Return to the Little Coffee Shop of Kabul (4 page)

“You mean Jack bought half of a winery with no grapes?”

“This place hasn't made any wine for years.” Sky reached out to scratch the dog behind the ears. “Rick said he was waiting for Jack to come back before he put anything more into this place, before he brought in any more grapes.”

“Well, now I guess he'll just have to do it on his own.” Sunny noticed the two men's eyes meet for a split second. “So those vines in the front are simply for decoration? Do they even get grapes on them?”

“Ah, that, kiddo, is where young Sky and I are doing our magic, with Jack's blessing of course. You see,” he said as he slowly sat back and leaned against the tree, “when I settled over in Italy, after the war, I grew my own grapes, I made my own wine. My Sylvia, bless her soul, came from a family famous for their Chianti. For forty years I had my own little patch of land, where I made just enough to last me and all my friends from harvest to harvest. Ever since she died, and I came back home to here,” Joe pointed to a low white house visible through the trees, “to help my brother, I have dreamed of trying again. And what you see over there,” he said, pointing in the other
direction, “will be the first vintage of Screaming Peacock Vineyards' rosé.”

Sunny followed his last gesture to the sad, empty vines she had walked through earlier. “I thought you just said it was too hard to grow grapes around here.” Jack had to have been delusional when he made this decision, she thought. That long scar across his head from the blast he'd experienced in Kabul was proof enough that his brain had seen a lot of scrambling over the past few years. How else could she explain this normally rational man's faith in this place?

“You know, this is not such a bad place,” Joe said, as if reading her mind. He coughed into his sleeve. “Sure, it can be lonely,” he continued without missing a beat, dismissing the thought with a wave of a hand. “And yes, it can rain enough to drown a bullfrog, but things could be worse. Me,” he said, pointing at his chest with both index fingers, “I was away from this area for sixty years. A long time to stay away from where you were born and raised, right? And when I came back? It was very difficult. Joe, I said to myself, this is not home anymore. Why are you here?” He flung out his hands, as if he were asking himself the question all over again.

“Now my late brother, may he rest in peace,” Joe paused to look up at the sky and back down again, “he would tell you this is the best place on earth. God's Green Acre. My brother, he was a happy man. Always content. Believed in live and let live, forgive and forget. Much more than me.” Joe sighed. “But he was right about one thing.” He bent and struggled to scoop up a handful of moist dirt from the ground below. “It is good here, the land. If you treat it well, treat it with respect. It's like a temperamental woman,” he continued without taking a breath. “Like my Sylvia was. Show her some tenderness, listen to her,
attend to her needs, but always make sure to leave her longing for just a tiny bit more, and she'll give you whatever she's got, and then some. But deny or ignore her or try to make her be something she's not, and she'll shut down faster than a possum getting a whiff of fox.” Joe squinted toward the vines and shook his head. “Jack understood that.”

She had to laugh a little to herself at that. Who was this funny old man who looked Japanese but spoke English like an Italian, who talked with his hands as much as his mouth? And didn't he ever stop?

“So you know what they say in Italy, right?
Bisogna accomodarsi ai tempi.
”

Sunny looked at him blankly. Suddenly she felt exhausted.

“Gnaw the bone which is fallen to thy lot,” Joe continued. “Make the most of what you have,” he explained, with an encouraging pat on Sunny's knee. “You'll hear my story soon enough, and I will learn yours. We'll have plenty of time to talk more and get to know each other better.”

Sunny forced a smile. Inside, she was feeling a little sorry, knowing that wouldn't be the case.

“Have fun. Be safe. And remember what Yazmina said: not too many sweets. And no soda! And be careful not to …” The door of the old brown Mercedes slammed shut before Ahmet could say more. Halajan was anxious to get moving, knowing that the drive could take forever, a trip that should normally last no more than twenty minutes. They should have left earlier, and would have, had she not been forced to wait for Khalid, the
chokidor
, to arrive at the coffeehouse in his own sweet time to give them a ride. Traffic in Kabul had become a nightmare thanks to the barricades that could turn a through road into a dead-end street without warning, and the thing they called the ring of steel, which was really just a fancy name for the checkpoints guarded by the newly appointed police—those pimply-faced boys with goggles pushed up on their helmets, knives strapped to their body armor, flashlights attached to their rifles—trying their hardest to appear as tough as the international forces that came before them.

“Just turn and go around that truck!” she yelled impatiently from the back seat. He drives like an old woman, Halajan thought. How she longed to grab the steering wheel from Khalid's hand. You could bet your life she wouldn't be so meek and courteous as he was being, not if she could drive.

It was a full hour before he finally dropped them off at their destination. Najama tugged at the bottom of Halajan's green chador, pulling her with a four-year-old's determination toward the statue standing guard at the zoo's entrance. The bronze lion glimmered in the early spring sunlight, his face proud and defiant.

“Do not worry, little one. We will go say hello to our old friend Marjan, as always.”

The girl ran ahead as Halajan struggled to keep up. The story of the hero lion was one of Najama's, and Halajan's, favorites. Of course, she had not shared all the details with her granddaughter. Like how, after the mujahideen had driven the country into violence and chaos, there was no one left to feed the animals in the zoo, and many of them died of hunger. Or how the deer and ducks met their ends on the dinner plates of the hungry fighters, and about how the others—tigers and bears and monkeys, all those who were considered
haraam
, forbidden—died of neglect or stray bullets. But Marjan, the lion; now
there
was a fighter, as proud and tough as the Afghan people themselves. As the story went, it was when the fighting had reached its peak that an idiot warrior with something to prove had slipped into the animal's cage, seeking to tease him. But the
mujahid
was no match for the lion, who gobbled him up in an instant. The next day, the dead man's brother came seeking revenge by throwing a hand grenade straight at the lion's snout. Though blinded and scarred by the attack, Marjan refused to give in, and instead
lived on through two more decades of war and turmoil into old age, finally coming to rest in a grave in the flower garden at the rear of the zoo. No, Halajan thought as she watched the child gently stroking the bronze cat's majestic mane, Najama would hear those gruesome details on her own, soon enough.

Yesterday's clouds were gone, leaving behind a sky as blue as the deepest of the Band-e Amir lakes high in the Hindu Kush mountains. The crisp morning air had not been enough to keep away the flocks of families seeking a few hours of peaceful escape behind the zoo's high, sturdy walls, or the young couples walking and talking together, safe from the judging eyes and wagging tongues of others.

Halajan dug deep into her pocket for the coins needed to enter the aquarium. The girl skipped ahead through the blue doorway, Halijan hustling to join her inside, where she found Najama standing transfixed behind the low chain separating the people from the ugly brick walls holding the tanks. The look on her granddaughter's face—that mix of curiosity and delight that seems only to appear on the very young—was well worth the price of entry. Though Halajan had to wonder what it was about a stupid fish swimming in circles through a forest of plastic plants that could bring so much joy. Halajan, she preferred the snakes.

Outside, Halajan held tightly to Najama's hand as she pushed her way through the crowd, past the cascading fountain to the pit where the big bears lived. Along the enclosure's stone wall, a trio of women in blue burqas drew back with a start as a brown bear reared up onto his hind legs with bluster and command, as if he were a fat warlord waving around an AK-47. Najama squealed with delight, then spun on her heels, anxious to see more. The two of them wove their way down the stone pathways past
the pens of listless gazelles and wolves, past a lone lioness pacing back and forth across a small patch of dirt, past a cage full of nasty-looking vultures pecking relentlessly at one of their own.

Though the zoo had made many improvements since its years of wartime neglect and its near-extinction under the Taliban, it was still nothing like the modern marvel it had been upon its opening back when Halajan was still in her teenage years, when things had been so different. The zoo had been the pride of Kabul, a wondrous oasis built along the banks of the flowing river, surrounded by the city's winding hills. The generous King Mohammad Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, had even donated a pair of snow leopards from his own private collection at Kaaraiz e Meer, outside of Kabul. No, this sorry excuse for a zoo was not the zoo she had known. But still, they were trying.

“Look at Mr Showoff.” Halajan led the little girl to an empty space between the tall fir trees, where a peacock stood in full bloom, his eye-spotted tail a shimmering fan of sapphire and emerald. “I think the poor bird is looking for a wife,” she said to no one in particular. Well, she thought, even single he is at least better off than the ones for sale in the narrow alleyway of the Kaa Forushi bird market, sitting day after day in their wicker cages, unable to spread their wings.

Najama stood mesmerized by the bird's splendor, so vibrant against its dusty brown surroundings. “Nana! I want a pretty bird!
Luftan?
Please?”

“
Inshallah
.” God willing. Halajan smiled and herded the girl forward toward the next lonely animal, a single pig rooting in a pen of patchy grass, his pale snout blackened with dried mud, oblivious to the curious crowds eager to see the only pig in Afghanistan, where, under Islamic law, he was definitely
considered
haraam
. But what was even more fascinating than the peacock or the pig to little Najama were the bright yellow and blue and green cars of the spinning ferris wheel in the distance. Halajan fiddled with the purple ribbons holding the tips of Najama's thick braids in place, and did her best to ignore the girl's pleas. She would just as soon jump straight off the top of Mount Noshakh naked than allow herself to be spun and tossed like that, locked like a pigeon in a painted cage dangling eight stories above the ground.

“Look over there, Najama!” She turned the child's attention toward a crowd that had suddenly gathered around the monkeys' cage. As the two of them maneuvered their way closer, through a sea of brightly colored chadors and of a mob of dark cropped heads, Halajan spotted a short man in blue jeans tossing bits of kabob through the small open spaces of the wire fence. Everyone, young and old alike, was screaming with laughter at the little creatures as they competed for the tiny morsels, diving over each other and into the waterless moat in a routine fit for a circus. Halajan clicked her tongue. “Do these people not see?” she asked her granddaughter, pointing to the white metal sign with a big, red circle and backslash covering an illustrated hand with morsels tumbling out of it. “Do they not pay attention to the announcements?” she said, looking up to the loudspeaker above. “
Do not feed the animals.
Perhaps they cannot read, but are these people idiots?” Yet the monkeys continued to reward the crowd with their antics, encouraging more and more participation from their own side of the fence, until the floor of the cage was littered with food and garbage. The animals greedily picked their way through the contraband loot. When one curiously unwrapped an entire piece of chewing gum, popped it in its mouth and started to chew like a sassy teenager, the crowd
roared. “Ach,” cried out Halajan in disgust as she grabbed Najama and turned to leave.

But the laughter around them had suddenly become a chorus of wild hollers and shrieks and whoops, and all at once the crowd was on the run, in pursuit of one tiny brown monkey who had somehow managed to escape from its jail. The men and boys were scrambling and pushing and leaping over each other—just like those monkeys—to claim the honor of being the first to capture the poor thing. One threw a soda can into the monkey's path, and another followed, until the sky had become a sea of flying cans.

Halajan had seen enough.

She pulled Najama away from the spectacle and headed quickly back down the walkways that led to the zoo's exit to sit and wait for Khalid. Have these people not learned anything? No, this was not the Kabul she knew, the one where respect and dignity mattered above all else. What had become of her city? Hers was not the Kabul where people acted worse than animals. Hers was not the Kabul where men felt free to piss on the streets regardless of who was nearby, where mothers fed their children opium and rented them out to others for a day of begging, where spectators gathered daily on a bridge to watch men suffering and dying from heroin addiction on the muddy riverbank below, as if it were a movie for their entertainment.

She let out a huge sigh. How she longed to get home, to be out back in the little courtyard, alone, where she could pull off her itchy head scarf and light up a smoke, and dream of the old days, and the pride she had once felt for her city and its people. How she prayed that feeling would one day return. And how she hoped that that “one day” would come soon,
inshallah
.