The War Inside

Lipstick in Afghanistan

By Roberta Gately

(Gallery Books, Trade Paperback 304 pp. $15)

Review by Vivian Lake

A young woman without many options finds herself compelled by a photograph in a magazine to help the sick, the ill, the desperate and disenfranchised wherever they may be. This calling propels young Elsa Murphy, a girl from the gritty streets of Dorchester in Boston, to go to college, become a nurse and volunteer to work anywhere in the world she is needed.

This is also the story of Parween, a young Afghani who is vibrant, intelligent and ambitious, but because of where she lives will have a very different life.

Based on the author's experiences in Afghanistan and other war-torn nations, this novel serves both as witness and warning. While the fictional Elsa lands in Afghanistan shortly after the September 11th attacks, the author first worked there during the Russian invasion in the 1980s, which gives her a deeper knowledge of the area and its people than is seen on the evening news.

Roberta Gately talks about Lipstick in Afghanistan

video courtesy of Simon & Schuster

Elsa, who has never been outside of Boston, finds herself in the remote Bamiyan province of the country. "...Bamiyan seemed chisled out of some long-forgotten age where it had been frozen in time." There is no electricity or running water and food is cooked over open fires.

Elsa is provided with a small house and a cook and not much else. Bed is a foam mattress covered in fabric and water for bathing and cooking will be brought to her from a nearby well. Elsa barely has time to process this when she

finds out that head of the office has to go to another part of Afghanistan and that she will be in charge of the clinic in which she was to be a staffer.

Petrified but determined, she arrives at the small, overwhelmed hospital, meets the staff and begins her work steamlining procedures and learning as much as possible as quickly as possible so she can help the patients.

Elsa soon has a circle of close friends; Hamid her driver, Laila and Ezat, the doctors she works with, and Amina her chaperone (single women can't live alone in Afghanistan). She also befriends the American servicemen in the area, who give her their perspective of the area, which she finds at odds with the warm hospitable people she knows.

She also gets to know the vibrant people in the village - the Hazara - who fought and succeeded in getting the Taliban out of their village. They remain a threat, having taken over a village a few miles north, but for the most part, Bamiyan is free.

Woven through this story is the history of Parween, who has no freedom. Betrothed at age twelve against her wishes, Parween has to wear the veil, cannot go out alone, and can't go to school. Her soul rebels at the thought of the same future of childbirth, housework, fieldwork without end. Abuse from the husband or his family is often part of life for young wives. Parween sees her best friend packed off as a third wife to a wizened old man and despairs of her future.

How Elsa and Parween meet and how their friendship affects them both is the culmination of the story. Climax and parable, the book questions the future of a nation that shackles half its population in slavery, and how the simple act of friendship can open doors actual and spiritual, and can inspire heroism

Oh, the Horror!
The Dead Janitors Club: Pathetically True Tales of a Crime Scene Cleanup King

By Jeff Klima  341pp $15.99 non-fiction Trade paperback Sourcebooks

Crime scene cleaners aren't the sexy CSIs portrayed on TV.  CSCs are the people who show up after the the body (or what's left of it) has been removed, detectives have left, and the evidence had been bagged, tagged and photographed. Their job is to remove blood stains, brain matter, bodily waste and the putrid decomp that occur after death, from wherever that death occurs. You definitely did not hear about this employment opportunity at career day.  It's not a glamour gig, but it pays well, which was all the author cared about when he heard about an opportunity for a CSC job.  Our hero is a student at Cal-State Fullerton and working a soul-crushing retail job when he hears about the opportunity. He's immediately interested and after a wait of a few weeks Klima is called to his first death scene. He's had no training. When he arrives his boss/partner (a sheriff who's moonlighting) hands him a crate with some special cleansers and brushes, a uv flashlight (the better to see bloodstains with) and a tyvek suit. Welcome to the funhouse.

At the first scene they need to scrape blood, brain and skull matter off the walls of a house where a woman shot herself.  Its amazing what a mess a little old lady with a shot gun can make. Klima and his partner get to work and just as they were finishing up they spot some unfinished business splattered on the stucco ceiling. Klima reaches up and begins to scrape, when "I felt the gentle, cold splat of something soft connect with the naked orb of my eye." Oh, the horror. Klima is shaken up, but not shaken enough to quit. The money is too good, even with his idiot partner doing everything wrong. 

A pond of blood, the circumference of a throw rug, lay on the smooth linoleum of the kitchen floor as though someone had dropped the world's largest red egg onto it. And in the center, comprising its yolk, was a piled up large crimson mass with a jellylike consistency....which I speculated was a brain...

Klima hangs in there, going into scenes that are by turns violent (the dead prisoner), poignant (the old lady who was so alone she died and disolved into the floor) and horrific (the quintuple suicide that was discovered after three weeks). Throughout the story, Klima's kick-ass style and gallows humor makes the horror less horrible.

At some point the business expands to cleaning up hoarder homes for the county. If you've seen those homes on the A&E show Hoarders: Buried Alive, you know the kind of cleanup involved. The only upside is the chance of finding a hoard of cash.

All this goes on against a background of the author pursuing his dream of becoming a frat boy and pledging a fraternity. Although these scenes provide a fuller portrait of his life at the time , the work is center stage.

Klima's formidable talent turns what could be a creepy voyeuristic tale into a fast-paced, rip-roaring yarn. You will laugh out loud, you will groan out loud, but you won't want to put it down.