With time, the boy grew from a student into a man, into a qari, into a well-respected scholar, and when the Ts took control of Afghanistan in the mid-nineties, Khaista and Mullah Mansour were able to return to Logar restored and rewarded. Mullah Mansour had made connections with the Ts, and while he never officially joined the political or the armed wings of the organization, he supported them and had made many powerful allies within their spheres. Had he or his mother wished, they could have had all six of Khaista’s idiot brothers executed within the day.
But Khaista’s heart was more wearied than vengeful. She decided to spare her nephews and nieces the fate her son was forced to suffer. Instead, she took up her own portion of her father’s land, built a small compound, an orchard, and a well, and never again spoke with her brothers, who, like all cockroaches, were able to outlive the revolutions, the Russians, the massacres, the civil wars, and the Ts without any sense of gratitude or grace. In fact, when the Americans invaded in 2001, and Khaista’s son was forced into hiding, two of her six idiot brothers joined the ANA, and with the backing of newly appointed bureaucrats in the Afghan government, they even tried to oust Khaista from her land.
* * *
—
“I should have had them shot,” Khaista concluded.
“But how will you keep your land?” I asked.
“The mujahideen will return,” she said, “and my son will return with them, and the laws of Allah will reign over these lands once more. Inshallah.”
After we heard Khaista’s story, Bibi and Miriam led me toward the bride’s chamber near the beranda, where they thought the butcher’s twins might be helping their soon-to-be sister-in-law with her dress. Nabeela had changed from her purple piece into the Kochi kali, and she sat on a toshak in the center of the room, surrounded on all sides by her sisters, cousins, and all of the butcher’s daughters except, of course, for the twins.
Moor and her sisters were in a rush, applying and reapplying Nabeela’s makeup, but every time it seemed they were getting close to a finish, Nabeela would burst into tears and ruin her mascara. It was the first time I had seen her cry. She didn’t hold back either. Big green globs swept down her face like burst faucets.
“Oh, Mother,” she cried to Abo, “I’ve fucked my life.”
“By the will of Allah,” Abo said, on the verge of weeping too, but not just yet, “you’ve fucked me up too.”
“Damn this heart,” Nabeela shouted, and struck her chest, stirring a thousand little mirrors.
“If you ruin your dress . . . ,” Moor warned, restarting her mascara.
“This is your life,” Hawa Khala said, dabbing a glob with a white dusmal. “You mustn’t weep for your life.”
But this only made Nabeela cry some more as she began to beg Hawa Khala for forgiveness, for the shabby way she’d treated her since the first day she entered their home fourteen years ago, a lonesome young girl from Tangee, her sister by marriage, but never treated as a sister, instead worked, instead cursed, without true love in her heart until she saw Hawa’s fate lying before her.
“They’ll work me into bones,” Nabeela wept, and Sadaf and Shireen kept having to apologize on her behalf to the butcher’s daughters, who all watched her, it seemed, without much sympathy.
“I know it because I deserve it,” she continued, and looked to Hawa, “but, O Allah, I can’t become like a needle or a strand of hair on my husband’s head. I want sons and daughters, four or five each, and you need flesh for birth. Not just bone.”
Hawa Khala dabbed at another swirling glob and shook her head. “Don’t weep, little bride. You’re much stronger than I am. More shameless too. If anything, these babies he’ll give you will only make you rounder. Boy or girl, fat or thin, dark or light, a bounty nonetheless,” she said, and dabbed at one last glob of a tear because there were no more coming.
Nabeela Khala laughed, just one short burst that almost immediately, it seemed, ended her mourning and opened the door for a barrage of jokes. Moor teased her for crying and promised to come up with a terrible name for her first daughter, Abo called her soft and denounced all the rumors regarding her toughness, Shireen sang her a quiet line from a dirty song about her wedding night, and Sadaf chided Nabeela for making her wait so long to get her own man, only to weep for her fortune on the day of the wedding.
Nabeela warned Sadaf to wait until her time, to see what would happen on the day she too had to leave her father’s home, a daughter apart, and if she didn’t weep big green globs of tears, she would let Sadaf secretly name her second-born daughter, because, as she’d promised, Moor would be naming her first. The room burst with curses and laughter. Rolling with the tempo, Nabeela asked Hawa Khala a question in Farsi, which was actually a dirty joke, which everyone understood except me, and so all the ladies laughed (and me with them), but my fake laugh cut through the rest.
“Who is this?” Abo asked the whole room at once.
“We’re looking for Gul’s fiancée,” Bibi answered for me.
And before Abo could question us further, one of the butcher’s daughters (unaware of Abo’s temper) interrupted her and pointed us toward a chamber on the farthest end of the compound. I slipped out in a hurry, Bibi and Miriam following after, and the three of us cut across the courtyard, shadowed the walls, climbed a very short flight of stairs, and reached the doorway of a chamber bursting with so many songs and drums, I had to stop and wait and just listen.
Here, I thought, and even before the girls led me inside, I sensed in the tumbling of the waters in my belly that this was the chamber I was meant to find.
The butcher’s twins huddled together in a corner of the room, singing and clapping with an older woman that might’ve been their khala. A few feet away from them sat a pair of burqa-clad guests, one of which was particularly wide and the other of which was very clearly staring at the butcher’s twins. I wasn’t sure which one exactly. The room was so packed, me and the girls could hardly fit. Eventually, I was able to squeeze into a space offered to me by another woman in a burqa, but Miriam and Bibi had to stay by the doorway. Though they got some nasty glares, the girls waited for me to find a spot before leaving.
I never even thanked them.
With my eyes on the ladies who must’ve been Gul and Dawood, I sat on the edge of the dance floor, near the doorway, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, and then, in between each song, I gradually moved from one open spot to another, until I sat next to the impostors.
“Gul?” I whispered, but Dawood was the one to answer me.
“Is that you?” he asked.
“It’s me,” I said. “Are those the girls?”
“They are.”
“So which one is the one he loves?” I asked Dawood, reaching for my camera, but Gul was the one to answer me.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“How can you not be sure?”
And maybe because he could not give me a good response, Gul decided to do the stupidest thing possible. In the middle of the song, as all the ladies were still singing or dancing or enjoying themselves, Gul got up, crossed the dance floor, nearly stumbling, and sat right beside the girl that might have been his love. The twins gave him a quick glare and scooted aside, and just as they did, Gul slipped his hand from under his burqa and grasped the fingers of the girl sitting closest to him.
At first, the butcher’s daughter smiled, maybe thinking the woman beneath the burqa was one of her khalas or amas playing a trick on her. But when she placed her other hand on top of Gul’s, she must have felt his hairs, freshly sprouted, or his rough knuckles, blunted in fistfights, or the sweat on his fingers, which trembled uncontrollably, because after touching the top of his naked hand, the butcher’s daughter let out a yelp that cut through the singing, that stopped the dancing, that interrupted the party, that got me and Dawood up out of our spots, ready to run, but which, unfortunately, did
not do the same for Gul.
He sat there, both hands still locked about the fingers of the girl that might’ve been his love. The butcher’s daughter shouted for the whole room to hear: “This woman is not a woman!” And just as all the ladies were about to jump him, me and Dawood rushed over, pulled Gul away from the girl he wouldn’t let go, and flew out the room.
Only a few of the ladies followed after us, but they shouted our misdeeds for all the party to hear. We were already out the door, and almost halfway down the road, when all at once a shot rang out. Gul fell down, Dawood stopped, someone screamed, and I kept on running past the compounds and the fields and the chinar and the canals and the graves and the farmers and the workers and the mules and the flowers and the toot and the flags and the birds and the walls and the doorways until, some way or another, I made it all the way back to the marker by the canal where Watak once died.
On the Ninety-Seventh Afternoon
For a long time, I knelt beneath Watak’s mulberry tree.
Flowers fell from its branches in a rough breeze. Nearby, the canal had flooded, turned into a river whose waters almost touched the stone and the ash at the base of Watak’s marker. Through the thousand eyes of my burqa, the dark blue outlines of the linen, I watched the white flowers fall and the floodwaters rise and the mountain winds twist the tatters of Watak’s flag, and I knew, at that moment, that I was one hundred years too early to be feeling this old. My stomach bubbled. I wanted to vomit, but I only gagged. There was nothing in me.
I turned toward the maze, and somewhere just outside my vision, I knew, a thief watched it with me. Another bandit in a burqa, not even pretending to be otherwise, knelt beside me. Jawed the Thief spoke to me in an English without hint of an accent, and he told me that what had happened at the party didn’t matter, that it was of no consequence whether Gul died or not, whether Dawood held him as he was dying or living, whether his mother was the one to kill him, whether his sister would be abandoned on the day of her wedding, or whether Moor’s whole family, almost untouched by the wars, would finally fall apart.
“But Atid is writing,” I said, and in response, the Thief recounted for me a hadith recorded in Al-Mu’jam Al-Kabeer, wherein it was reported by Abu Umamah that the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, once said, “The scribe on the right is trustworthy over the scribe on the left because when a person does good, he records it immediately, but when a person sins, he says to the scribe on the left: ‘Stay your hand for six hours, and if the believer seeks forgiveness from Allah, then do not write it. Otherwise, it will be recorded.’”
“Six hours?” I asked.
“Six hours,” he said, standing beneath the mulberry tree, flowers gathering at his feet.
“How did you find me?”
“You’ve left a trail,” the Thief said, and gestured toward the trickle of blood, which followed me all the way from the wedding. My finger. It pulsed and it dripped and I hardly noticed till I saw its trail. I lifted the skirt of my veil a bit. The folds of my kameez and partug were spotted in blood. Jawed the Thief tore a strip of his burqa and took my finger and wrapped my wound for me.
“If you stay here,” he said, “they’ll find you.”
I could see in my mind all the trails and all the walls of the maze that stood there so close. “They never found Budabash,” I said.
“You never found Budabash.”
“But I might,” I said. And then I stood up, flower petals and dust scattering about the skirt of my burqa.
Before we entered the alley, the Thief asked me for the camera I had forgotten was hidden inside the pocket of my kameez and with which I was supposed to have taken a picture of Gul’s love. After I handed it to him (stolen, returned, and returned again), he led me into the maze.
The compounds of the maze were built tall and tight and out of a hard, dry mud. The paths were filled with turns and twists, but the Thief was so sure of his way, we nearly sprinted along the trails. The alleys and the surrounding compounds seemed completely empty. That was, until we ran into the interpreter. The same one I met on the road more than two months ago, when me and Zia were waiting for a savior beneath the mulberry tree. His left arm hung limp, and blood leaked out of a wound in his shoulder. His army fatigues were in tatters, and he’d grown a scraggly beard. “Sisters,” he almost sobbed after staring at us for about two minutes, “do you know the way out?”
“We do,” Jawed replied, and tore off a strip of his burqa, “but first tell us what happened.”
“There’s no time,” the interpreter shouted, “there are gunmen coming.”
“These alleys are filled with nothing but time. If they are following you, they’ll never find you. Besides, you’re leaking.” Jawed got the interpreter to sit down, and while he wrapped his wound, the interpreter explained that he’d been lost in this maze for more than two months, that there wasn’t a single person in any of these compounds, and that if it weren’t for the occasional fruit tree or abandoned well, he and his squadron would’ve starved weeks ago.
“Where is your squadron?” I asked.
So he told us.
The Tale of the Ambush in the Maze
Apparently, after spending two months raiding each of the compounds in the maze but never finding a single occupant or any other traveler to guide them out of the village, the small squadron of soldiers was on the brink of losing their minds. Then, earlier that day, the interpreter spotted a group of wanderers. Seeing that two of them were armed and that the other two were tied up on a steer, the interpreter wanted to sneak up from behind and get a jump on the gunmen, but the sergeant (who despised his Afghan translator almost as much as he hated the militants) ignored him and told his men to arm themselves. The interpreter himself remained without a weapon. When the sergeant got within shouting distance of the gunmen, he commanded them to halt and to drop their rifles.
The gunmen, of course, replied back with AK fire, quickly cutting down the sergeant. The other soldiers were out in the open. Not a single wall or a tank or a base to hide behind. And because all the doors of all the compounds suddenly seemed to have disappeared, the interpreter had to duck down behind the body of the sergeant just to avoid the next two flurries of machine-gun fire. The gunmen, on the other hand, had their steer and their prisoners to use as shields, and after they tore the other soldiers to bits, the interpreter leapt up, dodged a few hundred bullets, and ran off in a wild fury until he came upon two ladies clad in burqas.
* * *
—
“So all your comrades were killed,” I said.
“They were killed and their killers are coming,” the interpreter said. “We should go.”
“We can’t,” Jawed said.
“Why not?”
Then Jawed told him a long lie about how we used to live in one of these compounds with a whole flock of other families back in the ’70s, but once the Russians invaded and the bombings and the massacres started, many families fled, while the ones who stayed behind tried to figure out ways to outlast the Soviet assault. During a particularly rough period of bombings, the remaining families used an intricate system of tunnels beneath their lands as bomb shelters. They were fairly effective, and if the men could warn the ladies and the children of an incoming air raid beforehand, not too many casualties were had.
“One night,” Jawed claimed, “we were informed too late of an incoming air raid and so we got to the tunnels after everyone else. We covered our children with our bodies in anticipation of the bombs. But they didn’t fall. That was the first night the Soviets used the gas. All of the women and the children hiding deep in the tunnels, in the safest spots, suffocated immediately, while those of us on the outer edges died much more slowly. Many of the mothers clung to their dead children, but when we heard the coming of a second round of gas, we fled from the tunnels and from our families. They all died and we did not. So now we return
to this maze of empty compounds in search of the broken tunnels where our children might be roaming.”
The interpreter asked us if we truly meant to find the ghosts of our dead children.
“Even ghosts need company,” Jawed said.
The interpreter nodded his head, dug his fingers into the thatch of the wall behind him, and slowly pulled himself up. Then he fled, all the while muttering about the little gunmen and the ghosts he had to outrun. But just before he turned a corner, the Thief snapped three quick pictures of the interpreter fleeing. When I asked him why, he told me it was for the sake of a visual record and nothing else.
Next, we ran into the ugly little T and one of his former prisoners. They held hands, and the both of them came marching down the maze, side by side, old rifles and new machine guns strapped to their chests, carrying hefty rice bags on their shoulders. They both dripped with blood that might not have been their own. When we met them, they set their bags down to rest.
“Sisters,” the ugly T said, “have you spotted an Afghan wearing an American costume?”
Jawed told him he had, and then he retold the story the interpreter told us.
The ugly T shook his head. “That’s not how it happened at all,” he said.
The Second Story of the Tale of the Ambush in the Maze
“First of all,” he started, “we were never given any warning to drop our weapons or to halt where we stood. We wouldn’t have done it even if they did, but they didn’t and that is the truth. In fact, the first thing they did was blow out the brains of one of my prisoners. Afterward, my brother and I ducked behind our steer, pulled down our other prisoner, and returned fire.”
He showed us his old bolt-action rifle and continued: “They had machine guns and armor, and we had nothing but these. It was our very first firefight. At least, I thought it was our first. The way my brother shot, how calm and quick he reloaded, how fearlessly he knelt and aimed and fired, it seemed as if he were right at home in battle. While I fumbled with my rifle, he must have wounded two of the Americans by himself. Firing, ducking down, reloading, and firing again, maybe a hundred times in a single minute, which was all he had, one minute, before they pierced him through the throat.
99 Nights in Logar Page 18