When he found her lying in a heap on the floor, Atiq immediately feared the worst. Curiously enough, he didn’t drop the package he was carrying, and his breathing was untroubled. He remained standing in the doorway, one eyebrow higher than the other, careful to make no noise. For several long minutes, he gazed at her body attentively — the hand turned toward the ceiling, the curled fingers, the open mouth, the rigid chest — looking for a sign of life. Not a hair on Musarrat’s head moved. After putting his bag on a low table, Atiq swallowed hard and approached his wife’s inert body. Cautiously, he knelt beside her, and at the moment when he bent over her pallid wrist to take her pulse, a soft sigh sent him lurching backward. His Adam’s apple began furiously twitching. He listened carefully, imagining he had heard some ordinary rustling sound, then brought his ear close to the still face. Once again, a faint breath touched his cheek. He pressed his lips together to hold his anger in check, straightened up, and with closed eyes and clenched fists backed away until he was sitting against the wall. Sternly setting his jaw and folding his arms across his chest, he stared at the body stretched out at his feet as if he were trying to pierce it with his eyes, through and through.
Ten
MOHSEN RAMAT can take no more. The endless hours and days he regularly spends in the cemetery have exacerbated his distress. However much he may wander among the graves, he can’t manage to put his ideas in order. Things are escaping him at a dizzying speed; his bearings are irretrievably lost. Instead of helping him concentrate, his isolation weakens him and magnifies his suffering. Every now and then, a mad desire to grab an iron bar and destroy everything in sight surges through him; curiously, however, as soon as he takes his head in his hands, his rage turns into an irresistible urge to burst into tears. Thus, with clenched teeth and sealed eyelids, he abandons himself to his prostration.
He thinks he’s going mad.
Since the incident in the streets of Kabul, he can no longer distinguish day from night. The penalty for that accursed little outing is harsh and irreversible. If only he had listened to his wife! How could he have believed that lovers’ promenades were still possible in a city that looks like a hospice for the moribund, overrun with repellent fanatics whose eyes stare out of the dark backward and abysm of time? How could he have lost sight of the horrors that punctuate daily life in a nation so contemptible its official language is the whip? He shouldn’t have deluded himself. This time, Zunaira refuses to forgive and forget what happened. She holds it against him; she can’t bear the sight of him, much less the sound of his voice. “For the love of God,” he begged her, “don’t complicate things between us.” Zunaira looked him up and down, her eyes baleful behind the netting in her mask. Her chest rose, lifted by a wave of indignation. She searched for the harshest, most malicious words she could think of to tell him how terribly she suffers from what he now represents for her, how incapable she is of distinguishing him from the turbaned thugs who have transformed the streets into an arena and the days into a deathwatch, how utterly the proximity of a man, any man, both disgusts and overwhelms her. Unable to express her bitterness and her affliction with sufficient venom, she shut herself in a room and started howling like a madwoman. Terrified by his wife’s deafening screams, Mohsen hurriedly left the house. Had the earth opened under his feet, he wouldn’t have hesitated to jump in and let it close over him. It was horrible. Zunaira’s cries echoed through the district, brought out the neighbors, stalked him like a raging flock of predatory birds. His head spun. It seemed like the end of the world.
Zunaira is no longer the woman she once was, the courageous, vivacious woman who helped him hold on, who supported him every time he stumbled. Now, having decided never again to remove her burqa, she has quite deliberately sunk into an odious world, and she doesn’t seem about to emerge from it. From morning until night, she haunts the house like a ghost, obstinately wrapped up in her shroud of misfortune, which she doesn’t even take off to go to bed. “Your face is the only sun I have left,” Mohsen pleaded with her. “Don’t hide it from me.”
“No sun can stand against the night,” she replied, pointedly adjusting her hood. She has worn it since they were bullied on the street the other day. It’s become her fortress and her refuge, her banner and her renunciation. For Mohsen, the barrier is reaclass="underline" It stands between him and her; it’s the symbol of the painful break that threatens to tear them apart. By denying him the sight of her, she’s withdrawing from his world, renouncing it from top to bottom. The extreme position she’s taken shakes his foundations. He’s tried to understand, but there’s nothing to understand. Does Zunaira realize how excessive her reaction is? Whether she does or not, her devotion to her own cause borders on fanaticism. When he attempts to approach her, she retreats, holding her arms in front of her to keep him at a distance. Mohsen doesn’t insist. He lifts his own hands in a sign of acquiescence and leaves the house, his spine bent under a mortal load.
Ten days!
For ten days, the breach between them has grown wider, deeper, better fortified.
For ten days, Mohsen has lived in a state of total infirmity, in a delirium worthy of King Ubu.
Every time he enters his house, Mohsen says to himself, This can’t go on. To whom does he say these words? Zunaira yields not so much as a square inch of territory, nor does she lift her covering even a little. Her husband’s unhappiness fails to move her; what’s worse, it increases her bitterness. She can no longer bear his whipped-dog look or his monotonous voice. The moment she recognizes his footsteps at the door, she stops whatever she’s doing and dashes into the next room. Mohsen grinds his teeth to suppress his rage, then strikes his hands together and turns back.
THIS EVENING, he gets the same reception. As soon as he opens the patio door, he sees her cross the living room, as fleeting as a hallucination, and vanish behind the curtain to her own room. During the course of several minutes, his entire being quivers; there can no longer be any question of walking out and slamming the door behind him. Thus far, his ill-judged departures haven’t served him very well. Just the opposite, in fact — they’ve widened the rift that separates him from his wife. It’s time to get to the bottom of the problem, he thinks. He dreads this moment— Zunaira is so hardheaded, so brusque and unpredictable — but he can’t prolong a steadily deteriorating situation.