“I watched Abdur Rahman run out in the middle of a battlefield. Shoot down six tanks with a rocket launcher on his shoulder. Then die at the base of a tree with so many holes shot through him the wind nearly carried his corpse away. I watched my half-cousin Abdul throw down his rifle, shout, ‘Fuck war,’ and disappear forever. For a long time, I hated him for that, until that moment in the trench with the bombs, when the sky roared so loud I forgot who I was. And where. And which story I was supposed to finish.
“When the bombings stopped, I ran back home and forgot the second bag.
“The jets returned in the night and punished Naw’e Kaleh with fire.
“In the morning, I found out Zarmina’s home had been bombed.
“By the time I got to her compound, her neighbors were already sifting through the wreckage. Zarmina and her whole family, save for little Waseem, had been torn to pieces.
“Because it was impossible for us to tell Zarmina apart from her husband and from her children, we could not bring her body home. We buried them all together, the whole family in one large grave, right near where they died.
“That night, Zarmina came to me in my dream.
“She wore a white burqa like a shroud, and I could not see her face, her eyes.
“She begged me to make her whole, but I did not understand.
“The next night, Zarmina returned to me in my sleep and asked me, again, to make her whole, but, again, I did not understand.
“When I awoke, I scoured my room and questioned my brothers, making sure Zarmina was not visiting me by mistake, and I searched every inch of the compound until I found—in the smallest pocket of my waskat—what I stole from Zarmina.
“You see, little bird, as I was collecting the pieces of Zarmina’s family, I found, amid the rubble, the tip of a woman’s finger still etched in henna, which I knew belonged to Zarmina. In the rush and in the haze of my sorrow, I must have forgotten that I slipped the finger into my waskat, intending to bury a small piece of my sister on our land.
“But when I found Zarmina’s finger that morning, a quiet part of me wanted to keep it there, in the pocket of my waskat, and it took a little while, I remember, for that need in my heart to become silent.
“It was only then that I wrapped the finger in a white dusmal and traveled to her home.
“Watak came with me.
“This was days before he would die.
“There, at Zarmina’s marker, I buried the finger and prayed that my half-sister would be made whole.
“And there, at Zarmina’s marker, Watak confessed that our sister had been visiting his dreams as well.
“I asked him if she spoke.
“He said that she did, that she promised a place for him in the gardens of heaven.
“And so it was.”
On the Fifty-Eighth Day
It was getting near midnight and Abdul-Abdul and Ruhollah still hadn’t shown up. Dawood and Gul held out hope, but the rest of us were less optimistic. We went on with our duties. Miriam made a pot of sarsar, and before we went to feed our patients, everyone gathered in the beranda, where Zia led a Jama’ah Salah but did not recite his surahs aloud. When he said the takbirat, though, his voice seemed to crack.
During our third visit, me and Gwora switched up our caretaking duties. He fed Agha while I fed Moor. It took a long time to feed them even a few spoonfuls, but they actually seemed to enjoy the sarsar. Though it still made them nauseated.
“Who made this soup?” Moor asked.
I told her Miriam did, and I explained to her how Miriam was the one making sure every single person in the house was fed and hydrated and cared for, and I told Moor we probably would’ve been in a lot of trouble if it wasn’t for her.
“She is a smart girl, isn’t she?”
I told her she was. Quick and levelheaded.
“And she’s good with kids.”
“With Mirwais, at least.”
“And she prays all her prayers.”
“More prayers than me.”
“And she’s pretty, isn’t she?”
This was the longest I’d been able to keep up a conversation with Moor in two days. I didn’t want to stop speaking, but I also didn’t want to continue.
“Don’t you think she might make a nice wife?”
And it was at that point in our conversation that I realized why Zia didn’t want me near his sisters. He always picked up on the chatter first. Who knew how long Moor and my khalas had been planning to pair me up with Miriam. Maybe that was why Zia had been acting weird with me all along.
Moor asked me again: “Isn’t she pretty, Marwand?”
I didn’t say anything just then, but for the rest of the night, out in the courtyard, when I wasn’t running an errand or taking care of my parents, I watched Miriam. The thing was, Miriam never stayed still long enough for me to take a good look at her. Even though she was only assigned to take care of her sisters, she broke her own rules by checking in on every other member of the family.
She went from room to room, her lamp floating in front of her, lighting up her path and her dress, but not her face, which, it seemed, she was almost always hiding. Eventually, I was able to catch her for a few moments in the tandoor khana. She was making sheen chai and bread and I offered to help.
“You’re going to burn yourself,” she said, and made a point of showing me how soft my fingers were.
She kept her lamp in the corner of the tandoor khana. Its flickering light barely reached the black pit of the tandoor. We talked for a bit about what she wanted us to do if Abdul-Abdul and Ruhollah didn’t show up or, if they did, how we might go about getting some medicine, but she wasn’t too concerned.
“They don’t need medicine. They need us,” she said.
Just as she did, Dawood came upon the tandoor and said: “We need some medicine.”
In the beranda, we all gathered together and Dawood explained that Abo and Baba had gotten more lucid recently and that they had given Dawood contradictory commands on how to cure the family.
“Abo,” he explained, “wants us to go out and collect some shrubs and herbs and other ingredients, so that she can direct Miriam on how to mix up a remedy for seasickness, but then Baba called me over and he whispered for me to go ahead and ride out to Wagh Jan, where we should pick up a case of his medications for severe motion sickness.”
We got into another argument. Gul and Dawood wanted to go ahead and ride out toward Wagh Jan, but Miriam wanted us to stay put, to make sure we weren’t infectious, and to keep looking after the sick. Eventually, our little argument was interrupted by the adhan for Fajr Salah, and we all looked to Zia, waiting for his orders, but he seemed hesitant to say what we expected.
“Shouldn’t we pray?” I asked in his place.
“We should,” he said, too loudly, as though he’d just remembered.
We prayed the Jama’ah Salah in the beranda again, but this time Zia suggested that Gul should lead the prayer, which was odd, you know, since Zia had never offered up his position as an imam to anyone in his life.
“You’re the oldest,” Zia argued. “You should lead.”
But Gul didn’t budge, especially since the Fajr Salah was supposed to be performed aloud, and Gul’s tajweed was almost as rough as my own. Zia stood there at the front of our congregation, offering up his spot to Gul, then Dawood, then me. And, one by one, each of us rejected it, until Zia was finally forced to lead the prayer.
I hadn’t heard Zia pray since that night on the road when he almost broke my heart with his recitation, but this time he sang so rough and so scared, his voice trembled without grace. Anytime he had to stretch a verse, the pitch kept cracking in his throat. Fell apart in his mouth. I almost wished I had taken his spot from him.
After he finished his prayer, he rushed off into the courtyard without even making
dua for the health of the family. I followed his trail and found him in the den, where he read a beginner’s Quran, quietly reciting to himself.
“Zia,” I said to him before he could stop me, “I understand.”
He stopped reciting.
“It took me too long to figure it out, but I did, Zia. I know my moor is making plans, but you don’t have to worry about that, Zia. I wouldn’t do that. Your sisters are like my sisters.”
“What plans?” he said.
“You don’t know what they’re planning?”
“I don’t know anything,” he said, and went back to his Quran, the type meant for little kids. He flipped through the pages and started to recite Surah al Fatiha. But only bits and pieces of it. “Alhamdu,” he started, but then stopped. “Rabih,” he began again, but paused and started at another spot. “Ameen,” and then “Rahim” and “Madeen” and “Sta-een” and “Mostakeem,” and though the both of us had memorized Surah al Fatiha when we were little kids, neither of us actually knew what those words really meant.
Just then a series of short honks blasted out to the tune of the theme song from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Gwora barged into the den and told us to hurry up and follow him because Abdul-Abdul and Ruhollah were trying to force themselves into the compound. Zia sat there in his corner with his little Quran and he didn’t move. So I followed my brother.
Dawood was on the verge of opening the gate for Abdul-Abdul when we arrived to explain why he couldn’t come in.
“So why aren’t you all sick?” Ruhollah said.
That was the question Dawood couldn’t answer.
“We are sick,” I shouted from behind the gate, “but we’ve been a little sick since we got back, so it hasn’t hit us too hard.”
“So why isn’t Miriam sick?”
“Miriam is always sick,” Gul said.
He admitted that was true, and after a few more rounds of arguing, Ruhollah agreed to pick up some medicines for us, and although we explained to him that Baba wanted us to pick up a prescription from Wagh Jan, and that Abo wanted us to make an herbal remedy, he and Abdul-Abdul decided to head back to the base, where they would consult the army doctors and get us American medications.
With that last promise, they drove off.
Almost as soon as they left, there was another knock at the other entrance. Gul went to answer the big green gate, but after he realized the visitor was Hameed, the butcher’s son, he asked me to talk to him instead.
Turned out the butcher’s son wanted to pay Abo a visit, and when I told him that Abo was sick, he asked to see Baba, and when I told him Baba was sick, he asked to see Rahmutullah, and when I told him Rahmutullah was out, he asked, very politely, if there were any adults in the household at all. I looked back on Gul and Miriam and the rest of the kids and made a face that meant What the fuck do I do here?
So Miriam, with her best impersonation of Hawa Khala, told Hameed that she would speak to him in a second. She signaled for me to close the door and then threw a burqa over me. After which, I poked my head out the door and pretended to be Hawa Khala, nodding up and down, while Miriam stood nearby and imitated her soft voice. She told the butcher’s son that half the men in the house were out getting meat while the other half was getting medicine. The rest of the ladies were all helping Nabeela try on a dress, and then, to finish him off, Miriam even teased the butcher’s son by inviting him to come inside and see his bride. All in a fluster, the butcher’s son laughed nervously, denied the invitation, and started back home, wishing good health to our sick.
But, in fact, our sick were not so sick anymore.
When we trudged back into the courtyard, we came to find that Abo and Baba were sitting in the beranda with Zia, drinking cups of chai and chatting about their plans for the wedding. All of us kids approached them in a great rush but slowed down to a trickle just as we got to the entrance of the beranda. Each of us greeted Abo and Baba as if they’d returned from a day trip to Kabul, and when we asked them how they felt, they both claimed that they still felt seasick, but it was so mild by that point they could more or less get along with their day. It seemed that they had just gotten used to the illness.
Shortly after Baba’s and Abo’s reappearance, Rahmutallah and Hawa Khala stumbled into the courtyard, then Nabeela and her sisters, then Agha and Moor, and, finally, the rest of Zia’s sisters returned to the beranda too, dizzy and a little nauseated but still feeling better.
At the end of the day, Abo cooked up a fresh batch of her herbal remedy and Baba sent Gul and Dawood after the medications in Wagh Jan. Two days later, Ruhollah and Abdul-Abdul showed up with enough American medication for about three people (they ended up giving it to Baba and Abo and Nabeela—for the sake of her wedding), while the rest of us took an odd mixture of Abo’s potion and Baba’s prescriptions, not exactly sure which of the two was the one that was supposed to cure us. Ultimately, just as the work for the wedding racheted up, almost all of the family was feeling—or had at least convinced themselves they were feeling—strong enough to take on all the inevitable troubles that came with the act of binding two people under the laws of Allah. That was, except for me.
I was starting to feel like shit.
On the Seventieth Day
The day before I was supposed to swallow the second dose of Abo’s potion, Agha decided to take me to a clinic in Kabul. Not for the seasickness, though. For my finger.
See, with the scabbed edges of my open wound refusing to close in on its center of blood and pus, the end of my finger was starting to look like a rotting eyeball. When Agha asked to see it the other night, he got so horrified, he planned our trip to Kabul that very second.
My seasickness, on the other hand, I kept a secret because I thought my family might realize I was the source of the big infection. Abo kept the secret with me (only Allah knows why), and before I left for Kabul that morning, I explained to her that Agha was taking me to see a doctor for my finger. Not my belly.
“It’s good you told me,” Abo said. “But be certain your baba doesn’t find out. His heart has gotten very soft with age. You understand?”
I told her I did.
Just outside the compound, I squished myself into the back seat of our Corolla with Nabeela Khala, Moor, and Sadaf Khala. Agha sat in the front with Rahmutallah.
My khalas and maamaas—along with the butcher’s son, who drove in another Corolla right behind us—were coming along to begin the process for the wedding’s paperwork. The butcher’s family wanted the wedding to be in complete accordance with the new laws of the Kabuli government, so Hameed and Nabeela needed to get themselves a permit or a license, and even though we were still about a month away from the wedding, Rahmutallah Maamaa was determined not to bribe any bureaucrats, which, he claimed, would require patience and time.
“Inshallah,” Rahmutallah said when he started the car, “we’ll at least get her tazkira approved.”
And with that dua, our little caravan was off.
As we drove through the roads of the village, Nabeela Khala warned me not to touch the crank for the window. Turned out there was a trick to it. You had to push the knob in first, twist it a few times, and then pull out completely in order to shift the window. For the whole ride Nabeela Khala lifted and lowered the glass in anticipation of dust clouds, gas fumes, and gentle breezes. When we turned a corner near a kamoot, Nabeela Khala twisted furiously to get the window up, and when we dipped down onto a riverbank, she gently lowered it.
Except for Moor, who sat in the middle, each adult had their own window, and each of them attempted to work in unison. Agha was always a little too fast and Sadaf too slow, but Rahmutallah and Nabeela were completely in sync. They turned and paused and lifted with the same fluid motions.
Near the bridge to Wagh Jan, we drove upon the work site where me and Zia stole the cement-man’s mule. Nabeela and Rahmutallah raised their windows at
the same time, and I quickly covered my face with a dusmal, but the workers were so absorbed with the cement, they didn’t even glance our way.
The road had grown. Its cement path crawling into Naw’e Kaleh. But even more impressive than the road were the poles. Almost thirty of them now, and while most of the poles were built up on the other side of the bridge, closer to Wagh Jan, two of them had made their way onto our village, looking naked and lonely.
“Subhanallah,” Agha said.
“I’d wait until it’s finished,” Rahmutallah said.
“But still. Power lines in our kaleh. Subhanallah, I still remember the first time I saw a light bulb. They hung from the stalls in Kabul. Red and green and yellow. I dreamt about them for weeks afterward. Thought they were fairies.” Agha laughed. Rahmutallah too.
In the back seat, Moor lectured Nabeela about the wedding.
“It’s good to cry,” Moor said, “but don’t overdo it with the sobbing and the shouting. Or you’ll just be trading one shame for another. Your mother-in-law won’t take kindly to it either, and even if your man is sympathetic to your plight, in the end, he’s going to do what needs to be done for his family.”
“No worries, my sister,” Nabeela said, “I don’t plan to cry at all.”
Moor forced a laugh. “Wait till the day comes.”
“Let it come! I’ll laugh the whole time. I’ll laugh so much, I won’t eat.”
“Alhamdulillah,” Sadaf said, and failed to muffle her giggle.
Nabeela reached over to pinch her, but Moor got in the way.
“You’ll laugh yourself into tears,” Moor said. “You’ll see.”
“Bet me,” Nabeela said.
Moor gave her a look like Are you serious?
“I’m serious,” Nabeela confirmed. “How about if I cry, just one tear, I’ll let you name my firstborn daughter, but if my eyes stay dry, I get to name yours.”
To my surprise, Moor agreed.
Back in the States she would have smacked me for betting a walnut, but here she was in Logar, gambling away my someday-to-be cousin’s name as if it were nothing. Even so, she wasn’t done with her lectures. In the middle of Sadaf’s explanation of Shireen’s dance routine, Moor interrupted her with another word of advice.
99 Nights in Logar Page 15