Dancing in the Mosque

by Homeira Qaderi

  While I reviewed Khoshhal’s homework inside the tent, he always waited patiently outside for my verdict, chewing on the tail end of his turban and shifting his rifle on his shoulder. I’d peek out after I whispered “Well done,” waiting for his smile to erupt. My pulse raced as pride straightened his posture.

  For every lesson, he wrote an extra page and I knew he hoped to hear my voice praising him not once, but twice.

  He wrote his letters in a quivering hand, a hand that always strove to write better.

  “Why does your hand shake so when you write?” I asked him.

  He looked right at me. “How do you know this?”

  I smiled within my burqa. “If I am the moalem, then I should know these things. I can tell.”

  Khoshhal was quiet for a moment. He scratched a line in the dirt with his sandal and said, “When my commander leaves our checkpoint, he never tells us when he’ll return.”

  “What about your squad, won’t they tell your commander about your writing?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I write my lessons when I am at my guard post. Another Talib is with me, a friend. He also copies what I am writing so that he can learn as well. Our guard duty is well spent learning; otherwise, the heat and the boredom would kill us both.”

  I placed Khoshhal’s homework on the ground. “If you like, you can bring your friend’s lessons to me. I can’t imagine that his handwriting is as beautiful as yours.”

  Khoshhal blushed. “My friend is from Helmand Province. He likes Herat very much. He is keen to quit his post and begin a life here.”

  “That would be a good thing,” I said.

  Khoshhal looked at the ground. “They won’t let us do what we want. They didn’t bring us here to build.”

  “And you think that destruction is a good way to live?”

  He stared right at me. I felt he could see me blushing beneath my burqa. “So, in your mind, we were born to destroy? Have you ever seen our green pastures? Once, we had prosperous fields. But in the war, which war and under what name, I don’t remember, everything was burned. It was turned to smoke and ash. If my commander allowed it, I would never leave this place. I would stay right here. I would send a letter to my mother.”

  When Khoshhal uttered the word “mother,” I felt the pain and regret in his voice.

  Shifting his rifle to his other shoulder, Khoshhal wrapped his shawl around his neck. He turned to leave. “Tomorrow, I will bring the Helmandi boy’s homework to you.”

  I never met the boy from Helmand Province. But starting the next day, I began correcting two sheets of homework and writing Well done twice.

  Once, I asked Khoshhal why he didn’t buy a notebook. “It is too dangerous, Moalem Sahib. When we use sheets of paper, we can destroy them if the situation arises.” Then he added, “But I never want to destroy these pages. Your name is on them beside mine.”

  “But that is too dangerous! I will no longer sign your homework.”

  “It doesn’t matter. In this place we are always in danger,” he whispered.

  At the very beginning of their rule, the Taliban banned televisions and all books other than the Qur’an. Agha dug a hole in our courtyard, wrapped his books, mostly Russian literature, in sheets of plastic, and buried them in the ground. When my father wasn’t looking, I stole Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter from the hoard that was about to be buried, secretly reading it at night under my bedcovers, using a kerosene lantern for light.

  Our radio broadcast nothing except Qur’anic recitations and poems praising the Prophet. I cursed that radio every day for never announcing the reopening of the girls’ schools. Nanah-jan warned me to repent and seek absolution for calling the radio useless. “For shame, Homeira! You are sharor, a naughty girl,” she scolded.

  Now Khoshhal brought us daily news of the war—mostly of war, only of war. Once, I asked him if there was any other news in the world. “Aren’t there any other stories?”

  While scuffing the ground with his toe, he said, “In the checkpoint, the commander’s portable radio is the source of all our news. And, here, there is only news of the war. We are taking casualties in every part of the province. In all of Afghanistan.”

  “Your people are also dying,” I said. “When will this horrible war end?”

  Khoshhal ignored my question and continued scuffing up clouds of dust with his sandal. “They have blocked all the roads to Herat. I hope that they clear the roads soon so that I can write a letter to my mother.” He lifted his head and looked at me. “I can’t write well yet. Will you help me write a letter to her?”

  “Yes!” I answered, that word of affirmation hanging joyfully between us.

  He blushed like a small child. “We must do this soon,” he continued. “There is a massive attack around the city of Mazar-e Sharif. They are sending groups of my friends to the northern front.”

  I bent down and placed his homework on the ground so that he could pick it up without getting nervous taking it from my hand and risking that our hands might touch. This was the law of the city that no na-mahram, “unrelated persons of the opposite gender,” has the right to look at one another or even touch one another in the slightest. This law was born with the city and we were obliged to adhere to it.

  Four days passed. When Khoshhal failed to return to the mosque, I feared the worst. Every afternoon I waited breathlessly for his long fingers to tap softly on the entrance curtain. Deep in my heart, I felt a hollow ache. Agha told me that the Taliban had massacred many people in Mazar-e Sharif. He said that they had been killed in the streets and in their homes. Hearing that, I was convinced that Khoshhal’s commander had sent him to fight in Mazar.

  Then, on the fifth day, while I was teaching in the mosque, I heard that longed-for tapping. I ran to the curtain without my burqa and flung it open. Caught off guard when he saw my face, Khoshhal spun around, facing the river. Embarrassed, I went back inside, threw my burqa over my head, and returned to the entrance.

  Khoshhal looked very tired. His head hung down and his eyes were sunken deep into his hollowed cheeks. He had his scarf wrapped around his mouth. “I have been sick; I have a fever and a sore throat. My entire body is aching.”

  He sighed. “Every time I fall ill, I miss my mother.”

  “My God,” I said. “I thought they had sent you to Mazar-e Sharif. I thought . . .”

  He lifted his weary head and looked at me. I wished that he could see my face. “I was ill,” he said. “There was no use for me at the front.”

  “Do you have anything good to eat? Something that will help you recover quickly?”

  Staring at the ground he said, “In wartime? No soldier gets anything but war rations.”

  The next day I cooked some turnip soup, wrapped the pot in a cloth to keep it warm, and took it with me to the mosque. Madar was curious about what I was doing. I told her I was bringing soup to one of my students who was very poor and always hungry. Madar didn’t argue with me. Even though we had very little, she knew that the plight of the refugees was much worse.

  I wrote the day’s exercise on the blackboard. As soon as the children began copying the lesson, Khoshhal arrived, tapping on the tent wall. I took my little pot of soup out to him. “Do you still have a fever?” I asked. He didn’t answer.

  “What have you brought me?” he asked.

  “Soup,” I said. I stooped to place the pot on the ground at his feet, in accordance with our unspoken agreement.

  “No!” he said. “Don’t put it on the ground. It is food, God-sent nourishment.” He reached out and took the pot from me.

  Khoshhal’s hand was burning from fever or from embarrassment.

  That evening, I could not bear the burden of my secret any longer. When the adhan echoed through the streets, I climbed the ladder and called my friend Golchehrah. I told her everything about Khoshhal. I told her that he was intelligent and that I thought he loved me. I told her that he hated war. Golchehrah’s face turned white in the falling dus
k.

  The next day Khoshhal summoned me from the tent with his gentle tapping. Placing the empty pot on the ground, he looked directly at me. “Your soup was delicious. It reminded me of home. God bless your food.”

  Then he sat outside the tent wall and said to me, “Go ahead, ask me any word you like, and I will write it perfectly.”

  “Write any words you want,” I said, “and I will correct them.”

  “You will not need to correct them, Moalem Sahib,” he said. “They will be perfect.”

  Separated by that worn canvas wall, I heard his pencil scratching across the paper. And beyond that curtain, I imagined the smile spreading on his handsome face.

  When he was finished, Khoshhal slid that fragile paper beneath the tent flap, waiting while I checked his work. And the first word on the page, written flawlessly, was my name, Homeira. His work was perfect, and I praised him. “I will return tomorrow,” he said. “Then you can help me write a letter to my mother.”

  The next day I waited for him. And the day after. Many days passed without Khoshhal returning. Finally, I asked Yarghal to go and find him. I told Yarghal, “Please give Khoshhal regards from his Moalem Sahib and say that she asks about his health. Let me know tomorrow what he replies.”

  Yarghal didn’t wait for the next day’s class to report to me. That very evening, he tucked his notebook under his arm and made his way to our house. Madar was surprised to find him standing at our door. “What a child,” she said to me as she led Yarghal into our courtyard. “His thirst for knowledge is bottomless.”

  Yarghal, out of the sight of Madar, whispered in my ear. “Khoshhal has been sent to the front.” My heart froze. I sat under our mulberry tree in the courtyard in dead silence, punctuated by the occasional thumping of ripe red mulberries hitting the ground.

  Five days later, Agha went with my two youngest brothers, Jaber and Tariq, to the public bathhouse. They returned very quickly, still unbathed. They sat on the terrace, looking very pale. Madar asked, “What has happened?”

  Agha prepared two glasses of sweetened water for my brothers. Carrying the drinks out to them in the courtyard, he said, “The Taliban have turned the public bath into a mortuary for their dead. Many corpses have been brought back to Herat from the fighting in the northwest. They will be buried here, but first, they must bathe their dead and wrap them in shrouds.”

  Jaber called my name. He was six. I had been teaching him, along with the refugee children. He accompanied me when there was no other mahram to walk with me through the streets to the mosque tent. I went over and sat beside him in the courtyard. He was shivering, even though the day was very hot. “Yes, brother,” I said.

  He turned to me, wide-eyed. “Homeira! Do you remember the day we were dancing in that mosque when those two Talib came?”

  I nodded, my heart gripped by fear.

  “And do you remember the younger one. The tall one?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “I remember.”

  “I saw his body there. Outside the bathhouse. He had been thrown on the ground. His eyes were wide open, and his turban was unraveled beside him, covered with dirt.”

  My dear Siawash,

  You couldn’t know it but it’s true: I spend most of my nights crying in the corner of this room that has kept me so far from you.

  Every day, I regret my decision to leave you. These stories I’m telling are meant to show you how strong I am, but I don’t always feel strong. Nanah-jan believes that an Afghan woman must first bear a son for the pleasure of her husband’s heart and at the end a daughter for the pleasure of her own heart. She would say, without a daughter, a woman dies with a bundle of pain and suffering. I am afraid I will die with my bundle of grief and heartache.

  My sister, Zahra, your aunt whom you’ve never met, and may never meet, secretly sent me a message through Mushtaq’s phone that your father had sent not my whole library, but only two bags of my books to Herat. She wrote: “Madar and Nanah-jan shed tears of shame over your books.” My writing is shameful in our country.

  These books haven’t done anything wrong but I am afraid my brothers will bury them as they were forced to bury all books during my childhood. And so, I am asking you, if I never see you again, I am asking you to take possession of the books at my parents’ home. No matter what they may say, books are not a bundle of grief and heartache. They are the proof of my happiness and freedom. Maybe someday they will become a source of pride for you.

  9

  The Golden Needle Sewing Class

  Of all the Taliban’s many restrictions, the one that upset my family most of all might have been the prohibition against reading.

  On the terrible day that the Taliban conquered Harat, Agha stood in front of his library, looking at his bookshelves, not saying anything. Madar said, “In Herat, thousands of young men are buried beneath the ground. A few books are nothing in comparison.”

  The Taliban were rumored to be searching every house for guns, books, and televisions. Baba-jan put his Hafez on top of Agha’s books. “We haven’t survived for this long so that we die now for a bundle of papers.”

  That was the last time I saw Baba-jan reading Hafez. After dark, Agha wrapped his books and our small television in thick plastic and put them in an iron chest. He dug a big hole near the mulberry tree, placed the chest at the bottom, and covered it with soil. On many nights when rain lashed the ground, Agha stood at the window sighing, as he stared at the spot where his books were buried. Even when the garden was covered with snow, he gazed out the window, gripping his tea glass so tightly I thought it would almost shatter in his fingers.

  Agha told me he had read most of his books during the war while he was guarding the trenches. “During the two days I was trapped in the mountains with Atiq, I read Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter.”

  “Agha, how could you? You were reading Russian books and fighting the Russians at the same time?”

  Agha smiled at me. “The people in the books are much better than people outside books. Literature is different from war.”

  Every year, at the end of May, when no snow remained on the ground and the spring rains were over, Agha made Mushtaq guard the courtyard gate so he could dig up his books. Lifting them from the iron chest, he would spread them out in the sunlight to dry.

  And every year, while the Taliban ruled the world outside our walls, Zahra and I would attack those books. We would whisper the titles to each other and flip through the pages. And every year, I would beg, “Please, Agha, take the books and hide them in the cellar so we can read them at night.”

  Baba-jan always intervened. “You shouldn’t take the risk. Don’t bring danger into this house. We should bury the enemy under the ground.”

  “But Baba-jan, these are only books, not enemies,” I said.

  Baba-jan sighed. “Homeira, power defines what the enemy is. We must act prudently.”

  During all the years the Taliban ruled Herat, Agha took his books out to dry them in the sun in May. And each time, he wrapped them in thick plastic and buried them again.

  The day after I read my family the first story I wrote, Agha dug up his books.

  When Baba-jan saw what Agha was up to, he headed for the front door. “Wakil Ahmad! Don’t expose this household to danger.”

  Smiling, Agha looked over at his father. “The girl who writes must read stories. I will hide the books in the cellar.”

  Screaming with joy, I hugged Agha. Baba-jan walked away without saying anything. Nanah-jan shook her tasbeh. “Wakil! Don’t ruin your daughter’s life by your own hands.”

  After that, at night, when all the men had returned to their homes from evening prayers and the street was empty, I read forbidden novels by lamplight. Kerosene was very expensive and difficult to find. It was imported either from Iran or Pakistan. Madar always complained that it was mixed with water.

  Almost every night, Agha, Zahra, Mushtaq, and I gathered around the only lantern in the house, reading books under its sm
oky flickering light.

  Agha encouraged me, saying, “By reading more novels, Homeira, you will become more creative. You will know more people and you will experience many different lives.”

  Agha was right. After I read some Russian novels, I realized that the red ants didn’t just ride green tanks and wear their high boots only for war, they also danced hand in hand with their lovers in big beautiful ballrooms. They fought duels over love, and when they got drunk, they started singing.

  In the books taken from the underground box, there were no burqas. There were no girls whipped with pomegranate branches and they were never traded for fighting dogs. There was no girl given away to the city’s aged holy man, no beaten girl who threw herself down a well to avoid being stoned to death. There was no girl forced by her father to wear boys’ clothes and to play the role of the family’s son. In those buried books, women didn’t whisper their stories to the water or go to graveyards to talk with the dead about their loneliness.

  On so many nights, I wished that I could hide inside that hole in the yard and that somebody would bury me alive with the books. I told this to Madar. Smoothing her embroidered bird’s half-sewn wings, she said, “They have written about their own lives. You must write about yours.”

  Madar didn’t even look up as she was counting the stitches on the bird’s wings and continued to sew.

  “But, Madar, who is going to read my stories when we are all trapped here?”

  Madar laughed and held up her embroidery. “Look at these birds, Homeira. See! We will tie your stories to the wings of these birds, and they will fly to the farthest corners of the earth.”

  After that, I spent all my spare time writing stories. Nanah-jan thought that I needed to learn how to cook. Madar said, “One cook should be enough in every household.”

  Agha was the first person who listened to my stories. He told me, “I wish there was someone who could help you with the basic rules of story writing.”

  Leila, Shaima, and Kolsoom were older girls that I had met at a book club in the years before the Taliban. I was very young then, so no one took me seriously. But I still went every week and sat in the corner, listening to the other girls.