We drove down the roads, such as they were, bumpy and indifferent, like someone started paving them and then decided “why bother.” As usual, I stared out the window as everyone outside stared in at me, both of us watching an equally odd zoo exhibit. The old men wore impossible turbans and had faces etched like a topographical map. Faceless women in dirty blue burqas knocked on our windows, shoving penicillin prescriptions toward us with henna-stained fingers, holding dirty swaddled babies with kohl eyeliner, demanding money. Blue bottles, other journalists called them. It was easy to depersonalize them because these women had no faces, easy to avoid looking at them, to avoid their pleas. But it was tough to ignore the children and the old men, even if we rarely paid out, tough to say no to someone looking you in the eye.
Throughout the capital, evidence of war was still everywhere. The most solid buildings were the squat, rambling concrete apartment complexes and Kafkaesque government ministries left as parting gifts by the Soviets, the tallest of which was the foreboding Ministry of Communications at a mere eighteen stories. Many of the mud buildings were crumbling, and others were pocked with bullet marks or destroyed by rockets. In places, Kabul looked like someone had shaken a giant box of crackers and dumped them out. Traffic lights didn’t yet exist. Cops directed traffic around crowded roundabouts. Convoys of foreigner-filled SUVs jockeyed for position with wooden carts pulled by people and donkeys.
Yes, it was good to be back—even if everything in June 2004 was different than before. Farouq could not work with me for a while because he was getting married the next day, which was also his twenty-eighth birthday. The newspaper no longer had a house—we had given that up because the Afghan conflict was no longer seen as big enough to justify the expense. And this overseas gig was no longer a once-in-a-while adventure. Now, I lived here.
Nasir and Farouq dropped me off at a guesthouse, the Gandamack Lodge, named after a famous Afghan battle that the British had lost more than a hundred and sixty years earlier, a sprawling Dr. Seuss–influenced two-story building where one of Osama bin Laden’s wives once lived. There was no “Green Zone” in Kabul, no place where all the foreigners lived, protected by walls and men with guns. Instead, foreigners stayed anywhere, in guesthouses like the Gandamack, or in shared houses, which like all Afghan houses were compounds protected by high walls from prying eyes, most likely so women had some privacy. Some foreigners hired security guards. Others didn’t.
Farouq, panicked and sweaty over juggling a wedding and me, started making phone calls and eventually found me a fill-in translator, Ajmal Naqshbandi, a sweet, shy, dumpling of a man with a slight mustache, probably because that was all he could grow, who translated every interview like a romantic poem. I liked Ajmal’s poetry. I missed Farouq’s English skills. Later I would wish I had given Ajmal better advice. I would wish I had told him he was too sensitive for journalists and too brave for his own good, and that news reporting was no profession for a poet.
The next afternoon, Farouq stopped by the Gandamack briefly, and I asked him what I should wear to the wedding. He looked me up and down, at my green baggy Afghan shirt, my baggy black pants, my dusty black tennis shoes.
“What you’re wearing is fine,” Farouq pronounced.
This was absolutely not true. I showed up that night at the massive wedding hall, where women sat in one large room, men in another, segregated even during a wedding ceremony. None of the Afghan women spoke English. We said hello to one another about fifty times, nodded and smiled, and then said hello some more. They all looked like fairy-tale princesses, with sequin-and-velvet gowns, heavy makeup, and three-tiered hair. My problematic hair had been mashed under a scarf all day. I wore no makeup. Another American woman joined me at a long table—Farouq’s former English teacher, who spoke Dari and dressed appropriately. Farouq and his bride came in and sat on a couch in the front of the room of women. She sobbed. He looked grim. No one is supposed to be happy at an Afghan wedding, especially the bride, because she is leaving her family to move in with the groom and his family.
Farouq looked around the room, spotted me, and called me to the stage. Self-conscious in green, I sat with the new couple. I posed for pictures, wondering how the marriage would affect Farouq’s plans.
He had wanted to go to medical school in America, and for years friends had tried to help him. But his hoped-for scholarship never panned out. Farouq had stopped talking so much about leaving Afghanistan to study. In one way, this marriage was great—Farouq had a wife, and after twenty-eight years, he deserved something to focus on besides working for everyone else. But I also worried that this marriage could mean the end of Farouq’s surgical aspirations, and that he would become like some of the guys I had dated, talking wistfully about plans and goals while working as a waiter to pay the rent.
After dozens of photographs, Farouq and his wife left the stage and the dancing resumed. A few men, the only ones allowed in the women’s room besides Farouq and the musicians, videotaped the dancing. Wedding videos are often used by Afghan families to pick prospective brides for single men because, for once, they can actually see what Afghan women look like out of their drab baggy clothes, headscarves, and burqas.
One of the bride’s friends adopted me, even though we couldn’t understand each other. She had a brown ponytail and wore a man’s suit. She touched my knee, grabbed my hand, carefully peeled and cut me pieces of an apple and fed them to me with her fingers, and at one point pulled me toward the dance floor. It felt like a first date with a mime. I did not want to do this, but I relented and started to sway to the Afghan music and its polka-like beat. Then my date left me on the dance floor. Everyone left me on the dance floor. It was like a practical joke, and I was the only person standing, with all the Afghan women clapping and cheering me on, and the few men on bended knee pointing video cameras at me. Just groovy. I was left with a choice: I could sit down, or I could dance like an idiot. I chose the idiot route, jumping up and down like a teenager at a punk-rock concert. By myself. For ten minutes.
And that was how I decided to approach this region. I decided to go all in, for as long as I stayed. I didn’t know how long—maybe two years, maybe three, depending on Chris and what happened. My indecision mirrored that of the foreign community, already trying to figure out an exit strategy for Afghanistan and a way out of the quagmire in Iraq.
CHAPTER 3
AMERICAN IDIOT
I soon learned that I rarely had the right clothes, and I rarely knew the right things to say or do. After Farouq finished his wedding duties—no honeymoon, just a lot of traditional family obligations—we ate lunch at the Marco Polo restaurant, a gloomy, fly-spattered hole-in-the-wall with decent meat but no running water in the bathrooms. I launched into a serious conversation, prompted by a book about Islam I had just read and my annoyance with the segregation of the sexes here. Over kebabs, bread, beans, and rice, I lectured Farouq about women in Islam.
“It’s all Umar’s fault,” I said, blaming Islam’s second caliph, who lived in the seventh century, for installing certain restrictions on Muslim women.
“No, Kim. He was a good, strong man, and he defended Islam. I am named after Umar, and I can’t accept that,” Farouq said. Umar had been given the honorary title of “the Farooq,” which in Arabic means “the one who distinguishes between right and wrong.” Farouq took this stuff seriously. “That’s not true,” he went on. “Take it back.”