The Swallows of Kabul (10 page)

“THERE IS NO DOUBT,” says Mullah Bashir over his goiter. His ogreish finger slashes the air like a saber.

Elephantine and domineering, he pulls at the cushion he’s sitting on, adjusting it amid the creaking of the platform that serves as his rostrum. His massive face seems to burst from his stringy beard. His alert eyes, twinkling with lively, intimidating intelligence, sweep the assembly. “No doubt about it, my brothers. It’s as true as the sun rising in the east. I have consulted the mountains and examined the signs in the heavens, in the waters of the rivers and the ocean, in the branches of the trees, and in the ruts in the roads; and they all affirm that the long-awaited Hour has arrived. You need only listen, only take heed, and you will hear everything on this earth, every creature, every murmuring sound, telling you that the moment of glory is within our reach, that the Imam El-Mehdi is among us, that our path is bathed in light. Those who would doubt this for a second are none of ours. The Devil dwells in them, and Hell will find inextinguishable fuel in their flesh. You will hear them for all eternity, bewailing their failure to seize the chance that we offer them on a silver platter: the chance to join our ranks, to place themselves once and for all in the shelter of the Lord.”

He strikes the floor sharply with his finger. Again his flaming eyes subdue his audience, petrifying them in a sidereal silence. “Though they implore us for millions of years on end, we shall remain deaf to their pleas, just as they are deaf today to the voice of their salvation.”

Mohsen Ramat takes advantage of some stirring in the front rows to cast a look over his shoulder. He sees Zunaira sitting on the steps of a ruin across from the mosque, waiting for him. A Taliban thug with a rifle slung across his back approaches her. She rises, pointing at the mosque with a timid hand. The thug looks in the direction indicated, nods, and withdraws.

Mullah Bashir drums on the floor, demanding close attention. “Henceforth, there is no doubt. The Word of righteousness resounds in the four corners of the earth. The Muslim peoples are gathering their forces, and gathering their most deeply held convictions. Soon there will be but one language on earth, but one law, one sole command.” Brandishing a Qur’an, he cries out, “
This!
The West has perished; it no longer exists. It proposed a model to fools, and that model has failed. What is that model? Exactly what kind of emancipation does it offer? What does it consider modern? The amoral societies it has set up, where profit takes precedence over all else? Where scruples, piety, and charity count for nothing? Where values are exclusively financial? Where the rich become tyrants and the wage earners slaves? Where business takes the place of the family, isolates the individual, subjugates him, then dismisses him without further ado? Where women willingly give themselves over to vice? Where men marry one another? Where bodies are sold and bought openly, for all to see, without provoking the least reaction? Where entire generations are penned up in primitive existences, reduced to marginalization and impoverishment? Is that the model they’re so proud of, the basis of their success? No, true believers, it is futile to build monuments on shifting sands. The West is finished, it’s over and done with, its rising stench smothers the ozone layer. It is a world of lies. What you may think you discern in it is nothing but an illusion, an absurd, insubstantial phantom collapsed amid the rubble of its own flimsiness. The West is a hoax, an enormous farce, a dissolving dream. Its pseudoprogress is a flight forward, its colossal facade a masquerade. Its zeal betrays its panic. It stands at bay; it’s caught like a rat in a trap. When it lost its faith, it lost its soul, and we will not help it to regain either one. It thinks that its economy is strong enough to keep it safe; it thinks it can impress us with its cutting-edge technology and intercept our prayers with its satellites; it thinks it will dissuade us with its aircraft carriers and its gimcrack armies. And it forgets that those who have chosen to die for the glory of the Lord cannot be impressed; that even though our radar may fail to detect stealth bombers, nothing escapes the eyes of the Lord!”

His fist violently strikes the floor. “And who would dare to measure himself against the Lord’s wrath?”

A voracious smile curls his lips, and he wipes away the froth that has gathered in the corners of his mouth. Gently, he shakes his head; then, with his index finger, he begins pounding the floor again, as though determined to punch a hole in it. “We are God’s soldiers, my brothers. Victory is our vocation; Paradise is our caravansary. Should one of us succumb to his wounds, he will find a throng of houris, beautiful as a thousand suns, waiting to welcome him.
Never believe that those who have given their lives
in the Lord’s cause are dead; for indeed they have not
died. They are alive; they live with their Master, who
showers them with His blessings.
. . . As for those who are martyrs to the cause of Evil, they will depart from the Calvary of this earth only to abide in Gehenna forever. Like the carrion that they are, their corpses will rot on the battlefields and in the memories of the survivors. They will have no right either to the Lord’s mercy or to our pity. And nothing will prevent us from purifying the land of the
mumineen
, so that from Jakarta to Jericho, from Dakar to Mexico City, from Khartoum to São Paulo, from Tunis to Chicago, cries of triumph shall ring out from the minarets. . . .”

“Allahu akbar!”
one of the mullah’s companions bursts out.

“Allahu akbar!”
the assembly roars in response.

WHEN SHE HEARS the thunderous clamor in the mosque, Zunaira jumps. Thinking that the sermon is over, she gathers up the skirts of her burqa and waits for the congregation to come out; but not so much as a shadow emerges from the sanctuary. Quite the contrary, in fact: the Taliban police continue to intercept passersby and whip them toward the green-and-white building, where the holy man, galvanized by his own words, begins to speak with renewed vigor. From time to time, his voice rises to such a pitch that the police outside surrender to its spell and forget to discipline the curious onlookers. Even the children, wild-eyed and clothed in rags, catch themselves listening to the preacher for a few moments before they dash off, squealing, into the teeming alleyways around the mosque.

It must be ten o’clock, and the sun can hold on no longer. The air is heavy with dust. Mummified under her veil, Zunaira is suffocating. Anger knots her stomach and obstructs her throat. A mad desire to lift the cloth in search of a hypothetical breath of fresh air intensifies her nervousness. But she does not even dare to wipe her dripping face on her burqa. Like a lunatic in a straitjacket, she stays where she is, slumped on her steps, sweating in the heat, listening to her breathing quicken and her blood beat in her temples. All of a sudden, she’s outraged at herself for being there, sitting like a forgotten sack on the threshold of a ruin, attracting curious attention from passing women and contemptuous glances from the Taliban agents. She feels like a suspicious object exposed to every sort of interrogation, and this feeling torments her. She’s overcome with shame. The urge to flee—to return home at once and slam the door behind her and never leave her house again—convulses her mind. Why did she agree to go along with her husband? What did she expect to find in the streets of Kabul except insults and squalor? How could she have consented to put on this ludicrous outfit, this getup that annihilates her, this portable tent that constitutes her degradation and her prison, with its webbed mask over her eyes like the kaleidoscopic grillwork over a window, its gloves, which take away her sense of touch, its weight of injustice? Exactly what she feared has come to pass. She knew, before she set out, that her rashness was going to expose her to the most detestable fact of her existence, to the constraint that even in her dreams she refuses to accept: the forfeiture of her rights. It’s an incurable wound, a disability nothing can compensate for, a trauma beyond rehabilitation or therapy. She cannot resign herself to it without sinking into self-disgust, and Zunaira perceives that disgust quite clearly: It’s an inner ferment; it sears her guts and threatens to consume her like a burning pyre. She feels its heat at the core of her being. Perhaps that’s why she’s sweating and suffocating under her burqa, why her parched throat seems to be disgorging an odor of cremation onto her palate. An irrepressible rage constricts her chest, bruises her heart, and swells the veins in her throat. Her vision clouds; she’s on the verge of bursting into tears. With a mighty effort, she clenches her fists to stop her hands from shaking, straightens her back, and concentrates on bringing her breathing under control. Slowly, she ratchets her anger down, one notch at a time, and empties her mind of thought. She must suffer patiently; she must hold on until Mohsen comes back. One mistake, one protest, and she’ll expose herself uselessly to the zeal of the Taliban.

MOHSEN RAMAT must admit that Mullah Bashir is powerfully inspired. Carried away by his diatribe, the mullah interrupts his rhetorical flights only to pound the floor or bring a small carafe to his burning lips. He’s been speaking for two hours now, impassioned, gesticulating, and his saliva is as chalky white as his eyes. His taurine breathing, rumbling like a tremor in the earth, resonates throughout the room. The turbaned faithful in the front rows are unaware of the stifling heat. Literally enthralled by the holy man’s verbiage, they listen openmouthed, unquenchably thirsty for the flood of words cascading down on them. Behind the first rows, opinions are divided; the mullah’s prolixity instructs some and bores others. Many in the congregation, here against their will and displeased at having to neglect their business, wring their hands and shift about continually. An old man has fallen asleep; a Taliban agent prods him with his cudgel. Barely awake, the poor devil bats his eyes like a man who can’t recognize his surroundings. Then he wipes his face with the palm of his hand, yawns, relaxes his birdlike neck, and goes back to sleep. Mohsen lost the thread of the sermon some time ago, and now the mullah’s words have stopped reaching him altogether. He can’t stop casting anxious glances over his shoulder at Zunaira, who’s sitting motionless on the steps across the street. He knows she’s suffering behind her curtain, both from the heat and from the mere fact of being there, an unmoving anomaly among all the passersby, she who detests making a spectacle of herself. He looks over at her, hoping she can make him out in this mob of stony-faced, incongruously silent individuals. Can she possibly understand how much he regrets his insistence on going out for a little stroll? In a city where things move about frantically without ever really advancing, their walk has taken a turn for the worse. Something tells him that Zunaira will hold it against him. She’s sitting there in a rigid crouch, like a wounded tigress compelled to go on the attack and gathering herself to spring. . . .

A whip hisses past his temple. “You’re looking the wrong way,” a Taliban agent reminds him.

Mohsen complies and, with a heavy heart, turns his back on his wife.

When the sermon is over, the faithful in the first rows rise euphorically to their feet and rush upon the holy man, striving to kiss the hem of his garment or a part of his turban. Mohsen must wait until the Taliban agents give the congregation permission to leave the mosque. When he finally manages to break free of the jostling throng, Mohsen finds Zunaira dazed by the sun. She has the impression that the world has grown darker, she hears the ambient sounds spin and slow down, and it’s hard for her to get to her feet.

“You don’t feel well?” Mohsen asks her.

She finds the question so daft that she doesn’t deign to answer it. “I want to go home,” she says.

Leaning against the remains of an entryway, she tries to recover her senses, then starts to walk, staggering along with blurred eyes and a boiling head. Mohsen tries to support her, but she pushes him away roughly. “Don’t touch me!” she cries out in a strangled voice.

Mohsen feels his wife’s cry as a sharp pain, like the one he felt a couple of hours ago, when two whips lashed him across the shoulders at the same time.

Nine

IN A DESPERATE EFFORT to avoid a huge boulder, the driver gives the steering wheel a violent jerk and sends the car swerving and skidding along the shoulder of the road. The defective brakes can’t slow the big 4 × 4, which bounces down an incline amid a burst of deafening pops from the shock absorbers before coming to a miraculous stop at the edge of a crevasse. Imperturbable, Qassim Abdul Jabbar merely shakes his head. “Are you trying to kill us, or what?”

The driver gulps as he realizes that one of his front wheels is about four inches from the precipice. Daubing his forehead with the tail of his turban, he mutters an incantation, puts the vehicle in reverse, and backs up.