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Word of Marjan’s return prompts the women of the hill to gather. They are invested in her story now, this young widow and
her child.
“You gave up so soon?” Kobra asks. “You’ve been trying for days. But today you just throw your hands up and come all the way
back here.”
Marjan nods, stone-faced.
“I don’t buy it,” Kobra declares. There are murmurs of agreement from the gathered women, whispers that encourage Kobra to
push harder, to demand answers on their behalf. “We’ve taken you and your daughter in. We’ve helped you. We deserve to know.
What are you hiding?”
Marjan purses her lips. She wonders where Zarifa and Elaha are right now. Being welcomed into another country maybe? There’s
been little talk about what happens after boarding an evacuation airplane.
“I am . . . I was a soldier,” Marjan says. “I served in the military, in a small unit of special forces.”
“But you’re a woman!” someone calls out, as if this is a revelation.
“The Taliban have our information. They’ve taken over all the ministries. They have our information, our files. They came
to our apartment. We evaded them once, but we won’t be able to trick them again. They are searching for people who worked
against them. I am one of them.”
“Make her leave!” a woman shouts. “We don’t need those men trampling through our homes. What will happen to us?”
Concern ripples through the room. Kobra tries to still the waters, but it’s more difficult because she herself is uneasy with Marjan’s presence.
She considers the mother and daughter before her, crosses her arms. No, it’s not Marjan’s presence that makes her uncomfortable.
It’s Marjan’s reticence. Most of the women on the hill are eager for someone to hear of their suffering, to know what they have endured.
Kobra, like a librarian, has spent her life surrounded by their stories.
With Marjan, she feels she’s opened a book only to find a chunk of pages torn out.
“Please take your daughter and go,” someone pleads. Hawa turns to the women, searches for the voice, but the women are murmuring
to each other.
“Hush! I have questions still,” Kobra says sharply. Marjan lets out a heavy breath. She feels as if she’s been dropped into
a mission with no intel, no time to strategize. “You have seen hell at the airport already. Today, you are quite shaken. Why
is that?”
“I haven’t slept in days. If we don’t get on a flight—”
Kobra takes another step toward Marjan, close enough to see the fine lines and purple shadows beneath her eyes.
“Who is he?” Kobra asks.
Marjan will not be tricked into answering a question that hasn’t been asked.
“You are frightened of him, even in your sleep,” she says. Marjan stiffens as Kobra takes a step closer. “I don’t sleep well
either. None of us do.”
“I was a soldier. I’m entitled to nightmares,” Marjan says.
Kobra shakes her head.
“It’s not war that haunts your sleep. It’s a man,” Kobra says. “Don’t take her. That’s what I heard you say. Who were you talking about? Who are you running from?”
Marjan’s lips press into a thin line.
Hawa looks to her mother. M-A-D-A-R, she thinks, though she does not know why the letters her mother traced onto her back with a fingertip have come to her now
on the palm of her hand. Hawa is unnerved to see her mother this way. She looks directly at Kobra.
“My mother has made a lot of enemies in her life,” Hawa says, her voice quavering. “But I’m the reason we are in danger.”
“Hawa—” Marjan starts to object, but Kobra raises a hand.
“Explain what you mean,” Kobra orders Hawa. Marjan is silent. She has succumbed to an understanding that this, too, is her
naseeb, a fate of her own making though not of her own design.
“My mother ran away from my father years ago. He is not a good man but he is powerful and angry. We saw him today at the airport.
He is looking for us. He’s looking for me.”
The room quiets.
“This changes nothing,” one woman says. “We cannot have her among us. We have our own children to think about!”
“I’m sorry,” Marjan says. “I thought we could hide safely among you. I never meant to put any of you or your children in danger.
I think . . . I think it is best that we go.”
“Where will you go? What will you do?” Kobra asks.
“I will find a way.” Marjan’s promise sounds more like a prayer.
She takes Hawa’s hand and feels a small squeeze.
“We cannot cast you onto the street just yet,” Kobra says.
Behind her, one woman clucks her tongue. Another curses her own terrible luck. And a third murmurs that God is merciful. There
is no consensus, of course, but there is respect for Kobra, a deference she’s earned over decades.
“You can think and plan here for now. You two,” Kobra says, pointing at the women standing by the doorway. “See what we can
offer them to eat.”
“Why are we doing this?” a woman mutters. “She’s not even a widow.”
“And don’t we all know that sometimes that is worse?” Kobra asks of her bereft neighbors. She is met with silence, a slow
dispersal of women and children into the yard. Marjan’s temples throb. She buckles, falls onto the cushion where she slept,
where Kobra overheard her mumbling, pleading with her demons—Don’t take her. She covers her face and sobs. She has never done this in front of Hawa, but she is capsized.
Hawa falls to her knees, touches her mother’s shoulder. She’s never seen her mother this way, unraveling. Hawa is unnerved by the sight, but she feels something else too, something she can’t name. Like a hand has wiped the fog from the mirror she’s been gazing into.
Don’t take her, her mother had said in her sleep. Her mother wanted her. Her mother would not leave her. Her mother was fighting for her.
“Let your mother rest a bit. You, daughter of a soldier, can join the others outside,” Kobra says, ushering Hawa out of the
room. Hawa obeys, wanting to get some air. Outside, two little girls stand behind a timid sapling, hoping it isn’t obvious
they are eyeing her.
Hawa tucks her hair behind her ears, avoids their gaze. She sits on the ground outside Kobra’s home and prepares to stay vigilant
while her mother rests. It is, she imagines, what a soldier would do.
“Hey,” a girl with long brown hair calls. “Is your mother really a soldier?”
Hawa nods. Two more children join, a shaggy-haired boy and a girl wearing a faded green dress with crepey sleeves and a panel
of embroidery on her chest.
“I told you,” the little girl whispers to him. They walk around the tree and sit cross-legged on either side of Hawa.
Four more children join. The circle widens.
“Is your mother the only one?”
“No,” Hawa said, thinking of Khala Soraya. “There were others.”
“Has she ridden in a tank?”
“Can she fly a jet?”
“Is she a sniper?”
“How many terrorists has she killed?”
Hawa has all these questions herself, and more. She has never seen her mother in this light, a woman to be admired. Even feared.
“I can’t talk about it. It’s all top secret,” she says, because it feels good and is probably true. She hopes one day she’ll
know everything there is to know.
“Were you learning to be a soldier?”
“No, of course not. I was . . . I was learning to play the rubab.”
“If I were going to play an instrument, I would have chosen the tabla,” a boy declares. He points his elbows out to his sides and begins to wiggle his fingers across imagined drums.
“I like the sound of the harmonium,” a girl says, grinning. “And I would pick the tambourine for my baby sister. She’s good
at clapping.”
Hawa misses her rubab, misses the way it fills the hollow of her lap, the space she has carved out for it in the same way
the mulberry tree is hollowed to make space for music. In the same way that silence makes space for sound and hurt makes way
for healing.
Pick up your rubab, Ustad Rafiqi had once said to her. He repeated the instrument’s name a second and third time, splitting it down its center
and revealing its essence as if it were an exotic fruit. Ru-bab. “Ruh” means soul. You know this. And in Arabic, “bab” means door. Watch your audience and you’ll see that the notes from this instrument are indeed a gateway to the spirit.
“I want to hear you play music,” a small girl says, the one chosen for the tambourine. She falls into her older sister’s lap.
Hawa does not have a rubab, but she does have the wooden flute in her bag, the bag that sits just outside Kobra’s home. She
retrieves the tula and returns to her audience. It is the simplest of instruments, one that they used to teach the basics
of music to all students. She positions her fingers on the holes in the lacquered shaft, brings the tula to her lips. There
is only one song she knows. It is a spare, doleful melody. The children’s heads and trunks sway to the rhythm, as if they
are once again in the arms of their mothers. As if they are sky-bound sunflowers in a summer breeze.
The children don’t know the lyrics, but the women on the hill do. The music stops them in their tracks, penetrates their thoughts.
Hawa sees the rapt faces of her audience and continues. They are unaccustomed to this proximity to music, this contact with
its elemental form. It is the difference between looking at a picture of fire and feeling one’s hands warmed by a flame.
The song could go on forever. How will she know when to stop?
Further down the hill, a woman lifts the corner of the tarp and considers the dirt path, the small trees, the railings.
She is tired and has spent all day calling herself a fool, fighting the urge to turn around.
She sees nothing beyond the tarp. Her headscarf clings to the sweat on her brow, and her breathing is heavy.
She doesn’t have the energy to go up this hill and can’t imagine this is anywhere useful anyway.
She drops the tarp and takes a step back toward the road but stops when she hears the sound of a lonely flute, the kind a shepherd would use to soothe his flock, and she follows the notes up the hill.
Hawa holds the last, low note then sets down her flute. The children follow her gaze to the approaching stranger, a woman
with a familiar face. The woman drops her bag and lets her headscarf fall to her neck.
“Hawa. I can’t believe I found you,” she says.