99 Nights in Logar

by Jamil Jan Kochai

  But neither of them answered me.

  Gul because all he wanted to talk about, think about, dream about, was the butcher’s daughter. All day and night with the descriptions and re-descriptions of every single detail of her face, her clothes, her manner.

  “When her mom was patching me up in their house, sometimes I pretended to be asleep and she’d pass by my room and I could smell her, I swear to God, like wood smoke and wet leaves.”

  It was getting weird.

  Dawood, on the other hand, just had his mouth full. Ever since he woke up he’d been gorging himself at an almost absurd pace, until this one dinner when he dipped into Ruhollah’s side of the platter they were sharing and Ruhollah smacked him so hard that Rahmutallah got mad and cursed them both.

  Again, a little light shone in the dark, then the rumble, and then the gentle stirring of the tree branch we were sitting on.

  “Maybe they’re looking for something,” I said.

  Dawood chomped at his apple.

  “If I could paint,” Gul said, “I’d paint her face. That’s all I’d do all day. Wallah.”

  “You know,” I said, “Gwora’s a pretty good drawer.”

  “Yeah?” Gul said, responding to me for the first time all night.

  “Yeah, he drew a few sketches of Budabash that looked just like the real thing.”

  “You think you could get him to draw me a picture?”

  “Not right now. You didn’t want him to come along with us.”

  “He wanted to get lost too?”

  “Well, he’s still mad. Won’t even talk to me.”

  “That’s nothing,” Gul said. “I can fix that.”

  The next morning, I snuck into the room where Gwora and Mirwais slept, wearing Agha’s waskat and pakol, and, making my voice as deep and as soft as I could, I woke my brothers up.

  “Little birds,” I whispered the way Agha sometimes did on the weekend mornings when he wasn’t working, “you want to hear a story?”

  Rubbing his eyes of their gunk, Gwora squinted up at me in the sunlight and said: “Agha?” And just like that the spell of his silence was broken. Even if it was a trick, he spoke to me, acknowledged me; he gave me his word, you know. And before either of them could say anything else, I retold the whole story of how I got lost on the roads, from start to finish, from the gate to the tree to the bridge all the way back to the gate again. By the end of it, they just couldn’t stay mad at me. They needed the details.

  So Gwora ran off toward the den to get himself a notebook, but when he got back, Gul was there sitting with me. We had to ask him a few times in a row, and in a few different languages, but eventually Gwora gave in and agreed to draw a pretty picture of Gul’s love. But just as Gul was about to speak of his girl’s beauty, Bibi burst into the room, smile so big she couldn’t have covered it up with six hands. When she and Gul made eye contact, she burst into a giggling fit. “You owe me a present,” she managed to say.

  “You’re lying,” Gul said.

  At which point, she sang: “Mubarak!”

  Everyone wanted to know how the butcher bested Abo in the negotiations, but the truth was the butcher’s daughter had melted the old woman’s iron will. At first, Abo had found the girl to be too meek, too pale, too sickly to produce the horde of grandchildren she so desired. But with time, visit after visit, Abo realized that the girl actually had some spice to her, that she wasn’t all salt and white rice. It started off with a single high-pitched laugh that Abo thought she must have misheard. Then, during the next visit, the girl sat right next to Abo, looked her in the eyes, and asked: “Honorable Mother, have you heard the one about the Hazara, the Tajik, the Pashtun, and the prostitute going out for a swim?”

  She hadn’t.

  And from that point forward, though Abo never actually laughed, whenever her father left the room, the butcher’s daughter whispered joke after joke, puns upon puns, old silly stories a dead ama of hers used to share, until Abo couldn’t hold back the tiniest crinkle of a smile.

  “The girl is worth it,” she concluded. “She will return a measure of the joy we will lose with our Nabeela.”

  The date was finally set. Hameed would marry Nabeela within the month, and Gul would get his chance just as soon as the butcher’s daughter hit the legal age for marriage, which, coincidentally, would be right around the time that Gul might start working.

  Immediately after we heard the news, Gul rushed out into the courtyard, where all the ladies in the house were waiting to pounce on the someday-to-be groom. Nabeela was the one who hugged him last and for the longest. His love made hers possible, you know. Abo was the only one chilling in the beranda, sitting in her favorite spot, on a toshak, drinking a hot cup of chai but feeling, I was sure, cool as hell.

  Gul went up to her and kissed her hand and her forehead and apologized for fighting with her earlier, and for a while she didn’t say anything, just looked him up and down. It was her and him in the beranda. As Gul waited for her response, Abo sipped her chai, poured another cup, and kept on sipping. Only after she finished her second cup did she rise up from her spot, real slow, and walk past Gul, out of the beranda, and up into her chamber.

  Gul understood. He didn’t pout or talk shit or anything. Instead, he snuck into the washroom. Everyone else was still waiting for him in the courtyard, not yet ready to stop the early festivities. When Gul poked his head back out, all of my khalas started cursing.

  “This motherfucker,” they all said in one way or another as Gul stepped out into the sun, the light of it shining his upper lip for the first time in almost a year. Honestly, I had to admit, without the mustache, Gul was the prettiest I’d ever seen him.

  And then the wedding preparations truly began.

  On the Forty-Ninth Day

  For the next week or so, families from all across the village came to congratulate Nabeela and Gul on their engagements, confirming, in the process, that when the weddings arrived, they’d have a spot on the guest list. They rolled up to our gate one after the other, hour after hour, almost as if they’d organized it ahead of time, which they hadn’t, of course, because occasionally a few families did arrive at once, and so the men and the women would split up, all the ladies sitting in the beranda while the men drank chai in the orchard. During one of these visits, me, Mirwais, and Gwora snuck up to the roof above the beranda. We lay prone on our bellies like soldiers, and while me and Mirwais just listened and whispered, Gwora busied himself with his journal.

  Apparently, that was all he’d been doing since I left for the road. After getting beat up and left behind, Gwora collected all of his papers and locked himself up in the den and just wrote in his notebooks for the next two days straight. While the whole family was losing its mind because we got lost, Gwora kept on writing everything he heard or saw. At least, that’s what I thought he wrote. Even after we made up, and he asked me to tell my story and to remap the entire journey, detailing every single twist and turn, he still wouldn’t show me what he was working on. He kept each notebook near his heart or his balls, and whenever he filled one up, he hid it somewhere secret in the compound.

  We lay close to the edge of the roof, near the orchard, to listen in on the men, but when they started talking about the condition of their crops, arguing over the best technique for harvesting—which could keep a group of Afghans busy for a few hours—we decided to roll over near where the women were chatting in the beranda.

  We listened as the ladies were saying goodbye to one of the guests, an older Pakhtana who’d showed up all by herself, without her husband or her children, and who left the compound just as lonely as she came. After she was gone, the remaining guests wanted to know who she was and why she left all alone.

  “Not a single brother or a son or even a nephew?” one of the ladies asked.

  “She has a son,” Abo said.

  “Just the one?�
��

  “Just the one.”

  “Well, let’s hear it.”

  But before she began, Abo made sure to emphasize that she was not gossiping and that she was actually sharing this story for the sake of Nabeela.

  The Widow’s Tale

  “Her name is Khaista,” Abo said, “which once suited her since she had been a great beauty in her day. And as it goes with great beauties, many lonely men sprang up from all over the village to wait at the door of her compound. But to get to her, they had to get through her mother and father, decent people, to be honest, and her six idiot brothers, none of whom had accomplished a single thing in their lives except having a pretty girl for a sister.

  “Eventually, though, as it goes, the suitor with the best reputation and the biggest dowry was able to win her dusmal. A young, handsome fellah by the name of Atal. So things started off well for her. All in all. It was only after the nikkah that her life turned to ash.

  “Although an imam had made the nikkah between Khaista and Atal official, giving them the holy right to fuck as much as they pleased, poor Khaista was beset by her six idiot brothers, whose ghairat revealed itself only in times of ease or during opportunities for cruelty. They had not wanted their sister to sleep with her husband until after the actual wedding, which was still a few months away. So when the six wicked wives of the six idiot brothers reported to them that their sister was pregnant, the six brothers fell upon her one morning, beating her savagely for many hours in an attempt to kill the child in her belly. But being the fuckups that they were, they couldn’t kill the poor baby with the first beating or the second or the third.

  “After the fourth or fifth beating, poor Khaista, who was maybe fifteen at the time, was so afraid for her own life that she went and drank an entire canister of oil, hearing from some old whore that the oil would kill the child without ending her in the process. But, by the will of God, she and her baby both outlasted the poison. That was until . . .”

  Here Abo’s voice got so low, her whispers so quiet, I was halfway hanging off of the roof just to hear her story. Gwora scribbled away at his journal while Mirwais held my legs with his little arms.

  “Eventually, she gave birth. . . .”

  I scooted a bit closer.

  “And about a month later, the Russians and the Khalqian started their killings. . . .”

  Gwora tossed his journal, held on to one of my legs and Mirwais to the other.

  “So at sixteen she was widowed and shunned and with a baby. . . .”

  * * *

  —

  By that point I was so far over the ledge that one of the guests saw my head poking down from the roof and she let out a quick yelp, which startled Mirwais, which made him bump Gwora, who let go of my leg and I tumbled down into the courtyard in front of all of the ladies.

  On the Fiftieth Day

  The fall wasn’t so bad. Just a bump and a few cuts and my busted finger got dirtied a bit. The aftermath was much worse. All of a sudden, everyone thought I was a snoop of a kid, possibly a perv, and who knows what else. Word spread quickly and got back to Agha, who decided I had to spend a few days away from Moor’s house. Gwora and Mirwais got dragged along with me, and though we’d be traveling only three or four miles down the road, we said our salaams with a sadness that overwhelmed Mirwais. He started to cry. The only one of us still allowed to.

  On the way to his house, Agha stopped for a few minutes by Watak’s marker. We parked near the entrance of the maze Gul got lost in, and I stood for too long beneath the mulberry tree, staring into the clay alley, listening for any sign of life: a shout or a curse or maybe even a growl. Not hearing a sound, I knelt above the spot where me and Zia once slept and whispered, where we became afraid for our lives, and where he showed me the evidence of Allah’s existence sketched on my palms:

  =+

  When I lifted my hands to look at these numbers, the ghost of my finger rose up with them, wriggling at the end of my wound, moaning, I felt, for Budabash’s life. That was when Agha shouted my name. Quick and clear, but without anger. And, alhamdulillah, by the time I joined him and my brothers in front of Watak’s flag, the ghost had faded.

  Me and Gwora made a quiet dua for Watak’s soul, but Mirwais told Agha he didn’t know what to say. Agha smiled. He had the too-dark face of a lifelong laborer: scarred and pockmarked, with the signs of charring still drawn across his neck, his forehead, and at the edges of his nearly grayed beard. “Ask Allah to bless your Watak Kaakaa,” he said. “Ask Allah to forgive him his little sins, to accept him as he is, and to let him look upon us with joy and pride. And after that, you can just talk to him for a bit; tell him you love him and that you are thinking of him. Our prayers are like gems for the souls that have passed. When we remember them, when we pray for them, they can feel it and it brings them joy. Like this, they watch over us.”

  “How did our Watak Maamaa die?” Mirwais asked.

  “Watak Kaakaa was killed.”

  “By the Russians?” I asked because I could not help myself.

  But Agha didn’t answer. He picked at the ash near the base of the marker. Rubbing it between his fingers. He seemed a little lost, as if, for a moment or two, he forgot where he was and when.

  Mirwais tugged at his sleeve and Agha looked down and said we could pick some berries if we wanted. He kept on praying by the marker as me and Gwora and Mirwais went over to the mulberry tree. I showed them where exactly I slept, and Gwora pulled out his notebook and he recorded my thoughts. It almost made me not want to tell the story, his writing everything. Just as I was about to take them to the canal hidden behind the chinar, to show them where the shadow leapt out from the field, Agha called for us to head on home.

  As we rolled up toward the front of his compound, the first thing Agha pointed out was the crater indented into the middle of the big red doors, which, he explained, was left behind by a Russian rocket launcher.

  “Your grandfather built these doors almost eighty years ago,” he said, “and they took on all the bullets and the bombs, but look at them, boys, there they are.”

  Inside the compound, we walked past the sections of the house that belonged to Agha’s half-brothers, who lived in Alabama and couldn’t come back to Logar for reasons I didn’t completely understand. In the meantime, they let cousins live on their portions of the land.

  Agha’s section of the house was in the very back.

  During the first few weeks of our trip, he spent quite a bit of his time and his landscaper’s income repairing these rooms, which led to a few hushed arguments between him and Moor. All the walls were built back up with fresh layers of clay, the roofs were patched, the bases reinforced, and, best of all, many of the craters filled in. It was nothing compared with Moor’s house, but it was now the one part of the compound that wasn’t rotting.

  Malang met us at the door of Agha’s section. He was a distant cousin who watched over the place. His own pops had sold his rightful land out from under him to a pair of Kabuli developers shortly after the US invasion, and if Agha hadn’t helped him out, Malang probably would have been strung out under a bridge someplace. Although he was supposedly a hash-head and a bum, he was also a decent enough guy. The type that is too lazy to cheat anyone out of his share in a deal. “These days,” Agha said, “that’s really the best you can ask for.”

  “Salamoonaa,” Malang drawled. His folks came from the mountains and he spoke Pakhto with the distinct accent of the hills. It was lovely to listen to. My father took his hand and gave him a hug and the three of us kids did the same.

  “The boys are spending the night?” Malang asked.

  “A few nights,” Agha said. “They’ve been causing trouble at their mother’s place.”

  “Not these boys.”

  “Her family is soft. They let the boys do whatever they want. So we’re going to work them for a few days. You boys understand?
”

  We didn’t, but we would.

  The next morning, Agha had us up at dawn washing our balls, praying our prayers, making dua for Watak, and then we were out on the land. We planted seeds in the fields behind his compound. I flipped the earth with Agha, Gwora dug out little holes with his hands, and Mirwais sprinkled the seeds into the ground. From time to time, my belly started to swash, and when Agha wasn’t looking, I had to stop and take huge huffs of the mountain’s breeze. It calmed the waves.

  Though we worked hard for Agha, he always worked harder. In his youth, he had developed a freakish capacity for labor. His father was almost sixty when he was born, his older half-brothers were always gone, and so at about twelve years old he took over most of the work on the farm. Started as a kid and never really let up.

  This was why we didn’t see him too often back in the States. It wasn’t that he was a deadbeat like some of my buddies’ dads, who just got drunk or high all day and then cashed in their mothers’ disability checks. My father worked. From six in the morning till seven at night, he hauled barrels of pesticide, drove trucks, and landscaped the lawns in white neighborhoods. Weekdays, weekends, and holidays too. Sometimes when he got home, he’d be so tired, he just sat in his chair and drank his chai and whispered to Moor. He looked like he was trying very hard not to hurt any of us. I could see it in him even then. How hard he tried not to be broken, not to break us.

  But that day with Agha out in those fields, that was a good one. The whole time he sang. Wallah, he sank his shovel into the rough clay and lifted massive slabs of the earth and flipped them back down and then I’d get at these slabs, cutting them up, and the whole time he was singing. Old Pakhto love songs or war chants or Sufi poems for God. He had the shrill voice of a mule, but me and my brothers still loved hearing him, smelling him, watching him in the sun. He was there with us in the work.

  When we finished, Agha let us sit out in the shade of our nikeh’s mulberry tree, at the edge of two intersecting fields, and he told us stories about his brother Watak, his half-sister Zarmina, his best friend Merzaghul, and all the other people he loved who died during the war. He told only the nice stories, though. We sat and listened and watched the fields, the black mountains, the reddening sky, until Mirwais fell asleep in Agha’s lap. Then we all trudged back toward the house to eat gul-pee and chicken shorwa.