She had been right in her decision not to meet him. It was foolish to think of it at all. Yet the regret that weighted her chest seemed to grow heavier with every passing minute.
The early morning was spent with cleaning chores and entertaining little Anashita who was querulous but recovering from her bout of stomach illness. As the sun climbed higher, Chloe gathered her books, lesson plan and carefully hoarded pencil stubs and sheets of scrap paper. Putting them in a cloth sack, she looped this around her neck, then donned her blue burqa. Ahmad had left at daybreak, as he often did, going to Kashi on the business of the Taliban. Treena’s husband, Ismael, a quiet young man with the eyes of a poet, a pronounced limp and the slender, perpetually tarnish-grimed hands of a silversmith, would leave soon for the shop where he worked with his brother making jewelry and other items in a trade passed down for generations. First, however, he must do the family marketing. Treena and Chloe would go with him, Treena to advise on the food for a special evening meal ordered by Ahmad who was expecting visitors, Chloe to be dropped off at the home where the secret classes for girls were being conducted at present.
Ismael knew what she did there, of course. He was a special man, a gentle soul who had lost half a foot to infection after a childhood bicycle injury. Sometimes he praised his limp because it meant he was exempt from service with the Taliban militia, and Chloe thought he was only half joking. He did not subscribe to the stringent Islamic views that gave Ahmad such pleasure, and was deeply disturbed over the neglect and destruction of his country’s few civilized amenities. The policies of the current government that had brought on trade embargoes in the wake of the Afghan situation were abhorrent to him, but he despised the United States for its sanctions, which deprived the civilian population of food and medicine.
Ismael’s disapproval of the restrictions imposed on women came in large part from his mother’s experience. A woman barely fifty years of age, she had owned an export business during the previous regime, one inherited from her father. Chic, cosmopolitan and highly organized, she’d made frequent business trips to Europe and the States. Then the Taliban had taken away her business and given it to her father’s younger brother. She had fallen into severe depression followed by dependency on the drugs used to alleviate it. Involvement in the RAWA had saved her sanity, as she put it, and it was she who had recruited Treena. Ismael never came right out and approved the RAWA affiliation, but he did not question Chloe’s morning visits, ignored her hours spent over schoolbooks while Ahmad was away, and was incurious about the females who came and went, whispering over tea and walnut cakes in the women’s quarters. If he knew no details of the activities of his mother, wife and stepsister-in-law, then he could always claim he had thought them busy with nothing more than gossip and female matters.
The class went much as usual. Young girls drifted in one or two at a time, some arriving with their brothers or younger male cousins, one or two escorted by their fathers and accompanied by mothers who drank tea with their hostess while Chloe presided over the classroom. The methods she used depended, in the main, on rote learning since the oral tradition was strong among Hazaris and books and supplies were scarce. While she taught, she kept a copy of the Qur’an at her side. If any person outside the circle of RAWA sympathizers appeared, she could instantly switch to the recitation of holy writ.
Time melted away. It seemed there were never enough hours to teach everything she wanted the girls to know. All too soon, she had to close her book, make her polite and effusive farewells to the woman of the house who was risking so much by permitting the use of her back room, and be ready to meet Ismael and Treena when they came for her once more.
As she joined them in the entrance, her sister-in-law greeted her with eyes that shone behind their mesh covering. “We saw him, your American from the stadium,” she said as soon as they had left the house. “He was there in the bazaar.”
“Not mine,” Chloe said in instant denial as she reached to help with the string bags filled with grains and melons that her stepsister carried. “Do you think he saw you?”
“He stared at Ismael for an instant, but gave no sign of recognition. My presence he failed to acknowledge at all.”
Chloe frowned a little as she heard the trace of injury in her stepsister’s voice. The feeling of being beneath notice while wearing the burqa could be difficult to endure. She was oddly reluctant to have Treena think that her countryman had intended to compound the effect. “It’s considered impolite to stare in my country,” she said. “Besides, the man might not wish to risk angering your escort.”
“You think he may have recognized us after all?”
“He managed somehow to pick me out of the crowd in Kashi yesterday. Since he could see nothing to go by, he must have zeroed in on Ahmad and Ismael.”
“But how would he know them?”
“I’ve no idea,” she answered. It wasn’t something she wanted to think about, either, for fear she wouldn’t like the answer. “Was he still at the bazaar when you left?”
“Indeed, and looked as if an explosion could not move him.”
“He’ll go soon, when he is bored with the game.”
Treena glanced at her, turning her whole body to see through the burqa opening. “He didn’t appear bored. Annoyed, perhaps, but not bored.”
“Too bad,” Chloe muttered, not entirely for Treena’s benefit.
“Are you sure you don’t want to discover what he has to say to you?”
“Quite sure.” As long as she didn’t know, then perhaps she could remain fairly content.
Ismael had been listening as he limped ahead of them. Speaking over his shoulder, he said, “Let us hope he gives up this attempt to speak to you soon, before Ahmad loses patience.”
“You think someone will tell my brother that the American has followed Chloe here?” his wife asked.
“Of course.”
The idea made the hair lift on the back of Chloe’s neck. “He will be gone by that time.”
“Pray that it is so.”
“Yes.” In a firm change of subject then, she spoke of the amazing progress of a young pupil who had been unable to recognize her name only two weeks before but was now reading. They continued in that vein until they were home again.
Chloe busied herself for the rest of the day with ironing Ahmad’s uniforms, tending the children so Treena could rest, and overseeing preparation for that night’s all-male dinner party. In late evening, while Ismael, Ahmad and his friends were eating in the hajra and Treena was feeding the children, Chloe had her own scant portion of the lamb, rice and vegetable dish in the kitchen. Afterward, she picked up the bowl of kitchen scraps left on the counter and carried them outside into the walled garden.
The last colors of sunset were fading from the sky, leaving it to the lavender and gray of approaching night. She stopped for a moment to stand staring upward at the inexorable transformation. The day was almost gone. Soon the American would go away as well.
The ache of sadness brought by that idea was surprising. Yet why should it be? She might never again have contact with the life she’d left behind. Some small nostalgia was surely permitted? What mattered was her final decision, not her emotional reaction. This had been made and accepted, and no brief twilight reverie could change it.
Turning her gaze to the stone path again, she moved toward the fig trees at its far end. They were beginning to bear, and could use every bit of mulch she could scrape together to help them through the present stretch of dry weather. Rain fell more often around Ajzukabad than elsewhere in the desertlike country but never enough, and only household wastewater could be spared to help plants survive.
The town was nestled in a high valley formed by the Kashi River. Protected by snow-veined mountain peaks, its climate was subtropical. She grew a variety of other fruits, vegetables and herbs along the walls and in the beds separated by crushed stone walkways, including grapes, melons, apricots, tomatoes, beans, chili peppers, potatoes, turn
ips, carrots, onion, peas and cabbage in their different seasons. Her efforts added to the family larder and medicine cabinet, as well as providing a welcome excuse for solitude and outdoor exercise.
She emptied the bowl she carried, then she wandered among beds, pinching dead blooms, pulling a weed or two, and inhaling the fragrance of the mint and chamomile, sage and sorrel that rose as her skirts brushed against the sprawling herbs. She was putting off the moment when she must go back inside, she knew, but couldn’t bear to trade the peaceful dusk for the strained atmosphere that her stepbrother always brought into the house with his return.
As she neared the mulberry tree that shaded a rough table and chairs in the corner made by the house and the garden wall, she heard the quiet rasp of cloth, saw the shift of movement in the darker shade cast by the tree. She stopped with her heart beating high in her throat.
“Evening.”
That deep-voiced greeting in English rasped along her nerves. Instantly she caught the trailing end of the scarf she wore over her hair, drawing it across her face even before she made out the tall shape of the man that emerged from the shadows. “You!”
“Didn’t mean to startle you. But you stood me up at the bazaar, and knocking on the front door didn’t seem like the best idea under the circumstances.”
She barely controlled a shudder at the thought. “If you’re discovered here, you could be killed.”
“I needed to see you.”
“Did it occur to you go back to the States and leave me alone?”
“Not possible,” he said with a decisive shake of his head. “I can’t leave until we’ve had our little talk.”
She stared at him in the fading light, at the set of his features, the thick dark brows, sculpted facial planes, and chiseled mouth with firmly tucked corners. It was a strong face, even in repose. The emerald glints in the hazel-brown of his eyes only added to the impression. “Do I know you? Did I ever know you back in the States?” she asked finally.
“No, but I’ve known you, or known about you, for a long time.”
“And that’s why you’re hounding me?” She was becoming used to his colloquial English with its many contractions, she realized. A few of her friends liked to practice her language, but theirs was a textbook-formal style and she’d fallen into a similar habit unconsciously in order to be better understood.
“I told you before that your dad sent me. You could call it a deathbed request if you wanted to be dramatic.”
“I don’t want it to be anything—” she began, then stopped. “Deathbed? But that would mean…” Her throat constricted to a hard knot while trembling began deep inside her. She clasped one arm around her abdomen and stepped abruptly to the nearby wall, putting her back to its sun-warmed support.
He was silent for so long that she thought he didn’t intend to answer. Finally he asked, “You didn’t know? You’ve received no letters in the past six months saying that he had cancer and wasn’t going to make it?”
She shook her head, a jerky movement.
“I guess that means you’ve had no contact with his lawyers, either.”
“None,” she said in compressed tones. “There have been no messages at all. Not since I left the States.”
He whispered a soft imprecation. “No wonder you looked at me yesterday as if I’d dropped out of the sky.”
“I thought my father…I wasn’t sure he knew where I was.”
“He had an address, but nothing sent to it was ever answered,” the American said. “I verified it for him. And I sent the most recent messages.”
“You.” The word was flat.
“At his request.”
“And you’re positive they came here, to this house?”
“As positive as anyone can be considering the situation these days.”
Ahmad must have intercepted those messages, Chloe realized, just as he’d destroyed her letters years ago. The outrage of it moved through her like a poison. She let it take her, for otherwise she would disgrace herself by crying in front of this American who seemed to have no idea how much he had hurt her.
“So,” she said with a lift of her chin as she turned her gaze toward the glow of lights behind the high kitchen window. “I have the news now. You have completed your duty and are free to go. Leave at once, please, before you do something that will get me killed.”
“I hope I have more sense than that.”
“So do I, but I can’t depend on it.”
“I promised your dad that I’d get you out of this country and back to the U.S. where it’s safe,” he returned, his voice deliberate. “That’s what I intend to do.”
“Impossible.”
“Everything is arranged. All you have to do is gather up what you need and come with me. Or come with nothing, for that matter.”
“I have no passport.” It was a weak objection considering all that she could have said, but the first thing to come to mind.
“You had one when you came here. It’s been renewed.”
“Travel requires money and I have none.”
“Your dad left you everything he owned. He wasn’t exactly wealthy, but he didn’t have a lot to spend his paycheck on during these past few years, and he had a knack for investments. His estate is worth half a million, give or take.”
She faced him again while stunned disbelief moved over her. The amount mentioned was a fortune in Hazaristan where men worked all year long for the equivalent of two thousand dollars and the local currency, the Hazari, was exchanged at nearly five thousand to the dollar. If Ahmad learned of this inheritance, there was no way he would ever let her go.
But he knew already, she realized a second later. Why else would he be suddenly intent on seeing her married. As long as she was single, she remained an American citizen with the right to assume control of her father’s estate and go where she pleased as soon as she had the means in her hands. Once tied to a Hazari husband, however, she would become a nonentity expected to put her financial affairs completely in his keeping. The Qur’an might prohibit a marital tie between stepchildren, but all Ahmad had to do was marry her to a Taliban brother-in-arms, one of several who were under his thumb, and the two could then divide her inheritance at their leisure.
“I appreciate your effort in coming here to tell me all this,” she said to the man who waited in such controlled silence beside her. “But I don’t believe it’s possible that I can leave with you.”
“Come again?” He put his hands on his hipbones as he stared at her in the darkness.
Her refusal sounded less than certain even in her own ears, possibly because she’d used the polite feminine form that she’d learned so well. She tried again. “My life is here now. I have friends and obligations that I cannot desert.”
“Looks to me as if you’re up to your neck in something that could earn you a starring role in one of those productions you saw yesterday.”
He referred to her RAWA activities. Voice sharp, she asked, “How do you know that?”
“Let’s say I have my ways.”
She preferred not to think what that might mean. “Then you should understand.”
“I’m trying, but it’s damn hard to make out why you’d want to stay in a place where they treat women like dirt.”
“It’s not what I want to do but what I must,” she told him as irritation moved over her for his assumption that she didn’t know what was best for her. “I’d have died without this cause, these women who have become a special family. They saved my life. I’m needed here, needed desperately. To teach young girls, to give them the knowledge that will save them from becoming the slaves of men because they know nothing else, is a good and powerful thing. To stand in front of them and tell them what it’s like to live in a land where women are free to come and go as they please, wear what they please, say and think what they please is to reveal amazing truths. I have purpose, I have value, I have…”
“A mission?” he suggested as she stopped.
&nbs
p; “If you must call it that.”
“And what good will it do this mission if you’re dead?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Perhaps I may inspire others who can take my place.”
“Oh, well, that’ll fix everything, won’t it?”
She looked away as his sarcasm told her how impossible it was for him to realize the soul-killing effects of the repression she and the women around her faced every day, or how life-giving it was to fight against it. “You are a man. How can you be expected to see.”
“That’s not the point.”
“But it is,” she insisted, her voice hardening. “You have never worn the burqa that smothers and stifles while it turns you into a faceless heap of cloth. You have never been beaten merely for showing an inch of skin at your wrist. You don’t know what it’s like to have someone destroy everything you value, to be forced to eat separately from men as if you will contaminate them, to be made invisible by being kept behind walls, to be expected to have no will, no needs, no desires, no dreams. In America, women complain of the glass ceiling that prevents their climb to success. Here, there are ceilings, walls and floors that make a prison of iron, the iron will of men. Who would not wage war against that? And how could I not feel like a coward if I ran away because of a little danger?”
“So you’ll turn yourself into a martyr?”
“You demand an explanation, but don’t listen when it’s given! You only hear a woman when she is saying, ‘Yes, yes, you are right. I will do exactly as you command.’ Like most men!”
He watched her, his gaze steady on the uncovered portion of her face as if he were trying to read her eyes in the dark. Finally he said, “You don’t like us, do you?”
“My feelings are not the issue.” She didn’t dislike men so much as distrust them, she thought. She’d learned the hard way to walk warily around males of any age. It was excellent programming for covert activities, especially when fear was added to the mix.
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