A Cup of Friendship Read Online Free PDF Page B

dealing with the mud that seeped in through every possible crack and crevice in the walls each spring when the snow melted.
    “You going to tell me? Or am I supposed to guess?” asked Sunny, teasingly.
    Bashir Hadi reached into the pocket of his kameez and pulled out a newspaper article, neatly folded. “Look,” he said, “we rebuild the wall. Then we get UN compliance and the UN people will come. Then we’ll be busy.”
    He opened the article and spread it on the counter. Sunny skimmed it. The United Nations was encouraging restaurants, hotels, and hostels to build their walls to height and depth specifications to ensure the safety of UN employees, and then the UN would sanction their use. It could double their business.
    Sunny looked out her front courtyard to the wall that sheltered the coffeehouse from the street. She could see the brightly painted turquoise gate with Ahmet’s guardhouse in front. She remembered when she first came to Kabul, riding in a taxi through the streets that were walled on both sides and reminded her of the narrow roads through the dense cornfields back home. The big difference was that these walls were rife with bullet holes instead of cornhusks. They separated one home from another and every home from the street, making it difficult for people to find where they were going or to know their neighbors. They insulated the city’s residents from harm but separated them from freedom. But they were usually only about seven feet high. To get UN compliance, they had to be four meters, or about thirteen feet high.
    “It’s like one of those, what do you call it? A cycle. You need more money to make the coffeehouse safer, so you build a better wall and then you get more people and more money.”
    “There’s only one problem,” said Sunny, thinking about her dwindling bank account. “We need money to build the wall higher in the first place.”
    Bashir put his elbow on the counter and rested his chin in his hand. “So we do something to get enough people to come so that we can do what is necessary to get more people to come.”
    “Hmm. Maybe a party?”
    “Do you mean to sell liquor? I don’t like that. It’s too dangerous.”
    Sunny shook her head. “And I didn’t come to Kabul to be a bartender. That’s the life I left back home.”
    “Something else then. We’ll think of it. But we need to do something quickly. Something for Christmas, maybe. Because before you know it, it’ll be Easter, and the coffeehouse will move to outside. It must be safe by then.”
    Her first year in Kabul, Sunny instituted a couple of new traditions in the coffeehouse. One was Christmas, when she decorated with a big plastic tree and decorations from Chicken Street, and the other was Easter, which the coffeehouse celebrated as a welcome to spring, when Sunny opened the outdoor patio and created a Shangri-la of hyacinth and fuchsia that climbed the open-walled tents she’d brought back from Dubai. Christmas was around the corner; Easter was in just a few months.
    “We’ll make that our goal. Safe by Easter.”
    He bowed slightly, raised his head, and said, “Until then we can pray for safety. Thanks to Muhammad for Easter.”
    “Thanks to Muhammad for Easter!” Sunny concurred.
    And they both smiled.

H alajan walked down the back hallway to the door that led to a small courtyard behind the café, where she could have some privacy and take off her hot, itchy scarf. It was the only way a woman could do such a brazen thing in Kabul these days and not be stoned. Ach, the stupid Talib idiots, she thought as her plastic shoes click-clacked on the marble-tiled floors, one of the many improvements Sunny made to her house. What little men they are, she thought, to put women back in the burqa. She’d gotten so used to the sun that she vowed she’d die before ever hiding in the darkness again. Wearing a head scarf was one thing. She could almost understand it, if only because of tradition. But purdah—the