The Swallows of Kabul (18 page)

“Raise your head, warrior,” he says. “You’re going to get a crick in your neck, and then you won’t be able to look in the mirror properly anymore.”

Atiq nods but keeps his eyes fixed on the floor.

The militiawomen reappear, urging the prisoner ahead of them. The two men step back to let them pass. Qassim, who’s watching his friend out of the corner of his eye, coughs into his fist. “It’s already over,” he says softly.

Shivering from head to toe, Atiq hunches his shoulders a little higher.

“You must come with me,” Qassim insists. “There are a few matters I want to discuss with you.”

“I can’t.”

“What’s stopping you?”

The jailer opts for silence. Qassim looks around and glimpses a silhouette crouched in a corner of Atiq’s cubbyhole. “There’s someone in your office.”

Atiq feels his chest tighten, cutting off his breathing. “My wife.”

“I’ll bet she wants to go to the stadium.”

“Right, exactly right . . . that’s just what she wants.”

“So do my wives and my sisters. In fact, they demanded that I requisition the microbus outside. Ah well, what can you do? Tell your wife to go in the bus with them. You come with me, and you can pick her up at the stadium exit when it’s over. I’ve got a proposal for you, something very dear to my heart, and I have to tell you about it.”

Thrown into confusion, Atiq casts around for a way out of his plight, but Qassim’s heavy voice prevents him from concentrating: “What’s the matter? Are you trying to avoid me?”

“I’m not trying to avoid you.”

“What, then?”

Atiq, caught off guard, slouches toward his office, half shutting his eyes in an attempt to bring some order into his thoughts. Everything around him appears to be picking up speed, overtaking him, jostling him about. He’s unsure how to cope with this completely unexpected turn of events. And never before has the look in Qassim’s eye seemed so penetrating, so alert. It’s making Atiq sweat all over. A vertiginous tide rolls over him, scanting his breath and sawing at his hamstrings. He stops in the doorway, reflects for a couple of seconds, then shuts the door behind him. The woman sitting on the camp bed stares at him. He can’t distinguish her eyes, but her stiffness makes him even more uneasy than he already is.

“You see?” he mutters. “Our prayers have been answered. You’re free. The man waiting outside has just confirmed it. They’ve dropped all the charges against you. You can go back home today.”

“Who were the women I saw passing in the hallway?”

“This is a women’s prison. Women often come and go here.”

“Did they take away a prisoner?”

“That’s no concern of yours. The window of yesterday is shut; let’s open the window of tomorrow. You’re free. That’s what counts.”

“So I can go now?”

“Of course. But before you do, I’m going to take you to some other women. They’re waiting in a little bus right outside. There’s no need to tell them who you are or where you come from. In fact, they mustn’t know. . . . The bus will drop you off at the stadium, where some official ceremonies are under way.”

“I want to go home.”

“Hush! Don’t talk so loud.”

“I don’t care to go to the stadium.”

“You must. It won’t take long. When the rally’s over, I’ll wait for you at the exit and take you to a place where you’ll be safe.”

In the corridor, Qassim clears his throat as a signal to the jailer that it’s time to go.

Zunaira stands up. Atiq walks her to the bus, then returns to the 4 × 4 and gets into the front seat next to Qassim. He doesn’t look, not even once, into the back of the vehicle, where the two militiawomen and their prisoner are sitting.

THE MULLAHS’ diatribes, broadcast through a battery of loudspeakers, echo amid the surrounding ruins. Intermittently, the stadium vibrates with ovations and hysterical clamoring. The crowd grows steadily, for spectators keep streaming in from all parts of the city. Despite the double and triple cordons formed by the forces of order, the atmosphere around the arena is pregnant with excitement. Qassim first directs the little bus to a less congested gate, ushers the ladies out, and turns them over to some militiawomen, ordering them to seat the women in the reserved stands. Then, satisfied on this point, he climbs back into his 4 × 4 and charges onto the field, where armed Taliban agents are bustling about with excessive enthusiasm. A few bodies dangling from ropes here and there testify that the public executions have already begun. The stands are filled to overflowing with people packed shoulder to shoulder. Many of them have come in order to avoid harassment; they witness the horrors, but they remain passive and make no demonstrations. Others, who have chosen to assemble as close as possible to the platform where the dignitaries of the apocalypse are lounging, do everything in their power to get themselves noticed; their inordinate (not to say morbid) jubilation and their discordant shouts repel even the religious authorities.

Atiq leaps to the ground and stations himself in front of the 4 × 4, his eyes fixed on the section of the stadium reserved for women. In each of them, he thinks he recognizes Zunaira. Detached from reality, impregnably barricaded, body and soul, inside his delirium, Atiq hears neither the mullahs’ sermons nor the crowd’s applause. Nor does he seem to see the thousands of onlookers who fill the stands in bestial packs, their mouths more rank and pestilential than their beards. As Atiq tries to guess the location of the woman he’s determined to protect, his burning eyes relegate all the rest of the world to oblivion.

A sudden uproar on one side of the stadium gives rise to some sinister ululations. Agents of the Taliban police hustle one of the “damned” to his destiny; on the pitch, a man with a knife is waiting for him. This part of the program lasts only long enough for the accomplishment of a few simple movements: The bound prisoner is forced to his knees; the knife glitters before it slits his throat. In the stands, sporadic applause pays tribute to the executioner’s dexterity. The bloody corpse is tossed onto a stretcher. Next!

Atiq is concentrating so hard on the rows of burqas ranged like a blue wall above his head that he doesn’t see the militiawomen lay hold of their prisoner. They walk her to the middle of the field; then two men escort her to the site reserved for her. A peremptory voice orders her to kneel. She complies, and as she raises her eyes behind the grille of her mask for the last time, she catches sight of Atiq, standing with his back to her over by the 4 × 4. At the moment when she feels the muzzle of the rifle brush against the back of her skull, she prays that the jailer won’t turn around. In the next instant, the weapon fires, carrying off in its blasphemy an unfinished prayer.

Atiq doesn’t know whether the ceremonies have lasted a few hours or an eternity. The stretcher-bearers finish stacking the corpses onto a trailer pulled by a tractor. A particularly trenchant sermon closes the festivities. Immediately thereafter, thousands of the faithful pour onto the field for the general prayer. A mullah with the air of a sultan leads the ritual while fanatical police agents harry late-comers. As soon as the prestigious guests depart, the crowd begins to ebb and flow in savage waves before converging on the exits. Incredible melees break out, so violent that the forces of order are obliged to beat a retreat. When the burqas start filing out of the stands, Atiq joins a large gathering of men outside. Qassim is there, hands on hips, visibly pleased with his performance. The public executions have gone off smoothly, without a single hitch, and Qassim’s convinced that his contribution to this success has not escaped the notice of the holy men at the top. He can already see himself promoted to the directorship of the country’s biggest prison.

The first women emerge from the stadium, to be quickly retrieved by their men. The women—some of them burdened with several children—leave the area in more or less uniform little groups. As the crowd disperses, the hubbub dies down and the environs of the stadium grow quiet. The throngs making their way back to the center of the city disappear inside clouds of dust, cut into sections by the Taliban’s trucks, which follow one another in an anarchic convoy.

Qassim has recognized his harem in the midst of the crowd and directed them, with a movement of his head, to the bus, parked and waiting under a tree. “If you want,” he says to Atiq, “I can drop you off at home, you and your wife.”

“That’s not necessary,” Atiq says.

“I don’t mind—it’s only a little out of my way.”

“I’ve got some things to do in town.”

“All right, as you wish. I hope you think about what I said.”

“Of course I will. . . .”

Qassim waves and hurries away to catch up with his women.

And Atiq keeps waiting for his woman. The crowd of people around him shrinks away to nothing. Soon there’s only a little cluster of shaggy individuals still keeping him company, and after a few minutes these disappear in their turn, dragging a number of rustling burqas in their wake. When Atiq comes back to himself, he realizes that there’s no longer anyone around. There’s only the dust-laden sky, the wide-open stadium gate, and the silence—a wretched silence, as deep as an abyss. Incredulous, completely disoriented, Atiq looks around; he’s alone, absolutely alone. Seized by panic, he rushes into the stadium. The pitch, the stands, the special platform—all are deserted. Refusing to admit the truth, he runs to the section reserved for women. The naked stone steps are depressingly empty. He goes back down to the field and starts running back and forth like a maniac. The ground undulates under his feet. The deserted stands start whirling around him, empty, empty, empty. A mounting wave of nausea forces him to stop for a moment, but he immediately returns to his frenzied sprinting. The commotion of his breathing threatens to overwhelm the stadium, the city, the entire country. Bewildered, terrified, with his heart about to leap from his throat, Atiq returns to the middle of the pitch, exactly at the spot where there is a pool of coagulated blood. Taking his head in his hands, he stubbornly examines all the sections of the stadium, one by one. Suddenly, realizing the magnitude of the silence, he sinks to his knees, crying out like a stricken beast. As terrible as the fall of a Titan, his howl echoes across the arena:
Zunaira!

THE FIRST STREAKS of night have gone methodically to work, putting out the last twilight fires in the ashen sky. The daylight has already retreated, step by step, to the uppermost part of the stands, while insidious tentacular shadows spread their cloaks on the earth to welcome the night. Far off, the sounds of the city are dying down. And in the stadium, where a breeze freighted with ghosts is preparing to blow, the concrete tiers lurk in sepulchral silence. Atiq, who has waited and prayed as never before, finally raises his head. The utter misery of his surroundings calls him to order; he has nothing more to do inside these ghastly walls. Pushing himself off the ground with one hand, he rises to his feet. His legs wobble uncertainly. He tries one step, then two, and manages to make his way to the stadium gate. Outside, night has buried the ruins in darkness. A few beggars emerge from their hole; their voices are sleepy enough to make their lamentations convincing. Farther off, some boys armed with wooden swords and rifles carry on the morning’s ceremonies; they have bound some of their comrades in the center of a blasted square and are preparing to execute them. Aging idlers watch the boys with smiles on their faces, diverted and touched by the exactness of the youngsters’ re-creation. Atiq goes where his legs take him. He feels as though a cloud drifts under his feet. A single name—Zunaira—insistent but inaudible, fills his parched mouth. He passes his little prison, then Nazeesh’s house. Full night finds him at the end of an alleyway littered with rubble. Fleeting silhouettes pierce him through and through. When he reaches his house, his legs betray him again, and he collapses in the patio.

Stretched out on his back, Atiq contemplates the moon. Tonight, it’s perfectly round, like a silver apple suspended in the air. When he was little, he would spend long hours contemplating it. Sitting on a mound far from the family shack, he’d try to understand how such a heavy star could float in space, and he’d wonder if creatures like his fellow villagers worked the fields on the moon and pastured their goats there. His father joined him once, and it was then that he explained to Atiq the mystery of the moon. “It’s only the sun,” he told the boy. “After shining conscientiously all day long, the sun gets carried away and tries to violate the secrets of the night. But what he sees is so unbearable that he blanches and loses all his heat.”

For a long time, Atiq believed this story. And even today, he still can’t stop believing it. What’s so frightful about the night that it makes the sun lose all his color?

Gathering the remnants of his strength, Atiq drags himself inside the house. His fumbling hands knock over the lamp. He makes no light; he knows that the least glimmer would strike him blind. His fingers slide along the wall until they come to the doorway of the room that used to be his wife’s. He gropes around for her straw mattress and collapses onto it. Choking with sobs, he seizes the blanket in a desperate embrace: “Musarrat, my poor Musarrat, what have you done to us?”

He lies down on the pallet, draws his knees up against his belly, and makes himself very, very small. . . .

“ATIQ.”

He starts awake.

A woman is standing in the center of the room. Her opalescent burqa glitters in the darkness. Dumbfounded, Atiq energetically rubs his eyes. The woman doesn’t vanish. She’s still in the same place, afloat in a luminous blur.