A House White with Sorrow
Ballad for Afghanistan
By
Jennifer Heath
Smashwords Edition Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Heath
All rights reserved.
First (physical) edition published 1996, by Roden Press
Second (physical, illustrated) edition published 2002, by Baksun Books on behalf of Afghans4Tomorrow Afghanistan Literacy Programs
Third edition published 2011 Kindle Book © Jennifer Heath
The cover for A House White With Sorrow was designed and letterpress printed by Brad O’Sullivan on the Kavyayantra press at Naropa University.
Cover linocut by Sarah and Matt Corry.
In memory of my father,
to Jack, Matthew, and Sarah
and
for Tamim, Ali, Hussein, Abdul, Mohammed, Malli, Ghulam,
Ahmed, Aisha, and Shireen…wherever you are
and
for Roxanne Gupta and Wahid Omar…with thanks.
Contents
Book One: A Separate Brown Planet
Book Two: Inside the Lion’s Jaws
Book Three: The Fruit of Heaven
Book Four: The City of Lamentations
Book Six: Brown Ocean, Little Salt Lake I Love to Sail
On December 24, 1979, the Soviet Union, under Leonid Brezhnev, invaded Afghanistan with tanks and aircraft that entered the country by roads and airports built with Soviet and United States aid. The two superpowers found Afghanistan a perfect spot for spying on one another. In return, Afghanistan received tools for modernization. Afghanistan is landlocked and bounded on all sides by China, Pakistan, Iran and territories of the former Soviet Union: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. It is one of the poorest nations on Earth, yet one of the richest in physical beauty, culture and history. It has now suffered three decades of war.
The lands that today comprise Afghanistan were once on the trade route to India. Each traveler and conqueror left a legacy, making it a confluence of civilizations. In the 7th century A.D., Arab invaders brought Islam to Afghanistan, establishing it as the primary religion. Most Afghans are Sunni Muslim (whereas Iran, for example, is primarily Shi’a). The major ethnic groups include Pashtun, Tajik, Nuristani, Uzbek, Turkoman and Hazara. The Pashtun have dominated since 1747, when Ahmad Shah established the Durrani dynasty.
In the 19th century, the British, having imposed their empire on India, became fearful that Russia would seep through Afghanistan to the Indian frontiers. British and Russian competition became known as The Great Game, and resulted in three British invasions of Afghanistan from 1838 to 1919, when the Durrand Line on the Indo-Afghan frontier was ratified by Britain and Afghanistan, dividing the Pashtun people into separate nations. In 1947, when Pakistan became independent from India, Afghanistan demanded self-determination for the tribes and launched a movement to establish a separate state called Pashtunistan. The results were chronic battles and skirmishes with Pakistan, finally resolved in 1967.
Meanwhile, Soviet influence was growing. The 1979 invasion precipitated a bloodbath, but the Afghan people have never tolerated invaders. Not for nothing was Afghanistan called “Land of the Unruly,” “Land of the Insolent.”
I am bound on the sword for
the pride of the Afghan name.
I am Khushal Khattak,
proud man of this day.
—tombstone inscription 17th century
A Separate Brown Planet
Alauddin Sayyid
September 7, 1980
Near Qandahar, Afghanistan
Shells roll down the morning sky.
I squat on the roof with Ghulam the farmer’s boy, huddled against the wind kicked up by the Soviet helicopter that daily circles the villages, strafes its fields, then tilts back toward Qandahar.
There is a blast. A long flame runs along the ground. Ghulam pitches against me. My gaze catches the flat, red star on the chopper’s tail. The star spurts and expands, until all I see is red.
Ghulam slides off the roof and falls to the powdery earth. He lands face down and still as a stone.
I dive for the ground. Mud sticks to the blood on my shirt, my trousers, beard and eyes. Blood from the boy who’d been listening to my stories of life in America and France. My life story that seems a lifetime ago before the Shoravee shayytan, the Russian devils, invaded our country.
A woman darts from the hut. She spills to her knees. She clutches the boy. Shakes him as if she could wake him. Frantic, falsetto cries rise from her throat and she jerks the veil from her head.
I cradle Ghulam and carry him into the house. The mother stumbles into my shoulder. Ghulam is the third one she’s lost to Russian fire.
I lay Ghulam on the charpoy. His thin body sways on the rope bed. The first villagers who heard the mother’s cries and saw the flares and shrapnel shove into the hut. I turn and walk out the door. A greybeard holds me back.
“Badal, Alauddin Sayyid,” the ancient demands. “Blood revenge, Daktar Sahib.”
I elbow him aside. I am sick of revenge. Sick of war. My stomach coils. The weight of blood and mud presses against my eyelids.
The wheatfields are embers. I vomit on the path.
Akbar & Anique Sayyid
1959
Washington, D.C.
“Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.”
Anique sings and flutters around the patio table. She brushes dew from the cloth. The French, she tells her children, invented perfection.
“Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.”
Anique sings to Jeanette Crowell. To the white napkins she’s folding into fans.
She sings to her grandmother’s silver cutlery and polishes it with her sleeve. She cups her hand under the tea cozy, checks the pot’s warmth, plumps the pillow on her husband’s chair.
Ambassador Sayyid will soon be finished with prayers and hungry for the baguettes she buys at the Belgian market on K Street and the English mulberry jam from a small grocery run by Moroccans in Georgetown.
Even before Da’ud had freed women of purdah, Anique enjoyed flaunting her Frenchness. It was more important back then. And her husband defied everyone to let her have her way. It was not Mohammed—God bless him and grant him peace—who made the laws of purdah, but ordinary men who came after, he said. Akbar’s mother had stuck her fingers in her ears to block this devil talk.
Anique raises her arms, stretches and glances about the garden to see if the servants are spying. She picks two roses and places them in a vase on the table.
In Washington, the servants care little about her activities. They are immigrants from Bolivia or Ethiopia. There are no reports from the cook to the KHAD, the Afghan Secret Service. Anique can’t help looking around again anyway. She is not like Jeanette, who takes liberty for granted. Anique has learned the hard way to treasure fresh, free air.
In the beginning, the custom of sheltering women angered her. She regretted her marriage. She hated Akbar. She wanted to smother him under their blankets. To suffocate him. When they made love, she lay cold and gray and panicked. She struggled to keep her throat open, her lungs from shrinking, waiting for his last soft spasm.
She discovered pleasure in purdah when Shaer was born. Within the veil, she was secure and still. Nothing existed but a clear, compact outline of herself protected inside the filmy, impenetrable wall of silk or rayon. Nursing her baby boy under the chadri, she felt whole. Purdah was no longer a prison, but a welcome place of solitude.
That still surprises her.
In Kabul, the royal women and wives of high government officials crowded into overstuffed rooms. Gossiping and teasing, they sought solace from the turmoil of men. They talked of equal rights. Progress. Then, at the sound of footsteps, they quickly covered their faces.
When the unveiling was ordered, no one disobeyed Da’ud. No one ever did, though Allah and their brothers and fathers might strike the women dead for their bare faces and blasphemy.
Akbar was too permissive, the women said. Anique was too haughty. She would always be a ferenghi, a foreigner. She sneered at them and clamped the chadri’s lace visor over her eyes. She had no friends.
Now she has Jeanette.
“Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.”
With luck, the Foggy Bottom rain will wait until after breakfast. There are deep puddles in the cracked flagstone-and-cement courtyard, left from last night’s downpour. Poor Akbar. He hates the rain.
They met at the Sorbonne. It was a love match and they married despite Sayyid family objections. The old and venerated Sayyid clan—Durrani, the Pearl of Pearls—had had a different arrangement in mind. A bride’s price. A tribal exchange of property and status. Anique came with no sheep, no camels—what would she do with a sheep or camel? Walk it on a leash along the Champs d’Elysses? She had no land, no pastures, but a house in Montpelier and a Paris flat her cher papa had left her. A lot of good those did shepherds and nomads.
Her dowry was her strawberry hair, a boulevardier sashay and flinty patience. Like that of the Prophet’s dearest wife, A’isha, Akbar assures her. Anique doubts it, but she likes to hear it.
And, of course, there are her children.
“Halal! Halal!”
They yodel at the patio doors, wave and bound toward her. Shaer leaps and bats a high leaf on the magnolia tree. It spins and crackles. He bows to his mother like a gallant Scaramouche.
Yasmin and Maryam toddle onto the terrace and cheer for Shaer.
Her beautiful girls.
“Bon jour, Maman,” they call in chorus, prodded by their brothers. With one arm, Shaer lifts both his sisters onto their booster seats. Skinny Yasmin reaches for the sugar bowl. Shaer stops her hand.
“Ay, mon dieu!” Anique cries. “Yasmin, did you not wash?”
Yasmin shakes her pink curls and folds her freckled arms behind her back. Raven Maryam imitates her.
At breakfast on summer Sundays, the children play at French manners. La politesse for her sake. With this game, she fancies she civilizes them. The French, she tells them, also invented civilization.
Alauddin escorts Anique to her chair and holds it for her. She tucks her skirt and sits, nodding contentedly.
In Alauddin, Anique sees the mad Macedonian blood of Alexander, Sikander the Greek. As if a stray strain of blue-eyed Nuristani stock has sneaked into the Sayyid gene pool.
In Shaer—furiously scrubbing Yasmin’s fingers with his napkin—Anique sees Darius the Persian. Fierce, walnut eyes and honey skin like Akbar’s.
The girls are divided that way, too. East and West.
The filigree of a new moustache is settling across Shaer’s upper lip. When the whiskers finally grow as bushy as his father’s, Shaer will be more the lion for which he was named than this strapping, awkward donkey in a basketball letter sweater.
Alauddin is one year younger and hairless as a Swede.
“Il y’a longstemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.”
The boys stand at attention as the barefooted Ambassador crosses the patio puddles. Washington’s seaboard air makes Akbar perpetually queasy.
The boys kiss Papajan’s hand. His eyes are bleary from sobh, the first day’s prayer, and he wears his morning piety like a comforter around his traditional tunic and velveteen vest.
His sons wear traditional American high-school polo shirts, blue jeans and loafers.
Anique grins at Akbar and puckers her lips in a covert kiss. She reaches across the table, sweeps his hand and pours milky Indian chai into Akbar’s cup. He has such fluid beauty, organic dignity no Frenchman could hope to possess. Flesh and blood out of fairy tales.
At university in Paris, Sardar Akbar became more or less resigned to indecently dressed women with loud opinions. The nakedness was not titillating. There was no poetry without mystery. But the women’s cocky high spirits excited him. When Ambassador Sayyid feels deceived or confused by the convolutions of the kafir mind, the heathen mind, he asks his French wife’s advice. What she gives him is lively mocking, slapstick impersonations of congressmen and their shrill wives, of stealthy diplomats squinting across highballs at cocktail parties. Her bedroom skits never fail to make Akbar’s teeth ring with lust. And if she keeps sending him these belly-stirring kisses across the teapot, she can have kafir breakfasts, lunches and dinners every day for all he cares.
He believes in love, for he believes in progress. He believes Afghanistan, pinned in time like a desert rose, can no longer remain a stronghold against the speeding, graceless 20th century.
He smiles at Anique. He rubs his knee against her thigh. Delicious indecency. He butters his bread. The mulberry jam tastes like talkan, the mulberry jerky of Akbar’s youth. A hard, blushing pomegranate sits on the porcelain dish at his place.
He sugars his tea. One spoonful. Two. Three and four. He wraps his hand around the pomegranate. A channel to home. The Prophet—God grant him peace—said the fruit would purge the system of hatred and envy.
Akbar feels none of that, only a low, humming devotion to Allah and Afghanistan, to Anique and his fine daughters and sons. They will be educated in the West. In the fountain of progress. They will be doctors or engineers or agriculturalists. They will bring the new world to Afghanistan, while they live strictly by the code of Pashtunwali.
Each day, he rehearses them in the rules of Pashtunwali: hospitality, geniality, truce, persistence, constancy. The honor of women. Bravery, asylum. Honor among men, between enemies. Steadfastness, righteousness. Badal…blood revenge.
And daily he warns Shaer and Alauddin against corruption and mercurial faith. Against western disdain for God, for honor, for family. What is a man with his clan, he tells them, if not lost and invisible, wandering in wilderness, ashamed before Allah.
His sons will uphold the laws of Islam. They will make a love match between the 20th century and the word of God.
For Allah is great.
Allah o akbar.
A Folktale of Pashtunwali
The tents were pitched and the women prepared the evening meal. As dusk approached, a rider came out of the desert. He rode to the tent of the Khan and leaped from his horse, prostrated himself at the Khan’s feet, and demanded protection. A large band of horsemen with whom his family had a blood feud was following him and would surely kill him. The old Khan, wise beyond years and pure as his white beard, granted the supplicant asylum. The man was led to the guest tent and told to ready himself for dinner.
At dinner, the Khan’s young son stood and pointed at the stranger. “Oh, my father!” the boy cried, “that is Badshah Gul, who two months ago murdered my brother, your oldest son.”
“Yes, but now he is a guest in our camp. He has asked for asylum, and we have given it to him. Remember, my son, even if it takes a hundred years, your brother’s death will be avenged.”
The young son left his father’s tent. He took his brother’s dagger from its honored place. He crept to the guest tent. He buried the dagger in the breast of Badshah Gul. The blood of badal flowed dark and thick.
The next morning, the body of the guest was discovered. Cries and lamentations ran through the camp. The old Khan tore his clothing and ripped his turban in agony. “Who could have done this? Who could have brought dishonor on the name of our family? The camps of the Baluch will forever condemn us for this dishonor!”
The young son threw himself at his father’s feet. He pleaded forgiveness. It was blind rage, he said, that had driven him to dishonor the clan.
The old Khan took the knife which had killed the guest and plunged it into the heart of his son.
Carey Crowell
September 7, 1980
Jones Camp, Peshawar, Pakistan
I’m full of foreboding. Spiders creep under my skin. Is that surprising in this refugee camp? At night, when I close my eyes, I see bodies. This morning, goats bray outside my window, crying to be milked, while my little son Jahan pulls at my tit with such greedy force, I bite my lip to resist flinging him away.
As I sit on our bed waiting for Jahan’s small mouth and needle teeth to stop pumping, I picture these crowded quarters turning into empty space. My husband, Alauddin Sayyid, is flipping, spinning in air. Then I imagine Shaer, his brother, his enemy, up to his knees in guts and bodies. Shaer’s arms are open, aimed at catching Alauddin’s fall, but Alauddin keeps falling and never lands.
I have no patience today for Jahan. His blue eyes spell mischief. When he’s finished suckling, I shake myself loose and give him to Hazrat. Professor Jones, who founded this sanctuary for the maimed and homeless of Afghanistan, calls Hazrat my “worthy right hand,” but she is my dearest friend, my companion, the one who listens enraptured to my memories.
“Don’t worry, Carey-jan,” Hazrat says, taking the baby. “You will hear from Daktar Sahib soon.”
A new woman and her three bony kids arrived last night. On foot from the far north. The journey took more than a month. In that time, the stomach stops growling.
We settle the newcomer into a lean-to in a corner of the refugee compound. The camp women created this shelter of goat skins lined with diapers from my mother’s elaborate care packages. At least this jury-rigged home will be absorbent.
Today, the sun is dry for a change. For once, the Peshawar humidity has let up, the mold that crawls over everything has taken a breather. This fresh, arid air, so like Afghanistan, will not last.
To make room for the goat-skin dwelling, we destroy more vines and shrubs in this lovely Raj garden. That Professor Jones, a prep-school headmaster from Virginia, managed to procure this mansion for this purpose from the Pakistani bureaucrats amuses me—but not today. My hands are shaking and I jab my thumb on a thorn. “JesusMaryandJoseph!” I swear like my mother. My mother, the indominatable Jeanette Crowell, has an unbreakable bond with “JesusMaryandJoseph!” especially the exclamation point. She is a connoisseur of exclamation points, but so forceful and unbeatable, I have always relied on her perverse strength in spite of myself and, today, I envy it.
The refugees who understand Christian curses laugh at me. The laughter is catching and soon the others are guffawing, too. I’d laugh along, I’d be a good sport, if it weren’t one of those days when everything goes haywire. And it has been too long since I had word of my husband 300 miles away.
If there were stairs here, I’d fall up them. If there were mirrors, I’d crack them. If I had a tire, it would go flat.
Jeanette Crowell
1980
Paris, France
Dearest Daughter:
I can’t imagine what possible use you’ll have in that godawful concentration camp for my “memoirs,” as you put it. But hell, dearie, you can employ my purple prose to line the chicken coops. (I do hope you’re not in charge of chickens or any barnyard creatures. Take a lesson from your mother’s own tragic experiences.)
The beginning? Which beginning? Anique suggests I tell you how we became friends. She promises not to censor my recollections! It’s as good a place to start as any, I suppose, unless you’re dying to know my place of origin, mother’s maiden name, etc. In that case, I’ll gladly supply you with my stack of invalid passports. After all these years in the sacred service, you can bet it’s a tall stack, each stage of my life boiled into green-and-gold books stamped “diplomat.”
The sacred service is also a kind of beginning, for it giveth and taketh away and provideth every goddamned little thing. Gawd, am I glad to be out! It may have appeared to you that I put great stock in protocol, that miserable diplo-motto, but believe me, kiddo, it was merely lip service. In practice, I gave protocol short shrift.
Which is what brought Anique and me together. My forwardness inviting myself to the Afghan Embassy in Washington for tea was most definitely anti-protocol. Since the Crowell family was on its way to Afghanistan, I figured I’d get the skinny on the place. And I was terribly curious about this French wife of the Ambassador. I wondered how on earth she could bear Islamic attitudes toward women.
“Have you ever heard of a Frenchwoman who wasn’t candid?” I asked your father.
I arrived armed to the teeth with peonies. It turns out Anique despises peonies. They remind her of funerals.
Although Ambassador and Madame Sayyid gave many modest parties, Anique had few daytime visitors. Muslim wives were treated as outsiders as if they were invalids. There weren’t many calling cards in Anique’s silver dish.
Not that she cared. She’s not one for hen parties. Within Akbar’s family, she was accustomed to being an outsider, and she’d lost track of her Parisian friends. She’s revived some of those friendships lately, and I find her crowd rather dreary and shallow. But to each his own, n’est-ce pas, dear girl? She might as well have stepped off the planet when she married Akbar.
We’d made our date for Wednesday, the one weekday I didn’t have to chauffeur Teddy to some horrid after-school activity. Gad! Aren’t you fortunate there are no cub scouts in that wretched dump of yours, but I suppose instead you’ve already got my grandson bowing toward Mecca.
Anique woke early and before darling Akbar had finished his morning prayers and breakfasted, she had the cook mobilized baking petit fours. And there were the inevitable watercress sandwiches. At one-thirty, when the Ambassador drifted back to his office after lunch, Anique unlocked the liquor cabinet. Fortification. (And it was the key to that cabinet, you see, that would unlock our hearts.)
It was one of those grimy Washington afternoons that passes for an autumn day. I wore the requisite white gloves and broad-brimmed bonnet which had only a few stylish months left before Jacqueline Kennedy introduced that comical pillbox. I sported a forest-green shirtwaist. I drove the family’s brand-new, fire-engine-red Buick station wagon. Do you remember that wonderful car? Did you know it became a Kabul taxi?
Anique received me in the foyer wearing a celedon linen suit. It was like looking in the mirror. Two blue-eyed redheads with sharp Celtic profiles. We were beauties in our time, and, let me tell you, we’re not bad now, for a couple of old biddies.
Anique’s hair was done in one of those chignons, but mine was cut short, haute 1959 coiffure. As the face falls, I always say, so the hair should rise to uplift it. Mark my words, Missy, and find some good stylist to chop off that horrid braid. You’re beginning to look far too Gothic for your age!
The sitting room was nothing stunning. A showcase for Afghan artifacts—rugs, pottery, relics, that sort of thing.
“I understand your family is soon moving to Kabul,” Anique said, belaboring the obvious to break the ice. She handed me tea. “One lump or two, Madame Crowell?” I loathe sugar, thank God.
I said we were excited to be moving to Afghanistan, but Anique sneered. “It’s not a very exciting place, Madame Crowell. Foreigners grow terribly bored. No nightclubs. No beaches. No art galleries. It’s barbaric...”
My, my, didn’t I say Frenchwomen are candid?
I protested. “We’ve enjoyed living in some of the most uncivilized and boring countries in the world. Mr. Crowell dislikes glamorous European embassies. Calls them paper swamps.”
Indeed. Your father was absolutely crazy about what are now, for some reason, labeled “Third World” nations. The more primitive, the better. Fine for him.
But I hadn’t intended to be snooty any more than she’d really meant to be forthright. She’d too easily dismissed what she assumed was my politesse. That’s what protocol will get you every time.
I hate silences, and this is my technique: By revealing a fragment, a harmless particle of my own life, I disarm my opponent, and then, ever so courteously, take control and direct questions. With my “confession,” you see, I give others permission to babble and they love me for it. It’s noise I want, not content. You’ll find everyone’s story turns out more or less the same.
Poor Anique. While she grappled for some safe topic, I hurled a mild disclosure at her. “I’ve always had a special feeling for France,” I said. “My older brother died there during the war, of pneumonia in a field hospital while his battalion fought the Battle of the Bulge.” Works like a charm every time.
“I am so sorry,” Anique replied. “My papa died in the war, too. He was a resistance fighter transporting Jews to Switzerland. He was shot down by the Gestapo. On the street, like a common criminal.”
She blinked back tears. “It was on the icy street he died, covered with mud.” Tears don’t come as easily to Anique anymore.
She leaped up quite suddenly and began pouring cognac into tiny sterling shot glasses. She drew a steadying breath and toasted “La France!” in a booming voice.
What the hell. I toasted Afghanistan and King Zahir Shah. A tad sacrilegious considering Muslims are forbidden to drink. But it got us chuckling. And Anique, no end of surprises to this day, kicked off her shoes. I removed my hat. She lamented that redheaded women were required to wear green. Fashion permitted us to look like leprechauns or Christmas ornaments. Yet here we sat, both wearing green that day. Protocol redux deluxe.
Naturally, Anique was grateful to be married to a diplomat, to live abroad. Not me. I was sick of it. Mort would have settled into some college if I let him, but those dull faculty do’s were too, too much and too, too little. Life is such a rut, as I’m sure you,
daughter dear, of all people, are discovering. On the one hand, I was up to here with being a diplo-mate, and, on the other hand, I could not fathom leaving it all to climb into an ivory tower.
Anique was not exactly sympathetic. “Count your blessings. It would be much worse if you were a Muslim wife,” she said. She had a point, but what was the difference, after all? In the final analysis, a woman must be a good asset to her husband, no matter what. Attitudes have changed, but not much for the better.
Combine my dissatisfaction with the absolute humiliation of the goddamned wife’s report, which rated, you’ll remember vividly, the performances of wives, children, how the family adjusts to the post, etc., etc., ad vomit, and you’ve got real hell. It infuriated and depressed me. Let me remind you, Missy, you did nothing to improve my scores.
Jesus! I got tired of being the hostess with the mostest. Anique has just accused me of trying to one-up. Well, certainly marriage to a Pashtun has its little surprises, too. She admits she was a giddy, romantic girl. When she met Akbar, she thought he was a Prince of Persia. Of course, he was a prince, a sardar, but not the storybook kind.
Ambassador Sayyid was noble and his family were royal snobs. Before Anique’s first visit to Kabul, Anique’s own mother tried to convince her that Akbar had three more wives at home. He didn’t, bless his heart. He adored her and resisted political entreaties to take other wives, as any decent husband should.
Ah, but we warmed to one another, lubricated by cognac, baptizing our friendship. Anique confessed how homesick she’d been in Kabul, how she cried herself to sleep every night. There was no running water and no toilets, much like Jones Camp. But unlike you, apparently, Anique is not only delicate and unsuited to hardship, but she takes exquisite care of herself.
She had no friends, and no place to meet them if she had. On rare occasions, when she was escorted out of the house for a breath of air, she was forced to wear that hideous chadri. Imagine her ecstasy when Prime Minister Da’ud sent Akbar to the embassy in Paris and then to London and then made him Ambassador to the U.S.A. It was bliss.
She wanted her children to have proper Western upbringings. Akbar insisted on their religious educations and taught them the Qur’an from top to bottom. He hired tutors to teach them Afghan history, while Anique, thank God, pounded French manners into their heads. She used her own money to send those boys to school in Richmond.
We gabbled and guzzled that afternoon away. I can’t remember how I managed to get the Buick back into the suburbs unscathed. I’ve no idea when Anique handed me that heavily embroidered black-and-red Afghan dress wrapped in a box from Lord & Taylor. It came in handy, though, didn’t it? Nor did I recall how I snagged the sleeve of my forest-green shirtwaist so that I had to have it remade in Kabul by Madame Ghalfari. How I do miss Madame Ghalfari.
My last memory, for these so-called memoirs, dearheart, is marching arm in arm with Anique around her garden singing:
“Hitler—has only got one ball,
“Goering—has two but they are small,
“Himmler—is very sim’lar,
“And poor old Goebbels has no balls at all”
Over and over till we collapsed on a chaise dizzy and cackling. Anique says it was 8 o’clock when she pulled her bedcovers over head and passed out cold. Fortunately, the Ambassador worked late.
It was as if we each knew the punchline to a secret joke. We talked on the phone every day until our family left for Central Asia.
That’s enough for now, dearie. His Royal Pain-in-the-Ass is hollering for me. Lord, I wish you were here to care for me in my old age. Without Anique, what would I do? She’s right. The start of our friendship was the beginning. It is also the end and all I have. You are heartless to hide my grandbaby at the ends of the earth and leave me nearly alone.
Incidentally, I’ve mailed Jahan a big box of wonderful books, three of them in French, hand-picked by Anique. Do show some gratitude for a change.
Love,
Mom
Purdah
In 1959, Afghan Prime Minister Da’ud Khan employed educated theologians to comb the Qur’an for all the traps between the lines. When they had read forward and backward and pulled their beards and twirled their moustaches and studied by sun and moon the whole of the Holy Book, the Prime Minister took quiet action. First, he sent a cadre of women to work as airline hostesses and ticket takers for Afghanistan’s Ariana Airlines. Then he sent a group to work as telephone operators and another to the Kabul China Factory. No one seemed to notice.
So, four months later, with no public, royal declaration, at the summer Jeshn Independence Day celebration, the wives of high-level government officials—including Sardar Da’ud’s wife, the King’s own sister—appeared on the reviewing stands unveiled. The Jeshn crowds were speechless. There were no hip hip hoorahs that afternoon.
The next day, a delegation of mullahs visited His Excellency to inform him that he was an anti-Islamic pervert. Da’ud Khan dared them to find the law that said women must be hidden. Where was it written that women are low as dogs or pigs? The mullahs pulled their beards and twirled their moustaches and deliberated day and night, but they couldn’t prove a thing.
They attacked Sardar Da’ud from soap-box pulpits and in the mosques, hoping to incite rebellion. The Prime Minister sighed and arrested the mullahs for treason and heresy. But, since the people didn’t riot on the mullahs’ behalf, Da’ud Khan let them go again.
Carey Crowell
September 7, 1980
Jones Camp, Peshawar, Pakistan
It’s been twenty-one years since I first set foot in Central Asia. Who would have thought I’d wind up here, jury-rigging homes for refugees?
Twenty-one years ago, I traced the map looking for our new post. Lying on my belly in our house in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, I spread my fingers as wide as I could and used my thumb and pinkie to measure the distance from our last assignment. Colombia was three hands away from Afghanistan.
I’d never heard of the place.
A crusty military “type,” as my father, Mort Crowell, called people he disapproved of, met us at the railroad station in Peshawar. We had come north by train from Karachi. From here on out, there was no public transportation. The clotted air clung to our skin and my mother fussed about ringworm.
The children in Jones Camp suffer from ringworm. The roseate circles brand them as foreigners, their mountain blood too thick to move through this torpidity.
We were chauffeured, British style, down the left side of the wide avenues, honking past bicycles and buggies drawn by sweating, skinny horses to the green marble residence of the American Consul. In that neighborhood, the single-story buildings are palatial English bungalows.
A few months before, Gary Powers had taken off in his U-2 spy plane from the U.S. Air Force base in Peshawar and before he knew what hit him, he was refusing his government-issue cyanide pill and eating borscht for breakfast instead.
“Daddy was supposed to be assigned here,” my mother said. She coveted this house for its smothering yellow, white and purple blooms. For the emerald lawn and jacaranda trees. And especially for the smooth, verdant foyer like a ballroom. Waltzes, tangos, fox-trots, Jeanette Crowell loves to dance.
“JesusMaryandJoseph! What a joint! We could have lived in this house,” she snorted, running her finger across a marble wall.
“Why aren’t we?” I asked.
My mother shrugged.
Classified information.
U.S. vs. T.H.E.M.
Top secret. Better not to ask questions that wouldn’t be answered anyway.
Jeanette consoled herself. “You’d have to have a helluva lot of servants to keep this place polished.”
The American Consul and his wife served tuna casserole for lunch. All this way for tuna casserole, but my little brother Teddy loved it. In Peshawar, they bought sterile cans of Star-Kist and boxes of Velveeta at the lavish Air Force base PX. The tuna casserole reminded the military type, Colonel Ulysses X. Scarborough, to warn us about stocking up on U.S. goods. Constant border skirmishes between the Afghans and Pakistanis meant supply trucks loaded with Butterfingers and Fruit-of-the-Looms couldn’t get through to Kabul.
The Colonel sighed. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul had a small commissary. At least you could get booze there, thank God.
My parents declined the PX offer.
“Thanks anyway,” Mort answered. My father’s smile was kindest to those he disliked.
“We’ll go native,” my mother said.
“You’ll be eating a lot of mutton,” Mrs. American Consul cautioned.
“Oh, good! I’m Irish!” No one ever guessed Jeanette’s sarcasm. It was so sweet and disarming.
The Irish joke made everyone at the table laugh, and brought up the question of presidential campaigns. That Irishman Jack Kennedy? Or would it be Joe McCarthy’s old boy, Dick Nixon? Whose would be the chilliest foreign policy for a Cold War?
Mort disappeared with Mr. American Consul to be “briefed.” I imagined briefings really meant my father was being physically shortened. The bottoms of his feet, where he kept his secrets were shaved, and afterward, he was returned to us imperceptibly stunted. One day, he’d come home as a dwarf, empty of mysteries.
We spent the rest of the afternoon touring the city, inching along in an official black car, honking every two feet at the knots of bearded men and veiled women and barefoot kids and beggars and sheep meandering the bazaars.
“Ugh!” Teddy pinned his nose with his fingers. At seven, his favorite word was “ugh.”
“Just like Paris,” Jeanette cooed. “The sweet-and-sour scent of sewage and flowers at the Place de l’Opera. God! If Anique could hear me, she’d kill me!”
Finally, we checked into Dean’s Hotel, where Daddy was already waiting. I scanned his height, but once again, the briefing was not detectable.
Mort and Jeanette left us in the room and drifted to the bar. In hotels, they escaped from us to quiet, dim-lit corners, mumbling nose to nose, fingering icy tumblers of topaz liquid.
“You can find scotch anywhere in the world,” Jeanette said, “but bourbon’s another story. I’m on a worldwide search for Old Grandad, and, you never know, it may turn up in Katmandu.”
Teddy crumpled into sleep, despite the heat. He could sleep through anything. As far as I’m concerned, he’s still asleep, an emotional narcoleptic. In Colombia, he slept through a revolution. The crack of gunfire in the street. A bullet smashing through his bedroom window, shattered glass on his orange quilt, and Jeanette tearing into his room, yanking him by one tiny arm from the bed. Running for shelter to my room across the house. Diving under the covers. Then Jeanette cackling out loud as if she’d just heard the best joke in the world. And Teddy snoozed through it all.
I climbed over him into Peshawar night. I sat on the stoop by our room, gazing at the pink petals of a rhododendron growing by the door. A fat, ivory-robed man strolled by, eyes glazed, hands folded on his big belly.
Moonlit clouds were mirrored on the plump flowers. Staring hard at them, I could turn the blooms into a thousand and one nights, a mosaic of stories about the silk route. Into Omar Khayyam’s perfumed miniature gardens. Illuminations in the Rubaiyat I got for my last birthday, when I turned fourteen.
Then Mort was shaking my shoulder, whispering, “Carey, come inside to bed,” and Jeanette’s tipsy laughter arched down from the full moon.
At dawn, Colonel Scarborough showed up, raring and jittery to get us to Kabul. His chewed-cheroot face was shaded by a pith helmet.
Our steamer trunks were shoved in two Jeeps. We scrambled into a third. Belligerent surreys with canvas canopies. My mother wore a silk scarf around her carrot-red hair and she insisted on braiding mine into an invincible plait down my back.
“And Carey,” she said, “for heaven’s sake, don’t forget your sunglasses. You’ll regret the squint lines later.”
Jeanette is forever agonizing about my future wrinkles. The lack of beauty parlors and cosmeticians in a refugee camp don’t faze her a bit. All my life, I’ve been enchanted by her glamour, sucked into it like a swamp. Scared to death of it, too.
I slid the sunglasses on top of my head and ran back to pick last night’s rhododendron. Romance. I shoved the flower into the tight, ugly braid.
Now I plait a practical braid each morning. To weave it with flowers is a sign of optimism. I have reached my destination, but hope comes and goes. Even when the ground is solid under my feet and clouds smile at my school children, the flowers are short-lived.
The Colonel was an untiring tour guide. He jerked his chin toward the drivers. “Afghan men,” he winked at Daddy, “are nasty fellows. Buncha valorous thieves. Can’t tell jokes on themselves like us American guys. No sense of humor, these people. Easily insulted buggerers.” Mort winced.
“The men hold hands, you know. Reeevolting.” The Colonel fingered a pistol under his shirt.
“Two fellas meet up, takes ‘em half an hour of hugging and kissing and babbling ‘salaam aleikum’ and ‘may you never be tired,’ ‘may you never be sad,’ ‘may your camel never be crippled,’ and so forth and so on. Never allowed to exchange bad news. Shameless flatterers. It’s religious law, for Chrissakes. No goddamned wonder these people are backward. Uncivilized. Unrealistic. Living in another century. Their goddamned calendar’s baasakward. Fools count from the birth of their prophet, so it’s still the dark ages, for Chrissakes. Their goddamned days start at sunset. Mark my warning, you might show up at an official function a day late. Easy to do. Keep close track of everything is the best advice I can give you.”
The Colonel’s back heaved with his rattling advice. Jeanette rolled her eyes.
We bounced out of Peshawar over cobblestones, onto potholed dirt roads. The terrain expanded from a steamy lime oven to barren red rock twisting into no man’s land.
“Pashtunistan,” Mort said. “lost to the Afghans in 1893 when the British created the Durrand Line.’ Teddy yawned. He could have been in Nebraska.
The Khyber Pass. Ominous canyon walls rose like mammoth, rusting sentinels. The stones stored the echoes of centuries of invading armies. Millions of nomadic footfalls.
You’d have thought Colonel Scarborough invented the Khyber Pass, he was so proud of it. He signaled the drivers to pull into a ruddy fort where Queen Victoria’s Khyber Rifles, playing the Great Game against Russia, aimed their barrels toward Afghanistan. A separate brown planet in the distance.
We crossed the Pakistan-Afghan border and switched to right-side driving, American-style. The road through the Kabul Gorge was hitched twine, narrow and lumpy. Turbaned figures lead donkeys or sheep or camels across nowhere, to nothing. No village or farm. Floating sand and the sharp, grey teeth of the Gorge shot up on one side of us, while the big river rushed down the other.
Our Jeep squealed to a halt. Water buffalo, iridescent, primordial cattle rose from the roadbank and swayed across our path. Behind them, a tiny, sandal-footed man in dusty pajamas waved a tree branch at oblivious rumps.
More caution than ever now. Above us were men with picks and shovels and bulldozers and a wide ribbon of clean cement behind them. The Soviets were building a highway.
The Colonel sneered. The U.S. of A. was also building a road for Afghanistan and an international airport at Qandahar, too, for Chrissakes.
“We built ‘em a goddamned dam that’d do the Tennessee Valley Authority proud, but they don’t use it. Ignorant bastards say their old irrigations methods work better. Worse than medieval, these people! Damned Rooskies won’t get ahead of us, though, for all their street paving.”
A two-for-one sale in Afghanistan.
A new Great Game, but this time the rivalry for dominance in Afghanistan was not between the Czar and Great Britain, but the Soviet Union and the United States.
“Prime Minister Da’ud would make fools of us, if we let him, you understand?”
Mort understood. He nodded at the Colonel. Top secret.
The road bent. It shimmied along the steep Gorge. No trees. No bushes. The rhododendron petals had blown off the stem in my braid, leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail a Pashtun prince might follow.
Sometimes the earth shook and there was a far-off blast of Soviet dynamite in the mountain.
This minute, this September day, irascibility follows me everywhere. I snap at the children during lessons. Hazrat tsk-tsks and reprimands me with her one eye.
Then the camp doctor, Aisha Ebrahim, summons me to the clinic. Somewhere on the way out of Afghanistan, a new woman and her hungry boys rescued a wounded mujahedin.
“Can you believe it, Carey?” Aisha says. “This holy warrior is barely alive. How did that poor family drag him through the bombing and over the mountains?
Jones Camp clinic is running on prayer and toothpicks. There are no moments to rest. There are no spare mattresses. Daktar Aisha says we’ll put the remnants of this fighter in my bed.
“Carey, there is nothing I can do but make him comfortable. He will not live through the afternoon. You’ll have your room back by sunset.”
Tonight, we’ll sleep again with the persistent shadows of the dead.
Daktar Aisha leaves the room and I frisk the mujahid.
I turn him this way and that, looking for letter from my husband. He sends letters with the wounded when he can get them back to Jones Camp. The ones who are healed enough to return to the war take letters to Alauddin from me. We call this postal service the Trauma Express.
There must be a letter. It’s been more than a month, almost two. I pat my hands hard across the man’s wounds and his rag layers. I hope I’m not hurting him, but he moans. I’m sorry. Nevertheless, I continue my search. It’s this simple:
Alauddin Sayyid is behind enemy lines in Afghanistan, fighting Jihad. Holy war.
And I want him back.
Alauddin Sayyid
September 7, 1980
Near Qandahar, Afghanistan
A fine warrior-poet I’ve turned out to be. Ghulam is dead. Tumbled off the roof and here I am, Alauddin Sayyid, the villagers’ stalwart Daktar Sahib, retching on the ground and trembling.
The red-star helicopter attack should have been no surprise. Russian brutality is predictably unyielding.
The farmers who haven’t fled to Pakistan or Iran, the widows, the children, and wives of absent mujahedin have rebuilt this primeval village. After a fashion. They’ve replanted the fields poisoned by napalm or yellow rain and prayed for an edible harvest. At first, they believed the respites between bombings meant the communist murderers had moved on to other victims.
It is Commander Nurzai’s camp the Soviets are after. Somehow they’ve discovered our mujahid hideout is in this region. There are spies everywhere.
The hut we jokingly call a chaikhana, a teahouse, is actually an abandoned caravanserai tucked under a shelf of burled rock that juts out of the mountainside. For a thousand years, caravans took their rest here and were well-hidden. The Russians hope that blanket-bombing might flush Nurzai and keep him on the move.
The commander has no intention of fleeing and the villagers have no objections to his intentions. Succoring the holy warriors, they, too, can fight Jihad, holy war.
Once this valley was green, fed by ancient irrigation systems. We played here, Carey and I. Here in the green so green its reflection made the mountains blue and blend into the sky. There were water buffalo, too. Many herds. But they are gone.
Shubkhun, blood in the night. Badal, revenge. I can’t count how many raids I’ve been on. How many times, in the slow nightcrawls across rocks and beneath Soviet floodlights, my companions and I have dared the shayytan, the Russian devils to burn us alive.
Will this war go on and on until my own son is creeping through the dirt with a muzzle-loading rifle?
I wipe vomit from my face and wipe my hands on my blood-damp trousers.
John Randolph Jones enters my memory, bossing, bullying. I agree with the Professor. “Yes sir, I should stay at Jones Camp. I have to go where I’m needed more. I’m still young. Strong. Pashtun, so I’m bound to the laws of Pashtunwali. Bound to answer the call to Jihad.”
“Sentimental fool,” the Professor answers. The conversation grinds relentlessly through my mind. I wave goodbye a million times to the faded picture of Professor Jones and to Carey’s stormy moon face, eyes clouded with love and resentment. I had to go. Without question and without argument. Why? her face demands, then disappears.
It is written: If you should die or be slain in the cause of Allah, His forgiveness and His mercy would surely be better than all riches…before Him you shall be gathered. Men must fear nothing but God Himself. I’m afraid of bullets and the fire. I’m afraid for my companions and my clan. I fear death. I’m afraid the Shoravee will bomb us again tomorrow. I’ve got it backwards. The only thing I’m not afraid of is Allah, all merciful and forgiving.
I could have saved Ghulam. I should have brought the boy down when we spotted that helicopter, when it was a roaring dot in the sky. The angel on my left shoulder documents this sin. Doctors are supposed to save lives.
My brother Shaer ignored his angels, and made excuses to the other boys for mine. The good angel on my right. The bad angel on my left. All Muslims have angels. I brushed my shoulders constantly, keeping house for them to record my sins or virtues in their Book of Deeds. My angels lived in comfort. His were expelled.
“It’s only a tic. He’s had it since birth,” Shaer told our classmates. I still have that so-called tic. My angels still ride on my shoulders.
He was ashamed, too, of our secret brother-language.
“Halal! Halal!” Shaer and I summoned each other to meals. “Halal!” on the playing fields during recess. “Halal!” don’t miss the bus. “Halal!” the mail’s arrived. “Halal!” the proctor’s prowling the dorms. “Halal! Hello, how are you?”
It was our code, discovered when we were small, before Prime Minister Da’ud sent Papajan abroad. We played at being the heroic chapandaz, buzkashi riders, spinning toward the circle of justice.
“Hail! Hail! The gang’s all here!” Shaer’s best friend Jamie Hennings teased him. Jamie called him Rise and the name didn’t take long to catch on with the others. Shaer is difficult to pronounce with a mouthful of Virginia crackers.
He was Rise, because he took to basketball at Jefferson Davis Academy as if he’d learned on a Chicago playground. His aim was keen. He jumped with steel springs in his ankles.
“Hail! Hail! Is that like the rebel yell?” Jamie asked, but Shaer was embarrassed.
“Yeh,” he agreed, refusing to be a foreigner.
Basketball was Rise’s solid entrée into Jeff Davis society.
“Jefferson Davis Academy,” John Randolph Jones bragged, “is not the sort of place you’d usually hear the bloodcurdling war yelps of the Central Asian steppes.” Not among these eloquent Ionic columns, the red brick serpentine walls, the rose gardens, the old slave quarters, the portraits of patrician alumni on every wall.
Boys, boys and more boys, and Rise was a star. Me, I was a studious, dull youth, prone to shoulder-brushing and dreams of Pashtun warrior poets. At night, while Shaer engaged in towel fights in the halls, I wrote clumsy verse and read about bugs and botany.
Headmaster Jones loved us like a horse loves sugar. Hundreds of boys passed through the Professor’s care, but there had never been an Afghan. We were wondrous, exotic as Himalayan bears. Best of all for the Professor, we became a vocation.
And we were on our way to becoming Papajan’s ideal Islamic 20th-century men. But at school, we never spread our rugs and prayed. Religion had the Sunday and graveyard shifts at Jeff Davis. While the other boys attended evening chapel, we raced to the stables and saddled the polo ponies. On the playing field, I trilled my lips in a drum roll, signaling the charge. At top speed, maneuvering sticks we pretended were 10-foot lances, we whacked pegs pounded in circles in the lush ground. A real lance would impale the peg, but this was Virginia and nyza bazi players were ill-equipped.
Over the student choir’s clabbered “Onward Christian Soldiers,” we shrieked, “halal! halal!” and leaned into our mounts’ flanks, slapping the wooden sticks till they dislodged. We had watched our grandfather play tent-pegging. He taught us to ride before we could walk. And nyza bazi was good practice for polo. But our strange sportsmanship and the contusions and abrasions we left on our teammates elicited angry complaints.
We were dangerous, they said. It was impossible to figure out which side we were on. En masse, the Jeff Davis polo team visited the Professor’s office to protest. Headmaster Jones thought he understood our devilish horsemanship.
Genetics.
“Now boys,” he said. “As nigras have natural rhythm, Afghans have natural barbarism. Some of it’s tempered, acourse, by their Mohammedan religion, but it’s also encouraged, you see, by their holy book, the Qur’an, that tells them to fight fiercely and to the death any encroachments on their honor and their god, known as Allah. Different name, same basic lord as yours ‘n’ mine, truth be told.
“Anyway, Rise and Al,” the Professor free-associated in his patient, smoked-ham voice, “come from different stock than us. Their people’re nomads, mean and tough as nails—gotta be for that kinda life. And besides that tent-pegging contest that Rise and Al love, these nomads play a game called bushcashee, the uncivilized father, you might say, of polo. In fact, boys, listen up. Here’s a history lesson for you. The British imported bushcashee, but they refined the game and called it polo so’s nobody’s get killed.
“Well, it’s no wonder the Sayyid boys treat that ball like it was a gory goat carcass, because in their country, it is a gory goat carcass, if it doesn’t happen to be your enemy’s head. There’s one winner, one hero playin’ for himself, no teams. Rise and Al play like they’re Latter-day Genghis Khans, because that’s what they are. The ruthless blood of the Mongols cruises through their veins. They can’t help themselves.”
If Papajan had heard that soliloquy…If Papajan had known how we never disabused our teammates of the notion that we were descended from Genghis Khan ...
After lights out, we huddled in the dorm with the other boys and told stories of our great-great-great-grandpa Genghis. Shaer was never so happy. By the end of the playing season, Headmaster Jones received visits from the three rival polo coaches who bitterly lamented the unmannerly, indeed savage, conduct of the recently renamed Jefferson Davis Hazara Warlords. And what, they demanded, is that godawful howling they make riding onto the field?
Halal, my Shaer-jan, wherever you are.
During the middle of sophomore year, Papajan asked that Shaer be excused from shaving the incipient black lace on his upper lip. “It is the custom,” he wrote the Professor, “for Muslim men to wear moustaches as the Prophet did.”
To Shaer, this was a directive to be different from the other boys, and it was unbearable.
The best Jihad, said the Prophet—God grant him peace—is to utter the word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler.
I comb my fingers through my beard. It is matted with Ghulam’s blood. This blood, this physical thing, is undeniable truth, but what about the blood between brothers? Brothers who have chosen separate, hostile paths. The expression, “blood is thicker than water,” only explains an obligation between relatives, it says nothing about intrinsic, biological loyalty.
Bile carpets my tongue. I scrape my teeth across it and spit on the road. The village mullah—short and wiry in a blue cotton shirt and filthy pantaloons—flutters past me, stops and pulls on my sleeve.
“Time to honor the dead, Daktar Sahib,” he says, and I follow the scraggle-beard. Dome dwellings protrude from the earth like sun-baked blisters. And everywhere cairns of scorched rubble.
Da’ud Khan
1959
Kabul, Afghanistan
There is a picture window overlooking Kabul’s Blue Mosque, an Iranian rosewood desk with ornate brass inlays and a pile of Indian pillows embroidered with tiny mirrors on a mud-red rug from Qortshangu.
But there is nothing on the light grey walls of Sardar Mohammed Da’ud Khan’s private office.
Prime Minister Da’ud keeps the walls free to accommodate the visitations of ghosts.
Nursing his chillum, sucking long so the mufarah—the delectable recipe of marijuana, opium and ginger—glows like an oil lamp, Da’ud Khan invokes and entertains the departed princes of Afghanistan. He can’t predict which of these eminences will be his night visitor, but they never fail to comfort him with a sense of shared power and a lifeline to his Durrani tribe. No living politician, certainly not his sheepish cousin King Zahir Shah, provides him with such spellbinding company.
He squeezes his eyelids. Inhales. Holds his breath, until he seems to levitate and drift backward into the past. Then, slamming the brakes of his mental time machine, Da’ud Khan pops his bloodshot orbs and his massive eyebrows jump like startled black weasels.
King Amanullah sails in from Heaven.
The fat monarch settles like a harvest moon over Da’ud’s rubbery body. The pillow mirrors glisten.
The practice of chatting with dead men started when Sardar Da’ud was a young military officer with his heart set on the highest rank of command in Afghanistan’s army. The apparitions guided him. Up, up the family ladder to the prime ministry. He took it from the doddering uncles in a bloodless coup. King Zahir remains a helpless figurehead. He might as well have been born a girl.
Chatting with ghosts gives Da’ud sinful, gleeful rushes of immortality and the boundless satisfaction of dominating the conversation. In they roll, every evening, Ahmad Shah, Nadir Shah, Amir Abdur Rahman, Amir Habibullah…the autocrats, the unifiers, the builders, the warrior poets.
“Welcome,” Da’ud says aloud and King Amanullah’s corpulent outline bobbles back.
Afghanistan’s most glamorous despot. Jazz Age Amir. The Reformer.
Da’ud blinks at the wall and smirks, remembering his father’s and uncles’ outrage when photographs were circulated to the aristocrats in Kabul of Amir Amanullah and his wife Soroya on their Continental tour in the 1920s. “They mock Islam and Allah!”
Da’ud laughs at the overfed apparition.
“Ah, balli, but you were brilliant, dynamic. You opened the way for progress. Yet so impolitic,” he scolds. Having the upper hand in these seances, Da’ud feels free to tweak the ghostly tyrant.
Amanullah and Soroya. In Venice they sailed on a gondola. In France, they explored the Louvre. The Queen wore infidel dress, silky, sequined, drop-waisted flappers’ shifts.
“Travel,” Da’ud chuckles. “It made you wistful like Zahir. Afghanistan, and soon Pashtunistan, are enough for me. Fools journey, Wise men keep their seats.”
Queen Soroya, newly revealed without her veil, enchanted young Da’ud. In one portrait he keeps hidden in the rosewood desk, Soroya sits beside President Paul von Hindenburg at a state dinner. She is lovely. Clumsy. An intellectual’s daughter, shy among the crowned heads of Europe.
Amanullah is wedged next to Frau von Hindenburg, who is blonde and round as a cheese ball. The king’s cheeks jut from his collar, his brainstem is pinched by his high military demeanor and the post-wienerschnitzel squeeze of his full-dress uniform.
He looks much more comfortable now in his Paradise-issue pajamas and golden robes.
Da’ud’s mother grumbled; “People say Amanullah consumes the meat of pigs and that he will return to Afghanistan from Europe with machines to make soap from human flesh. That is infidel progress for you!”