13
One week before she was scheduled to move out of the shelter and into the halfway house, Marjan stopped sleeping. Utterly
alert at night, she heard every cricket, every distant car sound, every hiss of an old pipe. During the day, she found herself
nodding off while she was folding laundry or even while she was spooning mashed rice and lentils into Hawa’s eager mouth.
The lack of sleep frayed her nerves. One moment, she would marvel at her growing, thriving daughter and feel determined to
succeed if only for her. A moment later, she would realize the price of milk and oil and flour and be racked with terror that
she would fail as a mother. She was a passenger on an erratic flight, awed at her soaring height one moment and throttled
by the turbulence the next.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she told Samia. “Sometimes I think I’m capable and sometimes I fear I’ll fail at everything. Which
do I believe? Which is true?”
“Ah, sweet girl, everything is true!” Samia laughed. “You are right to be terrified. And you’re right to feel capable. The
trick is to feel both without letting it jam you up too much. Being afraid that you won’t provide for your daughter will push
you when you need to be pushed. And you’ll need to feel capable on those days when you realize this city is made of more walls
than doors and you’ve got to convince people that you deserve a chance. And one more thing, my darling. All of this is infinitely
harder alone. Find yourself a circle of women, even if that circle is very small.”
What Samia said made logical sense but did little to temper the highs and lows of Marjan’s moods.
She resigned herself to living with the head spin, hoping she would grow steadier with time.
She was still a teenager and younger than any of the other women in the shelter.
She’d kept to herself, which meant she’d not heard their stories, hadn’t learned from their experiences.
She was expert at meeting their questions with a shrug of her shoulders, a sudden headache, a need for sleep.
Their first weeks in the halfway home tested Marjan in every way. She and Hawa had to share a room with six other women. Their
sleeping quarters were a single large room with metal-framed bunkbeds lined against the walls and three large windows that
drenched the space in light. The room had an eggplant-colored carpet with white lines running across it in a zigzag pattern.
Marjan didn’t mind that it wasn’t traditional. It was the kind of machine-made carpet that was sold off giant spools and lacked
warmth. But the real issue was that it felt rough as burlap and made her feel like she was going cross-eyed whenever she opened
her door to enter the room.
To Marjan, the women seemed listless. While they all had run away from abusive homes, very few were running toward anything better. They cared for their children and made small talk and sometimes even revealed the lives they had dreamed
of for themselves in their youth, before something essential had been beaten out of them.
She thought of the women she met in the Parliament when she was accompanying her illiterate sister wife, the one who had been
placed there as a puppet for their warlord husband. Those women moved and spoke as if they were up against a ticking clock.
She remembered one parliamentarian who narrowly survived her car being struck by gunfire, then returned to a voting session
with bandages covering where glass had sliced through her skin. She thought of her beloved Khala Shaima, crippled but still
bright as a summer day. Marjan felt her feet drag, her thinking slow. Her own fire was dampening, slipping into a winter of
the soul.
So when she met Aneesa, she did not pull away.
“Ah, God bless those fat little feet!” Aneesa cheered when she saw Hawa. Aneesa had already been living in the halfway house when Hawa moved in. On Marjan’s second day at the house, when all the other women were tied up with classes or work, she shared her own story.
Aneesa’s husband had both a heavy fist and a taste for liquor, a combination that meant two years of misery for Aneesa. On
the eve of her sister’s wedding, on a night for women and henna and dancing, Aneesa had put on her finest dress and done up
her makeup. She was taking their toddler with her. She was sure her husband would spend the evening doing what he usually
did, scrolling through mindless videos on his phone and snacking. She had tried not to look too excited to be heading to a
party for once, but there must have been a bit too much cheer in her voice when she called to their daughter, Roqia, that
it was time to put shoes on.
His fist hit the coffee table first. That was her only warning, and it hardly gave her enough time to process what was happening
before he slapped her across the face so hard that he sent her spinning. Her daughter watched her mother’s skirt twirl like
that of a dervish, as tiny coins sewn onto the hem lifted and fell. With one more blow, her husband slammed Aneesa’s head
against the wall and she crumpled to the floor in an unconscious heap.
Aneesa never made it to the party. She didn’t make it to the wedding either. She woke in the middle of the night still on
the floor with a massive headache. Roqia had fallen asleep next to her; her cheeks bore the tracks of dried tears. The next
morning, Aneesa made her husband breakfast and carried on as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This was tragically
easy to do.
Her family had been furious with her for not coming to the henna party and the wedding. Her thin excuses about not feeling
well had left them only angrier.
Four days after the wedding, her sister showed up at her house to make clear how betrayed she felt.
She took one look at Aneesa’s battered face and realized what had kept her sister from coming to her henna party.
They plotted her escape, and within forty-eight hours, Aneesa found herself in the shelter with her daughter.
The team at the shelter had tried to work with her husband, to rehabilitate them as a family and talk about nonviolent communications.
They quoted verses from the Quran that required husbands to protect their wives.
They reminded him that the prophet himself never struck his wives.
He laughed. What did a bunch of women know about the prophet?
Talaaq, talaaq, talaaq! he had shouted, as he waved a thick finger in her face. And with the word “divorce” repeated three times, he formally severed
their union.
The only silver lining was that, despite his right to claim their daughter, he had no interest in being responsible for her.
Aneesa and her daughter were more comfortable in the halfway house than they had ever been at home. Aneesa was working as
a seamstress in a high-end fashion boutique. They both slept better and smiled more, and Aneesa was hoping to soon find a
place for them, a life she could never have imagined before her marriage.
Hawa stood up, took a few steps toward her rag doll across the room, then looked over her shoulder to confirm her mother was
bearing witness to this triumph. Her cheeks were round, still cherubic. The colic of her first months was a distant memory.
It was almost as if she had gotten all her crying out of the way so that she could spend her time smiling and babbling now.
“She must have grown tired of all that rug burn from crawling on this carpet,” Marjan said.
Aneesa laughed.
“Watch out. She’ll be outrunning you soon,” she warned Marjan. Aneesa did not know that Hawa was not Marjan’s first child.
They knew her only by the simple story Marjan had grown accustomed to telling—a widowed woman who had escaped an abusive family
of in-laws.
Aneesa and Marjan became friends, both of them young and determined. Roqia was two years older than Hawa. They held hands
and shared toys. The sight made Marjan miss her four sisters, especially Parwin.
She wondered if there would be any reunions with her other sisters or family members in this life. She didn’t see how it was
possible. She feared any attempt to get in touch with them would signal her whereabouts to Abdul Khaliq.
“You know, Eid is only five days away,” Aneesa said. “Do you have any plans?”
“Oh, maybe I’ll take Hawa to the park. She loves playing in the grass and watching the water fountains. I think she’s just
earned herself an ice cream too.”
“You both deserve an ice cream,” Aneesa advised. “Will you visit anyone?”
Though they were similar in so many ways, Aneesa’s situation differed from Marjan’s. She still had her parents and siblings
to deal with, her uncles and even a grandmother. Her divorce had brought sufficient shame to their family. They refused to
magnify it by having her move back in with her parents, and still encouraged her to try to reconcile with her husband. This
stung Aneesa, but she understood. She couldn’t bear to cut herself off from her family. They still cared for her and doted
on her daughter.
Marjan shook her head.
“I have no one in Kabul. But it’s okay. It’s better this way,” she said. A month ago, she had worked up the nerve to send
a letter to her khala Shaima. She had signed it Bibi Shekiba, the ancestor whose name only her aunt would recognize. She was
certain Khala Shaima was worried about her, and Marjan wanted to put her mind at ease. Marjan didn’t share her location, so
there was no way for her aunt to respond, no way for Marjan to know if she ever received the letter or if she was even still
alive.
“Maybe we can visit the market and pick up new clothes for the girls?” Aneesa suggested.
Marjan liked the idea. She had just started working as a teacher in the halfway house. She wasn’t earning much, but it was
the first time she had earned anything at all, and she quickly learned that she relished the feel of paper bills between her
fingers. She was practically floating with joy, as if they had given her wings instead of a few colorful afghanis. That was,