Love and war are two ends of a single rope, Boba told me once. Poetry comes from the tangling of the two. Deep into the night, high in the hills, warriors would gather around fires, strumming lutes and singing songs about love as old as the mountains, with their swords tucked under one leg.
Even in peacetime?
Of course! For a warrior, peacetime is only the prelude to war.
The Marines ushered us down a maze of hallways. Everywhere I looked, people were closing windows, stuffing papers into folders, and moving toward the innermost parts of this massive building.
“Will someone please tell us what is happening!” Tilly shouted.
“We must hide,” I said. I squeezed Tilly’s hand, my eyes skittering from the soldiers running beside us to the walls and windows around us, looking to see which would fail us first.
We moved as a cluster, feet shuffling in disunity. We stood in a room with a long table at its center when we heard a series of booms. Tilly held me so close that I felt the rise and fall of her chest. Her breaths were short and shallow, quickening every time we heard artillery fire break through the near-silence. People around us offered reassurances.
“Everything will be fine. We’re behind brick walls and a metal gate. The police will get them under control.”
“He’s right. Their backup is probably just arriving now.”
My parents had been just as confident.
I could hear shouts coming from outside, a cacophony of anger. How far into the streets did this go? I thought of Antonia, sitting at a desk in the embassy back in Kabul. I wondered if she and her colleagues were under attack also.
“What’s happening?” Tilly asked the woman standing next to us. She was fiddling with a walkie-talkie, trying to secure a connection to someone outside.
“Protests. Just some students probably. Some people don’t want us here,” she said. But the shouts seemed to be getting louder, and the smell of smoke wafted into the room.
I would not let anything happen to Tilly. If there was anything I could do to keep her alive, I would do it. The tissue in her hand had turned to pulp. We were moving, back into the hallway and up a flight of stairs. I took Tilly’s bag and held her arm steady as she navigated the steps, the crush of people around us becoming unnerved by the riotous sounds.
We pressed into a vault, a small room lined with filing cabinets and cardboard boxes, and the Marines shut a heavy double door behind us. For the second time in my short life, I was caught in a storm. Updates came sporadically and did little to soothe us. A clamoring mass of bodies had collapsed a segment of wall and then climbed over the bricks, bent rebar, and crumbled mortar to reach the outside of the embassy. They had set fire to the building, and the heat was seeping into the vault. Some said it was an attempt to smoke us out. Others shook their heads and said the guards were fully capable of managing a protest.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” Tilly said to me. She said it more times than I could count. I felt for the ring sewn into my pocket and touched it nervously.
The doors to the vault opened momentarily, and an American soldier with a gunshot wound was brought in. The woman at his side was pressing down on his wound. Her calls for a doctor went unanswered.
I jumped when I heard something pounding on metal behind me. On the far end of the room was a narrow hallway and a ladder that led to a hatch door. The hatch bent inward, cratered with the force of each insistent blow. The soldiers stood poised to fire, barely blinking. Sweat collected on foreheads.
Then the banging stopped.
In the fifth hour, Tilly began to cry so quietly that I might have missed it. I don’t think anyone else noticed. I leaned in closer to her. The room was starting to melt, the oxygen sponged up by eighty pairs of lungs and a simmering fire just outside the walls. When I lifted my foot, the sole of my shoe stuck to the melting vinyl of the tile floor. A patch of carpet caught fire. I heard a soft pop and fizz as a man drained a can of soda onto the burning rug.
The shouts and pops slowed, but the fumes worsened—smoke and vinegar. My chest tightened, as if all the people in this room were pushing against my rib cage. But Tilly was in worse shape. She vomited into a paper bag, all color drained from her face, then slid to the floor with her head between her knees. I knelt beside her, my clothes sticking to my skin.
The room was nearly silent, as if people couldn’t find words important enough to justify using what little air remained in the vault.
“We cannot stay here,” I said to no one in particular. Tilly was past the point of putting on a show of confidence for me. Surely the adults in the room would have come to this conclusion even if I’d not said a word. The walkie-talkies offered nothing but static. The room was hazy with smoke. No one was coming to save us, and we had only one soldier guarding the vault from the outside.
“We have to get to the roof,” the woman with the walkie-talkie declared. The hallway, opaque with smoke, was certain death. Two soldiers worked the bowed hatch, muscling to turn the wheel against an unseen force. They pried it open just enough for a current of air to swirl through the vault. The opening, a waning moon, offered little view of the outside world.
The soldier couldn’t get more than a shoulder out.
“It’s jammed from the outside.” He plunged his arm into the gap. The soldiers switched places. The woman with the walkie-talkie climbed the ladder and took her turn. She came back down the ladder, ruddy and breathless.
I dropped Tilly’s hand and pushed my way through the huddled bodies. Tilly called out after me, but her voice was low and hoarse. I stepped past American men and women in damp shirts. The whole room would perish if we didn’t get that hatch open.
I put my foot on the bottom rung of the ladder and felt a stabbing pain so acute that I wondered if the wound had torn open again. Hearing my yelp, the soldier put his hands on my shoulders to pull me down. I wrested away from him, climbing and climbing without knowing what lay on the other side of the hatch.
“Be careful,” a voice called after me. “Don’t let go.”
Bending my body into the shape of a crescent moon, I slipped out of the vault and onto the roof of the building. Grunting, I managed to free the piece of rebar that had been locking the outside latch.
“It is open!” I called into the space. I pulled and the soldiers pushed. The door flipped open, and one by one the Americans joined me on the roof. The embassy grounds were charred, smoke billowing up from buildings, flames licking at every window. I felt as if I were standing on the roof of Arg, watching the palace go up in flames.
I knelt by the opening of the hatch door, waiting for Tilly to emerge. She came out coughing, her face glistening with moisture and her hair wild.
“Tilly! You are okay,” I said dumbly, all my words caught up in the smoke.
To evacuate, we needed to get to the ground, but we were on the roof of the highest building in the compound, a blazing fire on our heels. I was terrified but not alone. Eighty Americans ran across the rooftop with me, jumping four feet to the searing roof of the second building and then another twelve feet down to the roof of the auditorium.
The Americans helped me get Tilly from one building to another, one man easing her down while another readied to receive her. I saw the glint of a ladder propped against the side of the building, the flicker of red lights beyond a cluster of trees. Shouts in a language that sounded simultaneously foreign and familiar.
I crossed scorched earth for the second time in my life, unsure if it would be my spirit or my knees to buckle first. Unsure which fire would shape my destiny and which would burn me. Unsure if what I was running toward was any better than what I was running from.
Chapter 25
“Are you leaving too, Leo?” Tilly said, rubbing off bits of adhesive from the crook of her arm. It was three in the morning, and we were in Leo’s home, a three-bedroom apartment in a quiet neighborhood. He had insisted on bringing us back here, though it was obvious he was responsible for mo
st of the other people in the mission. We’d been taken directly to the hospital, where doctors and nurses had sorted through the exhausted and injured. Tilly had been laid out on a stretcher with crisp white sheets that turned her paler. They’d inserted a needle into her arm and dripped clear fluids into her veins. She’d now removed the gauze and tape, but the adhesive clung to her papery skin.
“We’re evacuating all non-essential staff. I’m staying on.”
Leo looked exhausted. He’d been taken to the British embassy while we went to the hospital. At some point in the middle of the night, the army declared the streets safe for travel. The Americans were rounded up and divided into groups. Leo made sure Tilly and I were among the twenty people taken to his home. Leo’s wife, unfazed by the swell of people in their living room, had turned their modest space into a shelter. She distributed saltines, mandarin oranges, clothing, and cups of water. People sat shoulder to shoulder on the sofa and on the living room floor, knees bent and heads resting against the wall.
Leo stepped away for a few moments, returning with wet hair and a fresh set of clothes on. He took a seat in the living room next to the phone. The calls didn’t let up.
“I’m sorry, which press did you say you were with?” Leo asked, squinting to hear the response come across the line. “Right, right, okay.”
I listened to him recount the events of the night. But he didn’t answer all the questions he was asked. Time and again, I heard him say he could not offer official comment.
Leo sat with his knees angled outward, tapping a pencil against the table.
“How are all these people getting home?” Tilly asked.
I pressed an orange peel to my nose to combat the smell of smoke emanating from my hair and clothes.
“Pan Am is diverting a flight from Delhi. They’re coming here in a few hours, and we’ll get everyone home. The Pakistani army is going to escort us there,” he explained.
“Get us on that flight, Leo,” Tilly said, with just a flicker of the fire she’d had a day earlier.
Leo looked at Tilly with consternation. He lowered his voice, glancing around to see if anyone was listening in.
“We haven’t had the birth certificate verified yet,” he reminded her. “Without the documentation—”
“Documentation!” Tilly coughed. She was sweating, her cheeks flushed. She pinched her nose with a tissue. “Do you even hear yourself? Just a few hours ago, this girl saved the lives of every person in that vault, and you are hung up on a piece of paper. A piece of paper!”
I felt for the ring in my pocket, traced its now-familiar edges. If I was honest, part of me was afraid of getting on a plane and leaving this continent. And if I was completely honest, all of me was afraid of what would happen if I were to make it to America. Those two fears radiated through me at unique wavelengths.
But twice now I’d walked through fire. And I knew from the night of the coup that I had to keep moving, to continue taking steps in the hopes that God would bless my path. As I approached him, Leo eyed me warily.
In Dari, the word for witness, shahid, and the word for martyr, shaheed, differ by only a vowel. They are two leaves, splitting from a common stalk, catching light and rain at different angles. With a slight reshaping of lips, I could go from witness to martyr. Indeed, it felt as if the world around me was calling me by those two names and waiting to see to which I would answer.
“Your name is Leo,” I said. “In the stars, this is the name of the lion.”
Shair, the shameful soldier, had also been named after the king of the jungle, the ultimate beast. How many hopeful parents around the world had named their sons with such optimism, only to commit them to a lifetime of disappointment?
“Are you a lion?” I asked Leo.
Leo straightened his shoulders. He looked into my eyes for the first time since I’d met him. The pencil fell from his fingers and landed with a light clink on the glass table.
As the plane lifted off from the runway, my cheeks were wet with tears. I felt a buoyancy in my bones, as well as a heaviness in my chest. My father had brought me bits and pieces of the world from his many trips. He’d promised we would one day fly together to places he had shown me on a globe so I could collect my own treasures. My first flight was supposed to bring me closer to him. Though my parents were gone, I still felt like a traitor to be leaving them behind.
The airplane took on altitude, the engine rumbling beneath us, gears shifting. We bobbled through a veil of clouds, and Tilly’s hand stayed on mine until we were above the fray. Her face looked flushed, and thin beads of sweat persisted on her hairline. Her staccato breaths unsettled me. She sounded as if she was trying not to cry.
A solemn silence permeated the plane as all who had just evaded death ascended into the heavens. With my eyes on the bright blue sky outside the window, I drifted to sleep, losing track of time and place. I didn’t know if I was falling or flying, if I would soar or sink. All I knew was that nothing would ever be the same again. I had new hollows and edges and curves and knots. I let my head fall against the seat and prayed for wings.
Chapter 26
“When we get there,” Tilly explained, “we’ll tell them you’re going to stay with me. Antonia will come soon. Once they meet you, once they see how brave and bright you are, they will do all they can to help you.”
I did not know who “they” were, but hoped they would be as kind as Antonia and Tilly. Tilly sensed my discomfort and brushed my hair away from my face and squeezed my hand. She looked at me the way my grandmother did when she was still alive.
Tilly pulled a small booklet out of her purse and offered it to me as a way to pass the time. It was the travel guide, Eastern Bound, that she’d taken from Indigo’s friend. I flipped through the sections, each devoted to a country. Chapters began with ink drawings of a bearded man with a turban on his head. In Turkey the cartoon man held a bow between his hands. In Iran he sat perched on a rearing horse, and in Afghanistan he sat in profile, the tip of a long-necked water pipe between his lips. The pages were decorated with childish flowers, leaves of five fingers, and miniature buses with clouds of smoke trailing behind them.
I pointed at words I didn’t recognize and asked Tilly what they meant.
“Nymphs and satyrs are just people drunk on themselves,” she said. “You’re destined to be a sober goddess, which is infinitely better.”
Tilly fished one of the magazines out of the seat pocket and offered it to me instead. I flipped through it until I saw her eyes close. Then I took out my notebook and, as I often did, jotted down what Tilly had said so I could try to make sense of it later. My notes ran back and forth in time, jumping from what I remembered to what I still had to figure out. The flight attendant brought me apple juice, which I gulped down before drifting back to sleep.
We were halfway across the Atlantic when Tilly began moaning. She was sniffling and blowing her nose, using a handful of crumpled tissues she had stuffed into her pocket. It looked like lifting her hand to her face caused her pain. Allergies, she had said. The flight attendant brought a small box of tissues, a shadow of concern behind her smile.
“Ma’am, is there anything I can get you?”
“Do you have anything for a headache?” she replied.
The flight attendant went to check and returned with a small bottle that rattled as she handed it to Tilly.
“Lucky for you, the pilot gets killer migraines.”
“Not that lucky,” Tilly said softly, with long spaces between her words. She’d grown pale again.
Her headache did not improve. She couldn’t get comfortable. I got out of my seat and asked the flight attendant for water with ice. The plane was dark then, with the window shades pulled down as we flew through a night sky. I walked back to my seat, almost losing my balance when the plane jostled slightly.
When I returned to the seat, I stopped short.
“Tilly!” I shouted.
Tilly was slumped on her side, her body
convulsing as if controlled by a djinn. Her back stiffened and her limbs moved with a quick, jerking rhythm. I held her shoulders, feeling the turbulence in her body.
“No! No! Leave her!!” I shouted at the djinn to let her go. I wanted to call for help, but all the English I knew had flittered away like napkins caught in a gust of wind.
People around me slowly started to stir. Perhaps they thought I was a child having a tantrum or reliving the siege.
One meek overhead light clicked on, and then another. A man peered over his seat and, with one glimpse of Tilly’s face, began shouting. Emergency, I heard him call. In a flurry of movement, I was pushed aside. I could barely see past the tangle of people who had gathered, some to help and some to see what could possibly have made this day even worse.
The flight attendant asked if any doctors were aboard the plane. No one answered. There was a retired nurse and a man whose sister had epilepsy. They laid Tilly down in the aisle of the airplane, turned her on her side, and searched through the first aid box for anything remotely helpful. There was nothing.
I stood and watched, feeling useless.
When Tilly stopped seizing, I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. She was alive. Soon, I told myself, she would speak to me and remind me that Antonia could handle anything and that I had nothing to worry about.
I waited for her to speak again.
Her breaths were slower, ragged.
She slept, moaning slightly. When the flight attendant and a man sitting one row behind us tried to move her back into the seat, Tilly grimaced. Her hand went up to her neck, and I thought she’d injured it when she’d been slumped over, her head lolling. As the plane descended and tiny homes and ribbons of highway became visible, I called Tilly’s name. Whether she heard me, I do not know.
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