I sat stone-faced while we ate. My jaw moved but I tasted nothing.
It could not have been coincidence.
I kept my face lowered, my thoughts so loud I feared my family would hear me and realize what I was. I was not invisible any longer.
In the orchard, I’d cupped my hands, raised my face to the sun, and prayed to God. When my neighbor finished his fateful prayer, I’d whispered Ameen. I’d pushed his words to Allah, as if I had any business praying with a stranger. His words, our words, echoed in my mind.
Please, Allah, bring a solution to my neighbor’s situation. Please help her avoid the path that others are choosing for her and this suitor. She’s not been able to take a peaceful breath in these weeks and surely things would only be worse with this suitor, as You know better than any.
A peaceful breath. A solution.
Please do not let anyone hold her back from her goals.
KokoGul was too distressed to eat. I hid behind her heavy sighs. My sisters gave one another curious looks, eager to get away from the eerie silence of our meal and share their thoughts where my father wouldn’t hear.
A quiet panic raced through me. It was entirely possible that I’d been complicit in this boy’s demise. It was also possible that I was more than merely complicit. I might have been wholly responsible for God taking his life.
I chewed carefully, afraid I would choke. Allah was in a fickle mood.
I wondered if my neighbor had heard the news. The thought of him sent my mind reeling in a whole other direction. I questioned his intentions and the meaning of the words he’d sent into the heavens.
I fought the urge to run out of the house and into the orchard, to call on him to explain what had happened.
I would have to wait.
Apart from my mother’s death, I was mostly certain that the world churned around me, unaffected by my existence. Maybe that was not so.
TWO DAYS LATER, OUR HOME HAD RECOVERED ITS COMPOSURE. My sisters accepted that I had nothing to say about the boy’s death. KokoGul had resigned herself to continue on in her unexalted household. Padar-jan went to Agha Firooz to pay his respects, an exchange the two fathers had never anticipated. In my harried state, I started the laundry and realized I’d forgotten the soap. On my way to get the soap, I remembered the meat needed to be marinated. Hours later I found the forgotten laundry, sopping wet and still waiting.
My chest about to burst, I wandered into the orchard. Every step felt like a trespass. The branches that had once welcomed me like open arms now seemed to point at me with accusing fingers, witnesses to my crime.
I coughed lightly.
“Salaam,” he called out cautiously.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”
“Good, it’s you,” he said brightly. “I wasn’t sure either.”
The cheer in his voice felt blasphemous.
“Did you not hear the news?” I whispered.
“News? What news?” His tone grew solemn.
“About the boy. You really don’t know?”
“What is it? You sound distressed.”
“He died.”
“What? Is this some kind of joke, Fereiba?” he whispered back. There was a bite to his tone that surprised me.
“I would not joke about such a thing,” I said. In my next breath I blurted out what I’d been wanting to scream since KokoGul broke this news at dinner. “It’s true. He’s dead and it’s almost as if we had prayed for it but we didn’t, did we? What did we ask for? What sin have we committed?”
“Lower your voice,” he cautioned. “You are serious then. Of course, we never prayed for such a thing. Don’t be foolish. Tell me what happened to him.”
I related everything I had heard from KokoGul. I’d gone over the events in my head so many times, it was almost as if I’d watched his last afternoon. I pictured him gasping, grabbing at his chest, his skin a fiery red, a storm raging from within and circling tight around his throat.
“Fereiba-jan, listen to me. This is shocking news and I know it might feel odd given our conversations but believe me, I had no intention of bringing him any harm. It was a prayer to God, not a curse. Whatever happened, it was never in our hands.”
“But we prayed—”
“And that was all we did. We wished no evil upon anyone, I promise you. We only meant for you to be spared from misery. You must know that.”
The orchard let out a soft breath, and the knot around my chest loosened. He was right. I did know that we’d meant nothing so fatal in our wishes. And I’d known from our first exchange that this voice in the orchard had a good heart. He had acted as a friend when I had no one to trust with my private thoughts. Even now, he was my only friend in a place and time where friendships between boys and girls did not exist. There were brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, husbands and wives — but no friends.
I could not bring myself to look directly at him nor would I offer to shake his hand even though these would have been meaningless gestures in comparison to the intimacies we’d already shared. I felt my face warm to think how much I had relied on this stranger through the ugliest days.
“You’re right. It was such a terrible feeling to think. .”
“Don’t think that way. You’ve been set free by strange and sad affairs. I won’t speak badly of the dead, but you and I both know what type of person he was. This was not your doing. It wasn’t my doing either, so don’t put it on our shoulders.”
I dared not interrupt when he was saying precisely what I needed him to say. In hindsight, I wonder if much of what he said was a bit too perfect. It was possible that, in my solitude, I’d created this friend out of a shadow of a person and brought him to life to fill a need, a dangerous trick of the mind.
“Fereiba-jan? Say something. Tell me you agree.”
There was no room for doubt when I heard him utter my name. For the time being, he was as real and true and caring as I needed him to be. I couldn’t leave, tied to him by an unseemly thread of my own creation.
CHAPTER 9. Fereiba
“THEY BLAME YOU FOR HIS DEATH. THAT’S WHAT I HEARD,” KOKOGUL said flatly. The back of my neck grew hot. I stopped drying the dishes. The rag hung limply in my hand.
“Me? Why do they think it was me?”
“They say that he was a perfectly healthy young man and that he was taken from his family the day before they were to come for your shirnee. Of course, Agha Firooz’s wife insists that you must be cursed. First your mother, then your grandfather, and now this suitor who was just hours away from becoming your fiancé.”
My eyes grew moist. To name the people whose loss hurt me most was cruel.
“It’s nothing to cry about,” KokoGul admonished. “How could they not draw such conclusions? They’re grieving and conflicted and they know your history. Maybe I should consider myself lucky to be alive.” KokoGul chuckled.
It was possible she had made the whole thing up. I had a hard time telling with her. Sometimes, she got so wrapped up in her own version of the truth that she couldn’t put her finger on the real story. I went back to drying the plates, but she continued.
“I went to pay my respects to his mother. As soon as she saw my face, she burst into a rage of tears and told me my daughter was a curse. She said ever since they started courting you, things had gone very badly for their family. I think a few of the women sitting around her heard, not many.”
Oh God. In the quiet of a fateha, I was certain that every woman in Kabul had heard her. I would be Kabul’s black maiden with whispers and raised brows following me.