by Gwen Florio
“Please God, please God, please God,” it pleaded through chattering teeth. She leaned the mattress against the window and lay down behind it. She folded her elbows around her ears, her instructor’s voice from those long-ago orientation sessions echoing in them: “Above all, protect your head.”
One hand opened and closed, wishing for the Beretta on which she’d uselessly trained. She could hear the multiple shots that made one weapon against dozens impractical. She longed for the self-administered escape a gun would have provided against the mob outside. Would she have had the courage to turn the gun on herself? The mob’s roar deepened. Yes, Liv thought uselessly, she would have. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her lips moved, but she couldn’t hear what she was saying.
* * *
“We will find her there! The whore who consorts with foreigners! She shames us all!”
The men, led by Nur Muhammed and Hamidullah, advanced up the street with looks of anticipation. Hands disappeared beneath kameez and emerged with Afridi knives. Men scooped up the heavy chunks of broken concrete that littered the sidewalk and gutters. Those with Kalashnikovs raised them high, occasionally pulling a trigger. They moved as one, mouths open wide in bearded faces, breathing in excited unison.
Gul pulled Farida behind the gate, out of the line of sight of the approaching men. She slumped against the wall. He grasped her arms. “Where is it? The device? We must return it to them.”
She felt herself falling through a long, deep darkness. There was no time to make him understand that it was too late; it was enough that he believed her.
He studied her, and then, with a quick movement, pulled the burqa from her body. As she stood frozen in shock, he lifted the device from her shoulders and draped it over his own.
“No. Please, no.” She reached for him, but he stepped back, gesturing toward the device. “I will disable it. I know how. Go, now, to That Woman. You’ll be safe there.” He touched her, a final brush of fingertips against her cheek, then pushed her toward the house. “Run.”
The courtyard seemed at least an acre across. Farida stumbled toward the house, shouting and sobbing Liv’s name, banging her fists against the locked door. Again she shrieked for Liv. “It’s me! Farida!” Unendurable moments passed. Inside, heavy things fell. The door opened a crack. Liv peered over a jumble of furniture, her face chalky. “Dear God, what are you doing here?”
“You must help. Get the police. ISAF. Please. My husband.” She turned, just in time to see someone in a ragged burqa pull the compound’s gate wide and stand a moment within full view of the mob before turning and racing across the compound toward Face the Future.
* * *
Martin moved to drop the bar behind Face the Future’s metal door. How often had he complained about the building’s narrow windows that dimmed the interior, the roughness of its concrete walls? Now he gave thanks for the fortresslike aspect of both.
A widow ran ahead of the mob. Who knows what she had done to provoke their wrath? It didn’t matter. He could imagine only too well her fate when they caught her. He turned away from the window so he wouldn’t see. A headline flashed through his mind: “American Saves Afghan Widow.” A way to erase the unpleasantness with Farida, to redeem himself.
He lifted the bar. Pushed the door open just far enough to admit the beggar. The bar crashed back into place. “You’ll be safe here,” he said, fishing in his fear-addled brain for the correct Pashto words as he gave the bar a final shove to secure it.
He turned and looked into the face of Farida’s husband.
* * *
Farida clutched Liv’s hands in her own. “You must come, you must come. The soldiers. They will listen to you. We must stop him.”
“Who?” Liv dug her feet against the concrete floor. She was taller, but Farida had the strength born of terror and dragged her through the door.
“My husband. He has a bomb. Not his. Those men. But I took it from them. And then he took it from me.”
“A what?”
“Please. We must get to him before—” Farida pushed the door open and pulled Liv into the courtyard. “Before it kills us all.”
* * *
The man stood incongruous in the burqa. He pushed the headpiece up above his face but clutched the rest robelike around his body.
Martin edged away from him. Call ISAF, he thought. But he’d switched off the satellite phone, and powering it up involved a time-consuming series of steps. He backed against his desk, feeling behind him with one hand for something that could be used as a weapon. A pen rolled to the floor, the sound of its landing swallowed by the din outside. Blows rained upon the door. The bar jumped in its frame.
“What do you want from me?”
“I want nothing.” His words were soft, silky. “I have a gift for you.”
Martin’s gut went liquid as he ran through the possibilities. A knife? A bullet? The bare hands of the mob?
“A gift from me,” Gul continued. “And especially from my wife, and from our child, and from all of the Afghan people. Something for you Amriki. Something that we gave the Russians before you and the British before them and all the others who came before them.”
Farida’s husband reached for the bar.
“Don’t!” Martin grabbed at his arm but was thrown to the floor.
The door swung open. Nur Muhammed and the others burst through.
Martin tried to crawl away, but Gul grasped his wrist and pulled him to his feet, holding him as he doffed the burqa, then moved his other hand toward his waist. Martin’s uncomprehending gaze followed the motion toward what he wore there.
* * *
Farida and Liv careened into the courtyard, Liv pulling backward with all her strength, Farida dragging her implacably onward. Shouts rang out around them, and then Liv heard nothing at all.
The ground heaved skyward. Farida’s hands fell away. Something slammed Liv down. Flakes brushed her face. She opened her eyes and saw a slow shower of white and thought it was snow, but no, it was summer, even though she felt cold. Bits of debris and paper sifted from the sky, landing in soft heaps atop unmoving bodies. Something was wrong with her ears. They felt as though they’d been stuffed with cotton, sound indistinguishable beyond a muffled hum. She cut her eyes to the right, afraid to move her head. Across the compound, the office was a jumble of rubble and flame. Martin had gone there. Gone.
She rolled her eyes to the left. Farida writhed a few feet away, one leg laid open, blood pulsing in scarlet spurts into the gray landscape. Her mouth open and closed, forming the words my baby, my baby. Liv forgot about her head and maneuvered onto her side. One of her arms didn’t work. She dragged herself to Farida and with her good hand tried to apply pressure above the wound, but the blood leapt mockingly through her fingers. She pulled herself onto Farida and knelt atop her thigh, putting all her weight on it, screaming into the suffocating hush.
Farida!
Farida!
Farida!
Thirty-Seven
KABUL, AUGUST 2002
The man at the desk flipped open a laptop. A second man adjusted a video camera atop a tripod and aimed it at Liv. Each wore a suit and tie in a nod to the U.S. embassy’s ostentatious air-conditioning against the outside heat. Despite the corporate mufti, they had economy of motion and the straight-shouldered bearing of military men. The man behind the camera pressed a button. A light glowed red.
“Full name.”
“Liv Laurensen Stoellner.” Face soft and swollen, a voice scraped over jagged stones.
“Age?”
She turned her face toward her questioner so that she could see him with her good eye. A trail of stitches, coarse black ends poking out like rude hairs, tugged at one side of her mouth. Two days earlier, at a military clinic in Bagram, a medic had spoken to her of luck as he tweezed slivers of glass from her head and dropped them into a bedpan. The shards had sliced through skin, he told her, but stopped short of severing muscle. As he worked, the metallic clatter of the
pieces dropping into the pan turned into the tinkle of glass against glass. “I didn’t get it all,” he said, after a very long time. “Some of these pieces will work themselves out later. Watch yourself doing the huggy-kissy thing. You’re liable to cut somebody.” He paused. “That was a joke. I’m trying to make you smile.” Liv twitched a corner of her mouth. It was the best she could do.
“Mrs. Stoellner?” The laptop quivered as the agent whacked at the keys with knurled hands. Close-cropped hair, the color and texture of steel wool, exposed a cauliflower ear. A boxer, Liv surmised, at least in his youth, maybe even still. His suit jacket strained across shoulders and biceps, and buttoned with ease across a flat stomach.
“Forty.” Barely managing a whisper, despite her efforts.
“Just speak as clearly as possible,” said the man behind the camera. “Would you prefer to answer the questions in writing?”
Liv held up her right arm, heavy in its cast, by way of reply. Her fingers, fat, purple, and immobile, protruded from the plaster.
“Place of birth?” The man at the desk again.
“Minneapolis.”
“Occupation?”
Liv gathered herself for a longer reply. “Until last year, I was a researcher in the library at the college where my husband taught Central Asian studies. We started working for Face the Future after 9/11.”
She sank in her seat, sapped by the effort of prolonged speech. The high back of the metal chair pressed a chilly rebuke against her bare neck. She missed the protective weight of her hair gathered at her nape. She fought an impulse to rub her scalp, to trace the cobweb of stitches creeping from beneath the bandages. After so many months in a head scarf, gauze seemed an inadequate covering.
“When, exactly?”
What was the point of asking? They knew everything. “We traveled to Pakistan in February for orientation. Martin left first, and I followed him. We arrived in Kabul in April.”
“What does Face the Future do?”
“It purports to provide Afghan women and girls with education and training for jobs.”
The studied blankness of the agent’s face told Liv he’d registered the sarcasm. He trained his eyes on the screen. “Had you been to Afghanistan before?”
Liv discovered she could speak adequately by moving the corners of the left side of her mouth. “Of course not. But my husband traveled to Pakistan in the 1980s to interview refugees from the Soviet invasion. He wanted to go to Afghanistan when the Russians left, but the civil war and then the Taliban regime made it too dangerous.”
“For someone who’d never been, you seem to know a lot about the area.” The agent lifted his gaze.
Liv narrowed her good eye, trying to bring him into better focus. The ear, bulbous and crenellated, defied the attempt. “Because of my job, I was able to help my husband with his research over the years.”
The agent stretched thin lips and showed a few teeth in something Liv supposed was meant to be a smile. “Will I see your name in the credits of his work?”
“I assume you’ve examined our records. So you already know that my work is not cited.”
“You understand that if we are to apprehend those responsible, we must do a thorough investigation. Sometimes that makes us appear intrusive.”
Liv put a hand on the arm of the chair and boosted herself to her feet. She hobbled the two steps to the desk. The man operating the video camera tilted it upward toward her face.
“Intrusiveness,” she said, “is hardly an adequate description for what you people do.”
Her interrogator leaned across the desk, his hands still on the keyboard, their faces inches apart. She caught scents of soap and shaving cream and well-tended flesh.
“You’re upset. That’s understandable. Just a few more questions. We’re interested, of course, in your friend Farida. If we can find her, she might be able to provide valuable information about the attack that killed your husband. What can you tell us about her?”
“Looks like she’s lost a lot of blood,” a medic had said to his partner as they strapped Liv to the backboard. His words muted, far away, her hearing only gradually returning. The world tilted as they loaded her onto a gurney.
“That’s not my blood. It’s hers.” Farida still on the ground, a swarm of uniforms around her.
Whose?
Instinct, unbidden. “I don’t know. Some woman. A beggar.”
Now that same instinct stiffened her spine. She grimaced. Felt a stitch pull free. “She liked Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. What does that tell you?”
The camera jerked.
“When did you last see her?”
Liv gave in to the impulse to touch the gauze on her head, as though stemming an ache. Farida had been in her shalwar kameez, no burqa, when she’d come screaming to Liv’s door. Had anyone in the compound seen her, recognized her? No, they’d have been drawn to the mob outside. Liv rubbed her forehead. “Earlier that morning, I think. She came by to do some filing. But she went home.” Which was true.
“We’ve been to the family’s home. No one has seen her. In fact, they denied knowing her. And her family in Islamabad has heard nothing from her since her wedding. They’re in custody now, all of them, and every last one of them proclaiming ignorance. So you see why your assistance is so important.”
Liv waited.
“Did you know her husband—what was his name again?” His turn to wait.
Liv’s heart walloped against the walls of her chest.
“Gul,” he said finally. Of course he already knew it. “Does that ring a bell? One of those people with only one name. So many of them here. Do you remember him?”
Gul. She’d never spoken with him—he’d have deemed it improper—and at first reflexively loathed him, presuming him to be yet another overbearing Afghan husband. But she’d watched from the narrow office window as he awaited Farida each evening, saw his face brighten as she appeared in the doorway, noted how he walked protectively beside her, rather than in front as did most husbands. Liv, seeing his slow smile as he turned toward Farida, had been appalled by the strength of her own envy.
The agent struck a single key. “This incident represents a dangerous escalation in tactics. Any information could be invaluable to our fight against the insurgents.”
A single careless word could doom Farida to the new prison of which Martin had spoken. What was it? Something with a musical name. Guantánamo. She thought of Farida caged a world away from her baby, that separation as much a torment as whatever she’d encounter during the inevitable interrogations. So often, Farida had protected her. The only way Liv could repay her now was to maintain her silence.
Harsh sounds came from her throat. The agent blanched and reached into his pocket. By the time he’d extracted a handkerchief and held it out, her tears had changed to laughter, ringing clear.
“What does it matter?” Skin so newly rejoined stretched and parted. She touched a fingertip to the spot. It came away red. “People have been trying for two thousand years to subdue Afghanistan, and nobody’s done it yet. Do you honestly think that your country will be the one to succeed?”
The agent balled the handkerchief in his fist. “Mrs. Stoellner. It’s your country, too.”
She put her good hand to the back of his laptop and shoved it shut.
Thirty-Eight
Farida cradled her baby to her chest and made sure to concentrate on the Afghan interpreter and not the Amriki medic. It would not do for anyone to know that she understood English.
“Your leg is free of infection, as is the incision from your C-section. You’ll be discharged tomorrow. You will need crutches for a while—we’ll send some with you.”
Farida looked to the interpreter, narrowing her eyes against the constant glare. Everything in the hospital was either blinding white—the sheets, the walls, the medic’s jacket—or shiny, indestructible steel. The bed frames, the trays, the instruments with which they’d ripped her son from her belly.
The interpreter stopped, and the medic spoke directly to him. “How the hell is she supposed to manage on crutches while carrying a baby? And wearing a burqa, too? With no husband, no family? The only reason she’s alive at all is that they brought her here instead of one of the local hospitals. Now they’ll both starve. It’s inhuman.”
The interpreter shrugged. Farida knew his thoughts as clearly as though he’d shouted them. Who cares about yet another maimed Afghan, and a woman, at that? Kabul was full of broken people.
The medic sighed and turned back to Farida. “All right—what’s your name again?” He consulted his chart and addressed her with the name she’d given. “Zainab. You are to take the antibiotic pills we give you. We will discharge you with some formula for your baby, some diapers. Good luck.”
Farida stared blankly at the wall until their footsteps faded. Formula. As though her son would need it. Even though her baby was delivered early, unnaturally, her milk had come in almost immediately, her breasts stretched shiny-tight, swollen with rich nourishment. She slid her gown from her shoulder and guided the baby’s head. He grunted, flailing with his little fists, until his lips found the nipple. He suckled urgently, forehead wrinkled with concentration.
She bent to breathe in his scent. “My mujahid.”
A miracle that he survived, the medics told her via the interpreter for whom she had no need. She’d tilted her chin in defiance. No surprise at all. This one is a lion. Which was the name she’d given him: Arsalan, the lion.
Her bravado faded. The medic’s words hung in the air. How indeed were they to survive? She’d have to slip into a refugee camp, surround herself with the hopeless. But even so, Kabul was not safe, nor Jalalabad, nor even the place she longed for most, her childhood home, the comfort of her sister’s presence. How long before Nur Muhammed’s men came looking for her, for her family? She could only hope the Amriki detained her parents and Alia before his men descended upon them. The Amriki had already been sniffing around her bed once, firing questions via the interpreter.