The Sound of Language (11 page)

“Isn't she just a piece of the moon?”

“Absolutely beautiful,” Layla said, peering at the girl's face. “Isn't she, Raihana?”

“Very beautiful,” Raihana said in agreement.

For the wedding ceremony, they all congregated in one of the side rooms where the food was going to be served. Flowers adorned the room with garlands of marigolds hanging alongside shiny gold curtains, tulips and azaleas in big vases, and rose petals strewn across the floor. Colorful pillows,
toshaks
, were thrown on thick Afghan carpets and suddenly it didn't feel as if they were in Denmark; this could just as well have been Kabul.

A Farhad Darya song was playing on the CD player and women were drinking tall glasses of cool
sherbet
, tasting the way it should, of almonds, milk, sugar, and rosewater.

“Sherbet
, straight from Hamburg,” Najeeba said and offered a glass to Layla.

“Straight from Afghanistan, that's what you should say,” a heavily pregnant woman suggested. “Layla, is that Raihana? Allah
hafiz
, I am Shafiqa.”

Raihana bowed her head a little. She remembered Layla telling her about the woman who had six children and was pregnant again.

“The
nikah
ceremony was at home,” Najeeba told Raihana as they sat down, snacking on dried apricots, sugarcoated almonds, and salted peanuts. The
nikah
ceremony was the religious and solemn part, where the marriage contract was signed. The
arusi
, the fun and celebration, followed the
nikah.

“I told Elias that we will pull out all the stops for the
arusi.
Nothing left to chance,” Najeeba said, smiling broadly. For an
arusi
, this was more than adequate, Raihana thought. It was grand, in fact, nothing like she had seen in Afghanistan.

“Have you met Hadi?” Najeeba asked. “Such a good boy. Most boys here, they don't want to marry who their parents choose. Look at Uzra, going around with some white girl. Allah, what has the world come to? I'd rather die than have that happen to me. But my Hadi, we said marry this girl and he said yes, and Farida … like I said is a piece of the moon.”

“So, Najeeba, they will live with you,” Layla asked as she arranged her
dupatta
over her shoulder.

Raihana smiled to herself. Layla had told her that Hadi and Farida were not going to be living with Najeeba and Elias. The couple had rented an apartment in Viborg and planned to live there. If it were up to Hadi, he would've preferred to live with his parents, or so Najeeba said. It was Farida who wanted to live alone. Not that Najeeba was blaming anyone.

“They are a young couple, they need their privacy,” Najeeba said. “We understand; times have changed. Young couples don't live with their parents anymore. It is the way it is when you live in a foreign country.”

“These are bad times,” a woman wearing a pink-and-white
salwar-kameez
said. “Did you read the news report in
jyllands Posten
the other day? My husband showed it to me. They are saying that immigrants working in Denmark take more sick holidays than Danes because they have exotic diseases. What nonsense is that, I ask?”

“Exotic diseases?” another woman said. She was wearing a dress similar to Raihana's and her hair had been dyed with henna. “What, they think we have some special diseases in Afghanistan? Like what?”

“God knows,” Najeeba said. “You should see how these Danes talk to us at the kiosk, like we have stolen something from them. We are citizens too, have EU passports and everything. But they behave like we are taking something from them.”

“How long have you been here, Raihana?” the woman with the henna-dyed hair asked. Though Najeeba had rattled out everyone's name when they first sat down, Raihana couldn't remember them all.

“Just ten months,” Raihana said.

“And she already speaks great Danish,” Layla said proudly. “Passed module two in four months’ time.”

“I heard that you are doing a strange
praktik
for some Danish man, going to his house alone and whatnot,” a woman in a white-and-blue
salwar-kameez
in the corner put in.

“Madiha,” Najeeba cried out.

“I help him with his honeybees,” Raihana said calmly. “I have experience, you see. I used to help my
chacha
who made honey and silk.”

“So what do you do to help?” Madiha asked, undeterred by Najeeba's shushing.

“I check the beehives; help make frames so that the bees will have more room to make honey. I help him add more boxes to increase the size of the colonies and when it is time to harvest, I will help him make honey,” Raihana said. “What do you do for
praktik?”

Madiha snorted. “I work in a factory.”

“What kind of—” Layla began when Najeeba clapped her hands. “Enough, enough, the wedding singers have arrived.”

As Raihana got up to leave, Farida, the bride, touched her shoulder. “She works in a meatpacking factory and hates it,” she said. “They are just envious that you don't have to clean supermarkets and pack meat like them.”

Raihana smiled at her new ally. “She is my mother's cousin,” Farida said. “I can't stand her either.”

Usually the bride went and got ready while food and tea were served. However, since they were in Denmark things were being done a little differently. Farida was already dressed and mingling with the other female guests.

When Raihana married Aamir, she didn't see Aamir until after the
nikah
ceremony, during which she signed her marriage contract by proxy. Here, the bride and groom went together to city hall and signed their marriage contract before the
nikah.

If they'd had the choice, she knew Aamir would've preferred this Western-style wedding. He would have liked the idea of her standing next to him as they were married. She would have liked that too.

The groom was seated on a
takht
, throne, raised up on a platform, and was dressed in plush red velvet and gold. Farida's veil was pulled over her face and her mother, Khusboo, held the Koran over her daughter's head. As soon as Farida sat down next to Hadi, the mirror ceremony began. The
Takhtee Khina
was brought out and put on the table in front of Farida and Hadi. The silver tray had a beautifully embroidered brown shawl on it and a bowl with henna.

Najeeba slid the Koran under the shawl and Hadi leaned over and whispered something to the veiled Farida, who giggled.

Layla shook her head at the blatant disregard for tradition. The groom and bride were just too free with each other before the ceremony was even complete. Raihana watched with a shaft of longing going through her. Had she ever been that young? That playful? Had she and Aamir giggled and been happy?

Farida removed the shawl from the tray and opened the Koran. Both Farida and Hadi read the lines expected of them. There was no accent to their voice, nothing Danish about what they said and how they said it. Raihana thought that no matter where they lived, Afghans would always be Afghans.

Farida's father, who was dressed in traditional Afghan clothes, put henna in Hadi's hand and wrapped it with a piece of white cloth, and then Elias did the same for Farida.

The ceremonies that followed were less formal and more gregarious than the mirror ceremony. Farida removed her veil and laughed openly while talking to Hadi.

“They knew each other before the wedding,” Madiha, whom Raihana didn't like at all, said to Layla. “Look at them cavorting.”

Layla's eyebrows went up. “Not arranged, you think?”

Madiha leaned closer, conspiratorially. “Lucky for Najeeba that Hadi went and fell in love with an Afghan, an Uzbek at that. Look at Walid; he keeps threatening to kill Uzra. And that Danish girl, couldn't she wear our clothes when she comes to one of our weddings?”

Raihana looked at the Danish woman who was watching the proceedings with her eyes wide. She kept asking Uzra questions. She had probably watched the ceremonies more keenly than anyone. Everyone else was busy chatting, drinking
sherbet
and
molina.

After the ceremonies ended the bride and the groom were seated on a velvet sofa in the main room of the community center while the wedding singer—hired from Århus for an insane five thousand kroner according to Madiha—started singing “Khinna-ba-karha,” the traditional wedding song, followed by other popular wedding songs like “Aros-e jan-e madar.”

“Ask him to sing something by Larmal Wasiq next,
Ammi,”
Farida said to her mother, who sat on the sofa next to her. “Have you listened to his
Qeel-o-qal
album, Raihana?”

Raihana looked up, uncomfortable at being singled out by the bride. She hadn't listened to the album and said as much.

Farida grinned. “We just love his music, don't we, Hadi?” she asked her husband who smiled, his thin mustache wiggling as he spoke softly to his wife.

“What you love, I love,” he said, making his bride laugh.

“I will listen to a Farhad Darya
ghazal
any day,” Layla said. “And we also have to listen to songs from all Shahrukh Khan's movies. You know Kabir—to be his wife I had to love everything about another man, Shahrukh Khan.”

Everyone laughed and the conversation turned to Indian movies and songs.

“Aishwarya Rai, she is just forty-five kilograms,” one of the men said. “And she is so tall. They say almost five feet eight inches. Ah, now that is beauty.”

“Hakim knows her weight, height, and everything else in between,” another man joked.

It had been a long time since music had been a part of Raihana's life. When she first came to Pakistan, it had been a shock to listen to music being played out loud in the open. During the Taliban regime, she and Assia would turn on the tape recorder very low and listen to songs. Assia had been the brave one, wanting to put the volume a little higher while Raihana was so scared that she wanted to turn the music off. They never knew when someone might be listening outside the flat, by the window. They could be arrested, killed for doing this.

She was so scared then, so insistent that they do as they were told. But neither Assia, nor Ismat, nor Aamir had listened to her. And then the Taliban looted her father's village fifty kilometers outside Kabul. Her father's house was burned down and he was killed. Raihana's mother had died before and it had been just been Raihana's father and thirteen-year-old brother living there, keeping their cows in the yard of their small house.

Raihana's brother managed to escape, Raihana learned later, but he was killed anyway. A stray bullet some said; others said it was intentional. He was just a boy.

Now in the wedding hall surrounded by music and happiness, the past seemed far away, like a bad dream, like something that never happened. As she celebrated this wedding of strangers, it was more meaningful than ever that she could listen to music, that it could be played as loud as they liked.

Raihana met Rafeeq after dinner. She had hoped she wouldn't have to, but Najeeba dragged him along and introduced them. Things were different here, Raihana thought. Back home her family would have settled the marriage and told her about it later. She remembered Salma, whom she met in Pakistan. Salma had been fifteen years old and had escaped from a prison in Kandahar. The Taliban had thrown her in prison for refusing to marry the man her father chose for her. Pretending to accept the marriage, Salma had gotten out of prison and then, with the help of a foreign aid worker, escaped to Pakistan with her aunts and cousins.

Salma was brave. Raihana had been in awe of her bravery.

Here in Denmark, Raihana didn't have to be extraordinarily brave to make a choice; she didn't have to fight for it. In Denmark, it was her right to choose the man she married. The freedom she had was not unlimited, but it was more than she'd ever had before.

“Layla tells me that you speak very good Danish,” Rafeeq said.

Raihana saw Layla and Najeeba watching them.

“She exaggerates,” Raihana said.

“She is very proud of you. And so is Kabir,” Rafeeq said.

Raihana didn't know what to say to a man who was not her husband or relative. How could Kabir and Layla ask her to speak to this stranger? What did they want out of her? And then it struck her that he wasn't the first strange man she had interacted with. There was the Danish man.

Maybe it was not that Rafeeq was a stranger that was the problem; maybe it was his interest in her that made her uncomfortable.

They talked some more. He told her about his job and about the island he lived on. He told her that he rented an apartment in the city and alluded that he would buy a house once he had a family in Denmark and his Danish citizenship. He wasn't struggling in Denmark, Raihana thought. He was settled in Denmark and comfortable living here.

Once the conversation hit a lull, partly because she wasn't telling him anything about herself, Raihana made her excuses and all but ran to Layla.

“What did you think of him?” Layla asked that night after they came home.

“I can't marry him, Layla,” Raihana said and then added a little harshly, “Please don't put me in such a situation again. If you want me to leave your house, let me know, but—”

“How can you even think that?” Layla cried out. “You're family. You can stay here forever.”

But Raihana started to wonder if she could. As she lay in bed in her small room, the converted attic where the roof sloped above her, she knew she had to do something. She would have to get married, because that was what Afghan girls did. They got married and left the refuge of their parents’ home, in this case her guardians’ home. But she didn't want to get married. So what was it she wanted to do?

TEN
ENTRY FROM ANNA'S DIARY
A Year of Keeping Bees

28 JUNE 1980

I read a beautiful beekeeping journal last week. It was a poignant passage through the bee season. I was touched and now I worry that my journal pales in comparison.

I wonder if my children's children will use the journal. I know that my children think beekeeping is a boring occupation; it is also to blame for stealing their parents away. But I do hope that someone will use my journal and learn something from it.

M
aria didn't leave with Lars on Sunday but stayed back with Brian and Johanna. Gunnar knew she wanted to wait for Raihana and he wasn't happy about it. He didn't like that she thought she could pry into his life. He needed help in getting her out of his house, he decided, and he called the person he thought could help him.

He called Julie, who said what she thought without worrying about the consequences.

“What do you mean she thinks it's a bad idea? What business is it of hers?” Julie demanded just as Gunnar knew she would. Julie didn't like Maria any more than he did and since Julie was an immigrant herself, she was not closed-minded about immigrants in Denmark.

“She's here now. She wants to stay the week. That poor girl will come here today and I don't want her harassed,” Gunnar said. “What should I do?”

“What can I do,
Far?
You kick her out, tell her to leave,” Julie said and then sighed. “I'm going to talk to Lars… actually, give the phone to Maria. I will sort her out.”

Gunnar smiled to himself. He found Maria in the kitchen and handed her the phone. He waited a moment to hear Maria sputter in rage and then sneaked outside to play with his grandchildren.

It worked like a charm. Within the hour, Maria was packing up the car and the kids. Gunnar was sorry to see Brian and Johanna go, but Maria looked so angry that he was a little afraid to ask her to leave the children with him for a couple of days.

Raihana was coming late today as she had to first go to the language school. And that was a saving grace; it gave him time to get Maria out of the house. He hadn't liked it when fat Ulla —not to be confused with thin Ulla, who lived across the street—had all but interrogated the poor girl the other day in the backyard. He was determined to avoid another interrogation session with Maria.

“I don't understand your behavior,” Maria said as she finished packing up the car. “You are such a stubborn old fool.”

Gunnar was taken aback. She was not always pleasant but Maria had never been downright insulting. Though he wasn't completely surprised for he had seen Lars get a dose of her sharp tongue several times.

“How could you leave Brian's bottle at home? What were you thinking?”

“How could you forget to fill up the gas tank? Did your brain take a walk?”

And so on and so forth.

Gunnar wanted to defend himself but wasn't quite sure what to say. He wished Lars was still here. Lars would know how to handle his wife in a temper.

“If you don't care what happens to you, why should I?” Maria said, throwing a pair of Brian's shoes inside the trunk. “If this is your decision then we won't come and visit again.”

Gunnar sighed. Maria could be so melodramatic.

“What is your problem with this girl?” Gunnar asked as Johanna and Brian watched the drama from inside the house.

“She is a Muslim.”

“So what?” Gunnar asked. “So what? She is a young girl who helps me and I hope I am helping her learn Danish. She is not some femme fatale out to blow up the world and trap your old father-in-law.”

Maria stared at him. “Then why don't you want us to meet her? Why are you kicking us out of the house?” She was yelling now.

“Because I am worried you will talk to her the way you talk to me,” Gunnar snapped back.

Maria calmed for a moment and Gunnar tried to smile at Brian and Johanna, who were enjoying the show with their eyes wide open. Gunnar never lost his temper. Never yelled. Never made a scene.

“What if I promise not to be rude to her?” Maria asked.

Gunnar took a deep breath. “I want you to stay. I want the kids to stay. But I don't want that girl harassed.”

“Okay, okay, we'll treat the Muslim girl like a queen,” Maria said in exasperation.

“Her name isn't Muslim girl, it is Raihana,” Gunnar said. “And she seems very fragile. A little lost at times. She understands some Danish but not a lot. Don't talk too fast, but not too slowly either… she isn't stupid. Okay?”

“Okay,” Maria said. “Anything else?”

“Sometimes she brings food from home. If she gives you some, eat it, don't make a face,” Gunnar said and walked away, glad to have had the last word.

Since Maria was going to be there, he planned the day a little, not wanting Raihana to clean the house like a servant. He decided they would check the hives again. He couldn't hear the early signs of swarming the way Anna could, so he had to do it the hard way, looking through the colonies one by one and making sure they had enough room.

He was suspicious that colony numbers eight and ten were getting ready to swarm but he didn't want to go into the backyard alone, without Raihana. So far he had only worked with the bees when she was there. The rest of the week he waited for her to come back so they could go back to the bees together.

Maria was determined to get rid of the Afghan girl. It was unconscionable that her own father-in-law was allowing one of those people into his home. She didn't have anything against Muslims or foreigners, she really didn't, she just didn't think they should be living in Denmark.

Now, if Maria went to Saudi Arabia or one of those other Muslim countries, she would be expected to wear a scarf and whatnot, but Danes were just supposed to accept that these women would wear their strange clothes in Denmark. Not only that, what was really frustrating was that Danes had to pay for the education of these people, their lives here, and then they didn't even go out and find jobs. She had recently read an article in Börsen that half of the immigrants in Denmark didn't work. How could they not work? Didn't they have any pride?

And she didn't trust people like this Muslim girl. What if she was stealing things? Gunnar wouldn't care; he didn't even know what was in the house.

In all honesty, Maria didn't like Gunnar much. He had always been passive, following Anna like a little puppy. Anna decided how the children would be raised, what they would buy for Christmas, where they would go on vacation, and how they would take care of their bees. Maria had fully believed that after Anna's death, Gunnar would get rid of the bees; that he would sell them. His and Anna's bee colonies were worth fifty or sixty thousand kroner, according to a friend of Maria's who knew of such things.

Gunnar was not that interested in the bees. Anna had decided they needed a new hobby; she had read about bees and Christina's husband, a beekeeper himself, had encouraged her. Anna had told Gunnar they would keep bees and he had wagged his tail and said, “Yes, dear.”

Maria remembered the Christmas when Gunnar was keen on duck but Anna had decided they would have ham and the Danish sausage,
medister.
Gunnar really liked duck but when Anna firmly said that she would only make ham and
medister
, he had not argued. Maria had felt sorry for him and wondered why Anna couldn't just make duck for Christmas.

“I already said ham and now he wants duck? He always wants something else, like this is a restaurant,” Anna had said.

“But he likes duck,” Maria pointed out.

“So what? I decide what we have for Christmas dinner. If he wants to decide, he should learn how to cook.”

Then Anna roasted a duck for New Year's Eve and Maria marveled at her mother-in-law's ability to come out looking like a shiny øre coin because she had finally relented and made her husband's favorite dish.

Maria hated to admit it but she herself could be a lot like Anna — at times. Maria wasn't as manipulative as Anna but they had similar beliefs about raising their children and handling their husbands. Maria was less dominating than Anna, but she felt it was her job to keep Lars on the straight and narrow.

There were rules and Lars had to live accordingly. Sure he could go out on Friday night with the boys and come home drunk at four in the morning. Certainly he was allowed his weeklong ski vacation in Austria with his friends while she took care of the children at home. But then she decided who their friends were, what clothes everyone wore, what they ate, what kind of house they bought, and what kind of house paint they used. He had some freedom but she was the queen of her house.

Maria had harbored no doubts that after Anna's death she would take over that role for Gunnar, caring for him and helping him manage his life. But he was becoming more and more belligerent. He was getting out of control.

By the time the Afghan girl arrived at Gunnar's house, the children had already eaten lunch and were napping in Lars's old room. Maria had kissed their warm, flushed cheeks and held them as they fell asleep still talking about their soccer game in the yard.

Raihana was surprised to see a woman in the house when she arrived. She suddenly felt unsure about coming in as she was not really supposed to go into the house. She quickly retraced her steps and went into the garage, sitting down on one of the two wooden chairs at the worktable with the black leather notebook.

The Danish man followed her, almost immediately, and sat down on a chair across from her. The woman came inside the garage and stood behind him.

“This is Maria,” the Danish man said after a long silence. “My
svigerdatter.
”

Raihana didn't understand the word
svigerdatter
and for a moment wondered if it meant stepdaughter. The Danish man saw the confusion on her face and explained that Maria was his son's wife.

The woman was wearing blue shorts and a white T-shirt. Her hair was blond and short, like a man's, and she looked at Raihana with suspicion.

“I think colony number eight and ten might start swarming,” Gunnar said to Raihana, like they always spoke about the bees at the start of the day.

Raihana nodded, uncertain of what was going on. Was Maria checking up on them? Is that why he wanted to start working on the bees right away? Not that she minded because she liked the bees better than cleaning his house or sitting there doing nothing.

“You check colony eight and I will check colony ten, okay?” Gunnar asked.

“Jeg vil,”
Raihana said.

As she stood up to put on her protective suit she heard Maria clear her throat and whisper something to Gunnar. He didn't lower his voice enough when he whispered back because Raihana could hear him say, “But she's dead and has no need for it,” and then something else.

Raihana stared at the protective suit and swallowed uneasily. This was his dead wife's suit. Of course it was. Why hadn't she realized it before? And then she looked at the black leather notebook. It was his wife's too.

His wife was not real to her. She had seen pictures in the house of a regular Danish woman. Not too fat, not too thin. She had short hair, like Maria's, and wore dangling earrings in all the pictures she had seen.

Maria came farther inside the garage and looked around. Her hands were locked behind her back and she was peering at the things on the table.

“This is Anna's,” the woman said to Gunnar, picking up the black leather notebook.

Gunnar looked at the notebook and smiled. He had forgotten about it. Anna wrote it in their second year with the bees. She wanted to get it published but it never happened. She had written in those pages, painstakingly, reading out to him what she wrote from time to time. She would first write in a regular notebook and would then write the same thing in the leather notebook, once she was happy with it.

“What is she doing with it?” Maria demanded.

Gunnar had no answer. What was Raihana doing with it?

Raihana felt as if a bullet had ripped through her.

“This is my mother-in-law's book,” Maria said, speaking in Danish, loudly and slowly as if Raihana was stupid. “Where did you get it?”

Raihana's hands were clammy. “In … in brown closet,” she said, pointing to the cupboard in the garage.

“And you just took it?”

Raihana was going to tell her that she had asked Gunnar and he had given her permission, but before she could, Gunnar spoke.

“I gave it to her,” he lied.

“No, I found it and I… I… you say okay.” Her voice was shaking.

“It is okay,” Gunnar said, glaring at Maria. “She's reading it to learn about beekeeping and to learn Danish.”

Maria's eyes blazed. “This is my children's legacy and you are giving it to a stranger,” she cried.

“No,” Gunnar said. “This was my wife's and I choose to do what I want with it.”

Raihana was so nervous that she hardly understood what they were saying. Her eyes filled up with tears. She was not a thief, she wanted to say. But just like before, she couldn't get the words out. It had happened at the bazaar one afternoon; she never knew why the storekeeper screamed at her that she had stolen food as she walked away from his shop. Two Taliban soldiers were on her almost immediately, ripping her bag from her shoulder, shoving her onto the ground. They searched her bag and shouted at her, asking her what she had stolen, where she had hidden it.

“Don't you know what we do to those who steal?” one of the men demanded. Raihana's body went cold, her breath choked her, and her tears blinded her.

A Taliban soldier pulled her from the ground, his fingers a vise around her arm. Small moans escaped her mouth but she didn't have the courage to proclaim her innocence. They were big men, she could barely see them through the opening in her
burkha.

“No, no, it's okay,” the shopkeeper said then. “The apple is right here.”

The man let her arm go. “Don't ever steal, okay,” he warned and then shoved her away.

She cried for hours that day after she got home —out of relief and fear and frustration. She wiped the tears before Aamir came home and never told him about that incident. She had been ashamed.