“I’m eating very well — maybe too well.” And he had been. He’d been hazed in his first week in Kabul, his digestive tract less accustomed to the microbiology of the country than he’d anticipated. Since then he’d had no troubles. He was still cautious with raw fruits and vegetables, but everything else moved through him normally.
“Where are you now?”
“Home,” he said, surprising himself with how reflexively the word had come out. “I mean, my apartment.”
This did feel like home, though. Yusuf had fallen into a routine. Drivers knew where to drop him off, and he could walk into a handful of shops and expect to be greeted by name. He knew which streets reeked of waste and which streets were clean. He knew the best street cart for bulanee and the places where his cell phone would get no reception.
He smiled to think of the day he’d come off the airplane, that intoxicating blend of excitement and apprehension. It was good to be here. It would be even better if he could get this case to move in the direction he wanted it to.
“So what’s going on with that poor woman? Did she tell you why she killed her husband?”
Yusuf, trained in the Western concept of attorney-client privilege, debated how much he should share with his mother. But he counted the miles between them and looked out his window at a street full of greased palms and decided there was no harm in sharing a few details with her.
“I haven’t told you what I learned yet, have I? It turns out she walked in on her husband assaulting a young girl — in the worst possible way.” Yusuf was careful with his language. There wasn’t a Dari word for rape, Yusuf had realized when he’d begun his work here, as if not naming the act would deny its existence. Even in the judicial world, it was often called zina, or sex outside of marriage, equating the crime to a lusty and impatient couple having sex the day before their wedding. Zina was a blanket term that covered anything other than a husband claiming his wife.
“Oh no! God damn that bastard!”
“Yes. She won’t tell me much, but from what I’ve put together, she killed him to defend the girl, one of her daughter’s classmates. She doesn’t want to say anything to the judge about what really happened.”
“Good for her.” Yusuf’s mother sighed. “She’s killed one person. No sense in her killing another.”
“I know, but it’s terrible that the truth can’t help her.”
“Truth is a hard sell. You know how we are. We prefer to be polite or to protect our honor. Did we ever tell anyone that we didn’t want your sister to marry that louse? No, because having a disobedient daughter is worse than having a lazy son-in-law. We couldn’t live without our lies.”
Yusuf paused to reflect on this. Lies kept the whole earth spinning on its axis. This wasn’t unique to Afghanistan.
“She’s not a bad person, Madar. She is a bit of a jadugar, though. Did I tell you about that?”
“Really? Your murderess is also a witch? A woman of many talents!”
“She’s inherited her talents from her mother, actually.”
“Where else could children get their talents from?” Yusuf’s mother said pointedly.
“Wait till I tell my father.”
“He knows it’s true. But you did get your hair from your father. You should thank him for that since he’s the only man his age who can stand outside the masjid without his head reflecting sunlight. Now, I haven’t asked in a long time because I didn’t want to be one of those mothers with her nose in her children’s business, but how are things with Meena?”
Yusuf winced. He debated telling his mother that Meena was in love with another man. He didn’t fully trust his mother not to say something about it to Khala Zainab.
“We aren’t a good match, so I would get that idea out of your head. You know, Khala Zainab hadn’t even told Meena that she was giving her number to you.”
“Is that what Meena said? She was probably just embarrassed about it and made that up. How could you not be a good match? You were so cute together as children, and you’re both lovely adults. What more do you need?”
Yusuf shook his head.
“And, Yusuf, you can’t make a decision on one conversation.”
“It wasn’t one conversation, Madar. We just reached a conclusion that it wasn’t meant to be.”
“What would I know anyway? I’m just a woman who’s been married for thirty-something years.” Yusuf’s mother exhaled sharply. “Ay-ay, bachem. When are you going to have enough of that place? The stories you tell me and the chaos we hear about on the news are disturbing. How can you stand to be around these kinds of things?”
Were it not for the static on the line and the specifics of the case, Yusuf could almost have felt like he were only a train ride away from his mother, the way he had been when he lived in Washington. He could picture her, sitting on the living room couch, a basket of his father’s white undershirts in front of her, still warm from the basement’s coin-operated laundry machines. He knew when she hung up, there would be lines on her face from where she’d pressed the receiver against her ear. He pictured the furrows in her forehead and knew she was probably cupping her right hand over the speaker, a habit she’d developed from when conversations across continents traveled across tenuous fibers instead of satellites.
He could almost see out their apartment window, thick metal bars gridding the scene from the fourth floor. Though the view hadn’t been much, Yusuf had spent hours at the window’s edge staring at the building across from theirs and the others that flanked it. When he was twelve, Yusuf’s father had given him a pair of binoculars, hoping he would use them to develop an interest in the airplanes that flew low over their heads. But Yusuf wouldn’t become an engineer, despite his father’s encouragements. Instead, he’d used the binoculars to spy into other windows.
He watched the woman who would undo her pink bathrobe to breast-feed her baby in the mornings. He saw the gray-haired man who flipped through channels with one absentminded hand down the crotch of his pants and another on the remote. He saw the thin, teenage girl who stuck as much of her arm and face as she could through the window grate to keep the cigarette smoke out of her apartment. Yusuf did not feel like a voyeur in watching these private lives. He felt more like a guardian of secrets.
But that wasn’t why he was in Afghanistan. He hadn’t come this far from home because he wanted to be privy to the sordid details of people’s lives here. People had equally sordid lives in New York or Washington. His friends, his cousins, his parents, his colleagues — a hundred voices had echoed the very same question as soon as he’d booked his tickets to Afghanistan.
Why do you want to work there?
“Madar-jan, this is where I can do something real. The country needs a real justice system if it’s going to survive as a society. I want to be part of that. It’s rebuilding a nation and not just any nation — our nation. How shameful is it to leave it all for foreigners to do?”
“I’m proud of you, Yusuf. We’re all proud of you. You should hear the way your father talks about you with his friends or with your uncles. Just last weekend we went to a wedding and he ran into an old classmate from high school. ‘My boy is a hero.’ That’s what he said, honestly.”
Yusuf’s throat tightened. He rubbed his forehead and admitted to himself that he really missed home. He missed the smell of fabric softener on his undershirts and the feel of a gas pedal under his foot. He missed the paved roads and complicated parking signs detailing street cleaning schedules.