“But the walls didn’t close in?” I asked, and a few of us glanced quickly at Dawood.
“A little bit they did,” Gul continued, “but I think I went a different route because the walls opened up wide too, and then they closed in a little, and then they got even wider, the space between the walls, but also the space between each door, because in the beginning there were so many doors and gates, you know, at least one or two gates or doorways for each compound, but they stopped appearing, and the other odd thing was that all the walls were changing color. Nothing crazy, like green or blue, but just different shades of red and brown, which got darker as I ran deeper, until the trail and the walls and the maze itself turned into a mud so black I couldn’t make out Budabash’s tracks anymore, and by the time I stopped running, about to die of breath, I couldn’t see a thing in that black maze in that black night. Almost blind, I wandered about for a few minutes and decided to knock on one of the doors and ask some kind neighbor for their protection, but I couldn’t find me a single door. I felt along the walls for hours, looking for some touch of steel or iron, but it was just mud. And the whole time I had this odd feeling that something was near me, and sometimes I felt as if the thing that was near me was watching me, maybe protecting me, maybe hunting me, and sometimes I got this feeling in my heart that I wanted to find that thing just to know what it was, and then other times I got the feeling that I didn’t want anything less, that I would’ve run straight across Afghanistan, Iran, Africa, Europe, the ocean, the Americas, all the way to Shagha’s house—”
We laughed at that part. Especially Agha.
“—to get away from that thing in that maze that I felt was with me.”
“So what did you do?” someone whispered.
“I walked and walked, about to die of walking, until I heard the sounds of water, running water, and I knew I was getting near some sort of an end, and I started sprinting with the last bit of strength I had, and I shot into that dark, toward that water, running, until my legs buckled and stumbled forward and I lost myself. The next thing I know: I’m waking up.”
“In the butcher’s house?” Abo asked.
“No, Ma, I woke up on the road.”
“With the butcher’s son?” Nabeela asked, and immediately regretted it as she was struck with big grins on all sides.
“No,” Gul said, “it wasn’t with the butcher’s son.”
“Well then, who was it?”
The Tale of the Butcher’s Daughters
Turned out it wasn’t actually the butcher’s son who pulled Gul out of the water and carried him all the way home. It was his daughters. His twins, to be exact. Gul explained that he passed out, as tired and as thirsty as he’d ever been, and when he woke up floating on the road, staring up into the prettiest blue sky he ever saw, not a copter or a jet in sight, he thought, for a second or two, he was dead.
A chorus of “God forbid” passed through the family.
Then Gul realized he wasn’t floating off toward some heaven in the sky promised to him by his imams, but that he was in fact being carried, and when he made the mistake of looking up to see who was carrying him, both of his saviors yelped and dropped him headfirst on the floor. That’s how he got the gash.
See, the girls were carrying Gul to safety so early in the morning that there was hardly a soul on the road to see them or help them or chastise them for not wearing their chadors, though they were right around that odd age (between twelve and thirteen) when girls, depending on how old they appeared—or how pretty—were sometimes expected to stay covered and sometimes not. At that particular moment, when Gul woke up floating, not only were the girls’ faces uncovered, but even their tikrais were dangerously close to coming undone as they struggled with the weight of the stupid boy they had to pull out of a stream, all by themselves, or else let him be drowned.
After the girls dropped him, but just before he landed, Gul swore that he got a clear look at one of the girls’ faces. That is, falling toward the clay, he saw the butcher’s daughter’s skin framed in the light of the sunrise, by the backdrop of the falling leaves, and he took in her eyes the color of chinar’s bark, her skin like grain, her lips dry and bright, and the cleft of her chin, the tiny scar beneath her left nostril, her eyebrows barely touching in the middle, a birthmark or a slight burn on her right cheek, and the strands of her hair—not really red but more of an orange—falling about her face as he was falling toward the dirt, toward the road, and toward something else he couldn’t quite name.
* * *
—
But then he did name it.
Gul, to the family’s audible awe, declared that he had very clearly fallen in love and so intended, by any means possible (or impossible), to marry the butcher’s daughter, to devote his time to her happiness, and to repay her for saving his life.
He sat there quietly before his whole family, bubbling with love, waiting, just waiting for someone to deny him.
So Abo denied him. “Absolutely not,” she said.
The surety of her answer was almost as startling as Gul’s declaration.
“Then I’ll sit right here,” Gul replied, “and I’ll die.”
“Marg!” Abo hollered, and all the men seemed so surprised by the sudden turn of events that only Rahmutallah Maamaa had the foresight to get in between Abo and Gul as she leapt at her just returned child.
The men surrounded Abo, trying to reason with her, and the ladies did the same with Gul, and after only a few minutes, the family was able to come back together so as to discuss the issue at hand.
Baba urged Abo to hear the boy out. But she wouldn’t have it.
“If we go there,” she said, “crawling on our knees after some girl who didn’t even have the shame to cover herself up—”
“While saving my life,” Gul said.
Abo went on: “That shameless shit of a mule coming over here like he was Eesa. You know he’s not going to give us his daughter unless we give them Nabeela. He’ll demand a badal. You want to sell Nabeela to a crooked meat hacker with a—”
But before Abo could finish her assault, Nabeela, as if on cue, glided over toward her brother’s side and took his hand. The two of them, driven mad by love, sat squat in defiance of Abo, ready to take on whatever was coming.
Abo got very quiet.
Actually, everyone got very quiet.
Night birds sang in the orchard, not knowing how much danger they were in. Wolves like Budabash yelped from the mountains, and the crickets did not stop chirping. Abo burst into a barrage of curses so nasty, so complex, so intricate and personal and cruel, so creative and dirty, that I could not help but take offense as she marched off toward the washroom, shoved Ruhollah into a rosebush, made wudhu, prayed, and spent the rest of the night by herself in Baba’s chamber, which Baba himself was then not allowed to enter.
Gul and Nabeela were beside themselves with joy.
The next morning, as almost everyone predicted, Abo donned her finest Kochi dress, a pair of her sturdiest shoes, and her biggest, bluest burqa, and without consulting anyone else, she demanded that Baba, Rahmutallah Maamaa, and Moor all accompany her to the butcher’s house, where, inshallah, they would settle the negotiations for the badal.
And so it went.
On the Forty-Second Day
For the next few days, all the talk in the house was about the negotiation. With the courting situation reversed, Abo and Baba offered up a fair and simple badal: your son marries our daughter and our son marries your daughter. No walwar. Split all the costs for the double wedding straight down the middle.
On the first visit, the butcher rejected it outright, but by the fourth or fifth visit, progress was being made: the butcher had more or less agreed with the badal in theory, but he hesitated to have his daughter wed at such a young age to a boy without any clear prospects. The butcher’s counteroffer was as such: his son an
d Nabeela get married as soon as possible, while Gul and his daughter would be wed just as soon as she turned fifteen—the legal age for marriage according to the interim government of Kabul.
Most of the ladies in the compound thought it was a reasonable request and urged Abo to accept the conditions of the proposition, to settle the matter. But Abo wasn’t having that. “If the girl has had her period,” she argued, “and she agrees to marry the boy, she should be wed on the same day as Nabeela. Don’t give me any shit about legal age.”
And no one did.
Meanwhile, I had my own troubles.
See, the night Gul got home I dreamed about a girl in a burqa, sitting on a road, with all these flower petals falling down from some tree I couldn’t spot because of the sails of the boat I was steering. So many flower petals collected at her feet, I was worried she might drown. When I woke up at about fajr, my busted finger was tingling with the ghost, and I felt seasick: my stomach tumbling and my head spinning. And to top everything else, I had an ooze running down my leg, which at first I thought was blood but which later on I realized was an ooze I couldn’t name. The feeling of seasickness stuck with me, sometimes ebbing, sometimes flowing, but always, it seemed, on the verge of knocking me out.
It didn’t help that I was by myself all the time either. Gul and Dawood were back at school, leaving me with just my brothers, who still hadn’t forgiven me for abandoning them. When I felt really desperate, I popped my head into the den while they read or wrote and I just lay with them for a while, rubbing my gut, hoping they might say something; but they just went on blocking me out with a constancy I’d never seen before. Honestly, it was a little bit impressive. Back in the States, they used to crack by the second day of a silent treatment. Maybe the countryside had hardened them.
Anyway, with the guys at school and my brothers still mad and Agha back at his own house to finish some repairs and Ruhollah at work and Abdul-Abdul back at the base and Rahmutallah patching up every crack in the compound and Moor and all the other ladies busy with the badal and with Budabash still lost somewhere out on those roads, I had pretty much nothing to do with anyone all day.
Until Zia’s six sisters came out of hiding.
Their names were Bibi, Miriam, Susu, Sahar, Bahar, and Asma. Bulbul—or Bibi for short—was my age. The grown-ups called her Bulbul, which is a type of songbird, because of the way she whistled when she laughed, and whenever she laughed, which she did often out of nervousness, she held her hand over her mouth because of her buckteeth. All the kids called her Bibi because she was always playing the mother. She was not as tall or as dark or as thin as her own mother, but all of those things nonetheless. Hardly ever left her side. Helped with the cooking, the cleaning, the babysitting, and even when she played, she never seemed to sit down and relax. Her eyes were always glancing about, watching for Hawa Khala, who she knew was overworked and overkind and who she was determined to relieve any chance she got.
Miriam was a few years younger than me. Small for her age and prone to getting sick. A pale girl who, unlike her older sister, hardly laughed or smiled at all. Always living, it seemed, in anticipation of the next time she got sick. When healthy, though, Miriam spent almost all of her time with her baby sister: Asma. She carried her around everywhere she went. Fed her during dinner. Washed her, read her stories, played with her, and picked out her clothes.
Susu was only six at the time, but already brilliant. Twenty surahs memorized. Could read and write in Pakhto and Farsi. Multiplication, division, fractions. Daddy’s little scholar.
Sahar and Bahar were twins. Four years apiece. Little balls of fire.
Asma was just a baby.
During my first few weeks in Logar, I never really noticed Zia’s sisters except when they were doing their chores. But now, with no one else to play with, they seemed to keep popping up all over the compound, interrupting me in my lonely wandering. One day they needed an extra player for their card game, saw me moping about, and offered me a spot in the circle.
I acted like it wasn’t a big deal.
We played teka in the orchard, and me and Susu would pair up against Miriam and Bibi and we always lost, but Susu never faulted me for it. We bet apples and berries and sometimes candy. Miriam always won because no one could read her face except Bibi. They had a secret series of unnoticeable facial tics that they used as signals. See, teka is all about outwitting your opponents, making them think you got one card but somehow letting your partner know you got the other. Susu tried her best to teach me to talk without talking, but I never really got it.
When we weren’t playing cards, the girls tried to school me. In the tandoor khana, they showed me how to toss dough and bake fluffy ovals of dodi, but after I lost three breads in a row because the fires burned me quicker than it did the girls, Shireen and Sadaf Khala tossed me out. Then the girls let me in the chicken coop, but the little white rooster, George Bush, flew at my hands anytime I picked up an egg. I ran out of the coop with yolk staining my fingers. Later on, when I tried to milk the family cow the way Bibi showed me, I ended up drawing blood instead of milk. “Gently!” Bibi almost screamed.
I gave up after that. Stuck to teka.
But during one of these card games, Zia came up to us in an odd huff. He’d been acting weird ever since we got back from the road: praying seven, eight times a day, fasting in the hot sun and then breaking it with a single date and a glass of water, reading the Quran without being told to, and when he wasn’t off trying to talk to God, he was in the pen or in the coop whispering to the cows or the chickens—instead of to me, his buddy.
Zia asked me to talk with him for a bit (the first time in a week), but Miriam told him to hold up until she took me of my bundle. Zia got himself into a rage, saying something about he didn’t want to hear any back talk, and Bibi, who was barely eleven months younger than him, told him to calm down, which only got him more mad, until Zia and Miriam and Bibi were in a full-on shouting match, cursing in Farsi at the top of their lungs. I just watched them, but when Zia clenched his fists and his sisters clenched theirs, I got up and pulled Zia aside to see what he had to say.
He explained to me how I wasn’t a mahram no more, and I was too old to be playing cards with his sisters, which itself was a sin, and he lectured me like that for a good five minutes, and I listened and nodded my head because he was quoting hadiths and verses, and by the time he was finished I told him I would do as he asked. I mean, he had the Prophet backing him up.
So I fell back into solitude, into boredom, into dizzy wandering, and the big thick walls of the compound—which Rahmutallah Maamaa was always patching or making thicker in preparation for some calamity he sensed in his gut but couldn’t explain too well in words—didn’t feel like they were protecting me anymore. They felt like they were closing in.
I sat up on those walls, looking out on the black mountains or on the canals between the fields or on the roads we roamed, and a few times I caught myself scanning the landscape for the shadow of the beast we never caught. Sometimes I felt tempted to just leap down onto the trail and start walking, but whenever I was by myself, and especially when I was near the wall, I knew Abo’s eye of Sauron always followed me, watching my every movement, knowing, it seemed, my every intention.
“The fall is too high,” she said to me one day after I came back in from the orchard. We sat in the beranda. Zia’s mom and Bibi were mending a kameez on the other side. “You’ll break your leg,” she whispered. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but it’s only because your boredom and your seasickness have driven you insane.”
“I’m not sick, Abo.”
“You think I don’t see you rubbing your gut when you think no one’s looking? You think I don’t hear your machine-gun farts when you’re squatting in the kamoot? You think I can’t see the pain in your skin? It’s been a month, child.”
I kept quiet.
“The only
thing I can’t figure is how you got yourself seasick on dry land.”
“It’s not bad, Abo. I just get a little dizzy, my belly aches a bit. It’s not bad.”
“No, I know bad. You’re weak, but you’re not bad. You know why? Because I cast a blessing on you when you were born. Because I was the one that pulled you out of your mother. You understand? I was the first one to see you, hold you, and to give you the word of Allah. Me and you are connected by something realer than blood. I’ll make you good. A few more weeks and we’ll flush the sickness right out of you. Bulbul,” Abo called out in a boom, though Bibi was just a few feet away, “get me my mortar.”
Abo crushed up spices and tea leaves and mint and tree bark and a chunk of brown sugar and the yolk of a hard-boiled egg and a pinch of what looked to be just plain old dirt, and she mixed in a teaspoon of well water, spat a surah, stirred the potion for about a minute, and poured it into seven unmarked plastic bottles. The little ones. She ordered me to drink one bottle every week after the Jumu’ah prayers for the next seven weeks.
“Remember that I’m watching,” she said. “Always.”
But that wasn’t completely true.
Between the hours of one a.m. and five a.m., I knew for certain her gaze didn’t reach the orchard because me, Dawood, and Gul snuck out there, almost every night since Gul got back, to sit up in the highest branches of the apple trees and watch the roads in the dark. The three of us hadn’t slept a good night in over a week.
Actually, it was the four of us, since Zia was awake too, somewhere in the compound, praying all night long, reading Quran, memorizing surahs, hadiths, perfecting his tajweed, all the while counting out the ninety-nine names of Allah on his fingers.
The rest of us sat up in the trees, watching the little fires light up in the black mountains.
“What are they doing out there?” I asked. “What could they be killing?”
99 Nights in Logar Page 10
