Honey, I’m Home

In the fall of 1988, when my husband and I were living in Hong Kong, we decided to have four or five couples in for a proper American Thanksgiving dinner. Hang the cost and hold the rice; we would set our table by the book, serving only traditional food in smug, expatriate abandonment of imagination and nerve.

On the South China Sea we wouldn’t have autumn chills, and the Packers-Lions game would not be on in the next room, but we would buy, prepare and serve every one of the canonical trimmings, all effortlessly, if dearly, available in central Hong Kong.

A date was picked. The guests were invited. Shopping commenced.

It was a time when my job included reportorial visits to the war in Afghanistan, where the Soviets were entering the final winter of their occupation. I had applied months earlier for a visa granting legal entry into Kabul, the Afghan capital, but been given a bum’s rush each time I called to ask about the document.

Then, just about the time the Thanksgiving RSVPs started coming in, the phone rang. It was my visa officer. Finally, I was to be admitted to the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

This was not the moment to protest, “But I have 10 people coming for Thanksgiving dinner!”

I did what I could to prepare for the vagaries of Afghan wartime cuisine, packing a few cans of tuna, a box or two of Grape-Nuts, a Zip-Loc bag of powdered milk, instant coffee, a six-pack of Snickers bars, multivitamins. Two days later, I was aboard an overcrowded Afghan Ariana Airlines Ilyushin jet.

What thoughts do the onset of winter and the approaching holiday season evoke for most Americans? Parties, the popping of corks, a new dress, once-a-year excess, waistline trauma? Eternities of tedium with boorish relatives? Football on the tube? Turkey and cranberries? Counters full of dirty heirloom crystal and gravy boats circling the sink?

For me, yes, all this and doubtless more, but none of it had anything to do with daily life in the Afghan capital in November 1988.

Kabul, by that time, had been under the Soviet boot just shy of nine years, and the strains of occupation and war in the surrounding hills pressed down hard. Thousands of mud huts stuffed with refugees hanging on in atrocious circumstances covered the bleak hillsides, now under their first dustings of snow.

I’d reserved a room at the Hotel Kabul. Soviet-built, it featured a glum little bar with no alcohol and Stalinist plumbing of operatic volume throughout.

The dining room had all the charm of a mortuary after sundown. It was illuminated, if that’s the word, by a few dim bulbs, and patronized by an international clientele--Russian, Afghan, Indian, East European, a stray Iranian Communist and me--all of whom sat through their meals looking petrified. (After all, the American ambassador had been shot to death in a room upstairs a few years earlier, and infiltrating bands of warriors had more than once sprayed wedding parties in the banquet room with Kalashnikov fire.)

“Breakfast” was a term of art. If you got downstairs early enough, it was big, fresh ovals of flat Afghan bread, tea and, some mornings, a soft-boiled egg. If you petitioned the cook in person, you could sometimes score a can of Fanta too. Show up late and there was simply no food to be had until lunch.

Lunch looked a lot like breakfast but sometimes also included a big communal pot of greasy rice, at the bottom of which lay the bone of an unknown animal.

Dinner? See lunch menu.

In the first few days, such deprivations seemed little to bear. I was in Kabul! My Information Ministry minder was full of assurances that an interview with the president would soon take place. I’d get a good story.

But it wasn’t many days before the thrill of this particular chase began to pall. The presidential interview wasn’t coming through. An Afghan conscript fired a rifle round over my head from a passing troop carrier. A flock of schoolchildren threw pebbles at me, yelling “Russki!” as I passed.

My Grape-Nuts ran out first. Then the instant coffee. I discovered that plain, water-packed tuna sticks in your throat when you eat it in the gloom, chill and isolation of a Hotel Kabul room after curfew, with just the odd mortar thump somewhere off in the distance to break the routine. My initial sense of curiosity and enterprise was steadily replaced with something far less attractive: galloping self-pity.

And the self-pity in turn inspired guilt, for despite my privations, I was eating much, much better than the city’s put-upon thousands. I would somehow, eventually, get on a plane and leave. The Kabulis would stay on for years and years of senseless suffering.

But when would I leave? And If I didn’t get back, what was my husband going to feed all those Thanksgiving guests?

My husband, it should be noted, knows how to cook exactly one dish: He chops up great miscellanies of fresh vegetables, makes a pot of spaghetti and gives it all a spin in a wok with water-packed tuna. This is fairly tasty and very healthful, but it’s decidedly not party food.

These were the days before satellite phones. I could telex out, but my husband could not phone or telex in. We couldn’t consult on what he should do. Cancel everything? Hire a caterer? Raid the gourmet-food shops of Hong Kong and just toss the food at people?

I would just have to wait and see, which is what I did through the eventual interview with the Afghan president, through several days of wheedling for an exit visa, a fight for a seat on one of the oversold flights out, unexplained delays at the airport, a fog in New Delhi that grounded my connecting flight to Hong Kong for hours on party day itself. . . .

Well: From Hong Kong’s airport I took a taxi home. I walked up the stairs to our second-story apartment, not knowing what to expect. Through the door, I could hear voices. I turned my key in the lock.

Surprise! There were all 10 of our guests, happily tanked on pre-dinner drinks and just about to sit down to . . . a complete, no-fooling American turkey dinner, every detail as if seen to by Betty Crocker herself. My cookbook-avoider husband had roasted a vast creature in the heat of our unair-conditioned subtropical kitchen, put together stuffing, made cranberry sauce, mashed a pile of potatoes, chopped some coleslaw and creamed baby onions. He’d even made gravy.

I found him still over the stove, a pool of sweat and turkey gore spreading out on the floor all around him. He saw me, bunched up the apron and mugged it up Felix Ungerish: “Where have you been?”

Never has anyone appreciated the time-worn American basics as much as I did after the cold, dark, hunger and unhappiness of Soviet-occupied Kabul. No dish was out of the ordinary but, to me, the turkey tasted like aged filet, the pumpkin pie was like velvet (even though it came from a bakery; on this course my husband cheated), every guest a raconteur, every joke hilarious and the wine--just your basic airplane white--was nectar of the gods.

Dinner was splendid. There are those who still talk about it.

CRANBERRY SALAD

1 orange, quartered and seeded

1/2 cup water

1 (3-ounce) box lemon gelatin

1 (16-ounce) can whole-berry cranberry sauce

1 apple, cored and chopped

1/2 cup raisins

1 teaspoon ground ginger

This style of cranberry salad, traditional in some parts of the country, uses the whole peel, giving a bittersweet flavor.

Grind orange, including skin, to pulp in blender or food processor.

Bring water to boil, add gelatin and stir until dissolved. Mix in cranberry sauce, orange pulp, apple, raisins and ginger. Pour mixture into serving dish or 8-inch ring mold. Put salad in serving dish and chill until stiff, at least 2 hours.

Makes 10 to 12 servings.

Each of 12 servings contains about:

96 calories; 14 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 0 fat; 23 grams carbohydrates; 2 grams protein; 0.32 gram fiber.