The day before he was due to collect her Jabril had asked their driver, Tawfiq, to make a sign for him to hold so the new doctor would know him in the crowd at the airport. Unfortunately, there had been a little miscommunication and the sign read Dr Jabril. By the time Jabril had discovered the problem it had been too late to fix.
‘I’m Dr Jabril Aziz,’ he had said when the young woman with the striking red hair walked up to him. ‘Welcome to my country. How was your trip?’
‘It was very good, thank you. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Dr Aziz.’ He could see she was a little nervous but so was he. He also noticed she had automatically put out her hand to shake before pulling it back. He would have been happy to shake her hand, for he had lived in the West long enough, but it had pleased him to see that she had made an effort to understand and respect his culture.
‘Welcome,’ he had said again with his hand on his heart before leading her to his car and introducing her to Tawfiq. Again, he was pleased to see her attempt to greet Tawfiq in Dari. It needed some work but at least she was trying.
‘You will find it very rewarding working in Shaahir Square,’ Jabril had said as they drove out of the carpark and headed for Kabul, ‘but you might not get rich.’ He knew he should be saying only good things about his country, but it was also important that this new doctor had realistic expectations.
‘Oh, I don’t want to get rich,’ she said happily.
Jabril had been thrown by her comment. Who didn’t want to get rich? He didn’t think he had met anyone before who didn’t want to get rich. But her response, together with her efforts to learn their language and culture and her smile, had reassured him that Dr Sofia Raso from Australia could very well be the right person for the job, and absolutely nothing since that morning had given Jabril cause to change his mind. Of course, it would have been preferable to hire an Afghan doctor, and before Sofia had arrived the women of the square had not been backward in telling him so, but no suitable female doctors had been available at the time.
His happiness with her efforts encouraged him to venture further. ‘I should also point out that the situation is probably not what you are used to, but what are riches when you’re working for the good of others? Being a doctor is a service, is it not?’ He had turned around from his seat in the front to watch her response.
‘It is,’ she had said, offering him another glorious smile.
‘You’re happy to be here?’ he asked, a little baffled by her enthusiasm.
‘Oh yes! I’ve wanted to come to Afghanistan forever.’
Jabril turned back around in his seat, considering her comment. He thought it a little strange that someone had wanted to come to Afghanistan forever. Who wanted to come to Afghanistan? Still, this must also be seen as a positive.
In his growing enthusiasm, and Zahra’s absence, he decided his wife should become part of his plan to reassure this Western doctor that the situation for Afghan women was not as it was always portrayed in the Western press.
‘My wife, Zahra, sends her apologies for not being here to meet you today, but she is a very busy woman. I’m not always sure what she’s very busy doing,’ he had said with a smile for Sofia, ‘but she’s very busy doing it.’ After some consideration he added, ‘I think maybe she’s with one of her women’s groups today. No,’ he said, after considering other possibilities, ‘maybe some unsuspecting public servant, who thought women were unimportant, is meeting his match as we speak.’ Jabril laughed, imagining the scene, until he noticed that Tawfiq was unusually quiet. ‘Do you know where my wife is today, Tawfiq?’
‘She’s at the hospital, Dr Jabril.’
‘There you are,’ Jabril had said, as if the puzzle was solved. ‘You will soon learn, Dr Sofia, that my wife is a force of nature, answerable to no man, least of all to myself.’ Jabril could almost hear Zahra’s voice in his head telling him to stop right there. He had gone too far.
‘I look forward to meeting her. She sounds interesting.’
‘Oh, she’s more than interesting. During the time of the Taliban she secretly schooled five girls in our home. She would have been killed if the Taliban had found her. She also looked after women’s health under the Taliban, even though she wasn’t trained, but there were very few female doctors left in our country and women weren’t allowed to go to male doctors. Of course, some of the women Zahra saw were her friends and she had to examine them intimately. She would see them in one room in our surgery and then come to mine to relay their symptoms. It was difficult for everyone, especially when Zahra started to argue with my diagnosis.’ Jabril laughed at the memory before shaking his head. ‘My wife … you would have to be a miracle worker to understand my wife, but she can understand everything. Everything! Without even studying medicine she knows what’s wrong with my patients; she knows why someone she’s never met has done some inexplicable thing she’s read about in the newspaper, and she knows how to fix Afghanistan, and that,’ he said, holding up his finger to emphasise the point, ‘is probably the singular greatest miracle of all.’
Jabril could hear Zahra’s voice in his head. You need to stop talking right now, Jabril. He tried very hard to take her advice and was successful for a time, but having lived for twelve years in Boston he was worried about how foreign and chaotic Kabul would appear to someone who had been used to a modern, functioning metropolis. Jabril had discussed these concerns and how they should deal with them with Zahra, but in the end she said, ‘If she cannot handle it I think it best we all find out immediately.’ Of course, she was right.
On the side of the road, and in the rubble of the sidewalk, local vendors had set up shop, plying their cheap wares from wheelbarrows with faded beach umbrellas, tarpaulins and bits of ripped plastic to shield them from the burning sun. Behind these were small dark shopfronts with metal roller doors opening out onto the footpaths, or directly onto the street. A pharmacy, a silversmith, a rug merchant, a tailor shop, a bookseller, a shop selling household goods and another selling fruit and vegetables sat side by side as crowds of men and women moved in and around them. A lot of the women were wearing long shapeless coats and headscarfs, or long pants and tops, while others were fully covered in the shiny blue burqa that the West now associated with the Taliban but which had been around for over a hundred and fifty years.
A few buggies drawn by horses or donkeys vied for position on the broken roads alongside pedestrians, intrepid men on rusty bicycles, clapped-out yellow and white taxis, overcrowded minibuses, brightly decorated ‘jingle’ trucks and the ever-present SUVs with their blacked-out windows and missing numberplates.
‘Kabul was once very beautiful,’ Jabril began, wanting so desperately for her to see the Kabul of his youth. ‘We used to have modern universities and beautiful houses, summer villas and gardens, fountains, and shops and movie theatres where men and women could go together. In summer, music would float out onto the streets and there were concerts in the parks.’ Jabril had felt his heart expand. It was always like this when he thought back to what had become, in his memory, an idyllic life. ‘Yes, it is true in the villages we still had the traditional women, but many women in Kabul were modern and wore miniskirts, shorts and make-up, and their hair was free.’ He looked back at Sofia, who had turned in her seat and was watching everything pass by with an enraptured smile. She really wants to be here, he had thought in surprise. He had not expected such enthusiasm.