“I have pain,” he admits. “Too much.”
“I understand,” I say. “We have several medications that can treat the kind of pain you have. Looks like you have a good understanding of what you want for treatment. Tell me, what kind of work did you do before you came to this country?”
Your Kabul is gone, he had said the night he took me to Antonia.
“He was a high-ranking general,” his daughter manages to get out, her voice choked.
“A soldier,” I say, knocking the stars off his epaulets with a single word. “I see. And where was this?”
“In Kabul. Afghanistan,” his daughter replies, but I keep my eyes on Shair.
“Such a shame, what happened to that country,” I say, shaking my head. “Were you in the army back when it all started?”
“You know my country,” Shair says. He tilts his head, curious.
“Quite a history. Did you see the beginning of it all in ’78?” I ask.
He lets out a long breath and nods.
Tinny music erupts from his daughter’s purse. She pulls out her phone and answers it.
“Yes, Madar,” she says, speaking in Dari. “We’re talking to the doctor now. I can’t talk to her now, Madar. Fine, but quickly.”
She steps out of the room, the phone pressed to her ear.
I wonder if he will speak more freely with his daughter out of the room and if she knows what kind of man he really is. Shair shifts on the exam table. Paper crinkles under his thighs, making his every fidget obvious.
“Doctor, where you are from?” he asks me.
I respond with a tight smile. He doesn’t get to ask me questions and certainly not ones about my family. I feel a small pulse of satisfaction at letting his question go unanswered.
“It was a beautiful country then, wasn’t it?”
My voice nearly breaks. I focus on my breathing as I wait for him to answer.
“Yes, but people,” he says, wistfully. “People make it for waste.”
I have made fake profiles to enter chat rooms and join discussion boards to listen to people who remind me of my parents, people who share black-and-white pictures of Kabul fashion shows and laboratories with women holding test tubes. They post snapshots of hippies from the West and Indians on vacation in Kabul. They came for the pearly grapes, for the kebabs sprinkled with sumac, for the crystalline lakes and healing shrines.
He looks out the window of the exam room.
I remember the night he grabbed me by my neck and pressed my face to the car window.
Your people are gone.
“The coup must have been a very dangerous time, especially for you as a soldier.”
Shair shrugs.
“It is gone now. Finish,” he says.
I clear my throat.
“I read about what happened in the palace. There was a coup, right? What happened to all the people who were there that night?”
Shair is staring at the paper towel dispenser across from him. Or perhaps the diagram of the gastrointestinal system just beside it. Somewhere on the wall is a black hole that is slowly, steadily, sucking him in.
“And wasn’t it a military coup? The army turned against the president. All those people in the palace thought the soldiers were there to protect them. Do I have it right?”
Shair’s nostrils flare, his eyes shine. I am pulling at a loose thread.
“I am one man,” he says. His voice teeters, then comes close to breaking.
“There were innocent people there. People who trusted you. People who treated you kindly.”
His daughter steps back into the room. She takes one look at her father’s face and becomes alarmed.
“Padar? What’s going on? Is he okay?”
I don’t turn away from Shair. He is crumbling, and I want to hear every word that comes out of him.
“What man can stop a river?” he asks, then slips into Dari. “What man can stop a river? This is God’s river. I am nothing. God is God.”
“Oh, Padar,” Shair’s daughter cries, thinking he is lamenting the future when his mind is on the past. “God is good. He will take care of you.”
Shair’s daughter wraps her arms around her father.
Tears slide down his cheeks, and he wipes them away with the pale palms of his hands.
His daughter stuffs her phone in her back pocket and sniffles loudly. She turns back to the chair and fishes in her purse until she finds a packet of tissues. In all my meticulous planning, I did not anticipate how it would feel to see his daughter with him. I wanted to loom over him and press him for answers. I wanted to pin him on the role he’d played that night as a traitor.
I step toward Shair, lean in close enough to him that I am reminded of the night he told me to play dead and carried me to a truck.
“You will tell me where they’re buried,” I whisper in his ear in Dari, my voice breaking. “You will tell me everything.”
I slip out of the room and close the door behind me. Shair groans, and my throat threatens to close.
“So you’ve brought me here for this,” he says, sounding almost amused. “Everyone waits on a darkening sky and the heavy fogs, but here is Judgment Day. I never expected to escape it. I never did.”
“Padar, what are you saying?” his daughter cries.
I grab my bag from my office and sneak out the back door of the clinic before Lacey or anyone can see my wet cheeks. He is no longer a lion. And I am no longer a little girl.
I melt into the crowd outside, absorbed into the thrum of a city that has taught me never to forget.
Chapter 43
I don’t know how to feel about this afternoon’s encounter with Shair. I am rattled and triumphant and nervous and a bit ashamed too. I did not expect to feel like this.
But it doesn’t matter. I have waited so long for this day, doubting it would ever come. I cannot lose control now, not when I finally have a chance to make him admit what he did.
I’m not looking for revenge. I’ve not fallen for the myth of closure either. I don’t expect that whatever Shair admits to me will lessen my hurt. All I want is an accurate record of history. I want a truthful account of that night. I want something to mark the graves of my family so that the world can know for certain that they lived and died.
Truth matters.
I step into wide-leg pants and an emerald wrap top. I open my jewelry box to choose a necklace, maybe the one Adam gave me for my birthday. I hold it up against my neck and ignore the faint trembling of my hands as I examine myself in the mirror.
Something looks off, so I put the necklace back and try again. I try two other necklaces. Neither works.
I open the bottom drawer of the box and pull out the felt-wrapped ring. It’s been nearly a year since I last looked at it. It’s been decades since I’ve worn it. I’m not a child anymore and don’t want to be responsible for destroying something that should be in a museum.
The turquoise and garnet are just as brilliant now as they were when I first saw them dazzle a room gathered to celebrate the treasures of Ai-Khanoum.
I was reading myself to sleep one night when I learned that Anastasia’s mother, the Empress of Russia, had instructed her daughters to sew her collection of jewelry, an estimated twenty pounds of diamonds and gems, into their corsets. At the first attempt to execute the family, the bullets fired at the Romanov sisters ricocheted off those hidden stones. When the dust cleared and the girls, unharmed, stood before the assassins, there must have been a moment of divine confusion. I imagine the girls and the soldiers must have felt they’d just witnessed a miracle.
But the girls didn’t evade death. The soldiers moved forward a few paces to kill the girls more directly, crushing their skulls and mangling their faces with the butts of their rifles, plunging their bayonets through their corsets and into their bodies. The jewels somehow landed in auctions and museums everywhere from Europe to Washington, DC. Gems often have curious journeys.
I have carried this ring acro
ss the world. When I was ten years old, I’d worn this ring like a shipwrecked person wears a life preserver. Maybe I’d made a mistake in doing so. Maybe it wasn’t saving me at all.
Over the years I have felt its weight grow in my hands. It feels so heavy now that I wonder how I managed to lift my hand with it on as a child. At least a dozen times I made plans to turn the ring over to a museum, anonymously, like a desperate woman leaving a newborn baby at a fire station. But I couldn’t bring myself to see it displayed in a house of plundered treasures. Statues and carvings and stonework float out of countries wrestling with genocide. Museums are more than willing to take them in, without asking the seller many questions.
Finders keepers, children shout on sunlit playgrounds.
Finders keepers, their parents whisper in halls of antiquities.
I know in my heart this ring belongs closer to where it was unearthed, closer to the remains of the woman who once wore it on her finger. But how can I entrust it to anyone?
Before the DNA tests concluded that the entire Romanov family had perished together on that night, dozens of women had claimed to be Anastasia or one of her sisters. If it weren’t for the lure of a bejeweled inheritance, I doubt that anyone would have willingly assumed the identity of the ill-fated Romanovs. Two young women claiming to be grand duchesses were taken into a nunnery in the Ural Mountains. They died years later, their graves marked with tombstones bearing the names of the Romanov sisters—their lies etched into stone.
The name on my tombstone will be a lie as well.
This bothers me, and I haven’t figured out how to fix it without turning my life inside out.
People wanted to believe Anastasia had survived somehow. She hadn’t. And I can say with perverse certainty that it wouldn’t have mattered if she had escaped alive. After her lungs had filled with gun smoke, after she’d seen the eyes of every member of her family go lifeless, there would have been little difference between living another five minutes and living five decades.
“Are you ready?” Mom asks, tapping on my bedroom door.
“Two minutes,” I say, replacing the ring before Mom sees it and wonders why I’ve taken it out tonight.
On the way to the theater, we talk about Adam’s campaign. Mom tells me she’s been following him on Facebook, which Adam uses for networking and Mom uses to connect with friends and colleagues around the world. I’ve stayed away from all of it because even when I searched for Shair or members of my family, I was always too scared of being found.
My confrontation with Shair is at the tip of my tongue, but I hold back from telling Mom because I still worry she’ll step in and I need to do this on my own. Shair had come undone when I left. Lacey called me, feeling compelled to let me know that he was trembling and emotional when he’d come out of the room.
I’ve never seen a patient so terrified of dying, Lacey had commented.
“Speaking of Adam,” Mom says, prodding. “Is there anything you want to share with me about the two of you?”
“What do you mean?” I ask. The train comes to a stop. I scan the newcomers, wondering if I’ll bump into any of Shair’s family members and unsure whether I would recognize them if I did.
Mom purses her lips, then reaches into her purse and takes out her phone. In a few clicks, she’s pulled up Adam’s profile. She hands me her phone so I can take a closer look.
“I saw this earlier today,” she says.
Adam has posted the picture of the two of us in Bryant Park. The way he’s cropped the photo, my smile looks coy and playful. And he’s used a filter that makes it look warm and nostalgic. Underneath is a caption that sounds nothing like Adam, the boyfriend, and everything like Adam, the politician.
Daytime date with my one and only. This woman knows the importance of health care and saves lives daily. Like the speech therapist with colon cancer who just wants to see her two little girls grow up. That mom is in a battle with her insurance company too, fighting to be able to afford the medications she needs to live.
Lucky for me, this doc doesn’t need a scalpel to save my life. She just needs to say yes when that moment comes.
The post is followed with a slew of hashtags related to health care and the General Assembly, a couple for women doctors and surgeons, and even one that reads #sayyestoAdam.
I feel sick.
I can’t believe he would violate my trust. I can’t believe he would put a patient’s private information out there and risk my job. I’m stunned because Adam knows about protected information and the law. And he knows I don’t share my personal life online, where hospital administration or patients could find it.
“Why would he do this?”
Mom lets out a heavy sigh.
“The two of you will have to have a conversation about boundaries. Or maybe a new conversation about boundaries,” she says. “But this is going to come up as the campaign progresses, and there’s a long road between now and election day.”
I bite my lip, then take out my phone and shoot a quick text to Adam.
I need you to take down that pic of us you posted on FB. It’s a HIPAA violation.
“God, what is it about politics that makes people lose their heads?” I ask Mom.
Mom chuckles.
“They think the ends justify the means,” she says.
I’m kicking myself for trusting Adam with small stories from my day. That’s a HIPAA violation on my part too, I realize, but it’s hard to keep everything I see at work bottled up.
Does this mean I can never trust Adam to keep something to himself? And has the campaign changed him, or is it revealing who he’s been all along? I think of the cautionary hand on my knee in the bookshop, the rosy picture he’s posted on Facebook, his sudden desire for commitment, or at least the appearance of it. I can’t help but feel like he’s staging a new reality.
Mom checks her watch, and I’m reminded how excited we’ve been to see this quirky, off-Broadway production of Oklahoma! I tell myself not to think about Adam’s post or Shair and focus on the performance. We enter the dimmed theater and pick up our tickets from the plump woman in the box office. An inky-eyed Maltese dressed in a tuxedo sits on a director’s chair next to her, overseeing ticket sales. Mom hoots with delight at the well-behaved dog and snaps a photograph.
Our seats are left of center stage. We settle in just as the lights flash on and off and the chime of a triangle signals the start of the show. Mom takes the armrest between us and smiles.
“I can’t believe you did this, Ary. You really didn’t have to,” she says. She is looking more and more like Tilly these days, especially since she hasn’t cut her hair in months. “But if, at any point, you don’t want to be here, we’ll go. You rise and I’ll follow.”
“I’m fine, Mom. It’s just a show for me,” I tell her truthfully. I’d only heard Tilly read scenes from the script. I don’t know the music and never saw the performance in Kabul. But all those library books Mom checked out on grief and trauma have made her cautious about triggering experiences.
Through the opening act, Mom’s lips move ever so slightly during the musical numbers, the lyrics ready on her tongue as if she’s been in rehearsals all week. Music is miraculous in that way—songs wiggle their way into some black box in the corner of our hippocampi. Decades later, triggered by a word or an image or a few notes, they fly to the surface at warp speed.
I felt this rush when I discovered Afghan music on the internet. The soundtrack of my childhood flooded my room and swept me into the past. I found myself singing lines I didn’t realize I knew, humming melodies I hadn’t heard since before I lost my parents. I couldn’t get enough. I clicked on the second and third song before the prior one had finished. I hopped from one memory to another—an Eid fete, a Nowruz celebration, a wedding. In the same way that my muscles ache if I run after a long hiatus, the music squeezed my heart if I let too much time pass since I’d last listened.
Mom looks like she’s experiencing that same ache.
My phone buzzes. I open my purse to read Adam’s text without taking my phone out of my bag.
I’ll take it down. So am I even allowed to tell people you exist?
I tap out a reply.
If a tree falls in the forest, but no one posts about it on Facebook, is the tree even real?
My finger hovers over the Send icon, waiting for my better judgment to kick in. Maybe I’m being overly controlling when it comes to my privacy. No one will recognize me from my picture, and Adam has no idea why I’m so sensitive on the matter anyway.
I delete my message without sending it. Instead, I tap out a more tempered response.
Let’s not discuss via text. At the show now. How’s tomorrow?
I will tell Adam everything. That’s the only way he’ll understand.
Applause fills the theater. I close my bag and try to focus on the show. My mind races, though, replaying the afternoon with Shair and his daughter. I wonder if he’s realized who I am or if he’s shared anything with his family.
I watch the actors move about onstage in exaggerated movements. The songs are bright and infectious, sung in a western drawl that doesn’t befuddle me as it did when I was a teenager. Cowboys in vests and chaps and women in corsets stomp their boots in celebration of a new frontier. With steer roping and butter churning, with a rifle at every corner, this is as American as a musical can get.
Why don’t we all take a swim together? In Persia, where I come from, bathing is a social event, sings a character with eyebrows that dance like Groucho Marx’s. He is Ali Hakim, a flirtatious Persian peddler. He tells Laurey that in Persia women swim nude. Mom must sense my reaction. She leans in and waits for me to speak.
“I can’t imagine there were a whole lot of Persian men in Oklahoma a hundred years ago,” I whisper. “And why does he have to be such a perv?”
Mom opens her mouth to speak but stops short. Her brows come together, and she takes a long hard look at the stage. She watches the rest of the show a bit flattened. I should have kept my remarks for the ride home.
During the intermission, we stand in the line for the bathroom. Mom shakes her head.
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