Into the Sun

by Deni Ellis Béchard

  My mother was waiting in a chair, too afraid to call the police in case I’d been the one who’d done something wrong.

  She took off my clothes and put me in the shower, dressed me in pajamas and tucked me in. The next day was her day off. The two of us sat on the couch and enacted our weekly ritual of watching TV and eating a week’s worth of chocolates from her suitors.

  At night, for years, I was afraid to walk alone. Narrow streets I once loved I raced through. At school, I feared groups of teenagers and the spaces between them. I lived with the people in books and built myself with their words. But as I advanced in biology and genetics, I learned to see myself as a creature whose fears might not have begun that day. I studied the we of groups, of our species: genomic truths and the science of fear, our predictability and the limited paths of our lives. Maybe there are no first actions, and our pains, emotions, and aspirations precede our births, there in our biology and culture, cohering to form a personality, and we set about confirming them with story so that the mysteries of existence seem to emerge from our lives.

  But whereas the science I learned pried at the mysteries of the self, literature inhabited them, and novels led me on journeys whose experiences gave a different sense of inevitability: the accretion of detail endowing character with gravity whose consequence becomes destiny.

  The crystalline emptiness of space collapsed back into a dark node of animal panic. My hands shook as I held myself. Sitting among chairs and rugs in Kabul’s Finest Supermarket, I wished for Tam, for lovers scattered around the earth, for my mother.

  JUSTIN

  One night, well before the dawn call to prayer, Justin awakened. Sitting up, he noticed a pale spot in the backyard. Cold radiated from the window as he neared his face to the glass. Shafiq stood in only his pants, his naked muscles bulging, breath misting around his head.

  In the morning, Justin asked Frank about what he’d seen. Frank said that Shafiq used the freezing air to tone his muscles as part of his preparation for the Mr. Kabul competition. Almost proudly, Frank described how Shafiq had lived through the civil war and hated the Taliban and the mujahedeen — even those who remained heroes to the people, if they’d fought over Kabul. He had no interest in English, probably hated America too. He worked in exchange for a place to stay, and his only ambition was weightlifting.

  Nightly, Shafiq tested himself in the yard. Seeing the small man tempering his gnarled muscle, his chest lifted to confront the winter, Justin realized how unexceptional his own asceticism had been. His pain suddenly seemed insignificant.

  The day after the safe room attack, Sediqa didn’t show up to class, and her absence was palpable. The students glared at him. One complained that his exercises were obvious; they knew about democracy and didn’t want to be distracted from their grammar lessons.

  Afterward, Justin went onto the back porch. He’d been spending his days in his room, pacing in front of his desk, trying to find solutions for the school, to repair all the damage that had been done — or praying.

  She’s gone.

  Frank was sitting in a chair as the sun went down, the mountains edged in gold. Justin hadn’t noticed him.

  To America?

  A thick cream scarf was wrapped under Frank’s chin. He sipped coffee, his scrawny legs crossed, the ratty hiking boots with their torn laces looking too big on his feet.

  She left this morning, he said. I already had her passport made and the visa ready. She didn’t know it. This isn’t the first time I’ve had to do this sort of thing. There is serious jealousy in this country. Once the word got around about the scholarship, she didn’t have much time. This is the sort of thing you do to save people. They might not understand when it’s happening, but they’ll thank you later. Decades, I tell myself every day, think in decades.

  And what about her uncles? Won’t they figure out we were involved?

  I can’t be worried about that, Frank told him. God, it feels good to do something meaningful, to really make things happen.

  Justin excused himself. He went outside the gate, his boots growing heavy with mud. By the time he reached the poorly lit edge of the neighborhood, the sun’s glow had withdrawn. He was startled by the sudden appearance of stars behind the city’s light pollution.

  He knew so little of this place and had no sense of the reasons for all that was happening around him — the millions of people overwhelming the city with desperation, building and destroying because they had no choice. In his mind, endings were followed by clear rebirths, but his fear was gone, and nothing had changed.

  美智子

  I took the taxi from the supermarket to Tam’s house. I’d had time enough to formulate a plan. I would have to leave Kabul for a good long while. Steve wouldn’t give up now. The theft of the laptop would confirm his fears.

  Tam’s house was under construction. Afghan workmen were drilling and welding, installing iron security doors and bars on the windows. White drop cloths covered the furniture.

  On my way to find Tam, I glanced into the room that had been Alexandra’s. I thought of her writing in her journal after that first night with Clay, recording and contemplating every detail of their encounter, before she went back to his place the next evening. No one was in the room now, though a new tenant was renting it: a recently divorced Californian woman who was establishing a women’s artisanal cooperative, flooding the already saturated market.

  Tam wasn’t in her room, and I checked the rest of the house before pulling open the new iron door to the narrow walkway along the compound’s rear wall. She was sitting in a folding chair, an olive scarf on her shoulders and earbuds in as she read a biography of Robert Capa. The sun reflected off the white walls, but the mountain air was already cooling.

  When she saw me, she jumped up and hugged me, her earbuds swinging on their wires. Her book fell, splayed open, its pages fanning and swaying like the fronds of an aquatic plant.

  I’d expected her to be reticent or angry, but when she pulled back, she smiled and said, “So, Brutus, what are you writing?”

  “That’s a long story.”

  “Ah, your voice has changed again.”

  I suddenly realized that, to her mind, we were simply journalists hunting a story. She might have cared more when we were together, but so much had happened since. Violence was increasing across the country. She’d had harrowing encounters and was frequently insulted in the street. The Afghans wanted the occupation to end. Whereas they once invited foreigners to their homes and their weddings, they were now offended if we came anywhere near their events, and insisted we go away.

  I began telling her my story. At one point, Tam locked the iron doors to the kitchen and to the side of the house so no one would walk in on us. She said that the fortifications would make it easier to rent rooms, since organizations were requiring employees to live in places that passed a security code.

  A few clouds moved past the sun, but it kept reappearing, sustaining us.

  “You’re more ambitious than I thought,” she said. “I wouldn’t have told you either. In fact, you missed a pile of letters from Alexandra’s brother when you searched her room. Do you want to swap what we have?”

  I agreed to give her the journal, the emails, and other files. I’d been mulling over telling her about Steve, but I wanted to peruse his laptop first.

  “I’ll be curious to read what you write,” she said.

  “It might take some time.”

  “All the better.” She smiled. “Do you want to dance?” She lifted her earbuds and put one in my right ear and the other in her left. “I just found this,” she said and tapped her phone.

  As she slid her arms around me, the music began — strumming, raw drums, and a man’s low soulful vocals. It was a cover of a Lana Del Rey song, and I thought of the safe room and how everything since then had unfolded in the shadow of that experience. In the US, in S
outhern diners and Brooklyn bars, I’d heard her voice with a shudder. I’d seen her image in magazines — a carefully fashioned icon with an anthem for everyone — and considered that Americans were masters of not only nostalgia but also forgetting. The country they loved was a mirage from the past, a stylized memory bereft of history itself.

  After a moment, I gave myself over to the music and began stepping in slow circles. Tam pulled herself against me, her face to my shoulder to hide tears. I wished I could tell her something about this journey — about purpose and transformation, and how if what breaks us has no place in our daily life, we will travel far to find it. But unlike Frank, I knew I was fabricating. I saw the dangers of his revisions.

  Maybe the attraction to war is simpler than so many expats claim. Just by setting foot in Afghanistan, we have the authority we crave back home. Our journey is a story of the greatest human strength: leaving one’s domain and crossing the frontier into the territory of the other.

  There is an Afghan joke I have heard many times.

  An Afghan meets an American and asks how long he will be staying. The American says, “A week, but I leave tomorrow. I just came to write a book.”

  The Afghan asks what the subject of the book is, and the American says, “Afghanistan: Past, Present, and Future.”

  The first time an Afghan told me this — I have since heard the joke many times — he added, “I will someday go to America and do the same, inshallah.”

  Part 9

  Afghanistan: 1993–2012

  }

  IDRIS

  The two minds lived in his head, successive — day and night — but asymmetric, as if the sun could shine months unbroken before dropping into weeks of night. He had no place of origin except his memories of a large house in Wazir Akbar Khan. War had eroded it like a hillside beneath rain. Bullets pocked the compound wall and the exposed second floor. A mortar had punched through the dining room roof and splintered the table into the kindling they then fed their bukhari. His brother bought a sheet of plastic in the market and draped it over the hole, pinning the edges with chunks of cement he collected in the street. But the plastic was cheap, and gouts of water penetrated, slapping into a bucket like a hand on a drum.

  From his bed, Idris stared out the window where the glass had been shattered by shrapnel. If the street was quiet, he could hear the tock tock of drops striking into the bucket, echoing in the empty rooms. He pictured an immense clock with a human arm moving in increments, its pointed finger accusing the world before indicting the mystery of the sky. When looters came, they took the pots and pans, the scant food, the bedding, clothes, and shoes, even the bucket.

  One mind woke excited to kick a ball, run in the street, watch people passing: the boys gathering trash, the stooped men with creases around their eyes, bowed beneath bundles of sticks or sisal sacks or rickety wooden boxes of produce. He wanted to read the books his mother kept on the tops of cabinets where no one could find them, stories of springtime and the New Year, of children gathering pomegranates or wandering too far from home.

  His other mind could not get up. It turned his arms and legs to concrete, his skin to dust. Night was a giant black cat, carrying something dead and heavy in its mouth, dropping it on him, a breathless weight that made his body rank. He lay in bed, numb to the prodding of his family, until one night the hunter came again and lifted from him what it had left behind. His mind was as mysterious as the war that lulled and raged, that battered the city the way a woman beats a rug with a broom. Sometimes his mind fell silent, a barking dog called away with a bone.

  There was an evening when his mother stroked the hair from his forehead as he lay in a fever, his chest bandaged, and told him that if he’d been born two years earlier, he might have a memory of life without war. Maybe she’d told him what month he was born, or the year, whether it was before the chaos or as it was beginning. Being a child, he’d trusted that he would be able to ask again, but by the time he was six, his entire family was gone.

  His father had always been gone. Idris had no memory of him other than a photograph of a man standing with other men beneath a flag with three horizontal bands of color — black, red, and green — and a seal on its left containing a book, a rising sun, and a red star. His mother said he’d been an engineer, a scientist who joined the military, and Idris decided he wanted to study science too. His mother burned the photograph, telling them it was for their safety.

  Miriam, his sister, disappeared next. She was the eldest, a second mother. She was taking him and his older brother, Reza, to the park when uniformed men stopped them at a checkpoint. Two of them grabbed her arms and led her into the nearest house. Idris and Reza waited. A soldier came over and considered Reza. The men argued, and there was some pushing, but then Reza was taken inside too. Idris waited. A soldier with pockmarks on his cheeks crouched before him. He reached into the front pocket of his green jacket and pulled out a candy. He unwrapped it and put it on his palm and held it before Idris. It tasted faintly of honey. The man told him to be careful not to choke.

  Put it in your cheek, he said, like this, and pushed his own cheek out from the inside with his tongue. He touched Idris on the shoulder and stood, observing the street.

  Reza came back. He was blushing, his fists clenched like pale rocks. Two men hauled Miriam out by the arms. She sagged between them, and they lowered her to the curb. One of her hands groped at her headscarf and pulled it over her face. Her lip was bleeding. The soldiers argued until an old man with a handcart arrived. The soldier with the pocked skin gave him something from his pocket. Two soldiers, different from the ones who’d brought her out, loaded her into the handcart. She pulled her knees up and curled onto her side.

  The old man wheeled her home. At their house, he helped her inside, to the corner of the room where the family now slept on pieces of cardboard with blankets on top. She didn’t move. Their mother returned later with a small bag of rice and sent Idris and his brother into the compound yard to play. The spring air had chilled, the sky packed with stars. The breeze brought odors of wood smoke and burning plastic and diesel.

  When she called them back in, she fed them salted rice drizzled with oil and put them to bed. Idris slept. He awoke to his mother’s sobbing. Around his sister was a pool of gummy blood. His mother picked up her arm and squeezed her wrist, clamping it with her white fingers.

  Idris almost died next. Two months of calm had drawn the children outside. They kicked a ball between the raw walls of the compounds on either side of the street. The sidewalk trees had been cut down for firewood, and so few working cars and so little gasoline remained in Kabul that the residential lane might as well have been a schoolyard.

  When Reza played soccer now, he kicked the ball violently. The other kids held back as he raced for it. Idris was too small to keep up. He edged close to the action or drew away when it neared him, content to admire Reza’s lanky stride, the way he lunged and slid in the grit on the soles of his old shoes.

  A whistling sound resonated between the walls long enough for Idris to lift his hands to his ears. One of the boys pushed into him, and Idris hit the wall, his skull jarring. His chest felt wet. Had he fallen into water? Reza’s face was gray, with the lines of an old man’s. He lifted Idris’s arm and draped it over his shoulder. The street spun, and spots from the sun flared in Idris’s eyes.

  Once, years before, he’d asked his mother what war was — the booms and rumbling, the sudden nearby crashes, the repeated echoing in the night sky like ice cracking, the tracers that rose as if falling stars swarmed up from the earth. She’d tried to explain it. A gun was a stick that shot stones. A bomb was a bowl that fell from the sky filled with fire. Men used these things to win wars the way boys kicked balls toward goals to beat each other’s teams.

  The war must have been over because he could no longer hear it outside. His mother lay next to him, her body warm as she sang and brush
ed her fingertips through his hair and soothed his forehead with wet cloths. When she left, Reza took care of him, his eyes as deep as echoing wells, dark as the other mind.

  As Idris dozed, Miriam came to tell him about a land where the sun didn’t rise all winter and how their father traveled there so he could learn to make their lives better. That must be the land of the other mind. His body felt hot, like metal in the sun. She whispered to him to go inside. Her fingertips slid through his fingers.

  An old man appeared above him, moving his hands to remove the weight from Idris’s chest. He must be the old man with the handcart. Everyone had become an old man with a beard, with brusque hands as hard as wood.

  His mother showed Idris his chest. He lay beneath the weight of the other mind, but it was not so heavy. He could lift his head. Two purple notches marked his ribs.

  You are partly made of steel now, she told him. She moved his hand with her own and traced it over the glossy skin. You have iron protecting your heart.

  She was the next to disappear. She’d begun dressing differently, going out in a blue burqa he’d never seen before. A week later she didn’t come back. He was alone in the house for days. Reza dropped by briefly to give him a crust of bread and an overripe orange. Idris waited, peering out the gate. The explosions had ended. The old men looked older. Many passed with crutches.

  During the worst part of the war, when attacks had started suddenly, mortars shrieking down from the mountains, he and Reza had run home from playing. Dead people lay in the streets. Handcarts ferried bodies home — women, children, or old men pushing them. An ashen neighbor was wheeled home, his leg missing below the calf. Idris had believed the looters were taking hands and feet since everything else had been stolen. So many people were without limbs. But since his mother’s disappearance, the looting had stopped, as if she’d taken the war with her.