Just like Kabul, Saleem thought.
They filled their bellies, listened to music, and watched the men grow rowdy as the hour grew late. There was clapping, feet and elbows bouncing to the music blaring from a stereo system, the rhythm and the instruments reminiscent of the music of Kabul’s past. Tea and syrup-soaked pastries were passed around. Saleem, more sated than he could ever recall being, still did not turn down the flaky baklava or the pistachio-coated nougats offered to him. If only he could have shared this feast with his family. He licked his sticky fingers and wondered if there was a way to slip something into his pockets without being noticed.
“Hey, let’s get a smoke. It’s too hot here, no?” Kamal suggested. Saleem agreed and followed his friend out to the back of the house. His eardrums buzzed. Saleem took a deep breath of fresh air, stretched his arms out, and smiled. Kamal looked amused.
“Having a good time, are you?” Kamal asked, taking out a cigarette and matches.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a party. A really long time.”
“Yeah, well. This is life in Intikal. Every day is a party,” he said sarcastically, the cigarette casting an orange glow in the night. The boys began to stroll around the shed behind the house when they stopped short.
Explosive sounds thundered through the night — followed by screams.
Saleem’s instincts kicked in first. He grabbed Kamal by the shoulder and pulled him to the ground.
“Stay down!” he yelled. On their knees, the boys crawled around the side of the shed to get a look at the house. Kamal did as he was told. There were loud pops, more screaming, and the sound of breaking glass.
“What’s happening?” Kamal screamed, panic in his voice. The screams were more familiar than the gunshots to Saleem. Those were the screams of people under attack.
“My parents!” Kamal yelled, his voice breaking.
“Quiet,” Saleem warned, throwing his arms around his friend to keep him calm. “Quiet for a minute.”
Three shadows ran out of the house, leaped into a car, and roared off. Kamal and Saleem ran back into the house as the car lights faded down the road. The screams had melted into wails.
Blood. Saleem’s stomach reeled at the smell of gunpowder and metal. People were huddled in two corners of the room, groans echoing over the sound of festive music made for a macabre cacophony. Two women snatched curtains from the windows to make bandages. Kamal’s mother was one of them, shouting her son’s name even as she tore at the fabric.
“Mother!” Kamal ran over to her. She dropped the fabric and grabbed him by his shoulders.
“You’re not hurt? You’re all right? Oh, thank God!” she cried.
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Where’s Father?”
“Helping your cousins over there.” She picked up the curtain and ran over to a mass of people crouched over one woman.
Saleem stood locked in place.
People were yelling, walking around him as if unaware of his presence. He saw their mouths move and heard a noise, the sound of frightened, hurt people. He saw people running. Arms and legs moved around him, sometimes pushing him out of the way. He couldn’t move.
Saleem was back in Kabul. He heard rockets, saw people burying young children and families crying after disappeared fathers. His breathing slowed, and his eyes grew blurry.
There was no escape. The bloodshed had tracked him down to Intikal. How naïve he was to think he had left it all behind. It danced around him, taunting him and poking at his sides. It had followed him all along, waiting for him to grow complacent. Saleem had buried his head under a pillow as a young boy to muffle the sounds of the rockets. Now he put his hands over his ears to deaden the cries.
Saleem caught a glimpse of one of the victims, the bride’s father, his white shirt turned crimson. The color drained from his face as his daughter lay over him shrieking.
Everywhere he turned, Saleem saw his father.
CHAPTER 24. Saleem
HIS MOTHER BARELY STIRRED AS SALEEM CREPT INTO THE BEDROOM, his heart still pounding. He could hear Samira’s soft breathing. His eyes tried to adjust to the dark as he felt for his mattress on the floor.
“Thank God you’re home,” Madar-jan whispered. “It must be so late. Get some sleep, Saleem-jan.”
“Yes.” That was all Saleem could get out without his voice breaking.
He walked into the washroom and let out a trickle of water from the faucet. He let it run over his hands and between his fingers. He brought his palms to his face and held them there.
Get some sleep, Madar-jan had said. Get some sleep.
Saleem slipped out of his pants and shirt and slid under his bedsheet. He stared at the ceiling, traced its cracks in the dark, and tried to block out all he’d seen. But it all came back. The bride, her dress stained with her father’s blood. Her brother, shot in the leg but alive and yelling as they’d shoved him into a car to be taken to the hospital. Two others had been lucky, bullets just grazing their arms.
Lucky, Saleem thought, was relative.
It was forty-five minutes of chaos. A few cool heads had taken control and shouted out orders. Someone took the inconsolable bride into a back room. Her new husband, paralyzed with fear during the mayhem, felt his own body for bullet wounds that were not there. One of the shooters had aimed directly at him and fired, but the gun had jammed.
Lucky.
Saleem found himself whispering his prayers, as if his father’s hands were on his shoulders, turning him away from the windows and bringing him to the ground. He touched the lifeless watch on his wrist, absent of the soft ticking that once lulled him to sleep.
Kamal’s father had driven them home, filling them in on what had happened. Three men had burst into the house. They’d been recognized immediately as sons of the neighboring farm family — boys who had wanted this bride for their own clan. Slighted and incensed, they’d decided to exact their revenge on the young couple’s wedding night.
They directed their aim at the bride’s father, the groom, and then the bride’s brothers. Guests ran for cover, hiding under tables full of celebratory sweets and escaping into adjacent rooms.
They’d spared the bride, a punishment in itself.
Kamal had never seen more than a bloodied nose in a street fight.
Things are different outside the town’s limits. People take their own revenge when they feel they’ve been dishonored.
It was forever before the police officers arrived. They shook their heads and went from person to person, assessing the damage. They took notes, but it was unclear what they would do about the attackers. Kamal’s father decided to take the boys home. His mother was in another car with his aunts and cousins.
SALEEM HAD FALLEN ASLEEP THINKING OF WHAT KAMAL’S FATHER had said.
Grudges don’t die — people do.
Saleem woke abruptly to the sound of Madar-jan shrieking. She ripped the bedsheet off him. He bolted upright, his eyes bloodshot. Her hands were on him, touching his chest and face.
“What happened? Why is there blood on your clothes? Where are you hurt?”
The night came rushing back. Saleem cocked his head back and put his hands over his eyes.
“It wasn’t me. I’m not hurt,” he said. Samira was wide awake, staring nervously. “They were shooting, Madar-jan. It was terrible.”
“Shooting guns? What in God’s name are you talking about?”
Madar-jan was not fully convinced that her son was whole and searched his body for hidden wounds.
Saleem pulled her hands away and stood up to shake the slumber from his eyes. He had tossed his bloodstained clothing by the floor cushion, a gruesome sight in the early morning hour. He told her everything, keeping his voice low in hopes that Samira wouldn’t be too frightened. He told his mother how he’d helped lift the bride’s brother into the car so he could be taken to the hospital.
If he’d had a bit more sleep, he might have had the sense to filter some of the gore. By the end, he was crying. He’d been unable to move for so long, he lamented. She listened intently, a hand over her mouth in disbelief. Samira had moved closer, sidling next to her mother, and listened with the intent of an adult. Madar-jan whispered words of gratitude to God for sparing her son.
Madar-jan pulled Saleem to her and rocked him as she did Aziz. He didn’t resist, cherishing the smell of his mother, the comfort of her arms, and her kisses on his forehead. She asked Samira to put the water to boil and get breakfast started for Hakan and Hayal. Samira rose obediently.
“And your friend, Kamal. . he was not hurt either?”
“No, Madar-jan, he was outside with me. He is all right.”
“His mother and father?”
“They were not hurt.”
When Hakan and Hayal came down for breakfast, Saleem repeated the entire story once more. His Turkish had improved immensely since he had started hanging out with Kamal and the boys. He searched for a few words here and there but relayed the night’s events to them. Hakan and Hayal sat stone-faced. Hayal instinctively put a hand over Fereiba’s. To Saleem, the violence at the wedding was starting to feel more like a story than an actual event.
Madar-jan searched their faces for an explanation. How could something like this happen in Intikal? Hakan rose and said he was going to Kamal’s house to see his father. He was dressed and out the door within minutes.
“I’m late for work. I should already be at the farm, Madar-jan,” Saleem said, instinctively looking at his watch. “I’ll get hell for coming in at this time.”
“Saleem, bachem, you are not going to the farm today. After everything that happened last night, it’s out of the question. I want you with me.”
Saleem looked down at his hands and realized he was trembling slightly. He knew he must have looked like death and had the sudden urge to bathe, to scrub the night’s events from his skin with hot water.
Hayal made him a cup of tea with honey and brought him a plate of bread and cheese. Saleem ate silently. Samira stayed close by but quiet. She warmed a bottle of milk for Aziz and propped him up on her lap so that he could take his breakfast. For the first time in a long time, it looked like the Waziri baby with the broken heart was in better shape than the rest of the family.
Saleem went to the washroom and turned the water as hot as it would go. He let the water cascade over his head, his face, his shoulders. He closed his eyes and saw the bride’s face, blood streaked across her cheek. He heard her brother’s moans. Saleem opened his eyes to try to see something else, but the visions were burned into his retinas. He scrubbed at his skin until it was red and raw. His temples throbbed. He turned the water off, his skin stinging at the towel’s rough touch.
Madar-jan sat in the bedroom, on the edge of her bed. She looked mournful.
“Madar-jan?” Saleem said, hesitantly.
“I thought we were okay here,” she whispered. “This was not supposed to be like home.”
Saleem sat beside her.
“I brought us here because we thought it would be safer. We thought this would be better for you. What have I done?”
Without Padar-jan around, there was no one to share the blame for the plan that had landed them in Intikal. Saleem pressed his forehead against her shoulder.
“We could not stay in Kabul, Madar-jan. We had nothing left. We were going to starve there — or worse.”
“Aziz was okay there. He was fine until we left home.” Her eyes were glossy, filled with thoughts of a rosy yesterday that existed only in her mind. “Samira wasn’t washing strangers’ dirty dishes and folding their laundry. You weren’t working your hands to a bloody mess from dusk till dawn. We were okay in Kabul, but I brought us here.”
Fereiba had wanted to keep her children healthy, fed, safe, and free from working as indentured servants. She’d failed on all accounts.
“Madar-jan, we were not okay there.” Saleem crouched in front of her, jarred by the way his mother seemed to be speaking about him and not to him. “Don’t you remember? We were scared. We had no money and couldn’t leave the house. There was barely air to breathe.”
“I wanted my children to be children. I wanted them to laugh, to play. . to learn. I wanted them to do the things that I should have done as a girl. How far must we go? How fast must we run?”
Saleem could not find the words, much less arrange them in a way that would bring any relief. It broke him to hear his mother talk this way and to know the thoughts she was likely hiding from her children on most days. Her smiles, her cheerfulness — had it all been to make them feel reassured? Her eyes were tearless. She was not speaking out of emotion. These were thoughts that came from the most honest part of her spirit. This was the result of her careful analysis and her astute observations. This was very real.
“We’ll be okay, Madar-jan, you’ll see. This was the worst of it. We’ll get to England before you know it and we’ll be okay.” Saleem’s voice wavered. He was nowhere near as confident as his mother.
But Madar-jan’s expression changed, as if a switch turned on. Her lips tightened and her eyes focused with a glint of resolution. She pulled her shoulders back and met Saleem’s hopeful gaze.
“Yes, my son. That’s exactly it. We will go to England.” Saleem felt relieved that his mother had shaken her trancelike state. He nodded in eager agreement.
“Yes, Madar-jan, we just need to set aside a little more—”
“No, we must leave. We are leaving Intikal. We are leaving Turkey.”
“Leaving Turkey? But, Madar-jan, we haven’t—”
“God could not have sent a clearer sign. The time has come for us to continue our journey. We will thank Hakan and Hayal for their hospitality, pay whatever debts we owe, and pack our belongings. Every day that we stay here is digging ourselves into a deeper hole. If we don’t leave now, we may never go.”
Madar-jan believed in moving forward. She always had.