The Swallows of Kabul (3 page)

The prison world is getting Atiq down. During the last several weeks, he has devoted much consideration to his position as a jailer. The more he thinks about it, the less merit he finds in it, and even less nobility. This realization has put him in a state of constant rage. Every time he closes the door behind him, withdrawing from the streets and their noise, he feels as though he were burying himself alive. A fantastic fear troubles his thoughts, and then he crouches in his corner, refusing to calm down; the act of letting himself go in this way brings him a sort of inner peace. Can it be that his twenty years of war are beginning to take their toll? At forty-two, he’s already worn out; he can’t see the end of the tunnel, and he can’t see the end of his nose, either. Little by little, he’s letting himself move toward some unthinkable renunciation. He’s starting to doubt the mullahs’ promises, and sometimes he catches himself feeling only the vaguest dread of being struck down by a bolt of lightning.

He’s lost a considerable amount of weight. Under his fundamentalist’s beard, the skin of his face sags and droops; his eyes, though outlined with kohl, have lost their keenness. The darkness of the walls has got the better of his reason, and his dark employment is taking root deep in his soul. When a man spends his nights guarding condemned prisoners and his days turning them over to the executioner, he doesn’t have high expectations for his leisure time. Now, completely at a loss, Atiq is unable to say whether the silence of the two empty cells or the ghost of the prostitute who was executed this morning is the reason why the jail’s shadowy corners are filled with the musty reek of the next world.

He goes out into the street. A collection of urchins is stalking a stray dog, and all are yowling in a dissonant chorale. Irritated by the noise and the turmoil, Atiq picks up a stone and throws it at the boy closest to him. The boy dodges the missile impassively and continues to scream himself hoarse. He and his fellows are trying to disorient the dog, which has plainly reached the limits of its strength. Atiq realizes that he’s wasting his time. The little scoundrels won’t disperse before lynching the animal, thus precociously preparing themselves to lynch men.

With his key chain under his vest, he walks to the market, which is overrun with beggars and porters. As usual, an overexcited throng, in no way disheartened by the blazing heat, boils around the vendors’ makeshift stalls. Potential customers examine secondhand clothes from every angle, rummage among used objects in search of no one knows what, bruise overripe fruit with their skinny fingers.

Atiq hails a young neighbor and hands him the melon he’s just bought. “Take it to my house,” he commands. “And don’t even think about dawdling in the street,” he adds threateningly, brandishing his whip.

The boy nods in reluctant compliance, tucks the melon under his arm, and directs his steps toward a surreal jumble of hovels.

Atiq thinks first of going to visit his uncle, a shoe-maker by trade. His den is located just behind a nearby pile of ruins, but Atiq promptly dismisses the idea; his uncle is among the most tireless talkers ever begotten by his tribe, and he’ll keep Atiq listening until late in the night to the same old stories, endlessly reworked, about the boots the uncle made for the king’s officers and the dignitaries of the former regime. At seventy years of age, half-blind and virtually deaf, Ashraf indulges in quite a bit of raving. When his customers, exhausted by his tirades, slip out of the shop, he fails to notice their absence and keeps haranguing the walls until breath fails him. Now no one has shoes made to measure anymore, and the rare, aging specimens brought to him for repair are so severely compromised that he doesn’t know where to begin. Atiq’s uncle Ashraf is bored, and he bores other people to death.

Atiq stands still in the very middle of the street and considers what he’s going to do this evening. He can’t even think about going home to face his unmade bed, the dirty dishes forgotten in the foul-smelling basins, and his wife, lying in a corner of the room with her knees pulled up to her chin, a filthy scarf on her head, and purple blotches on her face. Because of her illness, Atiq arrived at the jail late this morning and almost jeopardized the public execution of the adulteress. It was no use going to the clinic; ever since the doctor threw up his arms in a show of impotence, the nurses can’t be bothered to attend to Atiq’s wife anymore. Perhaps she’s another reason why Atiq has suddenly stopped believing the mullahs’ promises and no longer feels any particular fear of lightning bolts fired at him from out of the blue. Prostrated, moaning, contorting her body, almost mad with pain, his wife keeps him in a state of constant alert every night and dozes off only with the coming of the dawn.

Every day, in his search for concoctions that may ease her suffering, Atiq is obliged to scour the pestilential lairs of various charlatans. But neither talismanic powers nor fervent prayers have succeeded in helping the patient. Even his own sister, who had agreed to move in with them in order to give Atiq a hand, has taken refuge in the province of Baluchistan and sent no further news. Left to his own devices, Atiq has lost his ability to manage a situation that’s steadily growing more and more complicated. If the doctor has thrown in the towel, what’s left except for a miracle? And do miracles still have any currency in Kabul? Sometimes, when he fears his nerves may crack under the pressure, Atiq clasps a
fatihah
in his trembling hands and implores Heaven to call back his wife. After all, why continue to suffer when each breath you take dehumanizes you and horrifies those you love?

“Watch out!” someone shouts. “Out of the way, out of the way . . .”

Atiq has just enough time to lurch to one side to avoid being run over. A horse pulling a cart has bolted. The frantic animal charges into the market, creates the beginnings of a panic, then suddenly veers off and heads for a nearby encampment. Thrown from his seat, the driver describes a low arc and lands on a canvas tent. Amid the squealing of children and the shouts of women, the horse continues its headlong dash and disappears behind the debris of a holy shrine.

Atiq hikes up the tails of his long vest and slaps the dust off his backside.

“I really thought you were done for,” remarks a man sitting at a table outside a little coffee shop.

Atiq recognizes Mirza Shah, who offers him a seat and says, “Can I buy you some tea, Warden?”

“I accept gladly,” says Atiq, dropping into the proffered chair.

“You’ve closed up shop ahead of time.”

“It’s hard to be your own jailer.”

Mirza Shah raises an eyebrow. “You’re not going to tell me your cells are empty. No more tenants?”

“No more. The last one was stoned this morning.”

“The whore? I didn’t attend the ceremony, but I heard about it. . . .”

Atiq leans back against the wall, folds his hand over his belly, and looks at the rubble of what used to be, a generation ago, one of the liveliest avenues in Kabul.

“I think you look very sad, Atiq.”

“Really?”

“In fact, it’s the first thing one notices about you. As soon as I saw you, I said to myself, Tsk, tsk! That poor devil Atiq, all is not well with him.”

Atiq shrugs his shoulders. Mirza Shah was his childhood friend. The two of them grew up together in a poverty-stricken part of town, where they went to the same places and knew the same people. Their parents worked in a little glassware factory and had worries enough without taking care of them. So, naturally, Mirza enlisted in the army at the age of eighteen, while Atiq worked as an apprentice truck driver before trying out a fantastic number of insignificant jobs, all of which reimbursed him by day for what the nights stole from him. The two friends dropped out of each other’s sight until the day the Russians invaded Afghanistan. Mirza Shah was one of the first soldiers to desert his unit and join the mujahideen. His courage and his commitment quickly raised him to the rank of
tej.
Atiq met him again at the front and served for a while under his command until an artillery shell broke the momentum of Atiq’s jihad. Atiq was evacuated to Peshawar; Mirza continued to make war with extraordinary zeal. After the retreat of the Soviet forces, he was offered several positions of responsibility within the administration, but he declined them all. Politics and power held few charms for him. Thanks to his connections, he was able to set up a variety of small enterprises that served as cover for his parallel investments, notably in contraband goods and the drug traffic. The rise of the Taliban cramped his style without necessarily dismantling his networks. He was happy to sacrifice a few exhausted buses and sundry other bagatelles for the good cause, contributed in his fashion to the messianic hooligans’ war effort against his former comrades, and succeeded in preserving his privileges. Mirza knows that it’s a rare pauper whose faith can stand against easy money, so he greases the palms of the country’s new masters and passes peaceful days in the very eye of the storm. He’s asked the jailer several times to come to work for him, but Atiq regularly sidesteps the offer; he prefers perishing by degrees in an ephemeral life to suffering torments for all eternity.

Mirza twirls his beads on one finger and stares at his old friend. The friend, embarrassed, pretends to examine his fingernails.

“What’s wrong, Warden?”

“I’m asking myself the same question.”

“Is whatever it is the reason why you were talking to yourself a little while ago?”

“Maybe.”

“You can’t find anybody to talk to?”

“Is that so necessary?”

“The way things are going for you, I’d say yes. You were so absorbed in your troubles, you didn’t hear that cart coming. Right away I said to myself, Either Atiq’s losing his mind or he’s cooking up an imminent coup d’état. . . .”

“Watch what you’re saying,” Atiq interrupts, squirming a little. “Someone might take you literally.”

“I’m just teasing you.”

“There’s no joking in Kabul, as you very well know.”

In an effort to soothe him, Mirza gently taps the back of his hand. “We used to be great friends when we were children. Have you forgotten?”

“Hotheads don’t have memories.”

“We never hid anything from each other.”

“Today, that’s no longer possible.”

Mirza’s hand clenches. “And what has changed today, Atiq? The same weapons are in circulation, the same mugs are on display, the same dogs are barking, and the same caravans are passing through. We’ve always lived this way. One king left; another divinity replaced him. The logos on the coats of arms may have changed, but they entitle their owners to the same abuses. Don’t delude yourself; the mental range is the same as it’s been for centuries. Some people waste their time waiting to see a new era dawning on the horizon. As long as the world’s been the world, there’ve been those who live with it and those who refuse to accept it. The wise man, of course, is the one who takes things as they come. He has understood. And you, too, Atiq, you have to understand. You’re unhinged because you don’t know what you want, that’s all. But that’s what friends are for: to help you to see clearly. If you still think of me as a friend, tell me a little about why you’re in such a state.”

Atiq sighs. He withdraws his wrist from under Mirza’s hand, searches his eyes for some support, dithers briefly, then gives in. “My wife’s sick. The doctor says her blood is breaking down very quickly and there’s no cure for her disease.”

At first, the notion that a man might speak of his wife in the street baffles Mirza; then, stroking his henna-colored beard and nodding, he says, “Is this not the Lord’s will?”

“Who would dare stand against it, Mirza? Not me, in any case. I accept it completely, with boundless devotion, except that I’m distraught and all alone. I haven’t got anyone to help me.”

“But it’s simple: Divorce her.”

“She has no family left,” Atiq naively replies, quite failing to notice the contempt darkening his friend’s features. Mirza is visibly exasperated at being obliged to dwell upon so degrading a subject. “Her parents are dead; her brothers have gone their separate ways. And besides, I couldn’t do that to her.”

“Why not?”

“She saved my life, remember?”

Mirza throws his shoulders back, as though the jailer’s reasoning has taken him by surprise. He thrusts out his lips and tucks his chin into one shoulder so that he’s eyeing Atiq sideways. “Rubbish!” he exclaims. “God alone has power over life and death. You were wounded while fighting for His glory. Since He couldn’t send Gabriel, He put this woman in your way. She took care of you
by the will of God.
She did nothing but submit to His will. What you did for her was a hundred times more valuable: You married her. What more could she hope for? She was three years older than you, already an old maid, with no vitality and no appeal. Can there be any greater generosity to a woman than to offer her a roof, protection, honor, and a name? You don’t owe her anything. She’s the one who should bow down before you, Atiq, and kiss the toes of your feet, one by one, every time you take off your shoes. She has little significance outside of what you represent for her. She’s only a subordinate. Furthermore, it’s an error to believe that any man owes anything at all to a woman. The misfortune of the world comes from precisely that misconception.”

Mirza suddenly frowns. “You don’t mean to tell me you’re crazy enough to love her?”

“We’ve lived together for more than twenty years. That’s not something one can just ignore.”