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“In the garden.”

That satisfied him. After hanging up, I walked back inside.

“I signed you up for ‘Like a Virgin,’ ” the former marine said.

“Funny.”

My only previous attempts at karaoke had involved songs by the Violent Femmes and Guns N’ Roses—songs, in other words, where being able to carry a melody did not matter. But what the hell, I figured. Here I was, newly single and newly thirty-five, dressed in baggy jeans, a gray Arkansas T-shirt, and an orange hooded sweatshirt. More important, here I was in Afghanistan, where nothing really mattered, where any sense of self-consciousness had been stripped away.

“Like a virgin,” I sang. “Touched for the very first time.”

For three hours, the Chinese women sat in the plastic chairs against the wall, a jury of blank faces and folded arms that watched us sing, torturing such classics as Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Boney M.’s “Daddy Cool.” A random Western man occasionally showed up, stepped inside, and went upstairs draped with the woman of his choice. She would return and slump back into her chair after thirty minutes or so. Bored. At one point, several Heinekens into the evening, we pulled the women out of their chairs and tried to make them dance with us. Finally, we got a reaction. They started laughing. After 1 AM, we left to pick up kebabs, the Afghan equivalent of IHOP, before I kissed one of my new friends good night and fell face-first into bed. I was no longer just observing the bad behavior of the foreign community. Within weeks of my breakup, I had fully signed on.

CHAPTER 8

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

Many Afghans were not happy with the direction the country was heading, especially conservatives. And in the middle of this disgust, Abdul Jabar Sabit, a windmill-slaying Afghan lawyer, saw an opportunity. As legal adviser for the Interior Ministry, his job description was somewhat vague, so he decided to declare war on alcohol and brothels, to stem the tide of foreign excess. He had launched a one-man anti-vice mission, a pared-down version of the Taliban’s Vice and Virtue Ministry, that notorious charm offensive responsible for enforcing the regime’s straitjacket-like morality rules. And in so doing, Sabit had seized on the mood of many Afghans, who felt that the Westerners were just too much—too free with their booze, too loose with their morals, and too influential over young Afghans.

Even though alcohol was illegal, the Afghan government had permitted a two-tiered society—one for Afghans, and one for Westerners. Foreigners could buy booze at two major stores that required passports at the door. Restaurants could serve alcohol to foreigners but not to Afghans, which meant most restaurants that served alcohol did not allow Afghans. The contradiction fueled resentment from everyone. Many Afghans viewed alcohol as more pernicious, more Western and un-Islamic, than opium or hashish. More liberal Afghans figured they should be allowed to drink alcohol inside the restaurants, which were, after all, in their country. Every time Sabit announced another booze battle, Farouq would shake his head.

“The price of raisins is going to go up,” he would say. Raisin wine was a concoction made popular during Taliban rule, along with antiseptic and Coca-Cola.

I had first met Sabit in the spring of 2005, in the office of the Interior Ministry spokesman. He had left Afghanistan during the late 1970s and landed first in Pakistan, then the United States, where he worked for Voice of America before moving to Canada. He had joined Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s fundamentalist Islamic party, Hezb-i-Islami, back when Hekmatyar was on our side against the Soviets and before he had turned into a renegade. After the Taliban fell, Sabit, a lawyer by training, had come back to Afghanistan, part of the flood of returning Afghans who claimed they wanted to help rebuild their country. He was an ally of Karzai’s—kind of—although he complained all the time about Karzai. Then again, Sabit complained about a lot. He was a human volcano,