A House Without Windows (38 page)

YUSUF TRUDGED ALONG THE ROAD, HIS SHOES MUDDIED AND
his socks damp. He'd rolled up the hems of his trousers, hoping to spare at least part of his clothing from the mud. The taxi driver had dropped him off as close to the entrance of Chil Mahtab as he could.

He should not have come today. There was no true urgency to this visit, nothing he was going to do that could not have been done tomorrow when the sun had been given the opportunity to dry the streets. Yusuf told himself that engaging with this reporter was strategy, not an act of desperation. He stood in the interview room while two guards rambled past, greeting him with a nod. He'd gotten to know their faces, if not their names, and put a hand to his forehead in a friendly salute before unfurling his trouser legs.

He checked his phone and saw that it was just a few moments after two o'clock. He opened his messenger bag and removed his notepad. He spotted his bottle of eyedrops and appreciated the rain for what it did to the air quality. He'd woken that morning without feeling like the insides of his eyelids were made of sandpaper.

He'd missed a call. He looked at the long string of numbers and realized his mother must have called with a calling card. She purchased them from the Afghan market she went to for bread, lamb, and thermoses, items she refused to purchase from any other retailer. She
took two buses and walked a quarter of a mile to get to the Afghan store but never complained about the inconvenience.

Everywhere else you go,
she would say,
they give you beef and call it lamb. They think people won't know any better. And these thermoses know how to keep tea hot for hours!

You think your fellow countrymen are above cheating you?
his father would retort with eyes still trained on the television set.
They just speak your language while they're doing it. We haven't had real lamb in years
.

The longer Yusuf stayed away, the more he found himself imagining what his parents might be doing at any given moment. On his phone, he switched between local time and New York time. It wasn't that he wanted to be back in their apartment with the wafting smells of the neighbors' cooking and rattle of air-conditioning units perched precariously on windowsills. It was more that he thought of his parents with a certain fondness. Nostalgia, he thought, was far more elegant than homesickness.

He would call his mother tonight, when it would be noon in New York and she would be home, cooking lunch for his father. She was, doubtless, delivering daily packages of food to his sister as well to keep her well nourished as she thickened with her growing baby.

“Have you been waiting long?”

Her voice startled him. Yusuf looked up and found himself staring into the kohl-rimmed eyes of a woman who had to be Sultana. She wore a knee-length army green jacket, with sleeves rolled at the cuffs. She had on slim-fitting jeans tucked into brown boots, smart wear for the day's conditions. She stuck out her hand and tilted her head to the side.

“You are Yusuf, aren't you?”

“I am,” he said and pushed his chair back to stand. He shook her hand, surprised both that she'd offered it and that her grip was as firm as it was.

“Sultana-
jan,
I'm assuming,” he said, pointing to the chair across from his. He waited as she put her shoulder bag on the ground and
flipped her brown cotton head scarf off her head, fluffed the top of her hair, and let it fall lightly back into place. She smiled politely, small dimples appearing at the corners of her mouth like apostrophes. She had no other makeup on her face and not a single piece of jewelry.

“Correct,” she confirmed. “Thanks for meeting me.”

“Of course,” Yusuf replied. It was inherently uncomfortable for the two of them to be seated in a room—alone. It didn't help matters that Yusuf felt stirred by her face, the way her cheeks tapered to give her a heart-shaped countenance. “I'm glad you're looking into this place, actually. When you start looking into the cases of these prisoners, it tells you a lot about where the justice system's priorities are.”

“Exactly,” Sultana agreed. “When we need the police, they throw their hands up and cry ‘what can we do without funding or training?' It's amazing how capable and resourceful they are in finding a woman who's escaped from a deadly home. No criminal is worse than a woman who wants to live for herself.”

“It must be hard to report on this as a woman,” Yusuf commented. “Frustrating to watch this happen.”

“I suppose so. It's not shocking, of course. Just a reminder of how things really are. I could easily be them, I think. Other women might choose to believe differently, but any one of us could end up here.”

Yusuf thought of the cases he'd reviewed with Aneesa: the woman who had strangled her husband after he'd prostituted her to strangers for money; the woman who had left the husband who had tried to stab her with a screwdriver; the woman who had refused to marry the man thirty years her senior. Yusuf thought of his own sister, who had dared to fall in love with a man his parents did not like. They'd shouted and protested, but in the end, it was her choice and they'd paid for her wedding and smiled when their friends congratulated them, never revealing how disappointed they'd been.

His sister could have been on the roll call of Chil Mahtab, Asma the guard watching over her and Qazi Najeeb deciding her fate over a cup of green tea. That was why Yusuf was here—because he could
imagine his family or himself in every tragedy in this land. He could have been the ill-trained prosecutor, incapable of framing a true legal argument. His sister could have been locked up here. His brother could have been arrested for being caught with his girlfriend. Hell, Yusuf could have been arrested for the same. Even his parents could have been arrested for some conflagration of the truth.

“What kind of article are you trying to put together, exactly?” Yusuf asked.

“I want to talk about the specific crimes and the way women are locked up without a second thought. The problem is that none of the women want their names or faces in the news. They'd be happier talking to foreign press about it, but the thought of their stories anywhere in the Afghan news makes them want to run and hide. Of course, it's impossible to get the judges or the police to talk about any of this. They're all doing the right thing, in their own minds.”

“I don't think Zeba's going to want to talk either, to tell you the truth,” Yusuf admitted. “She's got children she's thinking about and doesn't want her name smeared any more than it already has been.”

“I'm sure. That's why I'm not really talking about highlighting any particular case. I'd rather make it about the system as a whole.”

“You know, I never asked you,” Yusuf mused. “Why did you call me? I mean, there are a lot of lawyers with much more local experience here.”

“Good question,” Sultana said, laying her hands on the table as if to come clean. “I've been asking around and it's pretty hard to get anyone to talk. The attorneys who have trained here don't want to speak to a journalist, especially a female journalist. I thought you might be different. Plus, Zeba's case is fascinating. There aren't many murder cases, but in the few I've come across, the motivation is pretty clear. The women offer up exactly what it is that drove them to kill. She's not really given any kind of reason and”—Sultana's pointer fingers rapped on the table in synchrony—“I'm sure she must have had one. The fact that she won't reveal it only makes me more curious.”

Yusuf took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. There most certainly had been a reason, a very good one he wanted to say. Instead, he turned to her first reason for approaching him.

“How'd you know I came from abroad?”

“Ask enough questions, you eventually discover a few things. Simple as that. Speaking of which, where is home for you?”

“New York. Or Washington,” Yusuf answered, knowing it was all probably one big America to her. “I've lived in both places.”

She peered at him, divining something from the contours of his face.

“You were young when you left.”

“I was,” Yusuf admitted. “We went to Pakistan.”

“We did too for a while. But you . . . you were one of the lucky ones.” She smiled. “You went to America. We came back in 2003.”

Yusuf shifted in his chair. He was among the fortunate and knew it. It was the reason he felt uncomfortable around anyone his age in Afghanistan. They should have been peers, equals. They should have felt like countrymen, but they didn't. It was as if they were all in the same car accident, but only Yusuf walked away without a scrape. Sultana must have sensed this.

“We were lucky, too. So many others were not.”

Yusuf rubbed the back of his neck. He was thankful for the drop in temperature, a hint that fall was approaching and bringing with it cooler winds from the north. After fall, winter would settle in with its bone-chilling temperatures. He'd be watching the street children shiver in their threadbare sweaters and thin-soled shoes. If summer was brutal, winter was death itself. Yusuf's worst fear was that Zeba would be released from prison only to meet the justice of the outside world. Kamal's family might choose to avenge his death. If they did, they would do it quickly, Yusuf knew. She would be dead before the first villagers' toes turned white with chill. He thought of his grandmother's funeral, the browned
halwa
his mother had made and folded into halved pita bread rounds. The crispness of the caramelized sugar
was forever melded in his mind with the sound of his mother's quiet sobbing and the feel of the
masjid
's cold linoleum through his dress socks. It would be the same for Basir, Zeba's son, he knew. Maybe it would be the snow. Maybe every winter's snowfall would make him think of the day he lost his mother.

Yusuf kept his eyes on Sultana's hands, her tapered fingers and slightly rounded nails. He was a good lawyer. He'd been told so by law school professors, classmates, mentors, and supervising attorneys. He had an appreciation for statutes, precedent, formulating arguments. He liked the inherent rationality of the procedural codes and the penal codes. They were guidelines, blueprints for how to approach and build a case. They were anchors, preventing a society from becoming a ship unmoored in wild waters.

But he had traveled to the other side of the world. Sometimes, it felt as if he'd traveled back in time. The laws and codes were changing. The judge didn't have the full story; neither did the prosecutor. Sultana had an inkling that there was more beneath the surface, but she didn't have a clue. As things stood, Zeba's fate would not be based on facts—it would be based on the absence of information, which made it inherently unjust. Yusuf looked at Sultana and wondered if it just might be time to work within the set of unwritten codes that governed this land.

“What if I told you where you could find information about Zeba's case?”

Sultana cocked her head slightly and blinked.

“What do you mean?”

Yusuf tried to ignore the dampness settling into his feet. His mother would have stripped his wet socks off long ago.
You don't know it now because you're young,
she would say,
but you'll have arthritic legs the rest of your life if you don't get out of those things. I know you've got all those diplomas, but there's a lot you learn from living, too.

Yusuf tapped the tip of his pen on his notepad, then looked up. Sultana watched him, her shoulders even and poised. She knew not to push him. She only needed to be patient.

“You're right. Zeba's case is an intriguing one and there's a lot more to it than can be found in her arrest register,” Yusuf said. A confidence bloomed in him that this was the right thing to do. It was, in fact, the only thing to do. “There's been a lot of buzz in her village lately. Things people are saying about her dead husband that might shed a lot of light on what happened that day.”

“Really?”

“Yes. There's a lot of talk about things he had done in the months before he was killed. It's worthwhile getting to know what kind of man he was, I think.”

“You're suggesting I go out to her village and speak to people?”

There wasn't time for that. Yusuf knew just how long it would take to get there, knock on doors, and find the few willing to speak.

“Everyone's been interviewed by the chief of police—a man named Hakimi. It seems the deceased had a penchant for alcohol.”

Sultana's eyebrows perked with interest.

“Did he?”

“Yes. Among other vices. But the worst that came out of the police chief's investigation was that he'd destroyed a page of the Qur'an. Seems he didn't have much respect for God's book. A man who does something like that with the holy book—well, you can just imagine how he might have treated his wife throughout their marriage.”

“I see,” Sultana said, her lips pulling together grimly.

“This information hasn't really made its way outside . . . it's not likely to weigh too heavily on the judge's decision because he's looking just at the physical evidence.”

“Is there proof the husband did these things?”

“It's what a lot of people have been saying.”

Sultana said nothing. She leaned back in her chair and narrowed her eyes on the pen Yusuf twirled between his fingers.

“Anything else?” she finally asked.

Yusuf shook his head.

“It . . . it explains a lot, doesn't it? I think it would make an interesting piece for the public to read about.”

“Which would then get back to the judge and force him to be lenient with Zeba because her husband was such an awful man that he dared to burn a page of the Qur'an.”

Sultana's tone had a distinct edge to it. Her eyes were narrowed so that the kohl and lashes and dark irises meshed together into smoky half-moons.