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Marjan slips into a thin, black cloak. After sunglasses, a face mask, and her chadar, there is nothing left to recognize.
Even Soraya would wonder. Hawa is dressed in a navy tunic with small flowers on the collar, gray slacks, and a gray chadar.
They are out in the open, and it is a most uncomfortable feeling for Marjan.
Her military training has taught her to avoid exposure, to watch her back, to move swiftly, to find cover, and to scan her
surroundings for potential threats. From behind her tinted lenses, she looks for anyone who might be eyeing her. She moves
from one side of the street to the other to make sure they are not being followed. She tries to anticipate the unanticipated.
She thinks through what she will do if a Talib accosts them. If there is a bombing. If the text messages she has received
are to be believed.
The text messages.
Marjan is taken back to the one mission that nearly cost her her life, the one in which she flaunted protocol and risked everything.
Only Soraya knows the truth about what happened on that mission. She didn’t breathe a word to anyone else—not her American
sisters in arms, not the Rangers, not the other FTPs, and certainly not the commanding officers who listened to her debrief
without suspecting she had hidden something from them.
Was it her naseeb to be assigned that mission? Was what happened there a choreographed event? It had felt unrehearsed and
chaotic in the moment, but her aunt had told her once that life’s design was revealed only in hindsight.
“Stay close to me. Keep your head low,” she tells her daughter.
The city feels like it’s been drawn from memory. Everything is where it was before, but nothing is the same. They pass by
a beauty salon, the faint image of a woman in full makeup and an elegant updo still visible beneath two coats of white paint.
A small café has its curtains drawn, making it impossible to tell if the restaurant is open or closed. There are hardly any
women on the street, and the ones present appear in a hurry to be behind closed doors again.
Hawa does not know exactly where they are going, but they are approaching her beloved music school. She wishes today were
like any other day and she could slip through those gates and into the instrument room. Being this close, she can almost feel
the fret under the pads of her fingers; she can almost hear a plucked string tremble at the sound of its own poetry.
Sometimes Ustad Rafiqi would forget he had students in the room, and they would listen to him speak directly to the rubab:
Its wood and skin and strings long-dried,
From where does this lush sound of love derive?
They near the music school’s entrance, the thick concrete walls separating the space from the rest of the city. Hawa thinks
how strange it feels to walk purposely past the gate when just a few days ago she would have been flustered to be even a few
minutes late for the first class of the day. It must be close to noon. She wonders if she’ll hear the lunch bell, the signal
that the government-sponsored lunch was about to be served. Without a government, there would be no lunch.
“Do you think anyone is inside?” Hawa asks.
“No,” her mother answers. “It’s closed.”
Hawa bites her lip. She thinks of the instrument room and the piano-practice sign-up sheet.
She has in her pocket the laminated card she needs to present to borrow a rubab for an hour of practice.
She feels the corners with her fingers, the slight frayed edge of her proof that she belonged to the school and the school belonged to her.
The gate is open. She only wants to look. She slides her hand out of her mother’s grip and adjusts the straps of her backpack.
Her mother appears deep in thought, as if she’s trying to decide if they’ll go right or left at the end of this road. Hawa
looks around and confirms there are no Talibs patrolling the area, only a handful of people who seem unaware of their presence.
She wants to go in for just a moment, maybe to pick up a sheet of music or to see if Ustad Rafiqi has stayed behind.
“I will be right back,” Hawa says to her mother as she darts through the half-open gate. Her mother’s eyes go wide.
“Hawa!” Marjan calls, then bites her tongue. She does not want to draw attention. She follows and spots Hawa crossing the
quiet yard and approaching the concrete steps of the main building.
Marjan feels herself slow. Is there a sight more haunting than a deserted school? She might as well be crossing a cemetery.
Her bag, slung over her shoulder, thumps against her flank as she speed-walks, trying to catch up with her daughter. She is
not bothered by the weight. She and the other women routinely hiked five miles carrying a full load of gear over rugged terrain
to train.
Don’t you get hot in that headscarf? Georgia had asked. She wasn’t the only one wondering. Marjan wasn’t sure why women who didn’t blink at deadlifts or ten pounds
of gear would be so taxed by a square of cloth.
“Hawa!” Marjan calls again, a bit louder now that she is off the street, but Hawa is already through the door. She enters
the atrium and lets the door close softly behind her. The pictures from the spring concert have been torn from the wall, shredded.
On her left is the piano room, a soaring chamber for small performances.
It was in this room that Hawa sat center stage with her rubab and performed a song with only a tabla as an accompaniment.
Marjan had been desperate to take pictures on her phone, to capture this impossibility of her daughter shining among children who were the descendants of Afghanistan’s finest musicians.
The woman seated beside her had tsked at her fidgeting.
Just enjoy the music, she’d advised. It will all be over too soon.
It is possibly the truest statement ever made.
The notes burst with emotion, then slowed, a flock of birds taking flight.
You were incredible, Marjan had wanted to shout. The coy smile on Hawa’s face told her she knew it to be true.
But now, standing in the doorway, Hawa gasps at the horrific sight. She jumps when her mother’s hands touch her shoulders,
as Marjan takes it in as well.
Two legs of the music school’s piano have been shattered, the instrument kneecapped, humbled. The top has been bashed in,
a broken smile with white teeth scattered across the floor. A bass drum speared. A rubab, neck snapped and strings torn. Music
stands piled like tinder. A half dozen ruptured tablas, stabbed through the thick black syahi, a once-unblinking eye. Only
a high hat remains standing, bearing witness.
Hawa doesn’t realize she’s crying.
She picks up the splintered rubab. She thinks, for the first time, that its shape resembles a long teardrop. One of the tuning
keys has been snapped off. She finds the wooden peg nearby, carved in the shape of a clover, and pockets it. She touches the
torn goat skin of a tabla, traces the edges of the ruptured syahi.
In the first weeks, Hawa and her classmates were introduced to the sounds and necessary care of various instruments. Hawa
recalls a boy named Haroon, who was eager to begin drumming.
Ustad, should I powder the tabla? he had asked, holding the white container of talcum powder above the drum.
Put that down. You should do nothing until you know what to do.
Though he had chastised Haroon, he appeared to have appreciated that the boy’s misstep had given him an opportunity to do
what he loved best—teach.
Look at the tabla. What is it made of, this husk, this skin? Animal, fire, tree, metal, passion. You hear all of it in the music.
Hawa cannot imagine what kind of monsters would do such a thing to instruments. She regrets her impulsive dash into the school.
She’s then struck by a more terrifying thought. What would these monsters do to people who played these instruments? She understands
suddenly why her mother reacted so harshly to the video she appeared in.
Hawa’s heart thrums in her chest. She is ready to leave. She is ready to run. She looks to her mother, standing grimly behind
her.
“One day . . .” Marjan starts to say. But she can make no promises. She has seen too much, both as a girl made into a wife
and as a soldier on missions. She thinks of the mission that went wrong, the terrified woman she found sleeping among the
livestock because that was what she was to her husband, chattel.
It will all be over too soon.
She takes her daughter’s hand. Time is compressing. They need to keep moving. Marjan turns them toward the door. They slip
past the fallen photographs, their footsteps echoing, filling the columnar space. Marjan has a hand on the door leading outside
and is about to push it open when she looks through the glass pane and realizes there’s a figure on the other side.
Marjan claps a hand over her daughter’s mouth and spins them, partners in a desperate dance, so their backs are to the atrium
wall. They are still as the instruments. Willowy necks. Fragile skins. Unblinking eyes.