The Way Home (13 page)

H
E MADE HER
nervous. He was sorry about that, but he was also tired of avoiding her. No easy task, given the size of the little house that consisted of this kitchen, the sleeping/social room, Rabia’s sleeping room, and little else. They generally took their meager meals outside in the back, in a courtyard shaded by fruit trees and surrounded by the same type of brick and straw walls that had been used in the construction of the house. The head was a separate building out back and very primitive.

He thought of all of this and tried not to think about the soft body hidden beneath her long dark blouse and skirt or about the hair she had covered with a white scarf as she worked over the stove.

So he took some time to get his head back together and study the room. A heavy black iron stove with three cooking tops had been pushed against a wall. A stove pipe extended outside. A worn and dented bucket sat on the floor beside it. A dwindling supply of coal and wood chips lined the bottom.

The room was summer-hot, but the aromas actually had his stomach growling. He thought he might have gained a little weight during the past week. He knew he’d gained some strength. Their belongings were meager, as were the meals Rabia prepared, and he felt guilty for taking food from her mouth and her father’s.

“What are you cooking?” he asked, to break the tension that felt as uncomfortable as it felt edgy.

For past meals, she’d made thin barley and rice soup, the occasional serving of fresh yogurt, and small loaves of bread she baked in her oven. Fruits, nuts, tomatoes, and potatoes filled in at every meal.

“Tonight we will have
yakhni pilau
, mutton steamed in rice. And
oabili
—
pilau
again but with raisins and shredded carrots. Perhaps also some almond and pistachio nuts if I have them.”

“What’s the occasion?” This he knew was a special meal, one that must have cost her a fortune.

“I exchanged favors for the meat and the raisins,” she said simply.

“What kind of favors?”

“Only some sewing.”

So that’s what she’d been doing in the night when he’d awakened and seen a light on in her room.

“Is that what smells so good?”

“Perhaps it is the bread. It is almost done baking.”

It seemed odd, suddenly, that she represented his entire life and he knew very little about her. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”

She shook her head and continued stirring her pot. “My aunt. My mother died giving birth to me. I was my father and mother’s only child.”

Which explained why there was no extended family living with them, which was the Pashtun way—another tidbit he hadn’t known that he knew.

While there was no self-pity in her tone, he felt her sorrow and her loss. “I’m sorry.”

“As am I. She was my father’s second wife. His first wife bore him no children. I am told she died of a sudden illness. Like my mother, she was very young,” she said softly. “I am told my mother was a beautiful woman. I miss not knowing her.”

“I didn’t know my mother, either.”

The world inside the small room skidded to a screeching halt. Rabia froze at her stove, then slowly turned to look at him.

“I don’t know where that came from,” he said, his eyes wide, his heart pounding. “I don’t know why I know that.”

“This is a good thing. Do you remember any more?”

He resisted the knee-jerk urge to shake his head, catching himself at the last second. He’d had an actual memory, not a piece of information that he couldn’t attach to anything. It was short and incomplete, but it was real, and he didn’t want to cloud it by launching a vertigo attack. “No. That’s it. I just know that I didn’t know my mother.”

“Then I, too, am sorry.”

He closed his eyes and tried to will the thought to flesh out, to develop, to do something more than lie there like a lead weight to compound the other weights pressing down on his shoulders.

So. He didn’t know his mother. Why? Was she dead, too, like Rabia’s mother? Or had she left? What about his father? Did he have a sister? A brother? A wife? He’d wondered all of this often, but today a tangible piece of his past was within reach, and he felt the need for answers much more urgently.

His head started to hurt again, so he thrashed around for another diversion.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

She moved to her work space beside the stove and started chopping vegetables. “I am twenty-eight years.”

Despite her hard life, she looked younger. “Why aren’t you married?” The question had been rumbling around in the back of his mind for a long time now.

She hesitated with her back to him, then let out a breath. “I was.”

Was.

Divorce was uncommon in Afghanistan because of the social stigmas. Marriages were also generally arranged social and economic contracts between families. More nuggets of intel he had no idea that he’d known.

He wanted to ask what had happened, but he’d infringed on her privacy so much already that he let it go.

As it turned out, she volunteered the information.

“Rahim was a policeman in Kabul. He was killed by a Taliban fighter posing as a fellow officer.”

What a world. What a country.
“Again. I’m sorry. How long ago?”

“Four years. We had passed our second year as husband and wife.”

He felt very tired suddenly. And didn’t think he could bear to ask her any more questions. He wasn’t the only one who had lost. This war had cost her dearly.

Without another word, he slowly rose to his feet and left her alone with her thoughts.

H
E DIDN
’
T TURN
his head when Rabia joined him on the flat roof of her father’s house. He lay still on his back and stared into a sky that was obsidian-black and sprayed with stars shining over a land as foreign to him as his own face.

“You should not be up here,
askar
. You could be spotted.”

“And what would they see? A crippled-up old Pashtun scarecrow of a man with threads of gray in his hair. Even if I was spotted, no one would give me a second look.”

She sat down beside him, folding her feet beneath her hips. “The village is small. You are a stranger.”

“I’m your long-lost uncle visiting from the big city, remember?”

She didn’t think much of that, even though the cover story had been her idea, but she didn’t say anything, at least not for a while.

“How did you get up here?”

“Same way you did.” He’d painstakingly climbed the wooden ladder propped up against the back of the house.

“I meant, how did you get up here by yourself  ? You could have fallen.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you could have. The dizziness still comes and goes.”

That it did. The vertigo and piercing headaches crippled him more than his bad leg and the loss of vision ever could. Earlier this morning, he had moved too fast, and it had taken him down. He’d needed more than an hour before the room stopped spinning and the nausea had backed off to tolerable. So, yeah, climbing up here was probably a stupid risk. But he still couldn’t tolerate bright sunlight and couldn’t risk being seen in the daylight, anyway. This was the second night he’d ventured out on his own—but it was the first night she’d come looking for him.

“The house is warm. I felt caged in.” More than caged. He’d felt restless and edgy. He’d needed space. He’d needed distance from where she slept in her bed on the floor in a room not five feet away from him.

He never should have touched her that day. He never should have kissed her hand. Everything had changed between them in that moment. He was aware of her now. She was aware of him, and she kept her distance because of it, which was just as well, because there wasn’t a damn thing he could or should do about it, anyway.

He needed to get out of here. And there was the rub. Go where? Go how?

“Perhaps you wish you were back in the cave,” she said, breaking into his thoughts.

He laughed bitterly. “Or maybe you wish you had me chained up again so you could keep better track of me.” He didn’t know why he was angry with her.

“The chain was for your own protection. I could not be with you all the time. You were often disoriented. You could have wandered off. Fallen off the side of the mountain. Walked into a Taliban patrol.”

“Careful. I’ll start thinking you care.”

He turned his head slowly, chancing a glance at her then . . .intrigued by what he saw in the moonlit night.

She did care. She didn’t want to, but she did.

“I would care if you were caught and led the Taliban to us,” she said grumpily. “My father is old. I do not wish him to die at the hands of those barbarians.”

Yeah, there was that.

“Does your father know you’re up here?”

“He is asleep.”

The old man slept a lot. During the day, he napped quietly either in the back courtyard or in the shade of his front stoop, occasionally waking up to hold court with villagers who stopped to speak with him. He seemed oblivious to what went
on inside his own house. It made him wonder if the old man might be ill.

Her father’s name was Wakdar Kahn Kakar. Kakar, she had told him one day when he’d asked, was their tribe’s name.

“Wakdar means ‘man of authority,’ ” she’d said, then added, “Do not speak to him unless he speaks to you first. Then you should address him as Shaghalai Kakar, to show respect.”

“So what is he? Some sort of tribal elder?”

“He is the
malik
, the village representative, and speaks for the people at the
shura
, the village council.”

“So everyone brings him their problems.”

“And he takes them to the
mullah
—the religious leader—who decides if they will be presented to the council.”

“How would the
mullah
like it if he knew an American
askar
was hiding in the
malik
’s house?”

She’d had nothing to say to that. But he suspected she thought about it a lot. Most likely, she thought about it tonight up on the roof.

“Maybe I should run and save you both a lot of trouble.”

It was her turn to look at the sky. “Where would you go? How far would you get?”

“That was a joke.” He could barely walk, let alone run. Even if his leg wasn’t a problem, the vertigo would take him down before he got ten yards. “Joke? A funny statement?” he clarified when she said nothing.

“I know what a joke is.”

“Yet clearly, it’s a concept you don’t understand.” He crossed his arms and made a pillow for his head.

He realized now that he could easily start living for the night when he could come up here and see the sky and not breathe air that smelled of strong spices and her father’s tobacco
smoke. Up here, it smelled of living things instead of the bat shit and the must of the cave where he’d been for so long. Other foul smells hovered at the edge of his memory. Smells that he associated with pain but couldn’t pinpoint.

She started to get up. “We should go back inside. Come. I will help you down.”

“Not yet. Relax, OK? Even the bad guys snuggle up to their RPGs and sleep sometimes. They’re not looking for me tonight.”

She did not find his sense of humor remotely funny. He found it ironic that he had one.

The truth was, Rabia found nothing funny. Then again, how the hell would he know? It had only been a couple of weeks since he hadn’t been blitzed on opium.

“So if you’re not worried I’ll run, then why are you up here?” Unaccompanied women did not venture out after dark in this land of sharia law and public stoning. “Or are we back to the possibility that you were worried about me?”

The biggest joke of all. She might not know how to handle the sexual undertones rattling around between them, but she knew how to erect distance. When she again said nothing, he decided it was time to find out more about his reluctant nurse and host. That was the thing about opium. He had pretty much not given a damn about anything while he was on it. Now he had questions. Now his head was clear—empty but clear.

“What do you do, Rabia
jana
?” he asked surprising her by adding the formality used when addressing young women. “When you aren’t risking your neck hiding American soldiers? You speak English. You’re educated. That’s clear.” It was also unusual. Ninety percent of Afghan women were illiterate.

There went another one. A random piece of information he hadn’t known that he knew.

“I am a teacher of girls. My school is in Kabul.”

“Kabul?” This village was in the Kandahar Province, south of Kabul and west of the Pakistan border. Another mysterious nugget of information.

“You don’t normally live here?”

“I was born here. My father sent me to live with his brother in Kabul when I was sixteen. Right after the Taliban were removed from power.”

“In 2001, when the U.S. and Coalition forces launched an offensive.”

She looked at him sharply. “Do you realize what you said?”

Not until it had come out of his mouth. “Yeah. I do. Like I said, that’s been happening on and off lately.”