“Please, please, please, can you get them to stop working by eight?” I asked the holy man. “None of us can sleep. None of us can work. I think I’m losing my mind.”
I even played the female card. “The construction workers are harassing the women living here. They’re looking at us. It’s against Islam.”
The spiritual leader was kind, conciliatory.
“Don’t worry, Kim, I will stop it. I understand. Don’t worry. It’s no problem.”
I got off the phone. “He says he’ll stop it,” I told the others.
But within an hour, the banging again sounded like war. I was reminded of what I already knew—any time I was told “no problem” in Afghanistan, the problem bit my head off. I again tried calling the spiritual leader, but the phone rang and rang. He never answered.
The next night, at about eleven, Sean pounded on the upstairs door of one of the security contractors, already in bed, not sleeping.
“Can I borrow your gun?” Sean asked the security guy. It’s possible Sean was drinking.
The security guy gave him a toy BB assault rifle and a real gun laser. Sean took the gun and aimed it toward the construction workers. He trained the laser sight on a man’s chest. It took the other workers seconds to see the red laser point, then a few more seconds to look over at the Gandamack and the window where a crazed Brit clearly was pointing a remarkably real-looking gun at them. That was what finally stopped the pounding—not reasonable talk, not negotiations, not promises, but the threat of violence. Another Afghan lesson learned.
Finally the election was held. The results were predictable—the warlords, drug lords, and fundamentalist Hezb-i-Islami candidates won their seats, along with a smattering of do-gooders, former civil servants, and women, who under the constitution were given one-quarter of the seats. Despite allegations of fraud and illegal militias, the international election-complaints commission could do little. When the commission reversed one of its only decisions to ban a warlord-linked woman from running, one of the commissioners quit.
Even my first warlord, Pacha Khan Zadran, was allowed to run for parliament, despite his recent résumé of running an illegal militia and fighting the Americans before being arrested in Pakistan and jailed for a time. The disarmament commission reported that Pacha Khan had not surrendered all the weapons necessary to run for parliament. But still, the election commission allowed him, under the more-the-merrier warlord free-for-all. He won a seat. Like everyone else, he was now respectable, the past forgiven.
I stayed in Kabul for days after the election, the last visiting journalist in town. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to face Chris and what I knew I had to do. Finally an earthquake threw me out of bed, an earthquake that seemed to last for minutes and threatened to shake the Gandamack into powder. I flew back to India. The quake killed more than eighty thousand people, mostly on the Pakistani side of Kashmir. I spent barely a night with my fragile boyfriend before flying off to cover the earthquake. By the time I came back, Chris knew he needed to go home to Chicago. I also knew it—I couldn’t bear the responsibility.
“I think I want to break up,” I said as soon as I walked in the front door.
“I know,” he said.
Later I told him he needed to leave. Soon.
“But I want to stay for a while,” he said. “I want to be here for your birthday.”
“Go home for my birthday.”
I wasn’t trying to be cruel. The best gift he could give me was to get home safe. So I put my ex-boyfriend on a plane, threw away the Post-it notes bearing my name, and tried to forget about the lost files on my computer, which Chris had wiped clean. The next day I ran away again, back to Afghanistan, where life seemed simpler.
CHAPTER 7
MONKEY GONE TO HEAVEN
I left India without telling my bosses. They knew I was going to Afghanistan—they just didn’t know when. Not only that—I flew into Kabul, and then almost immediately took another flight an hour west to Herat. Why? Yes, I had found a story that I knew my bosses would want, but I also flew there because a man had invited me. I had become interested in Jeremy earlier that month, just as my long-term relationship was falling apart. This potential fling, spurred on by a flurry of e-mails, would never last. We were both on the bounce. I had met Jeremy a few times during the past year at various parties. Over the summer, he and his long-term girlfriend had split. Jeremy was only twenty-nine, and he bore a strong resemblance to every man I had ever dated—he was artsy, handsome, and angsty; he played the bass guitar; he wore corduroy; and he liked the band Postal Service. I told him very little about my breakup. He invited me to Herat for a long weekend. Coincidentally, a weekend that included my thirty-fifth birthday.
On that Thursday, a translator I found through Farouq picked me up at the airport. We started reporting a story on the largest parliamentary vote-winner in the province, which was near Iran and much more developed than most of Afghanistan. The top winner was a woman who won primarily because Afghan men thought the mother of six was hot. After interviewing a few men who had tacked up her election poster like some cheesecake pinup, I went to my hotel to wait for Jeremy to call. He was working on a U.S.-funded agriculture project, delivering wheat seeds to farmers in an attempt to discourage poppy cultivation. The opium trade had sprung back to life after an earlier Taliban crackdown, like a dried-out sponge dropped in water. Jeremy’s project was a well-intentioned idea but similar to fighting a hundred-year flood with a sandbag, if the sandbag were given out as a loan and had to be repaid at some point in the future. Jeremy was due back that afternoon from a meeting with farmers in Farah Province. I sat in my room, which was dubbed a “deluxe,” apparently because it had four single beds all crammed together, and waited. After an hour, Jeremy called.
“I’m really sorry, there’s no way I can get there today,” he said. “My talk to the farmers ran long. It’s too dangerous to leave this late. My security says we can’t go by road.”
“Oh. OK, I understand,” I said. I did, but I was disappointed. There I sat in Herat, after being invited to town by a guy who wasn’t even there. Lame.
“I’ll get there tomorrow,” he assured me.
Tomorrow was my birthday, but Jeremy didn’t know that. I wasn’t going to tell him. After all, I had already lied about my age for the first time in my life, without even thinking about it, inexplicably telling him that I was thirty-two. “You don’t look it,” he had told me.
So it seemed to put far too much weight on this visit to tell Jeremy that I happened to be celebrating my birthday with him. Jeremy did show up that Friday, coming over to my hotel lobby about noon. I skipped down the stairs, wearing a new blue long-sleeved butt-covering loose shirt with baggy black pants and a black headscarf.
“I like your shirt,” Jeremy said.
“Thanks,” I replied. “It shows off my figure.”
We smiled awkwardly at each other and shook hands. This was like seventh grade. We went to see the famed Herat minarets, pockmarked by various artillery. We looked at the rubble surrounding them, including chipped pieces of blue tile that once decorated the minarets. We could not hold hands. We could not hug. I could not spend the night at his place nor stay too long in his room—too embarrassing for him and his staff, since he lived in his office. Everything in Afghanistan was about appearances, even for foreigners. Especially for the women—we were already considered loose and easy, just by our very existence.
Jeremy and I ate dinner at a kebab joint that was shaped like a giant swan. I had been here before, on a trip with Karzai’s crew, when we sat on daybeds out back and were entertained by live music and a dancing boy. But now it was too cold for such fun. We ate dinner quietly because everyone was staring at us. We had no booze to help ease the jitters of an actual date.