Making Soapies in Kabul Read online

  Hot days, crazy nights

  and dangerous

  liaisons in a war zone

  TRUDI-ANN TIERNEY

  Certain names and details have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Trudi-Ann Tierney 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 427 2

  eISBN 978 1 74343 200 6

  Internal design by Christabella Designs

  Set in 11/19 pt Cambria by Bookhouse, Sydney

  To my amazing mum, who sent me off to Kabul with her blessing, and my wonderful Afghan friends, who welcomed me with warmth and love

  Contents

  1. The Den and my Knuckle-Dragger Friend

  2. Sticky-tape, Spit and String

  3. The Search for Salam

  4. Jallywood

  5. Propaganda and Production

  6. A Luminous Shade of Grey

  7. Helmut’s Secrets

  8. Rumblings Around Ramadan

  9. The Great Bar War of Kabul

  10. Hakim’s Word of the Day

  11. Hook-ups in K-town

  12. Extras and Ali Hitchcock

  13. The Eagle Soars

  14. Plan Bs and Whisky Shots

  15. Scarfgate

  16. Yule Tired

  17. Four in the Bed

  18. Purple Caterpillars and Kuchi Queens

  19. It’s All Just a Little Bit Wrong

  20. The Safe Room

  21. The Drama Queens No More

  22. Star-crossed Love

  23. All for a Good Night’s Sleep

  24. The Acting Ambassador

  25. A Skinful of Bliss

  26. My Most Difficult Meeting

  27. Someone to Watch Over Me

  28. Motherly Advice

  29. Farewell to Days Like These

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  The whistling dog woke me up again, for the sixth morning running. Despite having not hit my pillow until 2am, I smiled when I heard his feeble toot-tooting just after five. My mangy Labrador alarm clock didn’t exactly belt out a tune (although I had picked out a solitary bar of ‘Sweet Caroline’ two mornings before), and as I watched him sitting alone under my window, serenading the first signs of sun, I couldn’t discern any actual lip-pursing or puckering-up. But he was most definitely whistling.

  I had never encountered a whistling dog before, but then the past month had been a rollcall of phenomenal firsts; my entrée into life in Afghanistan in April 2009 had been nothing short of mind-blowing.

  Hundreds and thousands of expats had made this journey before me. Soldiers ordered here to fight the bloody war; aid workers committed to cleaning up the mess; doctors and diplomats; money-hungry entrepreneurs who’d sniffed out the scent of a quick buck to be made in the battle zone. Amongst them, I felt uniquely out of place in my mission to Afghanistan; I had come to Kabul to manage a bar and restaurant—‘The Den’.

  I spent my entire three-hour flight from Dubai into Kabul pressed up against the plane’s window, marvelling at the alien new world below. I gazed in wonderment as the plane cruised over chocolate-brown mountains, their tops sugared with snow, and then dipped into barren valleys where the only hints of habitation were tiny perfect grids of crude mud fencing. I was an unabashed, window-licking, mouth-breather, and I was not even particularly disconcerted when the turbaned fellow in front spent minutes at a time staring back at me through the gap in the seats. As we skimmed over the NATO base next to the airport and landed alongside military choppers standing to attention on the tarmac, I fumbled for my headscarf and recalled the extraordinarily easy journey that had brought me to this place.

  It all began late in 2008 over dinner with my brother Adam, one of my life-long friends, Paul, and his partner, Jose. Paul had just been appointed as the head of production for Afghanistan’s largest and most successful television broadcaster and was back in Australia trying to assure his family that moving to Afghanistan was a sane and sensible life choice. My TV career in Australia was kind of at a standstill. My business partner, Muffy, and I had recently had a comedy show optioned by an international production house and an Australian network was showing genuine interest in funding the series in the new financial year. Muffy also had a documentary in early development with another company. We were playing the waiting game and I was in need of a new adventure. Much to Adam’s horror, I farewelled Paul that night with a commitment that, if ever there was an opportunity for me to join him in Afghanistan, I wanted in.

  Over the next few months Paul and I emailed back and forth; he wasn’t in a position to offer me a job but, if I could somehow get myself into the country, he was certain that I would pick up work. Then in March he called me with a proposition—a new bar and restaurant had just opened in Kabul and it was owned and operated by friends of his, Sue and Don. They were going on four weeks’ leave and needed an expat to manage the local staff in their absence.

  Fifteen minutes later Sue, a chipper Australian woman with a smile in her voice, was on the phone to me. They would cover my airfare, arrange a work visa and pay me the not-too-shabby sum of US 3000 for a month of my services. I could eat and drink whatever I wanted and would be living in an apartment above the bar with Paul and Jose, plus a Swedish chiropractor, Jenny.

  Two weeks before my departure, I tumbled into a romantic relationship with Nick—a man I had known for years and who had just returned to Australia after a stint living and working in the UK. While our shameless love fest at my farewell party (played out to a backing track of calls for us to find ourselves a room) might have suggested otherwise, we had decided that our fledgling coupledom could withstand a few months of apartness.

  So within four weeks of my initial conversation with Sue, I was on a plane and launching into my new adventure. Sue had sent me instructions on how to navigate my way through the airport:

  1. Wear a long-sleeved top and trousers (loose fitting) and put on your headscarf before you get off the plane. You’re better off being as inconspicuous as possible and it’s not worth offending the locals.

  2. Immigration can be quite chaotic (Afghans have no concept of queuing). The men can be very pushy, but just stand your ground and try not to make eye contact. And the word for ‘thank you’ is tashakor.

  3. There will be porters at the baggage carousel who will take your luggage to the car park for you. The going rate is US$1. Don’t let them talk you into paying any more than that.

  4. Get them to take you to Car Park B. I’m attaching photos of Don and myself but, if all else fails, I will be the woman wearing the big, red scarf.

  The airport experience was everything Sue had described and, after a protracted stand-off with the porter ov
er his insistence that I pay him five dollars, I was left alone to wait. The plane had landed a little ahead of schedule so I sat on my over-stuffed suitcase and took in my new home. Guns—big guns, everywhere. Local guards stationed outside the terminal. Three surly officers manning the car-park gate. A whole lot of fit-looking westerners rounding up their expat arrivals and herding them into armoured vehicles.

  A raucous, bosomy American woman, wearing a tight T-shirt and with her blonde hair flowing free, stationed herself next to me as she waited with her group to be collected. The gate guys couldn’t take their eyes off her while a troop of turbaned elders, hovering close by, eyed her off less conspicuously, clearly passing judgement in between furtive peeks at her ample rack. I made an obvious show of turning away from her, but then I felt all indignant and abandoned when her ride arrived and she jiggled off with her posse to the car, leaving me as the only foreigner in the car park.

  After about an hour, I began to wonder if there’d been some kind of miscommunication about my arrival time. Even if this was true, I was powerless to rectify it, as I didn’t have Sue’s number. She had sent it to me, of course, but not being a particularly smart traveller and, according to my mother, sorely lacking in common sense, I hadn’t printed it out so it was still sitting on my laptop, in an email that I was quite unable to access. The address of my new home was uselessly hanging out in that same vicinity.

  I had placed all my faith in a woman in voluminous crimson headgear, whom I had never met, turning up on time to collect me, but clearly something had gone wrong. As the afternoon wore on, I figured I needed a cunning plan to get in touch with her. With my eye firmly on my suitcase, I marched out of the car-park exit and spied some taxis in an adjoining lot. I knew there was a four-star hotel in town called the Serena, as there had been a tragic bomb attack there the previous year that I’d heard about. I’d go there, get on the internet and track down my quarry.

  I approached the first taxi driver I happened upon and stated my destination. There really aren’t that many ways to pronounce ‘Serena’, but it took me around eight attempts before something finally twigged and he enthusiastically nodded and smiled his understanding. I was hurrying back to retrieve my luggage, loving myself stupid for being so resourceful and likening myself to an urban Bear Grylls, when a car came roaring up behind me. I turned to see a red scarf flapping wildly out of the passenger window.

  Sue and Don were effusive with their apologies as they loaded my luggage into the boot and we left the car park. There had been some mix-up with their driver and he had taken the car to go shopping; then they tried to call him and his phone was off . . . But I was too absorbed in the world beyond the airport to take in much of what they were saying.

  The place was uniformly brown and dusty; simple mud houses clung to the sides of crowded hills. Women in burqas strolled down the footpath. Two filthy children rode by on a wooden cart, piled high with rubbish and being drawn by a donkey with coloured ribbons and bells woven into its mane. We stopped in traffic and child beggars knocked persistently on the car window, chasing us along the road when we finally moved off. Local police, armed with machine guns, manned a roadside checkpoint. When a convoy of armoured trucks and tanks passed by on the opposite side of the road, Don pointed at it. ‘You never want to travel too close to a military convoy; they’re prime targets for insurgents. If you’re in a car and the driver is sitting behind one of those, tell him to pull back.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘If anything happens now, while we’re driving home, you are to stay in the car. Do not move from the vehicle. If there is an incident with an IED or VBIED, just remain where you are. All right?’

  ‘Yes . . . No . . . A what? I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay. If there is an explosive device, gunfire, a traffic accident . . . a bloody earthquake, just stay in the car.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Despite all the guns I’d seen at the airport, Don’s advice gave me my first real sense of being in a war zone and I casually slid away from the window, positioning myself in the middle of the back seat on the pretence of listening more attentively to my new, knowledgeable friends.

  When we finally slowed in front of The Den, I initially thought we were making a pit stop. We had arrived in a neighbourhood where the houses were comparatively modern—bricks and cement, windows, doors, tiled and tin-clad roofs—partly concealed behind barbed-wire fences and heavy iron gates. There was no signage to indicate that we had arrived at a bar, and it wasn’t until Sue announced, ‘We’re here!’ that I grasped we were home. The gates to the small compound were opened from the inside by two local guards (more big guns) and Don instructed me to stay put in the car until they had securely locked the gates behind us.

  It being a Friday, the Islamic day of prayer, the bar was closed; so Sue and Don were able to take their time showing me around. It was a small set-up but cosy, and Sue had done a splendid job of creating a shabby-chic feel to the place. There was a garden and a small terrace, a tiny kitchen and a storeroom with fortified walls and a heavy steel door, which doubled as a safe room in case of an insurgent attack.

  We were just going over the menu when I heard my second Aussie accent for the day. ‘Hello, darls. Thanks so much for this. Steve’s coming over for dinner tonight and I reckon the old fanny might be opening up again for business!’

  I turned to see a lean, tall, forty-something woman striding through the door. She did a double-take when she saw me, before stopping short and raising her hand to her open mouth. ‘Ooh ah. Sorry, love, I didn’t realise . . . Oh God! How embarrassing!’

  Sue quickly introduced me to Marg. As we shook hands, she said she’d heard I was coming to town and confessed relief that it was a fellow countryman she had revealed her genital re-launch to. She was there to pick up a bottle of wine to help facilitate the event and informed me that she would be helping me behind the bar the following evening, before hurrying off to gussy herself up for her date.

  Sue’s assurances that I would love Marg were unnecessary; I already did and was delighted to learn that she was down for two nights a week on a roster of expats who would work behind the bar for free food, booze and fifty bucks cash in hand.

  Don felt compelled to warn me that their clientele consisted mainly of ‘Knuckle Draggers’. I nodded my head, but really had no idea what I was affirming. I was scanning my brain for some suitable reference point when Sue stepped in and explained that ‘Knuckle Draggers’ were western private security contractors. Of course The Den had female patrons as well—otherwise, why would the blokes bother to show?—but the bar was usually packed tight on a Thursday night with big beefy guys who were liable to get punchy after too many ales. But all customers were frisked at the door and made to check their weapons, and the local security guards had been trained up by Don (himself a Knuckle Dragger) to deal with any trouble, so I had nothing to worry about. Apparently there were other bars in the city that catered to ‘Do-Gooders’—aid workers, NGO employees and the like—but it seemed that the two camps rarely mixed. When it came to night life, Kabul was clearly a tribal town.

  But the factions didn’t end there. The bar staff were all Pashtun cousins; the kitchen staff were mostly Hazara. I knew enough about Afghanistan to understand the implications of this. Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in the country and historically have been politically dominant. The Hazaras have been the most disadvantaged and persecuted group and were brutally oppressed under the Taliban. Apparently bar demarcation disputes were common, ranging from the divvying-up of tips to who should light the fire on the terrace each evening. Don explained that they had a tendency to ‘carry on like girls’, behaviour that constituted bitching, gossiping and sulking. It rarely got out of hand, but I wasn’t to buy into it.

  In the event of a police raid or an insurgent attack, I was to lock myself in the safe room and call one of Don’s security mates, Colin. Colin would also take me to pick up my alcohol supplies each week, retrieved from a house
across town belonging to an advisor for an international consultancy firm and stacked from floor to ceiling with booze. ‘Grog runs’ were highly illegal and, if the police caught us, we would undoubtedly end up in jail. In which case I was to call their Afghan business partner, Abdullah.

  Staff aside, I was never to allow Afghans into the bar. Embassy security guards were the only people permitted to bring their weapons in. Oh, and could I possibly find a good recipe for mango chutney?

  By the time Sue and Don settled me into my room, I was starting to wonder what exactly I’d taken on.

  The next day I officially began work. The first of the kitchen staff arrived at noon. Their English was limited, and my lonely tashakor could only get me so far in conversation, so we settled on a couple of rounds of smiling and nodding before I retreated to my room to scour the internet for chutney recipes.

  The bar staff started dribbling in mid-afternoon. The manager, Tamim, spoke impeccable English. He proved to be charming and funny and, in between showing me the ropes, offered a lowdown on all the regulars who would soon be arriving. It was a basic assessment. Dave was a good man. Ron was a good man. Trevor bad. Chris good . . . Bad—good—good—good . . . The only deviations from this simple scale were Inge, a Dutch woman who worked with us on Wednesdays and was ‘mad’, and Al. Al was a great man—he was Tamim’s best friend; Al was his brother.

  I heard Al before I actually laid eyes on him. I was in the kitchen, ostensibly checking on dinner prep but merely pointing at pots of bubbling gruel while doing the nod and smile, when a low booming, American voice arrested me mid-pantomime.

  ‘Tamim! Your retarded cousin here just served me a warm beer! Get me an ice-cold Corona right now or I’ll bend you over that bar and fuck you till your hips snap!’