by Gwen Florio
“Listen.” The Boy Wonder snapped his fingers again, the crack disconcertingly loud. “You’ve had your bad thing. And if you’re lucky, that’s the worst it will ever get. Those guys, they were amateurs, playing at being bad, probably all worked up from the weekly sermon. The real baddies never would have done it like that. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we had a successful kidnapping. But here’s the good part. You’ve been in the shit. Or gotten a whiff of it, at least. Now you know what it’s like. It won’t ever scare you like that again.”
I’ve been in the shit. Martin rolled the phrase around in his brain, trying to acquire a mental swagger. But his gut won out, queasy with the fear, imbuing him with a keen new appreciation for the next screen that flashed a display of handheld missile launchers, with their innocuous resemblance to plumbing fixtures. His stomach settled. If he ever found himself in the shit again, his side had things like this at hand.
He took a breath, narrowed his eyes, and focused. “Left to right,” he said. “Strela—NATO name Gremlin. Redeye. Fagot—NATO name Spigot. And, of course, Stinger.”
“Stinger.” The Boy Wonder underscored the word. “If you learn nothing else, learn that one. You hear about one, see one, you let us know right away. I mean, that very minute. Whatever you’re doing, you stop, walk away, find a secure place, get us on the satphone.”
“Us?”
His youthful instructor struck a key with a pinkie the size of Martin’s thumb. The screen went black. “That’s tomorrow’s lesson.”
Fifteen
JALALABAD, JANUARY 2002
Farida reclined in the beautician’s chair for the ministrations that would maintain her appearance to Maryam’s exacting standards.
The women were preparing for the six-month birthday of Bibi’s second child, an occasion made more momentous by the fact that this baby, unlike the first, was a boy. So, for the first time since their arrival in Jalalabad, Farida, Maryam, and Bibi left the compound and traveled into the city to have their hair washed and arranged, their eyebrows threaded, and makeup applied. As much as Farida looked forward to the party, she was more excited about the outing. Not that she could see much through the burqa’s grille. But she’d been so long confined that ordinary sights—the noisy, stacked-high crates of live chickens, the scarlet splash of roses affixed to the hood of a wedding-bound car, even the ominous rumbling from a passing Amriki military vehicle—thrilled her by virtue of variety. To be sure, Jalalabad lacked the sophistication of the smart streets in Islamabad’s Blue Zone and diplomatic area, or even Peshawar’s modern neighborhood of Hayatabad, where Gul’s family had lived before returning to Afghanistan. But still, it was a city, full of people other than those with whom she lived.
Farida, hungry for more insights into her new world, had hoped the beauty shop would be crowded, serving up delicious morsels of gossip along with the inevitable tea and sweetmeats. But Nur Muhammed had demanded, and paid handsomely for, a private visit for the women of his household.
A thread slid across Farida’s eyebrow. The beautician rolled a row of hairs between its cotton strands and clenched the end of the thread between her teeth. “Now.”
Farida braced herself.
The woman jerked her head back. A line of fine dark hairs whispered free. Farida winced. It had been far too long since she’d tended to her appearance.
“You’ll probably want to do this more often in Kabul.” The hot towels covering Maryam’s face to open her pores for her own threading muffled her voice but failed to disguise the censure it held. “No doubt you’ll show your face at that job.”
The move to Kabul was imminent. And through Nur Muhammed’s mysterious channels, work there had been procured for Farida, although its exact nature remained murky. Maryam’s dismay was anything but. The previous night, after Gul fell into the deep sleep of satisfaction beside her, Farida pressed her ear to the wall to catch the snatches of conversation from Maryam’s room next door.
“She will shame us all!”
“I will declare it acceptable.”
And the king has spoken.
“But she is—”
Farida held her breath. She was still early in her pregnancy, far too soon for the rest of the household, especially the men, to be told of it. Anything could happen. And even if the pregnancy proceeded without complications, Maryam had a point, albeit unspoken. Farida’s pregnancy, camouflaged by her loose garments, would likely remain undetected upon their arrival in Kabul a few weeks hence, but that would change quickly. What then?
“She is what?”
But Maryam, for all her bluster, apparently had reached the limits of challenging her husband’s authority. She tried another tack. “You know what happens to women like her in Kabul. Women who show their face. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about her.”
The slap echoed so loud that Farida fell away from the wall. She glanced at Gul, but he slumbered on.
“You are never to speak of that!”
At the shop, the beautician nodded toward the raised spot on Maryam’s cheek, shiny and purple as the miniature eggplants in the market. “Some special makeup here, I think,” she murmured. “Nothing will show. I’ll teach you how to apply it.” Farida wondered at the extent of her experience disguising the marks of men.
Until this day, Maryam had not mentioned the job to Farida or anyone else. Bad enough that the aunties knew Farida had worked before her marriage, a subject of endless questions and judgments.
Wasn’t it difficult to type in a burqa? Oh, she didn’t wear one? Shocked expressions all around.
“But I had my dupatta.” Farida made a motion across her face, neglecting to mention that she’d merely draped her dupatta over her chest and shoulders, leaving her entire head exposed.
Eyebrows arched high, conveying the inadequacy of her answer. So the men with whom she worked—she did work with men, yes?—could see her face? And her father approved of such a place? Didn’t the men take liberties?
“Yes. And no.” How to explain that her father more than approved, even if his support for his daughters’ careers was more rooted in financial need than feminism. As for liberties, Farida thought it best not to mention the occasional sotto voce dinner invitations, the approving remarks about her appearance, the impermissible hands to a shoulder or forearm that plagued her days. If a seemingly innocuous question had provoked a slap, what would happen if Maryam presented Nur Muhammed with such damning information? Now she sought to reassure her mother-in-law, and herself as well.
“Kabul is still some weeks away, yes? Things could change. Maybe there will be no job for me after all. Aiiee.” The beautician put the thread aside and wielded a tweezer, catching stray hairs.
“He will not change. And I will not try to make him.” Maryam’s warning was clear.
The beautician dipped a cloth in cold water and laid it across Farida’s brows. Pleasure overcame discomfort as the woman massaged almond oil into Farida’s scalp. Farida forced her attention back to the matter at hand, and others, too. Bibi was across the room, a manicurist tending to her nails. This was the first time Farida had been alone with her mother-in-law since her wedding. She didn’t know when such an opportunity might come again.
“You’ve lived in Kabul before.”
The folded towels stirred as Maryam nodded. Steam gathered in clouds above her chair. Water ran in slow drips down the wall behind her.
“What was that like?”
The beautician removed the cloth from Farida’s brows. “Much better,” she said. “The redness is almost gone. Oh, I missed one.” The tweezer probed the delicate skin near Farida’s eye.
Maryam expelled a forceful breath. “You must not ask. Not me, not anyone. It is bad enough that you have no sense of shame. Do not be stupid also.”
“Now,” the beautician said. The stubborn hair let go its hold.
Farida gasped, grateful for the pain that lent credence to her response, more grateful still that Maryam could not see
her expression. And a few minutes later, as the beautician lifted the hot cloth from her mother-in-law’s face, Farida wisely pretended not to see the tears leaking from Maryam’s eyes, just as she had ignored the glimpse of a similar telltale moisture before Gul turned away when she’d asked about their previous life in Kabul.
* * *
The women swept back into the compound in a haze of perfume and excitement, the exhilaration of their brush with the outside world permeating the household. Gul knew from experience that it would take days for the daily routine to resume its somnolent pace, for the voices to tumble from their high, twittering chatter to the languid lower registers.
The aunties clutched one another’s arms, eager to share what they’d gleaned from their hairdressers. Women’s talk. Gul, drawn to a doorway by their arrival, started to turn away. Then turned back. Something was amiss.
Maryam stood to one side of the group, Farida to the other, each holding herself stiff, neither joining the conversation that would run on through the evening meal and well past midnight.
Gul started toward his wife, then reconsidered. Respect demanded attention be paid first to his mother. He eased to her side, as though he were merely passing through the room, and whispered, “Has something happened?”
His mother spoke so quietly only he could hear, the anger in her words nonetheless distinct, unmistakable. “Your wife. She asks too many questions. She should not poke her nose into other people’s affairs.” The command was clear. He was to convey the message to Farida and would be held responsible for future transgressions.
And yet, asking after other people’s affairs was exactly what Nur Muhammed wanted Farida to do. As sorry as Gul felt for himself in that moment, he felt even worse for his wife, caught between competing demands. Even so, his mother was the most forthright of women. What could Farida have asked to provoke such a response? He could think of only one thing.
KABUL, 1993
Even the belated reappearance of Khurshid couldn’t dampen Maryam’s pleasure in the new house Nur Muhammed found during that first sojourn in Kabul, and Gul let himself hope that these more spacious quarters would ease the family’s tensions.
The house was near the university and belonged to a professor who had the dual qualities that over the years would make Nur Muhammed return again and again to educators to achieve his goals. Because so many academics had traveled abroad, they had the foreign contacts and information about other countries that Nur Muhammed found useful. They also were more naïve, and thus more easily manipulated, than the leaders of the constantly shifting government and tribal factions also cultivated by Nur Muhammed. Those latter, however, proved their worth in helping him decide on the family’s new location, tipping him off as to where the next round of skirmishes might take place.
Given the instability of the situation and the uncertain loyalties of those involved, it was inevitable that at some point Nur Muhammed would get bad information. But his folly was not immediately apparent. It was springtime, and the scent of roses scraggly and neglected, but blooming nonetheless, perfumed the courtyard of the new house in the neighborhood that Nur Muhammed had been assured was safe.
“It’s good, yes?” he said to Maryam. She looked away, unwilling to show pleasure in any move short of a return to Jalalabad. But Gul saw his mother’s approval in the way she swept her gaze across the thick walls that would ensure a cool, hushed interior. The house was set well back from the street, a luxury in the crowded city. And besides, there was that garden. Inside the house, all was dark, the windows shuttered. Maryam walked into the courtyard, flipped the front of her burqa away from her face, and lifted it to the sun. Strands in her dark hair glinted auburn. Her strong features, lately crabbed with worry, relaxed. It wasn’t a smile, but it was the closest Gul had seen in quite some time, and that night, Nur Muhammed shared her room again while Khurshid nursed her blistered ankle.
When Gul awoke, his father was gone, and his mother moved about slowly, sleepily, arranging their possessions in this new space so much larger than the flat. When Maryam first saw the house, she imagined luxurious furnishings within, but was disappointed to find it bare of nearly everything but outlines in the dust that showed where things once stood.
“Looters,” Nur Muhammed said. Gul thought he knew what had really happened. He could imagine Nur Muhammed arranging the sale of the professor’s possessions, pocketing the proceeds, and then professing ignorance when the home’s owner returned. There was a civil war, Nur Muhammed would say. No one, and nothing, was safe. Ignoring Maryam’s brief dissatisfaction, Gul and Bibi ran from one empty room to the next, choking on the dust stirred up by their passage. Only a large old cabinet, too unwieldy and ugly for quick sale, remained in a back room, and Gul impatiently opened its doors and banged them shut again, disappointed to find it empty.
“Gul.” His mother’s voice sounded sharp behind him. Gul sighed. He wanted to keep exploring. Bibi slid away as Maryam approached. Gul awaited his mother’s instructions, but she forgot him, intrigued by the cabinet, which stood taller than either of them. Maryam opened it and inspected the emptiness within. She started to close the door, then stopped and yanked it open again. She peered inside and rapped at the back of the cabinet. It echoed hollowly. Maryam ran probing hands across it. She gave a push, and the wooden panel swung open into a darkened space beyond. She crawled into it and emerged empty-handed. Whatever precious goods had been hidden there were long gone.
She pulled the makeshift door shut and closed the cabinet’s outer door. She grabbed Gul’s upper arms and drew him toward her. He had grown so quickly in the last year that she had to stand on tiptoe to be at eye level with him. “Say nothing of this. Not to Bibi, not anyone.” She pinched him and shoved him ahead of her out of the room and toward the courtyard.
“Khurshid!” Maryam’s voice lost no time in regaining its old peremptory tone. Gul looked up and saw the girl’s face peering between a slit in the shutters that covered an upstairs window. Maryam stood over a pump, working a handle that shrieked from long disuse. Brownish water trickled, then gushed in rusty coughs. Maryam lifted the handle and let it fall once more. She stuck her hands beneath the fast-clearing stream and raised them dripping to her face. A circle of damp widened around her feet.
“Khurshid!” Maryam bellowed. “Come and wash the clothes.”
That night, Gul lay with his arm flung across his eyes, inhaling the fresh scent of clothing cleaner than Khurshid had ever been able to get it in Macroyan’s sooty air. There, with too-large families crammed into too-small flats, the nights had been punctuated by greasy cooking smells, heavy footfalls, and arguments, with their occasional slaps and shrieks. Here, even the sporadic nighttime gunfire seemed quieter, its crackling muffled by the thick carpets Maryam had brought from Jalalabad and finally was able to unroll to their full size. For the first time in months, Gul slept without waking until the quavering wail of the daybreak call to prayer from the neighborhood mosque.
Many of their new neighbors were like them, essentially squatting in houses that had been deserted. From his prone position in the next room, as close to the doorway as he could get without being detected, he heard the women talk. “You shouldn’t have come here,” one of them said. “We’re leaving. You should, too.”
Maryam busied herself with the tea. Gul knew it pleased her to be able to serve it in such a gracious setting, to send the children off to another room rather than have them always underfoot, leaning up against her, tugging at her, demanding her full attention no matter how busy she was, when by rights she should have been surrounded by the female relatives who would have shared in their care.
“We can’t leave. My husband just went away again. We have to wait for him to come home.”
“When will that be?”
Maryam slurped her tea. “I don’t know. Weeks, maybe.”
The neighbor started. “That’s too long. Anything could happen in that time. You should come with us.”
&nbs
p; “Without my husband, that is impossible.”
Gul heard the regret in her voice. But he was glad. He liked this new house.
The neighbors left the next day, their possessions piled high on a clumsy wooden cart. Gul remembered the tension of the trip from Jalalabad, the car’s weaving feints through the gorge. He imagined this small, slow-moving group trundling toward the bandits there, wondered if they would make it even that far. Still, many people remained in the neighborhood, and they coached the new arrivals on the best ways to manage.
That other family, they told Maryam, had been too afraid. Yes, the factions were shooting at one another across the neighborhood, but each side was equipped with powerful weapons, and for once, this was an advantage. The artillery pilfered from the Amriki shot high and true, whistling above the rooftops at nightfall and wreaking damage on the surrounding hillsides, but leaving the houses below unscathed. During a large part of each day, Maryam was assured, the two sides took time to rest and reconnoiter. Then it was safe to shop and go about one’s business. Everyone made sure to be back inside by late afternoon, before the evening skirmishes that began with bursts of gunfire here and there, building to a few hours of shelling. Really, one could live an almost normal life.
* * *
At first, Maryam spent her days huddled indoors, much as she had at Macroyan, muttering curses directed at Nur Muhammed, wherever he had gone off to this time.
But day after day passed free of her dire predictions, and she began to venture from the house. The roses bloomed anew beneath her ministrations, and she sent Gul and Khurshid to scour the markets in search of seeds for the fruits and vegetables she craved, the tiny eggplants and rich pumpkins and sweet melons that would let her—rather, Khurshid, following her exacting instructions—serve the foods that reminded her of home.
