22
“Madar, what is an FTP?” Hawa asks.
They are both relieved and disappointed to be back in their apartment. Marjan is looking out the window, searching the streets
for answers. All she knows right now is that they were not the only ones to try to leave. Marjan noticed two neighbors returning
to the building with bags this morning. She’s also seen the Taliban walking around on foot, armed patrollers in multiplying
numbers. It’s an infestation.
“Where did you hear that?” Marjan asks, wondering if she heard her daughter correctly.
“When you and Khala Soraya were talking,” Hawa recounts.
Hawa has always been a curious child, and though she asks many questions, she also learned at an early age to be skeptical
of the answers she received.
“Oh, that’s an abbreviation for our jobs,” Marjan offers.
“What does it stand for?” Hawa asks.
“I forget the exact English words. Something about finances . . . Oh, is that Ingrid?” Marjan says, spotting a familiar figure
approaching the building. The temperature will reach ninety degrees later today, though it feels that hot already in the confines
of the apartment.
Hawa joins her at the window.
“She looks like she’s in a hurry,” Hawa observes. Marjan wonders what the latest is with Ingrid. Most foreigners have already cleared out. The embassies, the aid organizations, the contractors. Ingrid should have been gone by now, but she’s almost as stubborn as a native Afghan.
The city is still reeling. The president flew off without a word. The Taliban have taken over the palace. The new world order
has yet to be fully revealed. Marjan heads to the door to meet Ingrid in the hallway.
“Hello, my friends,” Ingrid says. There’s a hint of resignation in her voice, a touch of guilt. Ingrid has no reason to feel
badly that she has a way out, though that does not mean Marjan does not envy her.
Hawa runs over and throws her arms around Ingrid.
“Beautiful girl. How are you?”
“I thought maybe you were gone already,” Marjan says. “I knocked on your door earlier.”
Ingrid shakes her head. She pulls her headscarf off and pulls a folded paper from her handbag to fan herself.
“It’s hot as hell,” she mutters. “I’ll be leaving soon. I’ve just met up with a couple of colleagues. They’re terrified. Our
organization is trying to figure out how to evacuate them but everyone’s saying it’s damned near impossible. Our government’s
accepted a dozen asylum cases already but there are so many more.”
The same conversation is happening in more homes than anyone can count in Kabul. Everyone who had any connection with the
toppled government, the one that was seen as a puppet of the Americans, is feared to be a target for the Taliban. Anyone not
in lock step with their extremist views is an infidel, especially the women who had dared to rise to positions of authority.
Now that the Taliban has taken over all the government buildings, they have access to all the records and files of everyone
who was on the government payroll, which includes Marjan and Soraya and every other woman who served in the FTP.
“They’re right to be afraid,” Marjan says.
The past two years have been deadly, the Taliban ramping up their violence across the country even as they engaged in talks with the Americans.
They were launching attacks on hospitals and military bases.
They assassinated a provincial leader of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and women judges who had put their fighters in prison.
For all the compounds the Afghan military and their American counterparts had searched, for all the targets they had turned in for interrogation and detention, it seemed the country should have been safer.
“I cannot stand to see you still here, Marjan. What have the Americans said about getting you out?”
“They are trying,” Marjan replies.
Ingrid looks livid.
“Trying? Isn’t that lovely,” she snaps. She is flushed, and Marjan wonders how much of it is from the heat and how much is
from frustration. Marjan should be wild with rage, but she hasn’t the time for it now.
“You must push them. You must keep trying,” Ingrid tells her.
“I will. And you will leave when?” Marjan asks.
“Maybe tonight,” Ingrid reveals, and Marjan feels a knot in her stomach. “They will let me know when the transportation is
arranged. I am supposed to always keep my phone on me and wait for the call.”
“Madar!” Hawa yells, her voice coming from the bedroom.
“What is it?”
“Madar, come here!” Hawa calls again. Marjan and Ingrid step into the bedroom and see Hawa standing by the window, looking
down into the walkway around the building.
Three Talibs are standing together, one with a cellphone to his ear. Two are wearing peran tumban, baggy shirts hanging over
loose pants cinched at the waist by a drawstring, and the third is wearing camo pants and a black tunic. Their turbans are
shades of gray. One Talib looks up and sees Marjan before she can step back from the window.
“God damn them,” Marjan whispers. Her heart is pounding. Why are they outside her building?
“I’m going to my apartment,” Ingrid declares. “It is better if they do not see me with you.”
Marjan nods, though she knows standing next to Ingrid is not what makes her most at risk for Taliban wrath. She has been warned again and again that the Taliban have ransacked homes, broken television sets, and searched through personal belongings to track down their enemies.
Marjan races to the duffel bag.
“Madar, what are you doing?” Hawa asks.
“My child, we have to be ready. If they come here to ask questions, tell them you study at the public school. Say nothing
of your music. We will tell them I am a secretary in an office. Say little and cover yourself.”
Marjan pulls her documents out of the folder. She cannot get out of the country without these papers. She may not survive
the next ten minutes if she holds on to these papers. She looks around for a place to hide them but remembers the pictures
she saw online of a home that had been searched. Even the long, low cushions of the living room had been torn open.
What will they do with Hawa if they find Marjan out?
Marjan tears apart the papers that identify her as a member of the FTP, the Female Tactical Platoon, and flushes them down
the toilet. A part of her dies as she does so. She is left with a plastic badge, one that will not even bend in her hands.
She hurries to the kitchen to bury the badge underneath the soiled paper towels and potato peelings in the trash bin. She
hides her national ID card under the flowerpot on the balcony. On its own, the ID card doesn’t incriminate her, but she cannot
risk them taking it from her. The ID card might be her only path to a passport. Lastly, she silences her phone and stashes
it in the package of menstrual pads in the bathroom.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
“In the name of the Islamic Emirate, open this door!”
Marjan freezes. Hawa looks especially small in the corner of the room, as if she’s shrunken in size.
“Open it!”
Marjan peers through the peephole. The Talibs are one door away, at the neighbors’. She grabs her headscarf and long, black
abaya from the coat hanger and throws them on.
“Who lives here?” a man barks. Marjan can hear Abed, her neighbor, trying to speak calmly.
Abed and his wife own a small flower shop ten minutes away.
His wife smiles whenever she sees Marjan or Hawa, but she rarely has interest in anything more than small talk.
The story Marjan has shared with them is the same one she has shared with Hawa’s school: Marjan works as a secretary in a trading company.
She is a widow but has some family on the other side of town.
Hawa’s father died before his daughter could get to know him.
Marjan suffers from health issues and is sometimes hospitalized for a day or two.
This last bit helps explain her absences and, she hopes, will keep people from gossiping about her. A sick woman is barely
a woman, she learned from watching severe scoliosis turn her khala Shaima into a specter.
“God as our witness, our business is flowers. Nothing more. Please, our children are frightened.”
“Madar, will they hurt them?” Hawa asks. Marjan looks over her shoulder.
“I don’t think so,” she whispers, shaking her head. She turns back to the peephole and almost jumps when she sees a Talib’s
face enlarged by the rounded glass. The door rattles under his heavy fist.
“We order you to open this door!” he shouts.
“Let me see the paper,” someone behind him says. “Maybe it’s this one.”
“I thought he checked the list. Does he even know what he’s doing?”
Marjan takes a deep breath. She motions for Hawa to go into the bedroom.
There is more pounding but this time from the bottom, as a boot strikes the door.
Marjan has already assessed her situation. They are too high up to leave through the window. She has a couple of knives in
the kitchen, but it’s unlikely she’ll best three armed men. She has to be smarter than them.
“In the name of God,” she calls through the door. “Please. I am a woman alone with a child. I am trying to maintain my honor
and cover. Please understand.”
There is a burst of cursing.
“Open the door!” the Talib shouts, punctuating his command with a kick so strong it nearly takes the door off the hinges.
Marjan has no choice. She turns the knob slowly and opens the door a crack. A dust-covered boot wedges itself in the gap as
the Talib shoves his way into the apartment. Marjan takes two steps back, catches herself on a side table.
A second Talib enters. They reek of cigarette smoke and sweat. Marjan keeps her gaze on the floor and the end of her headscarf
pulled across the bottom half of her face.
“What’s your husband’s name?”
Marjan has debated how to answer this question. After what she heard from the taxi driver about the Taliban wanting lists
of widows, she does not want to risk them knowing she has no husband. Offering a name is also troublesome. What name should
she give? What if they ask a neighbor and someone contradicts her story?
“Zabiullah,” she says. The less information she gives, the better.
The Talib asking the questions looks past her.
“And that’s your daughter?”
Marjan whirls around, alarmed to see Hawa standing just outside the bedroom door, her delicate face framed by her headscarf.
She resists the urge to cover Hawa with her body.
“Yes, that’s my little girl,” Marjan confirms.
“And your husband? What work does he do?”
It occurs to Marjan that if this soldier goes into her bedroom and pokes through her things, he will find not a single article
of men’s clothing. Not one shirt.
“He’s a mechanic,” she says. It is hard to find a profession that will not offend them.
“Hey, a mechanic!” the Talib calls to the man behind him. “Just what we need!”
The Talib lingering in the doorway takes another step in; his eyes, dark and skeptical, sweep the apartment before they settle
on Marjan.
“Sister, think before you speak,” he warns. “Because we know someone here worked for the army.”
Marjan’s heart pounds. This is not a random visit. They have information that has led them straight to her door.
Marjan is acutely aware of how petite she is compared to these men.
She thinks back to the day Khala Shaima had visited her at Abdul Khaliq’s compound. She’d come for the Eid holiday with a
basket of cakes and sweets. The night before, Abdul Khaliq had summoned his youngest wife to his chambers. Khala Shaima shook
her head at the bruises she could see, knowing there were more she couldn’t.
Why did God bring me here to die? she had asked her aunt. Why such a cruel fate?
I don’t accept that this is your fate. Like the biscuits we have with our tea, no naseeb is shaped without the press of your fingers, her khala Shaima had told her as they sat in a corner, Jahangir playing between them.
But Khala Shaima, I’m too weak, Marjan had cried into her trembling hands.
Silly girl, Khala Shaima said. Look at me. I’ve been weak all my life. Where else would I get such strength from?