Sparks Like Stars

by Nadia Hashimi

  Dedication

  For Amin, my eternal flame

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part II Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Nadia Hashimi

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Until now, my history has remained buried in me the way ancient civilizations are hidden beneath layers of earth and new life. But people insist on digging into the past, poking at relics of yesterday to marvel at the simplicity of extinct creatures. We display the evidence of our superiority in glass cases, housed in grand buildings sometimes half a world away from where they were found.

  In London, I saw the Elgin Marbles, lifted from the Parthenon, the Gweagal Shield stolen from Aboriginal Australians, and the brilliant Koh-i-Noor diamond. In the language of my childhood, Koh-i-Noor means Mountain of Light, a name that obscures the diamond’s dark history.

  But I cannot be too critical. Not while I have my own plundered treasure in a box, far from where it was unearthed. How it came to be with me is the story that I have never wholly told, not to the woman who helped me flee a country on fire, not to the woman who raised me as an American, and not to the man I almost loved.

  Were it not for the day my buried life appeared before me unannounced, I might have kept it all hidden forever. And I might not have asked those questions I’d stifled to preserve this unexamined life.

  What are you? I have been asked as I pay for my coffee, as I check out a book at the library, as I explain to my last patient of the day how I will remove the tumor growing inside him. As if I am a species, not a person. People throw identities at me and look to see if one will stick: Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Argentinian, Eastern European. I trigger a railroad switch and divert their questions away from crates of ammunition and streams of pity and preserve for myself the first and only peaceful decade of my life.

  But untold histories live in shallow graves. Some nights, the cold wakes me and I find I’ve clawed my way out from under the covers. I count the stars to catch my breath.

  Once upon a time, a little girl with velvet ribbons in her hair crouched deep in the belly of a palace, tucked behind copper pots and urns and cartons heavy with treasures of a lost world. Each time she was shaken by the urge to scream, she plunged her teeth into the soft flesh of her forearm. She knew only that she should remain perfectly silent and prayed no one would hear the thin echo of the song her father would sing when he found her awake well past her bedtime.

  While I slumber, you are open-eyed

  I am naïve but you are ever wise

  Because of him—in spite of him—she did not wail in the dark.

  Meters above her, soldiers wandered, some solemnly and others less so, through the warren of hallways. Walls were marked with crimson splatters—the fingerprints of revolution. A general, feeling presidential, slid into a plush Victorian sofa and traced the curves of its lacquered arms. His chest puffed to think that people would soon come to appreciate the sacrifices he’d made tonight for the greater good. He stood and walked across a hand-knotted burgundy carpet, delicate white flowers laced through an elephant’s foot motif. He checked the sole of his left boot, then his right. He needn’t have worried, though. An Afghan carpet, perhaps by design, conceals blood just as well as it conceals spilled tea.

  The city, a halo around the palace, waited on an announcement from the president to explain the sight of Sukhoi jets and the sound of gunfire. American diplomats stationed in Kabul, some still fuzzy from cocktails, wondered what bizarre conflict had befallen their peaceful and exotic post. One silver-haired American woman, teetering from the effects of a stubby cigarette she’d purchased off a hippie couple, tried to touch the paper airplanes that soared over her head. She applauded the flash of fireworks, as Americans do.

  Never, that little girl in the palace knew with brutal certainty, had any child in history been more alone.

  On that night, giants were felled. A dizzying void swallowed all that had once been. But the trembling little girl could not succumb. She would be brave because her father had once told her that the world lived within her. That her bones were made of mountains. That rivers coursed through her veins. That her heartbeat was the sound of a thousand pounding hooves. That her eyes glittered with the light of a starry sky.

  I am that girl, and this is my story.

  Part I

  April 1978

  Chapter 1

  A string of vehicles pulled into the circular palace driveway, disappearing one by one as their engines and headlights cut off. I watched silhouettes emerge and approach the main entrance of the palace.

  “Neelab, they’re here,” I whispered.

  “How many cars?”

  “Fifteen, maybe. It’s too dark out. Hard to tell.”

  “We’re going to have to go soon,” Neelab warned.

  Mother must have seen the cars approach too. Her voice echoed from down the hall. The palace buzzed as it did on those special occasions when its grandest rooms filled with the most important guests.

  “Sitara! Where are you?”

  I could not hide my disappointment. I looked at Neelab, sitting on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest. The lamplight cast a yellow glow on her cheeks.

  “It’s a weekend,” I groaned.

  “They want all the little children in bed when they open that box downstairs,” Neelab said, repeating what her mother had told her. “You might as well go to her before she finds you.”

  But surrender had never been my style.

  “What about you? I bet your mother is looking for you too.”

  Neelab shook her head.

  “No way. I’m a young woman now. The rules have changed.”

  This amused me. “You’re barely a full year older than me. And you’d have to wear heels to look me in the eye.”

  “Go ahead and tease, but if I wanted to, I could throw on one of my dresses and join them downstairs and no one w
ould say a thing,” Neelab declared, arms folded across her chest. I loved her too much to point out to her how flat it still was.

  “Is Neelab with you?” Mother called, as if she’d forgotten that Neelab and I had been inseparable since I had learned to walk. “It’s past time for her to turn in too.”

  Neelab avoided my eyes then. She hated to be wrong almost as much as I relished being right.

  My best friend and I had ducked into the presidential library so I could thumb through a text I’d discovered last week. The Book of Fixed Stars was written a thousand years ago by an astronomer named al-Sufi. Like me, he’d been fascinated by constellations, stories written in a pen of light. I’d drawn the velvet curtains so I could match the constellations on the page with the stars of the night sky. One by one, I found them and marveled that time hadn’t stolen a single flickering gem.

  “I’m here, Madar,” I replied, glancing at the pages splayed before me. Al-Sufi had sketched the serpentine tail of Draco, a fork-tongued dragon, circling Ursa Minor. I had read, but had yet to confirm through observation, that it was visible all year long from Kabul’s latitude.

  Our months were named after constellations, and soon it would be the month of Saur, or Taurus. I drew lines between stars and saw the bull’s swordlike horns piercing the sky. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled to picture the giant beast leaping down from the heavens and galloping on this land.

  Mother poked her head between the French doors of the library.

  “There you are. It’s getting late, girls,” she chided, gently. “Sitara, I need you to stay with your brother so I can go downstairs. They’re serving dinner soon, and it won’t look right if I’m not at your father’s side.”

  “But Kaka Daoud told us we could—”

  The man I called Uncle Daoud was Neelab’s grandfather. For the past five years, he also happened to be the president of Afghanistan, and he granted us almost unlimited access to the presidential library with its irresistible floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

  In truth, there was no blood relation between my father and President Daoud, but our families were so close that Neelab and I had been raised as cousins. My father was the president’s most trusted adviser. We often stayed overnight in the palace, especially when the president hosted evening functions. Neelab and I would find a corner of the palace to hide in on those nights and talk until we fell asleep, the sound of music streaming up from the garden. We exchanged secrets that bound us together more profoundly than blood would have. Neelab knew of the time I had taken one of my mother’s pearl rings and traded it with a classmate for a doll with eyelids that opened and closed. And only I knew that General Jamshid’s pimply-faced son had penned a love note to Neelab, song lyrics on a sheet of lined notebook paper.

  Over the years Neelab, her brother Rostam, and I had explored every square foot of Arg, the name for the presidential palace. We would walk the perimeter, summoning moments from history and inserting ourselves into them. While Neelab and I fired imaginary bullets from our fingertips, Rostam pretended to be an invader trespassing the deep trench that was now filled in with green grass.

  We conjured the silky voices of the king’s concubines in the building that was once a harem, then popped into the structure once used for army barracks and marched, high-kneed and saluting. Rostam read stories of Genghis Khan’s conquests in this land while we sat in a vacant turret, our eyes tracing the sawtooth mountains that guarded Kabul like palace walls.

  If we could have moved through time, we would have visited every decade of Arg’s history to see how accurate we’d been in reenacting the signing of treaties, the betrayal of trusts, the never-ending fight for our country’s independence from foreign invasion.

  One day we sat in a copse of trees in the orchard with one of Boba’s history books. Rostam had watched me thumbing through the pages in search of a conflict or period we had yet to stage.

  “Whoever wrote this must have gone through his days with his eyes closed!” I’d said as I slammed the book closed and searched the spine for the author’s name.

  “Here we go. And what’s wrong with this one?” Rostam had asked, one eyebrow raised. Neelab had been lying on the grass, one leg crossed over the other. She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand.

  “Think of all the people in the palace,” I’d said, waving at the grand buildings in the distance. “Are there only men in there? Or in Kabul?”

  “What are you getting at?” Rostam asked.

  “There are no women in the book,” Neelab had said, taking pleasure in explaining to her older brother something so obvious.

  “Be reasonable. You cannot blame the book,” Rostam had argued. “Men are the kings and advisers, the warriors and the explorers. They make decisions and execute plans and make history. The books are a record of that. Last week, I picked the 1842 defeat of the British, remember? Both of you had to play the parts of men or you would have had no roles at all.”

  It was one of our best performances because we did not simply revisit the Afghans driving the British and the sepoys out of the country. We re-created the tea parties and Shakespearean plays performed by British officers and their wives just before the fighting began. We used every word of English we’d learned from our tutors.

  “Sitara will explain to you now,” Neelab said as she adjusted the imaginary top hat on her head and waddled parallel to a row of shrubs. She was channeling the stodgy, bespectacled British emissary with aspirations to colonize Afghanistan.

  “Rostam,” I’d said, with the impatience of an overworked teacher, “a British poet warned soldiers they were better off dead than facing the wrath of Afghan women. If you think women are not creatures of action, you’ve got pumpkin seeds for brains.”

  Rostam did not apologize, nor did he become indignant. But I know that he heard me, because he never excluded women from history again.

  “You can return to the library tomorrow,” my mother offered. “But this is an important night, and I need your help. Faheem’s been terrified of sleeping alone lately. You don’t want him to wake up and find himself alone, do you?”

  “It’s not fair. I always have to look after him,” I protested.

  “Better not complain. I’d rather look after sweet Faheem than have Rostam looking after me,” Neelab said with a shrug.

  Now that Rostam was thirteen years old, he didn’t want to be seen playing with girls. That suited my mother just fine, since soon people would read much more into our time together, ignoring the fact that we’d been playmates all our lives.

  Even Neelab would suggest that she and I could become real sisters if I could just stomach marrying her brother. I hated when she made those comments, but more because I had started to look at Rostam a little differently. He didn’t carry himself like a child anymore. I missed his company and wondered if that meant I liked him more than I should. Though I shared every little thought with Neelab, I kept this one to myself.

  “Girls, girls,” Madar admonished.

  I released the curtain from its tasseled tieback and, sighing loudly enough for her to hear, slid the Arabic book back into its place between other Dari, English, and Cyrillic titles. I understood just how awful it was to be gripped by fears, even irrational ones. My fear of the dark drew me to the twinkle of stars.

  “I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes open anyway,” Neelab said. “Sweet dreams, Sitara. Good night, Auntie.”

  “Good night, Neelab. Get some rest. Sitara will be up bright and early looking for you.”

  Neelab circled her arms around my mother’s waist and squeezed before slipping into the hall.

  I turned away then so Neelab wouldn’t give us away with a pert smile. Once she’d left, my mother turned her attention to me.

  “Let’s hurry. You know,” Mother whispered conspiratorially, “your Kaka Daoud can’t butter his bread without your father’s input.”

  “And Boba can’t butter his bread without yours. Maybe you should ha
ve an office next to Kaka Daoud’s as well.”

  Mother beamed, her smile the finishing touch on her elegant appearance. She wore a navy blue dress, belted at her trim waist. The hem fell just past her knees and the sleeves flared slightly at the wrists. My father had purchased the material, a delicate brocade, during his most recent trip to Lebanon. The design was my mother’s own, though the stitching had been done by the same seamstress who had made her wedding dress and every other gown she owned. She’d paired her shift with tan sling-back heels and a simple necklace, a calligraphy of Allah in eighteen-karat gold. She had her hair pulled back in a twist and had softly teased her crown to add an extra inch of height. I touched my mother’s face, marveling at the way her hazel eyes shone from beneath the inky liner she’d used on her eyelids. Was it envy, vanity, or just a surfeit of love to want to be as beautiful as one’s mother?

  “Sitara, what is it?” my mother asked. She smoothed her hair, betraying a flash of insecurity. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Madar-jan. Not at all. I was just thinking.”

  “About what?” she asked.

  I stole a kiss from my mother’s cheek. According to my father, the Qur’an teaches us that heaven lies at the feet of mothers. I roamed the palace feeling anchored by my mother’s presence nearby.

  “When are we going home?” I asked, missing the indulgent mornings when Faheem and I would sit on our parents’ laps in our pajamas. We came to the palace too often to feel like guests, but that still did not make our room here feel like home. “I think Faheem’s grown homesick.”

  “After the weekend,” my mother assured me. “Your father’s been so tied up in meetings the past few weeks, but things will get better soon.”

  “Is it very bad?” I asked. The meetings had been getting longer and longer for a time. Then they became very short, and some ended with the slamming of a door and feet pounding down a hall.

  Mother cupped my face in her hands.

  “Everything will be fine. Tonight is about celebrating our country’s past with people important for our country’s future.”