The Swallows of Kabul (12 page)

Atiq looks at his watch. He’s clearly impatient; Qassim’s arrival has driven his nervousness to new heights. What’s Qassim going to think when he sees him there, eating dinner in a greasy spoon not twenty steps from his house? He hunches his shoulders and screens his face with his hand until a waiter brings him a huge sandwich bundled in wrapping paper. Atiq slips it into a plastic bag, places a few banknotes on the table, and beats a hasty retreat, without waiting for his change. Just when he thinks he’s free and clear, Qassim’s hand lays hold of him. “Is it me you’re running from, Atiq?”

The jailer acts the part of the man who just can’t believe his eyes. “Are you back already?”

“Why are you sneaking out like this? Have I given you some cause for complaint?”

“I don’t follow you.”

Qassim, disappointed, slowly nods his head. “Do you know what I think, Atiq? I think what you’re doing is wrong. No, please, don’t put on a show. It’s not necessary, I assure you. I’m not going to give you a lecture. It’s just that—look, I think you’ve changed a lot recently, and I don’t like it. Normally, I wouldn’t give a damn about such things, but I can’t be indifferent in your case. Maybe it’s because of the long years we’ve spent together. Sometimes we’ve had fun, but more often we’ve had to struggle against adversity. I don’t like meddling in something that’s not my business, but I have no qualms about telling you this: if you barricade yourself inside your worries, you’re going to wind up stuck there, unable to get out.”

“It’s not a big deal. Sometimes I get a little depressed, that’s all.”

Qassim doesn’t believe him and makes no attempt to hide his incredulity. He leans toward Atiq. “Do you need money?”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

The militiaman scratches his forehead, deep in thought, then makes a proposal. “Why don’t you come and join us tonight at Haji Palwan’s? Only old friends will be there. We drink tea, we talk and talk, we reminisce about the army and all our skirmishes, and we laugh at the bad old times. It’ll suit you just fine, I promise. We’re just a bunch of war buddies; everything’s very relaxed. If you have any ideas, we’ll discuss them together so you can find the right partners and get things rolling at once. You don’t have to be a wizard to go into business. A little imagination, a modicum of motivation, and the locomotive starts moving down the track. If you’re broke, we’ll stake you and you can reimburse us later.”

“It’s not a question of money,” Atiq declares wearily. “Money doesn’t dazzle me.”

“It doesn’t light your way, either, as far as I can tell.”

“I don’t mind the dark.”

“That’s a statement that needs proving. For my part, I just want to tell you there’s nothing wrong with going to see a friend when things are getting you down.”

“Did Mirza Shah send you?”

“You see? You’re wrong all down the line. I don’t need Mirza Shah’s advice to reach out to a colleague I’m fond of.”

Atiq’s neck bone protrudes as he looks down at his plastic bag. He toes a stone, unearths it, and begins digging a hole in the dirt. “May I go?” he asks in a tight voice.

“But of course, what a question!”

Atiq thanks him with a nod and starts to leave.

“There was a learned man in Jalalabad,” Qassim blurts out, falling in behind Atiq. “A savant, a phenomenal sage. He had an answer for everything. No literary or scholarly allusion ever escaped him. He knew by heart every hadith in the
Six Sound Books
and all the great events that have marked the history of Islam, all Islam, from east to west. The man was astounding. If he’d lived in our times, he would’ve probably wound up at the end of a rope, or perhaps beheaded, because his knowledge was so great, it passed all understanding. One day, while he was teaching a class, someone came in and whispered in his ear. And all at once, the illustrious wise man turned pale. His beads slipped from his fingers. He got to his feet without a word and left the classroom. He was never seen again.”

Atiq raises an eyebrow. “So what did the other person whisper to him?”

“The story doesn’t say anything about that detail.”

“And the moral of the story?”

“You can know all there is to know about life and mankind, but what do you really know about yourself? Atiq, my boy, don’t try too hard to complicate your existence. You’ll never guess what it holds in store for you. Stop filling your head with false ideas and unanswerable questions and useless reasoning. Even if you find an answer to every question today, you still won’t be safe from whatever unknowable event may take place tomorrow. The learned man knew many things, but he was ignorant about the essential thing. Basically, being alive means keeping yourself ready for the sky to fall in on you at any time. If you start from the assumption that existence is only an ordeal, a test we have to pass, then you’re equipped to deal with its sorrows and its surprises. If you persist in expecting it to give you something it can’t give, that just proves that you haven’t understood anything. Take things as they come; don’t turn them into a drama. You’re not piloting the ship, you’re following the course of your destiny. Yesterday, I lost my mother. Today, I went to spend a few moments in silence at her grave. Now I’m at Khorsan’s getting a bite to eat. I plan to go to Haji Palwan’s tonight to hear what our old comrades are talking about. If some misfortune has happened since the last time I went there, it’s not the end of the world. There’s no more painful love than the love you feel when you’re in a railroad station and you exchange glances with someone whose train is headed in the other direction.”

Atiq stops walking, but he keeps his neck bowed. He reflects for a moment, then raises his chin and asks, “Is it really so obvious that I’m going through a bad time?”

“If you want my opinion, it’s written all over your face.”

Atiq nods and goes away.

Sadly, Qassim watches him leave. Then he scratches his head under his turban and goes back to rejoin his driver in Khorsan’s little eating place.

LIFE IS NOTHING but an inexorable process of erosion, Musarrat thinks. Whether you neglect yourself or take care of yourself, it makes no sort of difference. The fact of birth dooms you to death; it’s the rule. If the body could choose, people would live for a thousand years. But the will doesn’t always have the power to enforce itself, and an old person’s wits, however sharp, can do nothing to support his knees. The fundamental human tragedy derives from the fact that no one can outlive the most hopeless of desires, which is, moreover, the main cause of our misfortune. As for the world, isn’t it a human failure, the monstrous proof of human paltriness? Musarrat has decided to face the evidence. Putting a veil over her face won’t do any good. She has fought against the evil thing that’s gnawing her life away; she’s refused to lower her fists. But now the time has come to drop her guard, to resign herself to her fate, because that’s all that’s left; she’s tried everything else. Her only regret is that she must falter at an age when all the chimeras have been tamed at last. At forty-five, her life is still ahead of her, but more nuanced, more carefully measured; her dreams are less fantastic, her impulses more serene, and her body, when desire claws it out of its indolence, quivers with such discernment that lovemaking makes up in intensity for whatever it may have lost in freshness. The fifth decade is an age of reason, and that’s an advantage when one has to negotiate challenges. In her forties, her certainty about the end she’s coming to is too strong to admit a second’s doubt. Musarrat has no doubts; everything will come to an end, except this certainty. There will be no miracles. The thought grieves her, but not excessively. Excess would be useless, perhaps ridiculous, and surely blasphemous. Of course, she would like to make herself beautiful, to put mascara on her lashes and open her eyes so wide that nothing in Atiq’s eyes could escape her notice. But such resorts are no longer possible for her. That’s a hard truth to admit at forty-five years. And, alas, admitting the hard truth doesn’t exempt her from very much. There is no appeal from the reflection she sees in the small chipped mirror: she’s decomposing faster than her prayers. Her face is nothing but a fleshless skull with furrowed cheeks and pinched lips. Her eyes are glazed, icy, glimmering with a faint, deathly light, as though shreds of glass lie deep in her pupils. And,
my God
, her hands. Bony, covered with thin, drab skin, crumpled like paper, they have trouble recognizing things by touch. This morning, when she finished combing her hair, she found she was holding a fistful of it in her hand. How can you lose so much hair in so little time? She wound the hair around a bit of wood and thrust it into a crack in the wall; then she slid down to the floor with her head in her hands and waited for a tear to well up and bring her back to herself. When no tear came, she crawled on all fours to her pallet. There, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, she faced the wall for a full hour. Had her strength not abandoned her, she would have spent the whole day with her back to the room. But she was felled by her own obstinacy; she lay down on the floor and fell asleep at once, her mouth open in a long, drawn-out groan.

When he found her lying in a heap on the floor, Atiq immediately feared the worst. Curiously enough, he didn’t drop the package he was carrying, and his breathing was untroubled. He remained standing in the doorway, one eyebrow higher than the other, careful to make no noise. For several long minutes, he gazed at her body attentively—the hand turned toward the ceiling, the curled fingers, the open mouth, the rigid chest—looking for a sign of life. Not a hair on Musarrat’s head moved. After putting his bag on a low table, Atiq swallowed hard and approached his wife’s inert body. Cautiously, he knelt beside her, and at the moment when he bent over her pallid wrist to take her pulse, a soft sigh sent him lurching backward. His Adam’s apple began furiously twitching. He listened carefully, imagining he had heard some ordinary rustling sound, then brought his ear close to the still face. Once again, a faint breath touched his cheek. He pressed his lips together to hold his anger in check, straightened up, and with closed eyes and clenched fists backed away until he was sitting against the wall. Sternly setting his jaw and folding his arms across his chest, he stared at the body stretched out at his feet as if he were trying to pierce it with his eyes, through and through.

Ten

MOHSEN RAMAT can take no more. The endless hours and days he regularly spends in the cemetery have exacerbated his distress. However much he may wander among the graves, he can’t manage to put his ideas in order. Things are escaping him at a dizzying speed; his bearings are irretrievably lost. Instead of helping him concentrate, his isolation weakens him and magnifies his suffering. Every now and then, a mad desire to grab an iron bar and destroy everything in sight surges through him; curiously, however, as soon as he takes his head in his hands, his rage turns into an irresistible urge to burst into tears. Thus, with clenched teeth and sealed eyelids, he abandons himself to his prostration.

He thinks he’s going mad.

Since the incident in the streets of Kabul, he can no longer distinguish day from night. The penalty for that accursed little outing is harsh and irreversible. If only he had listened to his wife! How could he have believed that lovers’ promenades were still possible in a city that looks like a hospice for the moribund, overrun with repellent fanatics whose eyes stare out of the dark backward and abysm of time? How could he have lost sight of the horrors that punctuate daily life in a nation so contemptible its official language is the whip? He shouldn’t have deluded himself. This time, Zunaira refuses to forgive and forget what happened. She holds it against him; she can’t bear the sight of him, much less the sound of his voice. “For the love of God,” he begged her, “don’t complicate things between us.” Zunaira looked him up and down, her eyes baleful behind the netting in her mask. Her chest rose, lifted by a wave of indignation. She searched for the harshest, most malicious words she could think of to tell him how terribly she suffers from what he now represents for her, how incapable she is of distinguishing him from the turbaned thugs who have transformed the streets into an arena and the days into a deathwatch, how utterly the proximity of a man, any man, both disgusts and overwhelms her. Unable to express her bitterness and her affliction with sufficient venom, she shut herself in a room and started howling like a madwoman. Terrified by his wife’s deafening screams, Mohsen hurriedly left the house. Had the earth opened under his feet, he wouldn’t have hesitated to jump in and let it close over him. It was horrible. Zunaira’s cries echoed through the district, brought out the neighbors, stalked him like a raging flock of predatory birds. His head spun. It seemed like the end of the world.