by Gwen Florio
“But what is this?” Nur Muhammed looked first at the doorframe, then scanned the dim interior. Gul took in the shock on his face as he saw what was there—or rather, what was no longer there. No rugs on the floor, no cabinet shelves neatly arranged with Maryam’s cooking utensils, no sleeping mats rolled against the wall, folded blankets stacked just so atop them. Maryam stood motionless, Bibi behind her. The little children crowded the doorway to an anteroom, poised for retreat. Khurshid did not even rise upon Nur Muhammed’s entrance. She sat in her corner, head lowered, rocking.
Nur Muhammed crossed the room, put his hand beneath her chin, and tilted her face upward. It was much improved, but Gul saw her as Nur Muhammed did—the swollen eyes, the lips cracked and crusted, the cheekbones yellowed with fading bruises.
Nur Muhammed forced her to her feet. “Who did this to her?” He looked accusingly at Maryam, then at Gul. “Well?”
“Soldiers came.” Gul hoped it would suffice.
“And?”
“They took our things.”
Nur Muhammed still clenched Khurshid’s chin. He turned her face toward Gul. “How did this happen?”
“They beat her,” Gul whispered.
“Only her?” Nur Muhammed looked at Maryam and Bibi, conspicuously unblemished.
“We hid.” Bibi spoke up, then ducked back behind Maryam.
“Not her?” Ice frosted Nur Muhammed’s words.
“She wasn’t here,” Bibi said.
Nur Muhammed’s face was so awful that Gul felt compelled to help his sister. “She was at the market. And when she came home—” He stopped.
“They beat her.” Nur Muhammed filled in the blank.
“Yes.”
“And you did not protect her.”
Gul thought he had known shame ever since the soldiers appeared at their gate, but he realized that was some earlier, lesser emotion compared to the crawling feeling inside him now.
“They had guns.” Bibi spoke up.
“How do you know? You were hiding.”
“It’s true.” Gul directed the words toward the floor.
“Do you think that when men with guns came to attack my family, I would stand aside? Do you think anyone would have hurt my family without killing me first?”
Gul could not even summon the strength to shake his head.
A rasping noise startled him. For a moment, he could not even place it as Khurshid’s voice, so long had it been since he’d heard her speak. “They caught him and held him. There were many. He could do nothing to stop them.”
There was a terrible, long silence. Gul prayed for an end to Nur Muhammed’s interrogation. Maryam’s lips moved. Bibi went ashen.
“Stop them from what?”
From beating her. But Gul’s lips would not form the words.
“I am a soldier. I know the ways of soldiers. And you”—he let go of Khurshid’s jaw and wiped his hand on his tunic—“going to market alone. Is this your custom, whenever I am away? To go out on your own and consort with men?”
“Gul goes with me,” Khurshid said in her new strangled voice.
“But not that day?”
Gul tried to remember where he had been. He had slipped out of the house early to scavenge with his friend Amer. It seemed so long ago. He had not seen Amer since. His family had wisely disappeared as soon as the soldiers left. He did not know what had happened to the women of Amer’s family. Maybe Amer had protected them, and died for doing so, the way he himself should have died protecting Khurshid.
Nur Muhammed said he knew the ways of soldiers. Gul wondered if it was from firsthand experience. His thoughts ran on unbearably as Nur Muhammed glowered at them all in turn. Just as he had convinced himself that his father could not possibly have done such things, Nur Muhammed put his hand to Khurshid’s throat and grabbed a handful of her kameez, tearing the thin, worn cotton from neck to hem, revealing her breasts, bruised purple and yellow like fruit gone bad, and the still-red scar between them.
“Who did this?”
No one spoke.
“You let them touch you.”
“They had guns,” Khurshid whispered.
“You let them defile you.” He slapped her.
Her head rocked back, but she held her stance. “They had guns,” she said, louder. “They were many.”
He slapped her again. “After everything I’ve done for you, you shamelessly give yourself away.”
“They hurt me.”
For days, Khurshid had crept around the house like a broken thing. Now she stood straight, her arms at her sides, not bothering to hold the rags of her clothing across her mutilated flesh, looking Nur Muhammed in the eye, keeping her gaze on him even as he struck her again.
“You bring dishonor to my home.”
Slap.
“You shame my wife and daughter by your very presence.”
Slap.
“Whore.”
Fresh blood trickled from the corner of Khurshid’s mouth. She stooped and felt behind her for her torn kameez. She pulled it around her and moved in halting steps toward the door. Gul made as if to help her, but Maryam crossed the room and held him back.
“Let her go.” She raised her voice. “What will people say of your sister, a young unspoiled girl under the same roof with such a one?”
Something relaxed in Nur Muhammed’s face at her words. Maryam kept talking. “Let the whore go back to the streets where she belongs. After she is gone, I will wash everything she touched. You will take tea now. Please, you must sit. I am sorry for the bare floor, but you must be tired. Tomorrow, we will get new things.”
“Tomorrow,” said Nur Muhammed, “we go to Pakistan.”
“Yes,” said Maryam. “I think that is best. Now, please. Sit. Bibi, your father is home. Make tea.”
* * *
“Pakistan!” said Khurshid. “I wondered where you went. I came back, you know, but the house was empty. I wanted to thank your mother for her kindness to me. I have always wanted to go to Pakistan. There is no war there, I think.”
“No.” Gul thought that not even the annual bloody clashes between Sunni and Shi’a during each other’s holidays, nor the interminable guerrilla attacks in Balochistan, between Pakistan and Iran and Afghanistan, by those determined to create a new Pashtun republic, qualified as war.
“It is very prosperous there, I have heard.”
“Very.” Gul could not bring himself to describe the markets, with their firm, ripe vegetables piled high in artfully arranged pyramids, the carts wafting spicy scents of kebabs and samosas and fresh-baked naan, the people riding in shiny new cars, not clumsy tongas pulled by bony horses with sores oozing wetly onto cracked leather harnesses.
He sensed Khurshid looking at him with new attention, taking in his clothing of heavy, tightly woven cotton, the new, knitted waistcoat, the sandals of leather rather than cheap rubber. She took his hand between her own, so that he could feel her calluses pressing against his smooth palm.
“Your father did well in Pakistan. He was good to me, you know.”
Gul jerked in surprise.
“Yes, truly. He only did what he had to do. Any other man would have killed me. But he has found protectors for me. It’s not enough, though. I cannot live with this man here, so of course there must be”—she raised her chin and spoke almost defiantly—“there must be others.”
Gul found it difficult to look at her. Anger and shame churned within him. She was exactly as he’d first assumed when the shopkeeper had brought him into the room—a common whore. But his father, seemingly without a twinge of conscience, had put her in this position, likely even congratulating himself for his generosity.
Throughout his silence, Khurshid held his hand, and he was very conscious of her touch, of her nearness, of the burqa that had slipped down, revealing more of her creamy shoulders and part of her bare arms. “And you?” she asked. “What of your life?”
“I am married, just this past year. Soon she will have a chi
ld.”
Khurshid drew circles on his palm with the tip of her forefinger. “Soon? So your wife is very large now?”
Gul could not speak.
Her finger moved lightly up his arm, beneath his sleeve. “You are a young man. That must be difficult for you.” Her finger traced its way back down his arm to his wrist. She took his hand back in hers and brought it to her breast.
Gul groaned.
He closed his eyes as Khurshid lay back on the mat and pulled him atop her, sliding down his shalwar with practiced movements and guiding him to a pleasure more intense than anything he had ever experienced with Farida.
* * *
Gul came home in the evening, as he had for so many recently, in a foul temper. He stomped through the door, into the women’s quarters, and slammed a stack of naan onto the oilcloth in front of Farida, and then left without so much as a word or a glance.
She felt the aunties’ eyes upon her. Even though that sort of behavior was customary among men, she could not recall Gul treating her so indifferently, not when they were alone, and certainly not in front of others. In fact, his attentiveness had resulted in much sly teasing about the charms with which Farida had presumably bewitched him.
“They are like children when they are angry,” one of the aunties said now, after an awkward silence. The others chimed in eagerly on the familiar subject of the unfathomable and inferior ways of men, their animated chatter giving Farida time to blink back the tears that stung her eyelids. One of the aunties leaned over and patted Farida’s arm.
“He won’t stay angry for long. After all, you are about to have his son.” The comment sparked a new, albeit an equally familiar, round of conversation about Farida’s child. Surely it would be a boy, they agreed, trying to cheer her. She smiled wanly at their good-hearted attempts, reminding herself of her fortune in finding such acceptance by Gul’s family.
The aunties were full of stories about brides deemed unsuitable not just by their husbands but also by the women of the family—young wives who did not know their place, who sulked and did not show proper deference to their new mothers-in-law, who did not help about the house, and who, over time, fell victim to an uncommon number of household accidents. Razor-sharp knives mistakenly came down upon their fingers as they stood side by side with their husband’s female relatives, chopping onions. Hot oil splattered from pans onto their arms and faces. Pots of boiling water tipped from the stove and splashed down their legs. In the worst cases, a defiant bride would just have time to register the fist between her shoulders before stumbling into the fire, her loose clothing a shimmering veil of flame. Some survived, but really, given the future faced by a scarred and crippled woman, such brides were considered lucky if they simply burned to death.
Farida thought of the life she had envisioned when her father married her off to Gul and wondered, if her husband had been a different sort of man, whether she, too, might have welcomed a fiery end compared to the slow agony of such a marriage. She saw them, sometimes, these wives. At family gatherings, there might be a woman sitting to the side, speaking just when spoken to, claiming only small bits of food for herself, her eyes downcast and dead.
“Poor Siddiqa. She has lost her face,” an auntie said of one such woman at a recent wedding.
Farida looked at Siddiqa with new curiosity. Indeed, there was nothing of the play of emotion across her face that provided clues to personality. Farida could not tell if she were soft or stubborn, sober or silly. Still, the aunties’ sympathy moved her. Usually, these broken women were presumed to have brought their fate upon themselves. But there was also an acknowledgment, rarely discussed, of the suffering that an uncooperative husband—one who beat his wife, and used her cruelly and insistently, even through her pregnancies, only to take a new young wife when she became exhausted and old before her time—could inflict upon a woman.
Farida knew she was fortunate to have a husband who treated her so gently, especially as her pregnancy entered its last phase. The aunties had warned her that relations with her husband could hurt the child, and had hinted that Gul, being a young man—“But they are like that at any age, no?”—would try to avail himself of her body, anyway. Farida, well acquainted with Gul’s urgent need, nodded knowingly.
But he had begun to stay away, spending long afternoons out of the house and sleeping in another room at night. That was almost certainly the source of his testiness, she reassured herself. That, and the pressure of Nur Muhammed’s plan.
That night, though, he came to their room. Farida, who had dozed off, heard the door open and moved heavily to one side of the sleeping mat to make room for him. But he stood motionless in the doorway, not turning on the light, even though she could tell by the way the generators had fallen silent that the electricity was on.
“Hamidullah spoke to me,” he said without preamble.
“Hamidullah?” Farida remembered the young Talib who had been spending so much time at the house, and who had recently turned up as the new guard at Face the Future.
“He says you put your burqa aside when you are among Those People.”
Farida sighed. This was not the encounter she hoped to have. “I work indoors. No strangers see me.”
“That Man is there. And other men.”
Farida did not reply. Martin and the others were like relatives, she wanted to say—the sort of relatives one did not much like, but familiar nonetheless. But then she thought of the men who visited Nur Muhammed on such a regular basis, Hamidullah among them, men she knew by their voices but whose faces she had never seen and who, if they were to look upon hers, risked a quick and ruthless end. Many had been friends with Nur Muhammed for decades, yet they had never met his wife or daughters.
Gul’s stubborn silence awaited an explanation.
“It is impossible,” she said. “I cannot do my work in a burqa. The filing, the writing. And to read—it strains my eyes if I wear it. I wear my dupatta, always. I’m sure Hamidullah told you that,” she said, trying to keep the spite from her voice. Although the man would surely be useful for the plan she knew Nur Muhammed to be hatching, he was an intolerable busybody, the sort of man who, she thought, would cause a wife to lose her face.
“Why do you still go there?” Gul asked, ignoring her words. “You should not leave the house at all now. It is dangerous for you.”
She strained to see his features in the darkness. He stood straight and still, an inky silhouette, pronouncing judgment upon her with each measured phrase.
He should know why. He needed the information she provides. Because his father demanded it. Their plan—the one they think me ignorant of—will succeed because of me. She sensed that to speak the truth aloud would only stoke his ire. Still, her own anger surged.
“If your father approves,” she said, silkily placing the blame on Nur Muhammed, even as she reminded her husband of his powerlessness against his father’s wishes, “I will gladly stay away from the Amriki. I would be happy never to see them again.” She paused and tamped down the flare of rebellion, reminding herself that to voice such vexation was impermissible for a woman. “I’m sorry if I have given you cause for concern.”
“My wife is not a whore,” Gul snapped.
Farida recoiled from the ugly word. Hamidullah, she thought. She wanted to ask Gul to stay with her—even in this moment of discord, she missed his comforting warmth—but thought it might only offer more proof of her apparent wantonness. Besides, Gul left her no time to issue an invitation, but left as abruptly as he had come.
Thirty
KABUL, JULY 2002
It took weeks of pleading on Liv’s part, but Farida finally succumbed to her desire to visit a real Afghan market, not just the tourist shops on Chicken Street.
Farida resisted at first, even enlisting Martin’s help in protesting that it would be unseemly for a foreign woman to venture out unaccompanied. His vehemence shocked them both. “The markets are dangerous. I forbid it.”
Farida saw Li
v’s back stiffen at the word “forbid,” a flash of defiance, infectious. Her own shoulders tightened. Her chin lifted as the words slipped from her lips. “Dangerous? I myself shop in them all the time. And yet here I stand before you, having survived such a dangerous experience, day after day.” She dared not look at Liv, fearful of seeing her lips twitch toward a smile, the sort of thing that could nudge them both into full-blown laughter.
“But you just said—” Martin was befuddled by her lightning change of opinion.
“Oh, la, we women. You know how we are. Like the wind, blowing this way and that. Come, Liv. Let us go before I change my mind again. Mr. Stoellner”—with Liv, it was first names; Martin, never—“I promise to bring your wife back safely from our sojourn among the very dangerous vegetables and household goods.”
She swept from the office, savoring her sense of power over Martin, conspiracy with Liv. For all the unexpected and growing warmth of her relations with Maryam and Bibi and the aunties, her time with Liv was something different, a harkening back to her bond with Alia, a match of wit and shared experience of the outside world.
Liv named a market to the startled driver. He turned to Farida for approval. The man’s hesitation chased the smile from Liv’s face. “You’d better tell him politely that I’m not kidding,” Liv said. “I don’t have the right Pashto words for that yet.”
Farida lowered her burqa over her face and spoke the necessary phrases. The driver called to the guard and the gate swung open. A beggar in a green burqa slipped through. The guard shouted and reached for her, but Farida waved him away, pressing a few afghanis into the unfortunate’s hand. The woman gasped as their fingers met.
“It is too much,” she murmured after she recovered herself.
“It is not enough,” Farida corrected her.
“Little mother, if I may be so bold,” the woman ventured, her voice shaking.
“Ho,” Farida encouraged her.
“I would like to thank you by name.”