The Lovers (6 page)

Nearly two years of Ali’s military service went by, during which he and Zakia had no word of each other. Farah was indeed remote and often without cell-phone service. Once there was a skirmish with the Taliban, and word had trickled back to Kham-e-Kalak. Ali’s phone rang, and he was startled to hear Zakia’s father’s voice; Zaman was calling to find out if his own son, Gula Khan, was okay. Ali was struck dumb for long moments, wanted to ask about Zakia but did not dare, and then assured Zaman that his son was unhurt.

“How is the rest of your family?” he asked Zaman.

“Thanks to God, everyone is fine.”

“Everyone?”

“Yes, everyone. What do you mean, boy?”

“That is good. I am glad to hear everyone is fine.”

Then one day the Humvee that Ali was in rolled into a ditch, thanks not to the Taliban but to an Afghan National Army driver
who, like so many of his comrades, was stoned on hash or opium.
⁹
The driver had not noticed the small crater in the roadway left by an earlier mine blast. The crash badly fractured Ali’s leg. He was shuttled from one hospital to another; it would be nine months before he could walk without pain, and he came home to Surkh Dar to finish his recuperation. That was early in the summer of 2012, a few months into the Persian year 1391.

By then most of the boys who had joined the army from Surkh Dar and Kham-e-Kalak had deserted and returned home as well.
¹⁰
Zakia’s own brother, Gula Khan, was among the returning deserters, and he related to everyone what had happened to Ali—the only casualty from their neck of the woods. Desperate to see him again, Zakia went to all their usual rendezvous and accidental meeting places, but he was nowhere in the lanes or fields around the village. Ali was lying low, embarrassed about his limp. “I had kind of given up on our love and didn’t want to see her then,” he said. “Especially with my leg like that.”

Finally Zakia saw Ali on the road. She walked up to him boldly and said, “So now it is your turn to avoid me?” There were people around, and she should have been more circumspect, but the words tumbled out; she realized they would have only a couple of minutes to speak without arousing public suspicion, and there was much to say. “You remember what we talked about, what I told you was not possible? Well, now it is possible.”

“You see my condition, my broken leg. You wouldn’t want me like this. It may never heal correctly,” he replied. He does still walk with a slight limp, especially on humid days.

“No, it doesn’t matter. It will never matter.”

“What are you saying, Zakia-
jan
?”

“I accept your proposal,” Zakia told him directly, and then they tried to get away from each other as fast as they could, both appearing as disinterested in the other as possible, as if they had been discussing which well might be best to collect water from. They knew that the moment they aroused any suspicion, their families would intervene to make sure they never found another second alone together.

Ali was so stunned by what had just happened that it wasn’t until months after they eloped that he dared to ask her what she had seen in him. When he did, he said to her, “I’m not even that good-looking. What was it that made you love me?”

“You were gentle,” she said, “and you spoke to me with kindness.”

The next day Ali found a young girl to serve as his messenger and sent a mobile telephone to Zakia, set to silent. All she had to do was answer it, but it soon became clear that she did not know how. He waited impatiently until the moment came when he saw her on the footpaths and could explain to her what to do. “She didn’t even know how to drop-call me at first,” he said. There was no thought of her dialing his number, because at the time she was innumerate, but he programmed it in for her so it was the only number on her phone. He showed her how to just hit the green button until it dialed and then how to cut it off as soon as it rang on his end, so she did not use up any of the credit on the prepaid SIM card. That would be her signal that it was safe for him to call her back, and all she needed to do when it vibrated was push green again. Never take it off silent, though, he warned her. She had nowhere to plug it in to charge it either; there was no electricity in their house, and if there had been, a phone being charged would be instantly noticed. Many of the little shops and kiosks in such villages would charge a phone’s battery for customers for a few afghanis or swap charged batteries for spent ones in popular models. Because a woman would be marked as having a secret affair if she were seen doing that, Ali would charge a spare battery and when they passed in the lanes once every few days, swap it for her old one.

They never fought or quarreled in those days of their secret courtship, until one day when Ali decided to test Zakia’s love. Normally Zakia would dial Ali at 8:00
P
.
M
., hang up promptly, and then he would call her back to chat. This time he decided not to, even after she phoned him a second time. On her third effort, he picked up the call and pretended not to know her.

“I found this telephone with this number. Please do not bother me,” he told her.

“So you found this telephone and this number?”

“Yes,” he said, and she laughed and hung up, expecting him to call back, but he didn’t. For several days she did not call him again, and when she finally did, she was angry.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

“I was trying to see whether you truly love me.”

“That was a bad way to do it.” Zakia was so angry that she didn’t speak to him for another week. When at last she did, he was chastened and promised he’d never play with her affections like that again.

“After that, we never fought or disagreed on anything,” Ali said.

Their phone rendezvous were always going to be dangerous, in small homes crowded with many family members. “Once I was on my way up to Qarghanatu in Yakawlang”—a place they would later come to know in their flight—“and it was winter, and snow was everywhere,” Ali said. This would have been the winter of 2012–13. “We went to get our family’s money from someone who owed us some money. I received a dropped call from Zakia-
jan
, but I did not have credit on my phone to call her back. So I rushed to a shop and put credit on it.” That took an hour, by which time Zakia had stopped expecting a return call and had left her phone unattended, forgetting to hide it well. When he called, her brother Gula Khan found the phone and answered it but, suspicious, did not say hello.

“Zakia?” Ali said.

“Who is this?” her brother demanded. Gula Khan had been in the army with Ali, and they knew each other well.

“I’m sorry, I dialed the wrong number,” Ali said, hoping Gula Khan wouldn’t recognize his voice.

They hung up, but Gula Khan thought he knew the voice, so from his own phone he dialed the number that had just called for Zakia, and when he did, “Mohammad Ali” came up on his screen. Gula Khan could not read and write much, but he could recognize the names stored in his phone.

Gula Khan called Ali back. “Is it Mohammad Ali?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you call my sister?”

“By mistake.”

Gula Khan did not believe him and yelled at him never to call again. After he hung up, he turned on Zakia, who was three years younger than him. “Gula Khan came and beat me with his hands. He broke my phone, he beat me, he cursed me and warned me not to talk to Ali again,” Zakia said. “I didn’t mind the beating, but I really hated being cursed.”

Before long, Ali had enlisted the same little girl who’d delivered the phone to Zakia, a girl who was not from either of their families, and gave her a few afghanis to carry a small wadded piece of paper to Zakia. On it was written his phone number. Zakia begged some money from her father to buy clothing—it was still a time when he would give her whatever he could, as the prettiest of his daughters. Instead she used the money to buy a cell phone, again through the agency of the girl, who was too young for anyone to suspect that she was doing anything other than carrying out an errand for her parents. The younger girl, who was one of those who went to school, even showed Zakia how to use the phone and how to enter the number Ali had written. Soon they were speaking nearly every evening and managed nearly every day to meet on the footpaths around the village. “Most of the time, it wasn’t really an accident that we met,” Ali said with a pleased smirk.

One day Zakia had been fiddling with the phone, trying to figure out its mysteries, and had accidentally switched it from “silent” to “normal,” without realizing. She drop-called Ali, and he called her back, and to her horror it was really ringing, with her father in the next room. She could not figure out how to quiet it, shook it, tried to pull the battery out, failed, and finally hid it under a cushion. By then Zaman had stormed in and soon found it, still ringing. He threw it against a wall, then took the SIM card out and crushed it. “He just took the phone and cursed me. He didn’t beat me. My father never beat me back then. Just my brothers did, mainly Gula Khan.”

Her siblings all soon turned on her, she said. “When this matter with Ali happened and they found out about my affair, even my little brothers and sisters tried to distance themselves from me,” she
said. “It was very hard. Everyone in my family was against me.” Even nine-year-old Razak, the one she had felt closest to, would not speak to her.

It took Ali a few days of radio silence to realize what had happened; it was a particularly bitter winter and too cold during that February and March of 2013 for them to connive to meet in the lanes and the frozen fields during the day. Instead he resorted to secretly visiting her home at night. In those days he had taken a temporary laborer’s job at a construction site, working a night shift that finished at midnight, and he would come over afterward when the lanes were deserted and the homes all dark. There was a walled vegetable garden outside the window to Zakia’s room, where Ali would stand and call to her, as quietly as he possibly could, because she shared the room with the other girls and young boys of the family. When she heard him, she would steal out of the house and climb to the flat roof, where she could look down into the garden and they could talk in whispers. The garden was barren in winter; about a dozen leafless apricot and apple trees lined the mud-brick walls and surrounded long rows of tilled earth now frozen hard. In one corner was a pair of ragged bamboo cages in which Zakia’s father kept his partridges—used in the Afghan version of cockfighting—when he could afford them. A small brook had been diverted to enter a hole at the base of the garden wall, exiting through the opposite wall. Ali’s 2:00 or 3:00
A
.
M
. visits to the garden became regular occurrences, even on the coldest of nights, but at first she would not come down to join him.

“It was dangerous for both of us, and it was so hard,” he said. “I would wait outside her house sometimes under a rainy sky, sometimes snowing, sometimes so cold she was concerned about me in the bad weather.”

“I was always so frightened we would be caught and so worried for him,” she said. On one particularly cold night, Ali stood in the garden, dripping wet from a frigid rain that had turned to icy snow, and recited famous lines from a poem by the twentieth-century Iranian poet Malek o’Shoara Bahar, which have made their way into Afghan pop music:

Love is a nightingale pouring out his heart in song for a rose,

Bearing patiently the stinging lacerations of her thorns.
¹¹

“I don’t read and write, which is why I don’t know any real poems by heart,” said Ali, “but I love hearing love poems from others and listening to them read by singers.” He knew that there was a world out there in which poetry existed independently of music, and he even knew a few verses from famous poems. Songs, however, he knew word for word. Memorizing the words from music was easy, and he did not need to read anything; often he wasn’t aware of the lyrics’ roots in written poetry, not aware that when he recited lyrics without music, he was simply reciting poetry. They were all verses to him, arrows in his quiver.

Zakia’s favorite singer was Mir Maftoon, an Afghan from the mountainous northern province of Badakhshan, a place more remote than Bamiyan. Long before dawn one morning, early in the still-wintry spring, Ali recited one of Maftoon’s verses to her as she lay prone on the flat roof of her house, her chin on her folded hands, looking down over the edge:

Your two dark eyes are those of an Afghan,

But the mercy of Islam is not in your heart.

Outside your walls I spent nights that became daylights;

What kind of sleep is this that you never wake up?
¹²

Touched by the verses and by his suffering in the cold, and freezing herself, Zakia finally came down to join him in the garden. And so their love story became a love affair, as Ali delicately put it. He would have stayed there in spite of the intense cold on those mornings, but come the first call to prayer, the
subh,
which came long before any sign of dawn in these highlands, people would start stirring, going to the mosque to pray or beginning early chores in animal pens and fields. He needed to be well away from her house by then.

“If someone loves someone, she should have that bravery to do whatever has to be done,” Zakia said. “For a long time, I was
thinking about it and thinking about doing this, and why should I regret it now? That poem moved me, it increased my courage. Those days were so cold, and he was coming to meet me anyway, even though I told him not to come, because the weather was very cold, and he came anyway, and then he recited this poem.”

It was only a matter of time before they were caught. Ali slept in the same room with his older brother Ismatullah, and his nocturnal escapades did not escape notice.