4
If Rahima could have reached into her own body and clawed out the growing mass, she would have.
She curled into herself for a full week. Samia, softened by the news, let her be. When alone, Rahima would pound her fists
against the small mound of her belly. The world expects women—even girls—to crave motherhood no matter the circumstances.
The son Rahima had lost, little Jahangir, appeared in her dreams, writhing with pain and fever. Calling her name. She tried
to speak to him, to comfort him, but her words were locked in her throat. She’d thought she would not survive bringing him
into this world. And though she breathed and walked, she wasn’t sure she had survived outliving her son. She felt distinctly
dead inside.
Lying supine, staring at a water stain on the tiled ceiling, Rahima felt the full weight of all she did not know. Her body
was a mystery to her. She did not know if her parents, her sisters, or her sickly aunt were alive. She did not know how long
she would be allowed to stay at the shelter or where she would go if she left. How long might she last as a beggar on the
street, a ghost with a bundled child on her lap and an outstretched hand?
She existed on bits of bread and sips of tea. She was nauseated often. Her roommate must have complained, because she woke
one afternoon to see the woman retrieving her daughter’s doll from under the bed. All their other belongings were already
gone, moved to a less offensive room.
The staff checked on Rahima, even the stocky woman who had cleaned up her first pool of vomit. Samia began insisting that Rahima join the other women of the shelter for at least one meal a day and forced her to bathe. She appeared one morning with a cup of sweetened tea and some clothes.
“These should fit you. You’ll need to get out of what you’re wearing and wash them. Hygiene is important.”
“Please just leave me be,” Rahima groaned. “I don’t feel well.”
She felt both cocooned and suffocated by the small room.
“Little sister, this is neither a hospital nor a palace. We are not your mother or your nurses or your maids. Time to rise
and tend to yourself. Wake up. If you keep your eyes closed, you’ll see nothing but darkness.”
In Abdul Khaliq’s home, little Jahangir had been Rahima’s only source of light. She could still feel his small hands on her
cheek, the gentle breeze of his breath on her neck, the twinkling smiles he saved for her alone. She resented anyone or anything
trying to take his place.
That was the easier explanation for her despair, one she could use to self-soothe.
But there was more. This pregnancy felt like Abdul Khaliq’s hands reaching across an impossible distance, his fingers curling
around Rahima’s neck and his breath in her ear. She said nothing of her condition to any of the women, but there were few
secrets in the shelter and it was cheap therapy to ruminate on someone else’s misery. She was certain the other women in the
shelter could sense the resentment in her, that they could see what kind of monstrosity she was.
Rahima shuffled to the bathroom to relieve herself, hobbling as if her ankles were shackled.
Two weeks into her stay, Samia drew a red line.
“I’ve called the woman who begged me to take you in and told her I would accept no other referrals from her,” she said.
Rahima squeezed her eyes shut, tried to drive Samia’s voice away.
“She told me you were a lion of a girl,” Samia remonstrated.
Then she crouched to be close enough to Rahima that she could whisper and still be heard.
“Where is that lion? Have you let this sorry jungle tame you already? Do you think you are the first girl to have lived this life? Hardly. But you are one of the few to have a chance like this, to be in a place like this. Don’t squander it. ”
To Rahima, it sounded as if her aunt was speaking through this woman, reminding her of the women who had suffered and endured
before her. She could almost hear the wheeze of her aunt’s uneasy breathing.
“Get up, wash your face, and be ready. We’re going for a walk,” Samia commanded, her words sharp as a blade.
Rahima obeyed.
When Samia threw a chadori over her, Rahima’s heart began to pound. The rules of the shelter had been made clear on the first
day, and one of those rules was that no one was permitted to leave. There was no such thing as a stroll into town. But Samia
led her past the gate and into the narrow streets.
“Where are you taking me?” Rahima asked. Was Samia kicking her out? She wanted to apologize, to promise to be better.
They moved through small streets, passing by a government building. Rahima thought of the women she had met sitting in the
Parliament building not far from here. The world was so much bigger than her husband’s compound, she had learned. Some of
the people she met were good, and some were corrupt. Some were a bit of both.
And now, untethered from her husband and having thrust herself into the immensity of this universe, Rahima felt quite small.
She told herself to find comfort in that feeling. The smaller she was, the easier it would be to hide from Abdul Khaliq. She
needed to be little more than a speck. Invisible. She was grateful for the privacy the chadori offered her.
Rahima caught flashes of color through the mesh of her chadori, the yellow of taxis and a street cart piled high with red
tomatoes, emerald green cucumbers, and bulbous purple eggplants. When they came upon the Kabul River, a trough running through
the city, they followed its path.
Samia stopped at a place Rahima had never seen. Looming brick columns framed teal gates. Rahima read the sign with wonder.
Samia had brought her to, of all places, the zoo.
“Have you been here before?” she asked.
“Of course not,” Rahima said. She could have laughed. Did Samia think she had run from a life spent in parks and gardens?
Rahima may not have been familiar with the zoo, but plenty of other young families and clusters of men were strolling through
the grounds. She spotted a group of boys standing in front of a rectangular plinth with a bronze statue of a lion. The beast
was resting on its side, his head straight and eyes fixed on the trickle of new visitors coming through the entrance.
One little boy stood before the plinth on his toes, his fingertips just barely reaching the lion’s mane. When he reached out
to pet the statue, his friend standing behind him let out an explosive roar in his ear. The startled boy nearly fell over,
which had the other boys with them doubled over with laughter.
“Wait till I get you . . .” the boy cried out, giving chase and abandoning the statue.
“Do you know the story of Marjan?” Samia asked.
Rahima shook her head.
“Marjan came to this zoo in 1978. Chucha, a lioness, joined him shortly afterward. There was a coup that year, which was the
beginning of so much fighting. No one was paying attention to the zoo when the country was busy defending itself from Russians
first, then fighting each other once the Russians left. In all those years of war, the animals here suffered, even Marjan.
Their only saviors were the people who had worked for the zoo, people like my uncle, who risked their own lives to care for
these beasts, even after their salaries stopped. My uncle would gather from the markets what butchers and vendors could not
sell. He kept Marjan and Chucha and all these animals alive, barely.”
Rahima stared directly into the dark hollows of Marjan’s eyes as Samia spoke.
“Things were ugly during the civil war. Anyone who could, left. This zoo fell right on the frontlines. When one group took control of these streets, their warriors ravaged the zoo. They killed some of the animals and roasted them over open fires. My uncle thought of these creatures as his children. He nearly lost his mind then.”
“Was Marjan killed by a rocket?” Rahima asked. The story had piqued her curiosity. Stories always had, she realized, thinking
of the ancestral tales her aunt Shaima would tell her.
“No, Marjan survived, but he suffered at the hands of an idiot. In the nineties, a guerilla fighter wanted to prove his bravery,
so he went into their den and touched Chucha. The fool had forgotten that lions are territorial and even more proud than Afghans.
Marjan killed him. The fool’s brother returned the next day, hungry for revenge, and threw a hand grenade into the enclosure.
It exploded in Marjan’s face, blinding him in one eye. A few keepers did what they could to stop the bleeding, to bandage
his wounds. My uncle held his mangled face in his hands and cried into his fur. He thought he would lose his beloved lion
then.”
Rahima did not want to hear any more about Marjan. It became even harder to breathe under the chadori. Samia must have sensed
she was losing her audience, because she quickened the pace of her story.
“But Marjan survived with only one eye and saw the Taliban take Kabul in 1996. When some Taliban fighters visited the zoo,
they launched stones at Marjan. My uncle stepped in again and reminded them that our beloved prophet respected animals.”
“What a dismal life,” Rahima said, thinking both of the lion as well as Samia’s tenderhearted uncle.
“Dismal, yes. But Marjan became a legend. This beast survived a coup, a Russian invasion, and bombings from the mujahideen,
the Taliban, and the United States. This lion came to represent our struggle, our survival.”
Rahima did not feel like she was surviving. The word was a poor fit for her condition, but she could not yet envision herself
in any better condition.
“What became of him?” she asked.
“Ah, good question. Marjan died of old age one night. My uncle and six other men laid him to rest with the dignity of an elder.
Hundreds came for his funeral. Can you imagine such a thing?”
Rahima, who had seen stray dogs kicked in the street and songbirds in cages, could not imagine such ceremony for a lion.
“Some who suffer inspire pity. Others simply inspire,” Samia said. “If it’s pity you’re after, good luck finding much in the
shelter. No one comes to us because they’ve had it easy. Some stay a short spell and some stay longer. Everyone leaves eventually.
So think carefully about what you make of your time here. How do you want to leave this place? Do you want to be stronger,
prepared to be your own provider? Or do you want to become one of the women you see begging on the street with a drugged baby
beside her?”
Rahima felt a wave of nausea rising in her. She willed it away. It would be disastrous to vomit under the tent of the chadori.
Samia mistook her silence for contemplation. She turned to face Rahima directly.
“You are young. There is much fire in your eyes.”
Rahima could tell Samia meant well, but she was simply tired of listening to the woman talk. And the only fire in Rahima was
the one burning in her esophagus. Samia probably gave the same rehearsed speech to all the women who arrived at the shelter’s
doorstep.
Rahima could bear it no longer.
“Help me get rid of this,” she pleaded. “There must be a doctor or someone who can help.”
Samia was silent for a beat, her expression flat.
“Is that what you really want?”
Rahima nodded.
Samia chewed her lip. “It’s not legal, you know. Unless your life is in danger.”
“I would not be in the shelter if my life were not in danger,” Rahima replied.
“That kind of danger doesn’t count.” Samia sighed. She stared at the bustle of traffic in the street before turning back to
Rahima. “Let me talk to someone I know.”
Rahima nodded with measured gratitude.
“I think it’s time to go, Marjan,” Samia said, then caught herself. “Goodness, so much talk about Marjan, I’ve called you by his name. Let’s get back. Please don’t breathe a word about this to anyone.”
Rahima felt Marjan’s eyes on her back as they left. She stole one more glance over her shoulder but could hardly see the zoo’s
entrance, her vision limited by the blue mesh. Two steps more and she mistook the backfire of an engine for the sound of a
detonation and nearly tripped over her own feet.