He wasn’t the type of father to do much for them. If the children were anything less than perfectly behaved and fed, it was her fault and hers alone.
That she’d wanted the children — that her womb had ached for them — was easy to forget. That her heart had bled for and mourned the two babies she’d lost was a fading memory in recent years when Zeba had grown increasingly tired and angry and worn.
When she was young, there had always been more than one mother in the house. She’d lived in a compound shared with a brood of aunts and older cousins. Zeba had expected something of the same after she married, but when Kamal decided they should move away from the rest of his family, she’d not protested. It was a delicious break to get away from a clan she’d never felt comfortable with. His eldest sister, Mariam, had always been too pushy and intrusive. His youngest sister, Tamina, barely acknowledged Zeba and always found reasons to avoid them. If Kamal’s father hadn’t died of a heart attack before even a single hair had grayed, there would surely have been more siblings for her to dislike.
Zeba wondered if her mother-in-law didn’t sometimes rejoice in her husband’s early departure, but it was unlikely. She was loyal to her family and to her husband’s memory. Kamal’s only brother had been killed by a land mine. He’d lost a sister to a disease that the local physician couldn’t even name. Kamal’s mother shrank into her skin, fumbling through prayer beads and shaking her head in perpetual mourning.
With his father and brother dead, Kamal became the patriarch of his family, though he still didn’t garner the respect he felt he deserved. Day by day, his moods soured. He was bitter toward the children, brushing them away if they dared approach. More often than before, he would send Zeba tumbling to the floor with the back of his hand. She learned to bite her tongue around him and quiet the children with a stern look.
Just keep him happy, she told herself. It could always be worse.
Kamal began leaving home and wandering off, returning late and not bothering to explain his whereabouts. Sometimes he disappeared for days. Once, there’d been no word from him for over a week. Zeba was embarrassed to tell anyone. She doubted she would see her husband again but wasn’t sure if it was because he was dead or disinterested.
On the ninth day, Zeba worked up the nerve to pay Kamal’s eldest sister a visit. Just as she was getting the children ready, Kamal stumbled into the house — his clothes wrinkled, his beard scruffy, and his breath hot and rank.
Zeba steeled herself and asked no questions in front of the children. Instead, she prepared dinner and set it before him even as he scowled.
As things go in villages, people began to talk. Zeba kept away from neighbors and even family. She would pull her head scarf tighter across her face and rush the children inside to keep away the stares.
“Kamal-jan,” Zeba said cautiously on a winter day when she had stretched the vegetables and yogurt into more meals than she’d thought possible. “The children haven’t had a decent dinner in days.”
“Don’t you think I would bring something home if I could?”
“I just thought. .”
But he was not interested in her thoughts. He threw his sandal at her, missing her head by a hair.
He jabbed at her, both physically and verbally. He made small, snide remarks under cover of a joke as if daring her to react. Their intimate moments were now abrupt, rough physical interactions. Zeba had changed too. She wasn’t the bright-eyed bride she’d once been, but she’d believed their love had a trajectory. There was only supposed to be one direction to their relationship. This was all wrong.
“The war, the years of hardship, they’ve destroyed him. It’s not his fault,” Kamal’s mother would desperately say in the months before her death — as if she’d known she would not be around to defend him much longer. “Thank God at least he is here with us, alive and healthy.”
Zeba would bite her tongue. The Taliban were gone. The West had rediscovered Afghanistan and pale-faced men and even women in thick military gear and helmets roamed the village. There was nothing special about Kamal’s suffering. He’d neither been a soldier nor an amputee. They hadn’t had much but enough to get by with the work Kamal did as a blacksmith.
No, Zeba decided, Kamal would have been the same despicable man even if he’d lived through the glory days of kings and progress.
She cautioned herself to go easy on him. Everything would be worse if Kamal walked out the door and never returned.
But she felt no pity for him. He shamed her in ways she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud. Gulnaz would not have tolerated the behavior, but Zeba was not her mother. She was nothing close to it.
She could see the way Kamal’s eyes wandered through the market, feasting on the women who had thrown aside their burqas. She could see him tracing their silhouettes, undressing them with a greediness that made her face burn. She knew, when he came to her in the night, that he was thinking of a hundred other women — any other woman. He would travel to a nearby city sometimes, disappearing for a day along with money that should have been spent on food for the family. There were some women, everyone knew, who would lie with a man for the price of a meal.
But, to Zeba, the anonymous women were preferable to the vices he took part in in their own village. When Kamal was seen leaving the home of a friend, whispers floated back to Zeba that he was so drunk he could barely set one foot in front of another.
“I just want you to know I’m shocked at what I’ve heard about Kamal,” Fatima, Fareed’s wife, had said slyly. “You can trust that I won’t be saying a word about it to anyone. Some men are like that. I can’t understand it. . and to think, the rest of the family is so pious and decent. You did know, didn’t you? I would hate to be the one to break this news to you!”
Zeba had no plan. She’d never thought of an appropriate response to such a comment, believing that her husband’s behavior would never be the subject of open conversation within the family. She felt small and dirty, as if it had been her sin instead of his.
The drink made his temper worse. The children knew to avoid him when he came home with glazed eyes. Kareema and Shabnam would pick up Rima and busy themselves pulling the dried laundry off the clothesline. They walked with heads lowered and shoulders hunched, as if they were ducking a blow even before Kamal’s temper flared.
People talked about him. Zeba knew it from the way the shopkeepers looked at her. Their eyebrows lifted when she walked in, and their tone was less than respectful. Zeba never smiled. She made her purchases quickly and with her eyes trained on either the flour she was purchasing or the road straight ahead of her. With each time Kamal was spotted drunk in town, he further condemned Zeba to a life of ignominy. She begged him to consider their family, their reputation.
For that, Kamal had broken her nose, her rib, and half their dishes.
His sober interludes were hardly a return to the man he’d once been — they were moments in which an angry Kamal stumbled about the house, shouted at the children to keep out of his way, and grumbled about needing his “medicine.” Zeba’s couplets soothed her, distilling her fury and despondency into the shortest of verses.
Medicine is what this man calls his liquor
Strange is the remedy that only makes him sicker.
Zeba found it impossible to remember the man who’d whispered tenderly to her in their first days together, whose eyes had welled with tears when she’d given birth to their son. That man had never really existed, Zeba came to believe. He was a creature of her imagination, a way to believe her children had been born of something honorable.