The Taliban Shuffle_ Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan - Kim Barker [32]
I left for Kabul the next day, saying an awkward goodbye.
“Thanks for coming to visit,” he said.
“Well, my bosses wanted a story, so it worked out,” I replied. Even then, it was difficult to be honest.
We saw each other a week later, as he passed through Kabul on his way out of the country for vacation, for lunch at the Flower Street Café, a sandwich shop that was relatively private. We held hands beneath the table and kissed goodbye quickly in the path leading toward the front gate, pulling away when an Afghan waiter walked past. Neither one of us necessarily wanted anyone else to know that we were attempting to date. Kind of. We spoke in staccato sentences with abrupt punctuation, not wanting to reveal too much, or ask for too much.
“It’s been really nice getting to know you,” I said.
“Well. You know. I don’t want anything serious. I mean—I’m not—you don’t think—”
“Of course!” I interrupted. “You know. I just. Well, I don’t want anything serious. Obviously. But it’s nice, you know.”
“Well—yeah. I like hanging out. We’ll see what happens.”
“Totally. Have a great vacation.”
Seventh grade. Kabul was a fishbowl and not conducive to actual dating, even though the foreign women were vastly outnumbered by the foreign men. Our attractiveness rate skyrocketed accordingly. A ten in Kabul became a five as soon as she walked off the plane in Dubai. We were Kabul Cute, we were Mission Pretty. But still, the men here rarely asked the women out on actual dates—in that, Jeremy was an anomaly. Most of the attempts at mating involved bad tongue action and groping near or inside the bathrooms at L’Atmosphère.
We were a function of our environment. For many, life was a pressure cooker, going from home to office to restaurant, rarely being outside, and the only release was liquor, was parties, was dancing to the same soundtrack, week after week—“Hips Don’t Lie,” “Crazy in Love,” “Don’t Cha,” and “Let’s Get Retarded.” (In my nightmares, I can still hear that song list, over and over.) By this point, the social scene resembled a cross between a fraternity party and the Hotel California, where the same characters always seemed to stay too long and drink too much, where entertainment occasionally consisted of spelling words on legs with Nair hair-removal cream. The best pool table—or the only one—was at a brothel called Escalades. The disco Coco Cabana had opened a few months earlier but had rapidly turned into a seedy joint featuring alcohol-fueled grope-fests. The Elbow Room resembled a homey ski lodge, featuring a bar and a fireplace; Thai and Italian restaurants promised bad lighting and chilled red wine. A few thousand foreigners lived in Kabul, and even though many of them never went out at night, enough did to justify a dozen thriving businesses. The expatriate scene of Kabul even had its own magazine—Afghan Scene—that included articles and pictures of people at various parties, in various states of inebriation. (To be fair, money from magazine sales helped street kids.)
At this point, prostitutes seemed more in danger of taking over Kabul than the Taliban. Brothels came and went—the Lighthouse, the Tree House, Escalades, the Disco Restaurant, Bobo’s, Ching Ching (a so-called Chinese “restaurant” that advertised something called “mosic”). These brothels, mostly staffed with women from China or one of the former Soviet republics, had blossomed in Kabul like poppy farms after the Taliban’s fall, even though they were theoretically illegal and catered mainly to the security and contractor communities. Enforcement was spotty. A quixotic Afghan lawyer in a cape would raid one brothel. The poor women would then be bundled up and shipped back to their native country, only to be replaced by another brothel in another two-story house with new Chinese women who barely spoke English and did not