“I’ll admit, the peddler is a curious character. I don’t know how Rodgers and Hammerstein came up with him. Things are different now. When we did the show in Kabul, I honestly don’t think anyone raised an eyebrow. It was just good fun.”
“Did you get an Afghan to play the part of Ali Hakim?”
“No,” Mom says as she tries to recall. “I remember trying to get my driver to do it. He came in for one rehearsal and read a few lines. But then he dropped out. Apparently his wife told him he should leave the stage for people who look more like movie stars.”
“He would have choked on those lines about women swimming naked.”
“I suppose he would have,” Mom admits. “Mansour was a good man. A terrible singer, but a good man.”
The door opens and there’s finally enough room for Mom and me to step into the ladies’ room. Two gray-haired women stand at the sinks. One touches up her lipstick while the other shakes drops of water from her fingertips. A toilet flushes.
Mom disappears into a stall while I wait for the next one. Somewhere behind me, I hear a woman speaking in Russian. I think of all the lemon candies my father gave me, and the chocolates with the fanciful wrappers, small treasures from the land of the hammer and scythe. I would eat them wearing my American denim.
I remember my father’s amusement to see the Americans and the Russians investing competitively in Afghanistan’s resources.
One dollar comes in, two rubles come in. One builds a university, another builds a tunnel. One day I told the Americans that the Russians were planning an irrigation project for one of the provinces. The next day the Americans asked for a meeting with me to discuss building a highway across the country. They fight like siblings and we are the favorite toy.
Years later I learned that this sibling rivalry was also called the Cold War and that everyone from Reagan to Rocky Balboa was involved.
I remember watching my mother dress the night of the Ai-Khanoum party and asking her about both the Russians and the Americans being present together.
They should know better than to have their schoolyard scuffle in our home. Our people have seen enough.
Mom and I are walking back to our seats when my phone buzzes. It’s not Adam this time. It’s the answering service. I show Mom my phone and sneak out of the theater as the lights dim.
“Hello, Dr. Shephard. I’m so sorry to disturb your evening.” It is a man’s voice on the line. He is so bright and chipper that I can be certain he is nowhere near the East Coast. “But I’ve got a gentleman patient of yours who says he needs to speak with you urgently. I’ll be honest, I might not have understood exactly what he was saying. His last name is N-A—”
“Thanks for letting me know,” I say, my tone clipped. I spin around to look behind me. This phone call has the effect of a home intrusion. “Have a good night.”
“But, Doc,” the man says just before I end the call. “Don’t you need his name and number?”
Chapter 44
I will not call Shair back. I want to be able to look into his eyes when we have our next conversation, to watch his pupils dilate and constrict, to see the muscles of his face arrange themselves into an expression I can judge for myself.
I am on the pullout couch. I’ve given Mom my bed, since I have my desk and computer in the living room. I log into the hospital system once more before I turn in for the night. I spot a low calcium level and give the nurse a call.
“I was just about to call you,” he says. “He says he’s not in pain but needs something to help him sleep.”
It’s not easy to sleep with IV lines and alarms and stiff bedsheets. I prescribe something to get him through the night, and then I crawl into bed. With my eyes closed, the day replays in my mind. I roll from my left side to my right and see Adam’s post about my patient. I huff in frustration and take my phone out to read myself to exhaustion.
Around one in the morning, the answering service calls again. I answer quickly and keep my voice low so I don’t wake Mom.
“It’s the same gentleman, Doc. He won’t tell me anything. Just says he really needs to talk to you.”
He reads me Shair’s phone number.
“You know, Doc, my aunt Regina wouldn’t walk to her mailbox without making sure it was okay with her doctor. My mom used to joke that some people are called patients because that’s what you need to care for them.”
I smile in the dark and thank him for passing the message along.
I set my phone on the side table and close my eyes again, but I’d have better luck trying to catch a tadpole in a pond.
Shair is sleepless too. I wonder if his wife is watching him pace their apartment in the middle of the night or if she learned long ago to sleep through his midnight agitations. I don’t care what she thinks or knows, really. Over the years I decided to focus my energies on the man who could have saved us but didn’t.
It is three o’clock in the morning, far too early to go to the hospital, and I’m not in the mood for a run just now. I rake my fingers through my hair, furious with Shair for robbing me of sleep.
A glass of water sits on my coffee table, an industrial piece with a pop-up top. It is made of raw mango wood, stained a light golden brown that lets the grain tell its story. I see feathers and speckled waves, cheetah spots and wavy tresses. I open the top and pull out Clay Porter’s book. I turn on the lamp and begin reading.
In the first chapter, Clay describes Afghanistan before the war. He writes about the jewel-tipped branches of her orange, pear, and apricot trees. He writes about the women with beehive coifs and European hippies in fringed vests and shearling coats searching for enlightenment in Afghan villages. Clay has created a window into a world that lives in my memories, but not anywhere on the news.
The images must have lulled me to sleep because when I open my eyes, I see that the pink light of dawn has given way to a crowning sun. The book has slipped out of my hands, the open pages splayed across my chest as if my heart might have desired to read them too.
I take a quick shower, wrap a towel around myself, and slip into the bedroom quietly to get my clothes. Mom is awake, sitting on the side of the bed with her feet on the floor.
“Morning, love,” she says, still sounding groggy.
“Sorry if I woke you. Get some more sleep. It’s still early,” I tell her.
She shakes her head, then stands and stretches her arms above her head.
“Didn’t sound like you got much sleep last night,” she says. “I heard your phone ring a couple of times. Everything all right?”
I pull a camisole over my head, then slip my arms into a cardigan.
“It’s a new patient. He’s very anxious,” I say. I could tell her right now. I could tell her everything, and she could make sure I don’t do anything wildly destructive. But I say nothing.
“Are you sure that’s all, Aryana? You just seem a little . . .” She is careful with her words, as if navigating a minefield.
Mom can tell when my head starts spinning in that dangerous direction. I cannot hide from her completely. I step into my closet to finish dressing before I face her.
“I want to give the ring to a museum.”
Mom is caught off guard. She sits on the edge of the bed and crosses her legs, the hem of her nightgown falling just past her knees.
“The ring?” she asks.
“Yes, the ring,” I confirm. “I don’t think it should be with me anymore. Maybe it never should have been with me.”
“I don’t know about that. But which museum?”
“The Kabul Museum,” I reply. “I’ve been reading about it, and UNESCO has brought back hundreds of pieces from around the world. Stuff that traded on the black market. I think it’s time for this ring to be returned.”
Mom purses her lips, concern etched into her face.
“How long have you been thinking about this?” she asks. What she means to ask is how long I’ve kept this thought to myself.
“Not long.
I don’t even know how I would do it. Let’s talk about it more later,” I say, wanting to reassure her. “Though it’ll be after dinner. Today’s going to be a long one.”
Mom’s grown accustomed to my hours—workdays that start early and sometimes bleed into the next day. Mom’s friends are gathering tonight for the retirement party. As I leave, I can feel her questions following me. I think about telling her once more that I’m fine, but I know that the harder I try to convince her, the more unconvinced she’ll be. I really should be a better liar than I am.
I show up at the hospital and change into scrubs. I check out the board at the OR front desk to see if I’m in my regular room.
“Dr. Shephard. There’s a patient who needs to talk to you,” Inez, our charge nurse, says. Inez is one year away from retirement, and half the surgeons have vowed to retire with her. No one runs a tighter ship.
“I’m headed to pre-op now,” I say, grabbing a bouffant cap.
“Not in pre-op. Out by registration. He’s not a patient on today’s schedule,” she says. She rests a hand on her hip. “He’s refusing to talk to anyone but you. And so you know, I went ahead and called security to be around. I don’t want us to end up in the news.”
Shair is here.
I head out to the registration area. Families sit in clusters, chatting or toying with their phones. A woman facing the window knits. Three patients occupy the registration cubicles to sign consent forms and have hospital bands placed on their wrists. They all fade to the background when I spot Shair standing in the corner of the room, a row of windows to his left. His shirt is buttoned askew, his collar lopsided. I stiffen but do not hesitate to walk out from behind a counter to face him. Thanks to the two-inch platform of my clogs and the hunch of his shoulders, we stand eye to eye.
“Having trouble sleeping?” I say in the sweetest Dari I can muster.
“Are you the girl?” he asks, his voice gruff but muted. He searches my face for an answer.
“I have very simple questions for you,” I continue in the same language we spoke the night of the coup. “Who killed my family that night and where are the bodies of the murdered?”
His face softens, the lines melt away and the corners of his eyes crinkle with laughter. I do not flinch, not even as anger bubbles in me.
“You are the girl,” he says in Dari. There is a buoyancy in the rasp of his voice. “I knew she could help me save you. You were so determined to—”
He is a shadow of who he was then, the man who held me captive in his home, pushed me around at gunpoint, and threatened me in the night. I am close enough to see the thin, slight twitching around his eyes, to smell the scent that comes as one inches toward a century of life, and the more distant scent of the cancer that will stop him from getting there.
“You didn’t save me,” I fire back with my hands on my hips. “You were a traitor. You turned your gun on the very people you were meant to protect. You turned your gun on your own government. People put their trust in you.”
There is more I want to say, but my Dari is rusty and I don’t want to stumble in front of him.
“I was given orders. And those orders were meant to give our country a better future,” Shair insists. “You were a child. You couldn’t possibly understand.”
“I was a child. You most certainly were not,” I say. Shair blinks slowly. “You were a cowardly man who, even now, is not man enough to admit his sins.”
Spittle collects in the corners of Shair’s mouth as he tries to find words. From the corner of my eye, I see a security guard approaching. He moves slowly, gauging the situation.
“This many years later, still . . .” Shair laments.
“This many years later, still you have not answered my question,” I say, my voice controlled. People around us would be stunned if they understood our conversation. “Did you kill my family? My father and mother—the woman who showed you only kindness—and my brother who was barely old enough to be steady on his feet. What a threat he must have been to the future of the country! Did you kill him too?”
“What difference does it make?” Shair says quietly. His hands move to his belly and his eyes droop, forlorn. “The dead are dead. The dying will soon be dead. Only the living can stand and be counted.”
“It makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between heaven and hell,” I say.
“Heaven and hell,” Shair scoffs. “As if those are two separate places. As if you and I have not already stood in both!”
The security guard takes another two steps closer. His lips are compressed, his brow furrowed.
“Are you the nurse that called?” he asks me. He puffs his chest and positions himself so that his golden badge enters our conversation first. He reminds me of a boy in a superhero costume. “Everything all right here?”
Shair lets out a mournful chuckle. He ambles toward the door, not an ounce lighter than when he entered this room. He is almost at the door when he turns and points at me with one finger.
“She is not nurse. She is doctor,” he says, punching out the words like letters on a typewriter. And then he is gone.
Curious eyes follow me as I retreat behind the heavy doors of the operating suites. They will make assumptions, I know. Some will guess that he is a desperate patient and I am a coldhearted surgeon. Others might think he is an old man who has dangerously lost his mind. Maybe they’re all right.
I want to pound on his chest and demand answers. I want to scream to the world what a monster he is. I want to hold up the picture of my mother and father, of my three-year-old brother who lost his life to men grasping for power. Every day they have been absent from my life has been because Shair turned on us, because he didn’t bother to warn my mother.
I scrub my hands raw in the deep sinks, digging the bristles into my skin. My scarred foot releases the pedal and I hold my hands up, arms bent. Water slides down my forearms and drips from the knobs of my elbows like teardrops.
Shair wants to count me among the living to ease his own conscience, but I am not certain that is where I belong.
Chapter 45
My last case of the day is canceled because the patient forgot to stop taking her daily aspirin a week prior to surgery, as I’d asked. People are curious creatures. We forget to skip our medicine almost as often as we forget to take our medicine. We hate to exercise. We feel good when we exercise.
I want to move forward.
I keep looking back.
I’m on the train headed into Midtown to meet Adam for dinner. I’ve brought Clay Porter’s book with me. His words have the richness of fiction. The people he portrays are flawed and hopeful. He writes about a seven-year-old boy who works in his father’s tin shop, cutting sheets of tin into round discs with a chisel and hammer, and I can almost hear the clanging.
I wonder what Clay observed in Afghanistan. Maybe he walked past our family home, my elementary school, or the palace with its repaired buildings and grounds. I make a note to look for his articles when I get home, to read his observations from my homeland.
My secret homeland.
On reaching my stop, I slip the book back into my tote and pull on my gloves before I exit the train. The temperature has dropped about ten degrees since this morning. Storefronts twinkle with strings of white lights and sprigs of fir. We are meeting at a Peruvian restaurant just three blocks from here. It’s one of our regular halfway spots and has a sparse menu, but the food is so good I haven’t tired of it yet.
Adam wraps his arms around me and kisses me before we enter. The hostess seats us at a corner table. Two glasses of water appear, each with far too much ice. He is cheerful, almost surprisingly so given our text messages. I’m wondering if I read too much into the exchange.
“So tell me,” he says. “What did you have going on today?”
“Are you in the mood to hear about small bowel?”
“Maybe not,” Adam admits. He was once clearing some workspace on my desk and found one of my ana
tomy books, a photographic collection of dissected cadavers. He didn’t eat meat for a month. “Just feel like we’ve got a lot of catching up to do every time I see you.”
“I’m not going to end up in another social media post, am I?” I ask.
Adam shakes his head.
“Look, I took it down. I put up a picture with my brother’s dog.”
“Why not a picture with his hamster?”
“Dogs poll better.”
“And it’s all about the polling,” I say.
“It’s all about the people,” he insists. “That’s why people liked the post with you. It was about people.”
I take a deep breath. He needs to know my whole story, and this is the moment that makes the most sense. I feel a flutter in my stomach, an almost embarrassing tickle of nerves.
Our waiter comes over and flips a page in his memo pad. His hair is parted and gelled to perfection, not a strand out of place. He asks if he can start us off with some appetizers.
“We’ll do the ceviche,” Adam says. “You want anything else, Ary?”
“Ceviche is fine.”
Adam still has his menu open.
“Why don’t we just order now too? Do you know what you want?” he asks me.
We order entrées. Our waiter clicks his pen and drops it into his shirt pocket before moving on.
“I’m glad we could make tonight happen,” Adam says. “It’s a lot easier to talk in person than over text. Look, I should have cleared that post with you first, but you wouldn’t believe how many likes it got.”
“Likes,” I repeat.
“It upped my following by forty-five percent. Some people thought you were Latina, which worked out well, given the demographics of the district. And then the health-care piece, that was golden too. Everybody’s got someone affected by cancer. It was really effective.”
I see so clearly now what he is doing. I should have seen it long ago.
“I’m just asking that you consider helping me win some points. It would be a shame not to use what we have, and we can do it without breaking HIPAA or whatever.”
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