One afternoon Leila pulls the burka over her head, puts on her high-heeled outdoor shoes and sneaks out of the flat; past the broken entrance-door, the washing hanging out, out to the yard. She picks up a little neighbourhood boy as escort and chaperone. They cross the bridge over the dried-up Kabul River and disappear under the trees on one of Kabul ’s few avenues. They pass shoe-blacks, melon-vendors and bakers, and men who just stand around and hang about. Those are the ones Leila hates, the ones with time on their hands, the ones who take time to gape.
The leaves on the trees are green for the first time in many years. The last three years it hardly rained in Kabul and the sun burnt the buds to cinders. Now, this first spring following the Taliban’s flight, it has rained quite a lot, blessed rain, wonderful rain. Not enough to fill the Kabul River to its banks, but enough to make the few surviving trees sprout and turn green. Enough to allow the dust to settle now and again, the dust, the fine dust which is Kabul ’s curse. When it rains the dust turns to mud, when it’s dry it whirls around, gets into the nose, causes inflammation of the eyes, sits in the throat and muddies up the lungs. This afternoon it rained and the wind freshened. But the moist air does not penetrate the burka. Leila is aware only of the smell of her own nervous breathing and her temples pulsating.
On a concrete block of flats in Mikrorayon no. 4 big signs have been hung with the word ‘Courses’. The queues outside are long. There are literacy courses, computer courses and writing courses. Leila wants to sign up for an English course. Outside the entrance two men sit at a table to register new pupils. Leila pays the fee and joins the queue with hundreds of others who are trying to find their classroom. They descend some stairs and enter a cellar, which looks like a bomb shelter. The bullet holes form patterns on the walls. The premises were used for storing weapons during the civil war, right under a block of flats. Planks divide the various ‘classrooms’. Each cubicle has a blackboard, a pointer and some benches. There are even desks in some of the cubicles. There is a low drone of voices; the heat starts to spread in the room.
Leila finds her section, ‘slightly advanced English’. She is early; so are some gangly, loutish boys.
Can it be possible? Boys in the class? she wonders. She wants to turn and disappear but steels herself. She goes and sits at the back. Two girls sit quietly in the other corner. The voices from the other cubicles blend in one low buzz. Sharp teachers’ voices penetrate the walls. Some time passes before their teacher turns up. The boys start scribbling on the blackboard. ‘Pussy’, they write. ‘Dick, Fuck’. Leila regards the words uninterestedly. She has an English/Persian dictionary and looks the words up, under the table, so the boys won’t see it. But she cannot find the words. She feels great distaste for the whole situation: alone, or nearly alone, with a gang of boys her own age, some of them even a bit older. She should never have come, she regrets it. What if some of the boys started talking to her? What a disgrace. And she has even taken off her burka. You cannot wear a burka in the classroom, she had thought. And now she has already exposed her face.
The teacher arrives and the boys quickly rub out the words. The hour is torture. They all have to present themselves, give their age and say something in English. The teacher, a thin, young man, points at her with the ruler and asks her to speak. She feels she is turning her soul inside out, in front of these boys. She feels dirty, exposed, her honour impaired. What on earth was she thinking of? She had never dreamt that there would be boys and girls in the same class, never, it was not her fault.
She dares not leave. The teacher would ask her why. But when the hour is over she rushes out. Throws the burka on and dashes off. Safely home she hangs the burka on the nail in the hall.
‘Awful, there were boys in the class!’
The others stare open-mouthed. ‘That’s no good,’ says her mother. ‘You mustn’t go there again.’
Leila would not even dream of going back. The Taliban might have disappeared but they were still present in Leila’s head, and in Bibi Gul’s and Sharifa’s and in Sonya’s. The women in Mikrorayon were glad the Taliban era was over, they could play music, they could dance, paint their toenails – as long as no one saw them, and they could hide under the safe burka. Leila was a true child of the civil war, the mullah reign and the Taliban. A child of fear. She cried inside. The attempt to break away, do something independent, learn something, had failed. During five years of Taliban reign girls’ education had been forbidden. Now it was allowed, but she forbade herself. If only Sultan had allowed her to go to high school there would not have been a problem. There the classes were segregated.
She sat down on the kitchen floor to chop onions and potatoes. Sonya was eating a fried egg and nursing Latifa. Leila could not bear to talk to her. The stupid girl who had not even learnt the alphabet. Who did not even try. Sultan got her a private tutor to teach her to read and write. But nothing stuck, every hour was like the first one, and having learnt five letters in as many months, she gave up and asked Sultan if she could stop. Mansur had laughed scornfully from the outset at Sonya’s private literacy course. ‘When a man has everything and does not know what more to do, he tries to teach his donkey to talk,’ he said aloud and laughed. Even Leila, who on the whole disliked everything Mansur said, had to laugh at the joke.
Leila tried to lord it over Sonya and reprimanded her when she said something stupid or was unable to manage, but only when Sultan was away. To Leila Sonya was the poor country bumpkin who had been lifted up into their relative wealth only because she was pretty. She disliked her for the many privileges Sultan gave her and because the two girls although the same age had such dissimilar workloads. She had nothing personal against Sonya, who sat around with a mild, absent expression, watching what was happening around her. She wasn’t really lazy either; she had been a good worker at home, looking after her parents in the village. But Sultan would not let her work hard. When he was away, she often helped. Nevertheless, she got on Leila’s nerves. She sat all day, waiting for Sultan, and jumped up when he returned. When he was away on business she dressed shabbily. When he was at home she powdered her dark face, blackened her eyes and painted her lips.
Sonya had made the transition from child to wife when she was sixteen. She cried before the wedding, but like a well-behaved girl, she soon got used to the idea. She had grown up without any expectations from life and Sultan had used the two-month-long period of engagement to his advantage. He had bribed her parents to enable him to spend time alone with Sonya before the wedding. The engaged couple are not supposed to see each other between the engagement party and the wedding day, a custom rarely observed. But it was one thing to go shopping together, quite another to spend nights together. That was unheard of. Her big brother wanted to defend her honour with a knife when he learnt that Sultan had paid the parents money to be allowed to stay overnight before the wedding night. But Sonya’s indignant brother, too, was silenced with ready cash and Sultan got his way. In his eyes he did her a favour.
‘I must prepare her for the wedding night, she is very young and I am experienced,’ he told the parents. ‘If we spend time together now the wedding night won’t be so shocking. But I promise I will not assault her,’ he said. Gradually he prepared the sixteen-year-old for the great night.
Two years on Sonya is satisfied with her drab existence. She wants nothing more than to sit at home, with a few visits to or from relatives, a new dress from time to time, every fifth year a gold bracelet.
Sultan once took her on a business trip to Teheran. They were away for a month and the women in Mikrorayon were curious to hear what she had experienced abroad. But when she returned, Sonya had nothing to relate. They had stayed with relatives and she had played with Latifa on the floor, as usual. She had only just glimpsed Teheran and had no wish to explore further. The only thing she remarked on were the bazaars; there were nicer things in the Teheran bazaars than in the Kabul bazaars.
The most important thing on Sonya’s mind is to have children, or rather, sons. She is pregnant again and terrified it will be another daughter. When Latifa pulls her shawl off and starts playing with it, Sonya slaps her and ties it round her head. When the last-born plays with the mother’s shawl, the next child will be a girl, so the saying goes.
‘If I have a daughter, Sultan will take a third wife,’ she says after the two sisters-in-law have been squatting some time in silence on the kitchen floor.
‘Has he said so?’ Leila is surprised.
‘He said so yesterday.’
‘He only says it to frighten you.’
Sonya is not listening. ‘It must not be a daughter, it must not be a daughter,’ she mutters. The one-year-old she is nursing is lulled to sleep by her mother’s monotonous voice.
Leila is not in the mood for talking. She needs to get out. She knows she cannot sit at home all day with Sonya, Sharifa, Bulbula and her mother. I’m going mad. I cannot stand it any longer, she thinks. I don’t belong here.
She thinks of Fazil and the way in which Sultan treated him. It was that which made her realise that the time had come to stand on her own two feet, to try the English course.
The eleven-year-old had worked every day carrying boxes in the bookshop, eaten with them every evening, and slept on the mat curled up beside Leila every night. Fazil is Mariam’s oldest son, and Sultan and Leila’s nephew. Mariam and her husband could not afford to feed all their children, and when Sultan needed help in the shop they gladly accepted the offer of board and lodging with Sultan for their son. Payment was Fazil’s daily twelve-hour labours. He was let off on Fridays to visit his mother and father in the village.
Fazil thrived. He tidied up the shop and carried cases during the day and fought with Aimal at night. The only person he could not get on with was Mansur who slapped him or hit his back with his clenched fist when he made mistakes. But Mansur could be kind too. Suddenly he might take him to a shop and buy him some new clothes, or even take him to a restaurant and buy him a nice lunch. On the whole Fazil enjoyed life, far removed from the muddy streets of his native village.
But one day Sultan said: ‘I’m fed up with you. Go home. Don’t show yourself in the shop any more.’
The family was stunned. Had he not promised Mariam to look after the boy for a year? No one said anything, nor did Fazil. But when he lay on his mat that night he cried. Leila tried to console him, but it was no good, Sultan’s word was law.
The next morning she packed up his few belongings and sent him home. It would be up to him to explain to his mother why he had been sent home.
Leila was livid. How could Sultan treat Fazil like that? She might be next in line. It was time to think of something.
Leila hatched a new plan. One morning when Sultan and the sons had left, she pulled the burka over her head and disappeared out of the door. This time too she grabbed a little boy to accompany her. Today she chose another way, out of Mikrorayon, out of the appalling concrete jungle. On the outskirts of the neighbourhood the houses were so ruined they had remained unoccupied. Nevertheless, some families had taken shelter in the ruins and survived by begging from their almost equally poor neighbours, who at least had a roof over their heads. Leila crossed a little field where a herd of goats grazed the sparse clumps of grass while the goatherd dozed under the only remaining shade-giving tree. This was the border between town and village. On the other side of the field was the village Deh Khudaidad. But first she dropped in on big sister Shakila.
The gate was opened by Said, the oldest son of Wakil, the man Shakila had recently married. Said was missing two fingers from one hand. He had lost them when a car battery he was fixing exploded. But he told everyone that he had tripped over a mine. There was more status in being injured by a mine; he might have been fighting in the war. Leila did not like him, she found him simple and coarse. He could neither read nor write and spoke like a peasant, like Wakil. She shuddered at the thought of him. He gave her a crooked smile and grazed her burka as she walked past him. She shuddered once again. She shuddered at the thought of being yoked to him. Many of the family had tried to hook them up. Shakila and Wakil had both asked Bibi Gul for her.
‘Too early,’ Bibi Gul said.
‘About time,’ said Sultan. No one asked Leila and Leila would not have answered. A well-behaved girl does not answer questions about whether she likes so-and-so or not. But she hoped, hoped to escape.
Shakila arrived, hips swaying, smiling, beaming. All fear as regards her marriage to Wakil was unfounded. She was continuing to work as a biology teacher. His children worshipped her; she wiped their noses and washed their clothes. She made her husband fix the house and give her money for new curtains and cushions. She sent the children to school; Wakil and his first wife had not bothered much about that. When the oldest sons grumbled because they found it embarrassing to sit in the same classroom as little children, she just said: ‘It will be a lot more embarrassing later if you don’t go.’
Shakila was over the moon. At last she had a man. Her eyes sparkled. She looked in love. After thirty-five years as an old maid she had adjusted brilliantly to the role of housewife.
The sisters kissed each other on both cheeks, pulled the burkas over their heads and strode out of the gate, Leila in black, high-heeled shoes, Shakila wearing the white, sky-high, gold-buckled pumps, the wedding shoes. Shoes are important when neither body nor clothes, hair nor face can be exposed.
They skipped over puddles, avoided coagulated mud and deep ruts, while the gravel ground through the thin soles. The road was the road to school. Leila was en route to apply for work as a teacher. This was her secret plan.
Shakila had made enquiries at the village school where she worked. There was no English teacher. In spite of Leila having completed only nine years at school, she felt confident that she could teach beginners. When she lived in Pakistan she had attended English evening classes.
The school lies behind a mud enclosure. The wall is too high to see over. An old man sits by the entrance. He makes sure no intruders are admitted, especially men, as this is a girls’ school and all the teachers are women. The playground was once a grass pitch, now it’s a potato patch. Round the patch cubicles have been built into the wall. The classrooms have three walls: the back enclosure and the two side walls. The playground side is open, so the school head can observe what is going on in all the classrooms. In each cubicle there are some benches, tables and a blackboard. Only the older girls have stools and tables; the younger ones sit on the ground and follow what goes on on the blackboard. Many of the students cannot afford exercise books but write on little boards or bits and pieces of paper they have found.
Confusion reigns. Daily new pupils turn up who want to start school; the classes are getting bigger and bigger. The authorities’ school campaign has been very visible. All over the country large banners have gone up depicting smiling children carrying books. ‘Back to school’ is the only text necessary, the picture tells the rest.
When Shakila and Leila arrive the inspector is busy with a young woman who wants to register as a pupil. She says she has completed three classes and wants to start the fourth.
‘I cannot find you on our lists,’ the inspector says, leafing through the card index, which by chance has been left lying in a cupboard during the entire Taliban era. The woman is silent.
‘Can you read and write?’ the inspector asks.
The woman hesitates. In the end she admits she has never attended school.
‘But it would have been nice to start in the fourth class,’ she whispers. ‘It is so embarrassing to be with the little ones in the first class.’
The inspector says that if she wants to learn anything she will have to start from the beginning, in the first class, a class consisting of five-year-olds up to teenagers. The woman would have been the oldest. She thanks the inspector and leaves.
Then it’s Leila’s turn. The inspector remembers her from before the Taliban. Leila had been a pupil at this school and the inspector would welcome her as a teacher.
‘First you have to register,’ she says. ‘You must go to the Ministry of Education with your papers and apply for a job here.’
‘But you don’t have an English teacher, can’t you apply for me? Or I can start now and register later,’ asks Leila.
‘Impossible. You must get personal clearance from the authorities, those are the rules.’
The yells from noisy girls penetrate the open office. A teacher swipes them with a branch to quieten them as they tumble into the classrooms.
Leila walks out of the gate feeling depressed. The sound of excited children fades. She plods home, forgetting that she is stumping along alone on high-heeled shoes. How will she get to the Ministry of Education without anyone noticing? The plan was to get a job and then tell Sultan. If he knew about it beforehand he would put his foot down, but if she already had a job he might let her continue. The teaching was in any case only a few hours each day; she would just have to get up even earlier and work even harder.
Her school certificate is in Pakistan. She feels like giving up. But then she remembers the dark flat and the dusty floors in Mikrorayon and she goes to the nearby telegraph office. She phones some relatives in Peshawar and asks them to retrieve her papers. They promise to help and will send them with anyone who is coming to Kabul. The Afghan postal service is not operating and most things are sent with people travelling.
The papers arrive in a few weeks. Next step is to go to the Ministry of Education. But how will she get there? She cannot go alone. She asks Yunus but he doesn’t think she should work. ‘You never know what kind of job they might give you,’ he says. ‘Stay at home and look after your old mother.’
Her favourite brother is of no help. Her nephew Mansur only snorts when she asks him. She is getting nowhere. The school year started ages ago. ‘It is too late,’ says her mother. ‘Wait until next year.’
Leila despairs. ‘Maybe I don’t want to teach,’ she thinks, to make it easier to bury the plans.
Leila is at a standstill; a standstill in the mud of society and the dust of tradition. She has reached the deadlock in a system which is rooted in centuries-old traditions and which paralyses half the population. The Ministry of Education is a half-hour bus ride away; an impossible half-hour. Leila is not used to fighting for something – on the contrary, she is used to giving up. But there must be a way out. She just has to find it.