“MY MOTHER IS COMING TODAY,” ZEBA ANNOUNCED OVER A breakfast of bread and sweet tea.
Nafisa looked up with interest. She was fascinated by the transformation she’d seen Zeba undergo in the last two days. Zeba was a different woman. She joined her cellmates for meals and smiled warmly. There was no explanation for the shift. It had been sudden and gave the cellmates plenty to speculate about.
“Your mother? You’ve never mentioned your mother before. Where is she coming from?” Nafisa shot a quick glance at Mezhgan, who tried not to look too intrigued.
“She lives with my brother, about a half day’s travel from here. She’s . . . different . . . my mother. Not like most other women,” Zeba admitted hesitantly. She wondered what it would be like to see her mother now, in this place.
“What do you mean? What is she like?” Latifa’s hair was pulled back in a tight bun, which exaggerated her heavy facial features. She had been least impressed by Zeba’s abrupt recovery from hysteria. She had declared Zeba a charlatan who wanted to make fools of them all.
“She’s . . . she’s a strong woman. Very strong-willed.”
“Is that all?” Latifa huffed, shaking her head. Every time she gave Zeba a chance to redeem herself, Zeba disappointed.
“No, it’s not that simple,” Zeba said softly. “She has her own special ways of doing things. Things she’s learned along the years.”
“What does she do?”
Zeba wasn’t quite sure how her cellmates would react to her mother’s talents. She tread carefully.
“Since I was a young girl my mother was always mixing up herbs and things. She knows all about concoctions to . . . to help people get what they’re looking for.”
“A jadugar!” Latifa exclaimed, slapping her hand against her thigh. Her eyebrows lifted and her face broke into a smile. “She’s one of those women who can curse an enemy to choke on her food or set a husband and wife into a bitter fight!”
Mezhgan’s and Nafisa’s eyes widened.
“No, no. It’s not like that. The things she used to do . . . she never made anyone choke. What she did was different.” Zeba struggled to find the right words because they didn’t exist.
“Does she use dead pigeons? Oh, I’ve heard of things like this!”
“Is that what your mother does?” Nafisa asked in awe.
Their suspicions were raised, and Zeba became all that much more interesting to them—because of her mother.
WHEN ZEBA’S CELLMATES SAW GULNAZ, THEIR THEORIES WERE confirmed. She was an impressive silhouette, sitting on the other side of the prison yard’s metal fence. The ends of her eggplant-colored head scarf draped elegantly across her chest, and her back was straight as a schoolchild’s. Her skin was smooth, with barely a crinkle at the corner of her eyes and no evidence of years she’d spent mourning her husband or glowering over the things said about her. Even across the yard, the green of her eyes caught the sunlight and shimmered like gemstones.
Zeba spotted her as soon as the women entered the courtyard. Her cellmates did their best and tried not to stare too directly. Latifa watched from the corner of her eye and raised her eyebrows instead of saying what she thought. It was her way of demonstrating restraint.
Zeba left her roommates behind, walking toward her mother instead of running only because there was a world around her that still expected her to behave a certain way. Her cellmates would sit at a wooden table with benches, Zeba knew without turning around, casting glances over their shoulders.
Gulnaz watched her daughter approach, her heart sore from longing.
It was thirty-five years ago and Gulnaz was nervously touching the soft spot on the top of Zeba’s newborn head. She blinked and it was a year later, Zeba toddling on pudgy legs, holding on to low tables, and bouncing as her father clapped his hands. A flash. A pigtailed Zeba was on her lap, singing songs and mixing up the lyrics. She was five and holding her tooth in a warm palm, showing off her gap-toothed grin with pride. A single heartbeat. Zeba was eight and her wide, brown eyes looked up at her mother, begging for a story. A candle flickered. Zeba was twelve and whispering to her mother that the old woman beside her in the fateha had just passed gas. Gulnaz had stifled her laughter as best she could and hid her face behind a handkerchief as if she were overwhelmed by the sadness of the funeral.
Zeba sat facing her mother, the two women separated by a mesh fence and the river of good intentions that flowed between them.
“Salaam, Madar.”
“Salaam, bachem.”
“You came a long way.”
“I would have come farther.”
Zeba lowered her head. Gulnaz watched her daughter’s face. She looked tired, much older than the last time she’d seen her. The past few weeks in this prison, away from her beloved children, had cast dark circles under her daughter’s eyes. Zeba looked as if she’d been the one traveling all day, not Gulnaz.
“Have you heard anything about my grandchildren?”
Zeba shook her head. She felt glass shards in her throat. If she spoke, her voice would break.
Gulnaz spoke for her.
“Basir’s always been levelheaded and mature,” Gulnaz said. “Nothing like his father.”
Zeba’s fingers laced through the fence. She’d been longing for someone, for anyone, to give her a reassuring word about her children. She let out a tight sigh.
“Last I heard they were well. Basir is looking after the girls. They are together and that’s all I can ask for now.”
“It’s a good start,” Gulnaz said as she touched her daughter’s fingers. She let her own fingers rest upon them lightly. She was relieved her daughter did not pull away. “Tell me what happened, Zeba.”
Zeba looked up and met her mother’s eyes.
“What difference does it make?”
“It makes all the difference.”
“It was an ugly scene.”
“This much everyone knows.”
Zeba didn’t move her hand from the fence. It felt more comforting than she would have thought to have her mother here, touching her. She felt like a child.
“Madar-jan, I don’t know how this happened.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
Zeba looked at the ground. She’d rehearsed this conversation in her mind. Each time it went a little differently. Each time she was a little more honest.
“I know that when you came to me and warned me that something was wrong, I wasn’t ready to hear you. I thought I could protect my home better than you protected yours. I wanted to stay away from all . . . all that. But it was there. I started to see it. I could feel it walking through my house and laughing at me while I slept. That day, I finally saw it for what it was. Standing in our own courtyard, the worst kind of evil. The kind that people whisper about when they think you’re not listening. The kind that keeps mothers awake at night. The kind that turns your insides black with rot to even think how close you’ve been to it. I don’t remember much from that afternoon. I just know that when I opened my eyes again, it was gone. And I found myself here, without my children, and I’m not honestly sure if I should worry about them more or less now.”
“Zeba—”
“The one thing that I think again and again is that I should have turned to you,” Zeba said flatly. Gulnaz’s eyes softened and misted. She brought her other hand to the fence, reaching two fingers through the wires. Zeba held them tightly. “That’s all I can think. Maybe things would have worked out differently then. I thought what you did, all those things you did for so many years, I thought it was so dark and evil, but I know now what evil really is. Forgive me, Madar-jan.”
Gulnaz wanted to put her arms around her daughter, to feel her face against her own. She wished she could have done more too. She knew she should have pushed harder, found out what her troubling dreams meant and followed her instincts. There were so many things she could have done.
“Zeba,” Gulnaz said with a heavy sigh. “I’ve held so many grudges, I’m surprised I can still get up and walk. I’m not going to hold one against my own daughter. Anyway, this isn’t the right time for pity or blame. You did what you thought was the best thing for your family, just as I did.”
Zeba nodded. The tightness in her throat began to release.
“You’re in a whole lot of trouble, Zeba. Murder is no small charge. Let’s keep our eyes forward, eh? You’ve met with the lawyer Rafi sent for you?”
“Yes,” Zeba said.
“And?”
“God bless my brother,” Zeba said shaking her head. “I know he feels he needs to look after me because I’m his sister and now I’m . . . I’m a widow. The lawyer he hired is a boy, a young, naïve boy who thinks he can save me. But the stones of retribution will come my way. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Rafi said good things about this lawyer. They both want to help you, but they are men, and men can often only see what they can hold in their hands. The world is made of rocks and wood and meat for them. It’s not their fault; it’s how they were designed.” Gulnaz sighed. “We cannot leave everything in the hands of men. I made that mistake once, and I won’t make it again.”
Zeba looked back. She saw Latifa lean across the table and say something to the two younger women. She could imagine the wild speculations they were making about Gulnaz. She turned back to her mother.
“And women?” she asked thoughtfully. “What is the world to us?”
Gulnaz offered a meek smile.
“Do you not know, my daughter? Our world is the spaces between the rocks and meat. We see the face that should but doesn’t smile, the sliver of sun between dead tree branches. Time passes differently through a woman’s body. We are haunted by all the hours of yesterday and teased by a few moments of tomorrow. That is how we live—torn between what has already happened and what is yet to come.”
Zeba’s eyes glazed. Her mother’s voice soothed her as it probably had when Zeba could still be cradled and rocked to sleep. She would save these words, she knew, and consider them more carefully at another time. Zeba’s mind darted back to something else Gulnaz had said just a moment ago.
“What did you mean before? What mistake did you make?”
Gulnaz’s face was drawn, solemn. She looked at her daughter squarely.
“I have no reason to hide anything from you. You’re not a child any longer.”
Zeba waited.
“Your father. When we were first married, he knew about my habits, the things I could do to bend the winds. He found it endearing. He would smile and watch, but in truth, he thought my concerns were exaggerated. He told me I was smelling smoke when there was not even a glint of fire.”
Zeba felt uncomfortable, hearing about the conversations between her parents as husband and wife. It felt inappropriate.
“I was young, of course. I wanted to make your father happy. And maybe part of me was tired of keeping up such a guard. I let my walls come down. We spent more time with the family, with friends. Things were bad at that time, of course. War and bloodshed and scarcity all over the country. We were not that different. We struggled just like everyone else. You remember, I’m sure. We couldn’t hide the ugliness from you and your brother.
“I told myself a lot of bad things were happening to everyone, not just us. I tried talking myself out of thinking I was the target of any evil thoughts. I tried very hard.”
Zeba stared at her mother’s hands. Her fingernails were peeling at the tips and there were tea-colored spots where Zeba didn’t remember seeing any before. The years that did not show on Gulnaz’s face were quite obvious on her hands. It pained Zeba to see it.
“In truth, we were no worse off than anyone else. If you and Rafi were hungry, other children were surely starving or dead. I was beginning to think maybe your father was right. Maybe I was overly sensitive and creating my own problems. I put all my jadu aside and felt, for once, as if the weight of a thousand stones had been lifted from my shoulders. Even when my own mother died, I did not falter. I did not blame anyone. I told myself she was on in her years and that was the road for all of us, sooner or later. I lived that way, my eyes blinded by your father who saw nothing, least of all that which was in front of him.”
Zeba was surprised to hear there had been a time when her mother had turned away from jadu.
“Madar-jan, I cannot remember a single day when I did not see you busy with some kind of spell. It was with you from the moment you woke up in the morning.”
“Not always. I did what I did only when I needed to.”
Zeba grew pensive.
“Why did my father go off to fight? No one else in the family did.”
Gulnaz clucked her tongue and looked away. Her eyelids fluttered at the memory of that time. She spoke about him not as one speaks of the dead, but also not as one speaks of the living. That was the purgatory Zeba’s father had always lain in.
“I cannot explain your father’s thoughts. He didn’t really share them with me. That man—wherever he is may he be at peace—was an unreasonable man. He followed his own compass. I had no hand in swaying him. He used to listen to that old Russian radio, that block of wood with the brass dials, and curse into the night. Then, one day, he just left. He walked out the door and never came back.”
Zeba sat motionless.
“Did he not say where he was going or who he was going to fight with? Did no one ever say they had seen him in the fighting? So many dead were returned to be buried near their families.”
“And plenty more were absorbed by the land they fought for. We’ll never know, Zeba, and it’s useless to think about it now. You have much more important matters you should be concentrating on.”
“Did you not ever think he might come back?”
Gulnaz scowled.
“I used to expect him to walk through the door. Maybe next Friday, to return for Jumaa prayers. Or maybe in two weeks. Then I thought he might return for the Eid holiday, thinned from a month of fighting and fasting. Then the Russians were gone. I waited again, but there was no sign of him. And then the fighting started again, and I told myself he’d dug himself back into it.”
The civil war had meant there would be no peace even after the Russians had retreated. How could there be when the ethnic diversity of Afghanistan—barbed-wire distinctions and deep-rooted resentments—resurfaced? It was as if Afghanistan had been folded up into itself at the borders. Without a common outside enemy, they turned on one another.
“Finally, I wondered if he would come before Rafi was married. I told myself that if he didn’t return by Rafi’s wedding, then he was surely dead. War or no war, how could a father not be present for his son’s wedding?”
“But if he hadn’t known about the wedding . . .”
“By then I was tired of making excuses. I counted him among the dead and so did you.”
It was true. When she cupped her hands in prayer, she always asked God to keep her father in heaven’s gardens. It had been the safest assumption given the war’s death toll.
“I kept his clothes at the house. There was always a place for him in case he did return. And I wept sometimes to see the emptiness where your father should have been, but they were bad times for us, too, and I had to think of you. I had two children to feed and only my sewing kept us alive. Your uncles hinted at me marrying one of them, but I told them I wouldn’t marry again until your father’s body was brought home.”
Zeba cringed at the thought.
“You never told me this.”
“There was no reason to tell you.”
Zeba let her fingers drop from the fence. Her arms were beginning to ache. It was hard to hold on for too long.
“Rafi knew?”
“Rafi was old enough and wise enough to see what was happening, but he only saw bits and pieces. I didn’t want either of you to know.”
Zeba understood completely. How could she blame her mother for keeping this secret when she now wanted to spare her own children the shame of the truth she’d just learned?
“Did you go to my grandfather?”
Gulnaz shook her head.
“What could he have done for me? He was an old man by then, and people had become convinced that he was a spy for the British. I grew up in that home, and I knew he was not as powerful as he would have had people believe. To this day he won’t admit it, but I can tell you—that man was full of tricks.”
Zeba turned her gaze to the ground.
“Zeba-jan, there’s a special kind of hurt in learning that your parents are not the angels or saviors you wish them to be. I know it well.”
Zeba wanted to speak. She wanted to tell her mother that she hadn’t been resentful or disappointed in her, but the words wouldn’t take shape in her mouth.
“We survive it. We all survive learning the truth about our parents because you can’t stay a child forever.”
A light breeze blew between them, lifting wisps of Zeba’s hair and tickling the dampness behind her neck. Gulnaz shifted her weight and brushed at her skirt.
“You couldn’t save my father,” Zeba said blankly. Her legs were tucked under her, her hands fidgeting with the hem of her once-white pantaloons. “What makes you think you can help me now?”
“You are my daughter, Zeba. Just as I watched your grandfather practice his craft, you stood in my kitchen and watched everything I did. You know just how strong we were together. You saw what happened to those people who wished us harm. I kept you and your brother safe from the evil eye, and there were many around us. Whether or not you want to admit it, you know all my tricks. You know my secrets better than anyone, even if you turned your back to it. Nothing has changed. It’s all at your feet.”
Zeba’s head pounded. Her temples tightened under the sun’s glare, but somehow, Gulnaz was barely squinting. There was so much about her mother that Zeba still didn’t understand.
“I’ve brought you something,” Gulnaz whispered. “Not much, but at least a beginning.” With two fingers she reached into the inside of her dress sleeve, just past the cuff. She gave a slight tug and pulled out something Zeba recognized immediately, a taweez.
“Is this from Jawad?” Zeba let the folded blessing fall into the palm of her hand. Her fingers closed around it. She felt the years melt away. She was a child again, in awe of her mother who found ways to control the stars. This was precisely what she’d wanted. She’d wanted her mother to come and save her, to bend the winds in her favor this one time. If she were to dare to have hope, this was the form her hope would take.
“Of course it’s from Jawad. I wanted a taweez, not a scrap of paper. Jawad is the only one with real talent.”
Zeba closed her eyes and pictured Jawad. Even when Zeba had become a young woman, Jawad had looked right past her to Gulnaz. Zeba could picture him, his back hunched over a tiny square, his pen marks deliberate. Every taweez he created infuriated Zeba’s grandfather, Safatullah. Jawad was black magic while the murshid was God’s light.
“You believe in his talismans.”
“Because I’ve seen them work. It’s his craft. Your grandfather has his and I have mine. You can choose to believe in one or all of our methods but believing in something makes it a whole lot easier to rise in the morning.”
“My grandfather wouldn’t be happy . . .”
“Your grandfather hasn’t been happy in years. Once people started to doubt him, his heart grew weak and never recovered. I’m a respectful daughter so I keep my activities quiet, but I am also your mother. Doing what I can for you—that is all I need to be concerned with now.”
“Madar-jan, I’m grateful. But I don’t want to feel . . . I mean, there’s no reason for this to work,” Zeba said cautiously, eyeing her mother’s face to gauge her reaction.
Gulnaz brought her face so close to the fence Zeba could feel her mother’s breath on her cheek. They were together again, the feel of her mother’s touch lingering on Zeba’s skin. It was time moving forward and backward all at once.
“Tell me, my dear daughter, what have you got to lose?”