The Swallows of Kabul

Twelve

ATIQ SHAUKAT doesn’t understand all at once. A kind of trigger sets off a reaction in him, and a paralyzing wave like an ice-cold shower traverses him from head to foot. The pot he’s holding slips from his hands and crashes to the floor, scattering little wads of rice in the dust. For three or four seconds, he thinks he’s hallucinating. Staggered by the apparition that has just struck him full force, he withdraws to his cubbyhole to recover his wits. The light from the window assaults him; the shouts of the children playing war games outside throw him into confusion. He sinks down on his camp bed, presses his fingers to his temples, and curses the Evil One repeatedly in an attempt to remove his baleful influence.

“La hawla!”

After his head has partially cleared, Atiq goes back into the hallway to get the pot. He replaces its lid, which had rolled some distance away, and picks up the clumps of rice sprinkled across the floor. As he cleans up, he cautiously lifts his eyes to the roof beam looming over the cell like a bird of evil augury, and his gaze lingers on the anemic little lightbulb, growing steadily dimmer in its ceiling socket. Screwing his courage to the sticking point, he walks back to the lone occupied cell, and there, in the very middle of the cage, the magical vision: the prisoner has removed her burqa! She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor. Her elbows are on her knees, her hands are joined under her chin. She’s praying. Atiq is thunderstruck. Never before has he seen such splendor. With her goddess’s profile, her long hair spread across her back, and her enormous eyes, like horizons, the condemned woman is beautiful beyond imagination. She’s like a dawn, gathering brightness in the heart of this poisonous, squalid, fatal dungeon.

Except for his wife’s, Atiq hasn’t seen a woman’s face for many years. He’s even learned to live without such sights. For him, women are only ghosts, voiceless, charmless ghosts that pass practically unnoticed along the streets; flocks of infirm swallows — blue, yellow, often faded, several seasons behind — that make a mournful sound when they come into the proximity of men.

And all at once, a veil falls and a miracle appears. Atiq can’t get over it. A complete, solid woman? A genuine, tangible woman’s face, also complete, right there in front of him? He’s been cut off from such a forbidden sight for so long that he believed it had been banished even from people’s imaginations. When he was a young man, just emerging from adolescence, he profaned the sanctuary of a couple of girl cousins in order to spy on them in secret, feasting his senses on their outbursts of laughter, their physical loveliness, the litheness of their movements. He’d even fallen in love with an Uzbek schoolteacher, whose endless braids made her way of walking as much of an enchantment as a mystical dance. At that impressionable age, when fables, like traditions and prejudices, pathetically live on, resisting all assaults, Atiq was convinced that he had but to dream of a girl and he would glimpse a corner of Paradise. Of course, this was not the surest way to get there, but it was the least inhuman.

Then all that came to an end; that world of bold delight is gone, broken up and crumbled away. Dreams have veiled their faces. A hood with latticed eyeholes has come down and confiscated everything: laughs, smiles, glances, dimpled cheeks, fringed eyelashes. .

The following morning, Atiq is still sitting in the hallway, facing the prisoner. He realizes that he’s stayed up the entire night, and that he hasn’t taken his eyes off her for an instant. He feels completely odd, light-headed and sore-throated. He has the sensation that he’s waking up inside someone else’s skin. With the force of a sudden possession, something has overwhelmed him, invaded his innermost recesses. It animates his thoughts, quickens his pulse, regiments his breathing, inhabits his least tremor; sometimes he pictures it as a reed, but rigid and unyielding, and sometimes it’s like some sort of reptilian ivy, winding itself around his very existence.

Atiq doesn’t even try to make sense of all this. He feels no pain, but a vertiginous, implacable sensation, an exhilaration bordering on ecstasy, overcomes him, reducing him to such a state that he even forgets to perform his morning ablutions. It’s as though he were under a spell, except that this is no spell. Atiq ponders the seriousness of his impropriety, measures it, and dismisses it. He lets himself go somewhere— somewhere close and yet very far away — where he can listen attentively to his own most imperceptible pulsations while remaining deaf to the most peremptory calls to order.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER?” Musarrat asks. “That’s the fifth time you’ve salted your rice, and you haven’t even tasted it yet. And you keep on putting the water cup to your mouth without ever taking a sip.”

Atiq gazes stupidly at his wife. He doesn’t seem to grasp the meaning of her words. His hands are trembling, his heart is racing, and now and again his breathing is afflicted by a kind of suffocation. On wobbly legs, his head emptied of thought, he walked home, but he can’t recall how; he doesn’t remember meeting anyone on the streets of his district, streets where he can’t ordinarily venture without being hailed or greeted by many acquaintances. He has never before in his life known the condition in which he’s been languishing since the previous evening. He’s not hungry; he’s not thirsty. The world around him doesn’t so much as graze his consciousness. What he’s experiencing is at once prodigious and terrifying, but he wouldn’t be rid of it for all the gold on earth: He feels fine.

“What’s wrong with you, Atiq?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“God be praised, you can hear. I was afraid you’d been struck deaf and dumb.”

“What can you be talking about?”

“Nothing,” Musarrat says, giving up.

Atiq replaces his cup on the floor, takes a pinch of salt from a small earthenware bowl, and once again begins mechanically sprinkling the white granules over his dish of rice. Musarrat puts her hand to her mouth to hide a smile. Her husband’s absentmindedness amuses and worries her, but his radiant face, she must admit, is reassuring. She’s rarely seen him so endearingly awkward. He looks like a child just back from a puppet show. His eyes are sparkling, dazzled from within, and his agitation is almost unbelievable in one who never shakes, except with indignation, and then only when he’s repressing his anger and not threatening to destroy everything in sight.

“Eat,” she urges him.

Atiq stiffens. His forehead huddles around his eyebrows. Suddenly he leaps up, slapping his thighs. “My God!” he cries out as he snatches his great bunch of keys from its designated nail. “I’m inexcusable.”

Musarrat tries to get to her feet. Her thin arms give way, and she falls back onto her pallet. The effort has drained her strength; she leans against the wall, her feet out in front of her, and stares at her husband. “Now what have you done?”

Atiq feels badgered but replies nonetheless: “I just remembered — I didn’t give the prisoner anything to eat.”

He turns on his heels and disappears.

Musarrat remains where she is, deep in thought. Her husband has gone out without his turban, his vest, and his whip. Such a thing has almost never happened. She waits, expecting him to return for his things. Atiq doesn’t return. From this, Musarrat concludes that her husband, the part-time jailer, is no longer in full possession of his faculties.

ZUNAIRA IS ASLEEP, lying on a worn blanket. The sight of her makes Atiq think of a sacrificial offering. Around her, the cell, its corners spattered with unequivocal stains, sways in the pulsing light of the hurricane lamp. The night is thick, dusty, without real depth, its busy whir clearly audible. Atiq places a tray laden with skewered meats (bought with money from his own pocket), a flat cake, and some fruit on the floor of the cell. He squats down and extends an arm to wake the prisoner; his fingers hover above the curve of her shoulder. She must regain her strength, he tells himself. His thoughts, however, do not suffice to activate his hand, which continues to hesitate, suspended in the air. He creeps backward until he’s leaning against the wall. Clasping his drawn-up legs, he wedges his chin between his knees, then sits unmoving, with his eyes riveted on the woman’s body. Its shadow, fashioned by the bright lamplight and cast upon the wall as upon a canvas, delineates the landscape of a dream. Atiq is astonished by the prisoner’s composure. He doesn’t believe that tranquillity could reveal itself more plainly anywhere else than on that face, as limpid and beautiful as water from a spring. And that black hair, smooth and soft, which the least impudent of breezes would lift as easily as a kite. And those delicate, translucent houri’s hands, which look as soft as a caress. And that small round mouth. . “La hawla,” Atiq says, pulling himself together. He thinks, I have no right to take advantage of the fact that she’s asleep. I must go back home; I must leave her alone. Atiq thinks, but he does not act. He stays where he is, squatting in the corner, his arms embracing his legs, his eyes bigger than his conscience.

“IT’S VERY SIMPLE,” Atiq declares. “No words can describe her.”

“Is she so beautiful as that?” Musarrat asks skeptically.

“Beautiful? The word sounds commonplace to me — it sounds banal. The woman languishing in my jail is more than that. I’m still trembling from the sight of her. I spent the night watching her sleep. Her magnificence so filled my eyes that I didn’t notice the dawn.”

“I hope she didn’t distract you from your prayer.”

Atiq lowers his head. “It’s true — she did.”

“You forgot to perform your salaat?”

“Yes.”

Musarrat bursts into tinkling laughter, which quickly gives way to a succession of coughs. Atiq frowns. He doesn’t understand why his wife is laughing at him, why she’s not cross. It’s not often that he hears her laugh, and her unusual gaiety makes their dark hovel almost habitable. Panting but delighted, Musarrat wipes her eyes, adjusts the cushion behind her, and leans back on it.

“Am I amusing you?” Atiq asks.

“Enormously.”

“You think I’m ridiculous.”

“I think you’re fabulous, Atiq. Why would you hide such generous words from me? After more than twenty years of marriage, at last you reveal the poet who’s been hiding inside you. You can’t imagine how happy I am to know that you’re capable of speaking from your heart. Generally, you avoid such words as though they were pools of vomit. Atiq, the man with the eternal frown, the man who could walk past a gold coin without deigning to notice it, this man has tender feelings? That doesn’t simply amuse me; it revives me. I’d like to kiss the feet of the woman who’s awakened such sensitivity in you in the course of a single night. She must be a saint. Or perhaps a good fairy.”

“That’s what I said to myself the first time I saw her.”

“Then why have they sentenced her to death?”

Atiq flinches. Evidently, he hasn’t asked himself this question. That’s not like him at all, Musarrat thinks. Surely there must be some mistake. “How about her? What’s her story?”

“I haven’t spoken to her.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t done. I’ve guarded many female prisoners awaiting execution, some of them for several days. We never exchanged a single word. It’s as if you’re all alone and the other person isn’t there. We ignored one another completely, they in their cells and me in my hole. Tears can’t do any good when a sentence of death has been pronounced. In such cases, there’s no place like a prison for gathering your thoughts, so people keep quiet. Especially the night before an execution.”

Musarrat seizes her husband’s hand and presses it against her chest. Surprisingly, the jailer offers no resistance. Perhaps he doesn’t notice. His gaze is far away, his breathing tense.

“Today I feel quite strong,” she says, elated by the color in her husband’s face. “If you’d like, I could fix her something to eat.”

“You’d do that for her?”

“I’d do anything for you.”