by Gwen Florio
Liv turned back to her computer, to the dwindling stack of tasks awaiting her attention in her final week at the college, giving them half her attention, the other half focused on the fact that in just a few days, she’d present Martin with this new self, one that would erase any memories of a girl like Mandy.
Thirteen
JALALABAD, DECEMBER 2001
Farida slept in deep oblivion, savoring the warmth of her husband’s body curled around her, his bare skin silky against her own. On this night, she had whispered to him that the charade had become real, that there would, indeed, be a baby. She smiled as she slid into her dreams.
She woke screaming.
The earth beneath them rumbled and shook, the walls swayed. Crockery fell and shattered in the kitchen. Voices rose, sounded more annoyed than frightened.
The rumbling stopped. Then another crash, so loud the floor quivered.
Farida shrieked again. She feared the ceiling would collapse. She curled into a ball, folding her knees against her belly.
“Shhhh. It’s all right.”
“Is it an earthquake? Shouldn’t we go outside?” She tried to recall what she’d read about earthquakes. Outside, or under a doorway? She couldn’t remember. She struggled from Gul’s grip, feeling about for her clothing.
“Not an earthquake.” His voice was tense, with an edge to it that reminded her of Nur Muhammed.
“Then what?”
“The Amriki have come. They are bombing us.”
Farida made as if to leap from the sleeping mat. Gul restrained her.
“Let me go!” Her breath came fast. “Hurry. We have to get out.”
“Inshallah, we will be fine here.”
Even in her panic, Farida noticed the resignation in his tone. The house shuddered with a new explosion. “How are we fine?”
“They are far away. In the mountains.”
“But it sounds as though they’re next door.”
“Yes,” said Gul, in that same flat manner. “That’s how bombs sound.” Farida collected herself enough to realize that for this family, bombs were nothing new. She let herself relax, just a little, against him.
“Where are they?”
Gul listened to the next blast and named a nearby area.
“It sounds as though they’re hitting Tora Bora. That’s where the mujahideen are. They won’t get them, though.”
Farida tried to still her breathing and lay beside him, listening. The rest of the house quieted. She wondered if people had actually gone back to sleep. She turned her face into her husband’s chest and breathed in his scent, seeking reassurance from his calm presence.
“Why won’t they get them?”
“They are deep beneath the peaks of the Spin Ghar. The mujahideen have tunnels in those mountains that they have worked on for years. They used them against the Russians. They would come up from the tunnels and attack, and then melt back into the earth. It is like a city under the Spin Ghar, electricity, everything. They live better beneath the earth than some people do on its surface.”
Farida thought of the villages they had passed on their way to Jalalabad. Even in her stupor that day, she had noticed their poverty, whole families pouring from ramshackle homes to watch their jeeps pass, everyone barefoot and impressively dirty. But they looked like solid citizens in comparison to the ragged and filthy inhabitants of the Kuchi encampments they’d also seen, where unveiled women stared at them from the openings of their goat-hair tents.
“The people!” she gasped now.
“What people?”
“The people who live in the mountains. The bombs—oh, what will they do about the bombs?”
“They will do the same thing they did when the Russians came.”
Of course. How stupid of her to forget. These people had years of experience with all types of attack. Surely, they had developed ways to deal with them.
Gul spoke again, his voice harsh in the darkness. “They will do what they have always done,” he repeated. “They will die.”
“But—”
“They will die.” He fell away and lay rigid beside her. “First, I hated the Russians. Now I hate the Amriki. They will kill the people just like the Russians did, and then, just like the Russians, they will leave.”
Farida imagined a burst of metal and flame against mud hovels, shrapnel shredding the walls of a tent. She thought of people whose only experience with an airplane was the death that exploded from its belly. She wondered what kind of country would kill so many innocents in the name of tracking down just one man.
She reached for her husband’s hand and laced her fingers with his. “I, too,” she said, her words low and urgent as a vow of love. “I hate the Amriki.”
* * *
The bombing runs continued well past midnight. Gul whispered reassurances and stroked Farida’s hair, easing her into a fitful sleep that at last put a halt to her questions. She had tried to distract herself from the explosions by asking about the shellings of his childhood, inflicted first by the Russians, then by his own people during the ruinous civil war that followed the Russians’ exit.
His uninformative response—he told her only that his family had left Afghanistan because of the fighting—prompted nervous jests as she tried to cover the sound of faraway blasts with words.
“You must have been”—Gul swore beneath his breath as she calculated—“just becoming a young man.” She thought of her own wrenching leave-taking. Sympathy swelled her heart. “How difficult it must have been to abandon everything you knew.”
Finally, she fell asleep. But Gul lay awake till dawn, tormented by the long-buried memories aroused by her questions.
KABUL, 1993
Nur Muhammed, ever averse to strife, spent as little time as possible in the Macroyan flat after his clumsy announcement that he had taken Khurshid as a second wife.
He filled his days calling on different factional leaders, sounding them out, assessing them all, committing to none, trying to determine where the best opportunities lay. During his rare hours at home, the family settled into an uneasy armistice. Maryam treated him with exaggerated respect, rushing to prepare his tea before he left each day, handing him a freshly laundered tunic and a woolen waistcoat brushed free of lint.
Khurshid lingered in the sleeping alcove until Nur Muhammed left. Maryam stormed into it—she herself slept in the main room, with the children—and flung aside curtains drawn against the chill, sniffing the musky air like a feral dog about to devour some small, unfortunate creature.
“Up!” she bellowed, as Khurshid cowered on the sleeping mats. “It is late and we are hungry.”
It was not unusual for Maryam to reach down, wrap her hand in Khurshid’s long, shining hair, and drag her into the main room, releasing her with a flourish, sending Khurshid staggering toward the kitchen alcove.
The children, lolling sleepily on their own mats, giggled. Bibi hissed through her grin, enjoying Khurshid’s discomfort. Only Gul was silent. His own recent introduction to humiliation by the boys of Macroyan, and their unerring aim with the shards of concrete littering the buildings’ courtyards, made him feel sorry for Khurshid, who was, after all, so close to his own age.
Most mornings, after Khurshid finished preparing breakfast for the family and washing the dishes, she did the day’s laundry, making several trips to the communal well in the courtyard and laboriously hauling water up the stairs. She heated it on the coal-burning bukhari stove on the balcony, and Gul watched her covertly as she stirred the mass of heavy cloth in the steaming pot with a stick, then plunged her arms in up to the elbows, working in the harsh soap with her hands, which grew rough and reddened in the chilly air. As soon as she had finished, it was time for the midday meal and then the cleanup, by which time Khurshid’s shoulders sagged and her head drooped from exhaustion. Maryam, too, was always sleepy then. She would make a great show of rolling out her mat and reclining upon it, reciting the day’s marketing list in a bored tone.
&
nbsp; As much as Maryam liked to choose her own food, she refused to venture into this strange, cold city, her discomfort increased by the fact that few women in Kabul wore the burqa and instead bared their faces beneath carelessly wrapped scarves.
“People will think we are ignorant,” Nur Muhammed would say, but once he was out of earshot, Maryam would remind the children that it was better to be thought ignorant than indecent. So it was up to Khurshid to take herself and her naked face off to the market.
“Gul,” she would mumble, just before she dropped off to sleep, “go with your father’s whore. Make sure she speaks to no one and that the merchants don’t cheat her. Don’t let her spend all our money.”
Maryam deemed the markets near Macroyan too expensive. Instead, on her new neighbors’ recommendations, she insisted that Khurshid shop at the bazaars on the outskirts of town. Sometimes, depending on traffic, the jolting bus ride could take as long as an hour, and Gul, from his position near the front of the bus, could see that Khurshid, held upright by the press of women in the rear, used the opportunity to sleep.
Gul, too, found relief in the long ride. It was crowded and hot and impossibly tedious, but at least on the bus he was safe from Fahim, a tall boy who ruled over Macroyan’s swarms of dirty children. With schools closed and mothers who, like Maryam, were coping badly at best with their dislocated lives, the children ran wild. Nur Muhammed’s pains to establish his family’s importance had been for naught. Everyone in Macroyan had been someone where they lived before. The old Soviet towers were packed with former civil servants and businessmen and professors, the latter easily recognized in the courtyard by the stacks of books on the ground before them.
“Books in German, books in French, cheap for you,” one man urged as Gul and Khurshid rushed past every afternoon, even as another wheedled, “Mathematics, chemistry. Educate yourselves.”
In fact, the only thing that set Gul’s family apart was that they were Pashtun in an overwhelmingly Tajik area. In Macroyan, only the Hazara, with their tilted eyes and their strange Shi’a ways, were more distrusted than the Pashtun. Unless Gul was accompanying Khurshid to the bazaar, or making a rare trip with Nur Muhammed, he remained indoors, something more easily accomplished than he expected. Here, his mother proved an unwitting ally, insisting that Khurshid make several wearying trips each day to the well, a job that might otherwise have fallen to Gul, as the strongest. But staying in the flat was only marginally worse than going outdoors and risking the torments of Fahim. At least, though, if he saw Fahim about, he could make a dash for safety. Indoors, there was no escape from Maryam’s misery. His mother had quickly made friends with the women in their building, some of whom also had had to confront the indignity of new, young wives in their husband’s beds, and so shared a heartache that trumped ethnicity.
For hours each day, their pitched voices lifted and sank in litanies of pain, the rhythm breaking only long enough for Maryam to order Khurshid to bring more tea, more almonds, more of her husband’s favorite raisins. Finally, Khurshid complained to Nur Muhammed, or so Gul had surmised from what he could hear on the other side of the curtain.
Nur Muhammed’s voice rose. He worked hard all day, he pointed out to Khurshid, and when he came home, all he wanted was peace—“not squabbling women.” Besides, he continued as Maryam smirked beside Gul, Maryam had enough to do all day with taking care of the children. “It’s not as though,” he said, his tone sounding a threat, “you have any children yet.”
The next morning, after Nur Muhammed left, Maryam managed to stumble into Khurshid as she was carrying fresh tea, causing Khurshid to falter and lose her grasp on the pot, which spilled its steaming contents onto the bare ankle peeking coyly from beneath her pantaloons.
“Aiiii.” Tears trembled in Khurshid’s eyes. She bent over the ankle, lifting the pantaloons to inspect a patch of skin already bubbling an angry scarlet. Gul stared speechless at the exposed curve of calf.
Maryam glanced toward Khurshid and pushed herself up from where she had landed, but softly, on the floor. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I am so very tired. People were complaining last night, keeping me from my sleep. People should not complain. Here, let me help you up.” She righted herself, then took Khurshid’s upper arm, pinching it and hauling the girl so close that their faces nearly touched. “People shouldn’t complain,” Maryam repeated, then released Khurshid. She looked at the ankle. “That’s ugly. What a shame. It might get infected. It will rot and stink. No one will want to be near you.”
That very evening, Nur Muhammed, taking one look at Khurshid’s reddened eyes, her swollen, puffy features, and her sullen bearing, snapped at her to sleep in the main room with the children, and indicated, with a jerk of his head, that Maryam should share the bedroom with him.
This time, it was Khurshid’s turn to cry herself to sleep, although Gul noticed that she did so in near silence, only an occasional sniffle and shudder from beneath her blankets giving her away. In the next room, Maryam and Nur Muhammed sat up laughing and chatting, their lantern providing a line of light below the doorway that flickered late into the evening. In its dim glow, Gul could see Khurshid’s eyes fixed upon it. When Khurshid shared the room with Nur Muhammed, there was never any talking, at least not that Gul could tell, just the noises that left him restless and shifting uncomfortably on his mat until he fell into a sleep from which he awoke wet and ashamed. He wondered if Khurshid continued to stare toward the door when the light was finally extinguished, or if she pulled her blanket tight over her head to drown out the soft, rhythmic sounds that, until recently, she herself had caused.
* * *
Khurshid became so listless that Gul feared for her.
At the market, she turned her head away and so did not see when the vendor laid his thumb boldly on the scale containing the raisins. She said nothing when the baker snagged the pieces of naan hanging from the rusty hook above his stall where the bread had dried stiff in the sun and acquired a powdery coating of street dust, and she shrugged when Gul pointed out the indifferent cut of lamb from the butcher. Maryam, he knew, would have put her nose to the meat, then made such a show of gagging and retching that the butcher would have thrown in another quarter kilo for free. Khurshid, her burn still healing, limped as they left the butcher’s stall, and Gul offered to carry the package for her. She handed it to him without a word.
“I have a little extra money,” he said. “We could take a taxi home.”
“Your mother will be angry.” Khurshid spoke in a whisper.
“I’ll tell her we took the bus.”
“She’ll count the money. She’ll know.”
Gul thought a moment. “I’ll tell her that I did the shopping today.”
Some hair escaped from beneath Khurshid’s scarf. She tucked it back in, too fast for Gul to memorize its bewitching curl. “She’ll never believe that.”
“I’ll tell her I did it because I thought you were too stupid.”
A smile rewarded him. “That, she’ll believe!”
Gul laughed. Khurshid joined in.
“Hssst!” An older man glared at them. Their conduct was unseemly. Khurshid quickly assumed a more serious expression, but Gul caught the mirth in her sideways glance, and he choked as he struggled to contain his own merriment.
“Why,” he asked when they were in the taxi, “do you not wear the burqa?”
She gazed out the window, willing him to look with her. Although some of the women they passed were shrouded in blue, most opted for simple scarves, leaving their faces bare to varying degrees. Gul was used to Jalalabad, where the only women who showed their faces in public were the Kuchi, and he well knew his mother’s opinion of them. But Kabul was different, and the daily parade of pretty girls was one of his favorite things about the city.
“My family thinks—” She paused and blushed.
“What do they think?”
“That only people who are . . . that only people from the countryside wear the burqa.”
He considered her meaning. “Only people who are uneducated.” He took her silence for assent. He voiced the question that had nagged at him ever since he first saw Khurshid.
“Why did you marry my father, then?” He whispered, so the cabdriver would not hear over the cacophony of street noise.
“They made me.”
“Did you not want to?” He had heard, of course, of people who balked at their parents’ choice, and had heard also of the dire consequences that resulted.
Khurshid’s lips twisted. “Oh, I wanted to. I listened to him every time he visited my father. He said such interesting things. And he was so kind. Then.”
Gul could have told her that Nur Muhammed was always kind when he wanted something, but he decided that she had probably figured that out. Besides, it was already the longest conversation he had had with a woman not his relative. He sneaked quick glances at her face, at the smudges of exhaustion beneath her eyes, the hollows beneath her cheekbones. Her lips were cracked and dry. Still, he thought her beautiful. He ordered the taxi to stop a block from Macroyan so that no one would see them arriving in such style. When she stepped from the car, the pain in her ankle made her stumble, and she grabbed his arm and leaned against him. Her hair smelled of almond oil. Gul inhaled, then pulled away in confusion. But Khurshid held fast, shaking. She paused on the street, staring toward Macroyan’s forbidding towers. Gul was aware of the impropriety of the moment, but he, too, lingered, excited by her nearness. He told himself he was taking the opportunity to scan the area for signs of Fahim, but nothing registered except his own regret when Khurshid exhaled and dropped his arm, setting off toward Macroyan with firm and resolute steps despite her injury.
They crossed the space between apartment blocks without trouble, finding it unusually empty. Then Gul saw why. People clustered around a taxi at the far end of the block, whose driver scurried into their building and reemerged moments later carrying a bundle and followed by Maryam, berating him with every step, much to the amusement of the crowd. She turned upon Gul as soon as she saw him.