The girls had fallen into Zeba’s arms. Basir had stood next to his mother, nestling his head against her side at first, then pressing his face into the sleeve of her dress to blot his tears.
Zeba had turned to thank Tamina, who stood straight as steel.
“I think it’s best you stay away from me,” she’d said, staring at the backs of the girls’ heads. “We are nothing to each other anymore.”
“Tamina-jan, I am so grateful that you—”
“Don’t say anything, please. There’s nothing to say. I did what needed to be done. That’s what a mother does, I think. We do whatever it is God asks us to do.”
Zeba had only nodded, knowing she would not see her husband’s sister again. Kamal was buried beneath two meters of earth and with him was buried everything Tamina wanted to forget. This was her chance to do so, and she would not squander it.
Tamina had turned to slip back into the street when she paused and, without turning, said: “I’m glad for the children, Zeba. You didn’t deserve to die.”
Zeba, her arms still tightly wrapped around her daughters, her cheek pressed against the top of her son’s head, had sobbed loudly and fallen to her knees.
ZEBA HAD SPENT THE FALL AND WINTER AT HOME WITH HER children. Her grandfather, Safatullah, had given her ownership of a plot of land the family had leased to farmers. The rent payments she received were not much, but they were enough to sustain a small family. They’d seldom left the house during the three-month school winter break. Zeba used the time to recover. She’d opened the windows of her home to air out the stench of rotted food and vacancy. She’d raked over the dirt in the courtyard, though Kamal’s blood has been washed away by the heavy rains that had fallen while she was in Chil Mahtab. She cut away the dead branches of the rosebush and let her fingers linger in the softened earth beneath it.
Inside, Zeba swept the floors and washed every pot, pan, and glass in boiled well water. She did so in peace, noticing as she wiped down the walls of their living room that she did not sense the blackness. It had disappeared just as furtively as it had entered. In the room she had shared with Kamal for seventeen years, Zeba separated her husband’s clothing from her own, holding his shirts and pants at arm’s length. She folded each piece and stacked them in the center of an old bedsheet, tying the ends of the sheet into a tight knot. On the coldest days of winter, she’d opened the bundle and used his tunics and hats as fuel for the cooking fires, stoking the flames with a twinge of satisfaction.
The children did not speak of their father. They did not need an explanation, having known what their father was in life. That he was no longer part of their world did not trouble them. They would not miss his violent outbursts, the way he would leap at their mother’s cowering form. Their ears still burned under his twisting fingers, their cheeks still stung from his slaps. They did not miss the sound of breaking glass or the anxiety that sent a stream of urine running down their legs in the middle of the night. It was better and fair that he was gone and their mother was returned.
Let justice find its rightful owner, the judge had said. It was a truth her children had understood without hearing the fable. The jurisprudence of a child astounded Zeba.
It was spring now. Frigid temperatures were giving way to milder days. The palette of the world outside shifted, a spin of the color wheel. Yellow turned to green and gray turned to blue. The snowcaps of the mountain receded. The river waters ran cold and fresh, a new generation of fish filling its beds. It was time for her family to reenter the world, Zeba decided. Should the villagers gawk and stare, so be it. Should they point fingers and whisper or shout, it would not matter. She had not left Chil Mahtab only to make her children prisoners of their own home.
Rima’s small fingers, the soft pad of her palm, fit snugly into Zeba’s right hand. Basir carried a black plastic bag they would use to bring back fish from the river. Zeba followed her children, her chest bursting to see them in the warm sunlight. Basir, Shabnam, and Kareema were a few meters ahead of her, close enough that she could see their profiles when one turned to laugh at something another had said.
Kareema stopped abruptly, turned, and called back to her mother.
“Do you promise we will see Bibi-jan tomorrow?”
“Yes,” Zeba nodded. “We’ll leave in the morning to go to your uncle’s home. We’ll have to bathe well, though, so we don’t stink of fish when they hug us.”
Kareema burst into laughter and hopped a few steps to catch up with her siblings.
These are my children, Zeba thought to herself. Look at those brilliant faces, the way their arms swing as they walk, the way they nudge one another with a playful shoulder. There’s no part of the devil in them. They are mine.
Gulnaz would be waiting for them, as would Rafi and his wife. Without Kamal to spoil things between them, Zeba felt like she’d been returned to her childhood. Knowing the truth about their father had freed Rafi and Zeba to love their mother more completely, for they could finally understand her as a whole person. They didn’t need their father’s explanations nor did they have much desire to be part of his life. It was enough to know he was there, not a martyr, but not the devil, either.
Many of the villagers had come to the river, enough that the sight of them made Zeba hesitate for a second. She considered calling the children back and turning around, promising them to come another day. But then she thought of the women she’d left behind at Chil Mahtab. She thought of Latifa and Nafisa, Bibi Shireen and the young woman with the twin boys. She remembered that they’d called her Malika Zeba and burned her name onto their bodies.
We are so happy for you, they’d cried the day she was freed. Pray for us, Malika Zeba. You know no one else will.
They’d rejoiced in her release because that, too, gave them strength. If a murderess could be set free, there was some hope for the rest of them.
Bolstered by their voices that echoed still in her head, Zeba lifted her chin and pushed forward, nearing the villagers she’d avoided for two seasons. Boys laughed, carrying sticks strung with trout, their silvery-green skins dotted with red. A family was flash-frying the fish by the side of the river, just feet away from the stones where small children sat perched, dipping their fingers into the icy waters and shivering.
Zeba settled on a flat area, not far from where the river took a gentle bend. They were close enough to others that she could make out their faces but far enough away that she could not make out their words. She spread out the bedsheet she’d brought and they sat, cross-legged, while Basir went off to try the fishing net he’d borrowed from a neighbor. Shabnam and Kareema brought jacks and began their quiet game, bouncing the ball and deftly grabbing the silver spiders from the ground. Rima giggled each time they softly batted her meddling hands away.
The river water shimmered in the afternoon sun, and Zeba put a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the glare. She looked for Basir’s silhouette and found him amid a group of boys his age. While some stood on a cluster of rocks, Basir and a few others had sloshed into the waters with knees high, dragging their nets.
Zeba heard a rustling behind her, and her head swiveled instinctively. Seeing a mother and father making their way back home with a young girl walking between them, she turned her attention back to her daughters.
She had leaned over to brush Shabnam’s hair from her eyes when she suddenly felt her breath catch in her chest. She turned once more, slowly, half hoping the family would not notice her and half hoping they would. There were people around them, but no one paid them much mind, as if Zeba and her children were the most ordinary people.
The wife was speaking to her husband who nodded. The little girl’s hand was clasped in her mother’s. They were coming closer and would soon pass Zeba and her three daughters. Zeba lowered her gaze and felt her eyes mist. She blinked but could not look away. What a beautiful girl she was—just as lovely as the three who sat before her.
The girl’s slender frame came in and out of
view, half hidden by her father’s form. He looked to be a good man, Zeba thought, a wave of peace washing over her. He looked to be the kind of man who knew right from wrong, the way he walked with his wife and daughter and not ahead of them.
Something the mother said made the little girl look up and laugh, a bashful expression of cheer on her precious face. Zeba let out a soft cry, quiet enough that her own girls were not distracted from their play. But as if her breath crossed the open ground between them and tapped on the little girl’s shoulder, her head turned.
She looked in Zeba’s direction, and her mouth opened slightly. Zeba still could not bear to turn away, meeting the girl’s eyes and feeling her heart pound in her chest. Would she say something to her parents?
But she did not. She only blinked her eyes and smiled, a soft curve of her lips that felt to Zeba like tiny arms thrown around her neck. The many words left unsaid between them, the many questions each had about the other dissipated into the spring air, replaced by the sound of the babbling river, renewed with mountain water.
From this distance, Laylee looked distinctly unbroken. Her father’s hand absently touched the top of her head, as if to confirm her presence even as she walked beside him. She had lived over four thousand days but spent the recent months reliving the one day that had been infinitely worse than all the rest. While Fareed’s angry hands tried to wring the life from Zeba’s neck, Laylee’s mother had been bent over her daughter, her tears mixing with the ghastly crimson she was dabbing away from between Laylee’s tensed and bruised thighs. At the moment when Zeba had thrown her head back and screamed in the judge’s office, Laylee had begged her mother to end her misery. Kill me, she’d pleaded. In the next room, her father, Timur, had fallen to his knees to hear his daughter make such a quietly catastrophic plea. They had no other children. Laylee was everything.
You are a good, good girl, he’d whispered to her over and over again. Laylee’s mother had to turn away, broken a second time to see the way her husband cradled his daughter. His spirit was shattered but his honor intact.
Only because her father’s hand touched her head with pride and only because her mother had nursed her day and night back to health had Laylee survived to live these spring days. She would never be the little girl she’d once been, but her wounds would continue to heal.
Zeba lifted a hand and pressed it to her chest. Her eyes could have followed the girl forever, until she became nothing more than a purple dot against the sparse trees, but Zeba closed her eyes, burning the image of that timid smile into her memory.
“Madar, are you all right?” Shabnam asked, looking at her mother nervously. She and Kareema had paused their game, giving Rima a chance to scatter the jacks with one mischievous sweep of her hand.
Basir was on his way back to them, a glittering trout tied to the end of a stick, raised in the air like a triumphant scepter.
“I am more than fine,” she told her daughters, and for the first time in a long time, she believed those small, precious words to be true.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The time, motivation, and inspiration to write are gifts that my family so graciously gives me. Thank you to: my husband for keeping my stories (and our story) exciting; my parents for, as ineloquent as it sounds, everything; my children for making these stories important to tell and for their nascent love of books; my friends and family for sharing my stories with their own circles; and my colleagues for believing art and medicine are closer than they seem. I am indebted to and in awe of Heather Barr, whose Human Rights Watch report “I Had to Run Away”: The Imprisonment of Women and Girls for “Moral Crimes” in Afghanistan was a window into the inner workings of the women’s prison system there. Heather, you were generous with your time and wisdom of the penal and procedural codes of Afghanistan, and this book is more authentic for it. Any errors related to said topics are my own. I am grateful that the very dedicated Manizha Naderi put me in touch with Heather. Thanks to Dr. Esmael Darman, editor in chief of Rawan Online, for his insights into the stigma, prevalence, and treatment of mental illness in Afghanistan.
I am one lucky writer to have my work represented (and titled) by the sagacious Helen Heller. I am just as fortunate to be edited by Rachel Kahan. Your passion for purposeful books behooves us all. There are so many to thank at HarperCollins: Jeanie Lee and the sharp-eyed copy editors and proofreaders, Mumtaz Mustafa for a third wonderful cover, Virginia Stanley and the energetic library marketing team, Amanda Mulvihill and the international force (we’ve got lots of fun ahead of us), Camille Collins, Kate Schafer, Ashley Marudas and the marketing department, and the many, many others who help bring my stories to readers.
And of course, my gratitude to book clubs, coordinators of book festivals, librarians, booksellers, and all those who persist in celebrating stories and the transformative power of reading.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NADIA HASHIMI is an Afghan American pediatrician living in suburban Washington, D.C. She is the author of the international bestsellers The Pearl That Broke Its Shell and When the Moon Is Low.
nadiahashimi.com
/NadiaHashimiBooks
@NadiaHashimi
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ALSO BY NADIA HASHIMI
The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
When the Moon Is Low
CREDITS
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photograph © Patty Maher / Arcangel Images
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A HOUSE WITHOUT WINDOWS. Copyright © 2016 by Nadia Hashimi. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-244968-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-06-247784-2 (international edition)
EPub Edition August 2016 ISBN 9780062449665
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