car to the Hotel Reina Victoria where I go directly to bed and sleep sixteen straight hours. Early the next day Immaculada woke me early and took me off to the screening of a film, something about lesbians and bisexuals with psychological issues, and my reaction is something like God you sometimes wonder what these Westerners these Europeans these American women are thinking with all their closeups of piercing and cutting and vomit. Don’t they have anything else to make films about? I’ll never understand. They’re too rich and spoiled and what do they know about life? They haven’t been invaded, they haven’t been bombed, they haven’t had their uncles pulled out of a car and shot at a roadblock, they haven’t had mullahs telling them they had to hide their faces, they haven’t had brothers disappear one night, never to return, they haven’t seen the flares go up over the city or the terrifying but beautiful tracer bullets fired from rooftop to rooftop or huddled in a basement waiting for the artillery explosions to stop. And they haven’t had lovers either, not real lovers, haven’t had sweet words whispered over a phone line in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep, haven’t strolled with girlfriends across the schoolyard and seen Him sitting in his father’s car across the street, looking so proud and handsome waiting there just to see you and that feeling flies back and forth in the air, that love in his eyes meeting the love in your eyes, even though you have never been alone together, only have seen each other up close at huge holiday gatherings with all the cousins, and yet you know, both of you know that this is True Love.
Sometimes I have to wonder why we always so much admired the West. Europe. England. America. Where everything was modern and clean and up to date, like the Siemens fixtures in our bathroom and appliances in our kitchen in Kabul. In the West things worked and everyone was rich. No goats herded through the streets, no heaps of animal or human dung, no ragged peasants, no blind men with their hands out for baksheesh, no two wheeled carts pulled by boys, no carcasses of sheep and cows hanging in front of butcher shops, covered with flies and dripping blood into the dust, no run down stores with shop keepers sitting over tiny coal heaters, cooking soup, looking up and calling Come into my store and you’ll get the best deal. Sometimes Kabul seemed horrible. I always wondered when we came back from a period abroad why my country was so poor, so dirty, so primitive. Why couldn’t we be like the rest of the world, if not Europe than at least Turkey or Egypt.
Twenty years in America and I have begun to learn, begun to see the two worlds, Sharq and Gharb, East and West, as centuries apart. Yet the violence these young filmmakers show is fake because they don’t know the real thing, don’t have a clue. Violence is what they give you instead of love and they don’t have a clue about that either. Women who don’t accept the fact that men are different from us. Women who complain about men as if men were supposed to feel and act as we do. Women who have not for the life of me ever felt a tenth of what we feel with that single wave across the schoolyard or a few words whispered in a hallway during a feast like Eid el fitr which marks the end of Ramadan.
One of the wonderful things in Madrid is that so far nobody has asked me where I am from. They think I am an American, that’s it, even if a lot of them have to know because my background has been mentioned in all the publicity—our first Afghan American director!! and almost always with the exclamation points. I am here because I have put my community on the screen and so I represent multi cultural America, where everyone always asks you where you are from. But here nobody asks not even those who don’t know. Maybe they simply aren’t curious or maybe they look at my face and think the Moors are back, better not mess with her or they’ll be another invasion. That much Spanish I could understand: No que es su pais natal, senorita. It’s an easy language, a lot easier to learn than Arabic and a lot easier than English, which I learned so long ago. My father was smart. He knew even back then that English was the language of the future and so while he and mother stayed in New Delhi, they bundled us off to school in Missoura, an old British hill station, where the Nuns made us say Hail Marys before I cried myself to sleep. It was so cold, the Nuns didn’t believe in heating, it made you soft they said, and that’s why we had all those cold baths in the morning which were supposed to be good for you. The best part was on Saturdays when all of us in the school, marched two by two, holding hands, sandwiches and fruit in our brown bags, down the hill to the movie house to see cowboys and Indians or the real Indians from India, some jumped up version of the ones around us in the streets, only on screen they were dancing and singing, the women rolling their eyes like huge billiard balls and skipping across fields, almost but never quite kissing their handsome boy friends for just as their lips draw near and they look deep into each other’s eyes another song begins and away they whirl in yet another dance, dozens of women in bright saris in vivid green fields or boulder strewn mountains or in the courtyards of marble palaces.
The festival has put us in a wonderful and elegant hotel, with huge bay windows looking out on a green plaza across the street, and textured, flowery wallpaper, and thick carpets in the hall that caress your feet. Today I am free in the afternoon for what they call siesta, only after sixteen hours of sleep I am plenty rested and I want to make good use of my time in Madrid. Maybe I shouldn’t be wearing such thin soled sandals, but it’s gloriously warm this afternoon and my feet are the only place I dare feel naked, covered up as I am like a boy, with dark, silky pants and a long sleeved blouse, my hair up with a scarf around my neck not over my head. I don’t want to carry the stereotype too far but I will need the scarf if I go into a church, that’s one time where Catholicism and Islam aren’t so far apart. The dark, handsome bellboy with the gleaming black hair touches his cap in a salute as I walk toward the elevator. All the bellboys are dark and handsome. They look like bullfighters are supposed to look, their movements graceful and proud when they pick up a suitcase or unlock the door of your room and bow you inside, their eyes smoldering, glances full of a kind of contained passion that seems to suggest I would like to take you in my arms and call you mi amor.
Mmm, this country is great for the fantasy life. In the lobby, with the brocade and velvet sofas and chairs, and gleaming candle holders and glittering chandeliers, and Persian rugs, you can think you may have just walked into some palace out of the past. The women, are they guests or maybe hookers off duty, wear stark colors, white, black, or red, with lace shawls, their necks curved and mobile like swans, their hair piled all the way to heaven, the earrings swinging like huge pendants, and the way they stand, at once dignified and disdainful, slightly curved bodies in a maddening pose that has to be a threat and a challenge that if I were a man I would answer with violence, would be all over them in a moment, dragging them off to a bedroom and tying them to the posts of the bed. The men are sexy too, in dark suits and gleaming shirts, erect, centered, quiet, watching from beneath lowered eyelids, like that one at the desk who has just flicked his eyes my way for the tiniest of seconds, cool, a bullfighter surely for they say this is the hotel where bullfighters stay.
Do we ever escape our tradition? Our past? Or do we just drag it around like a huge suitcase on wheels, getting larger and heavier every year and more difficult to pull? I cross the street into a charming square named Plaza Santa Ana. So many names are a mystery here but at least Reina Victoria is familiar to me from the British nuns who never tired of telling us their convent was founded under Queen Victoria. There are stone and iron benches under leafy trees full of older people, and the beggar sitting on the ground, hair grizzled and white, his cap before him, looks up with an expression that takes me right back to Kabul to the one who used to sit on the same corner of our street in Sharinaw every day and look up as we walked by him on the way to school and his eyes stuck a needle into my heart, they were so sad, so full of pain mixed with faith, or a desperate hope, waiting for a reward in Jinat but now resigned to sitting in the dirt, to the laughs of young girls like my sisters, hurrying along, happy without knowing it because they are clean and well fed and dressed and I am the one to stop, stare into those eyes which silently teach me about my own mortality, and I hand over the pocket money I was going to use for sweets at the Indian spice shop, and then hurry down the street. We never once spoke, the beggar and I, though he was there for a year or more, and then one day he was gone, and that night I prayed that his soul was in Jinat, with the arms of the grape trees bending toward his mouth, the maidens holding him, rocking him to sleep at night, telling him that life had only been a bad dream and now at last he was really awake.
The question for me in Madrid was Am I awake? Is this really me, alone in a foreign city with no man to tell me what to do, no brother