The Widow's Husband

by Tamim Ansary

  Khadija sat on the bench, awaiting her turn with the clay water jug. The spent water ran through a drain in the middle of the floor to a ditch below, which carried it to the fields. Suddenly, her gorge rose, and she pitched onto her hands and knees over the drain to hunch and spew.

  When she struggled back onto the bench, shaken, she saw Soraya staring at her in wide-eyed, frightened sympathy. “Are you sick?”

  “A little. Nothing bad.”

  “How long? How bad?”

  “Not long. Nothing much, Allah willing. My dear malang is gone, and I worry about him, you know.”

  “We all do.”

  “I eat clotted cream. That’s my downfall! My goat keeps producing and its milk is so rich. I have to skim the cream and then I can’t waste it, can I? It’s all I seem to crave. I know it’s bad for me, but that’s what ails me, bad diet and anxiety, that’s all.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Soraya declared flatly. “You’re ill, I can see it. You have to move back in with us, Khadija-jan. I can’t get along without you. Just until the men come back. Please? They will come back, won’t they?”

  Khadija rinsed the taste of vomit from her mouth. “So you haven’t heard a word from them either? Nothing?”

  “Not a word. No one has. If I lose Ibrahim—”

  “Allah forbid. Allah is compassionate!”

  “After losing Ahmad—”

  “God forbid you should lose him. He’ll come back, may God will it.”

  “And he’ll bring the malang back?”

  “We trust in Allah, dear. All right, if you wish, I will move back here for a while. It’s better for me too, until the men return. I’m all alone up there.”

  “If you go back up, I’ll go with you, I swear. I can’t stay here with my mother and them.”

  “Never say that out loud,” Khadija warned. “Don’t even think it. Don’t let any of them see that you want to run. You’re the mistress here. Force them to know it.”

  “I need your help,” Soraya pleaded.

  “I’ll move back, my dearest, but I can only do so much to help. You see, my very help makes you weak. It’s better that you stand up to them on your own. That will make you stronger. Otherwise they’ll swarm in like locusts and ravage your husband’s stores. They’re at it already, eating through his wealth, all the while pretending they’re here to keep you company. You must defend this garrison, no one else can do it. Tell them they can stay, but it’s bread and turnips from now on, except when there is reason to feast. The malik’s household will be run prudently. Tell them, and hold fast.”

  That night, Soraya found Khushdil alone and confronted her. “You’ve kept me company through dark hours, Khushdil-jan, you’re a good cook, but the rice-eating days are over. Since you’re not here to feast, it won’t trouble you to learn that from now on we’ll have bread and turnips except on special days.”

  Khushdil’s lips twisted into a sneer. “This is Khadija talking.”

  Soraya blushed. “No,” she lied, and blushed harder, knowing she was lying. “I must—I must protect my husband’s stores.”

  “I’m amazed you listen to that woman. I’m amazed you even let her into your house—it is yours, you know. She has her own house. If she moves back in with us, she’ll soon be bossing all of us around, just wait and see.”

  “Well,” Soraya ventured, “you have a house of your own too.”

  Khushdil rocked back on her cushion of a butt and stared. “Yes,” she sniffed. “I do, of course, and if you want me gone, just say so. If you want me gone, I won’t even pause to put on my shoes. I’ll walk barefoot into the snow. Is that what you want?”

  “It’s not what I said,” Soraya stammered. “I want everyone to stay. I need all the comfort I can get, I who have lost my son, and now I’ve lost my husband—”

  “Oh, you’ll get your husband back, God willing. That’s why I wonder how you can welcome that woman into your house.”

  “Khadija? Why do you say that woman? What do you mean by that?”

  “You’re such an innocent—oh, we cherish you for it, believe me. Stay just as you are, you fragile flower. Stay innocent as long as possible!”

  “Innocent about what? What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t want to spread gossip. I abhor gossip, as you know.”

  “What gossip?” Soraya pleaded.

  “Well, since you pull it out of me—but it rips me in two to have to tell you. Your husband visited the widow before he left. I don’t blame Ibrahim-jan. Men are weak. It’s up to us women to avoid offering temptation. That’s what God commands. I try my best, God knows, and so do you. But we’re not all of us so careful.”

  “What are you saying, Khushdil? Say it or I’ll scratch your eyes out!”

  “Oh!” the fat woman lamented. “Oh, I hate to tittle and gossip—but it’s not gossip if it’s true, is it? Would it be right to hide a thing like this from his wife? I’m torn! Well, if you insist on knowing, he was seen, Soraya-jan. My boy followed him. You thought he went straight to Ghulam Dastagir’s house the day they left, but no: he veered up to Baba’s Nose on the way. He was alone with her from sundown until dusk, long enough to say twenty rakats of namaz, but I don’t think they were saying namaz all that time! Do you?”

  Soraya glared at Khushdil, then jumped at her, slashing at her face with her fingernails, an attack so sudden and violent it overwhelmed the bigger woman. Their screams drew the whole household. Men dragged Soraya off her cousin. She came away clutching handfuls of blood-speckled hair.

  “She’s horrid!” shrieked Soraya. But then she wouldn’t say what Khushdil had done or said. She just shook her head and whined, “She said nasty things! Nasty!”

  Khushdil sucked on her bleeding lower lip and did not contradict Soraya’s accusation. Everyone went away muttering that the mistress might still have a few djinns inside her. Everyone kept their distance from Soraya that evening.

  The next morning, Soraya found Khadija sitting in a patch of sunlight, looking pale. She had just come from the washroom where she must have thrown up again. She gave Soraya a wan smile and said, “Let me rest for a minute.” Soraya turned away from her one-time sister-in-law, blinking back jealous tears. She recognized Khadija’s symptoms all too well, now that Khushdil had pointed her in the right direction. She had suffered all those same symptoms herself—four times: once with Ahmad, and again with each of her girls. Outside, the djinns standing in the deepening snow began to knock on the walls, and Soraya could hear them whispering, “Come out, Soraya…come out…”

  36

  The appointed Thursday having come at last, Ibrahim and Ghulam Dastagir were on their way to see the mysterious Sekandar Boornus. He lived across the Kabul River from the Grand Bazaar, in that dense urban neighborhood called Shor Bazaar. The road to the man’s compound began near the river, and it was a tree-lined avenue at first, with sidewalks running along the base of the walls that flanked it. The roadbed itself was paved with stones, making it accessible to the horse-drawn tongas that abounded in Kabul. But the trees vanished, and the sidewalks thinned out, and the road itself grew ever narrower as it snaked deeper into Shor Bazaar, until it accommodated only foot traffic.

  Karim had begged to come along on this venture, and his father had given in to his pleadings, warning only, “Don’t get underfoot.” Now the boy trotted gladly between the men, grinning but smoldering. He wanted so much to please his father, the sad little fellow; but some other passion boiled in him as well, Ibrahim thought: some vengeful hatred, as if he bore the Engrayzee a special grudge. But what special hurt could he have suffered? Ibrahim had wondered about this before: did he have carnal feeling for the ruined girl, Shahnaz? Was that even possible for a boy so young?

  The pedestrian traffic kept thickening. Many people were striding along with an air of grim purpose, Ibrahim noticed. He began to sense that something nasty mixed into the excitement and it made him uneasy. All these people with blazing eyes—where were they goin
g? At one point, Karim spied a boy his own age and tried to slip away, but his father grabbed his neck.

  “Stick close! Something’s happening here, and I don’t like it! Stick close.” Oh, so Ghulam Dastagir sensed it too.

  “I was only going to ask that boy what’s happening, papa. He might know.”

  “Forget that boy! Stick close, I said! Malik-sahib,” the big man growled at Ibrahim, “where is this scoundrel’s house? How much longer must we walk?”

  “Not much, I’m sure.” Ibrahim looked about for anything matching descriptions of Boornus’s compound, but the crowd blocked his view. The crowd, in fact, was plugging up the street now, because it had stopped flowing. People were just milling about in place. The plug kept tightening as more idlers accumulated. What was drawing so many to this spot?

  Ghulam Dastagir elbowed through the crush of bodies, looking for a spectacle. The core attraction turned out to be an open compound door through which everybody was trying to squeeze. Well, if others wanted to get through that bottleneck, so did he. Ghulam Dastagir bulled through the opening, pulling Ibrahim and Karim along in his wake.

  Inside, the villagers found a large yard partitioned into geometric shapes by walkways and flower beds interspersed with statues of men and women, some of them nude. An elegant house spanned the entire yard. From its front door jutted a veranda paved in green and black tiles. At the edge of this porch, high above the crowd like a speaker at a podium stood Al-Sekandar Boornus. He wore a farangi-style shirt and trousers, but his head was swathed in a bulbous blue turban. His round face looked very pink, and his little moustache looked very waxed.

  “Stop this nonsense!” he was shouting in Farsi. “Stop right now, you men! What are you doing in my yard? If you have grievances, take them to your government. I can’t help you. Disperse, I say, or there will be trouble.”

  “Good God!” Ibrahim clapped his hands to his cheeks. “It’s him!”

  “It’s who?” Ghulam Dastagir squinted up.

  “Al-Iskandar Boornus. It’s him.”

  “I thought he said to come alone.” Ghulam Dastagir glowered around at the crowd. No one in the crowd looked back at him. All of them were fixated on Burnes. Ibrahim was peering up there too. A Hindu soldier stood just behind the Engrayzee, and another one slouched at the back of the veranda. A shadow moving inside the open doorway might have been a third soldier.

  Ibrahim nudged a beak-nosed man. “What’s everybody doing here?”

  The man shrugged and tore his gaze away from Burnes reluctantly. “I don’t know. The door was open, it looked like a bit of excitement, so I came inside.”

  “Me too,” said a towering Uzbek. “Miss a chance to see how these Engrayzee live? Not on your life! And it’s worse than I thought—look at these idols!” He gaped at a plaster statue of a woman cupping her breasts to keep them from spilling out of the sheet she was wearing. “It shouldn’t be allowed.” He licked his lips.

  Karim hammered at his father’s thighs. “I can’t see! Lift me up, Papa.”

  “Nothing to see!” his father barked. “Just a man.”

  “Oh, that’s not just a man,” the Uzbek assured him. “That’s Al-Sekandar Boornus!”

  “What does he mean by ‘grievances’?” Ibrahim asked of no one in particular.

  “It’s early,” Burnes shouted. A conciliatory burr was audible in his voice now. “I will meet with your leaders this afternoon. Pick just a few, I can’t meet with hundreds. Pick ten or twelve and we’ll talk like reasonable men. The rest of you, go home. Honorable folks do not force their way into other men’s private homes. This is not how Afghans behave. You know it’s not. You are a people famous for your honor.”

  “You of all people, braying about honor!” someone sneered.

  “Thief of honor,” another called out, and this struck a chord. “Thief of honor!” came scattered cries.

  “What grievances?” Ibrahim repeated.

  “Papa, is this the Engrayzee?” Karim demanded querulously. “Why won’t you let me get on your shoulders? I want to see him too.”

  “Be quiet! This is men’s work. Malik-sahib, stick close, I’ll get us to the front row.”

  “He lures them with gold and then despoils them,” someone muttered.

  “Gold?” piped Karim, his eyes bugging out. His high voice carried in the breeze.

  “What gold?” said a man with a henna-reddened beard. “Did someone say gold?”

  The jostling crowd pushed Karim against his father’s leg, making the boy gasp for breath. Seeing his son’s distress, Ghulam Dastagir shoved back aggressively, indiscriminately. “You’re crushing my boy, you oafs!”

  “Hey,” barked one of the men he’d shoved. “We all have scores to settle with the bastard up there. Wait your turn, mister.”

  “What scores?” Ibrahim demanded. “What’s he done?”

  “He plunders virtue, brother,” someone finally answered him. “Plucks our women out of the streets, one by one. His servants grab them by the wagonload at night. He showers them with gold, and you know how women are, they can’t resist gold. This is a crowd of husbands and fathers. If you haven’t lost some honor to this bastard, get out of the way, because other men have. Not me, mind you, I keep my women locked up tight, but these others—”

  “What’s all this about gold?” the red-beard called out again

  The word was crackling from dozens of lips now. “Gold, did he say?”

  Someone let out a cry and pointed to a second story window where a young woman stood, holding a curtain bunched to one side and looking down with big, frightened eyes. A general shout went up, and she let the curtain drop.

  “Why—the infidel’s got someone’s daughter up there right now,” Red-beard screamed, punching his way forward. The men he pushed shoved back. Scuffles rippled through the crowd. The three sipahis moved to the veranda’s edge and pointed their rifles down to cow the crowd into silence. Burnes’s shouting voice emerged again. “You’re angry about nothing! Lies, you men! Listen to me, go now, you get ten rupias. Yes! Ten for any man who leaves my compound now. Ten rupias just for leaving—easy money.”

  Ghulam Dastagir made it into the front row. Ibrahim squeezed in next to him and waved to attract the Englishman’s attention. Behind him the crowd was snarling.

  Burnes pointed at Ibrahim without any apparent recognition. “You, my good man, thirty rupias if you walk out of my compound right now! My servants will pay you on the street. Go, now—go, go, good fellow, go!”

  “I don’t want your money,” Ibrahim cried.

  “He doesn’t want your money,” the crowd roared.

  “Don’t you know me?” Ibrahim pleaded..

  “Don’t you know him?” someone echoed, and then like second echoes shouts rang out from many spots: “And me?” “And me?” “Don’t you know me?”

  Burnes backed away from the edge. “Gold,” he gasped. “I’ll give you gold—to leave—my men will shoot you. I keep my promises—Sekandar Burnes—a man of my word—you know me—you’ll die—I swear!”

  “A man of his word!” Derision rippled through the yard.

  “…women up there right now…”

  “…gold in the house…”

  “Bastard thinks he can buy our women with his gold,” roared Ghulam Dastagir.

  “Stuff your gold up your butt, you donkey!” Startled by the shrill voice, Ibrahim looked down just in time to see Karim fitting a walnut-sized rock into a sling. He had brought a sling? Oh, no! Before Ibrahim could utter a word, the boy whipped the rock around his head and let fly. The rock zinged past Burnes’s ear and into the house, where something broke with a glassy crash.

  Burnes flinched and flung up his arm. The rock had already missed him, but gunfire nonetheless burst from three rifle barrels: “No!” screamed Burnes.

  Too late: the guns had fired, the crowd had ignited. Pressure swelled against Ibrahim’s back. The roar rose. Implacably, ferociously, the whole mass began to surge toward the v
eranda. Ibrahim leaned back against it but the crowd broke around him like river water around a rock. Squeezed breathless by human flesh, Ibrahim glanced around for Ghulam Dastagir. His friend was looking down. How odd. And then—not odd at all for he was gazing down at Karim, who was lying on the ground for some reason, his face covered with blood for some reason. And people were stepping on the motionless boy, driven forward by the blind passion of the masses behind them. Ghulam Dastagir erupted. With flailing fists, he cleared a space big enough to lean down into. He swept up his son. Karim made no sound. The crowd would have drowned him out in any case, but there was nothing to drown. Karim was dead.

  And Ibrahim felt nothing about it, no hurt, no heartache. Not yet. The noise blended into a single roar like the falls downriver from Char Bagh. He and Ghulam Dastagir met eyes over Karim’s oozing head. Red rage was glistering in the big man’s eyes. Someone would pay for this. Someone would pay. Ghulam Dastagir nodded toward the verandah, a gesture, a request. Sudden random eddies of crowd pressure pushed the men together till the soft corpse was squeezed between them. Tears were welling out of Ghulam Dastagir’s eyes.

  Then, he relinquished the weight and was gone, gone to change both their destinies, leaving Karim in the headman’s arms. Ibrahim staggered to the wall. The verandah above him crashed with battle, no telling who was fighting whom. Another gunshot sounded and a man in Engrayzee livery came hurling off the verandah, hit the yard with a thump, sprang up, and raced for the gates.

  But never made it. Cut down from behind. Martial music in the street. Ibrahim could not go to see who was coming. He had to stay with Karim. His mind felt the weight of this heavy death now. The boy in his arms was as dead as Ahmad. But Ghulam Dastagir had other sons. Ibrahim had none, and would never have another. This young face, a hole where a nose should have been! He would have to be buried in Kabul now: how dreadful. But every place is close to God, Malang-sahib would have said. Every place. Why could he never ever feel it?

  The house clattered like a box with a rat trapped inside it. Windows broke on the second story, bits of wood came flying through the gaps. Windows broke on the ground floor. Wood and glass came flying out. People burst out the doorway. The mob had flushed two frightened animals. No, on second glance, they were women wrapped in blankets, running for their lives. Afghan women. Somebody’s daughters, sisters, wives perhaps.