If I’d known then what I know now, I would’ve handled myself differently that summer in Kabul. It was June 2009. The war was ramping up. The Taliban were moving in on the cities, blowing up restaurants and hotels and mosques. Obama had just taken office, and his national security team was cooking up a new war strategy. Suits from Washington up to New York and Boston were swarming in the hive of the knowledge war, trying to get their ideas, their formulas and solutions in front of the president. War presented opportunities, I learned, and so when I got into the Kennedy School, I was determined to make Afghanistan my next opportunity.
That was the war over knowledge, and it was almost as fierce, and certainly dumber, than the hot war itself. But I didn’t understand the ins and outs of it then. I was just finishing year one of a master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School, reading and watching everything I could get my hands on, documentaries and movies and Congressional hearings, white papers and strategies and newspaper articles. I was listening to everyone who thought they had anything to say about Afghanistan—professors, pundits, diplomats, ex-gov suits making a killing on K street or professing at the K School, even meatheads who’d just spent a few days in country inside the wire. I learned how to mix up and regurgitate what I consumed, add my own logic and a couple of novel sentences, convince myself I had my own solution. Then I started convincing others of that, too. I was getting As on my essays, professors were noticing, classmates were turning their heads and nodding whenever I spoke. I even took Farsi lessons, learned some phrases. When I think about it now, it’s amazing how much shit I was just making up, but so was everybody else.
Then I figured out a way to get an edge on the competition. I’d been finding creative ways to get ahead since I was a kid. I grew up scrappy in a South Carolina suburb near Greenville. My parents didn’t give a shit about education. My dad was a mechanic, my mom was a housewife, if that’s what you’d call it. They both drank and smoked and cussed too much. I started shaving my head at 15 just to stand out. I figured out how to talk to people. I did well in school, got a scholarship to Clemson, did a year in Uzbekistan with the Peace Corps, got a summer internship on the Hill. The Congressman I worked for hooked me up with a gig at a consulting firm in Manhattan run by a buddy of his, a lieutenant general he served with in the Iraq War.
Most of the people sitting in class with me had only dipped their toes in the water—done a tour as a junior diplomat at the Embassy, been over to Iraq or Afghanistan as a reporter for a few months, completed a tour or two with the military. Any of those experiences would make you an ‘expert’, sure, but no one had spent any considerable time outside the wire. I had the summer to research and write up my dissertation, and I knew if I could get to Afghanistan, speak to real Afghans, look around and get immersed, then I could create some real credibility for myself.
And I had an in no one else had. There was a girl in my Politics of Development class. Well, I guess I should call her a woman. She was Afghan, with a famous last name, I won’t say which one. Her father was a politician, her mother was a politician, her uncle was about as top-dog politician as you can get. You’d know who he was even if you just watched the six o’clock news every now and then. This woman—I swear she wanted to get with me. She looked at me in class, in the hallways, whenever we passed in the commons she stared at me and tossed her long, black hair. I saw her out one night in Cambridge, hanging over the bar with a few other girls ordering a Scorpion Bowl and maybe it was because she was drunk, but we made eye contact for a solid thirty seconds and she didn’t look away.
I saw her alone in the library one day, this was around April, and decided to go for it. There were about five books stacked on the table in front of her, one opened. She was typing furiously on her iPhone, her long, French-manicured fake nails clacking away, the noisiest thing in the HKS library. She had a devious smile on her face, like she was making some fun plans for later that night.
I could have written up anywhere that summer, but the thrill of telling friends and ex-girlfriends back home that I was off to Kabul was very attractive to me, so I went up to her and sat down. I didn’t even ask.
“It’s Sitara, right?” I said. “I’m Judah.”
She looked up from her phone, pleasantly startled. “Judas?”
“No, no, Judah. Ju-dah.”
She had long, impossibly straight hair, large, round, dark eyes and a cultivated American sense of style—expensive, flawless make-up with black eyeliner in a long, thick, straight line that curled up subtly just past her eyelashes, and teeth so white and straight I knew she must have spent money on them. She wore skinny jeans and ankle boots with low heels, and a tight, long-sleeved black shirt. A furry white coat rested on the back of her chair. I asked her what she was writing her thesis on and she said women’s rights in Afghanistan and I didn’t even bother going down that rabbit-hole of a non-specific topic. It was like saying, I’m going to write about politics. I asked her if she was from Afghanistan, even though I knew she was, and she offered me a deflated description of her immigrant upbringing in Virginia and her parents who “worked” back in Kabul. If I came from a family like hers, whose name was so bloated with infamy, so synonymous with money and power and politics, I would have taken a more dignified and knowing approach. I would have feigned humility for the sake of my own self-importance. She either didn’t seem to understand the weight of her own bloodline or didn’t possess the maturity to articulate it with much sophistication. But I just smiled at her and said, “That’s cool.”
I thought about seducing her, scrapping the whole grand plan and just trying to get her in bed. But there was more in it for me than that.
“So what are you writing your thesis on?” She asked. She had a pink-bejeweled pen in her hand and brought it up to her mouth and nervously nibbled at the end of it. She wore a Rolex on her left wrist. Money, I thought, it can buy you anything anywhere in the world—human rights, an education, justice, class, status, access, opportunity, and if you already had all that, it could also buy you a Rolex. Didn’t matter if it was in Afghanistan, where everyone from the Iranians to the Russians to the Americans, were flying in suitcases of cash to buy things as malleable and transferable as loyalty, or if it was in the United States, where rich parents were buying their thankless, spoiled kids admission to elite colleges, or the lobbyists were buying up the legislative votes of members of Congress, or companies owned by politicians were buying up billion-dollar contracts in places they were funding wars. Up until that thought crossed my mind, sitting next to Sitara in the library, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to write up on, but I heard myself saying to her: “I’m doing my dissertation on the economy of corruption in post-2001 Afghanistan and its effect on the development of the Afghan state, with a focus on the American contribution to developing that financial sub-structure. The way I see it, the Americans are always giving the Afghans a hard time about corruption, but they do just as much to feed it, maybe more. The Americans are cutting corners, waving money around, the Afghans are happy to participate. Who’s really at fault?”
“Wow,” she said, folding her arms across her chest in a slightly defensive position. “That’s not going to get you a job at the State Department.”
“I’m not interested in the bureaucracy. My dad was with State, he was a diplomat in the foreign service, and you know, it’s not for me. I don’t think I could put myself in that box,” I said, my thumb flapping impatiently through the pages of one of her unopened books. I couldn’t believe the bullshit that was coming out of my mouth and how damn convincing it sounded. “I think I’ll start my own consultancy. I’ve got my network on the Hill, and up in the City, too, from my time in Manhattan.” The way she looked at me then, with some desire, made me say boldly, “I’m going to be in Kabul this summer for research. You gonna be there?”
She said she was going to be there too and asked me where I was staying.
“I don’t know yet. I got a journalist buddy there who’s got a spare room, but I thought I might check out the Mustafa or the Serena. You got any advice?” I said, remembering names of foreigner-frequented hotels I had read about in books.
“You should stay with us,” she said. “My parents would love to meet you. They love having guests, especially Americans.”
And that was all it took, pulling a few hot words out of my ass, then finding their way to my mouth, not exactly what I thought I’d be doing with my mouth to get her that far along, but ok, it worked. I got her number, and the next week, I checked out some books from the library on the political economy of corruption and booked my flight to Kabul.
***
I planned to stay for two months in Kabul, but some shit went down at the end of the first week that caused me to change my plans. Actually, it changed me for the rest of my life, but now I’m getting ahead of myself. It involved the butler who worked in Sitara’s family home. Sitara sent him to pick me up—look for a short man with light brown hair and green eyes, she said. She had already been back for a few weeks. I’d had to sort out the sublet of my apartment and get packed and it wasn’t until the beginning of June that I arrived. I’d taken Sitara to dinner twice since I’d introduced myself at the library. Seemed obligatory since I was going to stay with her, but I was starting to admire her. She was clever and quick, had some serious street cred. She once talked us out of paying a full fare on a taxi ride when we both came up short.
The butler was there in the parking lot, just like she said he would be, unmissable. Small and short, unusually short, maybe just over five foot, with light brown hair and eyes green as emeralds. He wore a uniform—black trousers, a black suit jacket, a white dress shirt buttoned up, and a black bowtie. It was hot and dry, not a cloud in the lapis blue sky, but he kept his jacket on. He looked both ridiculous and respectably serious, standing there amongst all the other men in their dusty shalwar kameezes. He had a sullen look on his face, but his body was super relaxed. I would have described him, at the time, as something like ‘chill as hell’, but also ‘serious as fuck.’
“Are you Yusuf?” I asked him in Dari.
“I am he, the one speaking with you,” he answered in perfect English. His demeanor was rigid, but hard to read, like I couldn’t figure out if he was going to kill me in my sleep or sacrifice himself to save my life.
Yusuf took my bag brusquely. I had to walk fast to keep up with him, weaving amongst the taxis and private cars and all the Afghans picking up and all the foreigners being picked up.
I’d spent a summer traveling across India and done an Urdu course in Islamabad for a few weeks, and then the Peace Corps stint in Uzbekistan, so I was prepared for scenes of poverty, but Kabul surprised me. It looked poor, but it was cleaner than Delhi and even Islamabad. It was quaint, but cosmopolitan. I could see the lush greenery peeking out over the garden walls, and the architecture was a mix of old and modern and classical. The mountains were imposing and dramatic. The only thing that really unsettled me were the stray dogs, packs of them, sitting on mounds of garbage thrown around the dumpsters, nipping at the heels of the fat-bottomed sheep picking through the refuse. They roamed the streets, loped along the sidewalks, and gnarled at each other. I hated dogs, never had one as a kid. They scared me.
***
Sitara’s family had a dog, a big one, that barked ferociously as Yusuf led me into the family compound. I could hear its bark getting closer and louder as we moved through the multiple security gates. One was a heavy, cold, steel door that a guard had to push with all his might to slide open, another one had rusty, iron bars that creaked open. At the second one, a guard frisked me roughly and Yusuf hoisted my suitcase onto a conveyer belt that pulled it through an x-ray. This should tell you something about the family I was staying with. The final door in the labyrinth was an old wooden door couched into a six-foot high mud wall that was white-washed.
Yusuf pushed the old door open to reveal Sitara, in a long, red, chiffon dress with puffy sleeves, red lipstick to match, her hair as black and long and thick as she wore it in Cambridge. I don’t know why I expected her to be wrapped up, concealed in a headscarf or something. She looked fresh, good as hell, dressed up. And behind her was the dog, some kind of shepherd, I think, loping right toward me, fixated. It took every bone in my body not to turn and run. Almost instinctively, Yusuf stepped in front of me, authoritatively whistled sharply and held up the palm of his hand, and the dog immediately sat down and did not move. Yusuf kept his palm up and his eyes on the dog as he led me into the house. The dog did not move as we passed by him. He tracked me with his eyes eagerly, his tail levitated, his ears perked forward, but as long as Yusuf held up his hand like that, the dog did not move. What command, what respect, I thought, bewildered. It was enough to take my mind and eyes off Sitara for a minute. This man, Yusuf, he had his shit together. He ran the place.
Sitara looped her arm through mine and guided me into the house behind Yusuf. She sat way too close to me on the couch when Yusuf brought us tea. She didn’t seem to notice or mind Yusuf, and he didn’t look at us, but I felt his eyes all over me. He was only the butler, I got that, but I wanted to impress this guy the way he had impressed me with his command over that dog, and rubbing up on the boss’s daughter was probably not the way to do that, even though he didn’t seem to give two shits about anything other than the job in front of him. He was walking that line between disgust and duty so well.
The dining room table was laid out for a formal dinner—four seats. Sitara told me her parents would be home later, and we’d have dinner. I told her I needed to get horizontal for a bit. I went into my room and locked the door. I think I wanted to make sure she didn’t sneak in behind me.
***
I watched Yusuf throughout dinner, posted like a sentinel in the corner behind the dining table. He brought the food in warm from the kitchen and spooned it directly onto our plates—rice with meat, stewed vegetables, meatballs in tomato sauce and bread and a bunch of other delicious stuff, I wasn’t sure what it was. Then he’d stand in the corner and wait until we had finished that course. I still can’t put my finger on exactly what I found so captivating about him. I kept glancing at him, waiting for him to itch his nose, or swat at a fly, or shift his weight, or even just blink, but he didn’t move. The whole time, Yusuf watched the man at the head of the table, Sitara’s father, who was a minister in the Afghan president’s cabinet, who they called Wazir sahib. Yusuf watched him like he was trying to read his mind, and he watched the woman at the other end of the table, Sitara’s mother who was a member of the Afghan parliament who they called Wakil Sahib. She was the boss of the dinner, signaling silent orders to Yusuf with nods of her head and twitches of her jeweled fingers.
It was nuts that I was spending so much time fixated on the butler that night, because these two were the ones putting me through the gauntlet. These two were the ones I should have been paying attention to. Maybe I was trying to offset some of my nerves by watching Yusuf. At first I felt awkward, that maybe they’d be put off that their daughter had invited this strange, foreign man with a shaved head into their home, and they might question the nature of our relationship, if we were screwing, and they’d be pissed off about having to entertain their daughter’s sexual transgressor as a houseguest.
But over those few hours, I realized that maybe their daughter had fulfilled some kind of family duty by bringing me into their house. They asked me a lot of questions, first about my family, my father’s (non-existent) time in the foreign service (and did he know this person and that person? And had he ever been in Afghanistan?), and they asked me about my time on the hill with Congressman Jepp (and what his views were on Afghanistan? And what was the talk on the Hill about the war?), and they asked me about my time in the City working for Lt. Gen. McConnell (and did I know that he was an old friend of Sitara’s father?) and they asked me who I was planning to interview for my dissertation (and would I like to interview both of them?)
It was exhausting, keeping up with the lies. Lies on lies on lies. I’m gonna spill the whole truth here, just to get it out of my system so you don’t spend the next hour thinking I was feeling okay with all this—you know about my father, that he was never in the foreign service, and he didn’t know jackshit about the war or anyone involved in it; and I’d only brushed shoulders once with Congressman Jepp, had been part of a desk research team of interns that had worked on his immigration policy and I only knew what he thought about Afghanistan from what I read in the papers, it was one of his staffers who hooked me up with my gig in Manhattan and that’s only cause I talked a big talk and always paid for his beers at the bar; and I had never even spoken to or even met Lt. Gen. McConnell when I worked at his firm, I was low down there, so low down that I shared a desk with another employee who only came in two days a week and I had to take all my desk stuff with me at the end of the day. I was sweating, and I felt like Yusuf could smell my fear pouring out of me.
Then Wazir sahib got into heavier shit over tea and dessert. As we were dipping our spoons into the rice pudding, he leaned forward, cleared his throat and said, “And what will you be researching during your time in Kabul?”
“I’m looking at the political economy around corruption,” I said and held my breath.
He put his spoon down.
“You Americans are obsessed with corruption,” he said. “Can I ask you frankly? Why the obsession? In every meeting, it’s the first thing the Americans want to discuss—you have a long list of things you expect us to do about it. Do you know what I think about it? It shows precisely that you Americans don’t understand corruption and how it works here. And you don’t understand priorities, either. And you don’t understand your own part in this puzzle.”
“I agree with you, Wazir sahib,” I said. “That’s what I want to look at with my research—the American contribution.” I hoped that would appease him. He looked at me almost suspiciously and picked up his spoon again.
“The Americans are extremely heavy handed on this topic of corruption and it’s damaging,” he said. “You must know their intentions to have the President’s own brother arrested for corruption? Ha! When we are fighting a war and are supposed to be allies! Can you imagine having that discussion while we have our soldiers on the front lines, fighting terrorists? And our supposed allies are taking these kinds of hits against us at the same time? What kind of priorities are these? It’s insulting.” He shook his head. No one else spoke and only the sound of metal spoons tinkling against emptying bowls cut the silence.
He motioned aggressively for Yusuf to pour more tea. “You must know Ambassador Holstein?”
I knew he was the American Ambassador serving in Afghanistan at that time not because my fake-diplomat father had fake-served with him during the Gulf War, but only from reading his name over and over again in news articles and essays. I knew he was in the thick of the negotiations between the Afghan president and the American president about Obama’s new war strategy.
“Yeah, yeah, sure. He served with my father,” I heard myself saying. “Met him a few times in DC. He’s been over for dinner with his wife.”
“Yes, yes,” Wazir sahib nodded, and then looked at his wife and Sitara and said, “What’s her name?”
“Cheryl,” Sitara chimed in.
“Nice lady,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Anyhow, perhaps you could be helpful in that matter, Judah, especially since your family has friendly relations with the Ambassador. I have invited Ambassador Holstein here for a meeting this week to talk about this issue. The Americans must understand that they cannot talk to the media about these things and expect the President to react the way they want. It is insulting to read rude remarks by the Americans published in the media!”
“I totally agree,” I parroted.
“When the Ambassador comes, you must sit with us,” Sitara’s father insisted.
I nodded, trying to squeeze in a huge shit that suddenly felt like it was going to burst out of me. My nerves had gone to my stomach and I was going to be sick.
***
During those first few days, Sitara took me out in her private, armored car with her driver and team of security guards and showed me around the city. We did sight-seeing—walked around Babur’s Garden, ate at the fancy lunch buffet at the Serena Hotel, shopped for antiquities and lapis jewelry and rugs on Chicken Street. I kept myself busy by being treated like a guest, I successfully procrastinated on my dissertation research. I dreaded the Ambassador’s visit that was coming at the end of the week and thought obsessively about how I was going to get out of it.
To make me feel even more heat than I was already feeling inside the house, people stared at me wherever we went. I’ve never been stared down so shamelessly in my life. I’ve never felt so white, so bald, so foreign. A group of young men started trailing behind us as we strolled under the pine trees at Babur’s Garden. We sat down at one of the snack huts and Sitara ordered some kind of chickpeas in vinegar that came in a white plastic cup with a tiny plastic spoon. I watched her gobble it up. I was worried that it might give me a stomachache, but after the first bite, I could see why she so quickly went for another. It was delicious. I ate three little cups of it, and then she ordered Afghan ice cream and at that point, I didn’t care if I got sick or not. The taste was worth it.
A crowd had formed around us to gawk. I started to wonder if it was me they were looking at, or if it was Sitara’s make-up, or the way she let her thin chiffon headscarf slide off her head and sit around her shoulders for a few seconds before putting it back in place. As we stood up to leave, she got fed up, turned around and snarled at them, hissing angrily in Dari at the men, something equivalent to fuck off, I guess. They backed off. That was the first time Sitara ever seemed like an Afghan–like someone foreign to me, I mean–when she spoke a shared language to those men and was able to get the reaction she wanted. I envied her so badly, that she looked almost as much out place as I did but still this was her territory, and she could stand her ground in a way I couldn’t. I was helpless, out of place.
“Haven’t they seen a white dude before?” I joked.
She wrapped her fingers around my arm and I thought that was bold as hell, entitled even, it worried me a bit, made me look over my shoulder. I noticed she was wearing her Rolex and so it was not just a prop for Harvard. “Pretty much all the foreigners stay inside the wire.”
“What’s that like, inside the wire?” I asked.
“It’s fun. Sometimes I go for parties at the UN compound,” she said. “Actually, I think the MAD guesthouse is having their big monthly party this weekend. You want to go?”
“Sure,” I told her. But I wasn’t feeling too sure of anything. I was starting to feel disoriented. “What’s the MAD house?”
“The guesthouse of that big NGO, uh, what’s it stand for? Medical Agency Development? Medical Assistance, something? They have a huge party once a month and everyone goes. It’s a really good time.”
Sitara really liked me, I could tell. But it wasn’t a good feeling, she was getting to know someone that didn’t even exist. Everything she knew about me wasn’t true. It didn’t make me feel big and important to be treated like someone big and important, didn’t like the way the guards and housemaids treated me like some kind of royalty. The only one who didn’t seem to give two shits about me was Yusuf. Wazir sahib didn’t seem to know what was going on in his own house, wouldn’t have been fed or clothed or gotten around anywhere if it weren’t for the staff that surrounded him, and they were all directed by Yusuf. What was in it for him, I wanted to know. I wanted to ask him, dude, why do you work so hard? You’re always here. You live to serve these people. Why?
***
The day before the Ambassador’s scheduled visit, Sitara took me to dinner and the MAD house party. Her kid cousin, Zain, who like early 20s, picked us up in his armored Land Cruiser. I think he was already kind of drunk or high or something. Sitara insisted we ride with him, and so her car full of security guards obligingly followed behind us.
Zain was a junior at the American University in Kabul, studying business. He was wearing a tight, white t-shirt and crisp Levis and a brand-new pair of military boots that he had arranged in some kind of new style, the laces tied loosely only halfway up the boot with the tongue flapping out. If I had to find a phrase for his look, I’d call it ‘pseudo-war brat’. He blared Afghan pop as we bounced down the dirt road and wheeled quickly onto the main street where we immediately got stuck in traffic. The call to prayer started up and he turned down his music and started some small talk with me in heavily-accented English. He used a lot of slang words, precisely, as if he had looked them up and practiced them.
Beggar children peered in the window and tapped pathetically on the thick, armored glass. A little girl selling packets of bubble gum. I asked if I could buy some but Zain said the windows didn’t go down except for the driver’s seat. I handed him a 100 Afghani note, which was about 2 dollars back then, and asked him if he could hand it to her. He seemed annoyed but he did.
We started the night eating dinner at a Lebanese restaurant at the other end of the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood where Sitara’s family lived. Driving across the neighborhood, I could see it was full of houses that looked like Sitara’s. Poppy palaces, they were called. I’d read about them in books and articles. Large villas; 10, 12, 13, rooms; 3 or 4 stories, painted sickly pastel or vulgar neon hues; built by the nouveau-riche of the American-funded financial sub-structure of post-2001 Afghanistan (as I was referring to it in my dissertation). And money from the heroin business, of course, which was thriving in the south and was the primary source of income of the Afghan president’s brother, who the Americans now wanted to depose as part of their new obsession with ‘combatting corruption’. I thought about how angry Wazir sahib had been decrying this outrage to me over dinner, and I started thinking about what I really thought about the whole thing, since the next day I’d be sitting across from both him and Ambassador Holstein. My mind was starting to tie itself in knots.
Sitara ordered ‘red tea’ at the restaurant, and the waiter brought a large pot of red wine served in a decorated ceramic tea pot, which we poured into our teacups. Most of the clientele were foreigners, or young Afghans, or Afghans who looked like they’d been abroad and were upper-middle class. There were a lot of them. The restaurant was clean and well-styled, modern and sophisticated. I was embarrassed to feel surprised by that, but it was such a stark difference to the poverty outside that I just was. The food was the best Lebanese I’d ever eaten, but to be honest, I hadn’t eaten that much Lebanese food. I drank the wine. I drank too much wine, and I wasn’t even much of a wine drinker. We went through three large pots.
By the time we rolled up to the MAD guesthouse, all three of us were drunk. I don’t know how Zain got us there, drunker than he had been an hour before, turning left then right then right then left down what seemed like a labyrinth of the exact same dirt roads lined by the exact same dirt walls, but he did. There were a few Afghan guards manning the door, checking passports. As we stood there waiting to get in, the raucous sound of the party flowed over the compound wall into the street and I wondered how pissed off the neighbors must be.
I scrambled for my passport but Sitara told me I didn’t have to show mine—“only Afghans.” She took her American passport out of her purse and the guard glanced at it and waved her in. It appeared that Zain had forgotten his or didn’t have one but he was trying to talk his way in. Sitara told him she’d send someone out to get him.
“What’s up with that?” I asked.
“Only foreigners can get in. Or Afghans with foreign passports. Zain doesn’t have one, but I’ll see if I can get this guy I know to get him in,” she explained. That seemed really fucked up to me, that a dude couldn’t get into a party in his own country just because he was from his own country. It was illegal for Afghans to drink, but why not outlaw the parties, outlaw the booze, or just enforce the laws, but then that seemed even a little crazier to me. Priorities, I thought.
What laid in waiting for us behind the MAD house doors was like nothing I’d seen since my first week at Clemson at a haze party at some frat house where I watched a stupidly-drunk fresher swallow a whole goldfish while more stupidly-drunk people did lines and touched each other on the stairs. The rooms were crowded, packed full of people, foreigners in party clothes, drinking from one hand, smoking from the other. The kitchen had been converted into a huge open bar, with enough alcohol on offer to kill us all. The music was blaring, and people were sweaty-dancing. A drunk couple—he was kissing her neck—were slowly climbing the stairs. There was a long line outside the bathroom. A man with a drunk girl hanging over his arm skirted the line saying in a thick Irish accent, ‘Hey guys, let us in. She really has to go, this one, like now. She’s gonna boke!’
Sitara disappeared into the crowd, hugging people she knew. I sat down at a stool at the far end of the bar and just watched. I wanted to imbibe, I really did. I wanted to pound a few shots of Jager and maybe do a line or two of coke and get out on the dance floor with one of those hot aid workers, one in particular who was wearing a white tube top dress that pushed her large breasts together into one long line of cleavage I wanted to bury my face in.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I knew that when the party ended and it was time to go home, that tube top hottie would be putting on a full-length chadar and headscarf and tumbling into her private car driven by her Afghan driver, and going home to sober up so she could go to her office job the next day and get paid $10,000 a month to try and solve the war, or starvation, or gender equality, and then go on two weeks’ vacation every two months. It seemed fucked up to me.
And Zain reminded me so much of my dumbass little brother and his cokehead friends partying in the garage on the weekends back in South Carolina, hitting their homemade beerbong until they passed out cold in lawn chairs. And Sitara, she was the living symbol of ‘Afghan women’s rights’, she was an Afghan woman, except she wasn’t to me in real life, she was a pretty chick who wanted to sleep with me, and those two couldn’t be the same thing in my mind. I didn’t know how to act toward her—to protect her from myself, or to indulge her. It was like we were existing in two different dimensions in the MAD house, like metaphysical wires were crossing in my head and were buzzing loudly about to explode. My mind didn’t know where it was and how to act—I felt like I was in two places at once and it was glitching my system big time, a real mindfuck.
***
I ended up pounding waters at the bar so by the time we left the MAD house, I had sobered up. Zain never made it into the party and left, so Sitara had to call her driver, with slurred words, to come get us. The driver, whose name I never learned, was clearly pissed, having been woken up at 4 in the morning, but he remained dutiful and stoic and seemed kind of used to this sort of thing happening. Sitara tried to talk to me but I don’t remember anything she was trying to get out of her mouth.
I had to physically maneuver her into the house while the guards manning the many gates pretended not to see us. It was awful, the most shameful ‘walk of shame’ I’d ever taken in my life, and I was totally sober. She latched onto me and I thought she’d never let go. Thankfully, the front door was unlocked, and I thought Yusuf must have kept it open for us. The dog was in a pin on the side of the house but was barking wildly and I was terrified he was going to wake someone up. Sitara was half-laughing, half-moaning. I got her into her room and laid her on her side in the bed with a trashcan on the floor next to her. I finally got her to let go of me by telling her I was going to get her some water and that I’d be back.
I came around the corner of the back hallway and Yusuf was standing in the middle of the dark living room, looking like a ghost in his white shalwar kameez crinkled from sleep.
“Sir,” he said, “Do you need something?”
“Uh.” I contemplated making a million excuses. Hadn’t I talked my way through everything already? Couldn’t I talk my way out of this? He was only the butler. “Just some water.”
“Come,” Yusuf said. It felt like a kind invitation, not a reprimand. I followed him and he motioned for me to sit at the plastic table in the corner of the kitchen where he and the housemaid and cook had their meals. I felt honored, like I was part of an exclusive club. He put a glass of water in front of me.
“I meant, for Sitara,” I said.
“Don’t worry, sir. The khala will take care of Miss Sitara. She will be here soon.”
He busied himself lighting the stove, putting the kettle on. A rooster crowed. It was almost dawn and soon the house would be awake and buzzing with staff. Yusuf sat down at the flimsy table and looked at me but didn’t say anything.
“Where’d you learn English so well?” I broke the silence.
“For ten years, I worked with the American army, on the military bases. I was an interpreter, like my brothers,” he said. “I came home because they were martyred–one in Kandahar, one in Kunar, one in Nangarhar. Now, I take care of my parents.”
“Jesus Christ. I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say to him. It was like some real-life Saving Private Ryan shit and it was heavy, too heavy.
“God’s will.” He raised his hands slightly to the sky in a gesture of prayer.
“You know, you could be working in an NGO or an office or something, making more money, with that kind of good English. What’re you doing here?”
“I have a debt to this family, to Wazir sahib,” he said.
“What kind of debt?” I probed.
“Nothing for you to worry about, sir,” he said.
I stretched out. “I guess I have a debt to this family now too.”
He laughed and his face lit up for the first time. I had not seen him like that. He looked like a different person. “You are the son of an important man. You are American. What debt can you not pay?”
“No, I’m not.” It was like his honest laugh and his genuine smile had inspired me to reciprocate. “I’m a liar, Yusuf. I’m no one important and I don’t know anyone important. I don’t know jackshit. I’m just a poor-ass motherfucker with a big fucking mouth. We’ve got poor assholes in America too, you know.”
Yusuf kept laughing. He didn’t seemed surprised by what I’d confessed or the language I’d used. He seemed like he already knew, and like he understood American cuss words better than proper English.
“Don’t worry, brother,” he stood up for the kettle, which had begun to whistle. He patted me on the back. “You are among equals here.”
I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse. The dog ran around the side of the house, barking under the kitchen window, like the kettle whistle had summoned it, or maybe Yusuf’s laugh. Yusuf opened the window and shouted, Chup sha!, and held up his palm and the dog went quiet.
“What’d you yell at him?” I asked.
“I told him to shut up,” Yusuf said.
“What’s your secret with that dog?” I asked him. “He does whatever you tell him.”
“No secret,” Yusuf replied. “I am the one who feeds it.”
We drank our tea and then Yusuf fed the dog and we shared a cigarette on the back step while it ate, and then I went to bed.
***
I didn’t sleep. I was thinking about how fucked up the party experience had been and I was worried about faking it with Ambassador Holstein. I was replaying my conversation with Yusuf over and over again in my head, thinking about where I stood with him, what he thought of me. Finally around 7, I fell into a deep sleep and woke up about an hour later to the sound of an explosion. First the shaking—I thought it was an earthquake—then a second later the boom! The glass rattled in the windowpanes.
It took a few minutes for the news to travel. A man strapped with explosives had walked into a grocery store at the end of the road and blown himself up. So Ambassador Holstein’s visit got canceled that day. I felt like I’d escaped a trap, and so to thank the gods for their intervention, or to repent for my sins, I spent the whole day studying. Well, I slept the first half of the day, then I flipped through all the books I’d brought with me and started jotting notes and thoughts down, developing a theoretical framework and piecing together an outline for my dissertation.
I thought: People took bribes, people paid bribes. Businessman doubled as politicians and used their connections to secure large contracts and then they’d skim the cream off the top. The drug trade was booming. Businessman doubling as politicians doubled as drug lords, and half of them had past lives as war lords. It was a problem for the Americans—the voters in America were sick of the war in Afghanistan, it was unpopular and headlines of US tax dollars going to fund corruption in the Afghan government were making it even more unpopular.
But just because the Americans were right didn’t mean the Afghans were wrong. Wazir sahib had a point — there was an entire sociopolitical-cultural context to the issue of corruption, moral and even psychological and emotional factors, and it was not a problem that could be solved through sheer political will. It could not be ticked of a conditional to-do list handed from the Americans to the Afghans, it could not be stopped by a handful of powerful people, it was a self-perpetuating system that everyone would have to stop at the same time, and then another better system would have to replace it, or in fact, be built up first to replace it. You joined it, or it swallowed you up, it fucked you, and no one wants to be the one to get fucked.
And it also seemed to me a chicken and egg situation. The Americans were hypocrites—they publicly called for justice and criticized the Afghans in public speeches and slung around phrases like ‘combatting corruption’ and ‘building state institutions’ and ‘free and fair elections’ in their policy papers and then they pumped the place so full of money they didn’t even know where it was going. The NGO workers had something called burn-rates, where they had to burn through US-grant money at a fast rate just to get more of it. And the US military handed it out like candy to provincial leaders in exchange for loyalty, which sometimes amounted simply to a promise not to shoot at them on patrol. If the Americans didn’t want Afghans to misuse the money, shouldn’t they also not misuse it?
And what about priorities? The Afghans had a point about that for sure. Was it fair for the American Ambassador to be negotiating the arrest of the Afghan president’s brother while Afghan and American troops were surging into the war together, dying on the battlefield, when the Taliban was successfully taking the war into the cities, gaining ground? But the Americans too had a point, that one reason the Taliban were gaining ground was because of the corruption of the Afghan government. It was pissing people off.
Then I started thinking about corruption within the Taliban, and then I stopped cause that was a mindfuck and seemed like another dissertation topic entirely. I wasn’t even gonna go there.
I felt pretty good about what I’d written down. I thought for sure I could nestle all those thoughts amongst an academic theory, convert some of those words into the Afghanistan policy jargon of the day, annotate the hell out of it, stick a few quotes in from a few interviews I could scrounge up, and go on like that for 40,000 words. Yeah, I could do that, for sure.
It was late in the evening, close to 8. And I hadn’t eaten all day. I’d have to wander into the house and the dramas of its inhabitants to feed myself. As I came down the stairs into the foyer, the housemaid, who everyone called khala, passed by carrying a tray of covered dishes, walking toward Sitara’s wing of the house.
I walked into the dining room and Wazir Sahib and Wakil Sahib were seated in silence. Yusuf stood in his corner. Sitara’s chair was empty.
“Ah, my friend, sit, sit, join us,” Wazir sahib said.
I sat and Yusuf filled my plate with rice. It was a more humble, private meal than the performative ones of days before. I felt like I was intruding on husband and wife. I sensed conflict in the room.
I couldn’t not ask about Sitara, or it would’ve seemed like an admission that I already knew she was hung over as hell, so I said, after some small talk about the weather: “Where’s Sitara?”
“Sitara jan is ill,” her mother said.
“I have told this man, this good man standing behind me here, Sir Yusuf, to buy fresh meat, to spare no expense on the freshest meat,” her father started in, holding up his index finger, “I have told him many times which butcher to go to, and how to make a good selection. You must be very careful here when selecting the meat. But he doesn’t listen to me, that’s the problem. And our Sitara jan is very sensitive. Too much time in America—haha,” he slapped my arm disparagingly, “You Americans are very sensitive, too sensitive.”
“Sometimes she reacts poorly to the food here,” Wakil sahib said.
I looked at Yusuf. He looked at me with a pleading look, tension behind his eyes. It was the first time he seemed vulnerable to me, like his veneer had shattered.
I could tell that Wazir sahib’s monologue was a way to let me know that he wasn’t angry at me for accompanying his daughter to a raucous underground party full of drugs and alcohol and foreigners, that he didn’t consider me a bad influence, that I was still welcomed in his home, that he still needed me for his intervention with the Ambassador. Strangely though, I almost wanted him to yell at me and kick me out. I wanted him to be angry and defensive of his daughter, even though she’d been the one to drag me into it. It was all mixed up in my head. The feelings, the way things were going. And Yusuf, he was just a fall guy for this whole performance, getting publicly humiliated for buying ‘bad’ meat. I wondered what thoughts were swirling around in his head, forming at the tip of his tongue in near perfect English.
I was only vaguely tempted to take a stand for Yusuf and interject and tell the old man his daughter was a lush, drank like a 16-year-old Carolina boy at a Friday night bonfire, and it had nothing to do with the meat Yusuf had bought. But of course, he knew that.
***
Everything I’ve told you is relevant to what happened two days later, the day I called it quits on that trip. It all built up. Ambassador Holstein’s visit had been rescheduled. He was coming for afternoon tea. The stage had been set in the garden under the pergola, which was crawling with roses in full bloom—two wooden armchairs chairs with plush cushions, another, less elaborate chair, placed in the corner of the pergola, at the ready for a third guest to join at some later point in the conversation...me, I guessed? The chairs were in front of a glass-topped coffee table covered in a crisp white tablecloth. Delicately folded paper napkins in a holder, a small glass vase with some of those roses in it. I watched Yusuf arrange this from my bedroom window all morning and then kept glancing at the setting in fear every time I paced past the window.
The Ambassador’s security team came hours in advance on a recce.
The time passed. I kept trying to think of what I’d say when Wazir Sahib introduced me to Ambassador Holstein and said something like ‘but I guess you two already know each other’ and Ambassador Holstein looked at me blankly like, ‘I’ve never met this kid in my life.’ I even spent a couple hours researching everything I could find about the man on the internet. Ah, but it was hopeless. I’d never premeditated any of my big fish stories, all my lies just seemed to come out on demand and so my Plan B was to rely on that skill I had of spontaneously fast-talking my way out of, or into, anything.
I was in this state of agitation when Yusuf knocked on my bedroom door carrying a stack of my clean, folded clothes, and a few of my shirts ironed on hangers. Khala ironed everything, even socks and underwear, and I found it so fascinating that these people cared that much about their jobs. Yusuf was in his standard uniform, as usual. “Your clothes, Judah. May I?” he said and started hanging them in the wardrobe.
“Yusuf, dude, you got any advice for me? What do I say to this guy coming today? Has he, uh, been here before?”
Yusuf glanced over his shoulder and looked me up and down, wrinkled his nose slightly like the smell of desperation was coming off me strong.
“You mean, the American Ambassador? No, he has not been here before,” he said.
“Well, Wazir sahib thinks I know him, and he wants me to like, help him convince the guy to like, not fuck with the president’s brother or some shit like that, I don’t even really know,” I said. “I’m really fucked now.”
“You speak worse than the American soldiers,” he said under his breath.
“What should I do?” I knew he couldn’t really help me, felt dumb for asking the butler for help, but at the same time I just found him to be so wise, so steady, so sure of himself.
“Look, brother,” he said. “You know when to talk, but you also know when to keep your mouth shut.” He didn’t say anything else, not even, goodbye or good luck. He closed the door in my face.
***
The security team’s walkie talkies started going off when the Ambassador left the Embassy and so we got step by step announcements on his proximity and impending arrival. I was standing there, part of the greeting party, with Wakil Sahib, Wazir Sahib, Sitara, and of course, Yusuf. One of the guys in the advance security team, who looked like a real meathead, couldn’t figure out how to open the gate when the walkie talkie said, ‘Eagle is approaching the gate.’
Yusuf stepped up and masterfully swung open the gate himself. He must have excused himself after that, I don’t know, I don’t remember. I was too fixated on the Ambassador’s entrance that I didn’t notice where Yusuf went, just that he suddenly was not there.
There was the Ambassador, walking swiftly up the paved walk. He looked a little shorter than he did in the news. He greeted Wazir Sahib first, and then Wakil Sahib, and then Sitara, and then, with my heart pounding in my throat, Wazir Sahib, whose hand was placed lightly and hospitably on the small of his honored guest’s back, gestured widely to me and said, “And surely you must remember this young man?” Wazir Sahib was grinning widely, pleased with himself, and the Ambassador was extending his hand to me and scrunching up his forehead looking confused. Words weren’t coming to me, I opened my mouth and my jaw hung open for longer than a few seconds and all I could think of was what my dad used to yell at me when I did that as a kid: “You catchin’ flies, son?”
Ambassador Holstein said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m afraid I just don’t recall where we met. Can you remind me?”
What happened next was quick. A brown blur whizzed by in my peripheral vision, Sitara screamed, Wazir Sahib bellowed, that big dog came out of nowhere, leapt up and latched onto Ambassador Holstein’s empty hand that he extended to me. He shook it like it was a dead rat, his teeth sheared into the Ambassador’s hand and blood dripped to the ground. Instinctively, I kicked the dog, and when he didn’t react, I took off my shoe and started beating him on the nose, whacking him hard with the wooden heel of the expensive-as-fuck Johnston and Murphy wingtip I’d brought from the US for all the exclusive interviews I’d thought I’d be doing with high-powered government officials.
It wasn’t until Yusuf appeared, stepped in front of me, whistled sharply and held up his palm that the animal released and sat. Yusuf held a chain leash in his hand, like he had come prepared for the moment, clipped it onto the dog’s collar and escorted the animal away from the scene of the crime.
***
You can imagine how quickly Ambassador Holstein left after that. Wazir Sahib was by his side the whole way back to his car, spewing a frenzied monologue about how sorry he was, how the dog should have been locked up, it was always locked up, he didn’t know how it got out, he was beside himself with anguish about the whole situation, what could he do? But Wazir Sahib knew, as I think we all did, that Yusuf had done it on purpose.
I don’t know exactly why he did it. To this day, I don’t know. Sometimes when I can’t sleep at night now, a whole decade after it happened, I lie in bed and think about all the possibilities. Did he do it for me? I often ask myself. Did he do it to help me save face? But why would he do that? Did he do it to stick it to the man? Did he do it to get himself fired? Was he bored? Was he trying to let everyone know who was really boss? Was he pissed off, having a bad day?
I never got a chance to ask him any of these questions. I heard it all go down from the landing at the top of the stairs. Yusuf got screamed at for hours that night. He got hit, too. He got thrown out. Isn’t that the way it is? The man in debt always pays the price. I took all the cash I had left in my wallet that was supposed to get me through the summer—it was about 800 dollars—and snuck out the back door of the kitchen and into Yusuf’s quarters, which was a small room attached to the garden back wall. I was too scared to stay and talk, worried I’d get in trouble for being seen with him, was generally just frightened by the violence of Wazir Sahib at that point. I pretty much threw the money on his bed, told him to take it. He was one-handedly packing his things into a falling-apart old suitcase, his other hand was holding a rag to his nose. There was blood on his collar and spattered down his shirt, in his hair. He had a black eye and a busted lip and a cut on his right cheekbone. He looked at the money and then at me and didn’t say anything and I left before anything else could happen. I booked an earlier flight and left Kabul the next day. I never saw Yusuf again.
***
I did see Sitara from time to time around campus. She avoided me. She knew I was a fraud. I never had any other contact with her family. And I only recently saw her father again.
Here’s how that happened. After all my big talk about going rogue, I ended up in the bureaucracy. Not because I gave a particular damn about serving my country, but because it provided the fastest, surest route to being someone important, someone sought out to speak authoritatively on panels, someone respected by his peers, someone who gets invited to dinners around DC. Also, because after my failed attempt to rescue Ambassador Holstein from the dog, he’d taken an interest in me and had his secretary get in touch with me. He had invited me for lunch that fall back in DC and asked about my research and then, well, he’d hired me point blank after graduation.
Then he got appointed as the Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, which is just a fancy title for the man in charge of ending the war, and then, he appointed me as his deputy. It was the most important Afghanistan-related office in the State Department.
And that’s where I saw Sitara’s father, in a meeting between Ambassador Holstein (me sitting at his right hand) and the Afghan President (Wazir sahib sitting at his right hand). We ended up brushing shoulders as we left the meeting, but Wazir sahib just said, ‘Excuse me’, like I was a stranger, and at that point, I may well have been, except my head was still shaved bald and I knew there was no way he didn’t recognize me.
***
So how would I have handled myself differently that summer?
Well, I wouldn’t have lied, so badly, to Sitara and her family. I would have nurtured that connection, it was an important one with a powerful, influential family that a lot of people were trying to access. Could have opened more doors for me faster than they were already opening.
I would have gotten drunk at that MAD party and danced with that hot aid worker chick. I would have had fun, like everyone else there was doing for as hard as they could and for as long as they could.
I’m not sure I would have stayed in Sitara’s bed that night, but I’m not gonna lie and say I never thought about it, sometimes regretted not doing it. But that might have been crossing a line.
And I wouldn’t have ever spoken to Yusuf or placed such a high value on him. With him, I did cross a line. I crossed the line that separates reason and questioning from the established order of things. It’s a fucked-up line to cross cause it shows you just how fucked up everything really is, and it’s hard to get back to the other side once you cross it, and I crossed it so many times that summer. Someone always gets fucked on the other side of that line, and if I could go back to the moment I stepped off that plane in Kabul, I would have seen from the beginning that it wasn’t gonna be me getting fucked, and I never would have felt so shaken, questioned the whole damn order of things. I would have leaned in; I would have stayed inside the wire.
Lael A. Mohib’s writings have been published in Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, and Foreign Policy, among others. Her first novel, We Belong to the Living, is on submission and she is currently writing her second, a contemporary Southern Gothic titled Hunting Country. Inside the Wireis a part of her short story collection titled Bilagaana. She is an alumna of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Key West Literary Seminar Writers’ Workshop Program, and a recipient of an Author and Poet Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She has three children and lives in Florida.