by Gwen Florio
Or—Farida shuddered at a possibility she had not considered in her panicked flight—what if Hamidullah bypassed the men of the family entirely and went to the courts? There was only one punishment for an adulteress, as she would surely be judged. She imagined herself buried upright to her chest, the dirt banked tight against her, pinning her elbows to her sides, the roar of the crowd dimmed by her own panic. Would the first stone kill her? Or would it take many? She pressed her hand to her stomach and moaned. “Oh, my poor baby.”
She looked at the step. There was no customary heap of large sandals. So Nur Muhammed and his group were meeting elsewhere today. A wise precaution, she thought, given that their plan was so near fruition. She eased indoors. Footsteps shuffled nearby, a servant probably, or maybe even one of the aunties. She slipped through the nearest door, into the men’s sitting room, pressing herself against the wall until the person passed. For the moment, at least, she was safe.
She drew back her burqa, trying to still her breathing, and glanced around, curiosity driving a tiny wedge into the enormity of her terror. So this was where they planned their big secrets, this ordinary room with its showy sofas of leather and brass upon which no one sat, preferring instead the floor’s thick carpet. A few dusty silk flowers sat in vases, but the room was otherwise empty of adornment, save for a large chest.
Her eyes widened. That must be where they kept the device. The baby kicked, hard, demanding attention. Her bookish mujahid, in whom she’d invested such hope. Now he’d never have the chance to defeat his people’s enemies with his superior skills.
Unless.
She crossed the room, steps soundless on the carpet, and tested the chest’s ornate latch. Locked. She tugged at it in despair, then stood back and studied its simple design, merely a larger version of the tiny tin lock that had inadequately protected the pages of her sister’s childhood diary. Farida almost smiled at the memory. She pulled a pin from her hair. She jabbed too hard at first. The pin bent in her trembling hand. She reached for a new one, closed her eyes, and let the remembered movements come back to her. The lock fell open with a metallic click so loud that Farida feared it would alert everyone in the household.
She steeled herself and opened her eyes to see . . . a stack of folded blankets. An audible whimper escaped. She caught her breath, fearing she’d given herself away, but sensed only the normal sounds and aromas of life in the women’s quarters: the scent of baking bread, the rhythmic chopping of vegetables being prepared for dinner, the occasional faint laugh at the outrageous gossip of the day. Farida thought of the times she had chafed at the incessant fixation on domestic topics, but now she strained toward the tranquillity of the kitchen, where the women would be helping themselves to a light midday repast. She forced herself to think of the fate that awaited her. Never once had she heard of a woman being shot for infidelity. Nothing so easy would suffice. There was no if about her impending death. The only thing she could control was the how.
She plunged her hands into the chest, feeling beneath the blankets.
There.
Even though she had heard about it for so long, eavesdropping outside the door, the innocuous appearance of the device within was almost disappointing, the row of cylinders, the tangle of wires, all of it tucked into pockets sewn into a simple muslin waistcoat. She studied it, trying to remember what they had said of its operation.
A car slowed outside. Gul, or Hamidullah, or Nur Muhammed, or maybe all three together, would likely arrive at any moment. She flung aside her burqa and lifted the waistcoat—it was heavier than it looked—and shrugged into it, pulling the burqa over it. The cylinders bumped against her belly. Within, the baby shifted in protest. She yanked the tiered earrings from her lobes and tossed them to the carpet, unfastened her necklaces and eased the bangles over her swollen hands. They followed the earrings in a gleaming heap of gold, the bride price that had marked her as a valued commodity.
She pulled a book from her satchel and flung it onto the heap. Then, wriggling two fingers into her shoe, she extracted the roll of Pakistani rupees that Gul had returned to her after she walked into Afghanistan. She sat it atop the book. She thought again, and scooped up some of the money. She cracked the door, looked both ways, and hurried from the home and into the street, walking quickly around the corner, gasping with the unexpected exertion. Now where?
Her breathing eased. She knew. She’d always known where. And whom.
She hailed another cab and settled herself within it. A phrase from Alice came to her: “It’s no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” She thought of the self she was about to become and directed the driver to Face the Future’s compound.
For perhaps the final time, she gave thanks for the shield provided by the burqa, as she pressed her hands tight against her stomach to embrace her child. At least no one could see her tears.
Thirty-Four
Gul left the shopkeeper’s stall as he always did, in haste and shame.
Daily, he fought the need that drove him back to Khurshid; daily, he found himself lingering longer with her. He felt even worse after the shopkeeper reluctantly accepted his assignment from Nur Muhammed.
“You will be hailed as a martyr. Your son will be taken care of,” Nur Muhammed assured the man. Gul assumed an unfortunate accident would be arranged for the son within a few weeks, and that the shopkeeper probably knew as much. But one did not say no to Nur Muhammed. Still, the man naturally wanted to spend as much of his time left as possible with Khurshid, and he could barely bring himself to be civil to Gul, who waited outside the shop in the morning for her to arrive.
Gul consoled himself with the thought that he paid the man handsomely for the privilege of enjoying her first, and that he also paid for her to visit the hammam and clean herself before the shopkeeper took his own, abbreviated, turn.
Still, no matter how much he paid the man, not to mention the money he gave Khurshid, he could not cleanse his soul of the stain of consorting with a whore. He became rougher with Khurshid as a result, biting the tender flesh of her buttocks, commanding her to do this thing and that. But as she knelt before him, taking him into her mouth in a perversion he had heard about but never dared imagine, he assured himself that her actions were proof of the depraved nature that deserved the treatment Nur Muhammed had inflicted upon her so many years before.
When he came home from such encounters and glimpsed Farida sitting among the women, placid and heavy with his child, he experienced such confusion that he could not bring himself to spend time in her presence. Farida was everything Khurshid was not, he told himself, a loyal and dutiful wife, and even quite pleasing at night. But he remembered his early doubts about her, the suspicions raised by her ease in dealing with the foreigners. Did his wife, too, harbor a wanton in her soul? Given the right circumstances, could Farida end up kneeling before a near stranger with such apparent enjoyment?
These thoughts tormented him at night and sent him rushing back in the mornings at a too-early hour to the market, where he impatiently awaited Khurshid’s arrival. He no longer waited a seemly interval before hurrying into the room behind the shop and pushing her to the floor. He never bothered to unroll the mat or remove his own clothes, although he always insisted that she be naked. Her back soon was a mass of scrapes from the shopkeeper’s rough wool carpet, and her arms bore circles of bruises from the fevered intensity of his grasp.
Sometimes he berated her for her choice of occupation. At first, she listened to his comments in silence, but more recently, she had begun to respond with pointed simplicity.
“You are right. I am a harlot. You will return tomorrow, yes? The same time? Perhaps earlier?”
He flung money at her then and fled the place, as eager to leave as he had been to arrive. The time with Khurshid mandated a visit to the hammam on the way home, where he sat sweating away her scent in clouds of steam, resolving to make each day with her his last.
Because this was no time for
such frivolity. His father’s plans had been approved by whatever faraway puppetmaster had elevated Nur Muhammed and were nearly complete. Staff members from several of the NGOs, along with commanders from ISAF, were to assemble at Face the Future the following day. The device had been prepared and the shopkeeper schooled in how to use it. Heavier weapons secreted away, ready to be trained at the ISAF posts that surely would be abandoned when troops rushed to Face the Future. At the thought of the shopkeeper, it occurred to Gul, not for the first time, that his death would leave Khurshid bereft of her main source of income. The man had suggested as much, his voice tentative and pleading as he raised the issue with Nur Muhammed as they left their last meeting.
“It’s not just my son,” the man said. “There is a woman.”
Nur Muhammed laughed with sympathetic approval. “That kind of woman! You were thankful when I gave her to you, and yet you had no objection when I arranged for my son to have her.”
Gul held his face immobile. So his father deliberately had thrown Khurshid into his path. Nur Muhammed must have divined his growing love for his wife, an inconvenient emotion, one that led men to do foolish things, take unnecessary risks. Was there no end to how the man contrived to control him? Cold reality doused his flaring anger. He had thought of keeping Khurshid for himself after the shopkeeper’s death, but he knew he would have no way of ensuring that, as soon as he left her company, she would not invite the attentions of other men. As much as it had tormented him to imagine her with the foolish shopkeeper, his brain burned anew at the idea that she might be lying with others as young as he.
So, congratulating himself on his resolve, he told Khurshid—again—that truly he would come to her no more.
But she did not tease him as usual. “Of course. Because tomorrow . . .” She let the word linger, her face somber.
He started. “What do you know about that? Does”—he could not bring himself to name the shopkeeper—“he discuss . . . things . . . with you?”
“I am not so stupid as you think.” A flash of tolerant amusement in her eyes, a fleeting expression that but for its sardonic overlay reminded him of Khurshid as he’d first met her, still a girl. A girl-turned-woman who’d experienced every conceivable degradation yet shrugged away humiliation as though it were an unworthy, ill-fitting garment.
She took his hand, her voice low, urgent. “You don’t have to do it. The Amriki will not rest until they’ve found you, all of you. You could leave this place. Think of your child. Take your wife—Farida. Yes, I know her name. If you care for her, you will take her today. Go to Pakistan.”
“You must not speak of her!” How dare she presume to utter Farida’s name?
Gul scrambled to his feet, yet still she clutched at him, nearly wailing. “You must listen to me. I know something of survival.”
He flung her away, so hard that she fell.
She lay still and silent then, looking up at him, and he saw himself reflected in the stormy darkness of her eyes, standing over her as Nur Muhammed had done those many years ago, meting out undeserved punishment.
“I am sorry.” The apology—to a woman!—slipped out before he could stop it. And again. “I am sorry.”
He rushed from the room, even as she shrugged into her burqa, calling after him. Hailed a cab and leapt in, cursing the driver, urging him faster through the maze of slow-moving vehicles and animals, anything to escape the tear-blurred vision of Khurshid in her green burqa.
* * *
He ordered the cabdriver to let him out some distance from home and walked the final blocks, trying to calm himself.
He was right to extricate himself from the evil charm Khurshid had cast upon him. Farida would have the baby in a few weeks. He reminded himself of the pleasures of her ripe and willing body, one that had known none but him.
At least—he strode faster as fury seethed anew in his brain—none that he knew of. What might she have done in her years among the foreigners? He recalled the reassuring stain on their wedding sheet during the traditional display to relatives, and tried to steady himself. Such confusion was yet more evidence of the darkness that had come of knowing Khurshid. He slowed as he approached the house. Nur Muhammed missed nothing, and even a hint of distraction at this crucial time would displease him mightily.
Gul rounded the corner and stopped. There, as though he had divined Gul’s thoughts, stood Nur Muhammed, and beside him, the Talib Hamidullah, their faces dark as the terrible storms that formed over the Hindu Kush. Anguished wails arose from the women’s quarters.
Nur Muhammed beckoned him. “Something has happened,” he began, “something you must know.”
His face swam before Gul’s eyes, distorted, although his words were too clear. Gul forced himself to focus instead on the glowering visage of Hamidullah, standing just behind his father. It would not do to show emotion before one so loathsome, necessary though he was. Even as he struggled to grasp the news, Gul caught himself questioning Hamidullah’s motives, casting aside his own recent suspicions about Farida, permitting himself the briefest moment of doubt. Blood thrummed in his ears. His breath came short. It was all too much—Khurshid’s revelation that she knew of their plan, her plea for him to flee, her near-blasphemous utterance of his wife’s name and his own instinctive defense of Farida’s honor, and now this apparent proof that there was no honor to defend.
He pounded at his head with his fist to clear it. The sounds of traffic came back to him. Indoors, the women carried on so extravagantly that surely the neighbors would soon know everything.
“I told them to get rid of all of her things,” Nur Muhammed said. “Burn her clothing, throw her jewelry into the river. We must not taint anyone by letting them touch something that has belonged to so evil a one.”
Gul did not yet trust his voice. Still, he felt his lips form a question: “My son?”
A shadow of pity crossed Nur Muhammed’s face. “Yours?” he said, so quietly that even Hamidullah, hovering, could not hear. “She is very large. Is it possible she was pregnant when—” The ugly implication needed no elaboration.
Gul knew then what must be done. In such a situation, no man had a choice. He felt his father’s eyes upon him. Gul’s next words came unbidden. “Where is the whore and her bastard child?”
The rigidity drained from his father, and Gul knew only then that Nur Muhammed had wondered whether his son was capable of doing the right thing. “No one has seen her. But it won’t be long. Come, we must prepare ourselves.” Irritation tinged his words. “An unfortunate complication,” he muttered, “just a day before our action.”
He moved toward the house, Hamidullah following.
Gul stood a minute, thinking. Farida surely knew the consequences of what she had done, knew that among her own people, there would be no escape. But what of her friend, the foreign woman? “Wait,” he said as his father and Hamidullah reached the door. “I know where she is. She’ll go back to That Place. Those People.”
“Then we must hurry,” said Nur Muhammed. “We must stop her before she reaches there. Nothing about That Place can attract attention before tomorrow. Come. The knives.”
Gul and his father rushed into the men’s quarters. There, they stopped so abruptly that Hamidullah nearly stumbled into them. The chest stood open. Nur Muhammed crossed the room in two steps and buried his arms in the chest, feeling beneath the blankets. “It’s gone. Who . . . ?”
For the first time in his life, Gul saw fear in his father’s eyes.
He pointed to the gold bangles scattered on the floor, as if flung away. Filigreed earrings and heavy gold necklaces, their clasps broken, lay tangled together beneath a small book, its cover bound in worn red leather. Farida kept the book with her always, a keepsake, she had told Gul, of her childhood. He had thought the book sounded silly—something about talking animals and a British girl who got bigger and smaller—but Farida said it reminded her of her own journey from life among the foreigners to her happiness with him. His heart l
urched.
Gul imagined his wife, the bomb already wrapped around her pregnant belly, taking a few precious seconds to strip herself of the jewelry his family had given her, to leave behind even the book. He peered more closely at the mess on the floor. Yes, there was the wad of rupees he had replaced for her that day so long ago, after she had stumbled into his country on her bleeding feet.
His father and Hamidullah took wicked Afridi knives with their straight stabbing blades from where they hung on the wall and tucked them discreetly beneath their tunics. Gul grabbed a knife of his own and followed them, fighting the impossible, forbidden desire to save his wife.
Thirty-Five
“Stop here,” Farida told the cabdriver when they were still two blocks from Face the Future.
She handed him most of her remaining rupees—far more money than the ride was worth. The man called down the praises of Allah upon her as she stepped from the car. They had halted in front of a restaurant popular with foreigners. A crowd of pitiful widows clustered before it, swarming customers as they entered and left. The restaurant owner burst into their midst, lashing this way and that with a whippy bamboo staff until they scattered, only to regroup as soon as he’d gone back indoors. Farida beckoned to one of the women, in an especially ragged cotton burqa, so filthy its blue had gone gray, and motioned the woman to follow her into an alley.
