Do you see me?
He closed his eyes, and in the darkness everything became light. “I see you.” He crushed the pain rising in his throat. “I see you now.”
Goodbye, Abdullah, Telaya said. And she went out like a candle.
Telaya
The day before he sells the last of his opium and helps Daniel Sajadi raise money to fight the Communists, Taj looks into the sun in hopes it will blind him, because he no longer wants to see the dead girl in the mirrored dress. She is everywhere. He wishes his ears would fail him, too, because she is never silent. It’s all because of that whorehouse, that place that everybody knows about but nobody mentions. The place that made Taj do something he never, ever should have.
Taj hates the disgusting place and its disgusting owner, a man with sausage arms who wears an earring, and yet the place is useful. Taj gave one of the urchins a camera and told him to take pictures of the customers, because important men come to the forbidden house and Taj wants power over these men who have no power over themselves. Taj gives the children chocolates and blankets, and to one who likes music he gives a guitar.
In the city one night, a rich man who buys opium from Taj tells him about something else he wants to buy. Something that sells for an even better price than drugs. He asks Taj if he can find a special girl, one not yet used up by the men in that whorehouse near Shor Bazaar. He will pay more money than Taj can imagine. But Taj recoils. He is a businessman, but he cannot sell those desperate urchins.
It comes to him late one night. There is a way to sell the man what he wants: a child of those who don’t live like people should. The kind that aren’t really human, preferring to live without walls, trekking around deserts and towns, never settling. Even in a whorehouse, at least these creatures would have walls. But they wouldn’t care, because they aren’t really people. Not to Taj.
As he drives to the desert, the sun peers at him like a glass eye, and he is glad he does not believe in God, or it would seem like God was watching him. He walks among the Kochis, giving them jewels, medicine, rifles, and business advice, helping them with their affairs.
Then he sees the girl in the mirrored red dress playing with her doll. She is twirling, carefree and wild, singing a song she has made up, and her brothers laugh at her until she chases them away. The sun catches on her dress, the little mirrors like spinning rainbows. Taj laughs, too, because she amuses him. He finds out her name is Telaya. The transaction is easy. Her father, Baseer, agrees without much discussion, when Taj says it will be a better life for her and he will pay well. The mother tries to protest, but she is only a woman and she loses.
Telaya smiles when she sees Taj and wraps her arms around him and calls him Uncle. He has brought her a necklace today, the first truly nice gift in his haul. Incredibly, she shrugs and says, “Give it to my parents so they can sell it.” Most girls like jewelry, Taj tells her. “I like my mirrors,” she says, pointing to her dress and giving him a theatrical bow. “I don’t need anything else.”
Something in his heart stops. He never thought a girl would say such a thing. When Telaya hugs him, the empty place in him is replaced by a voice that says, this one is special. She is not like her kind. She is not like the urchins, either. And most importantly, she is not like Ashura or the girl who exchanged herself for opium. Maybe she dreams of walls, and if she doesn’t, she will discover their beauty. If Taj shows her what they mean. If, within walls, she finds peace and the wonders of keeping the good things in and the bad things out.
He decides there and then. He will not give Telaya to the rich man in the city. And he will not touch her, not in that way, not until she is older. He would never do such a thing. It is as if destiny has brought her to him, because Tela means gold, so together their names could form the phrase Golden Crown of the King. She is nine or ten, her parents think. Taj does not know how old he is either. He likes that they have this in common. His heart swells when he realizes that he can teach her to read, just as Socrates taught him.
As Taj and Baseer finalize the details, Telaya hears them. She makes a sound of terrible shock before backing away, shaking her head, clutching at her doll. She starts to cry, hiccupping through sobs. Her parents promise life will be better for her and also for them, although the mother weeps. Her father says this is a chance at something other girls have when they grow up, better clothes and better shoes, and he says this is how things are and that he loves her enough to give her away. But he didn’t give her away. He sold her. Telaya knows this, and she hates her father for it and she shouts at him as she runs away. “You can’t make me,” she screams. They try to catch her, telling her she will go with Taj, and to stop making a scene. But they cannot catch her. “Let her go for now,” says Baseer. “She’ll come back.” He goes into his tent to polish silver and asks his wife to return to her tasks.
The mirrors on Telaya’s dress sparkle as she runs through the desert. Taj watches her as she shouts, “No! I would rather die.” She runs faster. He does not chase her. Her father is right. She will return soon, and one day she will be grateful and she will care for him.
In the distance, a big beige car is coming closer. Suddenly, Telaya turns to Taj with a strange and terrible grin he never thought he would see on a child. She dips down into the ditch, sliding on her heels. He turns away and walks back into the sea of nomads and tents, leaving her for now to play. Alone, she cannot go far. He tries to erase that hideous smile from his memory.
Then, carried on the wind like the cry of a thousand birds, comes a terrible screeching sound. Something slams into Taj, nearly knocking him off his feet, and he hears her voice as if she were standing inches away. I win, she whispers. She is inside him now.
At the beginning, Telaya says very little, hissing small cruelties to him at night. Then she awakens, terrible and strong. It happens as Taj is walking away from a bistro one night, after Taj tells Daniel Sajadi that he will kill Telaya’s kin if Daniel destroys his poppies. After that, Telaya never goes back to sleep, haunting him even though Taj never believed in ghosts.
Sometimes she whispers and other times she screams, but she always tells him she knows what he is, and at night Taj lies awake, tortured by her voice. One night, he steals a bottle of wine and drinks until her voice grows dim. But eventually the wine wears off. She comes back louder. He drinks again. She tells him she hates him for making it so she had to die, had to had to had to.
Then she proposes a bargain, late one night when Taj is walking in Paghman Gardens after meeting with Daniel Sajadi, who has decided to become an opium prince now that the red pigeons have taken Kabul. As Taj begs the girl to leave him in peace, Telaya makes him an offer. She will leave him alone if he saves Daniel Sajadi.
“You must do this,” she says, and she sounds like she did on the day the horsemen cut the heads off foreigners at a Russian factory in the city and ended up shot by soldiers. Religious men went smashing windows and bottles that night, and Telaya told Taj to avenge the children used by evil men. He went to that disgusting house and killed its owners and customers, including that American named Greenwood, whose picture he already had, and whose hand he’d unknowingly shaken at the Sajadi house.
Driving toward the border zone with Daniel Sajadi, Taj knows that at last he will be free, because he will do what Telaya wants. He will save the man. Beside him Daniel is quiet, and in his silences he is more frightening than in his furors, with eyes ablaze and jaw set tightly. But Taj knows the man will not kill him. There was a time when Taj wasn’t sure of this, and he believes Daniel wasn’t sure either.
Close to the border, he counts the moments until he is free of Telaya. The bullets fly between the pigeons and the horsemen as Taj leads Daniel to the border, and as he shakes his hand, Taj says, “Until next time, Daniel Sajadi.” And the man is saved, vanishing into the sands of Pakistan. He will fly to America, and Taj is sure the man will forget all about him and become someone who was
never on the same side as Taj. Not even during the days when bombs blew holes in buildings and people, and flags were replaced, and blood fell like rain.
As the pickup truck carrying Daniel Sajadi rolls out of sight, a great force crashes into Taj, tearing open his chest, and suddenly he feels lighter than ever, as if something has finally escaped through the wound. Before Telaya dissolves in a shimmer of splintering mirrors and crimson mist, she whispers, I forgive you, Boy.
Taj cannot walk. The sudden weightlessness leaves him so dizzy he drops to his knees, and men take him by the arms and lay him down in a tent. Someone dabs his forehead with water while a man tries to pick something out of Taj’s chest, and a boy squats beside him, fanning him with peacock feathers. Taj feels blood drain from him as he falls asleep, and in the darkness he sees his new garden in Helmand, acre upon acre of flowers that will be shielded by proud mountains all around. His new garden has tall, towering walls. Like the garden he was born in. Like the garden he has dreamed of since he was Boy.
Epilogue
On the road before me, I see a blur of shimmering water. I know it is a mirage. I am almost alone on this length of desert highway. I pass a sign that tells me I can dine, refuel, and sleep at the next exit. If I stop, I can eat fast food and exchange friendly nods with other travelers. Families heading to the Grand Canyon. New Agers on their way to Sedona. Bachelorettes driving to Vegas. I don’t take the exit.
The drive to Scottsdale is more than six hours, and desert drives put me in a somber mood. The whispering engine is the only sound. Sometimes I listen to music in the car, but not on desert roads.
Thoughts of my past, present, and shrinking future float into my head uninvited. I am nearly seventy now, the age when people look back at their lives and tell others they have no regrets, even though they do. Some things don’t matter so much. Like the veins on my hands that look like purple worms, or the brown connect-the-dots on my thinning skin. Why don’t they call them freckles when you’re old?
But there are some things that time has forced me to reckon with. I’m not at death’s door, but watching your wife die forces a conversation not only with her but with yourself. Sending your son to war does the same.
When I arrived in Pakistan that night, the men drove me to Quetta. One of the guards’ cousins took me in. They fed me and let me shower and sleep, and never have those things meant so much. From there, I was able to call Rebecca. I learned I had a son. The labor nearly killed them both. I hitched a succession of rides to Islamabad, where the American embassy helped me get home. During that trip, I had hours on end to think. I was proud of having started something with meaning, something that would last. Not the destruction of the poppy fields, as I’d once hoped, but the religious resistance to the Soviet-backed Kalq.
I now know what I helped create when I gave that chaderi-clad woman a bag of diamonds. Would I go back and undo it? Sometimes I think, If only I could. But if only is a reflex that helps us build myths of what else could have been. I understand now that really, there are no alternate endings, only different paths leading to the same end.
I could never have gone back to that red flag, oozing like a wound in the Afghan sky. I could never have chosen that picture over the one I helped draw. Like war, love, and addiction, regret is a labyrinth with blind turns. I couldn’t have predicted the horrors that were eventually born of that movement, nor my son’s involvement in trying to free my homeland from what I helped build.
I never thought I would say this, but I miss the Cold War, when the enemy didn’t want to die any more than we did. How easy and predictable the Soviets seem now. How quaintly conventional to face soldiers who represent countries instead of the rogue battalions that roam the earth today, blowing people up from London to Baghdad. I remember when men wore uniforms instead of bombs.
Matthew returned from Afghanistan years ago, after his third tour of duty. He was stationed in Kandahar. The first time he was in Jalalabad, the second in Kunduz. His third tour was what killed Rebecca. I lost her to cancer ten months ago. They said it started in her liver and spread to her lungs, but I know it began and ended in her heart. My son was awarded a Purple Heart. No mother wants her child to earn a Purple Heart. Shrapnel tore through Matthew’s leg after an explosion that blew his Humvee off the highway. I know that road well. I once had an accident there, too.
Matthew will survive if he can end his dependence on the pills they gave him for his pain. Some of the soldiers smoked weed—do they still call it that?—and some drank, but more and more discovered the elegance of tablets and the tidy narcotic high. As Matthew says, one war ended for him and another began. My grandson is nine years old, living with his mother, who left Matthew last year. The place in Scottsdale is supposed to be one of the best. He’s been there thirty days, and it was his decision to go. I’m prouder of Matthew than of anything else in my life, and yet he has broken my heart.
Six months after he was born, I told Rebecca what I did in those last days before I fled. Having a child dissolved the divisions between us, and I was never able to hide anything from her again. When I confessed, she took my hand and made a confession of her own: she’d known about my father. Peter had told her that morning after the dinner party, when I found her and Laila in his hotel room. Still today, I watch the shadow play between my memory of my father and who he was.
Maybe one day my son will know the truth about his father and think of me with the same ambivalence. Rebecca added to the family myth with a story about me. She told Matthew that long ago, when Daddy’s people needed him, when terrible men hurt his country and his friends, he fought back. Daddy did what needed to be done. So little of this sounds true to me, but when everything is plunged into darkness, as it was in that red-versus-green world, truth ceases to exist. It is, to borrow a phrase I have checked off on countless medical forms, not applicable.
Scientists say the universe expands at an accelerating rate as more and more space is taken up by dark matter. But not all things that are infinite are dark. Rebecca’s love was infinite, and I have been blessed with glimmering color and light, the jewels that were my marriage, my family, my career. USADE feels far away now. After I came home, I spent the next thirty years fixing cars with Ian. In the sun and the surf, our children grew up together in the waves. I loved running that shop in Venice Beach.
I sent letters to Laila the first few years but never got a response. Rebecca sometimes said, “Leave her be. She’s part of a different world now.” I kept telling myself that one day, I would write to Sherzai. But there was too much to say, and so much less time than I thought. Agha was killed after the Russians invaded at the end of 1979, plunging my homeland into a war that never ends.
When I think back to that time, much of it is blurry. Maybe it’s better that way; there are things I do not wish to revisit. Now and then, when I read about the men and women who came back injured from fighting the movement I helped create, and the ones who didn’t come back at all, I feel as if I’ve just come from my own funeral and didn’t like the eulogy.
Peter never finished the book about my father. After I told him what I’d done, he quietly put it all away, and we never spoke of it again. He wrote a book about the opium economy instead, warning of its rise, and twenty years later was praised as prescient, appearing in newspapers and on TV.
When I was at USADE, Afghanistan produced one-third of the world’s opium. Now it produces eighty percent, maybe more. Almost all of that is grown in Helmand, with heroin labs stretched across the province. The pills my son is addicted to are derived from poppies grown legally in Turkey, while my father’s people struggle for food, water, and life. And there is an onslaught of new ways to feed those addicted to pills, with cheap, synthetic powder in tiny envelopes killing people like never before. Did it need to be this way? They fade in and out of the headlines, but they are always there. The addictions. The terror. The radicals. The war.
Years a
go, I affixed Telaya’s mirror to a ribbon. It hangs from the rearview mirror of my car, which is the perfect place for it. It helps me see things that are behind me, reminding me that they are closer than they appear. Sometimes, I still hear Telaya’s voice in my dreams and awaken in the dark to her whispers, and it is as if the past itself is whispering to all of humanity: I am faster than you.
Tomorrow I drive my son home to Los Angeles, where he will live with me. Ian and Pamela are down the street. Their son, Sean, fought alongside Matthew in the war. All of us will do what we can to make my boy whole again. It is spring, and we have plans to go see the California wildflowers, Matthew, Sean, and I. Few things are as unforgettable as a sea of poppies pushing toward the horizon, striving for infinity.
Acknowledgments
This novel was years in the making. It would never have happened without the extraordinary support, friendship, and expertise of dozens of people along the way.
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