Laila
L
aila remembered a gathering once, years before at the house, on one of Mammy’s good days. The women had been sitting
in the garden, eating from a platter of fresh mulberries that Wajma had picked from the tree in her yard. The plump mulberries
had been white and pink, and some the same dark purple as the bursts of tiny veins on Wajma’s nose.
“You heard how his son died?” Wajma had said, energetically shoveling another handful of mulberries into her sunken mouth.
“He drowned, didn’t he?” Nila, Giti’s mother, said. “At Ghargha Lake, wasn’t it?”
“But did you know, did you know that Rasheed . . .”
Wajma raised a finger, made a show of nodding and chewing and making them wait for her to swallow. “Did you know that he used
to drink
sharab
back then, that he was crying drunk that day? It’s true. Crying drunk, is what I heard. And that was midmorning. By noon,
he had passed out on a lounge chair. You could have fired the noon cannon next to his ear and he wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.”
Laila remembered how Wajma had covered her mouth, burped; how her tongue had gone exploring between her few remaining teeth.
“You can imagine the rest. The boy went into the water unnoticed. They spotted him a while later, floating face-down. People
rushed to help, half trying to wake up the boy, the other half the father. Someone bent over the boy, did the . . . the mouth-to-mouth
thing you’re supposed to do. It was pointless. They could all see that. The boy was gone.”
Laila remembered Wajma raising a finger and her voice quivering with piety. “This is why the Holy Koran forbids
sharab.
Because it always falls on the sober to pay for the sins of the drunk. So it does.”
It was this story that was circling in Laila’s head after she gave Rasheed the news about the baby. He had immediately hopped
on his bicycle, ridden to a mosque, and prayed for a boy.
That night, all during the meal, Laila watched Mariam push a cube of meat around her plate. Laila was there when Rasheed sprang
the news on Mariam in a high, dramatic voice—Laila had never before witnessed such cheerful cruelty. Mariam’s lashes fluttered
when she heard. A flush spread across her face. She sat sulking, looking desolate.
After, Rasheed went upstairs to listen to his radio, and Laila helped Mariam clear the
sofrah.
“I can’t imagine what you are now,” Mariam said, picking grains of rice and bread crumbs, “if you were a Benz before.”
Laila tried a more lighthearted tactic. “A train? Maybe a big jumbo jet.”
Mariam straightened up. “I hope you don’t think this excuses you from chores.”
Laila opened her mouth, thought better of it. She reminded herself that Mariam was the only innocent party in this arrangement.
Mariam and the baby.
Later, in bed, Laila burst into tears.
What was the matter? Rasheed wanted to know, lifting her chin. Was she ill? Was it the baby, was something wrong with the
baby? No?
Was Mariam mistreating her?
“That’s it, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“
Wallah o billah,
I’ll go down and teach her a lesson.
Who does she think she is, that
harami
, treating you—”
“No!”
He was getting up already, and she had to grab him by the forearm, pull him back down. “Don’t! No! She’s been decent to me.
I need a minute, that’s all. I’ll be fine.”
He sat beside her, stroking her neck, murmuring. His hand slowly crept down to her back, then up again. He leaned in, flashed
his crowded teeth.
“Let’s see, then,” he purred, “if I can’t help you feel better.”
FIRST, the trees—those that hadn’t been cut down for firewood—shed their spotty yellow-and-copper leaves.
Then came the winds, cold and raw, ripping through the city. They tore off the last of the clinging leaves, and left the trees
looking ghostly against the muted brown of the hills. The season’s first snowfall was light, the flakes no sooner fallen than
melted. Then the roads froze, and snow gathered in heaps on the rooftops, piled halfway up frost-caked windows. With snow
came the kites, once the rulers of Kabul’s winter skies, now timid trespassers in territory claimed by streaking rockets and
fighter jets.
Rasheed kept bringing home news of the war, and Laila was baffled by the allegiances that Rasheed tried to explain to her.
Sayyaf was fighting the Hazaras, he said. The Hazaras were fighting Massoud.
“And he’s fighting Hekmatyar, of course, who has the support of the Pakistanis. Mortal enemies, those two, Massoud and Hekmatyar.
Sayyaf, he’s siding with Massoud. And Hekmatyar supports the Hazaras for now.”
As for the unpredictable Uzbek commander Dostum, Rasheed said no one knew where he would stand. Dostum had fought the Soviets
in the 1980s alongside the Mujahideen but had defected and joined Najibullah’s communist puppet regime after the Soviets had
left. He had even earned a medal, presented by Najibullah himself, before defecting once again and returning to the Mujahideen’s
side. For the time being, Rasheed said, Dostum was supporting Massoud.
In Kabul, particularly in western Kabul, fires raged, and black palls of smoke mushroomed over snow-clad buildings. Embassies
closed down. Schools collapsed. In hospital waiting rooms, Rasheed said, the wounded were bleeding to death. In operating
rooms, limbs were being amputated without anesthesia.
“But don’t worry,” he said. “You’re safe with me, my flower, my
gul.
Anyone tries to harm you, I’ll rip out their liver and make them eat it.”
That winter, everywhere Laila turned, walls blocked her way. She thought longingly of the wide-open skies of her childhood,
of her days of going to
buzkashi
tournaments with Babi and shopping at Mandaii with Mammy, of her days of running free in the streets and gossiping about boys
with Giti and Hasina. Her days of sitting with Tariq in a bed of clover on the banks of a stream somewhere, trading riddles
and candy, watching the sun go down.
But thinking of Tariq was treacherous because, before she could stop, she saw him lying on a bed, far from home, tubes piercing
his burned body. Like the bile that kept burning her throat these days, a deep, paralyzing grief would come rising up Laila’s
chest. Her legs would turn to water. She would have to hold on to something.
Laila passed that winter of 1992 sweeping the house, scrubbing the pumpkin-colored walls of the bedroom she shared with Rasheed,
washing clothes outside in a big copper
lagaan.
Sometimes she saw herself as if hovering above her own body, saw herself squatting over the rim of the
lagaan,
sleeves rolled up to the elbows, pink hands wringing soapy water from one of Rasheed’s undershirts. She felt lost then, casting
about, like a shipwreck survivor, no shore in sight, only miles and miles of water.
When it was too cold to go outside, Laila ambled around the house. She walked, dragging a fingernail along the wall, down
the hallway, then back, down the steps, then up, her face unwashed, hair uncombed. She walked until she ran into Mariam, who
shot her a cheerless glance and went back to slicing the stem off a bell pepper and trimming strips of fat from meat. A hurtful
silence would fill the room, and Laila could almost see the wordless hostility radiating from Mariam like waves of heat rising
from asphalt. She would retreat back to her room, sit on the bed, and watch the snow falling.
RASHEED TOOK HER to his shoe shop one day.
When they were out together, he walked alongside her, one hand gripping her by the elbow. For Laila, being out in the streets
had become an exercise in avoiding injury. Her eyes were still adjusting to the limited, gridlike visibility of the burqa,
her feet still stumbling over the hem. She walked in perpetual fear of tripping and falling, of breaking an ankle stepping
into a pothole. Still, she found some comfort in the anonymity that the burqa provided. She wouldn’t be recognized this way
if she ran into an old acquaintance of hers. She wouldn’t have to watch the surprise in their eyes, or the pity or the glee,
at how far she had fallen, at how her lofty aspirations had been dashed.
Rasheed’s shop was bigger and more brightly lit than Laila had imagined. He had her sit behind his crowded workbench, the
top of which was littered with old soles and scraps of leftover leather. He showed her his hammers, demonstrated how the sandpaper
wheel worked, his voice ringing high and proud.
He felt her belly, not through the shirt but under it, his fingertips cold and rough like bark on her distended skin. Laila
remembered Tariq’s hands, soft but strong, the tortuous, full veins on the backs of them, which she had always found so appealingly
masculine.
“Swelling so quickly,” Rasheed said. “It’s going to be a big boy. My son will be a
pahlawan
! Like his father.”
Laila pulled down her shirt. It filled her with fear when he spoke like this.
“How are things with Mariam?”
She said they were fine.
“Good. Good.”
She didn’t tell him that they’d had their first true fight.
It had happened a few days earlier. Laila had gone to the kitchen and found Mariam yanking drawers and slamming them shut.
She was looking, Mariam said, for the long wooden spoon she used to stir rice.
“Where did you put it?” she said, wheeling around to face Laila.
“Me?” Laila said. “I didn’t take it. I hardly come in here.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Is that an accusation? It’s how you wanted it, remember. You said you would make the meals. But if you want to switch—”
“So you’re saying it grew little legs and walked out.
Teep,
teep, teep, teep
. Is that what happened,
degeh
?”
“I’m saying . . .” Laila said, trying to maintain control. Usually, she could will herself to absorb Mariam’s derision and
finger-pointing. But her ankles had swollen, her head hurt, and the heartburn was vicious that day. “I am saying that maybe
you’ve misplaced it.”
“Misplaced it?” Mariam pulled a drawer. The spatulas and knives inside it clanked. “How long have you been here, a few months?
I’ve lived in this house for nineteen years,
dokhtar jo.
I have kept
that
spoon in
this
drawer since you were shitting your diapers.”
“Still,” Laila said, on the brink now, teeth clenched, “it’s possible you put it somewhere and forgot.”
“And it’s possible
you
hid it somewhere, to aggravate me.”
“You’re a sad, miserable woman,” Laila said.
Mariam flinched, then recovered, pursed her lips. “And you’re a whore. A whore and a
dozd
. A thieving whore, that’s what you are!”
Then there was shouting. Pots raised though not hurled. They’d called each other names, names that made Laila blush now. They
hadn’t spoken since. Laila was still shocked at how easily she’d come unhinged, but, the truth was, part of her had liked
it, had liked how it felt to scream at Mariam, to curse at her, to have a target at which to focus all her simmering anger,
her grief.
Laila wondered, with something like insight, if it wasn’t the same for Mariam.
After, she had run upstairs and thrown herself on Rasheed’s bed. Downstairs, Mariam was still yelling, “Dirt on your head!
Dirt on your head!” Laila had lain on the bed, groaning into the pillow, missing her parents suddenly and with an overpowering
intensity she hadn’t felt since those terrible days just after the attack. She lay there, clutching handfuls of the bedsheet,
until, suddenly, her breath caught. She sat up, hands shooting down to her belly.
The baby had just kicked for the first time.
Mariam
E
arly one morning the next spring, of 1993, Mariam stood by the living-room window and watched Rasheed escort the girl
out of the house. The girl was tottering forward, bent at the waist, one arm draped protectively across the taut drum of her
belly, the shape of which was visible through her burqa. Rasheed, anxious and overly attentive, was holding her elbow, directing
her across the yard like a traffic policeman. He made a
Wait here
gesture, rushed to the front gate, then motioned for the girl to come forward, one foot propping the gate open. When she reached
him, he took her by the hand, helped her through the gate. Mariam could almost hear him say,
“
Watch your step, now, my flower,
my
gul
.”
They came back early the next evening.
Mariam saw Rasheed enter the yard first. He let the gate go prematurely, and it almost hit the girl on the face. He crossed
the yard in a few, quick steps. Mariam detected a shadow on his face, a darkness underlying the coppery light of dusk. In
the house, he took off his coat, threw it on the couch. Brushing past Mariam, he said in a brusque voice, “I’m hungry. Get
supper ready.”
The front door to the house opened. From the hallway, Mariam saw the girl, a swaddled bundle in the hook of her left arm.
She had one foot outside, the other inside, against the door, to prevent it from springing shut. She was stooped over and
was grunting, trying to reach for the paper bag of belongings that she had put down in order to open the door. Her face was
grimacing with effort. She looked up and saw Mariam.
Mariam turned around and went to the kitchen to warm Rasheed’s meal.
“IT’S LIKE SOMEONE is ramming a screwdriver into my ear,” Rasheed said, rubbing his eyes. He was standing in Mariam’s door,
puffy-eyed, wearing only a
tumban
tied with a floppy knot. His white hair was straggly, pointing every which way. “This crying. I can’t stand it.”
Downstairs, the girl was walking the baby across the floor, trying to sing to her.
“I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in two months,” Rasheed said. “And the room smells like a sewer. There’s shit cloths
lying all over the place. I stepped on one just the other night.”
Mariam smirked inwardly with perverse pleasure.
“Take her outside!” Rasheed yelled over his shoulder.
“Can’t you take her outside?”
The singing was suspended briefly. “She’ll catch pneumonia!”
“It’s summertime!”
“What?”
Rasheed clenched his teeth and raised his voice. “I said, It’s warm out!”
“I’m not taking her outside!”
The singing resumed.
“Sometimes, I swear, sometimes I want to put that thing in a box and let her float down Kabul River. Like baby Moses.”
Mariam never heard him call his daughter by the name the girl had given her, Aziza, the Cherished One. It was always
the baby,
or, when he was really exasperated,
that
thing
.
Some nights, Mariam overheard them arguing. She tiptoed to their door, listened to him complain about the baby—always the
baby—the insistent crying, the smells, the toys that made him trip, the way the baby had hijacked Laila’s attentions from
him with constant demands to be fed, burped, changed, walked, held. The girl, in turn, scolded him for smoking in the room,
for not letting the baby sleep with them.
There were other arguments waged in voices pitched low.
“The doctor said six weeks.”
“Not yet, Rasheed. No. Let go. Come on. Don’t do that.”
“It’s been two months.”
“
Ssht.
There. You woke up the baby.” Then more sharply, “
Khosh shodi?
Happy now?”
Mariam would sneak back to her room.
“Can’t you help?” Rasheed said now. “There must be something you can do.”
“What do I know about babies?” Mariam said.
“Rasheed! Can you bring the bottle? It’s sitting on the
almari
. She won’t feed. I want to try the bottle again.”
The baby’s screeching rose and fell like a cleaver on meat.
Rasheed closed his eyes. “That thing is a warlord. Hekmatyar. I’m telling you, Laila’s given birth to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.”
* * *
MARIAM WATCHED AS the girl’s days became consumed with cycles of feeding, rocking, bouncing, walking. Even when the baby napped,
there were soiled diapers to scrub and leave to soak in a pail of the disinfectant that the girl had insisted Rasheed buy
for her. There were fingernails to trim with sandpaper, coveralls and pajamas to wash and hang to dry. These clothes, like
other things about the baby, became a point of contention.
“What’s the matter with them?” Rasheed said.
“They’re boys’ clothes. For a
bacha.
”
“You think she knows the difference? I paid good money for those clothes. And another thing, I don’t care for that tone. Consider
that a warning.”
Every week, without fail, the girl heated a black metal brazier over a flame, tossed a pinch of wild rue seeds in it, and
wafted the
espandi
smoke in her baby’s direction to ward off evil.
Mariam found it exhausting to watch the girl’s lolloping enthusiasm—and had to admit, if only privately, to a degree of admiration.
She marveled at how the girl’s eyes shone with worship, even in the mornings when her face drooped and her complexion was
waxy from a night’s worth of walking the baby. The girl had fits of laughter when the baby passed gas. The tiniest changes
in the baby enchanted her, and everything it did was declared spectacular.
“Look! She’s reaching for the rattle. How clever she is.”
“I’ll call the newspapers,” said Rasheed.
Every night, there were demonstrations. When the girl insisted he witness something, Rasheed tipped his chin upward and cast
an impatient, sidelong glance down the blue-veined hook of his nose.
“Watch. Watch how she laughs when I snap my fingers. There. See? Did you see?”
Rasheed would grunt, and go back to his plate. Mariam remembered how the girl’s mere presence used to overwhelm him. Everything
she said used to please him, intrigue him, make him look up from his plate and nod with approval.
The strange thing was, the girl’s fall from grace ought to have pleased Mariam, brought her a sense of vindication. But it
didn’t. It didn’t. To her own surprise, Mariam found herself pitying the girl.
It was also over dinner that the girl let loose a steady stream of worries. Topping the list was pneumonia, which was suspected
with every minor cough. Then there was dysentery, the specter of which was raised with every loose stool. Every rash was either
chicken pox or measles.
“You should not get so attached,” Rasheed said one night.
“What do you mean?”
“I was listening to the radio the other night. Voice of America. I heard an interesting statistic. They said that in Afghanistan
one out of four children will die before the age of five. That’s what they said. Now, they—What? What? Where are you going?
Come back here. Get back here this instant!”
He gave Mariam a bewildered look. “What’s the matter with her?”
That night, Mariam was lying in bed when the bickering started again. It was a hot, dry summer night, typical of the month
of
Saratan
in Kabul. Mariam had opened her window, then shut it when no breeze came through to temper the heat, only mosquitoes. She
could feel the heat rising from the ground outside, through the wheat brown, splintered planks of the outhouse in the yard,
up through the walls and into her room.
Usually, the bickering ran its course after a few minutes, but half an hour passed and not only was it still going on, it
was escalating. Mariam could hear Rasheed shouting now. The girl’s voice, underneath his, was tentative and shrill. Soon the
baby was wailing.
Then Mariam heard their door open violently. In the morning, she would find the doorknob’s circular impression in the hallway
wall. She was sitting up in bed when her own door slammed open and Rasheed came through.
He was wearing white underpants and a matching undershirt, stained yellow in the underarms with sweat. On his feet he wore
flip-flops. He held a belt in his hand, the brown leather one he’d bought for his
nikka
with the girl, and was wrapping the perforated end around his fist.
“It’s your doing. I know it is,” he snarled, advancing on her.
Mariam slid out of her bed and began backpedaling. Her arms instinctively crossed over her chest, where he often struck her
first.
“What are you talking about?” she stammered.
“Her denying me. You’re teaching her to.”
Over the years, Mariam had learned to harden herself against his scorn and reproach, his ridiculing and reprimanding. But
this fear she had no control over.
All these years and still she shivered with fright when he was like this, sneering, tightening the belt around his fist, the
creaking of the leather, the glint in his bloodshot eyes. It was the fear of the goat, released in the tiger’s cage, when
the tiger first looks up from its paws, begins to growl.
Now the girl was in the room, her eyes wide, her face contorted.
“I should have known that you’d corrupt her,” Rasheed spat at Mariam. He swung the belt, testing it against his own thigh.
The buckle jingled loudly.
“Stop it,
bas
!” the girl said. “Rasheed, you can’t do this.”
“Go back to the room.”
Mariam backpedaled again.
“No! Don’t do this!”
“Now!”
Rasheed raised the belt again and this time came at Mariam.
Then an astonishing thing happened: The girl lunged at him. She grabbed his arm with both hands and tried to drag him down,
but she could do no more than dangle from it. She did succeed in slowing Rasheed’s progress toward Mariam.
“Let go!” Rasheed cried.
“You win. You win. Don’t do this. Please, Rasheed, no beating! Please don’t do this.”
They struggled like this, the girl hanging on, pleading, Rasheed trying to shake her off, keeping his eyes on Mariam, who
was too stunned to do anything.
In the end, Mariam knew that there would be no beating, not that night. He’d made his point. He stayed that way a few moments
longer, arm raised, chest heaving, a fine sheen of sweat filming his brow. Slowly, Rasheed lowered his arm. The girl’s feet
touched ground and still she wouldn’t let go, as if she didn’t trust him. He had to yank his arm free of her grip.
“I’m on to you,” he said, slinging the belt over his shoulder. “I’m on to you both. I won’t be made an
ahmaq,
a fool, in my own house.”
He threw Mariam one last, murderous stare, and gave the girl a shove in the back on the way out.
When she heard their door close, Mariam climbed back into bed, buried her head beneath the pillow, and waited for the shaking
to stop.
* * *
THREE TIMES THAT NIGHT, Mariam was awakened from sleep. The first time, it was the rumble of rockets in the west, coming from
the direction of Karteh-Char. The second time, it was the baby crying downstairs, the girl’s shushing, the clatter of spoon
against milk bottle. Finally, it was thirst that pulled her out of bed.
Downstairs, the living room was dark, save for a bar of moonlight spilling through the window. Mariam could hear the buzzing
of a fly somewhere, could make out the outline of the cast-iron stove in the corner, its pipe jutting up, then making a sharp
angle just below the ceiling.
On her way to the kitchen, Mariam nearly tripped over something. There was a shape at her feet. When her eyes adjusted, she
made out the girl and her baby lying on the floor on top of a quilt.
The girl was sleeping on her side, snoring. The baby was awake. Mariam lit the kerosene lamp on the table and hunkered down.
In the light, she had her first real close-up look at the baby, the tuft of dark hair, the thick-lashed hazel eyes, the pink
cheeks, and lips the color of ripe pomegranate.
Mariam had the impression that the baby too was examining her. She was lying on her back, her head tilted sideways, looking
at Mariam intently with a mixture of amusement, confusion, and suspicion. Mariam wondered if her face might frighten her,
but then the baby squealed happily and Mariam knew that a favorable judgment had been passed on her behalf.
“
Shh,”
Mariam whispered. “You’ll wake up your mother, half deaf as she is.”
The baby’s hand balled into a fist. It rose, fell, found a spastic path to her mouth. Around a mouthful of her own hand, the
baby gave Mariam a grin, little bubbles of spittle shining on her lips.
“Look at you. What a sorry sight you are, dressed like a damn boy. And all bundled up in this heat. No wonder you’re still
awake.”
Mariam pulled the blanket off the baby, was horrified to find a second one beneath, clucked her tongue, and pulled that one
off too. The baby giggled with relief.
She flapped her arms like a bird.
“Better,
nay
?”
As Mariam was pulling back, the baby grabbed her pinkie. The tiny fingers curled themselves tightly around it. They felt warm
and soft, moist with drool.
“
Gunuh,”
the baby said.
“All right,
bas,
let go.”
The baby hung on, kicked her legs again.
Mariam pulled her finger free. The baby smiled and made a series of gurgling sounds. The knuckles went back to the mouth.
“What are you so happy about? Huh? What are you smiling at? You’re not so clever as your mother says. You have a brute for
a father and a fool for a mother. You wouldn’t smile so much if you knew. No you wouldn’t. Go to sleep, now. Go on.”
Mariam rose to her feet and walked a few steps before the baby started making the
eh, eh, eh
sounds that Mariam knew signaled the onset of a hearty cry. She retraced her steps.
“What is it? What do you want from me?”
The baby grinned toothlessly.
Mariam sighed. She sat down and let her finger be grabbed, looked on as the baby squeaked, as she flexed her plump legs at
the hips and kicked air. Mariam sat there, watching, until the baby stopped moving and began snoring softly.