YUSUF, AS A YOUNG BOY, NEVER DREAMED HE WOULD ONE DAY BE a lawyer, much less a lawyer in America. He was like any other child and gave little thought to the many days beyond tomorrow.
He remembered well afternoons spent rustling through the low-hanging boughs of the pomegranate tree in his grandfather’s orchard. Plump red balls hung like ornaments on outstretched arms. Three proud trees grew enough fruit to keep Boba-jan’s children and grandchildren with red-stained fingers through the fall. Yusuf would pluck the heaviest and roundest pomegranate he could reach and slice through its leathery peel with a knife he’d snuck from his grandmother’s kitchen. He would crack the globe in half, careful to catch any loose ruby-colored gems. A careful fingertip wiggled each seed free from its white membrane. He worked diligently, painstakingly. Sometimes he ate the pearls one by one, feeling the tart burst on his tongue. Other times, he popped a handful in his mouth and teased the juice out before mashing the fibrous pits between his teeth.
Yusuf would throw the peels over the adobe wall that separated his grandfather’s yard from the street—not because he shouldn’t be eating pomegranates but because he didn’t want his siblings or cousins to know how many he’d devoured.
The youngest of four children, Yusuf adored his brother, who was six years older, handsome, and quite self-assured. He loved his two sisters, too, sitting by them while they crumbled stale bread between their palms and tossed it to the grateful pigeons and sparrows outside their home. Yusuf was a boy who loved stories, particularly ones that frightened and surprised. When he slept, he imagined himself a hero, chasing djinns into the jungle or finding treasures at the bottom of a well. Sometimes he was brave in his dreams, rescuing his family from the grips of evil villains. But more often than he cared to admit, Yusuf would wake to a mattress wet with a child’s fear.
When Yusuf was eleven, his father decided it was time to leave Afghanistan. The rockets were nearing their town, a village that had escaped the past decade relatively unscathed. Yusuf’s mother, who had worked as a teacher for just one year before the schools were closed, was glad to leave. She carried a few token items into their new life: a handful of photographs, a sweater her mother had knit, and an intricate peacock-blue shawl her husband had brought for her from his travels in India when they were first married. Her copper urns, their crimson hand-knotted carpets, and her silver wedding tray were all left behind, along with most of her clothing. Yusuf’s father, a trained pilot, hadn’t flown in years because the airlines had been grounded. He still made certain to pack his diplomas and certificates as well as the children’s. He was a practical man and did not lament leaving the rest behind.
The journey from Afghanistan to Pakistan was treacherous. The family crossed mountains, sometimes in the darkness, and paid suspicious-looking men large sums of money to help them. All four siblings, close in age, huddled with their parents in the darkness, in the back of a truck, as they climbed over rocks. They trembled when gunshots echoed through the valleys. Yusuf’s mother, stumbling beneath her burqa, urged them to press on and insisted the guns were too far away to reach them. Yusuf might have believed her had her voice trembled a bit less.
In Pakistan, Yusuf’s family settled in a refugee camp. Though they were far from wealthy in Afghanistan, the camp was a harsh adjustment for them. Pakistani police officers shouted and waved off any questions. They stood in lines for food, for housing, for documents that never seemed to materialize. They lived in an open field, a dust bowl full of tents and listless souls. They slept side by side, trying to ignore the stench of poverty, loss, and destitution. “The devil finds work for idle hands,” Yusuf’s mother would warn her children. They kept to themselves and spoke to no one in the camps of anything more than the interminable waiting and the abominable heat. This refugee camp was temporary, Yusuf’s parents promised, and soon enough they would join their relatives in America.
Weeks passed and no news came. Yusuf’s father searched for work, but the airline office scoffed at his appeals. He couldn’t find work as a mechanic or even as an assistant to one. Disheartened and with dwindling funds, he took a job as a brick maker.
“Dignity is not in what work you do,” he insisted to his wife and children who were unaccustomed to seeing him covered in mud and dust. “It’s in how you do that work.”
But his shoulders hung low as he washed the clay from his hands. Yusuf’s mother bit her lip and rested her hand on his arm in the thin privacy of their tent. Dignity was hard to find in the camp. They insulated themselves as much as possible and kept away from what went on: cockfights, opium clouds, the stench of unbathed masses, and the moans of mourning for a child who’d succumbed to disease.
Yusuf’s older brother worked alongside his father. His two sisters stayed with their mother, and Yusuf was sent to the local school, twenty boys sitting under a log shelter, open on three sides. There was a weathered chalkboard and a teacher who distributed small, stapled notebooks with onionskin paper. Yusuf’s relatives in America swore they were doing all they could to bring them to the United States—they had filled out forms, submitted bank statements, and even hired lawyers they could barely afford. The local consulate officials told Yusuf’s father his application was still being considered.
“Padar-jan, I can go work with you and Fazil. I’m not a child anymore. I can earn money, too.” They sat in their tent at dusk, drinking bowls of thin soup his mother had cooked over an open fire.
Yusuf’s father had stared at the ground, as if he expected it to drop from under him.
“Padar?”
“Yusuf-jan,” his mother interrupted softly. “Let your father eat his dinner.”
“But Madar-jan, I want to help. That school is crowded and the kids are . . .”
“Yusuf.” The unmistakable edge in her voice silenced him. Yusuf’s father slept that night without saying another word.
Weeks stretched into months. They grew despondent as they watched the camp swell with new families. When they finally received the letter saying they had been granted visas to the United States, Yusuf’s mother pressed her face into her husband’s chest to muffle her sobs. Kaka Rahim’s persistence had paid off. They were among the fortunate few who would turn their backs on this camp; but years into their lives in America, the mark was still on them, heaviest on Yusuf’s father who never managed to walk as tall as he had when he was an out-of-work pilot in their village.
Yusuf’s family settled in New York, in a Queens neighborhood that was home to the Afghan diaspora. They took it all in: the elevator buildings, the swarms of people walking to work, the reliable tap water, the grocery stores so bountiful that their fruits and vegetables practically spilled onto the sidewalks. The reunion with family was thick with embraces, tears, and meat-laden meals. They stayed with an uncle and his family in their three-bedroom apartment until they were able to secure assistance and enough work to rent an apartment of their own. Yusuf and his sisters were enrolled in school; his father and Fazil started working at Kaka Rahim’s pizza shop.
YUSUF’S ELDEST SISTER, SITARA, FELL IN LOVE JUST AFTER FINISHING high school. She had met an Afghan boy who lived in the same apartment building. Flirtatious looks in the dank elevator turned into stolen moments in the humidity of the basement laundry room. Yusuf’s parents warned their daughter to stay away from the boy, who worked part-time as a bank teller and whose parents were of a different ethnicity. Doors were slammed, phone calls were intercepted, and seething looks were exchanged. Predictably, the young lovers grew all the more desperate for each other and embraced on public buses, caring less and less that their parents would learn of their improprieties.
To stave off rumors, the families agreed to have the two married, and after a modest ceremony, Sitara moved in with him and his family to start her new life just two floors above her parents and siblings in the apartment the boy’s family had occupied for years. Yusuf’s second sister, Sadaf, opted to stay in school and pursue accounting at a city community college. His brother, removed from books for too long, sharpened his English by repeating lines of dialogue from television sitcoms. He rose quickly through the restaurant ranks and became a bartender. Yusuf’s mother enrolled in ESL classes at the local library and began working as a clerk in a department store. Yusuf’s father, grateful to Kaka Rahim for getting them on their feet, decided it would be safest not to mix work and family and driving a taxi, resigning himself to a flightless future. Almost overnight, Yusuf became an adolescent who had mastered the nuances of the English language and the crowded subways. He excelled in school and impressed teachers who urged him to apply for scholarships and pursue college.
He did well by day but woke in cold sweats at night at least once a week. He simply couldn’t go seven nights without fumbling in the dark to change his panic-soaked shirts and pillowcase without waking his siblings.
The family lived modestly but comfortably. They had one, then two televisions. Their closets filled with new clothes. They replaced their lost possessions with new ones. Yusuf’s mother burst into tearful laughter when his father came home with a silver tray, almost identical to the wedding tray they’d left behind. They watched television together, one person always with a ready finger on the remote should the actors and actresses fall into a love scene. Yusuf’s father followed Afghanistan in the newspapers and on the news. They all braced themselves after September eleventh and were shocked that strangers on the street would shout angrily at them in the disaster’s aftermath. Yusuf’s father cheered the U.S. decision to invade Afghanistan though he had no intention or hope of returning there.
Only fools run into burning buildings, he would joke.
When Yusuf was a freshman at NYU, news about Afghanistan was everywhere. It was tedious. Afghanistan was suicide attacks, battered women, and corruption. In his second year, Yusuf had enrolled in a course on human rights on a whim, thinking it would be an easy way to bring up his grade point average. By the second lecture, a fire was lit. In a flood of memories, Yusuf was back in Afghanistan. Death tolls. Small boys working as blacksmiths. A promising journalist murdered along with his wife and children. Dehumanizing refugee camps. A young girl sold to pay off a poppy crop debt. Untouchable warlords.
How could he turn his back on all that?
Others did not. Others were brave. Others championed the cause of the voiceless.
Yusuf had lived and breathed the American belief that one person could make a difference. Flyers in the student union and the optimistic rhetoric of professors swelled in him. He attended his first protest and liked the way it felt to chant with the crowd. He raised his voice. He developed a taste for the fight, the fury it brought out of him. Feeling angry was better than feeling afraid.
Two semesters passed, and Yusuf realized it had been weeks since he last woke in a cold sweat.
Yusuf chose law because it was the difference between right and wrong—because the law was the only way to protect the weak and punish the aggressors. He studied for weeks and burned through books of practice LSAT exams until he sat for the test and scored surprisingly well. He filled out a dozen applications but kept his fingers crossed that he would get accepted into a program in New York. With nervous excitement, Yusuf tore open a thick packet from Columbia. It was good news, but his parents shook their heads in disappointment.
Are you sure you don’t want to be a doctor? Doctors save lives every day, they reminded him.
I don’t want to save one life at a time, Yusuf declared. There are better ways.
His parents shrugged their shoulders and hoped for the best. At least he would be a professional, more accomplished than his siblings who had little interest in graduate school. They would have done more to stop him had they known what he would go on to do.
Yusuf took courses on human rights law and immigration law. He volunteered as an interpreter and sharpened his native Dari. He had professors make phone calls on his behalf to land internships with human rights organizations. He was thankful his family had settled in New York where opportunities abounded. He kept his nose buried in books.
You’ll be blind before you’re thirty, his mother had lamented. She was proud of her son but worried about him, too. Some weeks it seemed he barely slept at all.
Yusuf graduated from law school and was hired by the advocacy organization where he’d interned for two years. They’d been impressed by his drive and created a position for him. He wasn’t making as much as his classmates who had gone the corporate route, but it was more than he or anyone in his family had ever made and he was thrilled to have purpose. He worked hard and turned no project away.
Yusuf did carve out time to socialize, though he felt compelled to tell himself he was networking so he would not feel as though he was wasting time.
IT STARTED WITH HAPPY HOUR, A CHEERFUL EXCUSE TO DRINK upon exiting an air-conditioned office building. Over time, Yusuf acquired a taste for dark lagers. A cold beer in his hands made him feel like he was bonding with his colleagues. He kept this part of his life private from his parents and siblings. Though they’d shared tight living spaces all their lives, he still felt compelled to keep his sins to himself. It was not a matter of deceit, as he saw it, but a show of respect for his parents’ ideals.
Happy hour was where Yusuf had started dating. It had taken him that many years to feel like the girls around him wouldn’t see him as foreign or inferior. When an Asian girl named Lin leaned across a bar table and rested her hand on his forearm flirtatiously, Yusuf felt his confidence soar. He went out with a few girls but never let anything go further than five or six dates. If he sensed they were interested in more, he would slip away, letting a few phone calls go unanswered or confessing his reluctance to commit to any one person.
It was immature, he realized, but he had decided, after listening to his parents rant about his older brother’s diverse parade of girlfriends, that he would find someone his parents would adore. He wanted someone who could speak Dari with them, who would raise bilingual children with him, who would understand both American and Afghan culture. It was the practical and respectable thing to do.
Then he’d met Elena—beautiful and irresistible Elena who had immigrated to the United States with her family at a very young age from Peru. She had chocolate brown hair and her cheeks dimpled when she smiled, which she did often. She was a friend of a colleague and stopped when she spotted them drinking beers at a sidewalk café. She was making her way home from her job at an accounting firm, wearing a white peplum top and smartly creased, navy blue pencil pants.
She was sweet and smart and, importantly, did not flinch when Yusuf told her his family had come from Afghanistan. On their first date, they went to see a free Peruvian music concert in Central Park. On their second date, they ate artisanal ice cream in the East Village. Yusuf couldn’t resist slipping his arms around Elena’s waist and pulling her close when he was with her. She was five inches shorter than him, and when they embraced, Yusuf breathed in the sweet, tropical scent of her shampoo. She clung to him just enough that he felt adored and not so much that he felt trapped. She could talk about the implications of a trade agreement and the latest One Direction song in the same breath. Yusuf’s friends raised their eyebrows and beer mugs in approval. Elena was a catch.
When Yusuf met her, he’d already made plans to move to Washington, D.C., to work with a nonprofit that focused on crimes against humanity. He convinced himself they both understood things would come to an end once he left. Elena didn’t fit into his plans. And yet, Yusuf found immense happiness in a hundred quiet things: the way her nose crinkled when she laughed, the way she slipped a playful finger into his collar, the urge he felt to call or text her a moment after they’d kissed good night.
The fact that they had so little in common seemed to draw them to each other. Language, religion, professional fields—they studied each other with almost academic interest.
Elena listened to Yusuf talk about the headlines that pulled his attention: the unearthing of thousands of Muslim corpses, men and boys who’d been executed in the Bosnian genocide, the flogging of a dissident journalist in Saudi Arabia, the disappearance of a Malaysian passenger plane. Elbows propped on the table and eyes focused, she filled in with details she’d read in online news reports. She made Yusuf question his plan. Maybe he shouldn’t limit himself to women from his own background. Maybe a common culture and language wasn’t everything.
Maybe Elena was everything.
They were on their way to the subway station after a dinner with friends when Elena and Yusuf paused at a crosswalk. He turned to her and adjusted the paisley scarf knotted around her neck. It was fall and the evenings were brisk.
My niece’s baptism is this weekend. You’ll come with me, right?
The red hand turned into a white stick figure, prompting them to move forward. Yusuf didn’t immediately obey. Elena had to tug at his elbow.
Maybe, he had said. Let me see how much I get done with work this week.
They’d settled into two empty seats on the 7 train, New York’s version of the Silk Road. Elena would get off soon after they entered Queens, before the neighborhoods turned distinctly Asian. Yusuf had another nine stops to go before he got to Flushing.
You know, I already miss you, baby, Elena had said to him as the torque of the subway car nudged them closer together. I’m going to want to visit you every weekend in D.C.
Yusuf had kissed her squarely on the lips, long enough that Elena interpreted it to mean he would miss her equally. But something in Yusuf was rattled by the expectation that he would go to something as alien as a baptism, and, as their lips parted, Yusuf withdrew. When the conductor announced her stop, Elena smiled at him and walked off the train. He was already sorry for what he would have to do, but it could be no other way. Yusuf no longer saw all that Elena was—he only saw what she was not.
A REMORSEFUL YUSUF TRAVELED TO WASHINGTON, D.C., AND spent a year with a team of lawyers putting together a case against militia officers accused of genocide in Africa. He did his best not to think about Elena. When he missed her, as he often did, he busied himself with research or called his mother, which reminded him how Elena would not fit in with his family. Conversations with his mother were, by this point, fairly predictable. She would fill him in on the latest happenings with his siblings and gossip from his cousins. Inevitably, her attention would circle back to Yusuf.
You’ve finished school, you have a job. It’s time to get married. Are you waiting for all the good girls to be taken by boys that don’t even have a quarter of your looks or smarts?
Yusuf ducked out of the conversations. He missed having someone at his side, but he could not imagine taking a wife now. He could not imagine someone waiting for him to come home each night, asking him why he worked so late. He could not be bothered with a second set of parents and cousins and uncles. He had no desire to become a father. He made false promises to his parents that he would be better prepared for commitment next year.
But Yusuf had other plans. He would sacrifice, he believed, so that he could follow the path he was meant to follow. And he’d had no choice but to walk away from Elena.
Turning away from Elena would have been harder had he not felt a strange twinge in his chest.
It came from the land of clay and mountains. It was as if a siren had appeared in his dreams, begging him to save her from herself. He heard her name on the talk radio stations; he saw her face on magazine covers. The Internet screamed her sorrows, telling the story of the unjust blood shed on her land, the imprisoned and the persecuted. Each injustice called to him as if he were the only hope.
Afghanistan.
Yusuf picked up the phone. He sent painstakingly constructed e-mails. If he did not answer her call, who would? His resolve hardened.
On a bustling sidewalk, Yusuf realized he could not remember the last time he’d woken in a cold sweat. He smiled to himself, growing stronger just by thinking about her. Hurt and beautiful, she was home.