Afghanistan: The Arrest (7)

A memoir of life in Kabul, Afghanistan from 1976 to 1978: Part VII

Hans returned to Kabul two days after I did, and we were both really happy to be back and looking forward to picking up our lives again.

And then things became surreal.

A week after Hans had returned—before he had gotten around to handing over the truck to his Afghan business partner—he was contacted by an acquaintance of his named Clare.

Clare was a 20-something Canadian woman with a hippy shop in Montreal. Like many other young Westerners in those days, she would spend several months in Kabul every year smoking hashish, hanging out, and buying Afghan carpets, jewelry and clothing. Then she would ship everything to her store in Montreal and go home and sell it.

Clare heard through the grapevine that Hans had a truck, so she offered to pay him $30 to pick her most recent purchases up at a local shop and deliver them to customs at the airport. She promised to meet him there and take everything through customs herself.

So on the agreed day and time, Hans did just that. Except that Clare wasn’t at the airport to meet him. After waiting around for a while, he decided to unload the truck anyway. As he was doing so, he came across some carved wooden poles that belonged to a yurt (a nomadic tent) Clare had bought.

As he started unloading the poles, Hans noticed there was an oily substance on one of them. He rubbed his finger over the pole, smelled it, and immediately recognized that the substance was hash oil. It turned out that Clare had filled condoms full of oil and stuffed them into the hollow poles. Unfortunately, the condoms had started to leak.

Hans called a customs agent over to show him—and the agent immediately arrested Hans! Customs officials confiscated his truck, took his passport, and threw him in jail. In the meantime, Afghan contacts of Clare notified her what had happened and helped her flee overland to Pakistan.

Thank goodness Hans was put in a jail in Shahr-i-Nau—not in Pul-e-Charkhi prison, which was in the eastern part of Kabul and was (and still is) an absolutely horrible place of torture and death. I don’t know the name of the jail where Hans was incarcerated, but I do remember that it was on a quiet side street, similar to the compound of a house. It also had a small garden, except that the garden walls were made of bars instead of mud.

I could actually walk up to the bars on the street and talk to Hans through them. I could also bring him food to eat. Over the next few days, he started to look like he had measles because of so many bed bug bites, but he somehow remained positive. He even had me smuggle in some bottles of red wine that I bought from Rasul, the owner of an Italian restaurant where we often ate.

After ten days, the police finally released Hans, but they kept the truck and his passport.

“Investigating” the crime

Things became even more surreal about a week later. A police detective named Osman contacted us and invited both of us to ride around in his car while he “investigated” the case.

I have no idea why he did this, nor do I think he knew what he was doing. (Maybe he just wanted to practice his English?) I also think everyone knew that Clare had already escaped the country and that they were just pretending to go through the motions. In addition, I think they were just putting on a show since the livelihood of many Afghan farmers depended on poppies, and the world’s best hashish could be bought easily on just about every street corner in Kabul.

But we rode around with Osman for a few hours anyway. He must have liked us, because he ended up inviting us to the wedding of one of his relatives, which was to take place in three days’ time.

The wedding

On the day of the wedding, our new friend Osman the police detective picked us up at our house and drove us to a small village compound somewhere outside of Kabul.

There we separated: as a woman, I joined the other women in the house, who were sitting on carpets on the floor in a circle around the living room. The women were talking quietly with each other and drinking tea. I mostly sat there with a smile pasted on my face because I only understood a few words of what they were saying.

Hans and the other men, however, were outside the compound, racing around on horses, shooting rifles into the air, and altogether having a great deal more fun.

After what seemed like hours, the women began to stir, and the bride finally began to descend the staircase. She was wearing a Western-style white wedding dress with a veil covering her head and face. The astonishing thing that quickly became evident, however, is that she was approximately eight months pregnant!

Talk about shattering my preconceived notions of Moslem culture . . . In many Moslem countries (and in many families in Afghanistan, I imagine), a woman who becomes pregnant outside of wedlock would be killed by her father or brothers in order to regain family honor.

But thank goodness for this woman, a wedding took place instead.

I also would have thought that the family would want to marry the couple off as quickly and discreetly as possible. So why they waited so long into her pregnancy to marry, why they put on a large, formal wedding, and why Osman invited us to attend it are all mysteries to me.

Getting back to normal

Ever optimistic, Hans and I assumed his case would eventually be resolved. He talked to the Dutch Embassy, but there was nothing they could do about his passport since it had been confiscated by Afghan officials.

Hans wanted to stay in Kabul in any case because of his family’s business. So we put the fact that he didn’t have a passport out of our minds and got back to our day-to-day lives.

Now that I am writing about these events from such a distance of years, it makes me wonder what on earth we were thinking! The image of The Fool from the Rider-Waite tarot deck keeps coming to my mind.

The young man has confidently set out on a journey. Even though he is about to step into an abyss, he appears to be serene and confident about where he is going. Just like Hans and I were.

A new teaching job

After everything that had happened and the fact that my life was going in a completely different direction, it no longer felt right to remain in Peace Corps. I talked to the Director, and he was really understanding. He not only agreed to allow me to quit as a Volunteer, but he also gave me permission to begin teaching English for the United States Information Service (USIS).

USIS sponsored a language school in Kabul for men and women who wanted to learn enough English to be accepted into universities in English speaking countries around the world. USIS also provided scholarships to make this possible.

I loved teaching in this school. We had real books, comfortable classrooms, fixed courses, and students (men and women) who were highly motivated to learn. My youngest student was a 16-year-old girl named Nabila, and my oldest was a 30-something man named Mohammad.

They were so full of hopes and dreams for themselves and their country! They wanted to learn English, study abroad, and then come home again and help Afghanistan improve and grow.

I also made two friends among the teachers. Anne was from England and Ilhan was from the States. (Ilhan’s parents immigrated to Maryland from Turkey when she was a little girl.) Both Anne and Ilhan were married to Afghan men they had met as students at university in England and the U.S. After graduation, both couples had moved to Afghanistan, where the husbands had started small businesses and Anne and Ilhan had started teaching at USIS.

Planning our wedding

Hans and I finally came to a decision about when we would marry. I love fall, October is my favorite month, and it is particularly beautiful in Kabul at that time of year. In addition, Hans’ 30th birthday was going to take place on October 14 (1977), so I suggested that we marry on that day.

“That way,” I told him, “we will never forget our anniversary or how many years we’ve been married!” (Although it sounded like a good idea to me at the time, this turned out to be a bad decision in the coming years because we always celebrated Hans’ birthday and basically forgot our wedding anniversary.)

We notified our parents, and they began making plans to travel to Kabul for the wedding, as well as my twin sister, Janice.

Upgrading our house

The front of our house showing the balcony of our second story bedroom

In preparation for the arrival of our families, we made some upgrades to our house. The pictures shown here came from my sister and are the only ones available to me.

The living room

These pictures are old and fuzzy, of course, and the trunk/coffee table in the living room picture above is embarrassingly covered with junk. But who knew when I took this picture so many years ago that I would want to share it with you now?!

If you look at the floor in the pictures of the living room (above) and of our bedroom (below), you will vaguely see they are covered with straw mats. The floors of the house were made of bare concrete. To make them cozier, we hired two men to come to the house carrying bundles of straw. Then they sat on their knees on the floor and actually wove the mats in place.

The cushions for the living room chairs and couch are donkey bags, which were made by tribal nomads in Baluchistan (southern Afghanistan). They consisted of two large pouches that were knotted and piled like oriental carpets and held together by a length of strong woven material. Nomads actually put them over the backs of donkeys to haul things. We stuffed them with pillows and created comfortable cushions to sit on.

A picture of our bedroom looking out toward the balcony

I also went to the fabric bazar and chose material for the living room windows and our bedroom. Then the wife of Faramurs, our cook, made them into curtains. I especially loved the ones in our bedroom, which were a stylized version of Alexander the Great riding his beloved horse, Bucephalus.

We also had chests of drawers and closets built for our bedroom.

This is a picture of our gardener, who used a broom to sweep up leaves in the yard rather than a rake! Also note his turban in comparison to the Sikh turban shown below.

Finding a doctor

I became really sick again during the summer. This time, however, I don’t know what it was or how it started. Since I was no longer in the Peace Corps and did not have access to the American nurse (and her laboratory), I found a local doctor to consult with.

Dr. Singh was a nice young man from India who was a Sikh. Sikkism is an Indian religion that originated in the Punjab region of India around the end of the 15th century CE. One of their characteristics is that they do not cut their hair. Instead, the men twist their hair into a knot on top of their heads and then cover it with a turban. Sikh turbans look very different from Afghan turbans, so it is easy to distinguish between the two.

Example of a Sikh turban. © Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons

Dr. Singh came to our house and treated me with shots of penicillin. A couple of weeks later, after I was almost well, I went to his office for a final check-up.

I was in the waiting room when an Afghan man and his wife—wearing a chadri—came into the office. She was having a hard time walking and was clearly unwell. She went into a small private room off of the waiting room, while her husband went into Dr. Singh’s examining room to talk to him.

I watched as Dr. Singh would ask questions and the man would go into the other room to ask the questions of his wife. Then he would return to Dr. Singh’s office with her answers.

In other words, Dr. Singh never actually examined the wife or talked directly with her. He had to diagnose her and find some way to treat her symptoms with the husband as the go-between.

I felt so sorry for the woman and couldn’t imagine how she and so many other women must suffer under such a system. I also thought about my experience in Holland (as I wrote about in my fifth Afghan post titled Trip to Holland) in which I was expected to walk naked across the examining room in front of the doctor. Such differences in culture, with such different results for the women involved!

Visiting the home of Nancy and Louis Dupree

One other memorable thing happened that summer: Hans and I attended a 5 o’clock follies cocktail hour at the Shar-i-Nau home of Nancy and Louis Dupree.

I mentioned in my second Afghan post (Settling In) that Louis Dupree had taught my Peace Corps cohort about the history and archeology of Afghanistan during our in-country training. As a result, I knew that he was an archeologist, anthropologist and scholar and that he had conducted important digs throughout the country.

I also knew that he was the author of a major book titled Afghanistan that traced the socio-economic, cultural and political development of the country from the past to the present. (Hans and I owned a copy of the book, which was published in 1973.)

It wasn’t until later, however, that I heard about Louis’ wife, Nancy Hatch Dupree, and came to understand that they were the center of the social scene in Kabul. They would work until 5:00 p.m. and then open their doors to all for drinks and socializing. This tradition came to be known as “the 5 o'clock follies,” and it went on for many years.

The follies attracted Afghan leaders as well as a broad spectrum of foreigners who worked for the embassies and developmental agencies headquartered in Kabul. It also attracted less glamorous people from Afghan and international society—even Peace Corps Volunteers!

What this meant was that Nancy and Louis knew everybody—Americans, Afghans, Russians, East Germans, West Germans, the French, civilians and members of the military.

The couple also stood out for another reason.

Louis Dupree was born in North Carolina in 1925, earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, and arrived in Afghanistan with his wife, Anne, and their three children in the 1950s.

Nancy was born in New York in 1926 and raised in Travancore, India, while her father worked on UNESCO projects around Asia. Travancore (now part of Kerala), was a small feudal kingdom then, and Nancy’s family was close to the Maharajah. She returned to the U.S. to attend Barnard College. After graduating in 1949, she entered Columbia University in New York, where she earned a master’s in Chinese Art.

While she was at Columbia, she met a man named Alan Wolfe, who came from a wealthy Manhattan family and who had entered the foreign service. They married in Ceylon (current day Sri Lanka). In 1962, Wolfe was assigned to Afghanistan as a cultural attaché; in reality, however, he was the Central Intelligence Agency’s new chief of station in Kabul.

Nancy and Alan eventually met Louis and Anne and the four became fast friends. And then each couple suddenly divorced. Nancy almost immediately married Louis—and soon after, Anne married Alan! Anne and Alan left Kabul, but Nancy and Louis stayed.

Afghanistan in the 1970s attracted a fascinating mixture of people from around the world. The lives of many were enmeshed there for two or three years. The lives of people like Nancy and Louis Dupree—and of Frau Farhadi—were enmeshed for a lifetime.