53
Oh my God, Jenna writes. Are you sure? Did you confirm this?
If Marjan hadn’t seen Soraya’s lifeless body, she would have doubted the news as well. She has spent the last couple of hours
trying not to think of Soraya’s final breaths, the fight she surely put up.
Yes, I saw her. She is gone, Marjan confirms. She and Hawa are standing just around the corner from a main road. She needs to regroup before they head
to the airport for one more try.
Her cousin? WTF, Jenna says.
She was such a warrior. I’m so sorry, Krista writes.
Marjan sighs at this strange turn of phrase, this mixing of guilt and sympathy. It is fitting for her. She is sorry. She is
so sorry. Fatigue is wearing her down. She is living in exile in her own homeland, a homeland for which she has risked her
life.
She tells the group chat that she is heading to the airport now and asks if there are any instructions for which gate she
should get to. Hawa watches the exchange of messages over her shoulder.
We need you to catch the attention of the marines at the gate. What color is your headscarf?
It is blue with gray stripes.
Do you have something brighter? Something that will stand out?
Marjan wants to scream. She has been doing all she can to avoid standing out. Why must she be all things at once? Invisible and obvious. Strong and gentle. Brave and cautious. Mother and father. She leans her head back against the concrete wall.
“Madar?” Hawa’s voice is shaky. “Why did Khala Soraya’s cousin kill her?”
Marjan is too depleted to be anything but truthful.
“Khala Soraya and I were part of a special military unit. We were soldiers. Her cousin did not like that she did this work.
He accused her of shaming their family.”
“But you always told me you were . . . You were soldiers? Real soldiers with guns?”
Marjan nods.
“And you were fighting the Taliban?” Hawa asks.
“Yes. That’s why they’re looking for us. We were responsible for sending many of them to prison. Now they want revenge.”
In the end, the truth was so simple. So effortless.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” she asks.
Marjan hesitates. Hawa does not look away.
“I have not,” she says. Hawa blinks quickly. Marjan had hoped that the day she finally revealed her story to her daughter,
it would have been a careful excavation, not a crate tipped over, contents spilled.
“Is that the truth?” her daughter asks.
“I never needed to,” Marjan replies honestly. But the truth buried in the truth is that she would have fired her weapon if
she’d needed to; she would have taken a life to save her own, to save her sisters in uniform, to save her country.
“What about Khala Soraya?” she asks, unflinching.
“It was the same for her. Khala Soraya was a great soldier. We trained together and rode in helicopters and went on night
missions. We worked with the American soldiers. That’s why they’re trying to help us get out now. But you mustn’t say anything
about this to anyone. Understand?”
Hawa nods.
“But you never told me about a helicopter. And all those nights you were gone.”
Marjan can see Hawa trying to organize her questions. She presses her hands to her head and then turns to her mother with one question that must have risen above the others.
“Who is sending you those messages?”
“Those are American women. They are the soldiers we served with and they’re trying to help.”
“No,” Hawa says. “Not the messages in English. The other messages, from someone who says you should save yourself and your
daughter from him. Who is she talking about?”
Marjan’s vision blurs. Her heart pounds in her chest. When did Hawa go looking through her messages? And why must she be confronted
with this now? Here?
“She’s a friend. She was just talking about the Taliban.” Marjan has been consumed with thoughts of Shahla. Has she been punished
for their secret communications? She can do nothing but pray.
“Which friend?” Hawa asks. “I’ve not heard you talking about another friend.”
“You haven’t met her. She’s from a long time ago.”
“How does she know you’re in danger?”
Marjan is quiet for a moment. Hawa’s life has been shaped by the story Marjan has told her, in the same way a body is shaped
by the bones within it. What happens when those bones are broken and rearranged? Will Hawa come undone?
“I was given as a bride to a terrible man,” she tells Hawa. “I told you that he died but that is not the truth. I ran away
from him. And the person warning me is my sister. She is married to his cousin.”
A Taliban police truck drives past them. Marjan turns her face away from them. They walk a couple of steps so that she can
check the surroundings. She must remain vigilant.
“My father is alive?” Hawa asks, and her mother nods. One question gives way to ten more.
“Where is he? What does he know about me? What does he look like?”
Marjan hadn’t imagined revealing to Hawa the truth about Abdul Khaliq on a street corner while he was lurking in the vicinity.
“He does not live in Kabul, but he is here,” Marjan explains. She tells Hawa the briefest version of her encounter with Shahla.
She tells her about Abdul Khaliq’s alliances with the Taliban and the message from Shahla’s son. Hawa’s father surely knows
about them now, is looking for them. She feels immense relief in unburdening herself of this secret, almost forgetting that
Hawa is her child, not a confidante.
He was a terrible man, Hawa thinks, because she feels the familiar bloom of longing in the cavity of her chest. But was he very, very terrible?
Hawa senses she should not ask this question.
“I was so young. I was only thirteen when I was given to him, just a little older than you are now. And he was a grown man,
a very powerful man who always got his way.”
Hawa struggles to understand this. She is awfully close to thirteen and cannot imagine being given away to a man.
“I’m sorry I kept this all from you, but you were so young. I couldn’t risk anyone finding out.”
Her mother couldn’t trust Hawa to keep her secrets. This strikes Hawa as almost funny, considering how many secrets she has
kept from her mother. She never told her that she used to wet the bed at the orphanage, the shame she felt having to ball
up the sheets before anyone could see. Pointless, of course. Her bare mattress told the whole story. She never told her mother
about the girl who cut off a chunk of her hair. Khanum Atefa had to trim her hair short just to even it out. She’d never told
her mother that she’d tried to endear herself to another girl’s mother, a woman who came every week and showered her daughter
with affection. True, Hawa squirmed out of Marjan’s hugs but not because she hadn’t wanted them. It felt good to see her mother’s
crestfallen expression, the hurt so plain on her face. It also felt terrible, and Hawa would cry after those visits, wishing
for her mother to come back so that she could apologize and be held in her mother’s embrace, a pearl tucked inside her steadfast
shell.
But her mother knows none of this because Hawa is very, very good at keeping secrets.
“The airport is our only choice right now, Hawa, janem,” she pleads, readying herself for her daughter’s protests.
Hawa’s eyes glisten.
“Okay, let’s go,” she tells her mother, watches her dry her tears with her sleeve and straighten her shoulders. Her mother
reaches for her hand and Hawa gives it to her because she can see her mother needs it.
They turn the corner and join the bustle on the street. Uncertainty hangs in the hot Kabul air. A woman is trying to sell
kitchen appliances to a skeptical restaurant owner. A fruit vendor counts the afghanis he has collected today and wonders
if these bills will be worth more as kindling next week.
“Madar, wait!” Hawa says when they are halfway down the block. She points to a rack of fabrics hanging in a shop, a rectangle
of space with its narrow walls covered in chadoris, long headscarves, and burqas. Toward the back of the store is a stack
of brightly colored fabrics, each folded and contained in plastic sheaths. Marjan squeezes her daughter’s soft hand. They
take a step toward the store, take cover from the sun under its short awning.
“Agha, how much for one of those headscarves?” Marjan asks the shop owner, a bald man with a scruffy beard and generous belly.
The owner does a double take. There is a reason he has pushed those colorful scarves to the back of his little shop. It is
the hijabs and burqas that are selling these days. Last month, he sold no more than five each day. Yesterday, he sold seventeen.
“These?” he asks, as if Marjan has made a mistake. “Sister, this will not cover much.”
She points again to the back.
“That one,” she repeats.
The store owner shrugs. He can’t save everyone.
“Twelve hundred afghanis,” he says.
“Twelve hundred?” she asks, incredulous. “That’s three times what they usually cost!” But he insists it’s a fair price and suggests she check any other store to see for herself.
Marjan checks her phone, then pulls her wallet out of her bag.
“Which color do you prefer?” he asks while she counts out the bills.
“Your least popular color,” Marjan says. The man raises an eyebrow, takes a sip of tea from a paper cup, then pulls out an
orange headscarf from the pile, and hands it to her unceremoniously. There is a woman behind her eyeing the hijabs. He can’t
afford to lose a customer.
Marjan and Hawa continue another hundred meters before they find an empty taxi. Will this be the last ride to the airport?
This city is closing in on them.
Hawa has opened her bag on her lap. She touches the body of the tula, reassures herself of its presence. If she could, she
would have packed music books and a rubab into her bag. Since she’s dreaming of the impossible, why stop there? She would
have packed the entire youth orchestra and her instructors, the founder of the music school and the brick building that witnessed
her transformation from an orphan into a musician. She would have built an ark so she could save them all from this flood.
But she is just a girl with two hands and salt water lapping at her knees.