In the darkest part of a winter morning, he held a bottle of Scotch by its neck as he badgered us awake.
“Come quickly!” he demanded with a tone that wasn’t meant to be argued with.
Sleepy, tired, half awake, we gathered in the living room. He slumped into one of the upholstered wing chairs and motioned for us to sit at his feet. Candles and a kerosene lantern lit the room in an eerie glow. I tried to hide in the half shadows, but he waved me closer into the light. Poetry was his great comfort, and somehow he must have thought it would protect us too, keep us from falling into the dark hole he had found himself in and was trying to climb out of with the help of Hafiz.
“Laila, recite,” he demanded.
Laila, who had recovered quickly from the gassing, rose slowly and tried to stumble through a poem. Her lackadaisical memorization of poetry infuriated him.
“Okay, that’s enough of that, sit down.”
He would go around to each of us, still rubbing our eyes and yawning but aware of Padar’s irritability. When he came to Zia, who was never exact, precise, the way Padar liked it, Zia faltered and would try to make a joke about it, but Padar signaled his displeasure with a hefty grunt. This lack of attention to the music of the sentences flustered him. As if his whole world would be at rest if he could hear a beautiful poem. He had taught us all about poetry, how to listen to the words and enjoy the beauty of the language, but he was too drunk now to notice how afraid we had become and that even if we knew a hundred poems perfectly, we feared it would not be enough to keep him off his path to insanity.
This early-morning session grew tenser as he demanded more, his voice sharpened into a weapon.
When he came to me, I had one poem I could recite with conviction and depth, the way he thought poetry should be felt. If I could please him with my words and make this stop, then I wanted to do it.
“Enjeela, recite.” He pointed at me.
I slowly rose, the ethereal darkness all around me, and edged closer into the dim smudge of light radiating from a kerosene lamp. I spoke:
As I recited, Padar rocked back and forth, his index finger to his lips, and his eyes drooped closed. He was either meditating, or he was asleep. Somehow the words had given him peace. I stood in the half-light, and after a few moments, we could hear the regular breathing of sleep. Finished, I waited in the flickering light of kerosene flames. We sat around him in a half circle; the other half lay in the empty darkness behind his chair. The other half of our family—Mommy and Vida, Shahnaz and Shapairi and Ahmad Shah—was absent.
These sessions went on almost every week, deep into the winter, as the conflict became a war. At night, when the clamor of the city had died down, and Padar had released us from the broken circle, we could hear the battles being waged in the far-off mountains. The distance tempered the constant explosions—they sounded like fireworks. As if the countryside were in a constant celebration.
That winter was one of the coldest to ever hit Afghanistan. The snow on the mountains around the city was a thick white blanket. We had little electricity, and Noor gathered wood to burn in the fireplace in the living room. Padar brought home a coal-burning stove for the family room that he vented through a window, and in the freezing hours of the afternoon, we gathered around it, dressed in everything warm we could find, and told stories and ate dinner and waited out the weather. When it didn’t snow, we played outside, jumped off the roof into the pillows of snowdrifts piled up around the house. When it was too cold to go outside, we huddled in Ahmad Shah’s room, played a card game called fis kut (the game is much like gin rummy only with more players), and told scary ghost stories until we were so tired we fell asleep on the floor, close together to fight off the chill, all hoping as our eyes closed that Padar would sleep through the night.
I thought about Mommy the most when we played fis kut.
“I don’t think we’ll ever see Mommy again,” I said.
“You are mistaken as usual,” Zia said, picking up a card.
“Look at us. We live like animals,” I said.
“We are animals,” Zia said.
“Speak for yourself,” Laila said, her voice lifted up like she had it all planned out. “I can’t wait for the mujahideen to destroy the Russians so I can play volleyball again.”
“Do you think we’ll be able to go back to school soon?” Zulaikha said.
“They are making the kids speak Russian now and join the communist clubs,” Zia said. “Soon we’ll all be eating borscht.”
Padar had forbidden us to join the youth clubs the Russians had set up.
“Padar won’t let us learn anything Russian,” I said.
“That’s why we’re staying home, so we can eat our kabobs in peace,” Zia said. “Now it’s your turn to play, so stop talking.” Zia laughed and I laughed.
“See, already you have forgotten Mommy,” Zia said. “All you need to do is play more fis kut, and you’ll forget her completely.”
We all looked at him. Zulaikha’s lips curled up in fear. Laila looked angry.
“Padar won’t leave us,” I said.
“He’s already left us,” Laila said.
“Don’t talk like that,” Zulaikha said.
“Why not?” Zia said.
“He’s taking care of us, the best he can,” I said. “He won’t leave us.”
No one said any more as we continued playing our game. We played by the hour, day after day, week after week. We were becoming expert at it until we knew every rule and every trick. The more I thought about it, the more I had to agree with Zia. Playing games did allow me to forget about Mommy. I couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like or what it was like to be really clean.
It was one of these freezing winter nights that I saw the man with the white horse.
He walked right out of Ahmad Shah’s closet toward me. He was an old man, a very old man, with a long white beard, and his clothes matched the brilliant white of his horse, who had a princely saddle, full mane, and a bushy tail. He stood tall and strong next to the man. At first I was certain they were ghosts. But we had been telling ghost stories all night long, so then I thought I must be asleep and it was a dream.
“I can see you,” I said to him.
The man stopped and stared down at me. He held the horse’s reins as if he were taking it out for a midnight ride to see what was left of the city.
“Are you awake?” he said, a lilt of surprise in his voice.
I told him I was. “Who are you?” I asked, suspecting already that I might know who he was.
“You can see me, little one?”
I sat up and nodded. He was as real to me as my sisters and brother sleeping beside me.
“You must be very special to see me. No one sees me.” He smiled at me and tugged on the reins of the horse. “I must go,” he said. “Go back to sleep before the others wake up.” His voice was warm and caring. None of the others even stirred.