“If you ever cared about me at all, and if you care about the things you say you do, you’ll get her out.”
“I’ll do everything in my power.” Sherzai walked to the door, his limp worse than ever. “You shouldn’t be here. It isn’t safe.”
His hand was on the knob when Daniel said, “I’ve planted a fistful of opium seeds somewhere in this office.” He heard the indignation in his own voice and hoped he didn’t sound like an angry teenager. He was far from that. The filter through which Daniel had seen his old guardian had been shredded by the revolution and the ugly stories it had already made, betrayals more terrible because they were inevitable. War and revolutions were like X-ray photographs: they revealed fractures and decay, and what people were made of deep inside. What gnawed at Daniel besides the pain of feeling like he didn’t really know the old man was a sense that Sherzai had been right. The gemstone firm had been useless in Daniel’s hands. It had given him so much, and he’d never given it anything at all. He should have gifted it to agha. He would have, if he’d thought of it at all. What he couldn’t bear was seeing his father’s life’s work in the hands of killers who would certainly do no better with it than he had.
“You did what? Impossible,” said Sherzai. “I was only outside for a few seconds.”
“A lot can happen in a few seconds.”
“What’s the meaning of this? I told you I would do everything I could.”
“I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“You ingrate. They search these offices whenever they like. They search everyone. They don’t trust us.”
Daniel’s former guardian haphazardly shuffled through books on shelves, ran his hands under cushions, opened and shut drawers. In his frantic search, he tripped on the carpet, which had shifted under him, and fell to his knees. Daniel rushed to his side and helped him up. He wondered if Sherzai really believed in the ideas of this regime. Perhaps he had borrowed them to get ahead. Plagiarized the plagiarists.
Daniel lifted the receiver. “Please make the call and tell them to let Laila go.”
Sherzai returned to the desk and dropped heavily in his seat. He dialed. He spoke to five individuals in four agencies, and at last told Daniel that Laila would be free within the hour.
“Thank you,” Daniel said. He could not leave without saying the next thing: “I never thought there would come a day when we wouldn’t be on the same side.”
“It’s not really sides.” Sherzai had raised his voice.
“Yes, it is. My father never forgot which side he was on.” Daniel admired Sayed now more than ever. He reminded Sherzai that he had never compromised and had still built an army and gone to war against an empire. “What would he say if he could see you now? He thought of you as his brother.”
“Not everything is about your father, and not everything is about you.”
“Exactly, this is not about me!” Both of them were nearly shouting now. “I’m not upset about the company, agha. I don’t really care.” Daniel pointed to the window. “You see what these men are like. The Russians are behind this. Do you want them here?”
“Enough!” Sherzai tossed his hands up as if throwing something high into the air.
“I don’t know how to fight an empire, Sherzai. I’m not my father.”
“No, you’re not. I’ve said so before.”
Daniel put his head in his hands. “I don’t know how he did it.”
Sherzai’s features grew heavy and he let his hands fall in exasperation. “Don’t you, batche’m?”
Daniel looked up. He felt his breath slow down. “What do you mean?”
“I think you know. Somewhere deep down, I think you’ve always known.” He dropped heavily into his chair, as if carrying the weight of a thousand years.
Something Khaiyam had said came back to Daniel. Real war required real money. Then he remembered something Peter had said in his hotel room the morning after the party, when Laila and Rebecca were there. Something about currencies that Daniel had found odd.
Sherzai’s skin looked clammy in the sunlight that streamed mercilessly through the windows. “Do you remember the Stupid Man?” he asked. He leaned forward and his normally grave voice was a forceful whisper. “Of the five houses on the street, didn’t you ever wonder why he sat only in front of yours?”
Daniel nodded. Yes, he had wondered this as a child. It was as if the answer had always been there, but written in a language he could not read.
“The Stupid Man wanted Sayed to see what addiction did to a man,” Sherzai said.
“My father saw many addicts in his time.”
The chair creaked under Sherzai’s body. “Not men who had once been his friends.”
Daniel’s thoughts began to siphon through a tunnel. With reluctance, he asked, “What did my father do?”
“The best he could, batche’m. Now fly home and be there when your child is born.”
“What do you mean, the best he could? Agha, tell me.”
“Daniel, do you know what it costs to bribe English businessmen and Russian generals?” Sherzai shook his head as he spoke to the floor. “They don’t take just any currency. Neither do arms dealers who sell the most modern guns made in America and Germany. You cannot pay them in afghanis.” Sherzai leaned forward. “Corruption is paid for in dollars and pounds.”
There it was again: something that wanted in and another thing that wanted out. Daniel didn’t blink. “You told me a thousand times that Sayed was arrested because he challenged a king who couldn't bear that Sayed was more loved than he was.”
“That’s part of the truth. Your father and the king struck a bargain. If Sayed promised never to challenge him again, he would only serve one year in jail, and the real reason for his arrest would not be made public. It was a good trade for both of them.”
Daniel shook his head. It had to be a lie. He searched for holes in the story. “He burned down a field of poppies. I saw it.”
“Did Sayed burn down the field of a criminal, or the field of a rival?” Creases of sorrow lined agha’s face.
“God.” Daniel slumped back into his chair, giving in to the truth. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You had no mother. I couldn’t take your father from you, too.” Sherzai loosened his tie. “He wanted you to remember him as the man he wanted to be, not the man he was. It’s what most fathers want.”
“All these stories about my father being a great man—”
“Sayed was a great man. That was never a lie. At first, he used opium only to fight the English. He bought poppy fields and consolidated them. His father had made him swear to never sell gemstones for anything but the local currency, but opium was another story. That was Sayed’s own business. He sold opium for dollars and pounds and deutsche marks and francs.”
“I was in gemstone mines and warehouses all of my childhood. They were real.”
“Oh yes, the gemstone business was real. And what a gift it was!” Sherzai told Daniel that Sayed hired men by the hundreds to score the poppies, collect the resin, and fracture it into small, irregular pieces that looked like any other freshly mined stone.
Daniel hacked out a laugh. Those tubs full of ugly little brown stones, the ones he couldn’t imagine becoming beautiful. The pain from his wounds returned. Another memory shattered.
Sherzai brought his thumb and index finger together. “They were this small. Painstaking work.” He shook his head in awe. “Rolled out by the truckloads into India and Iran with the real stones. When Sayed and I were preparing to resist the English in World War Two, he told me.” He rubbed his face as if trying to wash something off it.
“The field of a rival . . .” Daniel pressed his palms over his eyes. “That wasn’t during the war. I was eight, maybe nine. What need was there to be dealing with opium then?”
“Opium is addictive, whatever s
ide of the business you’re on. Sayed always said that as long as opium was the easiest way, it would remain the primary way. He knew better than anyone how true this was.”
“And after he died? All these years, my company has been—”
“No. You remember the years that the company faltered? I knew you resented me for that. I could see it in your eyes whenever it came up. It was because I divested the company of opium. Profits fell, obviously. I eventually made up for it by selling for foreign currency, as Sayed had refused to do. But that part you already know.”
With shaky hands, Sherzai picked up his tea and slurped. “Luckily, lapis lazuli started soaring in price a few years ago.” He chuckled. “The hippies like it.”
“The Stupid Man was a customer of my father’s?” Daniel asked.
“Not a customer. An employee. Later, a friend. He was a brilliant poppy scorer. He made the finest cuts into the pods.”
“Did my mother know about all this?”
“I’m not sure what she knew. But Dorothy understood much more than she said, unlike Sayed’s second wife. In the end, I think she left because of the new woman. It was a question for the Scale of Sages: her humiliation by Sayed weighed even more than her love for you. And her love for you was very, very great.”
Snippets of the past rearranged themselves, changing colors. It was like Daniel was looking at his childhood through a kaleidoscope held the wrong way. He met Sherzai’s eyes and realized he was truly seeing him for the first time. “My father always said that opium was the only enemy he couldn’t defeat.”
“And it was,” Sherzai said. “It has haunted me for so long, this story. I dreaded the idea that you were going to find out through a book.”
So that was what Peter had been writing. He asked Sherzai, who confirmed. “Peter figured it out a long time ago. The great man who wouldn’t take payment in hard currency but somehow bribed expensive men and waged war against England itself? The story didn’t fit. The book will not be unkind, Daniel. Peter likes to write about men who do what is necessary.” After a time, he added softly, “Did you really hide poppy seeds in here?”
“No.”
“Laila will be out soon.” Both men stood, and Sherzai put his arms around Daniel, who let himself be embraced but could not move. “I know this hurts, batche’m. But sometimes, the past demands to make itself known, or it will drive you mad without you ever really knowing why.”
Tears threatened to flood from Daniel’s eyes. How familiar and yet how foreign the feeling was, a bruising pain behind the eyes, a sharpness in the nose. The dam broke. Daniel wept in agha’s arms.
36
Laila had been taken to a prison not far from downtown. Daniel found her sitting rigidly among the slumping girls broken by either the injustice of life or the injustice of the law. She didn’t look at him as he led her away, the guard pulling the iron gate shut behind them. From a cell, a young inmate shouted accusations, telling everyone who could hear that her guard had raped her, although she was a good Muslim. An elderly woman replied, “They rape bad Muslims, too.”
Twisting her hands like she was lathering soap, Laila watched the road as Daniel drove her Golf, agreeing to pose as her servant if they were stopped. She conveyed nothing with her eyes, nor did she speak, other than to tell him he looked ridiculous. Every time he shifted gears, the jerking motion punctuated stretches of silence. At last she said, “Thank you.”
“Did you know about my father?”
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “Peter told me that morning at the hotel. He was asking if I knew, but I didn’t.”
Daniel wanted to explain how this made him feel but had no words for this emotion, no precedent. He cursed the limitations of language.
“I’m finished as a doctor.”
“Without an investigation or a trial? You’ll be cleared. You’re one of them, after all.”
“But I did it. Their accusations are true.”
Telaya piped up. What is accurate isn’t always true.
“You’ll still work for them?”
“It’s not about them. It’s just time for real change, Daniel.”
Daniel dropped her off at her house. Peter was already there. None of the guards matched Daniel’s bearded, turbaned profile to the photos of him in the book. He was beginning to feel inordinately lucky, just as he had when he was a small boy living in a big house before his mother went away and his father went to jail. Once he was home, he waited until it was nighttime and took every bottle of alcohol that was left and poured the contents into the pool. Daniel fetched Sayed’s portrait from inside and went into the shed and smashed the frame with a hammer until it was nothing but splinters. He tore at the canvas but couldn’t destroy it, so he stalked to the pool and dropped it in the water and watched the oil begin to smear, his father’s features becoming indistinguishable. Sayed Sajadi had died not once but twice. Once in his bed, when his body collapsed after decades of drinking. And again in a swimming pool, fifteen years later, when his son drowned him along with the alcohol he swore to never touch again.
Red Scare
They strut like pigeons on the sidewalk, puffing their chests out. They call themselves Communist but care nothing about the communal. Like Taj, they are salesmen, but they are the lowest kind, peddling things made by other people. They make nothing themselves. They grow nothing. Socrates taught Taj a little about their ideas, which are well known and sold in many countries, but seemed to be made in Russia and, like their cars, not built to last.
The difference between a good and bad salesman is how well he sells the commodity that all salesmen carry: lies. One might think lies are easy to sell, because people pay dearly to hear the ones they like. But in fact, they are the hardest to sell because there is so much competition.
The urchins are glued together these days like they’re a single organism. Taj watches from an abandoned bakery whose owner disappeared last week, the day the red pigeons came. The bakery isn’t far from that terrible place that used to exist, where urchins were sold, although everyone pretends it was never there. At least it is gone now, its owners and customers dead. They died like the cowards they were, trying to escape, begging for their lives.
The children squat against buildings, and without seeing their hands Taj knows how dirty their nails are, how blistered their hands are from helping people scrub floors or clean windows with chemicals too harsh for their skin. For their efforts, they will get a little food. He looks at one of them, a boy with mischief in his eyes and a smile that says, “I know something.” Taj can tell he is the thief of the group, which means he can run. He has a chance to escape this wretchedness, because the trick in life is to be someone other people cannot catch.
The Communist soldiers are patrolling the sidewalks. A sergeant struts over to a man who sells fruit and jabs him in the stomach with his rifle. “You’re in the way,” the sergeant shouts.
The old man picks up his wheelbarrow and teeters off to another corner, but the sergeant keeps shouting. His comrades laugh, and the old man wheels his apples and pomegranates farther away until he is out of sight. Taj realizes these men will do the same thing to him: they will chase him from Fever Valley, force him to move his fields farther and farther until it is like they never existed—unless he finds a way to stop them. Taj recognizes the sergeant. He is a client, as are some of the others who weren’t revolutionaries before but are now.
The children are holding hands, forming a chain, when the soldiers come toward them. Taj walks out of the bakery. It happens fast, a camouflage van leaving the curb and chasing after the children. The soldiers round them up and promise a better life awaits them. But Taj knows that once they get in that van, they might end up with no life at all. The children know, too. A few of them are crying, and a few look like they have never cried. Ordinary men and women pass by, one or two trying to interfere, but these are only street ch
ildren, and the soldiers are dangerous. A mother in slacks rushes past the scene, squeezing through the crowd with her two children, afraid the soldiers will take them, too. But they will not take her daughter and son. They target the weak ones—the unwanted, the invisible. Pigeons only go after crumbs.
Taj pushes the sergeant in the chest. The man looks at him like he’s a dog who gotten into his house and aims the gun at him.
Taj doesn’t move. “Leave them alone.”
“You’d best go back to where you came from.”
This is where I came from, Taj thinks but doesn’t say. He pushes the gun away and shoves the sergeant again. Here they come, the rest of the pigeons. Some of the urchins flee. Some are held in iron grips and look pleadingly at him. Taj hits the sergeant in the face, and suddenly there is some whistling and even laughter in the gathering crowd. But everyone disperses when the soldiers fire into the air. Two soldiers take Taj by the arms as others beat him, landing blow after blow. Taj tells the children to run. A little boy tries to save him, pulling the soldiers by their legs, but they kick him away and Taj says, “Run, child.”
When it’s all over, Taj is alone, facedown in the street. The soldiers disperse, telling everybody to remember what happens to people who don’t know their place. Passersby either stare at him or pretend he doesn’t exist. One woman asks if he needs help. No. Boy has never needed help. He will never be caught, not only because of his speed. The trick is to let those who are chasing you believe they have caught you. Sometimes, to survive, you have to act like you’re already beaten.
That night, he dreams he’s standing alone in an orchard, walking among mulberries and cherries and figs, and he plucks the fruit and hands them to urchins and all of them say thank you. All except one. The girl in the red dress with mirrors. She only curses him. He shouts in the dark that she doesn’t belong here. She grows louder, and he begs her to be quiet. He says he is sorry, and he thinks he has gone mad.
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