An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (9 page)

* * *

Abdul-Kareem closes our bedroom door in order to whisper. We are going to a Western-style party in the home of a young progressive Afghan couple. Foreigners will be there. The event is hush-hush. Men and women are going to be dancing together. By now, this feels forbidden, dangerous, even to me.

There is liquor and popcorn. The lights are dimmed. There are rock ’n’ roll records playing. Abdul-Kareem grabs my arm and tells me that I had better not act like the other Western “whores” there, women who agree to dance with men who are not their husbands. He remains at my side the entire evening.

Has he always been this controlling, suspicious? Perhaps he has been and I mistook it for love. Many years later a college mate writes me a surprising note. He says:

I was always a loner, the professional “Frenchman” who had to work hard on his English. I saw Abdul-Kareem as an English “bloke,” his accent was somehow British as were his clothes and manners. You were
pure New York. You were closer to Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. You were wild and funny, as talkative as he was a bit “tight.”

I had a (quiet) crush on you but Abdul-Kareem was always behind you or close by. I remember laughing with you a lot. You said things . . . OUTRAGEOUS! I really felt at ease with you . . . except Abdul-Kareem was ALWAYS around and you seemed tight as a couple, “going steady.” I was old enough to know when not to waste my time.

Ah well.

How can Abdul-Kareem resist the pull of his culture, since his family is demanding that he surrender to it as the price for being allowed back in—especially since he has a foreign bride?

I am a goner.

The entire family (Abdul-Kareem and his brothers and sisters and spouses) attended another, much larger party. A garden party: About sixty people sat listlessly in the heat, politely yawning and smiling between mouthfuls of kebab, pilau, and sweets. The company was, refreshingly, “mixed” but the men and women sat separately.

A German woman, Heidi, the wife of an Afghan engineer, rescued me. Heidi is twenty-two and has been living in Afghanistan for six months. We walked off together, through the garden and into an adjoining field, where we lay down, face-up, side-by-side. Heidi whispered, but then she bellowed.

“I am bored, bored, bored. I have no real life here. I cannot stand it.”

As foreign wives, we talked quickly and easily. In Kabul, I used French, English, and my knowledge of Yiddish to understand some German. Heidi spoke English well enough. We whispered because we knew that our conversation would be considered conspiratorial. We knew we could be interrupted at any moment, separated, and silenced.

“Phyllis, remember always that no opportunity to act sanely, rather than traditionally, should be wasted.”

She said this mischievously, but with a slightly mad and desperate grin. It was very hot. Heidi had brought two bathing suits to the party. There was a swimming pool at the other end of the garden where the men were planning on swimming later.

“Let’s go now,” she suddenly demanded, “before it’s completely off-limits to us.”

We undressed, put on the bathing suits, and laid back down in the grass to sunbathe, still hidden from the party. We dozed.

Abdul-Kareem and my sister-in-law found us. They were both shocked, angry, worried.

“Important people” are at the party, they hissed at me, people who would never accept my behavior or poor choice of companions. Heidi’s reputation is that of a “whore,” they said, and she was “ruining” her poor husband, who was the “laughingstock” of Kabul.

They physically pulled me away from Heidi. And they kept talking: “Her husband’s family is not as important as ours is,” I was not to compare myself with her. They ride a motorbike, they have no car. They are both going to return to Europe or certainly, she would. He would have to send her “packing.”

Ah—what could Heidi’s crimes have been? That she acted like a Westerner? That she believed women had the right to swim—or was it that she dared talk to men other than her husband? Afghan girls have been killed for far less, both in Afghanistan and among immigrants in the West. The standards for women are different here; the line a woman must walk is razor thin.

The British-born author Alison Legh-Jones fell in love with Khaled, a “North African Arab.” She married him in an Islamic ceremony and lived with him in the late 1960s somewhere in North Africa. In her book,
English Woman, Arab Man,
she writes:

After finding an Arab in my address book he decides it’s time to tell me what to do if a local man tries to pick me up. “Ignore him. He’s wondering how soon he can make love to you. If he doesn’t go away tell him you’re not a tourist. Say you’re married to an Arab and he mustn’t talk to you. If he’s a good man he’ll say ‘Excuse me, madam’ and leave you. If not let him talk to himself until he’s tired of looking silly.

“If I see you talking to another Arab without my permission I’ll kill you. As soon as a girl is seen with an Arab everyone assumes they’re making love. Whatever you do, I’ll find out. I’ve got friends everywhere. There’ll always be someone watching you. As soon as one of my friends sees you with another man he’ll come and tell me ‘Your wife is no good. She goes with other men.’

“Don’t speak to my friends either,” he adds. “They’re just as bad.”

My own parents had also watched me very closely. They assumed the worst if I came home a few minutes late. The “worst” always meant that I’d been with a boy and had done “something.” Whatever it might have been could “ruin my life” and “wreck all their plans for me.”

I have exchanged one jailor for another, one jailhouse culture for another, far more dangerous jailhouse culture.

Have all American wives regretted their decision to marry and live in the Muslim world? No.

In 1945 the tall blonde Californian Marianne Likowski Alireza married Saudi Ali Alireza, a member of the royal family. Once Ali was sure Marianne was not Jewish, neither he nor his family ever insisted that she convert from Christianity to Islam. She agreed that their children would be raised as Muslims. Marianne would enjoy a fairy-tale world of diplomatic parties, shopping extravaganzas, and extended vacations in the best hotels in Europe and Egypt.

However, Ali told her in advance what life would be like in the harem, in purdah: that she would have to be fully veiled and that, with some exceptions, she would mainly participate in gender-segregated gatherings. Marianne did not aspire to be more than a wife and mother and understood that she, not her Saudi family, would be obliged to adjust. The presence of black slaves did not bother her; on the contrary she adopted the Arab view that such slaves were better off. At times Marianne’s frustration and rage kept her in bed all day, but essentially she fit in and developed loving, lifelong relationships with her male and female relatives. She gave birth to five children and flourished in an extended family in which everyone lived, dined, and traveled together. Her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law embraced her with unfailing and spontaneous warmth. They did not reject her as a Christian infidel or foreigner.

Alireza’s book,
At the Drop of a Veil,
was originally published in 1971, a quarter-century after her marriage in California. It is a joy to read, and as I did so, I decided I would quote her at length as an example of how such marriages can work out. And then, in the book’s
last ten pages,
Marianne drops quite a bombshell. After fifteen years of marriage Ali suddenly tells her that he has unilaterally divorced her, Muslim style—and is taking the children away from her. By then their oldest daughter, Hamida, had just been married to her first cousin. Ali married a Lebanese woman and shipped all four children off to boarding school, first in Egypt, then in Switzerland. Marianne no longer had her American passport—Ali had locked it up the moment they first arrived in Saudi Arabia. Like me, Marianne was forced to enter America on
a foreign passport. But she was a cool-headed and determined mother with helpful friends.

On a vacation with her four children in Switzerland, Marianne planned and carried out a successful kidnapping and took them with her to California. At the time doing so was absolutely unheard of. I hereby salute her courage and resourcefulness. Marianne regrets nothing—and she still spends a few months every year in the kingdom visiting her relatives. She writes:

I have fifteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. . . . People say it’s remarkable that I made my peace with life in old Arabia, but I say no. What is truly remarkable is that those around me helped me to make my peace . . . it was in my worst moments that they helped me the most, and then we laughed together. So, this is a story of people who proved that even though we came from worlds apart, we could give respect, tolerance, understanding, sensitivity, and love to one another and make a human bond. If I had it to do over again, would I? You bet! I wouldn’t have missed it for anything!

More recently, in the twenty-first century, G. Willow Wilson, a young Colorado native, converted to Islam; she subsequently fell in love with and married a moderate Egyptian. In her memoir,
The Butterfly Mosque
,
she quite movingly conveys the sense of camaraderie and security that comes from living in a large, Egyptian Muslim family. Like Alireza, Willow sometimes becomes impatient and bored but expresses joy and excitement about performing everyday household tasks. I will not criticize these women for finding happiness in the Arab world; however, this type of restricted, protected, and utterly family-centered life did not work for me. Alireza and Wilson freely chose such lives; I did not.

I have been here for two months and have been allowed out only five or six times. Is this imprisonment meant to tame me, break me, teach me to accept my fate as an Afghan woman? I want to go home.

We thrash things out for hours the other night. Abdul-Kareem was not in the least bit understanding or guilty or apologetic. I discover that all along he has been editorializing what I say to family members when he translates my words. He says it’s “for your own good.”

I do not understand why we are not living by ourselves as we have already done for years. I point out that he still has no job, is still
completely dependent on his father for everything. He is also in a bad temper all the time.

Why do I have to ask twenty times for even the smallest thing? I am desperate for a tin of Huntley and Palmer biscuits or for a can of tuna fish.

But my nagging hunger is not as awful as having lost the man I once knew and trusted. He really doesn’t seem to care that I am miserable. He spends all his time with his brothers when he is home. Just as they do. His eldest brother never talks to his wife.

He is slipping away from me. I am a burden, a liability. He can’t even be bothered to buy a contraceptive. He is putting me at great risk. He is hard, indifferent.

Abdul-Kareem is waiting to be told what he can do next. He is waiting for his father to fix it up with the King and the government for him to become Somebody Important. But first, they are watching him carefully.

I am an unhappy and complaining wife. It is the only thing that makes him uncomfortable enough to hit me, yell at me, stomp out of the room.

He has begun to hit me.

Had I known that something like this could ever happen, had I known that we would have to live with his mother and brothers, I would never have come here.

Dear Diary: Thank you. Had I not written some things down, I would never have remembered that I had been asking that he use contraceptives.

I have no memory of Abdul-Kareem’s hitting me—yelling at me, yes, avoiding me, yes—hitting me, no. I would not have remembered this if I could not read it here. Worse than any slap or kick Abdul-Kareem might administer, worse, even, than refusing to use a condom, is that my very Western husband has confined me to a very Eastern harem. I am in purdah, however posh. And he acts as if this is all quite normal.

My female relatives drink tea; eat luscious fruit, nuts, sweet, sticky cakes; entertain their many, mainly female, relatives who come to call. They also sew, cuddle infants, prepare young children for school. Above all they supervise the servants. This alone can be made into a full-time occupation.

The servants and the daughters-in-law usually bear the brunt of the oldest woman’s or highest-ranking wife’s frustrations. And her
frustrations are many. I had known something about female-female cruelty in the West, but I learned even more about it in Afghanistan. Forty years later I published a work titled
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman.
It has a global perspective.

I have been talking about living in a harem. Let me explain what that means.

A harem is not a brothel, as so many Westerners erroneously believe. It is merely the women’s living quarters. Male relatives can join them—but no male nonrelatives may do so. It is hardly a den of eroticism.

Western men have never been able to visit a harem—it is forbidden to them because the women are sacred (property), which must be kept separate and apart in order to protect them from strange men. Because foreign men have not visited the women’s quarters, their imaginations have run riot. True, like a brothel (or a women’s prison) a domestic harem is an all-female and a female-dominated environment. But it is more like a celibate nunnery or a nursery and sewing room. It is not a place where seductions and orgies take place. Historically only Western women travelers, who were allowed to visit domestic and imperial harems, have been able to render a more accurate report.

Eventually, like prisoners everywhere, so-called protected women are blinded by the light; their eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The outside world seems dangerous, certainly unfriendly to women. Hence understandably, women become claustrophobic and agoraphobic. Women may even become anxious when they are outdoors.

I have begun to internalize the unspoken rules: Wait, and watch what the other women do before acting. Even I feel a bit too daring when I make my escapes into the city. I am beginning to experience as taboo, dangerous, what would be perfectly acceptable behavior back in New York. I am also getting used to spending my days at home, reading and waiting for the men to return.