At L'Atmosphere
Friday, October 7: Evening
L’Atmosphere is something of a scene, a large restaurant
with a bar and many tables set in a huge garden with a swimming pool.
Sean is in the middle of a group of expats -- no Afghans go to places like L’Atmosphere,
with the exception of young overseas Afghans -- and it seems we’re all waiting
for our ride to the party. Everyone is some sort of journalist. I’m
surprised that the sex ratio seems even, but I guess the mercenaries and
security types are a cadre unto themselves. You can usually spot them
right off -- bigger, burlier, and walking with a lumbering gait never seen in
the journalistic world.
It occurs to me as I observe the body language of the
group drinking in the garden that expat society in Kabul is split in two
classwise: the press corps and NGO administrators who are middle to upper
class, and the security people who are from the same strata as the armed forces
most of them were trained in. My impression is that the Americans and Brits
here are skewed to the upper class: two of the Americans I know here graduated
from Harvard, and Sean went to Eton. Like their kindred spirits from England
who went out to India and the farflung bastions of empire a hundred years ago,
these young Ivy graduates have gone to work in a country where they can have
more responsibility- and power- than as investment banking grunts back home.
The party is a big one -- maybe 100 people. Sean and his
friends drift off into more or less urgent flirtations, and I don‚t want to get
in their way. It‚s so crowded that it‚s easy to meet people anyway. I talk with
a Spanish NGO worker, an Australian who seems to have been drifting around the
country for nearly a year without any particular mission, and then, just as I‚m
casting about to see where the handsome men are, someone calls my name. Sven is
towering over me. I met him and his brother Eliot and his sister in my friend
John’s Bowery loft eight months ago, when Eliot was between jobs in
Afghanistan. They’re a strapping, attractive, quintessentially American upper
class set of siblings. Sven and I quickly make plans to play golf tomorrow, his
last full day in Afghanistan.
I went to the bathroom and took a walk around the party.
Any handsome men? There were a few, but they had that odd hostility that I’d noticed
on other trips here, a defensiveness that wasn’t going to help them move the
gender ratio in their favor, or they were wimpy Euros…
Gut!
Rédigé par: berlin | 27 février 2009 à 13h21