The Swallows of Kabul

Fifteen

WITH A GREAT SCREECHING of brakes, Qassim Abdul Jabbar brings his 4 × 4 to a halt in front of the jailhouse. Right behind him comes a little bus filled with women and children. Preferring to keep his distance from the malignant atmosphere surrounding the baleful little prison, the driver of the bus parks it on the other side of the street. Atiq Shaukat slips into the corridor and stands with his back against the wall. He pins his trembling hands behind his buttocks and keeps his eyes on the floor so as not to betray the intensity of his emotions. He’s frightened and cold. His tangled guts rumble and squeal as though they’re about to burst; shooting pains cramp his legs and threaten to cripple him. The beating of his blood resounds dully in his temples, like the blows of a club reverberating through subterranean galleries. To stave off an attack of panic, he clenches his teeth and holds his increasingly agitated breath.

Outside in the street, Qassim announces his arrival in his usual way, loudly clearing his throat. This morning, there’s something particularly hideous about his phlegmy hawking. Atiq can hear metallic sounds, then the thud of several pairs of feet hitting the ground. Shadows move through the violent light of early morning. Two militiawomen enter the unhealthy darkness of the jailhouse. Despite the steadily rising temperature outside, the interior of the building is cold and damp. Stepping with military precision, the women pass in front of the jailer without a word and move toward the cell at the end of the corridor. Qassim appears in his turn. His massive shoulders fill the doorway, accentuating the semidarkness. Hands on his hips, he shakes his head left and right, performs a few exaggerated contortions, and approaches the jailer while feigning interest in a crack in the ceiling.

“Raise your head, warrior,” he says. “You’re going to get a crick in your neck, and then you won’t be able to look in the mirror properly anymore.”

Atiq nods but keeps his eyes fixed on the floor.

The militiawomen reappear, urging the prisoner ahead of them. The two men step back to let them pass. Qassim, who’s watching his friend out of the corner of his eye, coughs into his fist. “It’s already over,” he says softly.

Shivering from head to toe, Atiq hunches his shoulders a little higher.

“You must come with me,” Qassim insists. “There are a few matters I want to discuss with you.”

“I can’t.”

“What’s stopping you?”

The jailer opts for silence. Qassim looks around and glimpses a silhouette crouched in a corner of Atiq’s cubbyhole. “There’s someone in your office.”

Atiq feels his chest tighten, cutting off his breathing. “My wife.”

“I’ll bet she wants to go to the stadium.”

“Right, exactly right. . that’s just what she wants.”

“So do my wives and my sisters. In fact, they demanded that I requisition the microbus outside. Ah well, what can you do? Tell your wife to go in the bus with them. You come with me, and you can pick her up at the stadium exit when it’s over. I’ve got a proposal for you, something very dear to my heart, and I have to tell you about it.”

Thrown into confusion, Atiq casts around for a way out of his plight, but Qassim’s heavy voice prevents him from concentrating: “What’s the matter? Are you trying to avoid me?”

“I’m not trying to avoid you.”

“What, then?”

Atiq, caught off guard, slouches toward his office, half shutting his eyes in an attempt to bring some order into his thoughts. Everything around him appears to be picking up speed, overtaking him, jostling him about. He’s unsure how to cope with this completely unexpected turn of events. And never before has the look in Qassim’s eye seemed so penetrating, so alert. It’s making Atiq sweat all over. A vertiginous tide rolls over him, scanting his breath and sawing at his hamstrings. He stops in the doorway, reflects for a couple of seconds, then shuts the door behind him. The woman sitting on the camp bed stares at him. He can’t distinguish her eyes, but her stiffness makes him even more uneasy than he already is.

“You see?” he mutters. “Our prayers have been answered. You’re free. The man waiting outside has just confirmed it. They’ve dropped all the charges against you. You can go back home today.”

“Who were the women I saw passing in the hallway?”

“This is a women’s prison. Women often come and go here.”

“Did they take away a prisoner?”

“That’s no concern of yours. The window of yesterday is shut; let’s open the window of tomorrow. You’re free. That’s what counts.”

“So I can go now?”

“Of course. But before you do, I’m going to take you to some other women. They’re waiting in a little bus right outside. There’s no need to tell them who you are or where you come from. In fact, they mustn’t know. . The bus will drop you off at the stadium, where some official ceremonies are under way.”

“I want to go home.”

“Hush! Don’t talk so loud.”

“I don’t care to go to the stadium.”

“You must. It won’t take long. When the rally’s over, I’ll wait for you at the exit and take you to a place where you’ll be safe.”

In the corridor, Qassim clears his throat as a signal to the jailer that it’s time to go.

Zunaira stands up. Atiq walks her to the bus, then returns to the 4 × 4 and gets into the front seat next to Qassim. He doesn’t look, not even once, into the back of the vehicle, where the two militiawomen and their prisoner are sitting.

THE MULLAHS’ diatribes, broadcast through a battery of loudspeakers, echo amid the surrounding ruins. Intermittently, the stadium vibrates with ovations and hysterical clamoring. The crowd grows steadily, for spectators keep streaming in from all parts of the city. Despite the double and triple cordons formed by the forces of order, the atmosphere around the arena is pregnant with excitement. Qassim first directs the little bus to a less congested gate, ushers the ladies out, and turns them over to some militiawomen, ordering them to seat the women in the reserved stands. Then, satisfied on this point, he climbs back into his 4 × 4 and charges onto the field, where armed Taliban agents are bustling about with excessive enthusiasm. A few bodies dangling from ropes here and there testify that the public executions have already begun. The stands are filled to overflowing with people packed shoulder to shoulder. Many of them have come in order to avoid harassment; they witness the horrors, but they remain passive and make no demonstrations. Others, who have chosen to assemble as close as possible to the platform where the dignitaries of the apocalypse are lounging, do everything in their power to get themselves noticed; their inordinate (not to say morbid) jubilation and their discordant shouts repel even the religious authorities.

Atiq leaps to the ground and stations himself in front of the 4 × 4, his eyes fixed on the section of the stadium reserved for women. In each of them, he thinks he recognizes Zunaira. Detached from reality, impregnably barricaded, body and soul, inside his delirium, Atiq hears neither the mullahs’ sermons nor the crowd’s applause. Nor does he seem to see the thousands of onlookers who fill the stands in bestial packs, their mouths more rank and pestilential than their beards. As Atiq tries to guess the location of the woman he’s determined to protect, his burning eyes relegate all the rest of the world to oblivion.

A sudden uproar on one side of the stadium gives rise to some sinister ululations. Agents of the Taliban police hustle one of the “damned” to his destiny; on the pitch, a man with a knife is waiting for him. This part of the program lasts only long enough for the accomplishment of a few simple movements: The bound prisoner is forced to his knees; the knife glitters before it slits his throat. In the stands, sporadic applause pays tribute to the executioner’s dexterity. The bloody corpse is tossed onto a stretcher. Next!

Atiq is concentrating so hard on the rows of burqas ranged like a blue wall above his head that he doesn’t see the militiawomen lay hold of their prisoner. They walk her to the middle of the field; then two men escort her to the site reserved for her. A peremptory voice orders her to kneel. She complies, and as she raises her eyes behind the grille of her mask for the last time, she catches sight of Atiq, standing with his back to her over by the 4 × 4. At the moment when she feels the muzzle of the rifle brush against the back of her skull, she prays that the jailer won’t turn around. In the next instant, the weapon fires, carrying off in its blasphemy an unfinished prayer.

Atiq doesn’t know whether the ceremonies have lasted a few hours or an eternity. The stretcher-bearers finish stacking the corpses onto a trailer pulled by a tractor. A particularly trenchant sermon closes the festivities. Immediately thereafter, thousands of the faithful pour onto the field for the general prayer. A mullah with the air of a sultan leads the ritual while fanatical police agents harry late-comers. As soon as the prestigious guests depart, the crowd begins to ebb and flow in savage waves before converging on the exits. Incredible melees break out, so violent that the forces of order are obliged to beat a retreat. When the burqas start filing out of the stands, Atiq joins a large gathering of men outside. Qassim is there, hands on hips, visibly pleased with his performance. The public executions have gone off smoothly, without a single hitch, and Qassim’s convinced that his contribution to this success has not escaped the notice of the holy men at the top. He can already see himself promoted to the directorship of the country’s biggest prison.

The first women emerge from the stadium, to be quickly retrieved by their men. The women — some of them burdened with several children — leave the area in more or less uniform little groups. As the crowd disperses, the hubbub dies down and the environs of the stadium grow quiet. The throngs making their way back to the center of the city disappear inside clouds of dust, cut into sections by the Taliban’s trucks, which follow one another in an anarchic convoy.

Qassim has recognized his harem in the midst of the crowd and directed them, with a movement of his head, to the bus, parked and waiting under a tree. “If you want,” he says to Atiq, “I can drop you off at home, you and your wife.”

“That’s not necessary,” Atiq says.

“I don’t mind — it’s only a little out of my way.”

“I’ve got some things to do in town.”

“All right, as you wish. I hope you think about what I said.”

“Of course I will. . ”

Qassim waves and hurries away to catch up with his women.

And Atiq keeps waiting for his woman. The crowd of people around him shrinks away to nothing. Soon there’s only a little cluster of shaggy individuals still keeping him company, and after a few minutes these disappear in their turn, dragging a number of rustling burqas in their wake. When Atiq comes back to himself, he realizes that there’s no longer anyone around. There’s only the dust-laden sky, the wide-open stadium gate, and the silence — a wretched silence, as deep as an abyss. Incredulous, completely disoriented, Atiq looks around; he’s alone, absolutely alone. Seized by panic, he rushes into the stadium. The pitch, the stands, the special platform — all are deserted. Refusing to admit the truth, he runs to the section reserved for women. The naked stone steps are depressingly empty. He goes back down to the field and starts running back and forth like a maniac. The ground undulates under his feet. The deserted stands start whirling around him, empty, empty, empty. A mounting wave of nausea forces him to stop for a moment, but he immediately returns to his frenzied sprinting. The commotion of his breathing threatens to overwhelm the stadium, the city, the entire country. Bewildered, terrified, with his heart about to leap from his throat, Atiq returns to the middle of the pitch, exactly at the spot where there is a pool of coagulated blood. Taking his head in his hands, he stubbornly examines all the sections of the stadium, one by one. Suddenly, realizing the magnitude of the silence, he sinks to his knees, crying out like a stricken beast. As terrible as the fall of a Titan, his howl echoes across the arena: Zunaira!

THE FIRST STREAKS of night have gone methodically to work, putting out the last twilight fires in the ashen sky. The daylight has already retreated, step by step, to the uppermost part of the stands, while insidious tentacular shadows spread their cloaks on the earth to welcome the night. Far off, the sounds of the city are dying down. And in the stadium, where a breeze freighted with ghosts is preparing to blow, the concrete tiers lurk in sepulchral silence. Atiq, who has waited and prayed as never before, finally raises his head. The utter misery of his surroundings calls him to order; he has nothing more to do inside these ghastly walls. Pushing himself off the ground with one hand, he rises to his feet. His legs wobble uncertainly. He tries one step, then two, and manages to make his way to the stadium gate. Outside, night has buried the ruins in darkness. A few beggars emerge from their hole; their voices are sleepy enough to make their lamentations convincing. Farther off, some boys armed with wooden swords and rifles carry on the morning’s ceremonies; they have bound some of their comrades in the center of a blasted square and are preparing to execute them. Aging idlers watch the boys with smiles on their faces, diverted and touched by the exactness of the youngsters’ re-creation. Atiq goes where his legs take him. He feels as though a cloud drifts under his feet. A single name — Zunaira — insistent but inaudible, fills his parched mouth. He passes his little prison, then Nazeesh’s house. Full night finds him at the end of an alleyway littered with rubble. Fleeting silhouettes pierce him through and through. When he reaches his house, his legs betray him again, and he collapses in the patio.

Stretched out on his back, Atiq contemplates the moon. Tonight, it’s perfectly round, like a silver apple suspended in the air. When he was little, he would spend long hours contemplating it. Sitting on a mound far from the family shack, he’d try to understand how such a heavy star could float in space, and he’d wonder if creatures like his fellow villagers worked the fields on the moon and pastured their goats there. His father joined him once, and it was then that he explained to Atiq the mystery of the moon. “It’s only the sun,” he told the boy. “After shining conscientiously all day long, the sun gets carried away and tries to violate the secrets of the night. But what he sees is so unbearable that he blanches and loses all his heat.”

For a long time, Atiq believed this story. And even today, he still can’t stop believing it. What’s so frightful about the night that it makes the sun lose all his color?

Gathering the remnants of his strength, Atiq drags himself inside the house. His fumbling hands knock over the lamp. He makes no light; he knows that the least glimmer would strike him blind. His fingers slide along the wall until they come to the doorway of the room that used to be his wife’s. He gropes around for her straw mattress and collapses onto it. Choking with sobs, he seizes the blanket in a desperate embrace: “Musarrat, my poor Musarrat, what have you done to us?”

He lies down on the pallet, draws his knees up against his belly, and makes himself very, very small. .

“ATIQ.”

He starts awake.

A woman is standing in the center of the room. Her opalescent burqa glitters in the darkness. Dumbfounded, Atiq energetically rubs his eyes. The woman doesn’t vanish. She’s still in the same place, afloat in a luminous blur.

“I thought you were gone for good,” he mumbles, trying to get up. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

“You were mistaken.”

“Where did you go? I looked for you everywhere.”

“I wasn’t far away — I was hiding.”

“I almost went crazy.”

“I’m here now.”

Clinging to the wall, Atiq gets to his feet. He’s shaking like a leaf. The woman opens her arms. “Come,” she says.

He runs to her and presses himself against her, like a child returned to its mother. “Oh, Zunaira, Zunaira, what would’ve become of me without you?”

“That’s not a question anymore.”

“I was so afraid.”

“That’s because it’s so dark in here.”

“I left the lamps unlit on purpose. And I see no reason to light them now. Your face will shine on me more brightly than a thousand candles. Please, lift your hood and let me dream of you.”

She takes a step backward and turns up the top of her burqa. Atiq cries out in fright and recoils. She isn’t Zunaira anymore; she’s Musarrat, and a rifle shot has blown away half of her face.

Atiq wakes up screaming, thrusting out his hands to push away the horror. Covered with sweat, his eyes bulging, he realizes only after several seconds that he’s been having a nightmare.

Outside, the day is dawning, and so are the sorrows of the world.

LOOKING LIKE HIS own ghost, Atiq drifts toward the cemetery. He’s wearing no turban and carrying no whip; his trousers hang low on his hips, barely held up by a poorly buckled belt. As he walks, he doesn’t so much move forward as haul himself along, with his eyes rolled up and devastation in his every step. His untied shoelaces trace serpentine arabesques in the dirt. His right shoe has burst open, exposing to the sun a misshapen toe with a split nail outlined in blood. He must have slipped and fallen somewhere, as his right side is stained with mud and his elbow is skinned. He looks like a drunk, like a man who doesn’t know where he is or where he’s going. From time to time, he stops and braces himself against a wall: bent over from the waist, hands on his knees, vacillating between his urge to vomit and his need to catch his breath. His dark face, under its thatch of unkempt beard, is as wrinkled as an overripe quince; his deeply lined forehead and swollen eyes complement his appearance of advanced deterioration; his misery is shrill, unignorable. The rare pedestrians who cross his path look at him with fearful eyes. Some of them make broad detours to avoid him, and the children playing here and there keep him under careful surveillance.

Atiq has no idea of the terror he’s arousing. His head is a weight on his shoulders, his movements are erratic, and he’s only vaguely aware of the maze of little streets. He hasn’t eaten for three days. Fasting and grief have drained him. Saliva like dried milk stains the corners of his mouth, and he keeps blowing his nose into his cupped hand. He needs several heaves to detach himself from the wall and set himself in motion. His legs buckle under his sagging carcass. He’s been stopped twice by squads of Taliban police, who suspected him of inebriation; someone even struck him and ordered him to return home at once. Atiq noticed none of this. As soon as he was let go, he continued on his way to the cemetery, as though summoned there by a mysterious call.

A family consisting of women dressed in rags and children whose little faces are streaked with grime is gathered around a fresh grave. Farther off, a mule driver tries to repair one of his carriage wheels, which has struck a large stone and sprung from its axle. A few scrawny dogs with muddy muzzles and cocked ears sniff along the paths. Atiq staggers about amid the mounds, without gravestones and without epitaphs, that blister the arid terrain of the cemetery. The graves are only holes in the ground, haphazardly dug and filled in with dirt and gravel and caked earth. They lie in an alarming jumble that adds a tragic note to the sadness of the place. Atiq lingers over these bare tombs, squatting now and then to touch one of them with his fingertips. Sometimes he steps over the little mounds; sometimes he stumbles on them and mutters. After going in a circle, he realizes that he won’t be able to identify Musarrat’s last resting place because he hasn’t the vaguest idea where to look for it. He spies a gravedigger eating a piece of dried meat, goes over to him, and asks him where the woman who was executed at the municipal stadium yesterday is buried. The gravedigger shows him a pile of dirt a stone’s throw away and returns with hearty appetite to his meal.

Atiq collapses before his wife’s grave, takes his head in his hands, and stays that way until late in the afternoon — without a word, without a groan, without a prayer. His curiosity piqued, the gravedigger comes over to check whether the strange visitor is awake. He tells Atiq that the sun is dangerously hot, that he’ll be sorry if he doesn’t get out of it. Atiq fails to grasp what he’s doing wrong. He continues to stare undeterred at Musarrat’s grave. Then, when his head is crackling and his eyes are half blind, he rises and leaves the cemetery without looking back. Leaning sometimes on a wall, sometimes on a tree, he wanders through a series of alleyways until the sight of a woman stepping out of a house with a mansard roof seems almost to clear his head. She’s wearing a faded burqa with holes in its skirts, and down-at-the-heel shoes. Atiq stations himself in the middle of the narrow street and waits to intercept her. The woman veers off to one side; Atiq catches her by the arm and tries to hold her back. With a jerk, she frees herself from his clutches and runs away. Zunaira, he says to her, Zunaira. The woman comes to a stop at the end of the alley, stares at him curiously, and disappears. Atiq runs after her, holding out one arm as though trying to spear a smoke ring. In another narrow lane, he bears down upon another woman, who is sitting on the threshold of a ruined house. When she sees him coming, she goes back inside and closes the door behind her. Atiq turns around and sees a yellow burqa slipping toward the district square. He follows it, still holding one arm out in front of him. Zunaira, Zunaira . . Children hurry out of his path, frightened by this disheveled man with bulging pupils and bluish lips who seems to be stalking his own insanity. The yellow burqa stops in front of one of the houses; Atiq rushes toward it, reaching it at the moment when the door opens. Where did you go? I waited for you at the stadium exit, just as we agreed, and you didn’t come out to me. .

The yellow burqa tries to free itself from his painful grasp. You’re mad! Let me go or I’ll scream. .

I won’t leave you alone anymore, Zunaira. Since you can’t find me, you’ll never have to look for me again.

I’m not your Zunaira, you poor fool. If you don’t get out of here, my brothers will kill you.

Lift your hood. I want to see your face, your beautiful houri’s face. .

The burqa sacrifices its side panel to his grasp and vanishes. Some boys who have assisted at this scene pick up stones and begin flinging them at the madman until he retreats the way he came. One of the projectiles has split the side of Atiq’s head open, and blood is pouring over his ear as he starts running, at first with little steps, but then, as he approaches the square, with longer and longer strides, his breathing hoarse, his nostrils dripping, foam boiling out of his mouth. Zunaira, Zunaira, he babbles, tossing aside bystanders in his search for a burqa. As his frenzy mounts, he starts chasing women down and — O sacrilege! — lifting their veils above their heads. Zunaira, I know you’re in there. Come out of your hiding place. There’s nothing to fear. No one will hurt you. I’ve taken care of everything. I won’t let anyone bother you. .

Indignant cries ring out. Atiq doesn’t hear them. His hands snatch at veils, violently tearing them away, sometimes capsizing the cornered women. Whenever one of them resists, he throws her to the ground and hauls her around in the dust, only releasing her when he’s certain that she’s not the one he’s searching for. The first cudgel blow lands on the back of his neck, but he does not falter. As though catapulted by a supernatural force, he continues his wild career. Soon the scandalized crowd fans out to contain him. The women scatter, screaming; he manages to seize a few, tears their clothes, lifts their heads by the hair. The cudgel is followed by whips, and these by fists and feet. The men who have been “dishonored” trample their women to get at the madman. Demon! Fiend! Atiq has a vague sensation of being carried away by a landslide. He’s kicked by a thousand shabby shoes, buffeted by a thousand sticks, lashed by a thousand whips. Pervert! Monster! Crushed under the tumult, he collapses. The furious pack, sensing the kill, hurls itself upon him. He has just enough time to notice that his shirt has disappeared, torn to shreds by vicious fingers, that blood is running down his chest and arms in thick streams, and that his eyebrows have burst, rendering it impossible for him to measure the unquenchable fury of his assailants. A few fragmented shouts reach his ears amid the rain of blows that keep him pinned to the ground. Hang him! Crucify him! Burn him alive! All of a sudden, his head starts to oscillate, and his surroundings slide into darkness. There follows a solemn, intense silence, and as he closes his eyes, Atiq entreats his ancestors that his sleep may be as unfathomable as the secrets of the night.