The Parthenon Frieze pointed to me many times, speaking in a huddle with Shirin. Julia Roberts came forward, rearranging her veil on her head. They stood next to each other and fixed their eyes on me, stock-still, rigid as a couple posing in an old-time family portrait.
“They say you can take their picture, if you like,” said Shirin.
“Really?”
“Yes. This woman, the taller one, says that nothing has changed since the new government is in power. Women are still slaves, and the world must know about this,” Shirin said forcefully, with sudden excitement.
The Frieze stepped forward, her voice shrill and on the verge of breaking, as she rubbed her teary eyes with the back of her hand. The room had plunged into a deep silence, everyone was holding their breath.
“She says all women in our country live in fear, but fear is like a prison. She says you are very much welcome here and wants to thank you for coming all this way to talk about Zuleya and her sufferings.”
Imo joined her hands together and bowed her head gracefully.
“That’s wonderful. Well, for us it is an honor to have been able to listen to them. Please,” she said, looking straight at Shirin for the first time since we had been sitting in that room. “Please tell them this.”
Julia Roberts interjected, the Frieze nodded in agreement. They readjusted their veils again and went back into their pose.
“The other lady also welcomes you and she hopes this photo can help all women to have a better life,” Shirin added briskly, yet somehow also communicating her personal disbelief about this particular hope. I had a feeling that by now she had developed some doubts about the sincerity of our mission.
She wasn’t alone in that. A few of the other women exchanged dubious looks. And yet, slowly, a couple of them, followed by a few more, moved and sat behind Julia Roberts and the Frieze. They shuffled, rearranged their clothes, primped their hair, tied it back or let it loose. Some of them laughed, embarrassed; others withdrew to the back of the room, to keep out of the shot. A solemn silence fell.
“Hurry up, Maria,” hissed Imo, “before they change their minds.”
They stood, straight-faced, looking the other way, intimidated by my gesture. I peered through the lens. The women were holding their breath, their eyes wide open and devoid of any expression, looking more like they were made of wax than of flesh. There was no way they were going to relax. I had to find a key to shoot them and I had to think fast: maybe I could use the awkwardness, show their passiveness through those petrified expressions. Through that unnatural pose, perhaps I could convey the idea of an even deeper coercion.
I was sweating. I had to work with what I had, so I framed the shot and focused. The colors were amazing—just now a shaft of light had painted a golden stripe on the wall. I felt every eye in the room on me and my clumsy movements. This time I couldn’t afford to get it wrong.
And yet, I knew there was a remote possibility. One in a thousand.
If, let’s say, an Afghan cabbie who had emigrated to London—say someone like Hanif’s cousin, there were hundreds of thousands of them living in England—bought the paper. What if he recognized those faces? What if he called a relative in Kabul? What if he e-mailed him the pictures? What if the relative went to the village and showed the pictures to Malik? They all had cells, and soon—if not already—someone like Malik would be able to receive photos straight on the screen of his mobile.
How would these women be punished? Would they be disowned, beaten? Would they lose their honor? And what exactly did that mean or imply?
It was one in a thousand, yet nothing was impossible now that there was no longer a village, a stone, a hut that had been forgotten, left unturned, overlooked by the satellite.
Just then, at the back of the room, Zuleya’s mother—the old woman who had flattened herself against the wall until we’d forgotten about her—got to her feet. Now she was moving forward, all bones and sagging flesh. She was screeching like a banshee. I saw her come at me with outstretched arms, hooked fingers.
I took the camera down from my eye and held it close to my chest, fearing she might smash it. I caught a glimpse of her livid, harsh eyes, as the rest of the women were quickly moving out of her way, silenced. I heard the rustle of their dresses, the thud of their bare feet on the mud floor. Then, all of a sudden, everyone was gone, they’d all disappeared. The room now was empty, as if a hand had brushed away a cluster of flies swarming over food.
Not even an hour later we were giving our good-bye to Malik, who had walked us to the car followed by a large group of villagers. He had had our car loaded with baskets of apples, almonds, freshly baked bread and sun-dried apricots. There had been handshakes and hugs between the men and Hanif, a request for yet another group photo, which I had dutifully taken. The umpteenth picture of stiff men holding guns looking like suspects in a police mug shot. The women had disappeared, swallowed behind the mud walls of their compounds as if they had never existed. As Imo had said—like ghosts.
Either Malik had decided to ignore what had happened inside the school or he hadn’t found out yet. Either way, he didn’t make any reference to the fact that we had attempted to take pictures despite his restrictions. However, he had decided he had a thing or two to unload on us before he let us go.
Shirin was standing next to the car translating what Malik had to say. She kept her eyes to the ground, careful not to meet his gaze.
“Malik says that Westerners feel their culture is superior to ours because women don’t have to wear the veil. He says what you Westerners never understand is that Muslim women cover themselves out of choice, because in our society, the physical aspect of a woman shouldn’t interfere with her place in society.” Shirin’s voice was barely audible, with no trace of emotion or intonation, as if she wished to make herself invisible. “In our culture, the more a woman ages, the more wisdom she acquires, the more authority and power she has in the family. In the West, instead, a woman who has lost her looks is worthless and has no place in society.”
She fiddled with her headscarf as she waited for Malik to say more, then she continued.
“He says that whereas for you the value of a woman is only in her appearance, for us it lies in her soul and in her heart. According to the Quran a woman’s beauty belongs only to her husband and it is a gift reserved for his eyes only, whereas in the West it is like, how do you say—merchandise?—something to trade and put on show, like at the market.”
Shirin was done talking and swallowed. Her cheeks were flushed.
Imo was standing perfectly still with that smile plastered on her face that she had decided to wear as a countermeasure to any offensive.
“Well, firstly, tell him it’s not true that in the West a woman’s worth lies only in her beauty,” she replied graciously. “Our women have a place in the government, teach in universities, they are judges, prosecutors. And”—here she lowered her gaze, affecting modesty—“they are reporters, like Maria and me. In other words, women help determine the fate of the country.”
Malik nodded gravely and pondered. He scratched his beard. Then he added some more.
“Malik wants to know if it’s true that women in your country sometimes have operations to stay young.”
“Yes, it’s true,” Imo admitted with a hint of impatience, “but tell him that it doesn’t mean that—”
Malik stopped her with his hand open, then spoke in a tone that had no polemic or hostile tinge but sounded cautionary.
“Malik wants to know what you are going to write in your article after this trip.” Shirin maintained her neutral tone. She hadn’t lifted her eyes off the ground yet. “Whether you’re going to say the Muslims are backward or barbaric because their women choose to cover themselves in order to preserve their dignity, or whether it is the Westerners who are savages, since they allow their women to cut themselves to pieces when they lose their youth and their looks.”
Imo nodded pensively, then gave me a look. I saw a sparkle flash through her eyes.
“Just wait till he finds out about
Nip/Tuck,
” she said quickly under her breath, trying not to smile, then turned to Shirin.
“It’s such a complex issue, this one. First of all it’s a big mistake to generalize. Not all the women in the West do this, you know.” Imo checked the time on her cell. We had to get going if we wanted to reach Kabul before nightfall. She sighed.
“Oh, God, we’d need a whole day to discuss this at length. Please tell Malik I’d be very honored if one day he would allow me to sit and explain to him my point of view.”
She then pulled out her card and handed it to him. Malik studied it carefully, then passed it to a couple of men behind him.
We left, laden with gifts, after a send-off befitting high-ranking dignitaries, invited to come back soon and showered with blessings for our journey, escorted to the village gates by a clamoring host of children and men waving their guns. I turned back before the track curved around the hill and the last image I had was of a small crowd of men bent over Imo’s card.
“It’s a total waste of time getting into an argument on women’s rights with men. It’s the women one has to educate, in this country,” Imo said once our hosts had disappeared from the rearview mirror.
“Choice. What choice is he talking about?” she said after a while. “What is choice to a woman who grows up believing that baring her face is a crime? Whose parents, community, teachers inculcate in her that her body is a piece of meat that only induces lust?”
Shirin didn’t answer and adjusted her scarf once more, looking out of the window. Hanif seemed concentrated on the driving and lost in his thoughts.
“But what he said about plastic surgery was quite…” I began. “I mean, how for us it has become culturally acceptable to fill your boobs with silicone, go under the knife in order to look younger and sexier and—”
“But we have a choice, Maria. Come on. We don’t have an imam or an Islamic court who made this a law.”
“I know,” I said. “But isn’t it interesting to look at it from their point of view for once? Something mustn’t be healthy in a society where one woman out of three refuses to age and let go of her sexual power. The balance must lie somewhere in the middle between Zuleya and Pamela Anderson, no?”
We left Shirin near the clinic where we had picked her up. Imo hugged her and promised to send her some DVDs and film magazines. I promised that I would slip in a few good shots I had taken of her. Shirin was surprised by our sudden affection towards her and especially by our kisses on both cheeks. We left her flushed, sweaty despite the cold, a big smile on her face.
We had been driving for some time and Imo was immersed in the biography of Catherine the Great. I don’t know how she could read on such a bumpy drive without getting sick. She had torn out the chunk she had read already, and was holding only the last fifty pages. I would never have the heart to mangle a book like that; according to my family religion it would have been sacrilege.
My frustration had been gnawing at me, especially now that we had left the village behind and I was beginning to gauge the scope of my failure.
“I’m feeling really bad that I did not shoot the women.” I had finally pried the words out of my mouth and looked at Imo expectantly.
She lifted her eyes slowly from her book and stared at me for a second, almost surprised, as if she had forgotten I too was riding in the car next to her.
“I know. I feel bad too,” she said slowly. “Those women looked incredible. What a shame, really.”
“I should’ve been…I don’t know, more surgical about the whole situation. It was a split-second decision. I choked…”
“It’s not your fault. You would have never had the time and the peace of mind to shoot them the way you intended to shoot them.” Imo sighed and went back to Catherine the Great.
“We do have plenty of other good shots,” I tried to offer.
“We do, we do. We have lots of wonderful shots,” she agreed, lifting her eyes again and looking out the window, but I couldn’t ascertain whether she really meant it. She seemed detached. Bored, almost, as if her energy level had suddenly plummeted.
“In any case, when I get back to London I’m going to have my editor track down that French girl,” she said after a pause, “the one who’s spent her life in hospitals, and see if she’s got any decent shots we can use.”
For a minute no one said anything. It gutted me that the editor would have to buy photos from that woman.
“Although, guess what I’m thinking?” Imo shoved the book inside her bag. “I’m actually tempted not to publish any photos of the village women. You know, I could write the story precisely about that; about the fact that it’s impossible to shoot a picture of a woman and how we weren’t able to get any one of them to lift the veil off her face. About this idea that women have become ghosts, that they don’t actually have a face, or a voice. In that case you’d actually be part of the story, Maria. A character in it. I think it’d be interesting.” She seemed amused by the idea and smiled. “In that case I’d have to take a picture of
you
for the piece. That would be fun, no?”
I mumbled something. Imo seemed increasingly taken with the idea.
“In fact, you know what, I could build the whole piece around it. It’s truer and, above all, more forceful. And besides, people love reading stories where writers fail to get what they had set out to do. I think it’s a very cool idea.”
It was true, Imo could always give facts a slightly different reading and turn them to her own advantage. For me it was much harder; with my work there was very little space for interpretation. Either you had the photo or you didn’t.
“In any case,” she went on, “I want to talk to what’s-his-face, that Paul guy, about the licenses to produce legal opium. Now, that’s an absolutely sensational story and I’m going to pitch it to my editor the minute I get back. And the mobile phone company story as well. I think they’d jump at it. Don’t you think?”