The Afgan Campaign

51

Shinar gives birth on the nineteenth of Artemisius. A healthy boy. We name him Elias. He weighs exactly the same as my pelta shield (about eight pounds) and fits handily inside its leather-and-bronze bowl. When I bathe him, he bawls like a trooper. He has ten fingers and ten toes and a tiny pink penis, with which, prone on his back, he spouts a stream like a marble fountain. I could not be more delighted. His birth has humbled me. Shinar, too, has changed. The boy has black hair like hers and hazel eyes like mine. A regular amalgam.

With the arrival of this little bundle, our life is altered forever. Vanished is my Narik ta? attitude toward death. To stay alive and be of use to this child has overnight become everything to me.

Flag and Stephanos visit to inspect this newest campaigner. He salutes their entrance with a stupendous defecation. My friends acclaim its volume and its manly stink. I could not be prouder if the child had produced a second Iliad.

I don’t want my boy to be a soldier. Let him teach music or practice the physician’s art. May he raise horses and cultivate the earth.

I am changed, yes. But Shinar is transformed. She is a mother now. I’m in awe of her. I fasten upon this aspiration: to see her in feminine converse with my mother. I want to watch them laughing together in our kitchen at Apollonia, or walking with little Elias in the hills above our home.

It occurs to me that my child has two cousins. The son and daughter of my sister Eleni and her husband Agathon. How I long to see these three toddlers at play! The night of our son’s birth, while mother and child slumber, I dig out my brother-in-law’s letter, which I have preserved among my kit these many months.

I sit now, watching my infant son…playing in the sunlight of the yard. Do you know, dear brother, that my own disfigurement had impressed itself so powerfully upon my imagination that when this child was born I expected that he, like me, would possess a stump instead of a limb. When I saw him whole and perfect, I wept. Through this babe I feel the whole world has been made new…

Six days after the birth, a bridal festival called Mazar Dar, “New Life,” is celebrated throughout the city. Its protagonist is the princess Roxane. The day is in her honor. The rites are for women only.

Something happens to Shinar during these rituals. She will not say what. But she is changed unmistakably on her return. Perhaps the cause is the warmth of being enveloped by scores of her countrywomen, cooing over her new son. Perhaps meeting and speaking with the many Afghan brides, who in days will take husbands of Greece and Macedon. I can’t say. But when she settles beside me in our bed that evening, she declares that she has changed her mind.

“Is it too late for us to get our names on the wedding list?”

“You mean get married?”

My sweetheart smiles. “If you will have me.”