2001-09-28 - 10:42 p.m.

Living Above Afghanistan (3)

Concluding the story of my downstairs neighbors in my old house

One afternoon I was home, minding my own business, when the doorbell rang. When I opened my front door, an elderly lady who I assumed was one of my downstairs neighbors was there. She began babbling at me in her native tongue. I couldn't understand a word of what she was saying. By gestures she indicated that I should follow her. She went into the downstairs apartment with me trailing along behind her.

In the downstairs apartment there was a baby wrapped in blankets lying on the floor, red-faced and crying. There didn't seem to be anyone else around except her and the some of the younger children. She then handed me a tiny notebook with what looked like a lot of phone numbers written in it. She pointed to one of the numbers and then handed me a cordless telephone, all the while babbling in her indecipherable language.

As near as I could understand, the baby wouldn't stop crying so she needed to call one of the people at the number she was pointing at. However, when I dialed the number, I got a recorded voice telling me that the number didn't exist. The writing in the book was close to illegible, so I tried a couple variations that I thought it might be, and those didn't work either.

While I was doing this the grandmother (I assume that's what she was) was rocking the baby and belching occasionally while staring off into space.

I was at the point where I was about to give up and go upstairs when I had an inspiration. I knew that some of the family members worked at a fried chicken joint because I'd seen T-shirts for it hanging in the back yard. I grabbed a phone book off the counter and looked up the number of the fired chicken joint, sure enough, the number was similar to the one written in the book. The main problem: the fours looked like sixes. No wonder I was having trouble!

I dialed the number, explained what was going on to the person on the other end, then handed the phone to the grandmother. She began babbling excitedly to the person I'd called. I stood around for a while, but she didn't acknowledge my existence further. I guessed I was dismissed, so I wandered back upstairs.

Basically, I was suffering from a case of culture shock. It was like there was a piece of Afghanistan right downstairs from me. They had a lot of odd habits.

For example, as I went in the front door of my place, I could look in the picture window of their apartment. Their apartment was set up differently than mine: there was a large living room/dining room that led right into a kitchen. Looking in the front window you could see to the back wall of the apartment.

What was odd about their place is that they had no furniture. None. No chairs, no tables. As far as I could tell they didn't even have any beds; they all slept on mats on the floor. During times when they had all those visitors over I'd look in the front window and the large living room/dining room was an unbroken expanse of sleeping bodies. It was like a huge slumber party ALL THE TIME.

Toward the end of my tenure there they finally picked up two pieces of furniture: a TV set and a beat-up recliner. As far as I could tell the recliner was the only chair in the house.

They also dressed in traditional Afgani garb all the time. The men all dressed in while pajama-like clothes that made them all look like dishwashers at a restaurant. The women and some of the children all wore these colorful sari-like garments. Because most of the women kept their hair covered I assumed they were Muslim.

One time I went down to the basement to check on my laundry, and ran into one of the Afghani women. As soon as she spotted me, she began to act all guilty and nervous. I quickly figured out what the problem was: she didn't have her hair covered and I'd seen her! Aiieee! Flee from the infidel!

I didn't really mind the fact that they were so different from me, what I minded was that they were so in my face about it. I felt like I was sharing my house with a family of human cockroaches. They were dirty, smelly, noisy and they got into everything. It was rather oppressive.

I've been calling the people downstairs "Afghanis" but the fact is that I thought that they were Pakistanis until a few months before I moved out. Well, I admit that I can't tell a Pakistani from an Afghani. However, they fact is that they WERE from Pakistan, sort of.

I got the full story from my landlord. Apparently the people downstairs were from Afghanistan, and once upon a time they had actually been quite wealthy there. They'd had a large house with orchards and other things. However, that all ended with the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s. Their house was seized and their orchards burned.

They fled as refugees to Pakistan, where they lived for a couple of years. They were planning on heading back home once the war was over, but then they heard stories of what living under the Taliban was like. Besides, they really had nothing to go back to. They had some relatives in the United States, so they decided to come here. Now they were helping the other members of their family (and there were a LOT of them) relocate to the United States.

There is something in the U.S. Immigration policy that makes it easier to get visas and green cards if you have relatives here already. No wonder there were always so many people downstairs! It was the endpoint of a Afghanistan-U.S. corridor!

Still, after I heard this story I felt kind of sorry for them. They'd had a tough life and they obviously didn't have a lot of money. However, this sympathy didn't last very long - they inevitably got in my face again over something.

One time I remember coming home, and there seemed to be nobody at home downstairs the little children, about five of them. They seemed to be cowering and looking out the picture window fearfully. It took me a minute to realize what the problem was. There was a fireworks display going on nearby with all sorts of loud bangs and bright lights in the sky. Through the half-open window, one of them asked me what all the noise was.

I considered being a meanie and saying that the Russians were shelling us, but instead I explained that it was just fireworks, and they were merely pretty to look at and not harmful. They looked somewhat relieved, but I could tell they didn't 100% believe me.

The Afghani children were much more Americanized than their parents, and most of them spoke pretty good English. In fact often times when I needed to communicate something to one of the adults there, they had to hunt down a kid to translate what I was saying. It's kind of daunting when a child who couldn't be more than five is bilingual and fluent.

Being an evil American Imperialist I took a sinister secret delight in the fact that as time went on, the children would become more American and less Afghani, no doubt to the consternation of their parents. The lure of American freedoms and goodies was going to make the kids lose interest in the boring old-country stuff their parents were into. In the future I could see many arguments about clothes, toys, music, TV shows, who they could and couldn't date, and so on. My only hope was that I wouldn't be around to HEAR all those arguments.

And that's the story of my former Afghani neighbors, not exactly a story of mutual understanding. In spite of the fact that I didn't much care for the little slice of Afghanistan I had to live with, I don't want to see the U.S. bomb the bejeebers out of a bunch of innocent people if they can help it. Also, people shouldn't get sore at Afghanis living in this country - most of them came here to get AWAY from the Taliban!

Anyway, after I moved out I started to wonder if I hadn't exaggerated the problems. After all, at the time I was kind of overwrought and under a lot of pressure from some unrelated things.

I had almost completely moved out of my old apartment when I met the woman who was moving into my old flat, above the Afghanis. She was a cheerful blonde nurse in her early 30s who said she was looking for "a quiet place to live" with her elderly mother.

I'm trying to think of why I didn’t try warn this poor woman what she was getting into. I think when I met her the landlord was with her and I liked my landlord and didn't want to scare off a tenant right in front of her. Also, I thought that maybe I was being hypersensitive about the noise. Maybe someone else wouldn't be bothered. At that point I really couldn't trust myself - my nerves were shot.

A few months later, by sheer chance, I had a conversation with a woman at the store, and it turns out she was friends with the woman who had moved into my old apartment. I asked the woman how her friend was getting along, and she said: "Oh, she moved out again. Her downstairs neighbors were horrible and noisy and she just got tired of fighting with them. The final straw was when they were cooking downstairs in the basement and nearly burned the house down!"