A House Without Windows (31 page)

“MY SON! YOUR LIFE WILL BE LONG, MY DEAR. I WAS JUST THINK
ING
of you when the phone rang.”

Yusuf smiled. He doubted that old superstition had much truth to it, especially not in Afghanistan.

“If I know you,” he teased, “you were probably just thinking about what a terrible son I am not to have called you in so long.”

“Eh, you know your mother well.” She sighed. “Can I help it? If I hear your voice every day, it's still not enough for me.”

“Do you not care about your other children at all?” Yusuf fell back on his bed. It felt good to joke with his mother. Her sense of humor surprised most people.

“Sadaf is having a love affair with her cell phone, and your brother doesn't appreciate my cooking enough to come home even once a week. As for Sitara, she's as self-absorbed as ever. Have you spoken to her, by the way? Have you heard that you're going to be an uncle?”

“Am I?” Yusuf exclaimed. He couldn't imagine his sister as a mother. She and her husband still lived liked teenagers though they were both two years older than Yusuf. “Wow, that's exciting news!”

“It is a blessing. It'll be a bigger blessing if the child doesn't inherit his father's laziness. That man thinks a full day of work is moving from the bedroom to the living room.”

“Oh, Madar. He's not that bad. He's got a good job at the bank.”

“Yes, a bank. For a man who's surrounded by money all day long, it's amazing how little of it he has. He wants to buy a used crib for the baby. If your sister would have listened to us and waited, she could have been married to a doctor. Imagine how useful it would be to have a doctor in the family. My cousin in California couldn't be happier. Her daughter just married a heart doctor. Or was it a lung doctor?”

“Maybe a plastic surgeon?” Yusuf asked sarcastically.

“Don't even start with me. Whatever he is, he won't have to have a child on a credit card. Anyway, enough about them. Tell me how you're doing? Have you found a way to help that woman yet?”

Yusuf pulled himself to sitting, positioning the pillow behind him and crossing his outstretched legs at the ankle. Two other lawyers had invited him to a local restaurant for dinner, but he'd turned them down, hoping a quiet evening at home would help him come up with a brilliant way to get Zeba out of that shrine.

“I'm working on it. I can't believe the way this case has turned out. As if the prison wasn't bad enough, they've sent that woman to a shrine to treat her insanity. They've got her chained up and barely surviving on bread and water.”

Yusuf's mother clucked her tongue in dismay.

“Oh, don't tell me that! That sounds like a myth. We used to go to the shrine in Kabul but only to pray. I'd never heard of one used for the insane. Is it real?”

“It's very real, Madar. I think it's the only one in the country, but it just happens to be here. And that's where she is. Afghanistan of today would surprise most Afghans who left years ago. It's a totally different place.”

“Your father and I have been watching the satellite television more and more just because you're there, but when we listen, sometimes I feel like they're talking about a country I don't know. But you're safe? Are
you
eating more than water and bread?”

“I'm eating very well—maybe too well.” And he had been. He'd been hazed in his first week in Kabul, his digestive tract less accus
tomed to the microbiology of the country than he'd anticipated. Since then he'd had no troubles. He was still cautious with raw fruits and vegetables, but everything else moved through him normally.

“Where are you now?”

“Home,” he said, surprising himself with how reflexively the word had come out. “I mean, my apartment.”

This did feel like home, though. Yusuf had fallen into a routine. Drivers knew where to drop him off, and he could walk into a handful of shops and expect to be greeted by name. He knew which streets reeked of waste and which streets were clean. He knew the best street cart for
bulanee
and the places where his cell phone would get no reception.

He smiled to think of the day he'd come off the airplane, that intoxicating blend of excitement and apprehension. It was good to be here. It would be even better if he could get this case to move in the direction he wanted it to.

“So what's going on with that poor woman? Did she tell you why she killed her husband?”

Yusuf, trained in the Western concept of attorney-client privilege, debated how much he should share with his mother. But he counted the miles between them and looked out his window at a street full of greased palms and decided there was no harm in sharing a few details with her.

“I haven't told you what I learned yet, have I? It turns out she walked in on her husband assaulting a young girl—in the worst possible way.” Yusuf was careful with his language. There wasn't a Dari word for rape, Yusuf had realized when he'd begun his work here, as if not naming the act would deny its existence. Even in the judicial world, it was often called
zina,
or sex outside of marriage, equating the crime to a lusty and impatient couple having sex the day before their wedding.
Zina
was a blanket term that covered anything other than a husband claiming his wife.

“Oh no! God damn that bastard!”

“Yes. She won't tell me much, but from what I've put together, she killed him to defend the girl, one of her daughter's classmates. She doesn't want to say anything to the judge about what really happened.”

“Good for her.” Yusuf's mother sighed. “She's killed one person. No sense in her killing another.”

“I know, but it's terrible that the truth can't help her.”

“Truth is a hard sell. You know how we are. We prefer to be polite or to protect our honor. Did we ever tell anyone that we didn't want your sister to marry that louse? No, because having a disobedient daughter is worse than having a lazy son-in-law. We couldn't live without our lies.”

Yusuf paused to reflect on this. Lies kept the whole earth spinning on its axis. This wasn't unique to Afghanistan.

“She's not a bad person, Madar. She is a bit of a
jadugar,
though. Did I tell you about that?”

“Really? Your murderess is also a witch? A woman of many talents!”

“She's inherited her talents from her mother, actually.”

“Where else could children get their talents from?” Yusuf's mother said pointedly.

“Wait till I tell my father.”

“He knows it's true. But you did get your hair from your father. You should thank him for that since he's the only man his age who can stand outside the
masjid
without his head reflecting sunlight. Now, I haven't asked in a long time because I didn't want to be one of those mothers with her nose in her children's business, but how are things with Meena?”

Yusuf winced. He debated telling his mother that Meena was in love with another man. He didn't fully trust his mother not to say something about it to Khala Zainab.

“We aren't a good match, so I would get that idea out of your head. You know, Khala Zainab hadn't even told Meena that she was giving her number to you.”

“Is that what Meena said? She was probably just embarrassed about it and made that up. How could you not be a good match? You were so cute together as children, and you're both lovely adults. What more do you need?”

Yusuf shook his head.

“And, Yusuf, you can't make a decision on one conversation.”

“It wasn't one conversation, Madar. We just reached a conclusion that it wasn't meant to be.”

“What would I know anyway? I'm just a woman who's been married for thirty-something years.” Yusuf's mother exhaled sharply. “Ay-ay,
bachem
. When are you going to have enough of that place? The stories you tell me and the chaos we hear about on the news are disturbing. How can you stand to be around these kinds of things?”

Were it not for the static on the line and the specifics of the case, Yusuf could almost have felt like he were only a train ride away from his mother, the way he had been when he lived in Washington. He could picture her, sitting on the living room couch, a basket of his father's white undershirts in front of her, still warm from the basement's coin-operated laundry machines. He knew when she hung up, there would be lines on her face from where she'd pressed the receiver against her ear. He pictured the furrows in her forehead and knew she was probably cupping her right hand over the speaker, a habit she'd developed from when conversations across continents traveled across tenuous fibers instead of satellites.

He could almost see out their apartment window, thick metal bars gridding the scene from the fourth floor. Though the view hadn't been much, Yusuf had spent hours at the window's edge staring at the building across from theirs and the others that flanked it. When he was twelve, Yusuf's father had given him a pair of binoculars, hoping he would use them to develop an interest in the airplanes that flew low over their heads. But Yusuf wouldn't become an engineer, despite his father's encouragements. Instead, he'd used the binoculars to spy into other windows.

He watched the woman who would undo her pink bathrobe to breast-feed her baby in the mornings. He saw the gray-haired man who flipped through channels with one absentminded hand down the crotch of his pants and another on the remote. He saw the thin, teenage girl who stuck as much of her arm and face as she could through the window grate to keep the cigarette smoke out of her apartment. Yusuf did not feel like a voyeur in watching these private lives. He felt more like a guardian of secrets.

But that wasn't why he was in Afghanistan. He hadn't come this far from home because he wanted to be privy to the sordid details of people's lives here. People had equally sordid lives in New York or Washington. His friends, his cousins, his parents, his colleagues—a hundred voices had echoed the very same question as soon as he'd booked his tickets to Afghanistan.

Why do you want to work there?

“Madar-
jan,
this is where I can do something real. The country needs a real justice system if it's going to survive as a society. I want to be part of that. It's rebuilding a nation and not just any nation—our nation. How shameful is it to leave it all for foreigners to do?”

“I'm proud of you, Yusuf. We're all proud of you. You should hear the way your father talks about you with his friends or with your uncles. Just last weekend we went to a wedding and he ran into an old classmate from high school. ‘My boy is a hero.' That's what he said, honestly.”

Yusuf's throat tightened. He rubbed his forehead and admitted to himself that he really missed home. He missed the smell of fabric softener on his undershirts and the feel of a gas pedal under his foot. He missed the paved roads and complicated parking signs detailing street cleaning schedules.

He missed Elena. He thought she might reach out to him even after they'd broken up. She never did, even when she knew he'd be leaving for Afghanistan. It was as if she'd agreed with him that they were too different to think they could be together. He'd not regretted
his decision. He'd only regretted that he'd let things get as far as they had because it had caused them both unnecessary pain.

Sitting in the terminal at JFK airport waiting for his flight to Dubai, Yusuf had taken out his cell phone and deactivated his Facebook account. It was a sharp-edged moment, dulled only slightly by the number of people who passed him without noticing the bright young lawyer who had just disconnected himself from that world. Maybe it wasn't such a monumental decision after all. He deleted the app from his phone. He would immerse himself in his work, he'd resolved, and it would be best not to be distracted by pictures of his former classmates clinking glasses in dimly lit lounges in the East Village of New York City or biking through Rock Creek Park in D.C.

“I'm not going to stay here forever, Madar-
jan
. I'll be home once I feel like I've accomplished something here.”

He could hear her tired exhalation, the acquiescence to her son's whims.

“I know that country better than you do,” she said. “You'll accomplish a lot there, but the second you step away, it'll seem that you've accomplished nothing at all. You'll be the poor ant who drags grains of dirt three times his size to build a home only to have it trampled over with one person's careless footstep. It'll break your heart, and that's what I'm most worried about.”

When he hung up, Yusuf felt the weight of quiet in the room. He rose from the bed and went to the radio on the dresser, flipping it on and turning the dial to scan through the stations. At the sound of a young man's voice, his fingers paused.

“You've called Radio Sabaa,” the host announced. “Go ahead and speak whatever is in your heart.”

“This is the first time I'm calling.” The voice was nervous and Yusuf closed his eyes. He could picture the caller, a young man in dark denim and sneakers, a polo shirt with Coca-Cola embroidered on the pocket. He was on his cell phone, ducking into a side room of his home so his sisters and parents would not overhear his confession.
“I've been in love with a girl since I was a boy. I love everything about her. The shape of her eyebrows, the sound of her voice, the way she smiles. I used to follow her whenever she left her home, just so she'd know how much I cared about her. When she noticed, she looked back and smiled at me and it was as if . . . as if in that moment our hearts became stitched to each other.”

“Ah, young love.” The host sighed. “Please go on.”

“In the last two years, we've talked nearly every day. We talk about our studies and our families and our hopes for the future. I want, God willing, to own a business one day, maybe a restaurant or a furniture store.”