by Gwen Florio
“Bearable.” Liv glanced again at Martin.
Howard followed her gaze. “Your husband?”
“Yes.”
“He won’t get anything from them, you know.” His expression didn’t change, but Liv bent toward him, as though he had urgently beckoned her near.
“What do you mean?”
“Those journalists. They’ve been here awhile. They’re not some green freelancers who will talk too much to someone just because he’s a Westerner, and at one of their own parties.”
Liv waved her hand in front of her face, as though clearing away the room’s cigarette fug would help her focus. “I don’t understand.”
“I mean, they know a spook when they see one.” He leaned in, his body pushed tight against hers, so that anyone passing by would have thought it just another party come-on. He placed his lips against her ear, speaking fast. “They know it, and believe me, so does everyone he’s ever talked to. Maybe not some of these newer reporters. But don’t forget, they’ve got English-speaking interpreters listening in on every word, and those guys figured out early how to double-dip.”
His beard scraped her cheek. “The interpreters take the money we’re paying them and then turn around and sell what they hear from us to people here who are happy to pay a lot more. Half the bad actors in Kabul, maybe more, know exactly what you’re up to. Face the Future. That’s a good one. See a Secret Agent, we call it. That fake-shabby little NGO is no cover at all. It just means you’re not nearly as safe as you would be if your husband were working directly for the CIA, instead of this sort of nonsense.”
“Bullshit. We’re not working for the CIA.” But she hesitated. Images clicked rapid-fire through her brain—the extravagant hotel bill in Islamabad, Martin’s list of questions. His reports, his fucking reports.
Of course.
“Bullshit yourself. Now,” he said, eyes flickering to something past him, “I’m going to kiss you to make this look good, and also because it’s been too long since I’ve kissed a woman.”
His tongue twisted inside her mouth. Liv sagged against him and he gripped her shoulders, holding her up. She reached and pulled his head even tighter to hers, kissing him back, hard.
“What’s this, what’s this?” Martin’s voice rang loud and close.
“Sorry, mate.” Liv noticed the exaggerated accent. “Your wife, of course. Don’t know what got into me. Apologies all around.” He bent at the waist, then straightened and backed away.
Liv looked at Martin, red-faced, breathing hard, a bit of beery foam cresting his thick lips, then at Howard. “Thank you,” she mouthed.
“He just kissed you without any encouragement on your part?” Martin jerked her arm. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Liv twisted in his grasp as he dragged her toward the door, looking back at Howard. Compassion washed his features, the look of someone who knew he’d made her face the truth about herself.
* * *
Liv tore a piece of paper from a legal pad, ran the point of her pencil down the middle, and wrote two headings at the top: “Reasons to Stay” and “Reasons to Go.”
She looked over her shoulder. Martin was at work in the anteroom he’d claimed as his office.
“Stay” was easy. And not. She tried to imagine herself explaining the appeal of the words that stacked up so quickly on the page.
“People.” The women who, no matter how poor or sick or merely exhausted, insisted upon preparing tea, pressing her hands between their rough ones, exclaiming at their softness. The children, despite their penchant for picking her pocket or fighting one another bloody to get at whatever treats she might distribute. She reminded herself that even the boys had gone years without the steadying effects of school, and the girls, most of them, had been effectively imprisoned indoors during the years of Taliban rule. And the men . . . here she had to dig deeper for sympathy. But so many lurched through Kabul’s streets on crutches or in clumsy, hand-pedaled tricycles that served as wheelchairs, limbs blown off by land mines. She didn’t know who had it worse—the younger ones, who’d spent their adult lives fighting in one conflict or another, or the older men, who remembered times of peace and relative prosperity.
“Bazaars.” Their panoply of scent and color. The snaggletoothed man who gripped a thick piece of leather between his bare toes, knife flashing as he sawed away at it, carving out a sole. More slices of the knife yielded a vamp, a tongue, a toe cap, all of which he attached to the sole with a needle like a small spear and leather thread. When he saw Liv watching, he displayed the completed shoe with a flourish. Or the noisy row of tinsmith shops, where men hammered out teapots and trays, each stall’s wares seemingly identical, but each with its own loyal clientele. Liv wondered if she’d ever be content with factory-made goods again.
“The land.” At once so harsh and so achingly beautiful. Her eyes, which initially saw nothing but unending variations on beige, had learned to seek out color—the dust-coated green of the spindly trees that somehow clung to life along the city’s boulevards, the scarlet splashes of the ubiquitous rosebushes, the sky like a canopy of sapphire silk.
And, finally: “Farida.”
Just the other day, in the office, Farida had upended her bag in her search for the day’s lesson. A leather-bound book slid out amid the papers, falling open upon the table to reveal a pen-and-ink illustration of a young girl with pale crimped hair, whose stiff garments exposed both arm and calf. The girl gazed curiously at the dark bottle in her hand, its large label commanding, “Drink.”
“Alice!” Liv and Farida dove simultaneously for the book. Liv’s hand reached it first. She bent her face to it, breathing in leather and paper and ink, the scent taking her back to long childhood hours in the crook of a willow tree, spent in the company of a girl whose curiosity led her to ever-stranger places, who did her best to adjust to incomprehensible circumstances, but who inevitably called stupidity what it was.
“Oh.” Liv closed the book and caressed the cover. She blinked back tears, undone by the unexpected reminder of home. “This was my favorite book when I was a little girl.”
Farida’s hand, reaching for the book, fell to her side. She smiled. “Mine, too. Like nothing else I’d read. Those silly rhymes.”
Liv closed her eyes and let the words come. “ ‘You are old, Father William,’ the young man said, ‘and your hair has become very white,’ um . . .”
“ ‘And yet you incessantly stand on your head,’ ” Farida prompted.
“ ‘Do you think, at your age, it is right?’ ” they chorused together, laughing.
A sudden bond, something they shared that no one else around them understood, so that the next time an officious guard crowded too near as they passed through a checkpoint, Farida was able to relieve Liv’s tension by whispering, “ ‘There’s a porpoise close behind us, and he’s treading on my tail.’ ” Kindness and humor, the ingredients of friendship, something Liv had not dared to hope she’d find. Yet there it was.
Intangibles, all. But they nurtured a fierce and growing attachment. And then there was the matter of her work, the chance to help the women so desperately in need of it. If that, indeed, was their mission.
Liv moved her pencil to the next line and wrote a final word, letter by reluctant letter: “Failure.”
Stay, or else she’d have to face them all, the colleagues who’d remember her casual dismissal of their skepticism. Her mother, her very silence a rebuke. Liv would find herself back in the library carrels, books at her elbow. Or, at her computer, scrolling through websites, compiling information to buttress theory instead of talking to people in person to collect facts. Which no one seemed to want to hear.
The pencil hovered over the paper. How to put in writing, even privately, the suspicions raised by the journalist at the party? Which, if she forced herself to admit it, had been there all along.
“Hey.” Martin stepped from the anteroom. Liv crumpled the paper, slipped it into her poc
ket, and pulled a UN report toward her.
“Where’s Farida?”
“We’re doing most of our work in the house these days. Why do you ask?” As if she didn’t know. Farida’s presence in the office acted as a magnet for Martin’s gaze, the pull nearly palpable. Liv had to bite her tongue against the sort of comments she once made about Mandy. But at least she knew there was no risk of Martin acting on his feelings. To do so would put both his and Farida’s lives in danger. His crush, as Liv thought of it, would likely be forgotten the minute they left Afghanistan, if not long before.
She thought of the list in her pocket, the blank lines awaiting her verdict beneath “Reasons to Go.”
“Martin.”
He fell into the chair beside her desk and blew out his breath, his disappointment obvious. “What?”
“What if we were to leave early?”
Just like that, she had his full attention. “Are you crazy? We’re only a few months in. I’ve barely begun my work. Our work.”
“And what work is that, exactly? All this stuff we’re collecting on women—we don’t do anything with it. But what about the other information we’re gathering? What are we—you—doing with that, Martin?” This was as close as she’d come to confronting him directly.
He slammed a hand onto the desk, sending a stack of papers cascading to the floor.
“Jesus, Liv. You sound like a broken record. We’ve been through this. We can’t initiate any programs until we know what we’re dealing with. Why is that so hard to get through your head?”
He rose and stalked back into his office. If there had been a door, Liv thought, he would have slammed it.
Liv collected the documents from the floor and rearranged them on her desk, squaring them with exaggerated care. She thought of Farida’s bitter words in the car. She thought of the escalating attacks: How much longer would she be able to enjoy their outings, or even make them at all?
Furious sounds came from Martin’s office, a keyboard clacking triple time. She slid her hand into her pocket and extracted a ring with its three lonely keys: house, desk drawer, and strongbox, nothing like the bulky set—house, library main door, office door, door and trunk for both cars, gym locker (rarely used), bike lock (ditto)—that had weighed down her purse in Philadelphia. She glanced over her shoulder, twisted a key in the drawer lock, extracted the strongbox and unlocked it, too. Stacks of crisp American hundred-dollar bills lined up within, Kabul’s currency of choice for anyone but its current residents.
Martin’s keyboard rattled away. Liv calculated, then filched a bill from the bottom of each stack, twenty in all. Two thousand should be more than enough for the cab ride to the airport and the UN shuttle to Islamabad, where she could catch the direct flight to Dubai, then London and finally home. She locked the box, replaced it in the drawer, and locked the drawer. She walked across the courtyard to the house, nodding to Ismail without looking directly at him, not so much out of courtesy but because she didn’t want to know if his own gaze went straight to the rectangular packet in the pocket she’d insisted the tailor sew into her shalwar. Impossible—the shalwar was comfortably loose, and draped with the kameez besides.
Later in the house, safely alone, she retrieved a kitchen knife and carried it into the bedroom. She tugged her carry-on bag from beneath the bed, dislodging a cloud of dust as it banged the bed frame. She ran the knife down the satin lining, creating a three-inch slit along the seam, and deposited the cash, warm from her pocket.
She filled the suitcase with a day’s worth of clothing—underwear, slacks, a blouse she hadn’t worn in months, a few toiletries. Something she could change into in the airport in Dubai so she wouldn’t look too out of place.
She kicked the bag back under the bed with a sense of satisfaction. There. If she had to leave in a hurry, she was ready.
Her pocket crackled as she turned to go. Had she missed a bill? No, it was just the list she’d started in the office, before Martin had interrupted her. He hadn’t answered her question.
She carried the paper into the kitchen, smoothed it on the table, and again picked up a pencil.
Under “Reasons to Go” she wrote a single word, as unambiguous as the “Reasons to Stay” were vague:
Death.
Twenty-Nine
Gul and Khurshid sat side by side on the mat, Gul with his shalwar pulled up and drawn more tightly than necessary around his waist, Khurshid with her burqa wrapped around her like an inadequate blanket. As she spoke, the awareness of her bare skin beneath the burqa competed with her words for Gul’s attention.
“I was sick for a long time after that day, as you know.”
The soldiers had passed what felt like hours in the family’s courtyard, as though unable to believe their good fortune in encountering a woman as comely as Khurshid. This was not the slow-witted daughter and her elderly mother from the home next door, to be perfunctorily raped and cast aside. Gul feared they would never leave.
But they were still soldiers, and when the commander finally called to them, they reluctantly assembled in the center of the courtyard. Some hoisted carpets, others toted cooking utensils. Even Bibi’s little doll went with them, dangling incongruously from an outsize paw. The commander looked back at Khurshid, lying broken and bloodied in the dirt. He affixed the bayonet to his gun and placed the tip of the blade between her breasts.
“Make it quick,” Gul prayed.
But the commander merely drew the bayonet from the middle of Khurshid’s chest, lengthening the earlier cut, trailing a scarlet thread down her torso. “We should skin her, eh?” the commander said, lifting the gun. “And hang her carcass from the gate, like the sheep she is.” The men laughed again, but they also looked impatient, burdened as they were, standing in the late-afternoon sun, with the unaccustomed effect of alcohol beginning to make itself felt. Some of them looked greenish, and as the commander waited for a response, one of the men leaned to the side and vomited. Even the commander appeared confused, as though he had forgotten why they were there. He walked to the gate, his men straggling through it behind him.
The two holding Gul let him go. He pitched forward onto the dirt, listening to their retreating footsteps. He assumed Khurshid was dead. She had not so much as twitched when the bayonet parted her skin as easily as a fingernail drawn down a peach.
It did not occur to him to look for his mother and Bibi. He would be grateful to them, later, for saying nothing about it, but he also knew they kept silent to disguise their own shame at the fact that after the attack of the soldiers, it was the women of Nur Muhammed’s household who took things in hand.
* * *
“But I did wake up,” Khurshid reminded him.
“Yes.” They sat in silence awhile longer, neither wishing to speak of what followed.
Nur Muhammed did not return for more than a week. Long enough for Maryam, marshaling resources that Gul had never suspected, to force herself unaccompanied into the streets of central Kabul, wheedling and browbeating passersby until she had begged enough afghanis to purchase a worn shalwar kameez and ragged burqa for Khurshid, a single pot and some limp vegetables, a chip of strong soap, and two thin blankets. Gul and Bibi huddled beneath one, the little children between them, while Maryam cradled Khurshid in her arms at night, soothing her with quiet clucking noises when Khurshid woke herself with raw, hoarse screams. Despite this nighttime tenderness, by day Maryam was as brusque as ever, wordlessly bathing Khurshid’s unspeakable wounds every few hours, cleaning them of pus and scabs, ordering her to at least drink something.
After a few days, Khurshid could sit up and swallow a few sips of tea. After a few more, she let herself be pulled to her feet and took several hesitant steps before sagging against Maryam. Her once-lustrous hair drooped in brittle hanks about her bruised face. Not once since the soldiers left had she looked at Gul. She spent most of her time sitting in a corner, staring at the wall, her hands moving in the mindless tasks that Maryam gave her, using a shard of
crockery to cut a potato Maryam had managed to procure, or scuttling across the floor on all fours, listlessly sweeping it with a leafy twig Maryam had broken from a tree in the park outside the presidential palace—one of the few places in the city that had not been stripped of its greenery.
Gul watched his mother watching Khurshid. Maryam pursed her lips, creased her brow, muttered darkly to herself. Once, she broke from such a reverie, turning to Gul so suddenly that he stepped back. “Maybe we should take her away. Before—”
“Take her where? Before what?” But he knew, or at least he knew what, if not where. Before Nur Muhammed got home and risked everyone’s lives by avenging Khurshid’s honor.
Gul did not want Khurshid to go away. He imagined the scene when Nur Muhammed arrived, his father’s rage, his vows for vengeance. Gul wondered if his father would let him be part of that mission, and he passed long, fiercely satisfying moments imagining the hairy commander on the ground just as Khurshid had been, a bayonet pressed to his chest. Gul thought if he were to give that bayonet the merest shove, it would feel like slitting a sleeping mat—a bit of initial resistance and then the quick slide into the interior, slashing downward to enlarge the opening, the wholly enjoyable spill of the contents. He wanted to be the one to announce triumphantly to Khurshid that her tormentors had been dispatched, that she was avenged. She would look at him with her former shining gaze tinged with a new respect and appreciation.
So certain was he of this scenario that when Nur Muhammed returned, Gul missed the warning signs—the way Maryam hung back, her face set, her shoulders squared, rather than hurrying toward him with her usual commanding officiousness. Gul leapt to his feet when his father appeared in the broken doorway, long splinters still hanging from the frame.