No. I will never go to see my father. I can’t possibly stay in Peshawar. I’ll go to Islamabad. But I don’t really like it there either. I’ll have to go somewhere else. Karachi or Lahore. I’ll get through this somehow or other. Soon I’ll be able to send for my mother, Parwaneh, and Farid.
I scratch my face on my mother’s dowry.
The car stops. The carpet with me wrapped up inside it is hauled out of the car and put on the ground. I roll over as it’s unrolled. The half-light of dusk hurts my eyes. I fill my chest with fresh air and the smell of the countryside. The trafficker drags my stiff frame free of the black patterns of the carpet. The car has pulled over by the side of a dirt track on top of a hill covered with thorn bushes.
“We’re taking a shortcut. We’ll be in the village in under an hour.”
The trafficker takes a packet of cigarettes from his waistcoat pocket and offers me one.
“Thanks, but I don’t smoke.”
Putting a cigarette between his lips, he lights up. Then he squats down on the carpet. Covered by their veils, his two wives leave the car to sit on the opposite corner of the carpet, turning their backs to us. I stand up.
The cigarette smoke and the trafficker’s voice steal over the golden slope of the hill.
“All being well, we’ll set off for Pakistan at dawn the day after tomorrow, by morning prayers. It’ll take two days. You …”
The low laughter of his two wives rises above his words.
“What are you laughing about?”
Both women immediately fall silent.
“You’ll stay in the village mosque,” the trafficker goes on. “But you mustn’t talk to a soul. By the way, do you have a student card?”
“No.”
“An ID card?”
“No, the soldiers took them off me.”
“Never mind. Do you have any papers at all?”
I go through my pockets mechanically. Other than two thousand Afghanis and a folded paper with my father’s address written on it, there’s nothing else.
My heart gives a sudden leap. Of happiness. Happiness about what? Mahnaz must have looked for my ID card and student card in the sewer … and found them … and my clothes … Will she hang on to them?
“Hey, Brother, snap out of it!”
I come back to the hill and our carpet, which is spread over the ground. On one corner sits the trafficker wearing his astrakhan hat. On the other, the two women with their blue and yellow veils … The setting sun merges their shadows with the carpet’s black patterns.
“Sorry, what did you say?”
“Do you know how to pray?”
“I think so, roughly …”
“Some nights the religious students get together and sleep in the mosque. They ask lots of questions of students like you from Kabul. But don’t worry. You’ll be all right unless you get into any kind of political discussions with them … It’s not a good idea to let on that you’ve been to university … Tell them instead that you left school after sixth grade and then got a job.”
I wonder if Mahnaz has washed my clothes? Will she give them to Moheb? No.
“Do you know anyone in Pakistan?”
“No.”
He says nothing. His narrow eyes, hidden under his thick eyebrows, follow the smoke curling from his cigarette into the fading light.
“Don’t you even have an address?”
“Is it important?”
“Yes. If anyone asks you, tell them you’ve already sent your wife and child to Pakistan and that they’re all there waiting for you.”
“My father is in Pakistan.”
“Then why did you say you didn’t know anyone there?”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with my father.”
“OK, that’s up to you. But it’s a good idea to have an address.”
No. I have no desire whatsoever to be beholden to my father.
“Why didn’t you bring your wife and child along with you?”
“My wife and child?”
Mahnaz and Yahya!
“It would be much easier if you were with your family.”
He throws away his cigarette butt. His voice is clear in the still evening air.
“Ya, Allah! Let’s go.”
The two women get off the carpet and head toward the car. The trafficker rolls up the carpet, empty of me, and tosses it into the back of the car. I get in too. The backseats of the car have been taken out. I sit on the rolled-up carpet. The women settle themselves in the front seat next to their husband.
Traveling downhill, the car kicks up a thick cloud of dust as it speeds around the bends in the road. The last red seconds of the day burnish the shoulders of the trafficker as he drives.
I ease myself off the carpet onto the metal floor of the car. I put my head on the carpet and kiss my mother’s footprints.
Once she’d left Mahnaz’s house, safely hidden under her veil, my mother went to the Shah-Do-Shamsira Mosque. There she tied a ribbon to the grill of the shrine and made a prayer for her son to get to Pakistan safely. My mother wept. But no one saw her tears. No one asked, “Mother, why are you crying?”
My mother wept to herself, lonelier than ever before. Walking back home from the shrine, she concealed her terrified face beneath her veil. More anonymous than ever before. More insignificant than ever before. Unable to confide to a soul, “My oldest son, the man of my house, has become a fugitive!”
And no one replied, “Mother, may his absence be filled with patience and grace.”
Shrouded in her veil, crazy with grief, my mother shed her tears in the backstreets of the ignorant city before finally reaching our home. She wrapped up her distress in the veil and gave it back to the laundry-woman. She squirreled herself away in the safety of her kitchen to rewash the clean dishes. When the laundry-woman left, she took all the clean linen off the clothesline and washed it all again.
She hasn’t said a word to Parwaneh or Farid about my escape. She’ll tell them tomorrow. My mother always hangs on to bad news. She lives with it for a while, she weeps, she curses … and then, the next day, during breakfast, she’ll announce, “Children, Farhad has gone to Pakistan.”
Parwaneh rushes next door to take out her fury by sinking her teeth into her pristine school veil. Farid, with tears in his eyes, stays close to my mother. His childhood is over. His chest swells. Now he is the man of the house. He takes the worn-out hands of my mother in his own small grasp and presses them tenderly. Tomorrow they will move the green kilim from my room and lay it on the floor of the front room.
The car comes to a halt next to a small mud compound. The trafficker unloads the atmosphere of our house, rolled up in our carpet, and, along with his two wives, takes it into the compound.
I stay behind with two earless dogs that appear from nowhere to sniff around the car, a car that is emptied of memories and filled with fear.
In a corner of the mosque a man lies asleep next to me, his head resting on a brick for a pillow. A dervish. A long white beard covers his face. A cloak is spread out over his curled-up body. He’s sound asleep. So soundly even the call to prayer hasn’t broken into his dreams. He’s been left in peace, as if he didn’t exist.
Four groups of men sit around four oil-lamps: young and old, faces concealed by lengthy beards. Here, everyone is armed. Alone and unarmed in my corner, I sit with my back propped against the wall of the mosque.