviet Turkmenistan, a couple of days from Mashhad, and then into Herät, Afghanistan.

This place was supposed to be the world caviar capital, but I doubted that we would dig down and shell out the $50 per eight ounces that was the local price. After all, $50 could just about feed the whole caravan for a week.

It was a seaside resort and we spent some time swimming in the Caspian Sea, just to say we swam with the sturgeon. I expected to taste fresh water, but it was brackish. Some Iranian teens said it had one-third the salt of sea water. They said that millions of years ago, the Caspian linked the Atlantic to the Pacific. Imagine that!

Tehran-Sari-Mashhad-Herät
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