prom night
Weekend morning. Bright sunshine. The pushcart peddlers hollering about potatoes in the quiet street. I eat my cereal in the cold then light a stove and open my laptop. At noon a friend stops by; she seems happy at first but once in the house she slowly crumbles down onto the rug. "Not too good," she says in response to the obvious question. She's a party girl by nature, now having to spend nights in her rented room watching reruns of Lost. Since the Serena hotel got attacked, all the restaurants are closed. Every bar but the bars on the embassy are off-limits. Her days are spent keeping development projects afloat as expats back out of their contracts. Everyone is spooked.
She tells me about her two friends that were in Kabul’s luxury hotel the night it was attacked. One felt bullets wizzing around her head and saw a man shot in front of her. Another hid in the women's locker room but when they came to rescue them he had to jump over the dead Filipino woman. "He told us the story cheerfully, laughing" she says gnawing the ruby stone on her middle finger. "He'd fucking lost it." Both of the friends had left Afghanistan, never to return.
We meet another friend at a restaurant, a reedy Canadian journalist with blue eyes and red beard. The last time I saw Red, he was planning to stay a year and write a book about the Canadian experience. Now he's put in notice. He got another job in Sierra Leone and leaves in two weeks. He'll be running to the airplane when it comes.
"I'm done with this country," says Red. "Done done done done done." We are eating the restaurant's specialty bolani, a sort of pastry stuffed with potato cut into bite sized squares. There are two dipping sauces for the pastry, a green one and a red one. Both are delicious. Red says he’s done trying to figure out the Afghan puzzle. He doesn't want to know anymore.
The rest of the meal arrives. Mung beans smeared with yoghurt and cardamon, comforting and succulent, also a kind of ravioli stuffed with leeks and parsely, some south asian-style meatballs, plain rice and fresh cucumber salad. Baklavah for desert. When we put on our coats it is almost four o'clock. We've been here three hours and the restaurant has had only two other customers.
The grocery store where we go next is the only crowded spot. I buy 10 boxes of juice, four jars of pasta sauce and four kinds of pasta. I buy so much food that the store owners laugh at me. I joke back and do not tell them that I have been hungry for four days.
That night I have dinner with three more friends, one of whom just broke her contract and another of whom is thinking about it. The third is sick since Christmas vacation. We are sitting in a living room on couches and cushions whispering on the edge of the circle while a British guy is holding forth to a Bulgarian woman on how when he went to Africa he failed to fix the bloody special setting in automatic cameras that you need to adjust to photograph black people. A christmas tree is in the other corner and a gas stove is making us lightheaded.
It might have been the fumes or perhaps nostalgic longings that drove me after dinner to a party at the US Embassy. The taxi drops me off at the barbed wire and concrete gate and I walk the rest of the way on foot. The concrete path is swept clean and well lit. I walk deeper into the compound. I see no one, just me and my breath under the spotlights. I wonder if there are snipers watching me somewhere in the darkness. Then out from the concrete wall steps a guard with a kalashnikov.
"Ho there!" he shouts. (He doesn't actually say 'ho there,' but the Dari phrase he uses sounds so ornate and old-fashioned. And the cold concrete platform feels like a stage.)
"Hey," i say.
When I finally arrive at the party I hear it before I see it. A guy is screaming into a microphone, something about a queen and a kiss. “It’s prom night!” someone says.
The embassy people, the USAID people, the people that pass out multi-million dollar development contracts several times a month, they're here, quite literally Playing That Funky Music (White Boy) in a cafeteria strewn with paper streamers and string lights and Betty Crocker cake. Someone hands me a slice, on a paper plate.
She tells me about her two friends that were in Kabul’s luxury hotel the night it was attacked. One felt bullets wizzing around her head and saw a man shot in front of her. Another hid in the women's locker room but when they came to rescue them he had to jump over the dead Filipino woman. "He told us the story cheerfully, laughing" she says gnawing the ruby stone on her middle finger. "He'd fucking lost it." Both of the friends had left Afghanistan, never to return.
We meet another friend at a restaurant, a reedy Canadian journalist with blue eyes and red beard. The last time I saw Red, he was planning to stay a year and write a book about the Canadian experience. Now he's put in notice. He got another job in Sierra Leone and leaves in two weeks. He'll be running to the airplane when it comes.
"I'm done with this country," says Red. "Done done done done done." We are eating the restaurant's specialty bolani, a sort of pastry stuffed with potato cut into bite sized squares. There are two dipping sauces for the pastry, a green one and a red one. Both are delicious. Red says he’s done trying to figure out the Afghan puzzle. He doesn't want to know anymore.
The rest of the meal arrives. Mung beans smeared with yoghurt and cardamon, comforting and succulent, also a kind of ravioli stuffed with leeks and parsely, some south asian-style meatballs, plain rice and fresh cucumber salad. Baklavah for desert. When we put on our coats it is almost four o'clock. We've been here three hours and the restaurant has had only two other customers.
The grocery store where we go next is the only crowded spot. I buy 10 boxes of juice, four jars of pasta sauce and four kinds of pasta. I buy so much food that the store owners laugh at me. I joke back and do not tell them that I have been hungry for four days.
That night I have dinner with three more friends, one of whom just broke her contract and another of whom is thinking about it. The third is sick since Christmas vacation. We are sitting in a living room on couches and cushions whispering on the edge of the circle while a British guy is holding forth to a Bulgarian woman on how when he went to Africa he failed to fix the bloody special setting in automatic cameras that you need to adjust to photograph black people. A christmas tree is in the other corner and a gas stove is making us lightheaded.
It might have been the fumes or perhaps nostalgic longings that drove me after dinner to a party at the US Embassy. The taxi drops me off at the barbed wire and concrete gate and I walk the rest of the way on foot. The concrete path is swept clean and well lit. I walk deeper into the compound. I see no one, just me and my breath under the spotlights. I wonder if there are snipers watching me somewhere in the darkness. Then out from the concrete wall steps a guard with a kalashnikov.
"Ho there!" he shouts. (He doesn't actually say 'ho there,' but the Dari phrase he uses sounds so ornate and old-fashioned. And the cold concrete platform feels like a stage.)
"Hey," i say.
When I finally arrive at the party I hear it before I see it. A guy is screaming into a microphone, something about a queen and a kiss. “It’s prom night!” someone says.
The embassy people, the USAID people, the people that pass out multi-million dollar development contracts several times a month, they're here, quite literally Playing That Funky Music (White Boy) in a cafeteria strewn with paper streamers and string lights and Betty Crocker cake. Someone hands me a slice, on a paper plate.
posted by gregory arthur at
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