The Swallows of Kabul (16 page)

“I must speak to Qassim about her,” he says at the end of a long monologue. “He’s got influential friends and connections in high places. People will listen to him. They can’t possibly let an innocent woman be executed because of a misunderstanding.”

“WHAT ARE YOU talking about?” Qassim Abdul Jabbar demands indignantly. He’s not best pleased with Atiq, who has disturbed him in his home about a lot of nonsense. “She’s a mad bitch; she’s been judged and condemned. Soon she’ll be executed in the stadium. Many prestigious guests are coming to the ceremony, and she’s the only woman on the entire program. Even if she were innocent, no one could do anything for her. And since she’s guilty—”

“She’s innocent.”

“How do you know that?”

“She told me so.”

“And you believed her?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because she lied to you. She’s an incorrigible liar, Atiq. She’s taking advantage of your good nature. Don’t play defense lawyer for a criminal you hardly know. You have enough problems as it is.”

“She didn’t kill anyone. . . .”

“Her neighbors testified against her. Their statements were categorical. That whore led her unfortunate husband a dog’s life. She was constantly chasing him out of his own home. The
qazi
didn’t even need to deliberate.”

Qassim seizes the jailer by the shoulders and looks him right in the eye. “Atiq, my poor Atiq. If you don’t get a grip on yourself right away, you’re going to wind up so lost, you won’t find your way home. Forget that witch. In a few days, she’ll join the ones who’ve gone before her, and a new one will come and take her place. I don’t know how she managed to bamboozle you, but if I were you, I’d try not to be fooled by the way she looks. You’re the one who needs attention, not her. I warned you the other day. You spend too much time in your bad moods, Atiq, all locked up inside them. Be careful, I told you: One day, you won’t be able to get out. You didn’t listen to me, and what’s the result? Your black moods weakened you, and when some smelly bitch appeared, all she had to do was whine and it broke your heart. Let her croak. I can assure you, she’s right where she belongs. After all, she’s only a woman.”

Atiq is beside himself. Caught up in a whirlwind, he doesn’t know where to hide his head or what to do with his hands when he catches himself cursing the whole world. He understands nothing, nothing at all. He’s become someone else, he’s been overwhelmed by a different person, who pummels him and submerges him, and without whom he’d feel like a cripple. How can he explain the shaking fits that make him shiver during the hottest hours of the day, or the sweats that cool him off a minute later? Never before has he lifted so much as a finger to help people in trouble, not even when a flick would have sufficed, so how can he explain his new boldness, his new ardor in this fight against the inevitable? How can he explain the impetuous wave of emotion that undoes him whenever he meets the prisoner’s eyes? He has never thought himself capable of sharing any stranger’s distress. His whole adult life has been based on this ambition: to be able to pass a torture victim without lingering over him, to be able to return from a cemetery with his resolutions intact. And suddenly here he is, desperately involved in the fate of a female prisoner whom no one can rescue from the shadow of the scaffold. Atiq doesn’t understand why, all of a sudden, his heart is beating in another’s place, nor why he has accepted so readily, from one day to the next, a change in himself of such magnitude that nothing will ever again be as it was before.

He had expected to find in Qassim Abdul Jabbar a modicum of indulgence, some inclination to leniency that would help him petition the
qazi
and induce them to reconsider their verdict. Qassim’s reaction was disappointing—or rather, unforgivable; now Atiq loathes him entirely. Everything’s over between them. No sermon, no holy man will reconcile them. Qassim is nothing but a brute. He has no more heart than a cudgel, no more mercy than a snake. He embodies the common evil, and he will die of it. They will
all
die of it, without exception: the
qazi
, crouched inside their venerable monstrousness; the howling fanatics, feverish and obscene, who are already making preparations to fill the stadium on Friday; the prestigious guests, who are coming to share the joy of public executions; the notables, who will applaud the implementation of the
Sharia
with the same hands that shoo flies, and wave away the lifeless remains with the same gestures that bless the grotesque zeal of the executioners.
All
of them. Including Kabul itself, the accursed city, every day more expert in killing, more dedicated to the opposite of living. In this land, the public celebrations have become as appalling as the lynchings themselves.

Atiq returns home. “I’m not going to let them murder her,” he protests.

“Why are you getting yourself in such a state?” Musarrat admonishes him. “She’s not the first, and she won’t be the last. It’s insane, the way you’re acting. You have to pull yourself together.”

“I don’t want to pull myself together.”

“You’re doing yourself a useless injury. Look at you! Anyone would think you’ve gone crazy.”

Atiq shakes a threatening finger at her. “I forbid you to call me crazy.”

“Then pull yourself together, right now,” Musarrat urges him again. “You’re acting like someone who doesn’t know where he is. And whenever I try to reason with you, you get twice as angry.”

Atiq seizes her by the throat and jams her against the wall. “Stop your yapping, you old hag. I can’t stand the sound of your voice any longer, or the smell of your body, either. . . .”

He lets her go.

Shocked by her husband’s violence and devastated by his words, Musarrat sinks to the floor, her hands holding her bruised throat, her eyes bulging in disbelief.

Atiq makes an infuriated gesture, picks up his turban and his whip, and leaves the house.

THERE’S A HUGE CROWD at the mosque; the beggars and the disabled veterans are engaged in a bitter struggle for what little space is left in the recesses of the sanctuary.

Atiq finds the spectacle so revolting that he spits over his shoulder and decides to say his prayers somewhere else. As he moves off, he runs across Mirza Shah, who’s hastening to join the faithful before the muezzin’s call. He hurries past Atiq without paying him any attention. Then Mirza Shah stops, turns around, and gazes at his old friend for a long time before scratching his head under his turban and continuing on his way. Atiq is walking straight ahead, with an aggressive step and squinting eyes. He crosses streets without looking either left or right, indifferent to the blaring horns and the cries of the wagoners. Someone calls out to him from inside a small café; Atiq doesn’t hear him. He wouldn’t hear a thunderstorm if it should burst over his head. He hears only the blood pulsing in his temples and sees only his furies, all of them busily suffusing his mind with darkness: Qassim, making light of his torment; Musarrat, not understanding the depth of his grief; heaven, looking elsewhere; the ruins, turning their backs on him; the eager spectators, preparing to crowd the stadium on Friday; the Taliban agents, strutting along the thoroughfares; the mullahs, haranguing the crowds, shaking fingers more deadly than sabers. . . .

As Atiq slams the jailhouse door behind him, the confused sounds that have pursued him here fade away. All at once, the abyss is before him, and a silence as deep as a long fall. What’s happening to him? Why not open the door again and let the sounds catch up with him, along with the twilight, the smells, and the dust? Panting, bent forward at the waist, he walks up and down the corridor. His whip slips from his hand; he doesn’t pick it up. He keeps pacing, pacing, his beard pressed into the hollow of his throat, his hands behind his back. He comes to an abrupt stop, springs to the cell door, unlocks it, and resolutely yanks it open.

Frightened by the jailer’s violence, Zunaira raises her arms to protect her face.

“Get out of here,” he says to her. “Night is falling. Take advantage of it and run away. Get as far as possible from this city of madmen. Run as fast as you can, and whatever happens, don’t look back. If you do, you’ll suffer the same fate as Lot’s wife.”

Zunaira fails to grasp what her guard is getting at. She cowers under her blanket, certain that her hour has come.

“Please get out,” Atiq implores her. “Don’t stay here. Go away. I’ll tell them it was my fault. I’ll say I must have padlocked the chains wrong. I’m a Pashtun, like them. They’ll curse me, but they won’t hurt me.”

“What’s going on?”

“Please don’t look at me like that. Put your burqa back on and leave.”

“And go where?”

“Anywhere. Just don’t stay here.”

She hangs her head. Her hands reach for something under the blanket, something that’s hard to reach and that she will not reveal. “No,” she says. “I’ve already destroyed one household. I don’t want to ruin any others.”

“The worst thing that can happen to me is that I’ll lose my job. Believe me, that’s the least of my concerns. Please go away now.”

“I have nowhere to go. Everyone in my family is either dead or reported missing. The only connection I still had disappeared through my own fault. I had a little light. I blew on it, trying to turn it into a torch, but I blew a bit too hard and put it out. Now there’s nothing holding me back anymore. I can’t wait to get out of here, but not in the way you propose.”

“I won’t let them kill you.”

“We’ve already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we’ve forgotten it.”

Fourteen

THE DAYS PASS like indolent elephants. Atiq is tossed back and forth between feelings of inadequacy and visions of eternity. The hours of daylight are extinguished faster than drifting sparks; the nights drag themselves out, as interminable as torture. Suspended between the two extremes, he longs to tear himself apart. His unhappiness is driving him mad; there’s no place that can contain him. He’s seen wandering in side streets and alleyways, his eyes wild, his forehead creased and furrowed. In the jailhouse, no longer daring to venture into the corridor, he shuts himself up in his nook and hides behind the Qur’an. After a few chapters, he feels enervated, unable to breathe; he goes outside for some fresh air, and soon he’s making his way through the crowds like a spirit in the underworld. Musarrat doesn’t know how to help him. When he returns home, he withdraws almost immediately to his room, and there, seated before a small reading stand, he recites verse after verse from the Qur’an in a steady drone. When Musarrat looks in, she finds him buried in his torments, on the verge of fainting, his voice quavering and his hands over his ears. She sits down across from him, turns to the
fatihah
, and prays. As soon as he notices her presence, he snaps the Holy Book shut and goes back out, only to return a little later, purple-faced and gasping for breath. He hardly eats at all anymore, nor does he sleep at night, dividing his time between the prison—where he never stays long—and his room, which he abandons almost as soon as he enters. Musarrat is so dismayed by her husband’s condition that it makes her forget the disease that’s sapping her strength. When Atiq is late, horrible images fill her head. She can see that the jailer has lost much of his reason, and she knows that bad things happen fast.

One evening, she joins him in his room and practically snatches away the reading stand. When there’s nothing between the two of them, she takes him firmly by the wrist and shakes him. “Get a grip on yourself, Atiq.”

Atiq replies in a stupefied voice. “I held the door wide open for her and told her to go away. She refused to leave her cell.”

“That’s because, unlike you, she knows that no one can escape his own destiny. She’s accepted her fate; she’s resigned to it. You’re the one who refuses to see things as they are.”

“She didn’t kill anyone, Musarrat. I don’t want her to pay for a crime she didn’t commit.”

“You’ve seen many others die before her.”

“Which proves that there are some things one can never get used to. I’m angry at myself, and I’m angry at the universe. How can a person accept dying because a bunch of incompetent
qazi
reached a hasty verdict? It’s ridiculous. And even if she isn’t strong enough to keep on fighting, I’m not going to give up. She’s so young, so beautiful, so . . . gorgeously alive. Why didn’t she leave when I held the door wide open for her?”

Tenderly, Musarrat lifts his chin and thrusts her hand into his tangled beard. “And you? Tell me honestly—look at me, please, and tell me, swear to me— would you have let her go?”