“What are we having, Laila?”
“Leftover
aush
soup.”
“Sounds good,” he said, folding the towel with which he’d dried his hair. “So what are we working on tonight?
Adding fractions?”
“Actually, converting fractions to mixed numbers.”
“Ah. Right.”
Every night after dinner, Babi helped Laila with her homework and gave her some of his own. This was only to keep Laila a
step or two ahead of her class, not because he disapproved of the work assigned by the school—the propaganda teaching notwithstanding.
In fact, Babi thought that the one thing the communists had done right—or at least intended to—ironically, was in the field
of education, the vocation from which they had fired him. More specifically, the education of women. The government had sponsored
literacy classes for all women. Almost two-thirds of the students at Kabul University were women now, Babi said, women who
were studying law, medicine, engineering.
Women have always had it hard in this country, Laila, but
they’re
probably more free now, under the communists, and have
more rights than
they’ve
ever had before,
Babi said, always lowering his voice, aware of how intolerant Mammy was of even remotely positive talk of the communists.
But
it’s
true,
Babi said,
it’s
a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan. And
you can take advantage of that, Laila. Of course,
women’s
freedom—
here, he shook his head ruefully—
is also one of the
reasons people out there took up arms in the first place.
By “out there,” he didn’t mean Kabul, which had always been relatively liberal and progressive. Here in Kabul, women taught
at the university, ran schools, held office in the government. No, Babi meant the tribal areas, especially the Pashtun regions
in the south or in the east near the Pakistani border, where women were rarely seen on the streets and only then in burqa
and accompanied by men. He meant those regions where men who lived by ancient tribal laws had rebelled against the communists
and their decrees to liberate women, to abolish forced marriage, to raise the minimum marriage age to sixteen for girls. There,
men saw it as an insult to their centuries-old tradition, Babi said, to be told by the government—and a godless one at that—that
their daughters had to leave home, attend school, and work alongside men.
God forbid that should happen!
Babi liked to say sarcastically. Then he would sigh, and say,
Laila, my love, the only
enemy an Afghan cannot defeat is himself.
Babi took his seat at the table, dipped bread into his bowl of
aush.
Laila decided that she would tell him about what Tariq had done to Khadim, over the meal, before they started in on fractions.
But she never got the chance. Because, right then, there was a knock at the door, and, on the other side of the door, a stranger
with news.
I
need to speak to your parents,
dokhtar
jan,
” he said when Laila opened the door. He was a stocky man, with a sharp, weather-roughened face. He wore a potato-colored
coat, and a brown wool
pakol
on his head.
“Can I tell them who’s here?”
Then Babi’s hand was on Laila’s shoulder, and he gently pulled her from the door.
“Why don’t you go upstairs, Laila. Go on.”
As she moved toward the steps, Laila heard the visitor say to Babi that he had news from Panjshir. Mammy was in the room now
too. She had one hand clamped over her mouth, and her eyes were skipping from Babi to the man in the
pakol.
Laila peeked from the top of the stairs. She watched the stranger sit down with her parents. He leaned toward them. Said a
few muted words. Then Babi’s face was white, and getting whiter, and he was looking at his hands, and Mammy was screaming,
screaming, and tearing at her hair.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING, the day of the
fatiha,
a flock of neighborhood women descended on the house and took charge of preparations for the
khatm
dinner that would take place after the funeral. Mammy sat on the couch the whole morning, her fingers working a handkerchief,
her face bloated. She was tended to by a pair of sniffling women who took turns patting Mammy’s hand gingerly, like she was
the rarest and most fragile doll in the world. Mammy did not seem aware of their presence.
Laila kneeled before her mother and took her hands. “Mammy.”
Mammy’s eyes drifted down. She blinked.
“We’ll take care of her, Laila jan,” one of the women said with an air of self-importance. Laila had been to funerals before
where she had seen women like this, women who relished all things that had to do with death, official consolers who let no
one trespass on their self-appointed duties.
“It’s under control. You go on now, girl, and do something else. Leave your mother be.”
Shooed away, Laila felt useless. She bounced from one room to the next. She puttered around the kitchen for a while. An uncharacteristically
subdued Hasina and her mother came. So did Giti and her mother. When Giti saw Laila, she hurried over, threw her bony arms
around her, and gave Laila a very long, and surprisingly strong, embrace. When she pulled back, tears had pooled in her eyes.
“I am so sorry, Laila,” she said. Laila thanked her. The three girls sat outside in the yard until one of the women assigned
them the task of washing glasses and stacking plates on the table.
Babi too kept walking in and out of the house aimlessly, looking, it seemed, for something to do.
“Keep him away from me.” That was the only time Mammy said anything all morning.
Babi ended up sitting alone on a folding chair in the hallway, looking desolate and small. Then one of the women told him
he was in the way there. He apologized and disappeared into his study.
THAT AFTERNOON, the men went to a hall in Karteh-Seh that Babi had rented for the
fatiha.
The women came to the house. Laila took her spot beside Mammy, next to the living-room entrance where it was customary for
the family of the deceased to sit. Mourners removed their shoes at the door, nodded at acquaintances as they crossed the room,
and sat on folding chairs arranged along the walls. Laila saw Wajma, the elderly midwife who had delivered her. She saw Tariq’s
mother too, wearing a black scarf over the wig. She gave Laila a nod and a slow, sad, close-lipped smile.
From a cassette player, a man’s nasal voice chanted verses from the Koran. In between, the women sighed and shifted and sniffled.
There were muted coughs, murmurs, and, periodically, someone let out a theatrical, sorrow-drenched sob.
Rasheed’s wife, Mariam, came in. She was wearing a black
hijab.
Strands of her hair strayed from it onto her brow. She took a seat along the wall across from Laila.
Next to Laila, Mammy kept rocking back and forth.
Laila drew Mammy’s hand into her lap and cradled it with both of hers, but Mammy did not seem to notice.
“Do you want some water, Mammy?” Laila said in her ear. “Are you thirsty?”
But Mammy said nothing. She did nothing but sway back and forth and stare at the rug with a remote, spiritless look.
Now and then, sitting next to Mammy, seeing the drooping, woebegone looks around the room, the magnitude of the disaster that
had struck her family would register with Laila. The possibilities denied. The hopes dashed.
But the feeling didn’t last. It was hard to feel,
really
feel, Mammy’s loss. Hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never really thought of as alive in the
first place. Ahmad and Noor had always been like lore to her. Like characters in a fable. Kings in a history book.
It was Tariq who was real, flesh and blood. Tariq, who taught her cusswords in Pashto, who liked salted clover leaves, who
frowned and made a low, moaning sound when he chewed, who had a light pink birthmark just beneath his left collarbone shaped
like an upside-down mandolin.
So she sat beside Mammy and dutifully mourned Ahmad and Noor, but, in Laila’s heart, her true brother was alive and well.
T
he ailments that would hound Mammy for the rest of her days began. Chest pains and headaches, joint aches and night
sweats, paralyzing pains in her ears, lumps no one else could feel. Babi took her to a doctor, who took blood and urine, shot
X-rays of Mammy’s body, but found no physical illness.
Mammy lay in bed most days. She wore black. She picked at her hair and gnawed on the mole below her lip. When Mammy was awake,
Laila found her staggering through the house. She always ended up in Laila’s room, as though she would run into the boys sooner
or later if she just kept walking into the room where they had once slept and farted and fought with pillows. But all she
ran into was their absence. And Laila. Which, Laila believed, had become one and the same to Mammy.
The only task Mammy never neglected was her five daily
namaz
prayers. She ended each
namaz
with her head hung low, hands held before her face, palms up, muttering a prayer for God to bring victory to the Mujahideen.
Laila had to shoulder more and more of the chores. If she didn’t tend to the house, she was apt to find clothes, shoes, open
rice bags, cans of beans, and dirty dishes strewn about everywhere. Laila washed Mammy’s dresses and changed her sheets. She
coaxed her out of bed for baths and meals. She was the one who ironed Babi’s shirts and folded his pants. Increasingly, she
was the cook.
Sometimes, after she was done with her chores, Laila crawled into bed next to Mammy. She wrapped her arms around her, laced
her fingers with her mother’s, buried her face in her hair. Mammy would stir, murmur something. Inevitably, she would start
in on a story about the boys.
One day, as they were lying this way, Mammy said, “Ahmad was going to be a leader. He had the charisma for it. People three
times his age listened to him with respect, Laila. It was something to see. And Noor. Oh, my Noor. He was always making sketches
of buildings and bridges. He was going to be an architect, you know. He was going to transform Kabul with his designs. And
now they’re both
shaheed,
my boys, both martyrs.”
Laila lay there and listened, wishing Mammy would notice that
she,
Laila, hadn’t become
shaheed,
that she was alive, here, in bed with her, that she had hopes and a future. But Laila knew that her future was no match for
her brothers’ past. They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death. Mammy was now the curator of their
lives’ museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. A receptacle for their myths. The parchment on which Mammy meant to ink their
legends.
“The messenger who came with the news, he said that when they brought the boys back to camp, Ahmad Shah Massoud personally
oversaw the burial. He said a prayer for them at the gravesite. That’s the kind of brave young men your brothers were, Laila,
that Commander Massoud himself, the Lion of Panjshir, God bless him, would oversee their burial.”
Mammy rolled onto her back. Laila shifted, rested her head on Mammy’s chest.
“Some days,” Mammy said in a hoarse voice, “I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks,
all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t
breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart, Laila. I get so weak. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.”
“I wish there was something I could do,” Laila said, meaning it. But it came out sounding broad, perfunctory, like the token
consolation of a kind stranger.
“You’re a good daughter,” Mammy said, after a deep sigh. “And I haven’t been much of a mother to you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Oh, it’s true. I know it and I’m sorry for it, my love.”
“Mammy?”
“Mm.”
Laila sat up, looking down at Mammy. There were gray strands in Mammy’s hair now. And it startled Laila how much weight Mammy,
who’d always been plump, had lost. Her cheeks had a sallow, drawn look. The blouse she was wearing drooped over her shoulders,
and there was a gaping space between her neck and the collar. More than once Laila had seen the wedding band slide off Mammy’s
finger.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
“You wouldn’t . . .” Laila began.
She’d talked about it to Hasina. At Hasina’s suggestion, the two of them had emptied the bottle of aspirin in the gutter,
hidden the kitchen knives and the sharp kebab skewers beneath the rug under the couch. Hasina had found a rope in the yard.
When Babi couldn’t find his razors, Laila had to tell him of her fears. He dropped on the edge of the couch, hands between
his knees. Laila waited for some kind of reassurance from him. But all she got was a bewildered, hollow-eyed look.
“You wouldn’t . . . Mammy I worry that—”
“I thought about it the night we got the news,” Mammy said. “I won’t lie to you, I’ve thought about it since too. But, no.
Don’t worry, Laila. I want to see my sons’ dream come true. I want to see the day the Soviets go home disgraced, the day the
Mujahideen come to Kabul in victory. I want to be there when it happens, when Afghanistan is free, so the boys see it too.
They’ll see it through my eyes.”
Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung that
she
was not the reason.
She
would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where
Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
T
he driver pulled his taxi over to let pass another long convoy of Soviet jeeps and armored vehicles. Tariq leaned across
the front seat, over the driver, and yelled,
“
Pajalusta!
Pajalusta!”
A jeep honked and Tariq whistled back, beaming and waving cheerfully. “Lovely guns!” he yelled. “Fabulous jeeps! Fabulous
army! Too bad you’re losing to a bunch of peasants firing slingshots!”
The convoy passed. The driver merged back onto the road.
“How much farther?” Laila asked.
“An hour at the most,” the driver said. “Barring any more convoys or checkpoints.”
They were taking a day trip, Laila, Babi, and Tariq.
Hasina had wanted to come too, had begged her father, but he wouldn’t allow it. The trip was Babi’s idea. Though he could
hardly afford it on his salary, he’d hired a driver for the day. He wouldn’t disclose anything to Laila about their destination
except to say that, with it, he was contributing to her education.
They had been on the road since five in the morning.
Through Laila’s window, the landscape shifted from snowcapped peaks to deserts to canyons and sun-scorched outcroppings of
rocks. Along the way, they passed mud houses with thatched roofs and fields dotted with bundles of wheat. Pitched out in the
dusty fields, here and there, Laila recognized the black tents of Koochi nomads. And, frequently, the carcasses of burned-out
Soviet tanks and wrecked helicopters. This, she thought, was Ahmad and Noor’s Afghanistan. This, here in the provinces, was
where the war was being fought, after all. Not in Kabul. Kabul was largely at peace. Back in Kabul, if not for the occasional
bursts of gunfire, if not for the Soviet soldiers smoking on the sidewalks and the Soviet jeeps always bumping through the
streets, war might as well have been a rumor.
It was late morning, after they’d passed two more checkpoints, when they entered a valley. Babi had Laila lean across the
seat and pointed to a series of ancient-looking walls of sun-dried red in the distance.
“That’s called Shahr-e-Zohak. The Red City. It used to be a fortress. It was built some nine hundred years ago to defend the
valley from invaders. Genghis Khan’s grandson attacked it in the thirteenth century, but he was killed. It was Genghis Khan
himself who then destroyed it.”
“And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another,” the driver said, flicking cigarette
ash out the window. “Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered,
and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn’t that the truth,
badar
?”
“Indeed it is,” said Babi.
* * *
HALF AN HOUR LATER, the driver pulled over.
“Come on, you two,” Babi said. “Come outside and have a look.”
They got out of the taxi. Babi pointed. “There they are. Look.”
Tariq gasped. Laila did too. And she knew then that she could live to be a hundred and she would never again see a thing as
magnificent.
The two Buddhas were enormous, soaring much higher than she had imagined from all the photos she’d seen of them. Chiseled
into a sun-bleached rock cliff, they peered down at them, as they had nearly two thousand years before, Laila imagined, at
caravans crossing the valley on the Silk Road. On either side of them, along the overhanging niche, the cliff was pocked with
myriad caves.
“I feel so small,” Tariq said.
“You want to climb up?” Babi said.
“Up the statues?” Laila asked. “We can do that?”
Babi smiled and held out his hand. “Come on.”
THE CLIMB WAS HARD for Tariq, who had to hold on to both Laila and Babi as they inched up a winding, narrow, dimly lit staircase.
They saw shadowy caves along the way, and tunnels honeycombing the cliff every which way.
“Careful where you step,” Babi said. His voice made a loud echo. “The ground is treacherous.”
In some parts, the staircase was open to the Buddha’s cavity.
“Don’t look down, children. Keep looking straight ahead.”
As they climbed, Babi told them that Bamiyan had once been a thriving Buddhist center until it had fallen under Islamic Arab
rule in the ninth century. The sandstone cliffs were home to Buddhist monks who carved caves in them to use as living quarters
and as sanctuary for weary traveling pilgrims. The monks, Babi said, painted beautiful frescoes along the walls and roofs
of their caves.
“At one point,” he said, “there were five thousand monks living as hermits in these caves.”
Tariq was badly out of breath when they reached the top. Babi was panting too. But his eyes shone with excitement.
“We’re standing atop its head,” he said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. “There’s a niche over here where we can look
out.”
They inched over to the craggy overhang and, standing side by side, with Babi in the middle, gazed down on the valley.
“Look at this!” said Laila.
Babi smiled.
The Bamiyan Valley below was carpeted by lush farming fields. Babi said they were green winter wheat and alfalfa, potatoes
too. The fields were bordered by poplars and crisscrossed by streams and irrigation ditches, on the banks of which tiny female
figures squatted and washed clothes. Babi pointed to rice paddies and barley fields draping the slopes. It was autumn, and
Laila could make out people in bright tunics on the roofs of mud brick dwellings laying out the harvest to dry. The main road
going through the town was poplar-lined too. There were small shops and teahouses and street-side barbers on either side of
it. Beyond the village, beyond the river and the streams, Laila saw foothills, bare and dusty brown, and, beyond those, as
beyond everything else in Afghanistan, the snowcapped Hindu Kush.
The sky above all of this was an immaculate, spotless blue.
“It’s so quiet,” Laila breathed. She could see tiny sheep and horses but couldn’t hear their bleating and whinnying.
“It’s what I always remember about being up here,”
Babi said. “The silence. The peace of it. I wanted you to experience it. But I also wanted you to see your country’s heritage,
children, to learn of its rich past. You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things
that, well, you just have to
see
and
feel.
”
“Look,” said Tariq.
They watched a hawk, gliding in circles above the village.
“Did you ever bring Mammy up here?” Laila asked.
“Oh, many times. Before the boys were born. After too. Your mother, she used to be adventurous then, and . . . so
alive.
She was just about the liveliest, happiest person I’d ever met.” He smiled at the memory. “She had this laugh. I swear it’s
why I married her, Laila, for that laugh. It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it.”
A wave of affection overcame Laila. From then on, she would always remember Babi this way: reminiscing about Mammy, with his
elbows on the rock, hands cupping his chin, his hair ruffled by the wind, eyes crinkled against the sun.
“I’m going to look at some of those caves,” Tariq said.
“Be careful,” said Babi.
“I will,
Kaka
jan,
” Tariq’s voice echoed back.
Laila watched a trio of men far below, talking near a cow tethered to a fence. Around them, the trees had started to turn,
ochre and orange, scarlet red.
“I miss the boys too, you know,” Babi said. His eyes had welled up a tad. His chin was trembling. “I may not . . . With your
mother, both her joy and sadness are extreme. She can’t hide either. She never could. Me, I suppose I’m different. I tend
to . . . But it broke me too, the boys dying. I miss them too. Not a day passes that I . . . It’s very hard, Laila. So very
hard.” He squeezed the inner corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. When he tried to talk, his voice broke. He
pulled his lips over his teeth and waited. He took a long, deep breath, looked at her. “But I’m glad I have you. Every day,
I thank God for you. Every single day. Sometimes, when your mother’s having one of her really dark days, I feel like you’re
all I have, Laila.”
Laila drew closer to him and rested her cheek up against his chest. He seemed slightly startled—unlike Mammy, he rarely expressed
his affection physically. He planted a brisk kiss on the top of her head and hugged her back awkwardly. They stood this way
for a while, looking down on the Bamiyan Valley.
“As much as I love this land, some days I think about leaving it,” Babi said.
“Where to?”
“Anyplace where it’s easy to forget. Pakistan first, I suppose. For a year, maybe two. Wait for our paperwork to get processed.”
“And then?”
“And then, well, it
is
a big world. Maybe America.
Somewhere near the sea. Like California.”
Babi said the Americans were a generous people. They would help them with money and food for a while, until they could get
on their feet.
“I would find work, and, in a few years, when we had enough saved up, we’d open a little Afghan restaurant. Nothing fancy,
mind you, just a modest little place, a few tables, some rugs. Maybe hang some pictures of Kabul. We’d give the Americans
a taste of Afghan food. And with your mother’s cooking, they’d line up and down the street.
“And you, you would continue going to school, of course. You know how I feel about that. That would be our absolute top priority,
to get you a good education, high school then college. But in your free time,
if
you wanted to, you could help out, take orders, fill water pitchers, that sort of thing.”
Babi said they would hold birthday parties at the restaurant, engagement ceremonies, New Year’s get-togethers. It would turn
into a gathering place for other Afghans who, like them, had fled the war. And, late at night, after everyone had left and
the place was cleaned up, they would sit for tea amid the empty tables, the three of them, tired but thankful for their good
fortune.
When Babi was done speaking, he grew quiet. They both did. They knew that Mammy wasn’t going anywhere. Leaving Afghanistan
had been unthinkable to her while Ahmad and Noor were still alive. Now that they were
shaheed,
packing up and running was an even worse affront, a betrayal, a disavowal of the sacrifice her sons had made.
How can you think of it?
Laila could hear her saying.
Does
their dying mean nothing to you, cousin? The only solace I find is
in knowing that I walk the same ground that soaked up their
blood. No. Never.
And Babi would never leave without her, Laila knew, even though Mammy was no more a wife to him now than she was a mother
to Laila. For Mammy, he would brush aside this daydream of his the way he flicked specks of flour from his coat when he got
home from work. And so they would stay. They would stay until the war ended. And they would stay for whatever came after war.
Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn’t understand. She didn’t
understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at
her.
LATER, after they’d eaten a lunch of boiled eggs and potatoes with bread, Tariq napped beneath a tree on the banks of a gurgling
stream. He slept with his coat neatly folded into a pillow, his hands crossed on his chest. The driver went to the village
to buy almonds. Babi sat at the foot of a thick-trunked acacia tree reading a paperback. Laila knew the book; he’d read it
to her once. It told the story of an old fisherman named Santiago who catches an enormous fish. But by the time he sails his
boat to safety, there is nothing left of his prize fish; the sharks have torn it to pieces.
Laila sat on the edge of the stream, dipping her feet into the cool water. Overhead, mosquitoes hummed and cottonwood seeds
danced. A dragonfly whirred nearby.
Laila watched its wings catch glints of sunlight as it buzzed from one blade of grass to another. They flashed purple, then
green, orange. Across the stream, a group of local Hazara boys were picking patties of dried cow dung from the ground and
stowing them into burlap sacks tethered to their backs. Somewhere, a donkey brayed. A generator sputtered to life.
Laila thought again about Babi’s little dream.
Somewhere
near the sea.
There was something she hadn’t told Babi up there atop the Buddha: that, in one important way, she was glad they couldn’t
go. She would miss Giti and her pinch-faced earnestness, yes, and Hasina too, with her wicked laugh and reckless clowning
around. But, mostly, Laila remembered all too well the inescapable drudgery of those four weeks without Tariq when he had
gone to Ghazni. She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid,
out of balance. How could she ever cope with his permanent absence?
Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where bullets had shredded her own brothers
to pieces. But all Laila had to do was picture Tariq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more
sensible to her.
* * *
SIX MONTHS LATER, in April 1988, Babi came home with big news.
“They signed a treaty!” he said. “In Geneva. It’s official! They’re leaving. Within nine months, there won’t be any more Soviets
in Afghanistan!”
Mammy was sitting up in bed. She shrugged.
“But the communist regime is staying,” she said.
“Najibullah is the Soviets’ puppet president. He’s not going anywhere. No, the war will go on. This is not the end.”
“Najibullah won’t last,” said Babi.
“They’re leaving, Mammy! They’re actually leaving!”
“You two celebrate if you want to. But I won’t rest until the Mujahideen hold a victory parade right here in Kabul.”
And, with that, she lay down again and pulled up the blanket.