by Lucy Ferriss
“Run,” he cried. He fell sideways. Afia scrambled away, over the rough gravel, the packed snow. From the dark she looked over her shoulder. Shahid, her brother, her beloved. In the headlights he rose, pushed to his hands and knees, fell back. Blood bloomed in his chest. “Run, Afia!” he cried again, the voice choking now—or maybe it was a voice inside her saying it, Run, as Shahid sprawled in the snow. And she did run, but toward him.
The headlights painted his skin white. Blood filled his mouth. His arms twitched, his hands clawed the ground, his knees jerked—and then stopped, like a child arresting a tantrum, the instant she laid her hands on them.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Shahid, don’t go,” as if he’d not quite made up his mind. Her hand pressed onto his chest. A faint throb, going, going. Then it was still. His eyes lifted to the black sky.
“Is he—” she heard behind her, and she turned to Khalid taking a step forward. Shadowed though he was, she saw the horror gouging his eyes. His mouth hung slack.
“You’ve killed him,” she said, or thought she said. She couldn’t hear her own words. What she heard instead were Shahid’s words, again, Run, Afia, as he was falling, falling, the bullet in his heart. Gently she passed her bloody hand across Shahid’s face, closing his eyelids for him.
For a moment they were there together, Afia and Khalid and Shahid between them. Then Khalid took a step forward. The dark fish rose, and she made herself ready. A whining came into her ears, the sound of death approaching she thought, but then she saw Khalid’s eyes widen and remembered. The call she had made, 911. Khalid looked from her to Shahid, lying still on the white snow now, lovely as a sleeping god. Afia pushed back, she stepped out of the light, she saw Khalid’s panic. The sirens rose. Run, she heard in her head again, and she turned to the dark woods. Her bare feet pushed slowly, then faster. Behind her, one gunshot; another. At the edge of the woods she twisted back, squeezed the trigger of the black thing in her hand, and it jumped high, and she dropped it. Khalid was in the car now. Spinning in the snow, then scraping over the gravel, it roared off, the red eyes at its back receding down the drive. Sirens. Run. Shahid lay in darkness. Her feet wheeled beneath her. She stumbled into the trees, her feet numb, branches beneath the snow but she ran, silent now, silent as the birds, only the sound of her breath threatening to betray her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Khalid sped over the snow, the tires slipping, the car as if it wanted to fly, a flying horse with a will of its own. He couldn’t see right. The tears got in his way. A guttural howl came from his throat, like an animal lodged there. Battling the animal, a voice in his head.
This is not the plan. Not the right outcome. Whatever Allah wants of you, it is not this.
What, then? What?
Shahid stepping in front of Afia like that and your finger moving on its own, squeezing the trigger like your heart squeezing? This was a dream of some kind. A dream, yes, you’ve had those dreams before, those dreams where your finger squeezes, squeezes, and the world flies apart. Those dreams where you are on a flying horse in the snow and it takes leave of the earth. You wake up and you say aloud, “It wasn’t real, not real.” Say it now. Say it. Wake up, wake up. Wake up.
He passed the police car, its siren rising, blue lights blinking atop like a carnival, but it took no notice of him. He drove across a bridge spanning a wide, half-frozen river, then followed the brightly lit signs to the highway. He was glad for the highway where you couldn’t drive accidentally on the left side and find headlights rushing at you, horns blaring. He couldn’t bear the noise. He pressed the gas pedal farther, farther, and the car floated down the black lane. Before the headlights, the snow swirled.
He needed to pray. He needed to find that point of light he saw, as if through the place in his forehead that touched the prayer rug, blazing from far off in the darkness. The pure light. All these other lights around him shone dull, yellow, corrupted.
If only Shahid had not stepped forward like that. If only he had let Khalid get off a shot, a clean shot. The bastard, the stupid arrogant bastard. Get in the middle, get yourself killed.
If only Shahid had played his part, the part Khalid had prepared so lovingly for him. So that he, Shahid, would be the one to cleanse their honor. Yes? Giving Shahid the glory, always giving him the glory.
If only! If only his badal, his retribution, had been allowed to proceed slowly, as he had meant it to. If only Uncle Omar had not become involved. There was the bastard: Omar. Pushing, always pushing. It was his fault, that bastard Omar’s fault.
He floated off the highway. He pulled the car into the parking lot of a Christian church. He needed to get his breathing under control or he would black out. He needed to retrace the map that had brought him to this place, to the cabin he’d just left and his brother’s body on the white snow, the red stain blooming behind his head.
• • •
It had begun that day he was at Ali Bhai’s, deep into the chat room for pashtunistan, flipping from the arguments about Imran Khan to some Western media outrage over a girl in the Afghan camps. Same commenters, same pissing matches. One guy wrote that Western universities made sweet Paki girls go stupid and headstrong, and Khalid had clicked on the website for Smith College to see how true that could be. And there she was, his little sister, her hand in that ape’s paw.
No. It hadn’t begun there, any more than it had begun when he looked into Afia’s room and saw the phone on her bed, waiting for him to find the photo of her in an orchard, her legs wrapped horribly around a man’s shoulders. It had begun earlier, so much earlier. It had begun—he leaned back in the car and shut his eyes—when he was six years old and his mother, his moray, was dying. How she had loved him! No, she hadn’t managed to have more children after him—but he was a boy, after all, and she had cared for him and Baba with all her heart. Then came the thing in her gut, the thing that had kept her from birthing more babies, and it ate away at her from the inside, and she never complained but kept at her duties day and night until she couldn’t anymore. Until the day he found her collapsed on the floor by the stove, and Tayyab shouting for the doctor. Yes, that’s where it began.
Never forget, she had told him, you are Pashtun. You are Allah’s beloved. You are pure of heart and mind. So pure, she swore to him, that the mark Allah had bestowed on him, the left foot that turned outward instead of forward and kept him from running as fast as the other boys, was His way of turning Khalid’s attention to the poor and the weak, of keeping Khalid from a life of vainglory or foolishness. So pure she had been, herself, that she had welcomed the new wife, Farishta, once her sister-in-law, into the house. Welcomed Farishta’s children, Shahid and Afia. Held Khalid’s small hand in her large rough one, burning then with fever, and made him promise to look after his new brother and sister, to help Farishta instruct them.
He had tried. By Allah, he had tried. When he saw the eyes his father cast on Farishta, a look he had never seen bestowed on his own mother, he turned away and willed his mind toward higher thoughts. When Farishta’s first two pregnancies in Nasirabad ended in miscarriage he cut the skin of his thigh each time he began to gloat, until the cuts were like the hash marks the reapers used to count bales of cotton. When she brought forth two girls in quick succession, he exulted loudly at the births and not at the fact that he remained his father’s only true son. He took Shahid under his wing, helping him study and getting him onto the cricket squad.
Only there came what he thinks of now as the terrible Eid, that season in his seventeenth year. First had come Uncle Omar’s visit, toward the end of Ramadan, and his singling out Shahid for training in Peshawar. The questions his friends pelted him with—what prizes could Shahid win, would he get to meet the great Jahangir Khan, how rich was this Omar?—were a storm of needles sticking beneath his skin. That he was his father’s only son, the one who would inherit the farm, hardly seemed to matter—for what was a farm, when all the glory
shone upon this little calf that his father’s second wife had brought to Nasirabad?
But worse were the conversations he overheard that same holiday season, after it was decided that Shahid would go to Peshawar. Chatter between Afia, twelve that year, and Tayyab’s daughters, as they compared the glass bracelets they had bought with their Eid money. From the day Afia came into his family, a button-eyed toddler, Khalid had warmed to her. She was rival neither to him nor to his dead mother, and he would toss her, laughing, into the air or boost her onto the lowest limb of the mulberry tree. But that Eid, coming back from a holiday cricket match, he heard her on the other side of the courtyard wall, laughing with the servant girls.
“Well, he couldn’t choose Khalid, could he?” she said. “Khalid walks like a seal! Batting a ball is one thing, but have you seen him run?” There followed a scuffling sound that he imagined was Afia’s farcical imitation of the way he ran, with his right leg springing off the foot and his left one dragging. “Oarf! Oarf!” Afia cried, and Tayyab’s daughters giggled. His face burning, he had slammed into the hujra.
He hadn’t wanted to talk to her, hadn’t wanted to see her. He was headed into his last year of school then. He’d shown inclinations toward mathematics, toward building things. Baba had urged him to think about engineering. He loved the clean lines of blueprints. They spelled everything his moray had wanted him to become—strong, clean, pure of heart, a man of ghairat. He understood why his father had married Farishta. Though he couldn’t help resenting his stepmother, it had been the proper match, nothing shameful. But when he shut his eyes at night he pictured the first night of true marriage. His untouched body, and his wife’s untouched body—what the Prophet, peace be upon him, had called the twin half of him—coming together in complete union. The wonder of it, like a fire that rises within you both and never destroys you, but only destroys the impurity of your discharge, which transforms into a milky river in which swim your sons and your daughters. By night he fixed his inner eye on the perfection of that act and kept his hands away from his aching, swollen parts. By day he worked to avert his eyes from the village girls.
It was during that same Eid, on the last day of the celebration, that he had left the hujra where the men were talking—again!—about Shahid and his athleticism, and how Tofan’s brother-in-law would give that boy the chance of a lifetime. He had wandered away, past the mulberry orchard and the first field of cotton, past the willows lining the stream and around the bend toward the deep area they used as a swimming hole. It was late summer then, the heat finally lifting from the earth; and late in the day, too, past the time when the village boys would leap from a tree branch into the deep water. So when he caught a glimpse of a body standing waist-deep in the stream, he took a step back. Then he parted a curtain of willow and looked. Afia stood in a slanting shaft of sunlight, her skin the color of sandalwood, her arms lifted as her hands pushed back her thick hair. She did not see him. The nipples on her wet chest showed only the slightest protrusion, as if they were being tugged out and upward. The rest of her torso looked elongated, no longer a child’s simple barrel but beginning to be whittled into a waist, hips. She was humming lightly, one of the songs they had been dancing to at the celebration. Khalid had backed away. His penis had become, suddenly and against his will, a rod of iron. Quickly he turned and ran, toward the house at first and then into a stand of trees. He had crouched and buried his head in his arms. He wanted to cut his sex away with a hatchet; to stab out his eyes. Naked! The Prophet, peace be upon him, had ordered women never to go naked, even with their husbands. How could Afia do such a thing to him, dirty his sight and his mind like that?
There, it had begun. For how could a man live—with such a brother stealing his birthright, with such a sister fouling his eyes? He had said nothing to any of them. But by the next year, to find his way back to purity, he had left home not for the engineering school but for the madrassa. Three years ago he’d gone further, to the high mountains, where men knew there could be no compromise with filth and disorder. Only when a Pakistani army bullet found his shoulder did he come home to heal. He’d passed the time at Ali Bhai’s, where he saw that image on the Smith website and began to understand: He could not run away forever. He had to put his family back in order. To put Shahid back in his place, and remove the corruption that had destroyed the pure stepsister he once loved.
He had told Baba of the photo on the Smith website hoping Baba would step in—would lock the girl up and marry her off, put a stop to this creeping rot. She left Nasirabad to gain knowledge, he’d argued, and what does she do but give away her greatest value. And to what? To a Jew! Yes, he had known it was a Jew, from the very hairs of the hand holding hers. Willfully, he had said to Baba, and without shame, she defiles herself. But Baba was weak, giving in to Farishta’s pleas: There would be an engagement but nothing else, and Afia sent back to the whorehouse she had made for herself.
What does a man do, under such circumstances? He plots. He downloads the website photo. He seizes the photo on Afia’s phone, the blurry one in an orchard, her legs wrapped around the Jew’s neck. He finds one of Afia’s phone contacts, Taylor Saintsbury, on Facebook. He chooses the name Kent Star, Kent for Superman’s disguise and Star the closest he dares come to Satar. As Kent Star, he friends Taylor, tags the photo. He returns to the mountains, and waits. The dish of revenge is best served cold.
For Khalid had seen clearly at that point. Only when Afia’s shame was cleansed with her blood—he pictured that, he couldn’t help himself, blood on her breasts, on her white neck—would they be able to lift their heads as Pashtuns. And Shahid must be made to do the thing. Shahid, too, must be broken, his arrogant hold on their family broken.
Patience had held him steady, through the cold weeks. Only once had he returned to Nasirabad, to show his father the photos, to express his sorrow and press for justice. All in time, it would have happened. But then Omar, who always interfered, had sent a messenger to the camp.
Even as he traveled down the mountain to Peshawar, Khalid had not been naïve. Omar might open his wallet, but he cared nothing for Khalid. Khalid was useful, that was all; his jealousy was useful. And then, as he left Omar’s mansion, Khalid saw his true, his final chance: He could take care of things. All it took was one more photo, a photo to be shown to no one except Shahid.
What was he hoping for, when he followed Shahid tonight from the squash court to the parking lot and onto the highway? To bear witness, while his coward of a stepbrother finally committed an act for which Baba would never forgive him? To see the blood flow over her white skin? From the number of times Shahid stopped—at a petrol station, a café, a house lit yellow along the road—it was clear he hadn’t known quite where he was going. Khalid had had to follow a half kilometer behind and to turn down a different road whenever he saw Shahid’s Honda pull over. Just barely had he caught the taillights swerving right, into a long driveway. When the Honda didn’t back out, he shut his own lights and rolled, quiet and dark, down the drive. He’d heard the back door open and shut; Afia’s voice; the ricochet of a heavy object—the gun, it must have been the gun he’d given Shahid.
What to do, what to do? He’d pulled his own Glock out from under the seat. One action could not be tolerated: for Shahid to take their befouled sister home to be married, as if she had committed no crime greater than the brush of one hand against another. Explicitly, Omar had charged him not to let Shahid abandon his glorious career for such nonsense. No good could come of trying to bleach an indelible stain. Yet there they had come, the open door spilling light onto their faces, Afia barefoot, her features knit tight, and Shahid with his hand on her elbow, guiding her down the steps. They were leaving. He could not let them. Not this time. No. He was a man, a Satar, he would take care of this. And so he had turned the headlights on, raised the Glock.
• • •
Allah! How can you account for everything that goes wrong in the world? Ho
w could you think a Pashtun brother could lay eyes on such a photo and still send his sister home to be honorably wed? How could you imagine that the recipe for combustion, memorized in the camps above the Khyber Pass, would stutter and delay and fail to kill? How could such a girl disappear, and why would a brother hunt her down for any reason but to seize back his honor? How could a finger on a trigger, once squeezing, fail to stop when a man blocked the target? What, oh what had he been made to do, when all he desired was purity and his rightful place?
He stepped from the car. His left foot throbbed the way it did when his muscles cramped up. The snow had stopped, the sky cleared. Following the constellations, he located the four directions. He knelt, facing east, and in a language that made no sense to him, recited his prayers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The place they took Afia wasn’t like a prison, not the way she pictured an American prison anyway. She had seen pictures of the cages, the dogs. Her room had a regular door, no bars. Though she was locked in at night, she had a bed and a sink and flush toilet, not a hole in the floor. The place smelled of disinfectant. They allowed her to have books—the jail’s small library had even got hold of the textbooks she needed—and she was allotted both paper and pencil, plus two hours a day in the library where there was an Internet connection. No e-mail.
Only one other inmate, a skinny black woman named Thalia who said she was a Muslim, ever spoke to her. Thalia came in two days after Afia, charged with murdering her boyfriend; she’d done two stints behind bars already, she said, and they weren’t granting her bail. The other women, a couple dozen at most, avoided Thalia as much as they did Afia. Then there was Officer Jane, the prison librarian, and Sara Desfani, her court-appointed lawyer. Sara—she told Afia to call her Sara—was Muslim, but she wasn’t Pashtun or even Pakistani. She tried to get Afia to talk about Baba and Moray and what they wanted for her, about Shahid and how angry he got when he found out about Gus. Afia didn’t see what business Sara had to understand life in Nasirabad. It was all she wanted now. Home. With Moray’s cool hands stroking her brow, stroking away the fever that gave her bad dreams in which Shahid was dead and she was locked away forever far from anyone who loved her.