A Curse on Dostoevsky

by Atiq Rahimi

  He lies down, and turns to face the wall. He curls up—legs bent and hands trapped between his knees—shuts his eyes, and sleeps.

  He sleeps until the call to evening prayers, until the gunshots fade on the other side of the mountain. Then there is silence, and it is this disturbing silence that wakes him.

  Feverish. No strength to get up. Nor desire, either. Nervous, he tries once more to speak. His breath still comes out strong, but without the slightest sound. More and more distressed, he shuts his eyes again, but the stifled groans of a woman make him jump. He freezes, and holds his jerky breath, listening hard. No more cries, no human noise at all. Intrigued, he labors to his feet, moves toward the window, and glances out past the masses of flies clustered on the pane. In the cold, dull light of the moon the courtyard is sad, empty and still.

  After a moment’s pause he lights a candle, pulls a small notepad from among the books, opens it, and scribbles: “Today, I killed Nana Alia.” Then he chucks it back in the corner, among the books.

  He drinks some water.

  Blows out the candle.

  Lies down on his bed.

  On the wall above his worn-out body, the moon casts the shadow of the window frame—a cross.

  It was a spring day. The Red Army had already left Afghanistan, and the mujahideen hadn’t yet seized power. I had just returned from Leningrad. The reason I’d gone there is a whole other story, one I cannot write down in this notebook. Let’s go back to the day I first met you. That is already almost eighteen months ago. It was at the Kabul University library, where I worked. You came asking for a book and went away with my heart. As soon as I saw you, your modest, evasive gaze took my breath away and your name filled my lungs. Sophia. Everything around me came to a standstill: time, the world … so that you and you alone existed. Without a word I followed you to class, and even waited for you until it finished. But there was no way I could approach you, or speak to you. After that, it was always the same. I did everything I could to watch you passing, for our eyes to meet, to smile at you—and no more than that. Why couldn’t I declare my love? I had no idea. Was it a lack of courage? Pride? Whatever it was, our entire love affair consisted of that fleeting glance and my discreet smile that you may, perhaps, not even have noticed; and if you did, modesty or shyness inhibited your response.

  It was this love that brought me to the Dehafghanan neighborhood at the foot of the Asmai mountain, around the corner from you. At the time you lived in a different house, with a beautiful view over the city, right next to those great rocks that I yearned to carve, like Farhad, into your likeness.

  Every morning I discreetly accompanied you to university, and then back again in the afternoons. You didn’t take the bus—on purpose, perhaps. You walked slowly, your hair covered with a light scarf, your eyes glued to the ground. Your heart was dancing from the fact of being accompanied, even at a distance, by me, your sweetheart—isn’t that right? Then, one day, you dared create an incident that would allow me to finally approach you. Not terribly original: you dropped your notebook, hoping I would pick it up and return it to you. But your ruse didn’t work! I certainly picked up the notebook, but I never gave it back. I took it with me, gripped tight to my chest like the Koran. And it is in this notebook that I’m writing now.

  It was the same notebook he had taken out earlier to scribble: “Today, I killed Nana Alia.”

  He had also written poems and tales, all addressed to Sophia, naturally—but which she had never read. For example: “Black is the world. Black is the day. And look at me, Sophia: in this empire of darkness, my heart is leaping. Because tonight, it will be with you!”

  You didn’t see me. Perhaps you didn’t even know that I ate at your house tonight. Yes, I was there, with your father; I even saw your brother Dawoud.

  It had been almost a year and two months since I last saw you. More precisely, a year and forty-six days. Yes, that’s right. A year and forty-six days ago, I returned to my family in Mazar-e-Sharif. But it no longer felt like home. My father had been so keen for me to study in the USSR, land of his dreams, that he was disappointed when I returned. He couldn’t stand the sight of me. After seven months I left them. And when I returned to Kabul, another war had started, fratricidal this time, in which people were fighting not in the name of freedom but to avenge themselves. The entire city had gone to ground. It had forgotten life, friendship, love … Yes, that was the city I came back to, looking for you. But you no longer lived in the same house. You had moved, but where to? Nobody knew.

  Then today, this afternoon, I went to the chai-khana. It was thick with tobacco smoke, and full to bursting with bearded men. I sat in a corner and drank my tea. My attention was drawn to a man’s footsteps as he struggled to make it up the wooden staircase. It was your father, Moharamullah, only now he was missing one leg, and had crutches tucked under his arm. I could hardly believe it. My delight soon dissolved. He was followed by two friends, one with no crutches but limping a great deal and in pain, the other missing an eye and his right arm. All three of them were high, from smoking hash in the basement saqi-khana. They came over to my corner. I immediately shuffled up to make room for them. Your father sat down next to me. He looked at me sharply, making me smile in spite of myself. The smile annoyed him. In his husky, drawling voice he demanded: “Is it your victory that’s making you smile?” and thrust the stump of his amputated leg toward me. “Well, CONGRATULATIONS on that victory, bradar!” I swallowed my smile, leaning forward to tell him that I was neither dabarish, bearded, nor tavarish, military … not conquered, still less conquering. Smoothing my beard, I reassured him that it was simply a “gift” of the war. He seemed impressed by this clever response. His gaze softened as he asked me gently where I was from. From here, from Dehafghanan. “This is the first time I’ve seen you,” he said, looking at me carefully.

  I wondered how to tell him that by contrast I knew him very well, that I was in love with his daughter …

  But I stopped myself. In these times of suspicion and doubt, it’s not right to bother people. So I told him that I’d just moved to the neighborhood.

  “And what do you do?”

  Just as I was inventing myself a respectable profession, one of his friends, the one-armed one, sniggered to the other: “Hey, Osman, look at our tavarish Moharamullah, he’s an investigator now!”

  “Why did Allah O Al-Alim, the All-Knowing, create the cat without wings?” asked the lame one, Osman.

  “Because otherwise it would have eaten all the birds in the sky!” replied the one-armed man. “Praise be to Allah, the Vigilant for not making Moharamullah a winged mujahideen, or else …”

  They burst into laughter. Your father turned toward them, annoyed: “Just wait till those winged, bearded cats arrive and give it to you hard; you won’t be laughing then.” This warning just made his two companions laugh harder. The one-armed one leaned toward your dad and said: “Chill out! We’re only laughing because we’ve already been fucked up the arse!” His reply cracked up the whole tearoom, including Moharamullah—everyone except the owner who, conscious of the talk, said: “Calm down, or they’ll be here before you know it, and they’ll ban the chai-khana and the saqi-khana.”

  “They will take your chai-khana! But our Islamic bradars will make sure this country stays full to the brim with hash, saqi-khanas, and fucked arseholes!” replied the one-armed guy, wiping away his tears.

  Everyone laughed even harder. The owner had had enough. He walked over to his counter, grabbed a bowl of water and tipped it over the two cackling cripples. Startled, they stopped. “We’ve paid to smoke, and now you’re spoiling our high!” said the one-armed man, standing up and muttering into his beard. The drenched men left the tearoom.

  Your father sat stiffly in his seat. Then he turned toward me, and saw me beaming at him. He couldn’t, of course, understand the reason for my happiness. He didn’t know that it wasn’t his friends’ jokes but his presence that pleased me, the fact that I was at la
st meeting someone from your family; it was a sign from you!

  “Don’t you laugh at us, young man. It is fate that has made us ridiculous; fate!” He said this slowly, and seriously. After a brief silence, he continued: “Fate … we say it is fate that in the end forces the mirror to make do with ashes. Do you know what that means?” He didn’t wait for me to reply. “You know that a mirror is simply glass covered with a blend of metals? Well, when time has eroded the metal, the glass is coated in ashes! Yes, it is fate that reduces everything to ashes … How old are you?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “I’m twice as old as you … more even … a noble life!” He stared into the middle distance, then continued, “War destroys man’s dignity,” and stood up. “My heart is bleeding but I have no blood on my hands. My hands are pure …” He showed me his palms. “I took part in the jihad myself, in my own way …” he moved closer … “for a long time I was administrative director of the National Archives. They used to be at Salangwat, just near here … It was during the communist era, the first one, the Khalqs. Yes, at the time we had a general director, one of those Pashtun dogs who used to sell all our archives to the Russians. Every time a document disappeared I felt like strangling him. This was the history of our country he was selling. Do you understand? The history of our country! Anything can be done to a population without History, anything! The proof …” He didn’t explain the proof, letting me find it myself in the ruins of our souls. “In short, there was nothing I could do about that director. He was a Khalq.” He spat in disgust and turned toward the owner of the chai-khana, crying: “Moussa, some tea for this …,” jerking his head toward me. He paused a moment, as if trying to remember what he’d been talking about. I reminded him. “Yes, thanks … hash … wrecks the memory. No, sorry, not hash!… Fate … fate reduces our memories to ashes! We need hash to cope with our fate—a good big dose to blot out all feeling. But how to afford that, these days? If I had any money left, I’d still be downstairs in the saqi-khana.” I told him that I would pay. He didn’t refuse. We stood up and asked the owner to bring our tea down to the smoking room.

  Downstairs, the smoky space was lit by the yellow glow of an oil lamp hung from the ceiling. Men sat in a silent circle around a large chillum, staring into space. They were all high as kites. Your father found us a spot. He smoked, I didn’t. Gradually all the others left. When only he and I remained, he continued: “What was I telling you?” And I helped him out again. He went on: “Yes, that dog of a director … that dog, whom fate had given wings, was one of these nouveaux-riche types who had heard people talking about whisky, but never tasted it. One day he asked me to get him a bottle. He didn’t say whisky, he said ‘wetsakay’!” Your father burst out laughing. “Do you know what ‘wetsakay’ means in Pashto?” Again, he didn’t give me time to respond. “It means: Do you want a drink?” He paused, and then turned serious. “I bought him some local alcohol, the worst I could find, and added some Coca-Cola and a bit of tea. It looked just like whisky. I put it in a smart bottle and screwed the top on well. Very professional! I took it to him, and told him it had cost six hundred afghanis. At the time that was a lot of money, you know! And after that he kept asking me for ‘wetsakay,’ and I kept giving him that same counterfeit alcohol. A few months later his liver exploded. Burst! Finished! Kaput!” He pulled proudly on the chillum and exhaled the smoke up toward the lamp. “So tell me, young man—wasn’t that jihad? I too have every claim to being a mujahideen, a bradar, a Ghazi!”

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked at him sadly. “Ever since that day, I call on Allah and ask him about justice—both his and mine. Listen, young man, that dog of a director was a traitor who needed to be punished. Which is what I did. I couldn’t wait for a change of regime in order to take him to court!” Another drag on the chillum, and a pause. “Now the regime has changed … These days any idiot thinks he can take the law into his own hands, with no investigation or trial. As I did then. So what! The purpose of punishment is to wipe out the betrayal, not the traitor … These days I ask myself whether this kind of law and punishment isn’t in itself a crime.”

  Having been totally absorbed by your father’s voice and features I suddenly jumped, and asked him if he had read Crime and Punishment. He looked confused, then burst out laughing. “No, young man, no! Life … I have read LIFE!” And suddenly he was quiet. For a long time. I was quiet too. He was smoking, I was thinking. Each of us in our own world. My world was full of you. I was trying to think of a way to get your father to talk about you. Suddenly he began speaking again, but still about his own concerns.

  “The era of the Khalq was over; it was the turn of the Russians. Shortly before they left, rockets were raining down left, right, and center. One day the Archives were hit. We were all in the office. Myself and my two colleagues whom you saw just now rushed to save the most important documents from the flames. Then another rocket landed, and all three of us were covered in blood.” He nodded, regretting their courage. “Now, we are disabled. Who gave us a medal? Who remembers us? No one!” Silence, again. Memories, again, and regrets, remorse … “Ever since then I stay home with my wife and kids. I have to cover the rent, and feed them all. Who’s going to pay for that? When I went to ask for money, they insulted me. They said I was a traitor because I’d worked for the communist regime. So I had no choice; I pawned all those precious documents I had saved. My landlord took them; he knew their value. But then he died. A heart attack. Only his wife and daughter were left, and I had to renegotiate the whole thing with his wife, Nana Alia—and what a bitch she is! A dirty illiterate! Not only did she never give me back the documents, she also increases our rent every month. We no longer own anything. My poor wife has pawned her dowry items to that cow, and her jewelry … And now my daughter has to work for her to pay the rent.”

  I wanted to stand up and shout, “So that’s where Sophia is!” and throw my arms around your father.

  “What do you do for work?” he asked, wrenching me from my delight. “What’s your name again?”

  I told him my name, and that I worked at the university library. After a silence, in which he looked at me tenderly, he said: “I can see that you’re an educated man, from a good family.” Another pause. “I’ve two children. A girl and a boy. My daughter is pure and innocent …” He stood up. “It’s late. I have to go home. She’ll be worrying about me …”

  We left the smoking room and lost ourselves in the gloomy, dusty fog of dusk. After a few steps in silence, your father continued as if he’d never stopped speaking. “But war recognizes neither purity nor innocence. That’s what terrifies me. It isn’t the blood or the massacres—what frightens me is that dignity and innocence are no longer valued. My daughter, like her mother, is the purest, most noble …” Again a silence, a long one this time, that went on until we stopped in front of your house. “This is my house!” he said, opening the gate. Trembling, I moved to shake his hand, but he stopped me. “You’re going home? You took me out and walked me all the way here, and now you think I’m going to let you go home?” He invited me in. As soon as I set foot inside I took a huge gulp of air, the air you had breathed. I held it for as long as I could as I followed your father through the little courtyard, under the espaliered vines starting to bud in the spring. I grew more and more nervous, dreading the moment of our meeting. My eyes were darting all over the place, taking in the nooks and crannies of the courtyard, the closed windows of the rooms, and the roof of the house, from which your brother was looking down with a pigeon in his hand. “Hello!” said your father. “Still on the roof?”

  “There was a cat wandering around,” replied your brother mischievously. Your father turned to me. “That’s my son, Dawoud. He’s been looking after my pigeons since the schools shut down. I can’t get up there anymore.” We walked into the house. Your father took me into a dark room and lit a candle; then he left, leaving me to entertain myself by running my foot along the only kilim in the room. I was
so excited, my heart racing so fast, that I didn’t even know whether to sit down on one of the three mattresses. I wondered if you were aware that I was here, in your house. But no. I wasn’t able to see you that evening, my beloved. I left the house after dinner, hoping to return soon.

  Another excerpt:

  Last Friday, as I was lazing around in bed trying to think of a reason to visit your house, I was rudely shaken from my idleness by the explosion of a bomb that shook the whole neighborhood. Panicking, I rushed out of my room and, finding myself prey to a strange impulse, ran to the site of the explosion. I was transfixed by what I saw. The tearoom was a burning ruin, emanating foul-smelling smoke. Men and women were busy digging bodies out of the rubble. From what they said, I understood that some people had been able to escape but others were still trapped beneath. I started helping them to pull out the bodies. I found your father under a mound of stones, dying. I put him on a wagon and took him home.

  And you opened the gate.

  Sophia didn’t recognize Rassoul with his bushy beard. He didn’t introduce himself, either. It was only when he brought round a doctor, and then went off to fetch medicine, that she began to realize she had seen him before. But she was so preoccupied with her father’s final moments that she soon forgot the joy of the reunion. That very evening, Sophia’s fate lay in his hands, his empty but strong hands.

  And so he found a new family who saw him as a man, a savior, and a protector—important nouns that filled him with pride.

  But look at him now, harassed and uncertain, staring into the abyss, lost in dreams, engulfed by nightmares, beneath the moonlight peeking through the walls.

  The shadow of the window now shatters over his feverish body.

  ANOTHER CRY, the same as before, but louder; then groans, more anguished. They rip through the silence of the room, bursting into Rassoul’s sleep. He jolts awake and sits up in bed, holding his breath the better to hear. Where do the cries come from? Who is making them? He does his best to stand, but he is weak. Such pain in his ankle! It’s as if his feet are tied. He drags himself over to the window, pulls himself up and peers out at the courtyard. The first thing he sees is Yarmohamad’s two daughters standing on the terrace, each holding a storm lamp; they are staring with a strange sort of serenity at the dead tree, just outside Rassoul’s field of vision. He heaves himself up a little further. What he sees takes his breath away: Yarmohamad bursting out of the passage with a huge knife in his hand. He rushes over to the naked figure of a woman, her ankles tied by the skipping rope to one of the branches of the tree. Rassoul’s horrified gaze swings over to a window, behind which he can make out Rona, also holding a storm lamp. But she is not looking at her husband, or the tree, or her two daughters. She is blowing discreet kisses to Rassoul. Dazed, he moves a little closer to the window. Yarmohamad spins the woman’s body around so that her face appears. It is Sophia. Rassoul screams. A stifled scream, dead in his chest. Yarmohamad starts to slice off the young woman’s breasts. Her cries become shrieks. Rassoul, unable to stand, bangs furiously on the window. Unperturbed, Yarmohamad continues butchering Sophia’s breasts. Gradually, she stops moaning and crying. Rassoul bashes the window until the pane shatters.