A House Without Windows (22 page)

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON IN CHIL MAHTAB AND JUST DAYS AWAY
from the Eid holiday. The temperature within the prison had climbed to over a hundred degrees. Women who should have been home preparing to celebrate the holiday of sacrifice were wilting within the prison's high walls instead. The heat should have rendered the women immobile . . . but it hadn't.

Zeba's success with Mezhgan had set the women's prison alight with hope.

A steady stream of women moved through the cell Zeba shared with the others. The guards had, at first, tried to prevent the women from congregating but they quickly gave up. The women were persistent and the guards curious.

“Would you let me speak? You've had your chance!” Bibi Shireen, a woman old enough to be Zeba's grandmother, pushed her way to the front of the line. “Zeba-
jan,
you're a mother. You've got to understand. My son was in love with a girl and when they ran off together, the girl's brothers found them and killed him. They've locked me up because my son is dead and someone's got to be blamed. And they want my daughter to be married to one of the killers, in retribution for my son's transgression. I've been here three years and have another twenty-seven to go. Do you see my hair—white as a garlic clove? I will die here! What can you do for me?”

“What idiots. Bibi Shireen, I had no idea you had another twenty-seven years still. That's a disgrace,” Latifa remarked with blatant disgust. She sat on the edge of her bed and watched over the pleas. She was learning things about her fellow prisoners that she hadn't learned in her eighteen months in Chil Mahtab.

“Tell me, Zeba-
jan
. What should I do? I once heard something about the feathers of a white pigeon bringing mercy, but I don't trust the person who told me. Whatever you say, I'll do it.”

Zeba listened in silence. She had not intended to create such a maelstrom. It had been an exercise really, a way for her to prove to herself that she could do something, even if it meant dipping her feet into murky waters.

“Bibi-
jan,
” she said respectfully. “I will think carefully about your situation.”

The women came in two or three at a time with all kinds of requests. Zeba quickly became accustomed to the ones in need of recipes to make families accept their beloved. But the prison housed women accused of more than being star-crossed lovers. Because of their various improprieties, many had been convicted of the broad crime of
zina,
sex outside of marriage. Some were convicted of attempted
zina
or imprisoned for assisting another woman to commit
zina
. An eighteen-year-old girl had run away from her elderly husband. A wife had left a husband after he sold their ten- and twelve-year-old daughters into marriage. Another had been arrested when a stranger reported seeing her leaving a man's private office.

They all begged Zeba for help. They needed the judge's mercy. They needed their families to be understanding. They needed their husbands to grant them divorces. The prison was teeming with stories of sex, love, and violence.

Zina. Zina. Zina.

Two women came to Zeba together.

“Go on, you tell her,” said the older of the two, the soles of her feet stained with henna. Zeba thought them to be mother and daughter at first but soon realized she was mistaken.

“Our husband was killed by his cousins, but the family pointed their fingers at us. They're free while we're in here. We did nothing, but no one seems to care. What should we do?”

“You were both married to him?”

“Yes,” explained the older woman. “I was his first wife. Then he took her. He was a decent man. He had land that his cousins had been eyeing for years. They wanted it and finally killed him for it. Three of them came into our home and strangled him. Blaming the two of us only made it easier for them to claim his lot.”

Zeba bit her lip.

“Let me think about it,” Zeba said. “I'm not sure what would be best . . .”

Actually, she didn't know at all. Gulnaz had never tackled dilemmas of this ilk, which was not to say that she could not have managed them. The opportunity just hadn't presented itself.

Madar, you would have the time of your life in this place.

Zeba cobbled together recipes from her childhood, recalling what Gulnaz had done in similar situations.

“This place, these crimes—it is an injustice what's being done here,” Zeba declared. A chorus of agreement rang through the small cell. “What a burden it is to be born a woman.”

What she could not articulate sometimes came more naturally to her in rhyme.

“Men treasure their manhood as God's greatest gift

Because without it, justice is brutal and swift.”

There was an outburst of laughter.

“What did she say?” Like links on a chain, the women passed Zeba's couplet from the cell into the hallway, the beauty salon, and beyond. They repeated it to themselves, not wanting to forget the two lines that should have hung like a slogan beneath the prison's name.

“Zeba, you'll never have to wash your clothes again. I'll do your laundry and use my own detergent if you'll help me.”

The woman before her had two wide-eyed children at her side. They looked like baby birds hidden under their mother's wings. Zeba noticed the bandages on her left wrist. She'd seen this woman undoing and redoing the strip of cotton a day earlier in the washroom, her back turned for privacy. Zeba could still picture the neat row of scabbed-over slice marks that ran from the middle of her forearm to the end of her wrist.

“My clothes?” Zeba asked with surprise.

“Now, that's an offer worth considering. I'd move her request, whatever it is, to the top of the list. But that's just me,” Latifa said. She was standing at the television, turning the dial to flip through the channels. When she came to the TOLO channel, she stopped abruptly and clapped her hands together. Zeba and the three women still waiting to talk to her all turned their attention to the television.

“It's the finals! They're going to announce the winner today,” she exclaimed. “How could I have forgotten?”

Two young men stood on a stage, microphones clutched in their nervous hands as they shifted their weight from foot to foot. They were being judged by a colorful panel of three men and one woman, some of Afghanistan's biggest names in the music world. One man wore a tuxedo, the two other men wore butterfly-collared dress shirts under jackets, their necks adorned with bold silver jewelry, the kind only musicians could pull off. The woman, with heavily darkened eyes, wore a beige, glimmery long-sleeved shirt and layers of thin gold necklaces. Her inky, black locks cascaded over her shoulders and acted as a backdrop for her dangling gold earrings.

Her name was Fariha and she was everything the women in prison were not. She was bejeweled, sitting in a room full of men. The audience revered her voice. She leaned back in her chair with the comfort of an unchallenged ruler, sparkling as she congratulated both contestants on their tone, emotion, and range. Rubbing her hands together
and lowering her smoky eyelids, she announced: “I choose . . . Isah-
jan
as the winner!”

The camera panned to Isah, a young man with curly hair and a sheepish smile. The host of the show lifted Isah's left hand into the air triumphantly. The audience, young men in their twenties, stood and clapped wildly.

“Isah!” Latifa cried. “I knew he would win. He's the best by far. You know he's from the same town as my mother.”

“Oh really? My congratulations to your whole family, then,” Nafisa mumbled. She sat cross-legged in front of her bed, flipping through a beauty magazine.

“Zeba-
jan,
” the woman went on. “As I said, I'll take care of your laundry if you can help me get out of here before my boys turn seven and they're taken away from me.”

Somehow, the fact that they were twins made them seem even more forlorn.

“How old are they now?” Zeba asked, touching the top of one boy's head. The prison was home to enough children that walking through its halls sometimes reminded Zeba of an elementary school.

“Six, and the guards have already started talking about sending them to the orphanage with the others,” the woman said, her voice cracking. “I can't be away from them. I've only survived this long because they've been here with me.”

“You've been here seven years?”

She nodded. She was younger than Zeba and had the freshness of an adolescent. But judging by the ages of her boys, she had to be in her early twenties.

“Why are you here?”

Latifa was glued to the television. The winner of the competition, Isah, was singing his victory song. The audience was clapping in time, cheering him on. Fariha moved her shoulders to the rhythm and nodded in approval.

The young mother looked at her boys and then around the room.
She spoke so softly that even Zeba had to lean in and pay close attention to make out her painful story.

“I was attacked by my cousin at my home. He cornered me in a room and told me he would kill me if I screamed. My family didn't believe me and when I went to the police, they arrested me.”

“They arrested you?”

“No one had seen or heard what had happened. The police said if it had been forced, I would have screamed. Since I hadn't shouted, they arrested me for
zina
. I was already in prison when I realized I was pregnant. Once my family found out about that, I never heard from them again.”

The boys were watching Zeba, looking for her reaction. She forced a quick smile their way. They'd heard the story before, she could see.

“Because you didn't scream . . .” she echoed. The words rattled her. “But you didn't scream because you were scared?”

“He had a knife,” she said plainly. Zeba sensed these were words she'd said a thousand times before to no avail.

Zeba rubbed at her eyes. The stories were too much for her. There was no way her
jadu
would free a prison full of condemned women. No spell would change the fact that a woman's worth was measured, with scientific diligence, in blood. A woman was only as good as the drops that fell on her wedding night, the ounces she bled with the turns of the moon, and the small river she shed giving her husband children. Some women were judged most ultimately, having their veins emptied to atone for their sins or for the sins of others.

“You've said nothing about wanting to be released,” Zeba remarked. “You just want the boys to stay with you?”

“Released?” She laughed lightly and shook her head. “Not at all. I don't know what I would do if I were turned out. My family will not take me back. I have no friends to take me in. I have two boys and a story no one wants to hear or believe. The boys will be sent out when they're seven, and even though they are what they are, I can't . . . I can't imagine being in here without them.”

The boys flinched. Their mother's lower lip quivered.

Latifa was flipping the channels again. Nafisa pretended to turn a page but was looking past the magazine at the woman with her two boys. She looked relieved not to be in her place. Zeba hated sending every woman away with nothing but a promise, so she undid the
taweez
she had safety-pinned to the breast pocket of her dress. The needle pricked her finger and drew a spot of blood. Zeba wiped it on her own skirt and pinned the
taweez
her mother had gotten from Jawad to the inside of the young mother's collar.

“Take this for now. I will think very carefully about what can be done,” Zeba promised. Even as she spoke the words, she could hear how hollow they sounded.

THE NEXT TWO DAYS BROUGHT MORE OF THE SAME. THE STREAM
of women grew steadier. They followed Zeba into her cell or found her in the yard or approached her in the hallways. Zeba was not accustomed to so much attention. They clasped her hands between their own. They brought her small hand mirrors or tubes of lipstick. They offered to wash her hair or to allow her to use their contraband mobile phones, which wouldn't have done her any good. Kamal's sister did not have a phone and, even if she had, likely would not have answered her call. Zeba tried to refuse the gifts and favors though some were left anonymously on her bed or done before she could protest. If bribery was practiced in the outside world, it was perfected in the prison.

“I HAVE A SIMILAR PROBLEM, BUT IT INVOLVES MY HUSBAND AND
his new bride. He had me locked up in here so he could get married without me in the way. Tonight's their wedding, and I want to do something to make him limp as a noodle.”

Another woman was elbowing her way into the room.

“I'm not trying to ruin anyone's life. I have a simple request. My
hair's been falling out in clumps since I've been here. Look here, sister. Just look at this!”

She lowered her head before Zeba and let her head scarf slip down to her neck. She raked her fingers through her hair, showing large patches of white scalp.

“I've tried washing it with red mud. I've tried rubbing raw eggs on my head. My sister even brought me a bottle of hair oil from India, but nothing's worked. You must know something that will help my hair—please!”

Zeba turned to Latifa and sighed heavily.

Latifa had become Zeba's agent. She would sit at her side and appoint each visitor a turn. When Zeba grew too fatigued to even listen to their requests, she had only to look at Latifa. With a nod, Latifa would shepherd the women out of the cell.

“Time to go!” Latifa announced with a clap of her thick hands. She turned the television off and guided the woman to the door with a hand on her back. “God created head scarves for situations like yours. How wise of Him, no? Khanum Zeba's not a doctor or a pharmacy. If you ask me, I'd say you should really stop gossiping so much. The things you said about your own cellmates—shame on you. Someone's probably cast a spell on your hair. Did you ever think about that?”