Our Afghan Friends

Vahe H. Apelian

My father with his Afghan friends

Kabul has fallen.  

But this is not the first time that I make a mental connection with Afghanistan and my parental family’s unusual friendship with Afghans that lasted more than a decade. Fifty plus years later, I can write about it with some comfort.

It might  have been fair that I titled this article as “My Father’s Afghan Friends”. Although he was the bond that cemented that friendship, the rest of  us as a family came along and nurtured the bond. 

My father

My father was born in Keurkune, Kessab. He had a younger brother and the two were the sons of orphaned survivors of the genocide. He spent the first sixteen to seventeen years of his life in Keurkune but left it in 1937/38 to escape possible conscription in the Turkish army as Kessab faced the possibility of being annexed to Turkey as part of the Turkish Hatay Province, the historic Alexandretta (Eskenderoun). Unskilled in any trade, like many Kessabtsi youth of his generation, he found employment as a server in famed Hotel Lux of the era. After a few years he left the hotel and ran a grocery store almost right across the famed Nshan Palanjain Jemaran and subsequently took over and ran Hotel Lux until its demise. Throughout those years, and for the remainder of his entire life, the Armenian word hajakhort –  client, customer, or guest – remained part of his daily vocabulary. That is how he made his living, by serving the clients. But there was something genuine in him. He served not because his job demanded it but because he was genuinely serviceable,  sociable, friendly and helpful. It seems that deep down we connect with each other well beyond words and social niceties, but through our guts. That was probably was how the customers of the Hotel viewed him for they kept frequenting the inn and spread the word associating him with the place as a single entity.

Lately I came a piece of paper on which my mother had jotted down her reflection of her husband of over fifty years. Realizing that the dreaded Alzheimers is clouding her memory, she had posted a note noting that it was “Solely for the purpose of remembering”. In it she had noted the following about him along with some sentimental notes: “He had a gentle, happy, considerate disposition, and with his friendly temperament, he had won the sympathy of those around him.” 

My parents with our Afghan friends

The Afghans

Most of the guests of the inn were Armenians from different Armenian communities such as from  Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Far East, East Europe, etc. They were in Lebanon as visitors, on business, or attending a community function, or they were on their way to West or Australia as immigrants.It happened one day that two Afghans showed up looking for a room. They had newly arrived in Lebanon and were wandering in down Beirut when they had come across the sign for hotel Luxe and thus had come to check in. It turned out that they were in Beirut to set up a business exporting maInly animal hide and intestines, pistachio.

Some fifty plus years later I wonder, how is it that they took the chance and set a business venture with my father they had just met in a foreign country? I am sure that in their guts they found him a genuinely nice guy they could trust.

My father thus became their broker and set up a warehouse in the seaport, which was not far from the hotel, to store the goods for processing and merchandizing. His Armenian connections became handy. The animal hides and intestines needed to be processed. It turned out there were Armenians engaged in that messy work and had made good for themselves. The processed goods and the pistachios were then sold for export. Local, long entrenched merchant families were the ones who were engaged in the trade. There was no credit line, bank transactions, or anything of the kind. It was by word of mouth and in cash or on consignment to be paid upon selling the product. There too, my father’s Armenian connections came handy. Throughout those years I would see piles of gold coins in the hotel my father purchased from an Armenian street money exchanger. My father had rented a lady who sewed the gold coins in straps. Then there was another Armenian who made suitcases. Mind you, this was before the Samsonite era. The suitcase maker would line up the long straps of gold coin along the side of the suitcase and dress the interior with a cover. The suitcase was then carried as a luggage or shipped on the plane after having stuffed with light weighed clothing. The same tailor also made a special coat to Mr. Zaman, inside of which there were pockets for the gold coins or bars. As to coins, again it was the Armenian money exchanger, whose family name I rather not mention long after his death, even after fifty years later, provided the gold coins and the gold bars. Hard to believe now that this whole thing was done in plain daylight as an accepted business conduct. I guess Levantine business still lingered on. God forbid if  anyone forfeited his word. I imagine that the person’s family would be ostracized by the merchant community for generations to come. 

 Along the merchandizing we established a friendship that transcended business and became genuinely very personal. Later on, as the businesses took off, many others wanted to take over the brokerage on the pretext that my father was a Christian. But my father’s Afghan friends entertained no such notion and they continued to frequent the hotel, at times they brought their wives to be with us, a gesture of ultimate trust, having established a familiarity and comfort with us and we in turn enjoyed their presence and their company and along the way, Afghan music as well. On a further note, the goods mostly originated from Kandahar in Afghanistan and were transported on trucks. Internet indicates that there are two land routes, a northern and a southern route. Distance wise it appears to be similar to coast to coast driving in the U.S.

My father, Mr. Zaman and Sheikh Mujaddadi

At one point during their business venture, they hosted the son of a prominent Afghan Muslim cleric, whose family, we were told family of Muslim clerics. The young cleric had just gotten married and had come to Lebanon for his honeymoon. His last name was Mujaddadi. My mother was allowed to visit the new bride as she remained confined lavishly dressed and bejeweled in a five-star hotel in Beirut. When the  Grand Mufti of Lebanon and other high placed Muslim clerics organized a reception in his honor, he invited my father to go along with him. My father told me that he introduced him as his Christian friend. Recently  I checked on the internet and I came across a few Afghan Mujaddadi clerics. I am not sure if either one of them was that young man we met in Lebanon some 50 plus years ago. If not, I tend to think that more likely than not, there are related.

Much like many other things, our Afghan friends became distant memories in time as the  Civil War in Lebanon, that started in 1975. The hotel was sacked and looted and downtown Beirut became desolate. The civil war put an end to many  other relations as well as the world we knew turned upside down. 

Me with Mr. Zaman

 My brother in Afghan dress with Mohammed Raman's brother and the rest of our family.