Carla looks from me to Mom.
“You understand, of course, that it will take some time to even find the right person to talk to about this,” she says.
Mom nods. She offers an understanding look but continues to sit back in her chair.
“And that’s why Aryana suggested we step out and wait in another room. I know this disrupts your day, but our time here is limited. We need only to be put in touch with the search commission. We’ll take it from there,” she says brightly.
Carla doesn’t look pleased. She sets her notebook on the desk and puts a hand on her hip. She looks through the office window as if hoping she might flag someone passing by for help removing us from her office.
She exhales sharply, then escorts us to the cafeteria. She reminds us that she can make no promises, but we three are already aware that no one can promise anything in this place. We opt for a corner table. Clay leans back and surveys the room.
“She’s not going to get back to us anytime soon,” he says grimly. “I think I’m going to make use of daylight while I can.”
“She will get back to us,” Mom insists. “We do have to understand that they’re running an embassy here. We’ve just waltzed in with this request. We have to give her a chance.”
Clay doesn’t argue. None of us are inherently patient or passive. We’re each accustomed to pushing—for the interview, for the allocation of funds, for the treatment a patient needs. We do not easily abide the inertia of sitting around a table.
“Where will you go?” I ask when Clay slips the strap of his bag over his shoulder.
“I’ve got a couple of stories I started on my last trip,” he explains. He’s going to stop by American University to see if he can reconnect with some contacts. Mom wraps her scarf around her neck as we watch him leave the cafeteria. The temperature has dropped significantly since we arrived.
“Mom, I think I want to tag along with Clay. Are you okay hanging out here on your own for a bit?” I ask.
Mom raises an eyebrow but doesn’t say what I know she’s thinking. She looks conflicted even as she reassures me that she doesn’t mind waiting alone. She’s never held me back and won’t start now. I put on my coat and gloves, then my headscarf.
“I’ll meet you back here in a couple of hours. Call me if anything comes up before then,” I say and kiss her cheek. I walk quickly until I am out of the cafeteria, then my step slows. I spot Clay at the foot of the stairs, then pause while he makes a turn toward the exit.
Once he’s out of view, I start to descend the stairs and make my way to the ground floor.
“Miss, your colleague is there. I will call him to wait for you,” the guard says, recognizing me from when we entered. He opens the door a sliver just as Clay raises his hand to hail a passing taxi.
“No,” I say cheerily. “No need to call him. We are going to different places. Excuse me while I check my messages.”
I take my phone out of my bag and pretend to tap through messages. I give Clay’s taxi ample time to drive away before I step outside. The guard watches me, more out of curiosity than obligation.
Though I am grateful not to have made this journey alone, I know that there are some things I need to do on my own. I adjust my headscarf once more, covering my ears and my hairline so I won’t draw unwanted attention. The guard clears his throat. I open the door and step out into the cold homeland.
Chapter 54
In our third year of residency, after a particularly hellish week in the hospital, I took Dayo out for sushi to celebrate her birthday. With half our training still to go, we were too far from the end to see the light yet. We decompressed over cleverly named cocktails and an assortment of rolls served in a wooden boat.
We were putting in eighty hours each week during a brutal flu season.
Half of our patients were placed in isolation, and we were donning yellow gowns, blue gloves, and white masks just to enter their rooms and ask how they were feeling. A construction worker had developed a rare fungal infection in his bloodstream, and a jewelry maker had just returned from Mexico with a tumor in her lungs after paying for a therapy we’d never heard of. The patient of the week award went to the man who had been declared a VIP when he’d been admitted. I was paged urgently to his room and walked in to find his wife holding tubing in her hand. She was threatening to rip the urine catheter out of him while his mistress stood on the other side of his bed, fuming.
We’d just repaired his abdominal hernia, and he seemed close to incurring another hole in his body. I told his wife how many hours I’d worked in the past week and how many more I’d have to work if I told my chief that I watched my patient’s urethra get torn apart. She dropped the tubing, took out her phone, and snapped pictures of her husband and the other woman before storming out.
I predict his cause of death will not be old age, Dayo had said, her hands swirling over an imaginary crystal ball. Then she’d gone wide-eyed with inspiration and claimed to know just what we needed to take a break from reality. When we left the restaurant, Dayo led me two blocks over to meet someone named Everly.
Indulging my best friend, I followed her into a dimly lit store where we were greeted by a blue-eyed woman in her early twenties. She wore paisley-patterned pantaloons that tapered at her ankles and an ivory T-shirt. Her raven hair fell long on one side of her head but was buzzed short on the other, giving her a curious asymmetry. One wall of the shop held cracked geodes, fabric-covered pens, and incense. The other wall held one shelf of books and small statues of Buddha, peacocks, and Hindu deities. A glass case displayed chunky jewelry, including a few pieces of lapis lazuli set in silver.
With her hands pressed together, Everly said, Welcome home, in a voice as smooth as a river stone. If I had dared to look at Dayo at that moment, my eyeballs might have rolled irretrievably to the back of my head. Dayo told Everly we were both interested in getting a reading. Everly smiled as if she’d guessed as much and flipped the front door sign to closed before picking a turmeric-colored scarf off a rack and hanging it loosely around her neck. Dayo motioned for me to go first, and I obliged, my joints loosened by the fizzy drinks we’d just consumed. I followed the woman to a carpeted nook in the back of the store, hidden behind a bookshelf. In the center of the cream carpet was the steel frame of a pyramid.
Everly motioned for me to join her in the square, and shooting another glance at Dayo, I did so. When she lit a bundle of sage, the burst of flame illuminated the peach undertones of her face.
I will expel the entities attached to you. Close your eyes and breathe it in, she instructed.
Through the mesh of my eyelashes, I watched her tap her nails and produce a deck of cards from a wooden box behind her.
When is your birth date?
I hesitated. I briefly considered daring her to guess but thought it would only drag this session out longer.
And her question gave me pause. For years I’d been using my sister’s birthday. Though I was born in the month of Aqrab, a Scorpio, my sister had been born in the month of Jawza, making her a Gemini, clever and imaginative.
The first of November, I told her, which was the day my mother brought me into this world and named me Sitara.
I waited.
Everly closed her eyes and began tapping her nails against the crystal again.
You are passionate and stubborn and so very brave, she whispered. You move with the force of waves and shape the earth around you.
I felt a hairline crack in my skepticism and chided myself for it as she began to turn over tarot cards. The first was the King of Fire. She half-closed her eyes as she continued.
You are determined, impatient, and restless. Something makes you so very restless.
I felt my shoulders tense. I wanted to be back on the sidewalk. The next card she pulled out was the Knight of the Earth.
You will embark on a mission that will change your life.
My pulse quickened.
And the Six of Air, she said, withdra
wing a third card. You’re struggling to climb out from under negativity. You’re digging yourself out of a hole. You feel buried—
I was on the sidewalk in a flash, Dayo following me and apologizing profusely. The buzz of the cocktails had dissipated.
I inhaled deeply, drinking in the gritty smells of exhaust and steel and anything else that lived aboveground. I managed to crack a joke.
I had to leave. She saw another six weeks of overnight shifts in my future.
Dayo didn’t laugh. Instead, she squared her shoulders and fixed her glistening eyes on me.
I’m so sorry, Aryana. I didn’t think . . . I’m so sorry, she whispered.
I wrap my scarf around my mouth, both to warm and conceal my face. I stand at one end of a long tree-lined road that leads to Arg, impassable to cars. I feel the uptick in my pulse, the adrenaline signaling my fight-or-flight response, and remind myself that I am an adult, an American, and that decades have passed since the day of the coup.
And yet.
The palace entrance, with its crenelated towers, does not reach as far into the sky as I remember. Objects in a child’s rearview mirror are smaller than they appear, especially after that child has stood under the Eiffel Tower, walked through the Hagia Sofia in Turkey, and passed through the halls of the Vatican. I live in a city with a skyline to humble the world.
And yet.
Arg retains her stately grandeur, the lovely symmetry of her gates. I move the scarf away from my mouth and take long, refreshing breaths of cold air. The street is empty but for soldiers in their olive uniforms with red-and-gold trim. Rifles hang at their sides. Two of them step toward me, speaking to each other out of the corner of their mouths as they approach. A tank is parked meters away, just as it was on that day. In two hours, it will be noon, the very hour at which the tanks and guards of the citadel turned their guns on us all those years ago.
“Miss, where are you going?” one asks in English. I look foreign to him. He has a short beard. The skin around his eyes crinkles like he’s spent his lifetime squinting against the sun. He and his partner assess me, hands on their rifles.
“I am passing by,” I say calmly. “It is cold, and I wanted to take the shortest way.”
The soldier’s eyes graze over my heavy wool coat. I try not to think of the bullets sitting in the weapon at his side. I turn away from them and take two steps before they stop me again.
“Where have you come from?” the taller soldier asks.
I nod my head behind me, in the direction of the embassy.
“American embassy,” he declares, as if he’s solved a puzzle.
They ask where I am headed, and I tell them my plan, the one I came up with this morning when I saw Carla’s polite smile, the one that inspired little confidence that she would manage to connect us to anyone of use.
“The Ministry of the Interior,” I reply.
An eyebrow perks.
“What business do you have there?”
I cannot tell if he’s asking me out of curiosity or protocol.
“With your permission, I’d like to pass,” I say, pointing in the direction of the ministry.
“Do you know the way there?” he asks.
I tell them it is no more than five minutes away, a nearly direct walk from where I stand. They begin to laugh.
“Better take taxi. You lost here,” one soldier advises. He gives me choppy directions to the Ministry of the Interior. It is not where it used to be, not in the place my father used to point out to me when we drove around Kabul.
I walk the length of Arg, wondering if any children race around the grounds as we once did, if they play history as we did, and if they storm into the president’s office and fire imaginary bullets out of the tips of their fingers.
I slip into the congestion of Chicken Street as if drifting into a dream. The motley wares of shops spill out from their storefronts. Carpets hang on balcony railings, sacks of spices sit outside glass storefronts, and embroidered vests and dresses dangle from tattered awnings. Sunlight turns the kicked-up dust of foot traffic into a nostalgic haze.
A passing man raises an eyebrow at me, teasingly. Another blows cigarette smoke directly into my face—a lewd exhalation. I hold my breath and bite my tongue to avoid making matters worse as women have learned to do.
I look up at the apartment where I’d stayed with Mom and Tilly and imagine I see the pale pink curtain flutter. The store below is no longer a bakery. I step inside, and the shopkeeper, a long-faced man with a short beard, gives me a nod. He adjusts the wool cap on his head and points at the small carpets hanging from the wall, the shelves lined with metal handicrafts.
More folded carpets and woven decor are stacked on a rack along the wall. The store has a rich collection of war rugs, small tapestries of traditional colors depicting land mines, tanks, and Kalashnikov rifles. One has a helicopter motif around the border and fighter jets at the center. Some have usa woven into a border while others have Cyrillic lettering.
“Who makes these?” I ask in Dari.
“Women. Children. Small fingers, good weaving.”
I think of the magazine article I read not long ago about opium’s ugly hold on Afghans, how they smoke it to forget their poverty or to ease an ache. A traumatized country has self-medicated with the crop that grows heartily on this land and enables them to feed their families and appease the warlords. The piece included a photograph of a mother blowing tranquilizing smoke into her infant’s face, the look on hers an expression of love. She did this, the writer explained, so she could sit in front of a loom for hours, tying thread after thread with cramped fingers stained with henna.
“Why do people weave war carpets?” I ask. He laughs, a joyless sound.
“You don’t like?”
I touch a woven tank and wonder if this trend started with the weavers or the customers. The shopkeeper does not wait on my reply.
“My customers like this very much. War, guns, history. If I put bullets on a chain, I can sell it as Afghan necklace.”
I don’t need to ask who his customers are. I can tell his shop is like one of the hundreds of souvenir shops in Times Square selling Statue of Liberty snow globes and place mats printed with the subway map—items no New Yorker would purchase.
The shopkeeper watches me with curiosity. He moves a bowl to the edge of the counter and invites me to look. The bowl jangles with pins of American and British flags and Russian and British military medals. I have no interest in this memorabilia. I thank him for his time and see the disappointment on his face.
I bow out of the store and nearly walk into two NATO soldiers. They are surrounded by a cluster of boys who have probably lived their entire lives in the shadows of soldiers.
I rub my hands together in the taxi, but they are still frigid when we arrive at the Ministry of the Interior. I’m trembling as I approach the glass doors at the front entrance, which is guarded by soldiers just as Arg was. They stop me before I come close. The world was so easy to navigate with my father at my side.
How will I present myself here?
I must choose between two conflicting rationales.
I will get nowhere if I admit who I am.
I will get nowhere unless I admit who I am.
By the time one of the guards approaches me and asks what business I have at the ministry, I’ve decided.
Moments later, I find myself sitting across the desk from a man with a thick mustache and thicker eyebrows. His spartan office has barely enough space for the two of us. A television set to a news show plays in the corner with the sound off.
Once upon a time, I was a little girl who wrote about the importance of recording history. I ask that little girl to send me some of her courage.
“I am the daughter of Sulaiman Zamani,” I begin in Dari. “He had a position in this ministry until he and the rest of my family were killed in Arg along with President Daoud Khan.”
The man listens, elbows on his desk. He considers me for a long
moment before he speaks, and his face shows no hint of surprise. I wonder if many people have sat in this very chair claiming vital links to the past.
“I see. And you have been abroad for some time,” he observes. He looks past me briefly and then continues. “Sister, what was it that you said to the guards outside?”
“I explained to them that I know about the mission to recover the bodies of those who were murdered,” I say, my spine straight. “This is a personal matter for me, obviously. I would like to know what progress has been made.”
“You would like for me to report our progress to you?” he says, with just the slightest hint of mockery.
His eyes drift up, past the top of my head. My skin prickles, and before I even turn around I know the doorway, the only way out of this room, is blocked. I turn my head and see three men standing behind me—two in uniform, and one in tunic and pantaloons.
“Boss,” someone shouts from across the hall, “the Americans are on the phone again!”
“Sister, you tell an interesting tale,” the mustached man says before looking to the men behind for affirmation. “Doesn’t she, gentlemen?”
He leans back in his chair, his right elbow on the armrest.
“You are not the first to return from the comforts of faraway lands, now that the dust has cleared. Perhaps you’ve heard that the foreigners will pay $10,000 per month to rent your family home. Or maybe you have your eyes on a seat in this Parliament? Or an official appointment by the president? Our sisters and brothers return daily, holding up their skirts so their hems do not drag in our dusty roads, clogging our courts with documents older than the mountains. And oh, how they all sing of their love for this homeland!”
I am instantly aware of the men behind me.
“If all that you’ve described outrages you,” I respond, “then please show some mercy on me. I’ll leave Kabul soon enough with nothing but the grief that brought me here.”
The mustached man says nothing. He purses his lips and looks over my head to the curious people listening in on our conversation.
Sparks Like Stars Page 33