Atiq stops walking, but he keeps his neck bowed. He reflects for a moment, then raises his chin and asks, “Is it really so obvious that I’m going through a bad time?”
“If you want my opinion, it’s written all over your face.”
Atiq nods and goes away.
Sadly, Qassim watches him leave. Then he scratches his head under his turban and goes back to rejoin his driver in Khorsan’s little eating place.
LIFE IS NOTHING but an inexorable process of erosion, Musarrat thinks. Whether you neglect yourself or take care of yourself, it makes no sort of difference. The fact of birth dooms you to death; it’s the rule. If the body could choose, people would live for a thousand years. But the will doesn’t always have the power to enforce itself, and an old person’s wits, however sharp, can do nothing to support his knees. The fundamental human tragedy derives from the fact that no one can outlive the most hopeless of desires, which is, moreover, the main cause of our misfortune. As for the world, isn’t it a human failure, the monstrous proof of human paltriness? Musarrat has decided to face the evidence. Putting a veil over her face won’t do any good. She has fought against the evil thing that’s gnawing her life away; she’s refused to lower her fists. But now the time has come to drop her guard, to resign herself to her fate, because that’s all that’s left; she’s tried everything else. Her only regret is that she must falter at an age when all the chimeras have been tamed at last. At forty-five, her life is still ahead of her, but more nuanced, more carefully measured; her dreams are less fantastic, her impulses more serene, and her body, when desire claws it out of its indolence, quivers with such discernment that lovemaking makes up in intensity for whatever it may have lost in freshness. The fifth decade is an age of reason, and that’s an advantage when one has to negotiate challenges. In her forties, her certainty about the end she’s coming to is too strong to admit a second’s doubt. Musarrat has no doubts; everything will come to an end, except this certainty. There will be no miracles. The thought grieves her, but not excessively. Excess would be useless, perhaps ridiculous, and surely blasphemous. Of course, she would like to make herself beautiful, to put mascara on her lashes and open her eyes so wide that nothing in Atiq’s eyes could escape her notice. But such resorts are no longer possible for her. That’s a hard truth to admit at forty-five years. And, alas, admitting the hard truth doesn’t exempt her from very much. There is no appeal from the reflection she sees in the small chipped mirror: she’s decomposing faster than her prayers. Her face is nothing but a fleshless skull with furrowed cheeks and pinched lips. Her eyes are glazed, icy, glimmering with a faint, deathly light, as though shreds of glass lie deep in her pupils. And, my God, her hands. Bony, covered with thin, drab skin, crumpled like paper, they have trouble recognizing things by touch. This morning, when she finished combing her hair, she found she was holding a fistful of it in her hand. How can you lose so much hair in so little time? She wound the hair around a bit of wood and thrust it into a crack in the wall; then she slid down to the floor with her head in her hands and waited for a tear to well up and bring her back to herself. When no tear came, she crawled on all fours to her pallet. There, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, she faced the wall for a full hour. Had her strength not abandoned her, she would have spent the whole day with her back to the room. But she was felled by her own obstinacy; she lay down on the floor and fell asleep at once, her mouth open in a long, drawn-out groan.
When he found her lying in a heap on the floor, Atiq immediately feared the worst. Curiously enough, he didn’t drop the package he was carrying, and his breathing was untroubled. He remained standing in the doorway, one eyebrow higher than the other, careful to make no noise. For several long minutes, he gazed at her body attentively—the hand turned toward the ceiling, the curled fingers, the open mouth, the rigid chest—looking for a sign of life. Not a hair on Musarrat’s head moved. After putting his bag on a low table, Atiq swallowed hard and approached his wife’s inert body. Cautiously, he knelt beside her, and at the moment when he bent over her pallid wrist to take her pulse, a soft sigh sent him lurching backward. His Adam’s apple began furiously twitching. He listened carefully, imagining he had heard some ordinary rustling sound, then brought his ear close to the still face. Once again, a faint breath touched his cheek. He pressed his lips together to hold his anger in check, straightened up, and with closed eyes and clenched fists backed away until he was sitting against the wall. Sternly setting his jaw and folding his arms across his chest, he stared at the body stretched out at his feet as if he were trying to pierce it with his eyes, through and through.
Ten
MOHSEN RAMAT can take no more. The endless hours and days he regularly spends in the cemetery have exacerbated his distress. However much he may wander among the graves, he can’t manage to put his ideas in order. Things are escaping him at a dizzying speed; his bearings are irretrievably lost. Instead of helping him concentrate, his isolation weakens him and magnifies his suffering. Every now and then, a mad desire to grab an iron bar and destroy everything in sight surges through him; curiously, however, as soon as he takes his head in his hands, his rage turns into an irresistible urge to burst into tears. Thus, with clenched teeth and sealed eyelids, he abandons himself to his prostration.
He thinks he’s going mad.
Since the incident in the streets of Kabul, he can no longer distinguish day from night. The penalty for that accursed little outing is harsh and irreversible. If only he had listened to his wife! How could he have believed that lovers’ promenades were still possible in a city that looks like a hospice for the moribund, overrun with repellent fanatics whose eyes stare out of the dark backward and abysm of time? How could he have lost sight of the horrors that punctuate daily life in a nation so contemptible its official language is the whip? He shouldn’t have deluded himself. This time, Zunaira refuses to forgive and forget what happened. She holds it against him; she can’t bear the sight of him, much less the sound of his voice. “For the love of God,” he begged her, “don’t complicate things between us.” Zunaira looked him up and down, her eyes baleful behind the netting in her mask. Her chest rose, lifted by a wave of indignation. She searched for the harshest, most malicious words she could think of to tell him how terribly she suffers from what he now represents for her, how incapable she is of distinguishing him from the turbaned thugs who have transformed the streets into an arena and the days into a deathwatch, how utterly the proximity of a man, any man, both disgusts and overwhelms her. Unable to express her bitterness and her affliction with sufficient venom, she shut herself in a room and started howling like a madwoman. Terrified by his wife’s deafening screams, Mohsen hurriedly left the house. Had the earth opened under his feet, he wouldn’t have hesitated to jump in and let it close over him. It was horrible. Zunaira’s cries echoed through the district, brought out the neighbors, stalked him like a raging flock of predatory birds. His head spun. It seemed like the end of the world.
Zunaira is no longer the woman she once was, the courageous, vivacious woman who helped him hold on, who supported him every time he stumbled. Now, having decided never again to remove her burqa, she has quite deliberately sunk into an odious world, and she doesn’t seem about to emerge from it. From morning until night, she haunts the house like a ghost, obstinately wrapped up in her shroud of misfortune, which she doesn’t even take off to go to bed. “Your face is the only sun I have left,” Mohsen pleaded with her. “Don’t hide it from me.”
“No sun can stand against the night,” she replied, pointedly adjusting her hood. She has worn it since they were bullied on the street the other day. It’s become her fortress and her refuge, her banner and her renunciation. For Mohsen, the barrier is real: It stands between him and her; it’s the symbol of the painful break that threatens to tear them apart. By denying him the sight of her, she’s withdrawing from his world, renouncing it from top to bottom. The extreme position she’s taken shakes his foundations. He’s tried to und
erstand, but there’s nothing to understand. Does Zunaira realize how excessive her reaction is? Whether she does or not, her devotion to her own cause borders on fanaticism. When he attempts to approach her, she retreats, holding her arms in front of her to keep him at a distance. Mohsen doesn’t insist. He lifts his own hands in a sign of acquiescence and leaves the house, his spine bent under a mortal load.
Ten days!
For ten days, the breach between them has grown wider, deeper, better fortified.
For ten days, Mohsen has lived in a state of total infirmity, in a delirium worthy of King Ubu.
Every time he enters his house, Mohsen says to himself, This can’t go on. To whom does he say these words? Zunaira yields not so much as a square inch of territory, nor does she lift her covering even a little. Her husband’s unhappiness fails to move her; what’s worse, it increases her bitterness. She can no longer bear his whipped-dog look or his monotonous voice. The moment she recognizes his footsteps at the door, she stops whatever she’s doing and dashes into the next room. Mohsen grinds his teeth to suppress his rage, then strikes his hands together and turns back.
THIS EVENING, he gets the same reception. As soon as he opens the patio door, he sees her cross the living room, as fleeting as a hallucination, and vanish behind the curtain to her own room. During the course of several minutes, his entire being quivers; there can no longer be any question of walking out and slamming the door behind him. Thus far, his ill-judged departures haven’t served him very well. Just the opposite, in fact—they’ve widened the rift that separates him from his wife. It’s time to get to the bottom of the problem, he thinks. He dreads this moment— Zunaira is so hardheaded, so brusque and unpredictable—but he can’t prolong a steadily deteriorating situation.
With a deep sigh, he joins his wife in her room.
Zunaira is sitting stiff-backed on a straw mattress. He can tell that she’s as compressed as a spring, ready to bound to her feet. Mohsen has never seen her in such a state. Her silence is fraught, like a cloud full of storms. Zunaira’s lips are sealed; she’s impossible to fathom, and Mohsen senses that any approach to her would be risky—not to say dangerous. Mohsen is afraid, terribly afraid. He’s like a munitions expert defusing a bomb, fully aware that his future is hanging by a thread. Zunaira has always been difficult. She’s raw, like an open wound; she hates to suffer, and she rarely forgives. Perhaps that’s the reason why he fears her, why he loses his composure as soon as she frowns. His awareness of the moment’s supreme importance makes Mohsen tremble, but he has no choice. He looks for a sign, some little clue that might give him a modicum of confidence. Nothing. Zunaira doesn’t flinch. He senses something welling up in her behind her sphinxlike facade, as if a pool of lava were seething deep inside her, ready to spew forth as suddenly and violently as a volcano. Although her expression is hidden by her veil, Mohsen is convinced that the look she’s giving him is charged with hatred.
“What exactly are you holding against me?” he exclaims in a harassed voice. “Are you angry because I didn’t put that Taliban imbecile in his place? What could I do against him? He and his kind are the ones who make the laws. They have the power of life and death over everything that moves. Do you think I’m not bothered by the things they do? An animal, a beast of burden, would find them appalling! When I think about that militiaman, a cur unworthy to lick your footprints in the dust! My actions were abject— I’m perfectly aware of that—and I know I should have shown more pride, but by the souls of our loved ones—peace be upon them—tell me, Zunaira, what could I have done?”
Nervous and distraught, he kneels down before her and tries to take her hand. She leaps backward and gathers her shroud around her.
“This is ridiculous,” Mohsen mutters. “Completely ridiculous. You treat me as though I had the plague. . . . Don’t turn your back on me, Zunaira. I feel as though the whole world has a grudge against me. You’re all I have. Look at my hands imploring you; see how totally lost I am without you. You’re my only lifeline. You’re my only connection to the world.”
His eyes swell with tears. He doesn’t understand how they’ve managed to escape his vigilance, but there they are, rolling down his cheeks, and in front of Zunaira—Zunaira, who hates to see men cry.
“I feel really bad,” he says apologetically. “All of a sudden, I’m afraid of my own thoughts. I have to get a grip on myself, Zunaira. Your rejection is my worst nightmare. I don’t know what to do with my days, I don’t know what to do with my nights. You’re my only reason for living, if living still makes any sense in this country of ours.”
Once again, he tries to seize her wrist.
Zunaira cries out and rises to her feet. Panting, she says, “I’ve told you a hundred times not to touch me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I’m your husband.”
“Prove it.”
“Don’t talk nonsense. What do you mean?”
Zunaira springs away from the wall and stands very close to him, thrusting her head forward so that her nose practically grazes his face. Her anger is so intense that her veil trembles before her agitated breathing. “I don’t ever want to see you again, Mohsen Ramat!”
A detonation would not have shaken him so hard. Mohsen is stunned by his wife’s words. At first, he’s incredulous—it takes him a few seconds to absorb what he’s just heard. His Adam’s apple jumps up and down in his throat. The sounds of their breathing, his and Zunaira’s, blend together, filling the room with an eerie humming sound. Suddenly, Mohsen gives a strange moan and punches one of the shutters so hard that his wrist cracks.
Pain distorts his features as he turns to face his wife, threatening her: “I forbid you to speak to me like that, Zunaira. You don’t have the right. Are you listening to me?” he shouts, grabbing her by the throat and shaking her. “I forbid you to say that! I forbid it!”
Zunaira imperturbably loosens the fingers that are crushing her throat. “I don’t ever want to see you again, Mohsen Ramat!” she repeats, hammering the words home, stressing every one.
In a panic, Mohsen wipes his damp hands on his sides, as if seeking to erase all traces of his brutality. He looks around, aware that the situation is getting out of hand. Pressing his palms against his temples, he tries to calm himself.
“All right,” he concedes. “I think I came home too early this evening. I’ll go back where I came from. If you want me to, I can spend the night out. But we absolutely must give ourselves a chance to get over this and make up. . . . I love you, Zunaira. There, that’s as reasonable as I can be. I’ve never heard any words more terrible than the ones you just said to me. Coming from your mouth, they sound like a monstrous blasphemy. I realize now exactly how imperative it is for me to leave you alone. I’ll come back tomorrow—or rather, the day after tomorrow. I don’t know how I’m going to manage to hold out that long, but I’ll do it. I’m prepared to do anything to save our marriage. Try to do your part, too. I love you. Whatever happens, I insist, you have to know that. It’s very important. There’s nothing more important.”
Zunaira doesn’t relent. Her lips start to move dangerously under her veil. Mohsen puts his hand over her mouth. “Not another word. You’ve said enough for now. Let me hope that this has just been a bad day and tomorrow everything will be the way it was before.”
Zunaira steps back, away from her husband’s grasping hand. “I don’t think you understand,” she says. “I don’t ever want to see you again, Mohsen. Those aren’t just empty words, and the passing days won’t mellow them. I want you out of my life, I don’t want you back in this house. And if you stay here, I’ll go away.”
“But why?” Mohsen protests, ripping his shirt in one violent motion and revealing his emaciated sickly white chest. “Tell me what I’ve done. What mistake was so grave that I deserve this fate? I feel it snapping at me, like a pack of dogs.”
“It’s over, Mohsen. Look, it’s simple: Nothing can ever be right between us again. The only thing I want now
is for you to go away and never come back.”
Mohsen shakes his head. “That’s not true. I refuse to accept it.”
“I’m sorry.”
She starts to withdraw to her room. He snatches her back by her arm, violently yanking her toward him. “I’m still your husband, Zunaira Ramat! I didn’t think it would be necessary to remind you of that, but since you insist, there it is. I’m the one in charge here. It’s against our traditions for a wife to repudiate her husband. It’s unheard of. And I won’t permit it. I’ve been putting up with this for ten days, hoping that you’d come to your senses. Apparently, you’re not interested in coming to your senses, and I’ve had it up to here!”
With a jerk, she wrenches her arm out of his grip. He catches her again, twists her wrist, and forces her to face him. “For a start, you’re going to take off this fucking burqa.”
“Impossible. The Sharia of our country requires me to wear it.”
“You’re going to take it off, right now.”
“Ask the Taliban for permission first. Go on, let’s see what kind of guts you have. Go to them and demand that they change their law, and I promise I’ll take off my veil immediately. Why stay here scolding me, strong man, when you could be pulling their ears until they hear the loud, clear voice of the Lord? Since you’re my very own husband, go find the miserable bastard who dared to lay a finger on your wife and chop off his hand. You want to see my face, the only sun you have left? First prove to me that a new day has dawned, that this awful night has been just a bad dream, part of some distant memory.”
Mohsen crumples her veil in a concerted effort to lift it. Desperate to prevent him, Zunaira writhes and wriggles in every direction, and a fierce struggle ensues; groans and imprecations burst out against a background of heavy breathing. Mohsen clutches her frantically, tearing at her clothing, but despite the pain he’s causing her, Zunaira clings to her burqa. When her husband won’t let her go, she bites his shoulder, his arm, his chest, but she fails to discourage him. In a paroxysm of despair, she savagely scratches his face. Surprised to feel her nails slashing his cheekbone, Mohsen recoils. A flood of agony pours into his pupils and blinds him; his nostrils pulse with rage. One furious hand describes a dazzling arc before landing solidly on his wife’s cheek. She collapses under the mighty blow.
The Swallows of Kabul Page 9