Born Under a Million Shadows (4 page)

More amazing, however, was my mother’s willingness to let me stay in the house alone and to sit with the Westerners for as long as “they don’t become bored.” Perhaps she thought it would be good for my English, although James was hardly ever around, May always seemed to be crying, and Georgie and I usually spoke Dari together.

From these little conversations I learned that Georgie came from England, the same country as London. She’d been in Afghanistan for ages and came to live with James and May two years ago because they had become friends and James needed the rent money. She worked for an NGO and combed goats for a living, and because she knew the country and traveled a lot she had made loads of Afghan friends. In that way, and many more, she was different from most foreigners I had met, and I think I fell in love with her instantly. She was gentle and funny, and she seemed to like being with me. She was also very beautiful with thick almost-black hair and dark eyes. I hoped one day to marry her—once she had given up smoking and converted to the one true faith, of course.

The engineer, May, was usually the second one home and tended to disappear into her room as soon as her quick greetings were over. Georgie told me she came from America on a contract with one of the ministries and that she was “a little unhappy right now.” She didn’t explain further, and I didn’t ask more. I liked the mystery it gave to May’s tears.

As a rule, James was always the last one home, and at least twice a week he would return very late, bouncing off walls and singing to himself. The more I got to know him, the more I was convinced he was related to Pir the Madman.

“He works very hard,” Georgie explained, “and mainly with the ladies.”

Georgie laughed at that, and I wondered how these women got permission from their husbands to work so late with a
man who freely showed his nipples to the world as if they were medals of war.

“What work does he do with them?” I asked, causing Georgie to laugh even louder. It was a good, strong sound, like thunder in summer.

“Fawad,” she finally said, “you’d best ask your mother that question.”

And that put a stop to that.

And because that’s always the way with adults—they shut you out just as things get interesting—I had no choice but to carry on with my own investigations, investigations my mother might call “snooping.”

Through much trying and failing, I found the best time to watch my new friends was at night, when the lights were on, it was dark outside, and everyone thought I was asleep. Luckily, my mother was a great help when it came to my nighttime spying, as she had chosen to sleep in the TV room, meaning I now had a bedroom to myself for the very first time, which gave me complete freedom to explore my surroundings and their strange Godless inhabitants.

Now and again, about an hour after I’d turned out my light, my mother would open the door to my room, which surprised me the first time because I was a breath away from leaving. But it was one of those warm surprises that make your toes tingle and your heart feel like it’s bleeding inside, because, thinking I was asleep, she kissed me softly on the cheek before returning to her own room, satisfied I was safely locked up in my dreams. Which of course I wasn’t. As a result of that first sweet surprise, I quickly learned to wait a good hour until after my mother’s visit before pulling on my shoes and allowing my adventures to begin.

Creeping along walls and crouching in bushes, I listened to magical, mysterious conversations that exploded with
laughter as Georgie, James, and May spoke with other white-faced friends around the table in the garden. Of course, I could hardly understand a word they were saying, but this simply meant I now had a code I would have to learn to decipher.

Really, I felt like I’d been plucked from the flames of Hell and placed into Paradise. In those first few weeks I wasn’t simply Fawad from Paghman; I was Fawad the secret agent. In those days, Kabul was crawling with spies—British, Pakistani, French, Italian, Russian, Indian, and American men as big as giants who wore their beards long to try to look Afghan. My mission from the president was simple: to discover who in the house was working as a spy, and the identity of their masters.

As I crept and crawled my way through the heavy heat of those Kabul summer nights, I wrapped layers of dreams and heroic tales around my adventures, and I plotted escape routes and hatched complicated plans to avoid detection so that I might hand over my carefully gathered information to my comrades at the palace. I lived in a world of hazy future glories, picturing myself as a national hero thanks to all the good work I had carried out as a mere boy.

“He was so young!” the people would say as they listened to the story of my successes.

“Yes, but he was a true Afghan,” President Karzai would tell them, smiling widely because he was the man who had appointed me.

“So brave! So fearless!” they would marvel. “He must have had balls as big as Ahmad Shah Massoud’s.”

“Bigger!” the president would correct. “The boy was a Pashtun!”

In order to fulfill my mission, I kept a careful record of all the foreigners’ movements in a red notebook Georgie had given me to practice my writing. Because James was hardly
ever there, and Georgie was too beautiful to work for the enemy, I decided to concentrate on May.

Once my mother had gone to sleep, I would sneak out of my room and shimmy up the wall of the “secret” passageway. From there I could see the door to May’s bedroom, on which was hung a long woolen jacket. On the far wall there was a wooden board with a collection of photographs pinned on it. I guessed they were of her family because the people caught in various poses all seemed to be short and yellow, but in my imagination they were part of a terror network supported by the pigs of Pakistan. The ISI, the country’s secret service, knew that the Afghan government would never suspect a Western woman from America of carrying out their evil plans. In that way they were as cunning as the devil himself. But they weren’t clever enough for Fawad—Afghanistan’s silent protector.

Unfortunately, though, May seemed to be going through some kind of trauma. Most of the time she just disappeared to her room. And if she wasn’t in her room, she would be shouting into her mobile phone. And if she wasn’t shouting into her phone, she would be downstairs picking at the food my mother had spent all day preparing for her, or even worse, she would be crying. Although it’s never good to see a woman cry, her face looked angry rather than sad, and I found it confusing. To be honest, I thought May was slightly mental, and by the end of the second week I decided to give up investigating her spying activity for the Pakistanis and dedicate my time to getting a look at her breasts.

Now, there was one small problem with this new mission. I could see only a third of May’s bedroom from the wall, and it wasn’t the third she undressed in. After thinking about this situation as I waited for my mother’s light to snap off, I realized my only option was to jump from the wall onto her
balcony. This meant I would have to clear a gap roughly a meter wide and try not to think about the fall below.

After a fortnight of undercover operations I’d discovered that the buzz of the generator, which gave light to the house every second night when the city electricity took a holiday, easily hid any noise I made as I scrambled around, so with no fear of alerting May, even if I fell to my death, I climbed up the wall opposite the edge of her balcony and concentrated on the railings in front of me. Twelve bars across. I just had to jump and reach out for one of them.

Taking five deep breaths, I closed my eyes, offered a prayer to Allah, and pushed my feet from the wall with every bit of strength my legs had in them. Suddenly, almost as if I hadn’t yet decided to jump, I felt my head slamming against the railings, and by some miracle my hands had hold of two of the bars.

Dazed and not quite believing I was there, I took a moment to breathe the silence back into my thumping heart. Only one small kick, and I could swing my legs onto the edge, pull myself onto the balcony, and the secrets of May’s balloonlike figure would be mine. I’d get to see her breasts, possibly more. If I was really lucky, I might even see her—

“A-hem.”

A sound came to worry my ears. It was a sound like a cough, and it seemed to be coming from below.

“A-a-hem.”

There it was again.

Slowly, hoping against hope that I was just imagining things, I looked down, a little to the right, and saw James standing there, shaking his head and wagging his finger at me. I looked back at the bright light coming from May’s bedroom, then back at James. He hadn’t gone anywhere, which would have been the polite thing to do. He was obviously waiting for me to make some kind of move.

“Salaam aleykum.” I smiled weakly.

I let go of the bars and fell to his feet, rolling myself into a tight ball as I landed to kill the blow of the soon-to-come assault. After a silence that lasted only seconds but seemed to last at least half of my short life, I heard another cough. I looked up to see James smiling. His eyes were shiny like glass, and he was swaying slightly. He then nodded his head in the direction of the garden and waved at me to follow.

I was in no hurry to go, but I decided it would be better to take a beating as far away from the front of the house—and as far away from the chance of my mother seeing my shame and adding her own style of torture afterward—as possible. So, holding my head high like a man, I followed James to the plastic chairs standing ghostlike in the gloom of the garden.

Without a word he invited me to sit next to him. He then reached down to his side, picked up a bottle of beer from a cardboard box, knocked its metal cap off on the edge of the table, and handed it to me.

It was obviously a trick, but I took it anyway.

James then reached for another bottle, opened it the same way, hit it against the one I held in my hand, and slurred something I didn’t understand. His breath smelled of old cheese.

Carefully I watched him, not daring to move, but he tipped his hand to his lips, showing that I should drink. So I did.

At first the beer tasted disgusting, bubbly and bitter like rotten Pepsi, but this was obviously my punishment and it was better than being beaten with a stick, so I took another sip, and then another, and another, and another.

In no time at all, I found my head had gone numb. A warmth, different from heat, breathed through my body, traveling up inside my veins to finish at my cheeks, making my eyes feel starry. Everything around me seemed to be muffled by an invisible blanket, and James was speaking in a language I didn’t understand. As I continued to drink, I began to talk
to him too. I couldn’t help myself; the words were jumping from my mouth as if they were racing down a hill, rolling over and over one another. Neither of us knew what the other was saying, that much was still clear, but it didn’t seem to matter. It felt like the best conversation I’d ever had in my life. The fact is, James really seemed to understand me.

By the end of my second bottle I’d told him all about Jahid and Jamilla and my best friend, Spandi. I revealed the secrets of our wages, our trips around the city hanging off the back of trucks, how we once found Pir the Madman asleep in the park and put wet mud in his pants so he’d think he’d shit himself when he woke up.

As the night grew old and the edges of the world blurred, I confessed to spying on May. At the sound of her name, James wiggled his hands in front of his chest, waved his cigarette and beer in big circles, and laughed. I laughed as well, although I wasn’t sure why, and soon James was jumping up from his seat, slapping me on the back, crashing his bottle into mine, and rubbing my hair, which I didn’t seem to mind anymore.

But then, as quickly as it had started, it all stopped.

Like a street dog caught in headlights, James turned and froze, his hand raised above his head, still holding the bottle of beer. Everything around us seemed to grow still, even the air we were breathing, and I watched mesmerized as the ashy tip of his cigarette floated to the floor and a dark figure emerged in the distance in front of him. It looked something like Georgie.

She was staring at us, and she didn’t appear happy.

She was dressed only in a long black T-shirt, her legs were bare, and her dark hair whipped about her head like a mass of angry snakes. She looked more magical than normal, furious and amazing, and I thought my heart would break at the dark, angry beauty of her, but then maybe it was the shock of
her arrival, I don’t know, or the sight of her naked legs, or the heavy thumping in my chest, or the sudden weight of a thousand camels that had come to drag at my head, but at that exact moment I leaned forward in my chair and threw up on my shoes.

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