Leila is the first to get up in the morning and goes to bed last. She lights the stove in the living room with thin sticks, while the sleeping bodies of her family are still snoring. Next she lights the wood-burning stove in the bathroom and boils water for cooking, washing and washing up. Whilst it is still dark she fills bottles, pots and pans with water. There is never electricity at this time of the day and Leila has got used to groping around in the dark.
Sometimes she carries a small lamp. Then she makes tea. It must be ready by half-past six, when the men in the house wake, otherwise she is in trouble. As long as there is water she keeps on filling receptacles. You never know when the water might go off, sometimes after an hour, sometimes after two.
Eqbal squeals every morning like a stuck pig. The howls jar everyone’s nerves. He lies on his mat, stretched out or bent double, and refuses to get up. The fourteen-year-old invents new illnesses every day to avoid spending twelve hours in the shop. But there is no mercy. Every day he has to get up eventually, but next day the same performance is repeated.
‘You bitch! Lazybones! My socks have got holes in them,’ he cries and throws them after Leila. He takes it out on anyone he can, while his real wish is to go to school.
‘Leila! The water is cold! There’s not enough warm water! Where are my clothes, my socks? Get some tea! Breakfast! Polish my shoes! Why did you get up so late?’
Doors are slammed and walls pounded. The rooms, the corridor and the bathroom are like a battleground. Sultan’s sons howl, quarrel and cry. Sultan usually sits on his own with Sonya drinking tea and eating breakfast. Sonya looks after him, Leila does the rest: fills up the washbasins, puts out clothes, pours tea, fries eggs, fetches bread, polishes shoes. The five men of the house are off to work.
With great reluctance she helps her three nephews Mansur, Eqbal and Aimal to get away. No one says thank you, no one ever helps. ‘Uneducated children,’ Leila hisses under her breath, when the three boys, only a few years younger than her, order her around.
‘Haven’t we got any milk? I told you to buy some!’ Mansur taunts her. ‘You parasite,’ he adds. If she bristles, he always responds with the same cruel answer: ‘Shut up, you old bag.’ ‘This is not your home, it is my home,’ he says fiercely. Leila does not feel it is her home either. It is Sultan’s home, for Sultan and his sons and second wife. She, Bulbula, Bibi Gul and Yunus all feel unwelcome in the family. But moving is not an alternative. It is a scandal to split up a family. Besides, they are good servants – Leila is anyway.
Sometimes Leila is bitter that she was not, like her older brother, given away at birth. ‘Then I would have attended computer courses and English courses from an early age, and I would have been at university now,’ she dreams. ‘I would have had fine clothes, I wouldn’t have had to slave away.’ Leila loves her mother, but she feels that no one really cares about her. She has always been at the bottom of the pecking order, where she has remained; Bibi Gul had no more children.
After the chaos of the morning, when Sultan and the sons have left, Leila can relax, drink tea and have breakfast. Then she sweeps the rooms, for the first time of the day. She goes through the rooms with a small broom, bent over, sweeping, sweeping, sweeping. Most of the dust whirls into the air, floats around, and settles down again behind her. The smell of dust never leaves the flat. She never gets rid of the dust, it has settled on her movements, her body, her thoughts. But she scoops up bits of bread, paper scraps and rubbish. Several times each day she sweeps her way through the rooms. Everything takes place on the floor and it quickly gets dirty.
This is the grime she now tries to scrub off her body. It rolls off in fat little rolls. It is the dust that sticks to her life.
‘If only I had a house that needed washing just once a day, that stayed clean all day, that I would have to sweep only in the morning,’ Leila sighs to her cousins. They agree. The youngest girls of their family, their lives are like hers.
Leila has brought some underwear she wants to wash in the hammam. Normally washing is done in the twilight on a stool by the loo hole in the bathroom. She uses several large basins, one with soap, one without soap, one for whites, one for colours. She washes sheets, blankets, towels and the family’s clothes. They are scrubbed and wrung before being hung up. It is difficult to dry them, especially in winter. Ropes have been rigged up outside the block of flats, but clothes are often stolen, so she does not want to hang them up there, unless one of the children watches them until they are dry. Otherwise they hang, closely packed, on the little balcony. The balcony is a few square metres in size and full of food and rubbish: a bag of potatoes, a basket of onions, one of garlic, a large sack of rice, cardboard boxes, old shoes, and a few clothes and other things that no one dares throw away as they might come in useful one day.
At home Leila wears old shaggy, frayed sweaters, spotty shirts and skirts that sweep the floor. The skirts collect the dust she cannot get at. She wears down-at-heel plastic sandals and a scarf on her head. The only glitter comes from large gold-coloured earrings and smooth bracelets.
‘Leila!’
A voice calls her weakly, tired, over the screaming children. It just manages to drown the splashes that crash on the floor when the women throw water-buckets over each other.
‘Leilaaa!’
Bibi Gul has woken from her trance. She sits holding a cloth, looking helplessly at Leila. Leila takes the hemp glove, soap, shampoo and the basin over to her large, naked mother.
‘Lie on your back,’ she says. Bibi Gul manoeuvres her torso down on to the floor. Leila rubs and kneads the wobbling body. Bibi Gul laughs; she too sees the comical side to it. The small, neat daughter and the large, old mother. The age difference is somewhere near fifty years. When they laugh the others can smile too. Suddenly everyone laughs.
‘You are so fat, Mummy, you’ll die of it one day,’ Leila ticks her off, while she washes wherever the mother can’t reach. Then she rolls her over on to her stomach, helped by her cousins, who each scrub one of Bibi Gul’s enormous body parts. Then her long, soft hair is washed. The pink shampoo from China is poured over her scalp. Leila massages carefully as though she is frightened that what is left of the hair will disappear. The shampoo bottle is nearly empty. It is a leftover from the Taliban era. The lady on the bottle has been scribbled out with a thick, waterproof felt pen. When the religious police mutilated Sultan’s books, they also tackled packaging. Every lady’s face on a shampoo bottle or baby’s face on a piece of soap was removed. Living creatures must not be portrayed.
The water is cooling. Children who have not yet been done howl even louder. Soon only cold water remains in the once steaming hammam. The women leave the baths and as they go the dirt is visible. Eggshells and rotten apples lurk in the corners. Lines of muck are left on the floors – the women use the same plastic sandals in the hammam as they do on the village paths, in the outside loos and in their backyards.
Bibi Gul tumbles out with Leila and the cousins in tow. Then on with the clothes. No one brought a change; they pull on the same clothes as the ones they arrived in. The burkas are pulled over clean heads: the burkas with their own odours. Little air gets in and so the burkas have their own peculiar smell. Bibi Gul’s reeks of the indeterminable aroma she surrounds herself with, old breath mixed with sweet flowers and something sour. Leila’s smells of young sweat and cooking-fumes. Actually, all the Khan family burkas stink of cooking-fumes, because they hang on nails near the kitchen. The women are now spotlessly clean under the burkas and the clothes, but the soft soap and the pink shampoo desperately fight against heavy odds. The women’s own smell is soon restored; the burkas force it down over them. The smell of old slave, young slave.