An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (3 page)

We visit the Louvre to ponder the enigmatic
Mona Lisa
and pay our respects to the Vermeers, Rembrandts, and Caravaggios.

I like Ingres and am entranced by his
Odalisque
and
Turkish Baths.
Ironic but telling: I am being introduced to the Muslim world through the eyes of those dreamy Western painters who expressed their own sensuality by painting their European patrons dressed in elaborate turbans, framed by large pillows and a Moorish arch or two.

We pile into the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, which houses all the riotously colorful French impressionist paintings: Monet, Manet, Renoir, Seurat, Degas, and of course my beloved madman, Van Gogh. I consider them all my friends.

Exhausted, in too much of a rush, we visit Versailles. I find it cold, very cold, and am not impressed by its vast mirrored emptiness or by the manicured formal gardens. Of course at this time we are both huge fans of the French Revolution and are not likely to be impressed by the aesthetic decisions of heartless kings and queens. (Oh, how I have changed my mind about some of this.)

But we are in Paris. We must visit the Left Bank. For me that means hours of dawdling among the bookseller stalls, never wanting to leave, but it also means visiting the cafes where, innocents that we are, we actually hope to run into a living existentialist or two. We walk for hours up and down the Champs-Élysées.

On our last night we go to a cabaret with a garish can-can show (Abdul-Kareem’s choice, not mine). The women dance topless, and I am shocked, titillated, slightly disapproving.

All this time Abdul-Kareem is preoccupied, impatient, but he tries hard to hide it. He wishes to indulge my passion for art, history, books, and travel, but he obviously has some serious things on his mind.

He chooses Munich as the city from which we will leave for the Middle East. Munich frightens me, mainly because I like it. I like the large soft comforters on our bed, the homey-cozy restaurants and cafes, and the heavy rich food. But the grotesquely large municipal Hansel and Gretel clock, with its combined German exactitude and deceptively childish facade, offends me. This is the country that, not long before, put all its Jewish, gypsy, and political Hansels and Gretels right into the smoking ovens.

Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact here; it gave Hitler the Sudetenland. It was a consummate act of appeasement. The Nazis marched
here only sixteen years earlier. Some areas of debris from wartime bombings still are cordoned off. Why am I comfortable here at all? Years later I will have a much more disconcerting sense of familiarity and comfort in Vienna: the city of both Freud and Herzl—Hitler’s city, too.

When we land in Beirut, the air is softer and oddly exciting. But we cannot stay; we are due in Teheran.

Abdul-Kareem’s Iranian friends send a car and driver to meet us at the airport. We are given a brief tour of the city. We drive down Isfahan Street and Firdowsi Avenue and the grand Lalezar Avenue. Of course there is also a Pahlavi Avenue.

Our hosts—people much older than we are—pick us up for a night out on the town. I remember a room with access to its own private balcony. The food, the traffic, and the laughter all flow together.

Our hosts decide to entertain us by making a disabled servant boy (a musician who plays the accordion) dance for us after they get him drunk. They throw more and more money at him as he makes a fool of himself. It is a cruel spectacle that I do not entirely understand.

The women are dressed in the latest European fashions. They smoke. They drink. They wear makeup. They laugh a lot. They speak French and English. They gossip: The Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, has been forced to divorce the woman he loves (Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari), because she cannot give him an heir. He has recently married Farah Diba, a beautiful young woman who, it is hoped, will do just that.

The women are sympathetic to both Soraya and Farah—but are mostly sympathetic to the Shah. “Life is tragic. One’s fate is what it is. One’s duty cannot be shirked.” I conclude that they may look European on the outside, but on the inside they seem to have different values.

I know I really am in Asia.

Here one can see enormous wealth right next to dire poverty. Barefoot women and children work for and live with people who wear only the finest Italian leather shoes. Yes, of course we have pockets of entrenched poverty in America, but I have never seen barefoot servants or child beggars on the streets of New York.

My family is poor, but we do not think of ourselves this way. True, I have sometimes worn hand-me-down clothes, but we have always had enough to eat, a roof over our heads, a free coed education, and private music, drama, and art lessons for me, the presumed child prodigy.

In Teheran’s Grand Bazaar shopkeepers man tiny stalls. I wonder if the bazaar has looked like this for the last thousand years.

Fresh carcasses of sheep hang in the streets. One has to buy fruit in one place, vegetables in another, bread and delicious pastries elsewhere. Each stall is devoted to a single item: carpets, hammered goods, spices. Everyone specializes. This is so different from the American department store or supermarket, where one can buy almost everything in one place and all indoors. The bazaar has a public bath whose exterior resembles a palace.

The smell of the bazaar is tantalizing, familiar, energizing. Gas and kerosene mingle with such spices as saffron, cinnamon, garlic, basil, and cilantro; the smells of fresh or not-so-fresh meat and vegetables combine with the smells of dirt, human sweat, cigarette tobacco, and the latest French perfume.

I love it.

We arrive in Kabul on an early morning flight from Teheran. From the plane the notoriously treacherous mountains—the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs—look like unassuming piles of snow-whitened red-brown sand. Thirty or more relatives are waiting for us at the Kabul airport—including not one, not two, but three mothers-in-law. Before I can even ask Abdul-Kareem what this means, the entire family is upon us.

It is all very emotional. There is much excitement, many introductions. I think I have been introduced to the same people two or three times. There are tears, smiles, handshakes, bows, and Russian bear hugs.

My (real) mother-in-law, Abdul-Kareem’s biological mother, is my father-in-law’s
first
wife. Her name is Bebegul. She is a short, full-breasted woman. Her feet seem small. She is wearing a long, loose, comfortable dress under which I can see her Turkish-style trousers.

I immediately want a pair of trousers for my own. Yes, I am eager to go native; I will undoubtedly be more comfortable dressed as a traditional Afghan woman (or man) on the many traveling adventures I have in mind.

Bebegul’s lined and weather-beaten face and shoulders are softly framed by a long chiffon veil. She steps forward and kisses me and her son on both cheeks. She searches our faces intensely.

Her husband, Ismail Mohammed, my father-in-law, is an incredibly commanding figure. He stands six feet tall and has dark velvet eyes and thick dark hair only lightly flecked with white at the temples. Ismail Mohammed (or Agha Jan, Dear Father) sports a debonair moustache, an expertly tailored European suit, and an expensive karakul
cap. Unlike Bebegul, he belongs to the modern world.

The other women are wearing devastatingly fashionable Western dresses, light scarves, and long coats and are exquisitely poised on high heels. Ismail Mohammed embraces Abdul-Kareem and addresses me in English, “Was the flight pleasant? Are you well rested?” Before our modern-day caravan can set off, an airport official politely but firmly demands that I turn over my American passport.

I refuse.

Everyone stops. Both the official and my husband—whom I trust more than anyone else on Earth—assure me that this is a mere formality. It will soon be returned to me.

“Madam, we will have someone bring it to your home.”

I reluctantly relinquish it.

I never see that passport again.

I am now subject to the laws and customs of Afghanistan. I am an Afghan wife. This does not mean that I enjoy the rights of an Afghan (male) citizen; rather, I now belong to one man and his family. I am their property. At the time I do not realize that I will not be able to leave Afghanistan at will or as an American citizen but only if my husband or father-in-law agrees to obtain an Afghan passport for me and allows me to travel out of the Royal Kingdom of Afghanistan.

In the weeks that followed, the Afghan government did not return my American passport to me. It was hard for me to understand and accept that Abdul-Kareem did not share my outrage and alarm. In fact he refused to discuss it. How could I have known that the loss of my American passport in Kabul might lead to further unimaginable difficulties in America?

In 1959 Edward Hunter, who had been an American intelligence agent in World War II, published a book,
The Past Present: A Year in
Afghanistan.
It is a psychologically brilliant work; few people seem to have read it. Hunter writes that the only way an Afghan man could have a “love marriage” (in the 1940s and 1950s) was if he “found a foreign girl.” If he did, it often constituted a scandal. According to Hunter, “The foreign wives had no idea of what sort of life they were coming into, of the discrimination they would come up against. The government made a point of seizing their foreign passports. Their children did not belong to them, but had to be brought up in accordance with the so-called customs of the country. . . . It was an open secret that many of these young wives were kept pregnant year after year under primitive conditions.”

In 1961, the very year I was trapped in Kabul, British-born Robin Jenkins published a novel,
Dust on the Paw,
which describes the hands-off
diplomacy practiced by European and American diplomats. Jenkins’s narrator describes the fate of a foreign wife whom the British and Americans refuse to help because, as a wife, “she comes under Afghan jurisdiction; we’ve got no responsibility for her at all . . . by marrying this chap, she virtually put herself beyond our protection.” The wife in question does not wear a burqa, “but the rest of the family do, and because she refused, they make her life a hell. She’s kept more or less a prisoner. She’s not allowed to visit other foreigners. She never has a penny of her own.”

At the time I knew nothing about the existence of either book.

The point is this: In 1961 I am a young girl who loves and trusts my husband. I have no way of understanding what the smooth removal of my passport might mean.

I also have absolutely no idea what kind of relationship I am expected to have with my father-in-law or with each of my mothers-in-law.

I have no time to think about these matters right now. The cars are waiting. I am too tired, too wired, and far too excited. We leave the barracks-like airport in a black cavalcade of Mercedes-Benzes.

In 1937 the marvelous British traveler Rosita Forbes wrote, “Kabul has a beauty like nothing else on Earth. Around the plain there are mountains. . . . They are rugged under snow. But on a clear day they are white, and I have never looked at them without surprise. They are nearer to the city than most mountains, and more final. The country needs no other defense.”

She was right about the mountains. They are majestic and as never ending as the sea. One is immediately humbled, relieved of responsibility. Here humanity is not in charge of, but is instead embraced by, eternity. Here Nature and God are the main protagonists.

Not that many cars are on the street. I see no tall modern hotels or dazzling modern restaurants. I do see a few ramshackle tea shops (
choi chanas
) along the way, filled with men. No women are on the street—not even women wearing burqas. Kabul seems at least fifty years behind Teheran and not that cosmopolitan.

As yet no nomads and no camels are in view. Small adobe mud dwellings tumble down the side of the mountain, but they are far away. We pass a lovely mosque.

The route chosen ends in a wide Western-style boulevard lined with trees. According to my husband, the high walls, one after the other, hide large and beautiful homes.

Abdul-Kareem’s family has a compound, comprised of a number of whitewashed, two-story European-style houses with patios, verandas,
and overflowing flower beds. There are fruit trees. A tiny picturesque garden stream runs through the property, and three cows, a cow herder, and some chickens live behind one of the dwellings.

The property also has a seemingly endless number of small one-story structures. An unheated one-room building is where the servants sleep, apparently right on the dirt floor.

My mother-in-law, Bebegul, has converted a series of unheated two-room buildings into quarters for her and her two youngest teenaged sons, Sami and Rafi.

Abdul-Kareem and I will be sleeping in the magnificent house of her oldest son, Hassan, where she once lived. We enter a large and quite formal European living room that’s the size of a ballroom. Velvet drapes, vast carpets, a number of couch-like benches line the walls; there are also a few large soft armchairs and small artisan-carved wooden coffee tables.

Turbaned male servants in poorly fitting Western jackets and baggy pants pass around plates of pistachios, raisins, and candies and cups of tea. Large, Russian-style samovars are bubbling merrily.

Bebegul takes me on a tour. Every bedroom is large and is meant to function as a private family apartment, like a bed-sitting room. My brother-in-law Hassan has one. We have another. I believe a third such bed-sitting room is on the second floor—but I am not sure.

The living room, hallways, and bedroom floors are all covered with the most beautifully designed maroon Afghan wool carpets. I come to learn that the carpets are from Baluchistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan as well as from Afghanistan.

I want to take my shoes off so that I can walk on them in my bare feet.

Bebegul proudly shows me that she has a modern, utterly clean, totally electric kitchen. I will learn that no one ever uses it. The cooking is mainly done outdoors over an open fire or in a fire-breathing ancient wood stove. The house also has two all-marble bathrooms that work, although the water is not always hot.