“So, Zeba, are you going to tell us what happened or are we going to have to guess?”
Zeba met Latifa’s stare. She shook her head and took a deep breath.
It was shocking how quickly the smell of blood had filled the air. Ghastly shadows appeared on her husband’s face. Was it pain? He’d looked shocked, as if he were staring the devil in the face. He had crumpled, his arms outstretched, half expecting Zeba to catch him. The ground had quaked beneath Zeba and she’d let out a sharp gasp. Darkness, seeping from her husband’s head, stained the earth around him and inched toward her. Zeba had stumbled to get back on her feet, never turning her back on him. She’d hobbled backward until her back hit the outhouse wall, then she’d slid to the ground. Zeba lifted her eyes for a second, just long enough to cry out a single word.
Go.
“I have nothing to say.” Zeba returned to her cot and buttoned the cuff of her sleeve. The others saw her fingers fumbling, her lips quivering. These moments came from time to time, sudden flashes from that day. It was difficult to have a conversation in those moments. It was sometimes even hard to breathe.
Latifa recognized it but pressed on.
“Nothing at all? Did I get it wrong? Or maybe he just wasn’t very handsome. Or,” she continued with a doubtful tone, “maybe you are just as lovesick as these girls. Maybe you did find a new man, someone a little less wrinkled. Or with deeper pockets. Please tell me that’s it. That would be a story I’d want to hear!”
Kamal’s face again. His eyes wild and glaring.
Latifa searched her pockets and took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. She poked a thick finger inside and felt around, disappointed. She tossed the empty pack on her bed.
Zeba’s breaths were shallow. Her fingers tingled.
Go!
Had it come out as a scream or a whisper? It was hard to remember.
“Enough,” Nafisa shouted. “Latifa, you’re a jackass.”
Zeba had melted away by then, her breathing even and her mind empty. This was the third time she’d fainted since she’d arrived. Mezhgan was unnerved by it. She brushed at her skirt nervously and swore she would never let herself be alone in a room with Zeba.
Nafisa put aside her anxieties about her upcoming exam. She would endure it in the name of love. She was a believer in romance, in star-crossed lovers and passion destined by God. How else could she survive the fact that her widower, despite his lusty promises, had not yet approached her family for her hand in marriage? She knew romance well enough to recognize the absence of it in Zeba’s face. The prison of Chil Mahtab, Forty Moons, was home to women who’d committed crimes far darker than lust.
“For God’s sake, Latifa, are you blind? This isn’t love,” Nafisa whispered, her eyes on Zeba’s trembling hands. “This is something unholy.”
CHAPTER 11
ZEBA’S EYELIDS LIFTED SLOWLY, HER VISION FOCUSING ON A metal grid. Her head felt heavy. She lifted a finger. Then a hand. She shifted and felt a bedsheet crumple beneath her sandaled foot. She was on her cot. She had no recollection of being moved, but her cellmates must have repositioned her on the bed with her shoes on. They no longer bothered calling the guards.
Zeba had never fainted before the last couple of weeks. Not as a child when she’d seen rockets fall from the sky. Not when she was pregnant in the hottest, driest months. Not even when she’d cried for her disappeared father. Something in Zeba had changed, and she knew what it was. The darkness was coming for her.
A lifetime had passed since she’d first seen it — so long that she’d nearly forgotten what it was to live without the terror. It came slowly, infrequently in the beginning. It slithered into her house like the smoke of a fire, curled through the gap between the window and the wall, touching Zeba and her children as they slept and making them jerk with fright in their dreams. It clung possessively to her husband, winding its way around his fingers, crawling up his arms and swarming his head with its bitter cloud. The children breathed it in, absorbing it into their innocent bodies, their veins darkening without them knowing. The family slept in one large room together, Zeba listening for the sound of the children breathing in the night, fearing the darkness would wrap itself around their young necks and choke them before the sun rose. The girls woke with a start, more than once, to find their mother’s fingertips brushing at their throats anxiously, then patting their shoulders with a hush to urge them back to sleep.
When Zeba did sleep, she dreamed of the darkness. She saw it weaving through their food and knew by dawn there would be evidence of its existence: maggots in the sack of rice, mold on freshly baked bread, and apples covered in bruises. She would wake in the morning and toss the most rotted food to the stray dogs. She would have thrown it all out if she weren’t afraid they would have nothing to eat at all. Zeba felt a gray film on their plates and cups and heard the incessant buzzing of flies. She did her best to scrub it off, but she could still taste it. It permeated metal, stone, and skin. It was inescapable.
Zeba’s angst grew. The darkness came more often, once a month. Then once a week.
She wished for her mother. Who better than Gulnaz to deal with something as intangible as this? Gulnaz approached darkness with her special kind of science. But Zeba couldn’t exactly turn to her now, not after the things Zeba had said.
What do you want, Madar? You want my children to be raised fatherless the way we were? You want me to put them through a life of shame and hurt, too? I won’t do it. I’m not you. I don’t want people to look at me the way they look at you!
No, her mother had probably not forgiven Zeba for that yet. She would have to find a way to deal with this herself.
She worked up the nerve to tell Kamal about it.
There is something here, Kamal. It is hurting us.
It was blackening their lives, it was a shadow over their home. The first time she brought it up, she was surprised that Kamal bothered to listen to her. When she finished talking, her hands wringing behind her back, he rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“You’re imagining things. Don’t be like your witch of a mother.”
His words stung, but she breathed a little easier. He was confident and concrete, and she could believe in him.
The second time she’d brought up her fears, he had said nothing but twisted her ear so hard that it swelled to a purple mass. She hid it with her hair and head scarf so the children wouldn’t ask her what had happened.
“I don’t want to be married to one of those stupid women who believe in the unbelievable.”
But if she believed in it, how could it be unbelievable?
Zeba bit her lip and went back to her needlework, unconvinced. He did not see what she could see. He didn’t understand that they lived in a house with no windows.
She watched the children carefully. She kept them close to her. They went from school to home, where she made sure they played at her feet while she tended to the cooking. She scrubbed at their skin like they were day-old dishes and repeatedly felt their foreheads for fever. The darkness could look like anything, she intuited. Kamal was of no help. It was up to her to protect her family.
Zeba lay awake in the nights, ready to meet the invisible trespasser and thinking of ways to fend it off. Though she could not always see it, she could smell it, like a piece of rotting meat so foul that it turned her stomach. Even the mice stayed away.
When Zeba cooked, she breathed in the fresh cilantro, garlic, cumin, and lemon. She tried to cleanse her senses of the stench that had settled into their walls.