by Gwen Florio
“For camel.” A man stood at her elbow. She waited as he assessed her ability to pay, weighing blond hair against local dress. He named a price. She spread her hands in regret. A lower price. She shook her head. He lifted one of the strips—Something functional, like reins? Or solely decorative? She had no idea but could see it hanging in a narrow hallway in her home in Pennsylvania—and tried to hand it to her. Her fingers twitched. She clasped her hands behind her and turned away. His shout—probably a lower price still, possibly even an acceptable one—was lost in the swirl of noise as she turned a corner.
Liv vowed to return another day, and then a day after that, both for the camel trappings and a basket. An armful of packages acquired in a single trip would make her more of a mark to rapacious merchants, Mrs. Khan had warned her. Still, she slowed before stacks of more woolen shawls. So what if they weren’t pashmina? Kabul’s mountain air would be cold at night. Why not go prepared?
“Liv!”
She whirled at the sound of running footsteps. Mrs. Khan stopped before her, breathing hard, one hand pressed to her side. “You must never do that!”
“Do what?” She hadn’t said anything to the shawl merchant.
“Go off alone. It is not safe.”
Liv glanced around. Mrs. Khan’s rebuke, her own puzzled response, had attracted attention. People frowned, shook their heads. “Really? It seems fine.”
“Come.” Mrs. Khan led her away. “I think our lesson is done for today. You have learned something far more important than bargaining.”
“What?”
“Never, never, go anywhere unaccompanied.”
Liv walked a step behind Mrs. Khan so that her mentor would not see her roll her eyes. “I was in public, in a crowded place. No one hurt me or said anything to me. I felt perfectly safe. Please, tell me what I am missing.”
“Never mind.” Mrs. Khan’s steps quickened. Liv hurried to keep up. “If you do as I say, inshallah, you will never find out.”
Twenty
JALALABAD, APRIL 2002
The car purred to a stop outside, the footsteps echoing in the hallway, Maryam gasping at her door. “They are here! Come quickly, come quickly.”
Farida fought a slow smile. “Just a moment. I’m almost ready.”
She closed the door behind Maryam, shutting out the turmoil ricocheting around the compound. Bibi and the other young wives bid tearful goodbyes. Maryam snapped orders, relayed along by shouting servants. Chickens flapped squawking from older children ordered to catch them; boys drove blatting sheep through the compound’s gate on the way to the day’s grazing, the animals’ double pads of rear-end fat wobbling ridiculously.
Farida wanted to linger just a moment in the cool hush of the room where she’d learned to love her husband, to luxuriate in the difference between this moving day and the one before, when Maryam had dragged her from the Peshawar house to what she was certain would be her death in Afghanistan.
And instead, she had found—yes, she dared named it: happiness.
Not at all what she’d feared when she’d scrawled her panicky note to Alia. Another knock at the door. This momentous day allowed no time for sentiment. Farida stood aside as servants entered to carry her trunks—they’d finally made their way to Jalalabad, contents miraculously almost intact—to the waiting vehicles. She would need her best clothing in Kabul, a realization that hovered at the edge of her contentment, the way a certain jaundiced flatness creeping across a luminous sky portended a storm.
Her smile dimmed. She remembered Alia’s words, on the eve of yet another leave-taking, that of her wedding to a stranger.
“You always wanted excitement—new things, different cultures.”
A sharp reminder of what that craving had cost her. And now she was to have those new things, to enter again—even if only for a few hours a day—that different culture. It was impossible to explain her own reluctance to Gul, her awareness of the damage such exposure could bring.
LONDON, 1996
She’d learned, oh, how she’d learned, the consequences of her early fascination with such openness during her family’s years in Britain, when she had felt herself as bold and free as a foreigner.
Even though she and Alia attended a girls’ school, there were plenty of opportunities to meet boys. She wrote to friends in Islamabad about how in this new life it was nothing to walk down the street with a certain boy, sit with him in a chip shop, steal quick kisses in an alley, and slip into a cinema with him on an afternoon when she and Alia were presumed to be rehearsing for a school play. She assured her friends that boys were just like their own brothers—awkward, annoying and, just when you were ready to give up on them, surprisingly sweet. Really, there was no reason to be so bloody stupid about the mingling of the sexes, she wrote, excited to scrawl the swear word she’d never dared to speak aloud.
But she remembered the confusion of those times, too, the trembling warm sensation that lingered for hours after the boy touched his lips to hers, the fear that her parents could look at her and tell what had transpired. Whenever the boy kissed her, Farida vowed never to let him do so again, but in short order she found herself yearning for the next time when, on the walk home after school, the two of them would drop behind the rest of the group and step into a doorway and he would pull her close. At first, the kisses had been quick and furtive, but they grew longer, and Farida let him part her lips with his tongue and press his body against hers. On the days that happened, she could barely breathe and took herself to her room immediately upon arriving home, pleading crushing amounts of homework in order to be alone with her thoughts.
Still, she was not prepared on the afternoon she once again skipped practice for the school play and went instead to the cinema, where the boy—a soft, shy-seeming youth given to easy blushes—guided her to the rear row of seats and proceeded after only a few minutes to drape his arm over her shoulders and ease his hand toward her breast.
“Stop that!” she hissed. He withdrew his hand and began kissing her in their old way, his tongue twining with hers, on and on, so that she got lost in the sensation and barely noticed that his hand had returned to her chest. She pushed it away again, but the third time she let it stay, a transgression so great that it seemed pointless to protest when he slid his hand beneath her blouse and inside her bra. She would not have believed the difference skin against skin made, and when he rolled her nipple in his thumb and forefinger, she crossed and recrossed her legs, hoping to contain the heat intensifying between them. But the boy must have known, because his hand went there next. She locked her thighs distractedly, telling herself that now was the moment to stop, but he was kissing her again and rubbing at the front of her panties, and really, as bad as this was, they were in a public place and she didn’t have to worry about the worst thing, Farida told herself as she let her legs fall open. The movie was loud, car chases, buildings disappearing in thundering blasts. The noise enveloped them and her hips rose to meet his hand, moving in unison with it.
She refused to let herself think about that later, nor about the way he took her own hand and rubbed it against the front of his pants, nor of the sensation of power that rose within her as the boy moaned suddenly and writhed against the seat, drawing shushes from those in rows far ahead of them. When the lights came on, people turned back to look at them, smiling knowingly at her disheveled hair, her half-buttoned blouse and rucked-up skirt. She suddenly saw herself with her parents’ eyes and began shaking so hard that the boy inquired solicitously whether she was cold and offered her his school blazer.
Afterward, back with their friends, the boy wrapped his arm around her waist and held her close to him as they walked, and the other girls cast questioning glances even as the boy’s friends stared with frank, appraising eyes. She couldn’t look at him, or any of them, without feeling hot waves of shame, and every time the boy so much as took her hand, it was all she could do not to snatch it away. At home, she washed her hand again and again, trying to rid
it of the feel of the boy through his trousers. An unexpected hatred for him rose within her, and that night she fell into a fitful sleep with her hand clamped tight between her legs, guarding what she knew was already, except in the strictest sense, lost.
When her family returned in haste to Pakistan—inevitably, word reached her parents that their daughter was spending time alone with a British boy, a fine excuse to leave an increasingly unsatisfactory situation—it was a comfort to put the incident far behind her. Her jobs at the embassies and NGOs were usually of the lower-level sort, where she worked mostly with other women and foreign men who had been in the subcontinent long enough to have mastered the art of looking past the female employees as though they were so much furniture cluttering up the offices.
Farida knew that when her father betrothed her to Gul, he had harkened back to what little he knew of that long-ago time to justify handing her off to such an unsuitable mate.
On the morning after her wedding, as Gul slumbered satisfied beside her, she had gingerly lifted the heavy coverlet and scrutinized the sheets in the gray morning light, nearly weeping in gratitude at the coppery stain there. Her quivering shoulders wakened Gul and, mistaking relief for modesty, he praised her even as he eased himself atop her again, far more gently than the previous night. Farida, so cheered that everyone would soon know her for an honorable bride, responded with a thankful enthusiasm that had surprised them both.
Odd, she thought now, that the episode in that British cinema had, in its roundabout way, brought her to this man and this place. She pushed the memories down, not wanting to face the knowledge that in her new home, such an incident likely would have meant her own death as well as that of the boy. The important thing was her present happiness. Nothing, not even this pending job among the foreigners, must be allowed to interfere with that.
“Aren’t you ready yet?” It was Maryam again, face flushed with the exertion of making sure every single thing about this move proceeded to her satisfaction. Well, Nur Muhammed’s satisfaction.
“Just one more minute. I forgot something.”
Farida thought it unlikely her previous note had reached Alia, but on the possibility it had, this might be her last best chance to communicate with her sister, to ease the despair that earlier note would have caused.
She dug some of her stash of tattered rupees from their hiding place in her undergarments, tore another page from Alice, and fashioned a halting follow-up. She chewed at the stub of the pencil she’d filched from the beauty shop. Then she wrote: “I know this will make no sense to you, but you must believe this. I have come to love him, more than I could have imagined possible. On pain of death, I could not leave him. Even more, I cannot leave his people. They are my people now. This place, strange as it may seem to you, has become my home.”
She stopped. She read the simple phrases and saw them through Alia’s eyes. Alia would find such sentiments preposterous. She would think that Gul had forced her to write them. Farida looked at this new note for a very long time. Then she tore it into tiny pieces and, as she followed Maryam to the waiting car, stepped into the cooking annex and slipped the shredded handful into the fire, staring into the burst of flame until it subsided into a few glowing threads.
Twenty-One
ISLAMABAD, APRIL 2002
After his near disaster in the market, Pervaiz treated Martin with exaggerated deference that bordered on insolence.
It didn’t help that Liv, after some initial awkwardness, seemed with the help of Mrs. Khan to be taking to the place. Every day, she went off somewhere with Face the Future’s office manager, her safety guaranteed by Mrs. Khan’s presence, exploring the city or the surrounding countryside, forgoing the office altogether, arriving home each evening barely in time to change for the night’s dinner party. On the advice of Mrs. Khan, she wore the local-style clothing during the day. Martin thought she looked absurd, towering over the smaller Punjabis in yards of patterned fabric, her blond hair shining incongruously beneath her sheer veil. But when he said as much, she shrugged him off with an unfamiliar assertiveness.
“Don’t be silly. It makes things so much easier for me here. You’ll see. Tomorrow, I’ll show you.”
The next day, she postponed her morning rounds with Mrs. Khan to accompany him to Face the Future’s offices. But they didn’t even have to go to the office for Liv to prove her point. When they emerged from the elevator into the lobby of the Marriott, Pervaiz waited. His normally severe expression softened when he spotted Liv, who that morning wore a buttery yellow silk shalwar kameez bordered with an olive-green geometric design. Rather than wrap the long scarf around her hair, she let it slide to her shoulders, and the ends floated behind her as she walked across the lobby, her steps smaller than usual, toward Pervaiz.
“Miss.” Pervaiz leaned toward her in a bow. “You look so smart in local dress. Much more, if I may be allowed to say it, very much more beautiful.”
Martin listened for the oily tone that seemed to accompany every sentence Pervaiz addressed to him, but he didn’t hear it. Instead, the man rushed to hold the car door for Liv. As Martin slid in beside her, he caught the aroma of perfume, different from Liv’s usual soap scent. Lipstick plumped her mouth, and her nails were lacquered in the same dark shade.
“What’s all this? Aren’t you a little overdone for morning?”
Liv seemed not to mind. “Mrs. Khan took me to the beauty shop yesterday.” The car turned onto the broad boulevard that led into the heart of the Blue Zone. “I don’t know if you noticed, but women here wear a lot more makeup than back home. They taught me how to do it.”
Martin lied and said he hadn’t noticed.
“It feels a little strange. But I want to fit in as much as I can. It makes things easier here. Don’t you think so?”
Martin didn’t know what to think. He tried to imagine himself padding about in the pajamalike getup that so many men wore, their bare feet flopping in sandals or loafers that could be easily kicked aside five times daily for prayers. He thought he would both look and feel ridiculous if he tried something like that. Maybe it was another lingering hangover, but Martin couldn’t seem to stop needling her. “You’ve really had a change of heart.”
“I’m still nervous. But I’m curious, too, especially after talking with so many of the refugees. I can’t wait to see what Afghanistan itself is like.”
Martin told himself he was imagining the reproach in her voice. He was responsible for the reports about the refugee camps, but the details that Liv related every evening when she got home were so repulsive—the flies, the smells, the pervasive disease—that he decided it was more efficient to let her collect the information he later compiled. Still, he, too, was eager to meet Afghan people on their own turf. Even though Face the Future was set up to help Afghans, its Islamabad office was staffed mostly by Punjabis, small, darting people who invariably made Martin feel overly large and clumsy by comparison. The Pashtun refugees he remembered from that long-ago trip had been tall and soft-spoken, with a dignified reserve that he hoped would translate into an acknowledgment of his own good intentions and that would prevent the sorts of vaguely challenging responses he always seemed to receive from Mrs. Khan and Pervaiz.
He’d hoped to regain the approval of the latter by paying him handsomely, a bonus of sorts, for the trip to Kabul. Despite the warnings against it, he wanted to travel overland, if for no other reason than to drive to the far end of the Grand Trunk Road, a route whose evocative name thrilled him, never mind its prosaic modern designation of N5. To Martin, it would always be Sher Shah Suri’s Great Road, Kipling’s River of Life, a device to use to give structure to the book already taking shape in his mind. He’d planned that he and Liv would make the three-hour drive to the border on the first day, stopping for the night in Peshawar, giving themselves time to see something of that ancient frontier city. Despite his experience in Aabpara, he even hoped to prowl its bazaars, provided that Pervaiz agreed to accompany them for security
.
If all went as Martin had planned, they’d cross the border into Afghanistan the next morning as the sun rose above the ramparts of the Khyber Pass, a moment he’d anticipated ever since his arrival in Pakistan.
But when he pulled Pervaiz aside to mention his plan for driving to Kabul, the man’s reaction went beyond cheek to outright insubordination. “Absolutely not.”
Martin stood silently, letting his objections—bandits, land mines, roving Taliban remnants, trigger-happy U.S. troops—wash over him. He allowed himself, one final time, to imagine the summit of the pass the way he’d seen it for so long in his mind, the road behind them falling back toward civilization, the track ahead snaking into the wild rocky regions populated by centuries of turbaned warriors. Then, as though erasing a memory file, he banished the image. “But of course. It was foolish of me. We’ll be happy to take the UN flight. What day? Sunday? That will be perfect.”
He called to Liv, across the room with Mrs. Khan, the two of them sitting at a computer, doing something with a database. They’d missed the entire confrontation, for which Martin was grateful. “If you two have any more shopping to do, or one last trip to the beauty parlor, you’d better do it now. Liv, take another one of those baths you like so much. We leave in three days.”
* * *
Martin saw the Khyber Pass from the air.
The drive would have been a disappointment, he told himself, face pressed to the prop plane’s scratched window. The zigzagging road below was nothing more than a strip of darker gray in a landscape composed of various shades of dun. The Spin Ghar range, the mountains that formed the southern end of the Hindu Kush, were lower than he’d expected, and he wondered why these unimpressive peaks had become the stuff of legend. He reminded himself that it was not the mountains, but what they represented—the last barrier between the arid highlands of Central Asia and the infinite stretches of the subcontinent’s rich, fertile lowlands and loamy cropland well watered by wide, slow-moving rivers.
