To stave off rumors, the families agreed to have the two married, and after a modest ceremony, Sitara moved in with him and his family to start her new life just two floors above her parents and siblings in the apartment the boy’s family had occupied for years. Yusuf’s second sister, Sadaf, opted to stay in school and pursue accounting at a city community college. His brother, removed from books for too long, sharpened his English by repeating lines of dialogue from television sitcoms. He rose quickly through the restaurant ranks and became a bartender. Yusuf’s mother enrolled in ESL classes at the local library and began working as a clerk in a department store. Yusuf’s father, grateful to Kaka Rahim for getting them on their feet, decided it would be safest not to mix work and family and driving a taxi, resigning himself to a flightless future. Almost overnight, Yusuf became an adolescent who had mastered the nuances of the English language and the crowded subways. He excelled in school and impressed teachers who urged him to apply for scholarships and pursue college.
He did well by day but woke in cold sweats at night at least once a week. He simply couldn’t go seven nights without fumbling in the dark to change his panic-soaked shirts and pillowcase without waking his siblings.
The family lived modestly but comfortably. They had one, then two televisions. Their closets filled with new clothes. They replaced their lost possessions with new ones. Yusuf’s mother burst into tearful laughter when his father came home with a silver tray, almost identical to the wedding tray they’d left behind. They watched television together, one person always with a ready finger on the remote should the actors and actresses fall into a love scene. Yusuf’s father followed Afghanistan in the newspapers and on the news. They all braced themselves after September eleventh and were shocked that strangers on the street would shout angrily at them in the disaster’s aftermath. Yusuf’s father cheered the U.S. decision to invade Afghanistan though he had no intention or hope of returning there.
Only fools run into burning buildings, he would joke.
When Yusuf was a freshman at NYU, news about Afghanistan was everywhere. It was tedious. Afghanistan was suicide attacks, battered women, and corruption. In his second year, Yusuf had enrolled in a course on human rights on a whim, thinking it would be an easy way to bring up his grade point average. By the second lecture, a fire was lit. In a flood of memories, Yusuf was back in Afghanistan. Death tolls. Small boys working as blacksmiths. A promising journalist murdered along with his wife and children. Dehumanizing refugee camps. A young girl sold to pay off a poppy crop debt. Untouchable warlords.
How could he turn his back on all that?
Others did not. Others were brave. Others championed the cause of the voiceless.
Yusuf had lived and breathed the American belief that one person could make a difference. Flyers in the student union and the optimistic rhetoric of professors swelled in him. He attended his first protest and liked the way it felt to chant with the crowd. He raised his voice. He developed a taste for the fight, the fury it brought out of him. Feeling angry was better than feeling afraid.
Two semesters passed, and Yusuf realized it had been weeks since he last woke in a cold sweat.
Yusuf chose law because it was the difference between right and wrong—because the law was the only way to protect the weak and punish the aggressors. He studied for weeks and burned through books of practice LSAT exams until he sat for the test and scored surprisingly well. He filled out a dozen applications but kept his fingers crossed that he would get accepted into a program in New York. With nervous excitement, Yusuf tore open a thick packet from Columbia. It was good news, but his parents shook their heads in disappointment.
Are you sure you don’t want to be a doctor? Doctors save lives every day, they reminded him.
I don’t want to save one life at a time, Yusuf declared. There are better ways.
His parents shrugged their shoulders and hoped for the best. At least he would be a professional, more accomplished than his siblings who had little interest in graduate school. They would have done more to stop him had they known what he would go on to do.
Yusuf took courses on human rights law and immigration law. He volunteered as an interpreter and sharpened his native Dari. He had professors make phone calls on his behalf to land internships with human rights organizations. He was thankful his family had settled in New York where opportunities abounded. He kept his nose buried in books.
You’ll be blind before you’re thirty, his mother had lamented. She was proud of her son but worried about him, too. Some weeks it seemed he barely slept at all.
Yusuf graduated from law school and was hired by the advocacy organization where he’d interned for two years. They’d been impressed by his drive and created a position for him. He wasn’t making as much as his classmates who had gone the corporate route, but it was more than he or anyone in his family had ever made and he was thrilled to have purpose. He worked hard and turned no project away.
Yusuf did carve out time to socialize, though he felt compelled to tell himself he was networking so he would not feel as though he was wasting time.
IT STARTED WITH HAPPY HOUR, A CHEERFUL EXCUSE TO DRINK upon exiting an air-conditioned office building. Over time, Yusuf acquired a taste for dark lagers. A cold beer in his hands made him feel like he was bonding with his colleagues. He kept this part of his life private from his parents and siblings. Though they’d shared tight living spaces all their lives, he still felt compelled to keep his sins to himself. It was not a matter of deceit, as he saw it, but a show of respect for his parents’ ideals.
Happy hour was where Yusuf had started dating. It had taken him that many years to feel like the girls around him wouldn’t see him as foreign or inferior. When an Asian girl named Lin leaned across a bar table and rested her hand on his forearm flirtatiously, Yusuf felt his confidence soar. He went out with a few girls but never let anything go further than five or six dates. If he sensed they were interested in more, he would slip away, letting a few phone calls go unanswered or confessing his reluctance to commit to any one person.
It was immature, he realized, but he had decided, after listening to his parents rant about his older brother’s diverse parade of girlfriends, that he would find someone his parents would adore. He wanted someone who could speak Dari with them, who would raise bilingual children with him, who would understand both American and Afghan culture. It was the practical and respectable thing to do.
Then he’d met Elena—beautiful and irresistible Elena who had immigrated to the United States with her family at a very young age from Peru. She had chocolate brown hair and her cheeks dimpled when she smiled, which she did often. She was a friend of a colleague and stopped when she spotted them drinking beers at a sidewalk café. She was making her way home from her job at an accounting firm, wearing a white peplum top and smartly creased, navy blue pencil pants.
She was sweet and smart and, importantly, did not flinch when Yusuf told her his family had come from Afghanistan. On their first date, they went to see a free Peruvian music concert in Central Park. On their second date, they ate artisanal ice cream in the East Village. Yusuf couldn’t resist slipping his arms around Elena’s waist and pulling her close when he was with her. She was five inches shorter than him, and when they embraced, Yusuf breathed in the sweet, tropical scent of her shampoo. She clung to him just enough that he felt adored and not so much that he felt trapped. She could talk about the implications of a trade agreement and the latest One Direction song in the same breath. Yusuf’s friends raised their eyebrows and beer mugs in approval. Elena was a catch.
When Yusuf met her, he’d already made plans to move to Washington, D.C., to work with a nonprofit that focused on crimes against humanity. He convinced himself they both understood things would come to an end once he left. Elena didn’t fit into his plans. And yet, Yusuf found immense happiness in a hundred quiet things: the way her nose crinkled when she laughed, the way she slipped a playful finger into his collar, t
he urge he felt to call or text her a moment after they’d kissed good night.
The fact that they had so little in common seemed to draw them to each other. Language, religion, professional fields—they studied each other with almost academic interest.
Elena listened to Yusuf talk about the headlines that pulled his attention: the unearthing of thousands of Muslim corpses, men and boys who’d been executed in the Bosnian genocide, the flogging of a dissident journalist in Saudi Arabia, the disappearance of a Malaysian passenger plane. Elbows propped on the table and eyes focused, she filled in with details she’d read in online news reports. She made Yusuf question his plan. Maybe he shouldn’t limit himself to women from his own background. Maybe a common culture and language wasn’t everything.
Maybe Elena was everything.
They were on their way to the subway station after a dinner with friends when Elena and Yusuf paused at a crosswalk. He turned to her and adjusted the paisley scarf knotted around her neck. It was fall and the evenings were brisk.
My niece’s baptism is this weekend. You’ll come with me, right?
The red hand turned into a white stick figure, prompting them to move forward. Yusuf didn’t immediately obey. Elena had to tug at his elbow.
Maybe, he had said. Let me see how much I get done with work this week.
They’d settled into two empty seats on the 7 train, New York’s version of the Silk Road. Elena would get off soon after they entered Queens, before the neighborhoods turned distinctly Asian. Yusuf had another nine stops to go before he got to Flushing.
You know, I already miss you, baby, Elena had said to him as the torque of the subway car nudged them closer together. I’m going to want to visit you every weekend in D.C.
Yusuf had kissed her squarely on the lips, long enough that Elena interpreted it to mean he would miss her equally. But something in Yusuf was rattled by the expectation that he would go to something as alien as a baptism, and, as their lips parted, Yusuf withdrew. When the conductor announced her stop, Elena smiled at him and walked off the train. He was already sorry for what he would have to do, but it could be no other way. Yusuf no longer saw all that Elena was—he only saw what she was not.
A REMORSEFUL YUSUF TRAVELED TO WASHINGTON, D.C., AND spent a year with a team of lawyers putting together a case against militia officers accused of genocide in Africa. He did his best not to think about Elena. When he missed her, as he often did, he busied himself with research or called his mother, which reminded him how Elena would not fit in with his family. Conversations with his mother were, by this point, fairly predictable. She would fill him in on the latest happenings with his siblings and gossip from his cousins. Inevitably, her attention would circle back to Yusuf.
You’ve finished school, you have a job. It’s time to get married. Are you waiting for all the good girls to be taken by boys that don’t even have a quarter of your looks or smarts?
Yusuf ducked out of the conversations. He missed having someone at his side, but he could not imagine taking a wife now. He could not imagine someone waiting for him to come home each night, asking him why he worked so late. He could not be bothered with a second set of parents and cousins and uncles. He had no desire to become a father. He made false promises to his parents that he would be better prepared for commitment next year.
But Yusuf had other plans. He would sacrifice, he believed, so that he could follow the path he was meant to follow. And he’d had no choice but to walk away from Elena.
Turning away from Elena would have been harder had he not felt a strange twinge in his chest.
It came from the land of clay and mountains. It was as if a siren had appeared in his dreams, begging him to save her from herself. He heard her name on the talk radio stations; he saw her face on magazine covers. The Internet screamed her sorrows, telling the story of the unjust blood shed on her land, the imprisoned and the persecuted. Each injustice called to him as if he were the only hope.
Afghanistan.
Yusuf picked up the phone. He sent painstakingly constructed e-mails. If he did not answer her call, who would? His resolve hardened.
On a bustling sidewalk, Yusuf realized he could not remember the last time he’d woken in a cold sweat. He smiled to himself, growing stronger just by thinking about her. Hurt and beautiful, she was home.
CHAPTER 3
“HER HUSBAND’S BEEN MURDERED! THIS IS NO TIME TO ASK RIDICULOUS questions! Where’s your honor? This man needs to be washed and prepared for burial. His parents, his family—has anyone spoken to them?”
Zeba clenched her hands together. If only they would stop shaking, maybe then she could understand what had happened. Maybe then she could explain. Her head was in a vise. There was too much talking. Kamal’s body was still by the outhouse. Certainly the flies must have noticed by now.
“This man was killed in his own home! We need to know what happened here!”
Basir and the girls were in the second bedroom. Kareema and Shabnam, eight and nine years old, were trying to be brave. They’d run to their mother when she finally came into the house, but the look in her eyes and the way her knotted hands trembled had unnerved them. They retreated, turning back to Basir who had tasked them with looking after Rima.
“Please, everyone, dear neighbors and friends, please understand that my mother, my family has suffered today. I have to get word to my uncles, the rest of the family.”
“But the police, they have to be called.”
“They’ve been sent for already.”
“Who called?”
“It doesn’t matter. The chief will be here shortly and he can decide what will be done.”
The screaming had cracked the neighborhood doors open, one by one. Scandal was an irresistible temptress. It was unclear who had been shrieking, and now neither Basir nor Zeba was sharing any information. Basir stood in the front courtyard biting his cheek. He fought back tears and kept his gaze to the ground. The men and women had gathered, word spreading through the mud-walled neighborhood like a drop of ink in water. Basir stole glances at the faces he’d known all his life. Women pinched their head scarves primly under their chins and clucked their tongues softly. The men shook their heads and shrugged their shoulders.
“Someone should call the mullah.”
“Yes, call the mullah!”
“And for God’s sake, someone needs to send word to his family! Rafiqi-sahib, send your son.”
Basir’s eyes darted to his mother.
“But why isn’t she talking? What happened here, Khanum? Did you kill your husband?”
“Of course she did! There’s a hatchet in the back of his neck! Do you think he killed himself?”
Zeba and Basir both winced at the mention of the hatchet. Basir crouched down next to his mother who sat with her side against the clay wall of their home.
His voice cracked in a nervous whisper.
“Madar, I don’t know what to . . . can you tell them what happened? Did someone come in here?”
Zeba’s eyes pleaded with her son. She said nothing.
Basir pressed his palms against his closed eyes, the pressure making the world go black for only a split second. He still saw blood.
“What are we to do now?”
Basir cried silently. Zeba pulled her head scarf across her face. Eyes were watching her, sentencing her. Her three daughters cowered in the room behind this wall. Zeba inhaled sharply and forced a deep breath.
“Basir, bachem, please go inside and look after your sisters. They must be so frightened.”
Eyes narrowed. Ears cocked to the side—the grieving widow was speaking. They waited for a confession. Basir didn’t move. He stayed at his mother’s side, angrily wiping tears away with the back of his hand.
What else will she say? he wondered.
“Dear God, what have you brought upon us? What did we do to deserve such a fate? What are we to do?” Zeba moaned, loud enough to elicit sympathetic head shaking. “How could this have
happened here . . . in our own home?”
The women looked at the men around them. They looked at one another. Zeba was as close to death as any woman could be. And then they began to echo her laments.
“This poor woman—without a husband—may Allah protect her and her dear children!”
THE CHIEF OF POLICE, AGHA HAKIMI, WAS IN HIS EARLY FORTIES. He was the grandson of a warlord who’d been conquered by another warlord with more men, more guns, and more money. Hakimi was the living legacy of impotence and failure. The village treated him as such.
When Hakimi entered the courtyard, he was immediately led to the back of the house. At the sight of Kamal’s body, he shook his head and narrowed his eyes, hoping to look more pensive than disgusted. The flesh of Kamal’s neck had been torn apart. Chunks of bone, puddles of blood, and bits of brain—a spray of pink, red, and white scattered just behind the dead man.
The police chief was updated in a series of interrupted accounts, his eyes darting from the morbid debris to the widow slumped against the wall and then to the many faces staring at him expectantly.
Zeba was moaning softly, mournfully.
Hakimi stared hard at the woman before him. Her eyes were glazed, her hands still trembled. When he spoke to her, she looked at him blankly, as if he spoke a foreign tongue. Exasperated, Hakimi turned to the crowd.
“No one knows what happened back there? God have mercy. What happened to Kamal? You were his neighbors? Did no one hear anything?”
Then Hakimi raised a hand for silence. He turned to Rafiqi. Agha Rafiqi had the grayest beard present, and his home abutted Zeba’s on one side.
“Agha Rafiqi, you share a wall with this family. You have known them for years. What did you hear?”
Over the years, Agha Rafiqi had heard plenty—not the same sound that had drawn Zeba into the yard, but other sounds that were easier to name. He looked at the woman slumped on the ground, trembling like a bird caught in a net.
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