Noor shook his head to say that he knew nothing about it. Laila and Zulaikha stared at me in shock that I had done such a thing on my own. Zia smirked. Padar turned to me.
“What did she say?”
“Auntie said you must stop drinking or Mommy won’t come home.” I held my breath after all the words came out. I squeezed the seat of my chair with each of my hands to hold down the shaking inside me. No one moved. If he jumped up and reached for me, I planned to duck under the table.
Padar furrowed his dark eyebrows and gave me a puzzled look as if he didn’t understand my words. He lifted the glass of Scotch to his mouth and took a long swig, then slammed the empty glass on the table. I could tell by the determination in his eyes that he would give up breathing before he gave up his Scotch. My heart threatened to tear through my chest it was beating so fast. Yet my chest puffed out a bit, feeling strong for the first time in my life—I had told him the truth we all wanted to say to him.
All of us waited in silence. The eruption would come. It always came. A fork scraped a plate, but not a word passed between us, only a silent wish for calm.
He pressed his mouth together, his mustache covering his upper lip, and he eyed me, furrowing his brow, with a malevolent glare that said You better not ever talk to me like that again. He kept his dark eyes on me the entire meal. When I left the table, he was still there with his shot glass of liquid. There was no poetry reading that night.
Mommy came home a few days later. If something had changed between Padar and Mommy, they didn’t tell us. None of us knew of any commitment by Padar to stop drinking, but his drinking did diminish from then on. With Mommy around, life began to take on its former ordered rhythms. She would have Shapairi check everyone’s homework when they came home from school. Vida and I were the only ones still not in school, so she checked us to make sure we were clean and ready to sit down for dinner when we came in from playing. Mother had a way of restoring order, of getting things done. The house was cleaner, organized, and my life felt safe. I stored away that conversation with my aunt about Mother’s health. She seemed fine, though I knew she and Padar spent a lot of time alone talking. With her around again, he began to drink less.
I didn’t see Shahnaz too often, but when her husband, the airline pilot, was on a long flight out of the country, she returned home to eat with us. She always made time for my sisters and me—reading or talking to us. In those times, we were all together, and everyone was happiest. For a while, I had forgotten the trouble that I had seen on my walk to Uncle’s and the talk of my older siblings about the goings-on outside our walls.
A couple of weeks later at dinner, we were talking and laughing and asking questions, and I asked if we could go visit Uncle.
Mommy was quiet, pushing her food around her plate.
“They are out of the country, Enjeela,” Padar said. His tone was so matter-of-fact that I thought it was merely another business trip.
“When they get back, we could go see them.”
“They aren’t coming back,” Mommy said. She went on, with real reluctance in her voice, to tell us they’d moved all their business to Germany. They had flown out last week while they could still get visas.
An emptiness came over me. Some people were fighting to live the lives they wanted; others were leaving. I knew Padar would never leave Afghanistan. He had said that many times. How many others would leave too? Would we end up the last family here?
Professionals and businesspeople all over Kabul were disappearing. At Shapairi’s school, teachers just didn’t show up for class. Rumors flew around that they had been jailed by the new regime for not teaching what the government wanted. Either that was true, or they had fled the country to avoid being imprisoned. Neighbor kids we used to play with didn’t come around any longer. When I asked about them, Mommy said their families had moved away. Where was everyone going?
Almost every afternoon, Mommy gathered us together and retold that sad story of Moses, abandoned in a basket on the river by his mother because of the Pharaoh’s edict that all firstborn boys must die. His mother had to make a choice: let him die or let him go into the waters of uncertainty. She would always end the story with a question none of us could answer: “What was a mother to do?” Then she would search us up and down with her large brown eyes as if her sadness could explain.
One morning, I heard a lot of noise in the hall by the front door. I ran from my bedroom to the hall and saw Shapairi, Vida, and Mommy all dressed up like they were going shopping.
“Where are you going?” I asked. “Can I go?” I didn’t understand why I wasn’t included in her shopping trip. Mommy knew that I loved shopping—picking out clothes, eating sweets, buying bangles, and watching all the other shoppers.
“Not today, Enjeela.” Her voice was firm. “We have some special errands.”
“Why can’t I come?”
Shapairi walked out the front door without a word. Mommy held on to Vida’s hand.
“I can help you with Vida,” I said.
She had that cold insistent look of hers. “No, you can’t come. You have to stay here.” She took Vida out the door and closed it behind her. I ran outside after them.
“Mommy, Mommy, let me go too,” I said, nearly crying. “I’ll be here all alone.”
“Noor is here,” she said, not even turning to me.
“Please, please, take me too,” I begged her. “Why can’t I come with you?” She pushed Vida into the back seat of the car, and before she closed the door, she said to me, “We’re going to get our photos taken.” Then she slammed the door.
I stood in the driveway awhile, gazing at the open gate to the street. Why wasn’t she taking me to get a photo? Another bit of emptiness crept in. I returned to my room and tried to distract myself from feeling rejected and lonely by playing with a doll or bouncing a ball. But it was no use.
All day, I moved around in a daze, trying to sort out why they would get their photos taken and not me? All the things I had ever done to make her mad at me tramped through my brain until I got a headache trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Was I too much of a tomboy? Did I get my good clothes too dirty as she always told me? Why would my two sisters get all dressed up and leave with her and not me? What had I done wrong?
That day, I remember spending a long while up in the pear tree by the gate, watching the road, waiting for my family’s return.
Mommy never explained anything to me about the photos, and it was quietly dropped.
Over the next month, Padar stayed very busy with the men who came to our house to talk business. He and Mommy kept up their heated conversations behind closed doors. But we knew they were talking about what they needed to do with their properties. The new socialist government was undertaking a land reform movement that would transform private ownership of property across the entire country. Mommy wanted to sell them. She kept saying that the Parchami would take them anyway. Padar didn’t want to at first, but he seemed to change his mind as the reform movement within the new government gained steam. It was at about that time that the army began setting up roadblocks in the streets of Kabul, checking identification papers, and arresting people.
A month or so after the photo incident, after my brothers and sisters left for school, I went looking for Vida. I often sat in her room in the quiet mornings, playing dolls with her, making her laugh. She was such a vibrant little sister, and we were very close. I usually found her on her bed or the floor, playing with her favorite doll, waiting for me to spend time with her. This morning, when I entered, she stood by a small suitcase, dressed in a traveling coat. Underneath, she had on one of her nicest dresses and a new pair of black shoes on her feet. Her hair had been brushed back. The maid helped her button her coat.