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.
“Where did that fucking rock come from?” the driver asks.
“Maybe it’s a meteorite,” says Qassim ironically.
The driver looks around, searching for a clue that might explain how the boulder could have rolled into the middle of the road. As he gazes up at the nearest ridge, he sees an old man climbing up the hillside. The driver furrows his brow. “Isn’t that Nazeesh up there?”
Qassim follows the man’s eyes. “I’d be surprised if it was.”
The driver squints, concentrating on the ragged creature clambering up the dangerous slope. “If that’s not Nazeesh, it must be his twin brother.”
“Stop worrying about him and try to get me home in one piece.”
The incorrigible driver nods and launches the 4 × 4 at full speed down the uneven road. Just before it curves around a hillock, he takes a last look at the rearview mirror, convinced that the old man in question is indeed the simpleminded graybeard who occasionally comes prowling around the little prison house where Atiq Shaukat spends so much of his time.
Exhausted, his throat burning and his calves knotty with pain, Nazeesh collapses on the crest of the ridge. Supporting himself on all fours, he tries to catch his breath, then lies down on his back and lets himself spin into vertigo. The sky, which seems within reach of his hand, inspires him with a rare sense of lightness; he has the sensation of emerging from a chrysalis, of slipping like a wisp of smoke through the mesh of his body. He stays that way for a while, lying on the ground with his chest heaving and his arms flung out in a cross. When the rhythm of his breathing slows to normal, he sits up and puts his drinking gourd to his lips. Now that he’s conquered the mountain, there’s nothing to stop him from taking on the horizon. He feels capable of walking to the ends of the earth. Proud of his exploit, unthinkable for a man of his age, he shakes his fist in the air and casts his vengeful eyes over Kabul, the old sorceress, lying there at his feet in the grip of her torments, twisted, disheveled, flat on her stomach, her jaw-bones cracked from eating dirt. Once upon a time, her legend rivaled those of Samarkand and Baghdad, and when her kings ascended to the throne, they immediately began dreaming of empires vaster than the firmament. . Those days are gone, Nazeesh thinks bitterly; you can’t bring them back by circling around their memory. For Kabul has a horror of memory. She has put her history to death in the public square, sacrificed the names of her streets in horrific bonfires, dynamited her monuments into smithereens, and canceled the oaths her founders signed in their enemies’ blood. Today, Kabul’s enemies are her own offspring. They have disowned their ancestors and disfigured themselves in order to resemble no one, especially not those creatures who wander about like submissive ghosts bowed under the Taliban’s contempt and the anathema of their holy men.
A stone’s throw away, a monitor lizard surveys his realm from atop a rock, his long tail lying at his side like a saber. Of course! A truce among predators is a serious miscalculation. And in Afghanistan, whether you’re a member of a tribe or a part of the fauna, whether you’re a nomad or the guardian of a mosque, you never feel really alive unless you’re close to a weapon. And so the big monitor is standing guard; he sniffs the air, on the lookout for traps. Now, Nazeesh does not want to hear any more talk about battles, sieges, swords, or rifles, nor has he any desire to expose himself further to the menaces of street urchins. He’s decided to turn his back on the clamorous gunfire, to go and commune with himself on some wild, unspoiled beach, to see the ocean close-up. He wants to go to the country he’s seen in fantastic daydreams, the one he’s built with his sighs and his prayers and his dearest wishes — a country where the trees don’t die of boredom, where the paths wander and drift like birds, where no one will look askance on his resolve to journey to the immutable lands from which he will never return. He gathers seven stones. For a long time, he glares tauntingly at the city, where his eyes can find no landmark. Suddenly, his arm uncoils and he throws his missiles as far as he can, determined to ward off ill fortune and to stone the Evil One in his tracks.
The 4 × 4 pitches madly on the unpredictable road. The recent near-fatal skid has done nothing to calm the driver. Qassim Abdul Jabbar clings to the door on his side and suffers in silence. Ever since they left Qassim’s tribal village, the young chauffeur has done just as he pleased. Like most combat soldiers, he’s learned to drive on the job, and he fails to notice the damage he’s doing to the vehicle. As far as he’s concerned, you judge an engine’s worthiness according to the speed you can wrench out of its innards, a little like the way you treat a disobedient horse. Qassim, convinced that nothing he can say will have any effect on the stubborn young man, braces himself in his seat and tries to withdraw his mind from his present circumstances. He thinks about his tribe, which the war has severely reduced, about the widows and orphans, whose numbers have grown beyond the outer limits of the tolerable, about the livestock, which the harsh seasons have decimated, about his dilapidated village, where he saw no reason to linger for any length of time. Had it been up to him, he would never have set foot there again. But his mother died a few days ago and was buried yesterday. He arrived too late for the funeral services, so he contented himself with a brief period of meditation at her grave. A few minutes of silence and a verse from the Qur’an were sufficient. Then he slipped a bundle of banknotes inside his father’s vest and ordered the driver to take him back to Kabul.
“We could have spent the night,” the driver says, as if he were reading Qassim’s thoughts.
“Why?”
“So we could rest. We didn’t even have anything to eat.”
“There was nothing to do up there.”
“But you were with your family.”
“So what?”
“Well, I don’t know. If I were you, I would’ve stayed awhile. How many weeks has it been since the last time you went back to your village? It’s been months, maybe even years.”
“I don’t feel comfortable in the village.”
The driver nods, accepting this explanation, but he doesn’t give it much credence. He watches his passenger out of the corner of his eye, thinking that Qassim is behaving quite peculiarly for someone who has just lost his mother. The young man falls silent while successfully negotiating a curve, then picks up the conversation again. “One of your cousins told me your mother was a saint.”
“She was a good woman.”
“Are you going to miss her?”
“Possibly, but I can’t see how. She was a deaf-mute. I remember very little about her, to tell you the truth. Besides, I left home when I was quite young. At the age of twelve, I was already running from one frontier to the other, earning my bowl of rice. I seldom went back home. One Ramadan out of every three. The result was that I didn’t know the deceased as well as I should have. For me, she was the woman who brought me into the world — period, new paragraph. She had fourteen kids. I was the sixth, and the least interesting. I was sullen and unapproachable, more likely to fight than cry. I thought there were too many people in the shack, and not enough ambition. Then again, my late mother was astonishingly reserved. The old man loved to say that he married her because she never questioned his orders. That made him laugh his head off. Quite a joker, the old man. A little slow on the uptake, but not demanding and never ever abusive. He had no reason to be. On the rare occasions when there was a domestic quarrel, it was conducted in complete silence, and he was too amused to lose his temper. . ”