12
“Hawa,” Marjan whispers. “It’s time to wake up, Hawa. Just like we talked about last night. Hawa? Are you awake?”
She is now. Barely. It was four o’clock in the morning, and Hawa was in the thick of a nettling dream. She was on a small
stage with a handful of her classmates, their faces blurry but for Layma’s. Someone urged her to hurry. The audience was waiting
for the music to start, but when Hawa looked down, she realized her lap was empty, tragically light. There was no rubab to
play.
“Please, Hawa,” Marjan pleads. Hawa rolls onto her side. She slowly realizes her mother’s voice had infiltrated her dream.
“If we wait much longer, the lines will be very long,” Marjan says. She is no longer whispering. The passport office has been
swarmed with people desperate for documents. Some have taken to laying a blanket on the sidewalk and spending the night outside
the office doors.
Hawa sits up, the mist of her dream evaporating as yesterday’s conversation comes back to her. Her mother has said before
that they needed to leave Kabul, but it never seemed like a real plan. Now it’s an emergency, an absolute. Hawa’s not sure
what will happen to them if they fail. She rubs her fists against her eyes so hard that Marjan grabs her wrists.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “I’m up.”
Hawa stands. She reaches for the light switch, but her mother stops her.
“We don’t need to let all the neighbors know we’re awake,” Marjan says. She lights a small candle, and Hawa moves quickly and quietly, dressing herself by its glow.
Marjan paces the room. In such a small space, pacing amounts to spinning in circles. It is dizzying to watch, so Hawa focuses
on fixing her headscarf.
“Madar?” Hawa whispers.
Marjan is looking at the glowing screen of her phone, perplexed. She begins tapping.
Hawa goes into the small kitchen, a galley where only one person can comfortably stand. She pours herself water and takes
a sip.
Her mother always seems to be elsewhere, even when she is close enough that Hawa can hear her breathing. When she can convince
her mother to watch a sketch comedy show on television, Hawa notices the stretch of time it takes for a joke to make her mother
smile, as if the humor has further to travel before it can reach her. Sometimes it does not find her at all, and Hawa feels
the smile on her own face dissipate.
It’s only when Hawa is ill that the chasm between them vanishes. Marjan’s hand lingers on her daughter’s forehead. She peppers
her with questions and spoon-feeds her tea with crushed ginger and expensive threads of saffron. She pulls the blanket over
Hawa’s shoulders and brushes her bangs to the side with a feathery touch. She is quick to take her daughter to the clinic
down the road, where the doctor presses the cold bell of the stethoscope to her chest and tells her to breathe deeply. Marjan
searches the doctor’s face while Hawa stares at her mother’s. Hawa’s energies are slow to return so that Marjan is always
late to realize that the cough, the fever, and the stuffy nose have long gone.
When Hawa is not ill, her body finds other ways to draw her mother near. She takes to bed with a headache. She picks at old
scabs. She barely touches her dinner. None of it is intentional but it works. A species survives only because the young have
the gift of adaptation.
“If you’re wondering why I didn’t just leave you with Ingrid and go to the office alone, it’s because I don’t know what they will tell me. If they demand to see you or want to take pictures, it’s better we are both there. We don’t have time to wait on these lines twice.”
Hawa’s eyes have adjusted, opened by the intrigue of the hour and her mother’s determination to accomplish what seems like
an impossible task. It is rare to find women living alone in this world. Hawa wishes she had more family, a father and siblings
and aunts and uncles. But she also swells with pride to think that her mother does the work of two parents. Sometimes she
takes out the photograph her mother keeps tucked in her belongings, a photo of seven women dressed in military uniforms, firearms
at their sides. Her mother is in the middle, somber-faced, while the other women smile brightly. The photo is from a training
exercise, her mother had told her. Even soldiers who spend their days battling paperwork must know how to hold a weapon. She
wishes her mother were more of a warrior, instead of a worrier.
Marjan locks the apartment door behind them. They move down the stairwells and slip into the quiet street. City lights glow
against an indigo sky. Hawa hears the sharp bark of a dog, but she cannot tell if the beast is around the corner or ten blocks
away. Sound reverberates against the concrete blast walls of the city and the facades of buildings, obscuring distances.
“Madar, how long do you think we’ll have to wait?” Hawa asks.
“I’m not sure. Let’s get there and see what the line looks like,” Marjan says, checking the time on her phone. She opens up
her messages, and Hawa tries to peek at the screen. “Where is he?” she mutters.
Hawa’s mother paid a taxi driver handsomely to pick them up at this hour. They were to meet the driver just beyond the borders
of the apartment complex, but there are no cars around. Moth-eaten clouds sneak past a sliver of a moon as the minutes tick
by.
“What if he does not come?” Hawa asks. “Will we still go?”
Marjan bites her lip. She doesn’t answer her daughter’s question. Hawa prepares to ask again, when her mother’s phone buzzes.
“Damn him. He says this road is blocked. We have to get to him,” Marjan relays.
She holds Hawa’s hand tightly in her own, watching the shadows. The streets have become treacherous in the past couple of
years. Kidnappers and thieves. Young men floundering without jobs, looking for shortcuts. Feral dogs who rest by day and roam
by night. Hungry and resentful, they travel in packs.
A man passes on a bicycle. He stares long and hard at the mother and daughter, and Hawa feels her heart thumping even after
he’s ridden past them. He is still visible when he laughs inexplicably. Hawa’s mother leads them across the street, picking
up her pace. Will the man circle back? She listens for the susurration of the bicycle’s chain.
Hawa yearns for the azaan, wishing a call to prayer would awaken the city and send people into the streets.
“What if he’s left?” Hawa asks.
But the taxi sits at the corner, lights and engine off. Marjan and Hawa make their way down the sidewalk, a network of interlocked
gray pavers under their feet. Marjan approaches the driver’s window first. The driver rolls down his window and nods at Marjan.
“Salaam,” Marjan says, keeping her tone formal. He responds in kind, makes no mention of his tardiness. “You were supposed
to be here ten minutes ago.”
“Forgive me,” he says. “I was praying.”
The taxi driver’s face is mostly in shadow, but Hawa feels in her gut that he is being spiteful.
Hawa notices the white curl of an earbud and the glint of a silver chain on his neck.
He rests his arm on the open car window, the sleeve of his checkered shirt rolled up to the elbow.
Marjan’s eyes shift to the back of the car and then to the street.
Hawa knows what’s making her mother hesitate.
She’s warned her daughter often to be wary of men, to avoid getting into a room or even a conversation with one.
Her mother has not told her what a man might do to her, but Hawa never felt the need to ask.
Her body seems to know and stiffens when she sees something primal in a man’s stance or his eyes.
She pretends not to hear the comments some men make to the women who pass them, especially those who wear a dash of lipstick or shoes with a bit of a heel.
“Shall we go then?” the taxi driver asks.
“Yes.” Marjan looks at her daughter, then at their apartment building. She runs some kind of calculation and decides to get
into the back seat of the car.
The taxi driver adjusts his rearview mirror. When his eyes meet Hawa’s, she instinctively looks out the window, into the dark
streets. The car merges onto the main road, the one that will lead them southwest to the passport office. The driver reaches
across the gear stick and plucks a tall, red aluminum can from the passenger seat. He pops the tab of an energy drink.
“Why is her father not with you?” he asks with a nod in Hawa’s direction. “Has he already left the country?”
Hawa sees her mother’s jaw tense and feels the muddle of feelings she always experiences when the question of her father comes
up. She has next to nothing of him, not a single picture and only the vaguest of stories.
Marjan does not respond to the taxi driver’s question. She rests one hand on her daughter’s knee and keeps her eyes on the
surroundings, alert as the soldier she cannot admit to being. Hawa sits up straight and pulls her shoulders back, mimicking
her mother’s posture. The daily congestion has not yet begun, so within minutes they arrive at the passport office. People
mill around the building, mostly men.
“It’s not a good idea to come here alone,” the taxi driver says.
“I’ve hired you to drive, not to counsel me,” Marjan replies.
“You’re only paying for the ride. I won’t charge you a cent for the advice,” the driver says with a laugh.
“It’s worth less than that,” she mutters.
Hawa hides her smile with her hand.
“If you’re unsuccessful at the passport office, don’t worry.
I am happy to drive you around. And you don’t need to sit in the back seat either.
It’s a better view of the road from here,” he says, and it’s evident he thinks himself quite clever.
He doesn’t see the harm of flirting. It gives a truly virtuous woman a chance to demonstrate her character and it gives the less virtuous the pleasure of his company.
Kabul is full of noble women, but that won’t deter him from his quest.
Hawa can almost feel the heat coming off her mother’s body. She knows her mother is biting her tongue, and she wishes she
wouldn’t. She likes it better when her mother fires back at people, wiping smirks off faces with a few words. Hawa is happiest
when her mother is a sharp pin, pricking at a world of hyperinflated egos.
“Here is fine,” Marjan declares, then turns to Hawa. “Get out of the car.” They’ve reached the passport office, the entrance
blocked by a growing cluster of people. The line trails along the side of the building and down the sidewalk. How long have
these people been here? Hawa wonders. Her mother takes her by the hand and leads her toward the tangle of people. Some have
black plastic bags in their hands, thin and crinkled. One man appears to be sleeping upright. It is not hard to find Soraya.
“There she is!” Hawa calls out, relieved to see her aunt. Soraya waves them over from a couple hundred meters away. She is
wearing a khaki coat that cuts at her knees and cinches neatly at the waist with a belt. Her makeup is understated, a better
fit for the hour and purpose of their outing.
“Sorry we had to drag you out of bed,” Soraya coos, pulling Hawa in for a tight embrace and planting a kiss on her cheek.
Hawa loves so much about Khala Soraya, the way she can speak of the scandal of a mismatched outfit with the same energy others
give to politics. And when Khala Soraya leaves lipstick imprints on her cheeks, Hawa slips into the bathroom to see what the
touch of color looks like on her face, to see if she can look pretty too.
“I don’t mind,” Hawa says, ever eager to please her vibrant aunt.
“You’re such a good sport, my lovely. And maybe you’ll bring us some luck today.”
Soraya steps back so that they can say hello to her brother, Temur, who has been standing behind his sister, scrolling on
his phone. Temur nods at Marjan and Hawa, presses a hand to his chest, then returns to his phone.
Two people further back in the line grumble loudly about Marjan and Hawa jumping the queue.
“We’re one family,” Soraya calls out loudly. She dismisses their complaint with a wave of her hand. “She’s my husband’s second
wife. Temur, tell them.”
Temur cuts his eyes at his sister then turns away, clearly embarrassed. Soraya is colorful, with or without her lipstick.
“More people show up every minute,” Soraya shares. “We can’t even see how far back it goes now. Have you heard anything from
Jenna?”
Marjan shakes her head.
Updates move up and down the line. The Taliban have claimed more territory, closing a border crossing into Pakistan. People
forced from their homes have gathered under tents far enough away to escape the sounds of gunfire. A media director was executed
while at the masjid for prayers. It’s not all dismal. There is the occasional spot of encouraging news. The military’s special
forces have won back a major city.
“We have a good army. They’ll win it all back, you’ll see,” someone says loudly. “And who wants America here anyway? I’m tired
of their bombs and puppet presidents and midnight raids. Let them find another country to use as a testing ground for their
weapons.”
Soraya and Marjan stiffen. Hawa senses they’re avoiding each other’s gazes, concealing any reaction to what’s been said. Hawa
wonders if Soraya hides as much as her mother does. Marjan’s instructed Hawa not to mention to her classmates or teachers
or neighbors that her mother is in the military and to never admit that her mother’s been trained by American soldiers. Some
see ties to the American military as boasting, others as betrayal.
“Khala, what if the office doesn’t open?” Hawa asks.
While Soraya searches for an answer, the sound of the azaan ripples through the air. Prayer is better than sleep, the muezzin
promises. Hawa has heard plenty of prayers standing on this line.
“The office will open because it has to, my doll,” Soraya says, finally finding words. “Say a dua that we’ll have our turn
today. God listens to the prayers of children. Your heart is pure, more than any adult’s by far.”
Pray for what, exactly? If they get these passports, where will they go? America? The thought terrifies Hawa, who has never been more than two hours outside of Kabul.
She tries to pray in silence, but the doubts and questions swirling in her head drown out her thoughts. If she cannot hear
herself, is there any way to imagine that God can hear her? She inches closer to her mother and waits for the timid dawn to
displace night.