Am I dead, then?
You die and return to life. There’s something here you want to see.
In an instant the sky turns black as night, and a loud noise like thunder booms. Lights flash around us. Machine guns rattle, and the sound of cannons threatens to tear my eardrums. I glide over the rugged land. A small village appears. Black smoke rises, and I see houses on fire. People pour out of a narrow alleyway. Bodies lie in the street. Men with missing arms and legs scream. I hear planes and helicopters overhead. Tanks roll into the village on their metal wheels.
I run like mad until I see a mosque in front of an empty lot, and rush into the corridor. Inside, hundreds of men and women are praying, their bodies prostrate on the stone floor. They keep bowing, standing up and kneeling down in silence, over and over. I ask the women, some in full burqa and others with only hijabs covering their hair: Have you seen Ali?
Ali? Who’s Ali?
Anyone here seen Ali?
Their questions fly back and forth through the mosque until the entire place is filled with their voices. I hear someone at the far end call out to me: I saw Usman. He went to Kunduz.
Murmurs of Usman, Usman and Kunduz, Kunduz spread through the mosque again. I push my way through the crowd in search of the speaker of that voice. But they all turn their backs when I get close. I keep pushing, burrowing further into the mosque. Someone grabs me by the scruff of the neck, and I am propelled between the pillars and back out to the corridor.
Those are the spirits of the dead, Becky says. They’re all stopped at their memories from when they were alive.
Is this Hell?
No, it’s like a way station. There’s no such thing as Heaven or Hell. If they work hard, they’ll be able to move on to a better place, the same way that babies are born and grow up. Souls with many sins take longer and are stuck at a lower spot.
I think of Kunduz, and immediately a dusty street, a bell tower and low houses appear. I see a plaza in the village where a market is held. There are wooden display stands and awning poles. But the streets are empty, and the houses are all shuttered. I hear a sharp whistling sound followed by an explosion. Dust billows up like a cloud and blocks out the sky. A shell lands in the plaza, and a large crater appears. Another shell lands on the roof of a house. Cement and stone shards fall like hail.
I picture the outside of the village, and in a flash I see a group of men standing with their arms in the air on the side of a road overgrown with dry weeds. There are several trucks. Soldiers with bare feet and military jackets over their tunics aim guns at the men. An officer shouts, and the soldiers fire. The men collapse; several break away and run. They fall face-first. The image vanishes, and it grows dark as the ground ripples with their crawling bodies. I run over to them.
Usman! Is there anyone here named Usman?
I hear a familiar voice behind me.
Bari? What are you doing here?
I turn, and Usman is standing there, tall and with big hands just like his older brother. He has a long beard that makes him look ten years older.
Ali came looking for you. Did you see him?
We parted ways immediately.
Shapes, wavering like wisps of smoke, watch as soldiers toss their bodies into trucks.
In a flash I am whisked away on the wind to where the land ends. I see sand and open water. Towering behind me are enormous mountains carrying heavy loads of snow on their heads. Becky stands next to me and gazes out over the ocean.
Your husband is at sea, she says.
Where is he going?
I don’t know, but it looks as if he’s headed to where the sun sets in the world of the living.
Help me. Please take me there.
When I plead with her, Becky gives me the same cold, expressionless look that she had when I first saw her in front of the bonfire.
Everyone suffers, she says. But they have to fix their own problems. That’s true for Emily and true for you, too. Now let me ask you this: why can’t I be with him?
Who?
My husband in the world beyond.
Let’s go look for him.
I can’t find him. He left long ago, on a ship. I spent my wedding night with a wooden effigy. The village elders all remember his name. They say he was a brave warrior who hunted lions.
We gaze out at an endless sea that is so blue it is nearly black.
*
I opened my eyes slowly, very slowly, as if peeling off strips of wet paper that had been gluing my eyelids shut. The world around me changed, and I was back in my body. Lady Emily was still asleep. I got up and pulled back the curtain: it was already after dark. I thought again about the scenes of war and Usman’s death that I had seen so clearly. I remembered how Ali had not appeared even once, and I pictured the beach to which Becky had taken me. I was certain that Ali was still alive somewhere. When I was a child in North Korea, the adults taught me that if I truly wanted something with all of my heart, then I shouldn’t tell anyone or it would never happen, it would only slip further out of my reach. I made up my mind that I would not tell anyone how certain I was that Usman was dead and Ali alive. I decided to hide it from Grandfather Abdul as well.
Eleven
Xiang came to Tongking several days after the Lunar New Year, looking for me. I was with a client. Vinh, who’d finished with her client first and was resting outside in the waiting room, poked her head through the doorway and waited for me to look up. I looked at her questioningly, and she gestured behind her with her thumb. I assumed she meant someone was waiting to see me.
I wrapped a hot towel around the client’s feet and went out into the waiting room. I didn’t recognize the woman there at first. She wore a short skirt, boots that came all the way up to her knees and a loose jumper that left her shoulders bare. Her hair was long, straight and parted down the middle like a stereotype of an East Asian girl. She sat with her legs crossed, but stood up halfway when she saw me, raising her butt off the chair awkwardly.
“How’ve you been?” she asked.
I could not for the life of me place her smile.
“I’m sorry … Do I know you?”
I tilted my head to one side as I looked at her, and she answered in a small voice: “I’m Xiang.”
For a moment I thought: Who’s Xiang? Then I clapped my hand over my mouth. She looked so much older that she was almost unrecognizable. Her once-pale face had turned dark, and the once-taut skin around her eyes was sagging, but what made it even harder to tell that it was Xiang was her caked-on makeup. I clasped her hand in surprise. At that instant, a rush of regret, like a kind of guilt, came over me.
“I meant to look for you,” I said. “But other things kept getting in the way. I’m so sorry …”
“I only need a minute of your time. Are you busy?”
“No, I have time.”
I took her across the street to a café. When she rested her hands on the table, I saw that her nail polish was chipped, and that the seams in her jumper were coming undone. She kept glancing at the counter and then at the entrance, as if she was nervous about something.