“Send food? They already have a cook who prepares food for them. It’s hard enough for us to feed the mouths we have here!”
“We will send food and pay our respects. We’ve marked happy days with them and shouldn’t shy from their sorrow,” Padar-
jan
said slowly and deliberately, his eyes narrowed at KokoGul. She sulked at his admonishment.
As a family grieved its son, I was ashamed to admit that I felt relieved, as if a yoke had been removed from my neck. But the weight of the misery I’d escaped was replaced by heavy thoughts.
I sat stone-faced while we ate. My jaw moved but I tasted nothing.
It could not have been coincidence.
I kept my face lowered, my thoughts so loud I feared my family would hear me and realize what I was. I was not invisible any longer.
In the orchard, I’d cupped my hands, raised my face to the sun, and prayed to God. When my neighbor finished his fateful prayer, I’d whispered
Ameen
. I’d pushed his words to Allah, as if I had any business praying with a stranger. His words, our words, echoed in my mind.
Please, Allah, bring a solution to my neighbor’s situation. Please help her avoid the path that others are choosing for her and this suitor. She’s not been able to take a peaceful breath in these weeks and surely things would only be worse with this suitor, as You know better than any.
A peaceful breath. A solution.
Please do not let anyone hold her back from her goals.
KokoGul was too distressed to eat. I hid behind her heavy sighs. My sisters gave one another curious looks, eager to get away from the eerie silence of our meal and share their thoughts where my father wouldn’t hear.
A quiet panic raced through me. It was entirely possible that I’d been complicit in this boy’s demise. It was also possible that I was more than merely complicit. I might have been wholly responsible for God taking his life.
I chewed carefully, afraid I would choke. Allah was in a fickle mood.
I wondered if my neighbor had heard the news. The thought of him sent my mind reeling in a whole other direction. I questioned his intentions and the meaning of the words he’d sent into the heavens.
I fought the urge to run out of the house and into the orchard, to call on him to explain what had happened.
I would have to wait.
Apart from my mother’s death, I was mostly certain that the world churned around me, unaffected by my existence. Maybe that was not so.
TWO DAYS LATER, OUR HOME HAD RECOVERED ITS COMPOSURE.
My sisters accepted that I had nothing to say about the boy’s death. KokoGul had resigned herself to continue on in her unexalted household. Padar-
jan
went to Agha Firooz to pay his respects, an exchange the two fathers had never anticipated. In my harried state, I started the laundry and realized I’d forgotten the soap. On my way to get the soap, I remembered the meat needed to be marinated. Hours later I found the forgotten laundry, sopping wet and still waiting.
My chest about to burst, I wandered into the orchard. Every step felt like a trespass. The branches that had once welcomed me like open arms now seemed to point at me with accusing fingers, witnesses to my crime.
I coughed lightly.
“
Salaam,
” he called out cautiously.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be here.”
“Good, it’s you,” he said brightly. “I wasn’t sure either.”
The cheer in his voice felt blasphemous.
“Did you not hear the news?” I whispered.
“News? What news?” His tone grew solemn.
“About the boy. You really don’t know?”
“What is it? You sound distressed.”
“He died.”
“What? Is this some kind of joke, Fereiba?” he whispered back. There was a bite to his tone that surprised me.
“I would not joke about such a thing,” I said. In my next breath I blurted out what I’d been wanting to scream since KokoGul broke this news at dinner. “It’s true. He’s dead and it’s almost as if we had prayed for it but we didn’t, did we? What did we ask for? What sin have we committed?”
“Lower your voice,” he cautioned. “You are serious then. Of course, we never prayed for such a thing. Don’t be foolish. Tell me what happened to him.”
I related everything I had heard from KokoGul. I’d gone over the events in my head so many times, it was almost as if I’d watched his last afternoon. I pictured him gasping, grabbing at his chest, his skin a fiery red, a storm raging from within and circling tight around his throat.
“Fereiba-
jan,
listen to me. This is shocking news and I know it might feel odd given our conversations but believe me, I had no intention of bringing him any harm. It was a prayer to God, not a curse. Whatever happened, it was never in our hands.”
“But we prayed—”
“And that was all we did. We wished no evil upon anyone, I promise you. We only meant for you to be spared from misery. You must know that.”
The orchard let out a soft breath, and the knot around my chest loosened. He was right. I did know that we’d meant nothing so fatal in our wishes. And I’d known from our first exchange that this voice in the orchard had a good heart. He had acted as a friend when I had no one to trust with my private thoughts. Even now, he was my only
friend in a place and time where friendships between boys and girls did not exist. There were brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, husbands and wives—but no friends.
I could not bring myself to look directly at him nor would I offer to shake his hand even though these would have been meaningless gestures in comparison to the intimacies we’d already shared. I felt my face warm to think how much I had relied on this stranger through the ugliest days.
“You’re right. It was such a terrible feeling to think . . .”
“Don’t think that way. You’ve been set free by strange and sad affairs. I won’t speak badly of the dead, but you and I both know what type of person he was. This was not your doing. It wasn’t my doing either, so don’t put it on our shoulders.”
I dared not interrupt when he was saying precisely what I needed him to say. In hindsight, I wonder if much of what he said was a bit too perfect. It was possible that, in my solitude, I’d created this friend out of a shadow of a person and brought him to life to fill a need, a dangerous trick of the mind.
“Fereiba-
jan
? Say something. Tell me you agree.”
There was no room for doubt when I heard him utter my name. For the time being, he was as real and true and caring as I needed him to be. I couldn’t leave, tied to him by an unseemly thread of my own creation.
“THEY BLAME YOU FOR HIS DEATH. THAT’S WHAT I HEARD,” KOKOGUL
said flatly. The back of my neck grew hot. I stopped drying the dishes. The rag hung limply in my hand.
“Me? Why do they think it was me?”
“They say that he was a perfectly healthy young man and that he was taken from his family the day before they were to come for your
shirnee
. Of course, Agha Firooz’s wife insists that you must be cursed. First your mother, then your grandfather, and now this suitor who was just hours away from becoming your fiancé.”
My eyes grew moist. To name the people whose loss hurt me most was cruel.
“It’s nothing to cry about,” KokoGul admonished. “How could they not draw such conclusions? They’re grieving and conflicted and they know your history. Maybe I should consider myself lucky to be alive.” KokoGul chuckled.
It was possible she had made the whole thing up. I had a hard time telling with her. Sometimes, she got so wrapped up in her own version
of the truth that she couldn’t put her finger on the real story. I went back to drying the plates, but she continued.
“I went to pay my respects to his mother. As soon as she saw my face, she burst into a rage of tears and told me my daughter was a curse. She said ever since they started courting you, things had gone very badly for their family. I think a few of the women sitting around her heard, not many.”
Oh God. In the quiet of a
fateha,
I was certain that every woman in Kabul had heard her. I would be Kabul’s black maiden with whispers and raised brows following me.
“What did you say to her?” I asked hesitantly.
“What could I say to a grieving mother? I told her that I prayed God would give them peace and rest his young soul in heaven.”
“I mean about me. About me being cursed.”
“Fereiba, a
fateha
is not the time or place to argue. I told her I hoped that wasn’t true.” KokoGul took a glass and poured herself some water. “Anyway, it’s terrible to speak of him this way now that he’s gone, but I hear he was a troublemaker—disrespectful and thieving from his own family. Homaira-
jan
said he once beat her young son so badly, he couldn’t see out of one eye for a week.”
“When did you see Homaira-
jan
?” I asked casually, keeping my eyes on the dishes.
“Oh, a couple of weeks ago, in the bazaar. She’s back from her trip to India, showing off her new gold bangles, of course.”
And yet she’d been preparing my
shirnee
.
Mother. All my life I had called KokoGul by this radiant and hopeful name, wishing for the touch of lamb’s wool on my cheek and too often getting nothing but a cool draft.
“The ladies were talking at the
fateha
. Agha Firooz thought marriage would settle the boy and knock the mischief out of him. They’d been trying to find a match for him for months. Who needs that? We aren’t here to give our girls as second or third options.”
I snapped the dishrag against the edge of the counter. “But you were ready to give them my
shirnee
anyway, weren’t you? Why am I so different?”
My tone was sharp. The hurt, unfurled, lay between me and KokoGul in a rare moment of honesty.
KokoGul’s eyes met mine.
“My dear, there is a difference between you and Najiba, and I’m surprised you’re asking me about it at this point. Najiba is simple. She’s a pretty girl . . . pretty enough that she’ll get attention. She comes from a good family. She’s bright and polite.”
“And me?”
“And you,” KokoGul said, her words jabbing me like a finger in my sternum. “I have to be more careful with you. Yes, you’re well mannered and have nice enough features, but
everyone
knows that you lost your mother. And
that
makes you different. And before you look at me with those angry eyes, remember that it is not my fault you lost your mother and it’s not my fault that people talk the way they do. But it is up to me to do the best I can for you. Think about it, Fereiba. If you wait to dance on the moon, you may never dance at all.”
“You don’t love me the way you love them.”
“And you don’t love me the way you love your father. Or your grandfather. Don’t think I don’t know that.”
I was silent. She was right, of course.
KokoGul, unfazed, went right back to being personally offended by the would-be suitors.
“I’m sorry she lost her son but I’m even sorrier I wasted my time serving them tea and biscuits.”
PADAR-
JAN
SAID NOTHING ABOUT THE MATTER. HE CAME IN AND
out of the house, speaking to us gently about our classes but not a word about Agha Firooz or his son. I wanted my father to be different,
but it wasn’t something he could do. Though I was free of the suitor and his family, I was left to wonder how readily my family would have given me away. And when it might happen again.
My neighbor was my retreat. He recited poetry and complained about losing points on his last engineering exam. He spoke passionately of the work he wanted to do when he graduated. He wanted to go abroad and train with a foreign company. He wanted to explore the world. I loved to hear him talk about the university and its layout. He described the buildings and professors in such detail, I could close my eyes and imagine walking through its halls.
One day, he said something he’d never said before.
“It would be nice to get to know you and your family without a wall between us.”
My cheeks grew warm. I smiled and wiggled my toes in the grass.
“But that would be . . . I mean, that’s not . . .”
“I don’t mean to be disrespectful. But I wanted to let you know that I was thinking our families should begin a conversation . . .”
“Do you know what you’re saying?” I asked, half embarrassed. “Don’t say things you don’t mean.”
“I wouldn’t, Fereiba. Believe me,
qandem
.”
My sweet.
My skin prickled to hear him say my name, the delicate but daring “
qandem
” settling in my ear like a soft kiss. “Do you know what I think about doing every day?”
I fell back into the grass and stared up into the branches, green teardrop-shaped leaves backlit by a defiant sun. Its white, red, and black fruits glimmered in various stages of ripeness. The light tickled my eyes.
“What do you think about?”
“Every day that I sit here and talk to you over this wall has made me think of climbing over it so I could look at you, walk through your father’s orchard with you, and talk while we listen to songs on the radio.”
I held my breath. The feeling in the pit of my stomach—the trembling
feeling of falling off a cliff—this was new. I found it odd that I could recognize so easily something I had never before seen or felt. This was love the poets described—I was sure.
“But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that I don’t want to trespass into your father’s orchard. I want to be welcomed through his front gate. I want to walk with you, hand in hand, without a wall between us, without having to hide our voices from the rest of the world.”
Tears slid from the corners of my eyes, past my temples, and fell to the earth. For so many years, I’d received nothing but the watered-down love of my siblings, the resentful tolerance of KokoGul, and the guarded affection of my father. These words, ripe and whole, fed the emptiness I’d lived with my entire life.