An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (14 page)

We visit Paghman sometime in mid- or late October. The family’s European-style villa is not in use. The furniture is covered with white muslin sheets. It feels ghostly, uninhabited, but still grand. Does Ismail Mohammed travel there with his third wife, or does he use it only to entertain foreign business contacts? Does he come here at all?

We remove the sheets from the couches. What an attempt at goodwill! My sisters-in-law and my brothers-in-law tell jokes to cheer me up—and Abdul-Kareem translates for me. They try so hard to please me. We had hoped to have a picnic but it is too cold, almost blustery. The way Afghans, Persians, and Turks organize picnics has been honed to a high art. The meal is meant to be unhurried, the conversations leisurely. One is expected to dine, doze, take a walk, fly kites. Being in nature is paramount. Abdul-Kareem and his Afghan friends took me on many such picnics in New York City, and the slow and courtly pace seemed to take place outside time.

On this precious day in Paghman we dine indoors but picnic style. (Actually every meal is picnic style since we always dine on the carpeted floor.)

The Afghans and Persians have a great reputation for both writing and reciting poetry aloud. Although the great Persian poet Firdausi, who wrote the
Shahnamah,
established himself in Ghazni, and the mystic poet Rumi once lived in Balkh, none of my well-meaning relatives recited any poetry that day in Paghman.

Afterward we tour Paghman. Slowly we walk through lush green gardens surrounded by emerald trees and rushing streams; the air is filled with the sweet songs of birds. I can still remember a young boy by a stream: such large beautiful eyes. I remember the smell of his skewered ready-to-eat kebobs and the taste of his sticky candies. We bought luscious melons from another young boy.

By then I thought nothing of child workers. They were everywhere. Families used their young children to help with cooking, shopping, gathering wood, babysitting, tending ailing grandparents. Children would feed the donkey or the chickens, herd the sheep, milk the cow, plant and harvest, and earn money in any way possible.

Businesses in Kabul routinely used young boys for errands and pouring tea. Fruit and vegetable vendors, butchers, tailors, kebob stands, bakeries all had boys as young as nine working with them full time, boys who were happy to be earning some money, perhaps learning a trade, or making lifelong contacts.

Afghanistan has been literally reduced to dust many times over. According to military historian Stephen Tanner, “In 1221 [many sources say 1219], the Mongol army descended on Afghanistan like a force of nature, or in [Louis] Dupree’s words, ‘the atom bomb of its day.’ Many communities in Afghanistan never regained their former stature. . . . Towns and farms based on centuries-old cultivation techniques lay naked in the path of the Mongol hordes.”

The people of Herat rebelled and murdered their Mongol governor. Mongol forces launched a siege against the city.

“Herat held out for six months,” Tanner continues, “but in the end its walls were breached and the people were lined up for massacre—a process that took seven days. Afterward a Mongol detachment raced back to surprise anyone who had emerged from hiding. It found two thousand more victims to add to the stupefying piles of bodies. Balkh, too, rebelled. . . . This time the massacre was so complete that a Chinese visitor who passed by the city’s ruins a few years later could only hear the sounds of dogs barking.”

As Rhea Talley Stewart describes it, the Mongols destroyed, “along with the people, the irrigation systems they had created. . . . Irrigation means life. . . . It turned [to] salt. Of all the places destroyed . . . only Herat, because it is in a fertile valley, really rebuilt itself.”

On the subject of what has been lost, in
Land of the High Flags,
Rosanne Klass writes, “Ghazni is now little more than a village, which was once a gorgeous court. Balkh, the Mother of Cities, is a heap of rubble. . . . The scholars are gone, the poets, the heroes, the kings were gone, the land was stripped of life, the fields were ruined and barren.”

As for the gardens and villas of Paghman, now they too are no more—they are gone, all gone. In my lifetime the Soviets reduced them to dust, debris. Now Old Paghman exists only in old photographs and in living memory.

Last night I viewed a series of old photos online taken in Paghman. I became quite melancholy. One of the early photos is in black and white and is labeled Royal Hunting Party. The royal residence may be seen both in sepia and in black and white. One photo is of Emir (King) Amanullah mounted on a camel. There are photos of men having
a meeting “between the trees” (there is no other way to describe it). There they sit, on chairs, with small tables nearby, Russian style perhaps, framed—no, hidden—by the great trees that surround them.

Our visit to Paghman is one of my happiest days in Afghanistan.

But such days are too few. Winter is here early. Already the nights are cold. I do not understand how Afghans without indoor heating can endure the howling blizzards, shoulder-high snowdrifts, the icy frozen winters—yet they do. They are made of sturdy stock. They are as implacable as Nature here. Otherwise they could not survive.

Seven

Escape

I
am determined to escape. But how? At home I am watched constantly. I am not allowed out by myself. When we go out, Abdul-Kareem stands right next to me and either drives the conversation or monitors what I say. So far I have not socialized with a single other American.

I am absolutely alone, without a single sympathetic ally or confidante. I have no money. The phone barely works—but who would I call?

I have already gone secretly to the American embassy.

I return a second time. A nice man tells me that he cannot help me because I am now an Afghan citizen and the wife of an Afghan citizen. He asks one of the Marine guards to escort me home. I did not understand that by marrying Abdul-Kareem, I was divorcing my country and revoking my citizenship. I am still flabbergasted that the embassy refused to aid an American.

Even if I could make a run for the airport, I have no passport and no way of paying for my seat. Perhaps I could convince an American or British pilot to take me anyway, but how would I know when a foreign flight would be waiting on the tarmac—and how would I get past the Afghan bureaucrats?

I am heartsick and frightened and can trust no one, not even myself. After all I am the fool who came here of her own free will, the naive dreamer who believed that she could have a grand, fairy-tale-like adventure without paying some terrible, unknown price. I—the bookish one,
the sexy one—believed that being a woman would protect me. Well, I learned a valuable lesson: Quite the opposite is true.

Abdul-Kareem and his family can keep me locked up
forever.
They can do whatever it takes to break my spirit, place me under house arrest until I turn pliant, grateful for any social life at all. If I misbehave—I will be back in solitary. And I am hungry all the time. Since no one cares about this but me, I fear that I will grow too weak to make an escape.

While I am angry at myself, I am also angry at Abdul-Kareem. He pretended he was someone he is not, and lured me here under false pretenses.

I constantly think to myself: Can I simply walk out of Kabul along with the nomads? How long would I last on foot on the muddy or dusty roads and mountain rocks? Can I trust them not to return me for money and not marry me off to one of their own?

Can I turn to one of the foreign wives to help me obtain a fake foreign passport? Will she also lend me the money for a ticket and trust that I’d repay her?

Or should I write to my parents, have them wire the money to whomever my foreign benefactor turns out to be, and proceed from there?

Should I approach my father-in-law? He has remained aloof but has been courtly, gentlemanly, friendly toward me. As a matter of fact I have never seen him treat any adult woman unkindly.

He does not speak to Bebegul; true, he has three wives; true, his children all cringe as they bow and kiss his hand each time they see him; true, his young daughter is only a servant to him—yet his manner is dignified, benevolent, authoritative, and always slightly amused.

I decide to approach a foreign wife who is married to an Afghan. No foreign diplomat will allow his wife to get involved, lest it compromise his career and his country’s relationship to Afghanistan.

I suggest that we visit a former mayor of Kabul whom everyone calls Papa, and whose second wife is a friendly German woman and someone I have met before.

Papa is known for having strung lights all over the mountains and for having been one of the few Afghans who was educated in Europe in the 1920s. He speaks German and French as well as his native Dari/Farsi and Pushto.

A picture of the exiled “emancipator king,” Amanullah, still hangs in Papa’s small but cozy living-dining room. Papa is no longer in politics. He owns a small business, and his wife has a dress shop. He receives us
in bedroom slippers—a sandy-haired, warm-eyed grandfather of a man. It is late afternoon and it is growing cold and dark.

A servant brings in wood and piles it into the pot-bellied stove. Soon the water begins bubbling, and the wood-paneled room is filled with warmth and shadows. A Swiss clock ticks on the wall; a collection of leather-bound books stands on the shelf beneath the window. White curtains frame the windows and cover the table. Two freshly baked cakes have been placed near the plates and glassware.

Abdul-Kareem and Papa drink dark beer in Bavarian mugs as we wait for Mutti. She comes in, her cheeks reddened from the cold air.

“Ach, sorry I am late. You have been here long? My friend at the Deutsch embassy had a birthday party today—do you know that my cousin Heidi is made manager of the new hotel! Yes, she leaves for Munich in a month to get the staff. And what a hotel it will be, with a band, a cocktail lounge, only European food.”

While she is still talking, Mutti has removed her fur coat and started to pour tea. It is hard to get her alone, but I finally manage it. Quickly I ask her if she will help me get out. She says she will.

Now, so many years later, I wonder if she actually would have done so. And would she have been punished, divorced—even banished from the country? Would her husband have been imprisoned? This all could have happened. I also wonder why so many Germans seem to be living in Afghanistan. Did they flee the war? Or did they have to flee Germany
after
the war?

I decide to write to my parents and ask them to call Mutti and wire her money for my plane ticket. I write the letter but I never send it. I save it and I have it still. It documents a telephone call between me and my parents. (I have no memory of it.) I write, in part:

I am sure that my ticket and traveling expenses will be provided for me and I am not particularly averse in having such expenses fall upon the shoulders of he-who-has-made-the-journey-desirable. . . . Also, I want to finish college now. . . . I am quite torn about leaving Abdul-Kareem but I can’t live here. I suppose I can lose myself in academic pursuits but I seem to be involved in a much larger “study” here, larger than anything I might learn in school. . . . Also, my books and papers have been held up at the border and I hate to leave without them.

I am no longer talking to Abdul-Kareem. We are fighting. By now after ten weeks in Kabul, I am stir-crazy, angry, frightened, and willing
to risk anything in order to get out. I still cannot eat the ghee-drenched food. Abdul-Kareem still refuses to do anything about this.

Fawziya gently explains to me, again and again, that Bebegul will not allow the cook to use Crisco for our meals and she will not allow the cook to prepare meals separately for me. Fawziya is sad but there is nothing she can do. Apparently Bebegul told them that I am now a proper Afghan wife, not an American.

Many years later I learn that I might have gotten sick anyway. It seems that many smiling Afghan fruit sellers are known to pierce their shrunken melons and dunk them in the drainage ditch overnight. By morning the melons will have swelled and will look most appetizing.

M
y parents have told absolutely no one that I have married a Muslim man and gone off with him to Afghanistan. In their Orthodox Jewish circles what words would they use without revealing the extent of my rebellion against their entire way of life? If they tell people and I return home, would people still accept me? They maintain a prudent silence.

Rereading the letter I’ve written, I wonder: Why do I write that “I am torn about leaving Abdul-Kareem”? I am utterly miserable. He has put me in harm’s way. Why am I still loyal to him?

Well, this is 1961 and I have not yet become a feminist—no American has. I may fancy myself a bohemian, but I am also a little bit of a 1950s-style wife.

Do I still love him? I will never really know. I argue with Abdul-Kareem many times about why I think he should leave Kabul, that there is no way he will ever transform his country, that Afghanistan is not populated with people who will enjoy Ibsen, Strindberg, Tennessee Williams, and the operas of Verdi and Puccini.

“Abdul-Kareem,” I would say, “why not trust in your talent? Let’s return to America. Here you are a rich man’s son, and that may pave your way to a government position. But whatever you do here will never be what you can do in America.”

Ah, but Abdul-Kareem is an outsider in the West, just as I am an outsider here. He could pass in both worlds, but he belongs to neither the East nor the West. Abdul-Kareem is genuinely a man without a country no matter where he lives.

In a sense his American education has ruined him for life in Kabul, but, even if he could succeed in America, he would never feel that he was a real American. His roots in America are fragile, recent,
in comparison to the countless centuries his ancestors have lived in Afghanistan.

Abdul-Kareem is an Afghan and a Muslim, and as such he needs to be part of a large Afghan family, without which he has no identity, no social world, no sure footing. His family does not live in the West, nor are they truly cosmopolitan. The women live in the past even when they dress to kill, Western style. The men keep them there, firmly in the “past present,” which is the title of Edward Hunter’s riveting book.

Perhaps Abdul-Kareem is afraid of having to compete against other theater and film directors without his well-connected family’s backing. He may be a loner—but he has not been trained to go it alone.

I have—I am a post–World War II American from a family with no connections but who is from a country filled with books, museums, libraries, concert halls, and scholarships.

I
have been asking for a language tutor every single day. So far no one has arrived. I have threatened to walk out again on my own to visit the museum in Kabul. To my surprise Bebegul decides to accompany me herself. Apparently one of her many relatives has arranged it all.

To my shock her relative has had the museum emptied of all other visitors so that we might visit it undisturbed. It is thrilling but spooky to be the only ones in an otherwise empty museum. Amanullah built this on Darul Aman Road; Darul Aman means place or abode of peace.

I vaguely remember seeing some Roman-era glass figurines and a large gold and silver coin collection. Some coins date to the sixth century BCE and are pre-Islamic. There are Greek-Bactrian coins from northern Afghanistan, but there are also Hindu and Buddhist sculptures from the early centuries of the Common Era and lovely Indian ivories.

The museum has no paintings of women, although it has some beautiful pre-Islamic goddess figurines and sculptures.

Bebegul is coy, even charming. She teases me a bit.

“Are you
sure
there are no elephants in America?”

When I had first arrived, she had asked me this question quite seriously. After many conversations in halting English, French, and Dari (always with an interpreter), she understands that neither elephants nor camels roam America’s city streets. Bebegul may have seen elephants when she and Ismail Mohammed were on their way back from exile in Iran and passed through India. When my father-in-law had to flee his country, Bebegul accompanied him; they fled Herat together. Bebegul hid the family’s jewels and gold bars under a baby in the baby carriage.

Bebegul cannot believe that Americans actually keep dogs as pets. Kabul’s dogs are wild and wolfish and always starving. The children stone them or worse. Dogs are considered dirty, religiously unclean. At night you can hear them howling.

As I have mentioned, an Afghan shepherd’s dog is quite another matter. These are large fierce dogs trained to kill anyone but the shepherd and his family; they keep the sheep from straying. Afghan dogs are also trained to fight each other unto death. In situ Afghan dogs vary widely in terms of appearance and are not necessarily friendly or gentle. They are not like those more familiar “Afghan hounds,” which were shipped off to England and Scotland in the 1920s, bred with other breeds, and trained as show dogs.

I love dogs but not necessarily when they are wild and starving. I see how dangerous they can be when a pack of five such dogs attacks a crippled pet deer I have named Lara. These dogs have managed to climb the wall—or find an open door—and have cornered Lara in our garden.

They are eating her alive, gnawing frantically on one hind leg. I run down. The dogs draw back, their eyes gleaming in fear and hatred. Lara lies in a twisted heap, death filming her large eyes. One whole leg has been chewed to the bone, it lies exposed under the stars, a dull white. Lights flash on in the house. “
Chee-as?
” (What is it?) The dogs turn round and round, then spring into the darkness. I slit Lara’s throat with a kitchen knife. A sleepy, frightened gate watchman begs pardon of everyone.

I wrote about this awful episode many years ago, closer in time to when I had been in Kabul. Now I can barely remember it. Was it an omen about what happens to living beings if they are vulnerable? Was it a warning to me that I had better stay strong and healthy?

I
t is too late. Before I can put any escape plan into motion, fate steps in to rescue me in a rather risky way.

One afternoon I faint in the garden. I have never fainted before.

I have a temperature of 105 degrees. No one but me seems perturbed. At home at the first hint of a cold a doctor would be consulted. Most Jewish mothers in New York would rush someone with such a high fever—be it an adult child or a husband—to the emergency room.

Abdul-Kareem does not seem too worried, even though we know that foreigners have been “falling like flies” with a virulent strain of hepatitis.

I ask to see a doctor. Hours pass. Darkness has fallen. I am burning up and physically weak. It is soon late at night. I do something that I’ve never done before, something that is quite beyond my physical capacity
to
do.

I creep over to my father-in-law’s house, ask to see him—and then ask him to summon a doctor as soon as possible. He explains that “our doctors don’t usually come out in the evening.” But he promises to look in on me.

I am feeling worse (if that is possible). I beg Abdul-Kareem to bring a doctor in to see me. It seems that all the family cars are in use, none are available. At about 3
a.m.
a car is reluctantly dispatched, and it returns with an annoyed eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist.