Najia hears children’s voices from the house. The dhobi is gone from the shrubbery, in its place swags of bunting run from the kitchen door to apricot trees now in blossom. Folding tables draped with coloured cloths are laden with halwa and jellabies, ras gullahs and sugared almonds, burfi and big plastic bottles of full-sugar Coke. As Najia walks towards the house the children burst from the open patio door into the garden, running and shrieking in their Kid at Gap junior casuals.
“I remember this!” Najia says turning to the aeai. “This is my fourth birthday. How are you doing this?”
“The visuals are a matter of record, the children are as you think you remember them. Memory is such a malleable commodity. Shall we go inside?”
Najia stops in the doorway, hands raised to her mouth in potent remembering. The silk antimacassars her mother insisted that every chair-back wear. The Russian samovar by the table, never off the gas; the table itself, dust and crumbs permanently engrained in the Chinese carving in which Najia-age-four had tried to discern roads and paths for her dolls and toy cars to follow. The electric coffee pot at the other end, also never inactive. The chairs so heavy she could not move them alone and would ask Shukria the maid to help her build houses and shops with brooms and blankets. On the chairs around the dining table, her parents and their friends, conversing over coffee and tea, the men together, the women together; the men talking politics and sport and promotion, the women talking children and prices and promotion. Her father’s palmer rings and he frowns and it is her father as she knows him from the family photographs, when he had hair, when his beard was black and neat, when he had no need for unmanly half-glasses. He mutters apologies, goes to his study, the study into which Najia-age-four is never permitted for fear of the sharp poisonous delicate personal infectious dangerous things a doctor kept in his workroom. Najia watches him come out with a black bag, his other black bag, the one he did not use everyday, the black bag he kept for special visits. She sees him slip away into the street.
“It was my birthday and he missed me getting my presents and the party. He came back late after everyone was gone and he was too tired to do anything.”
The aeai beckons her into the kitchen and in three steps down three months pass, for it is a dark autumn night and women prepare the iftar to celebrate the end of that day’s Ramadan fast. Najia follows the trays of food into the dining room. In that year her father’s friends, the ones from the hospital and the ones in uniforms, gather often in the house of a Ramadan evening, talking of dangerous students and radical clerics who would take them all back to the Middle Ages and the unrest and the strikes and arrests. Then they notice the little girl standing by the end of the table with the bowl of rice and they stop their talk to smile and ruffle her hair and press their faces too close to hers. Suddenly the smell of tomato rice is overpowering. A pain like a knife stabbed in the side of her head makes Najia lose hold of the rice dish. She cries out. No one hears. Her father’s friends talk on. The rice dish cannot fall. This is memory. She hears words she cannot remember.
“…will clamp down on the mullahs.”
“…moving funds to offshore banks. London’s looking good, they understand us over there.”
“…your name’s going to be high on any of their lists.”
“…Masoud won’t stand for that from them.”
“…you know about tipping points? It’s this American mathematical thing, don’t knock it. Basically, you never know it’s going until it’s too late to stop it.”
“…Masoud will never let it get to that stage.”
“…I’d be seriously looking if I were you, I mean you’ve got a wife, little Najia there.”
The hand reaches out to ruffle her softly curled black hair. The world whips away and she is standing in her Mammoths!™ pyjamas by the half-open living-room door.
“What did you do to me?” she asks the aeai, a presence behind her more felt than seen. “I heard things I’d forgotten for years, for most of my life.”
“Hyperstimulation of the olfactory epithelium. Most effective at evoking a buried memory trace. Smell is the most potent activator of memories.”
“The tomato rice. how did you know?” Najia is whispering though her memory-parents cannot hear her, can only play out their foreshadowed roles.
“Memory is what I am made of,” says the aeai and Najia gasps and doubles to another migraine attack as the remembered scent of orange-flower water throws her into the past. She pushes open the door’s light-filled crack. Her mother and father look up from the lamp-lit table. As she remembers, the clock reads eleven. As she remembers, they ask her what’s the matter, can’t you sleep, what’s wrong, treasure? As she remembers she says it’s the helicopters. As she has forgotten, on the lacquered coffee table, under the row of her father’s diplomas and qualifications and memberships of learned bodies framed on the wall, is a piece of black velvet the size of a colouring book. Scattered across the velvet like stars, so bright, so brilliant in the light from the reading lamp that Najia cannot understand how she ever forgot this sight, is a constellation of diamonds.
The facets unfold her, wheel her forward in time like a shard in a kaleidoscope.
It is winter. The apricot trees stand bare; dry snow, sharp as grit, lies drifted grudgingly against the water-stained white wall. The mountains seem close enough to radiate cold. She remembers her house as the last in the unit. At her gate the streets ended and bare wasteland stretched unbroken to the hills. Beyond the wall was desert, nothing. The last house in Kabul. In every season the wind would scream across the great plain and break on the first vertical object it found. She never remembers a single apricot from the trees. She stands there in her fur hooded duffel with her Wellington boots and her mittens on a string up her sleeve because last night like every night she heard noise in the garden and she had looked out but it was not the soldiers or the bad students but her father digging in the soft soil among the fruit trees. Now she stands on that slight mound of fresh dug earth with the gardening trowel in her hand. Her father is at work at the hospital helping women have babies. Her mother is watching an Indian television soap opera translated into Pashtun. Everyone says it is very silly and a waste of time and obviously Indian but they watch it anyway. She goes down on her knees in her ribby winter tights and starts to dig. Down down, twist and shovel, then the green enamelled blade rasps on metal. She scrapes around and pulls out the thing her father has buried. When she wrestles it out she almost drops the soft, shapeless thing, thinking it is a dead cat. Then she understands what she has found: the black bag. The other black bag, for the special visits. She reaches for the silver clasps.
In Najia Askarzadah’s memory her mother’s scream from the kitchen door ends it. After that come broken recalls of shouting, angry voices, punishment, pain, and, soon after, the midnight flight through the streets of Kabul lying on the back seat where the streetlights strobe overhead one flash two flash three flash four. In the aeai’s virtual childhood the scream tapers off into a stabbing scent of winter, of cold and steel and dead things dried out that almost blinds her. And Najia Askarzadah remembers. She remembers opening the bag. Her mother flying across the patio scattering the plastic chairs that lived out there in every season. She remembers looking inside. Her mother shouting her name but she does not look up there are toys inside, shiny metal toys, dark rubber toys. She remembers lifting the stainless steel things into the winter sunlight in her mittened hands: the speculum, the curved suture needle, the curettage spoon, the hypodermics and the tubes of gel, the electrodes, the stubby ridged rubber of the electric truncheon. Her mother hauling her away by her furry hood, smacking the metal things the rubber things away from her, throwing her away across the path, the frost-hardened gravel ripping her ribbed tights, grazing her knees.