A week after her husband’s death the terrorists returned. Someone had told local Mujahedeen fighters that the Abbas family had hidden on their property rifles, handguns, and other items that could be powerful in the struggling insurgent group’s fight to wrestle the country back from Taliban control.
The men burst through the front door of Jamila’s home. They tore apart her kitchen, ripped up floorboards in the sleeping area, and turned over what little furniture she had—damaging her windows and the tall wooden pillars that supported her roof and loosely divided the small, one-room house. When they found nothing, one of the men grabbed her oldest son, dragged him outside the house, and tied him to the back of one of the horses the insurgents used to ride through their village. The man commanded the animal to run. Jamila’s boy fell to the ground. Dust kicked up around his ten-year-old body as he kicked his legs, flipping himself over so his chest faced the sky. The Mujahedeen soldier stopped only to threaten to drag the boy to his death unless Jamila gave them the weapons they were looking for.
Through sobs she screamed. She had no rifles, no handguns. It was impossible for her to give them what they were looking for. Neighbors cracked open front doors and peered out of windows. A few brave witnesses ran toward Jamila’s home to shield the young widow’s children. One woman scooped up the baby girl, who had been standing by the home’s front door, holding onto what was left of its rickety wooden slabs. Another grabbed the middle boy who stood, in silence, near the home’s stone façade. The youngest boy was crying too loudly, flailing too wildly to be moved.
Jamila ran as quickly as she could into her house to retrieve the one weapon she did have, the only thing she thought could stop the insurgents from killing her son. Within the rubble of her once-immaculate home she searched for it, flipping over mattresses strewn in the middle of the floor, picking up clothing that had landed, after the Mujahedeen’s destruction, in the middle of what was once her kitchen. She found it peeking out between floorboards that had been broken and piled in a back corner.
The young widow emerged from her home holding a book with worn corners. Her Koran, its edges falling apart, floated high above her head. Frantically, with tears still streaming down her cheeks, she waved it in front of the men’s faces, quoting passages about peace. If begging wouldn’t free her son, she would shame them, she thought, confronting these men with the religious texts they claimed to so closely and conservatively follow. Her neighbors stood in silence. Women had been killed for doing much less.
The insurgents paused. As she shouted, Jamila grew bolder than she had ever thought herself capable.
But still, the insurgent told the animal to run.
Jamila threw her body on top of her son’s, pulling on the rope that kept him tied to the animal. All the while, clutching the holy book.
The men spared her child’s life. Perhaps they were finally convinced that if Jamila had weapons, she would have produced them. Maybe the sight of this desperate woman holding the holy book persuaded them that she was telling the truth. But the young mother still didn’t feel it was safe for her children to remain anywhere near the family home. She arranged for her kids to live with a family she knew in another village, and she kept in contact with them by delivering messages through trusted neighbors. All her children left except for the youngest boy, who cried so long and hard that it became nearly impossible for him to breathe. This boy, who was so attached to his mother that only she could comfort him, would stay by her side as she began rebuilding her life. They were each other’s only constant comfort.
After the raid Jamila and her son spent two weeks sleeping and living in a room off of another woman’s kitchen. Her neighbors raised money and spent days using those funds to help rebuild the Abbas family home.
But after her first week back she knew she couldn’t stay. The home looked brand new—the pillars had been replaced, the floorboards were a different color and size from the ones she had walked on before, the kitchen had a better stove—but the home held too many memories, ones that stopped her from functioning as she attempted to make her way through life every day. In the morning, when she walked into her kitchen, she could hear dishes crashing to the floor and see her babies screaming. Each time she looked across the yard and toward the hill that sat in the distance, she saw her husband’s murder. Closing her eyes didn’t stop the memories from coming. Again and again she could see the man dressed in black raise his machete and slice through Amir’s neck. She saw them dump his body in the river. She froze midchore, broom handle in the air, overtaken. The psychological damage of that home, she would recall years later, was too great.
On this morning she rose early, as she had every morning since her return, to start chopping wood before she walked the half mile to her local school to teach. Jamila started her day before the sun had brightened the morning sky. Slowly she pulled back the covers to avoid waking her youngest son, who slept beside her. For each load of wood she chopped and delivered, she got paid the equivalent of pennies. But it was money she didn’t have before. In the evenings, after she returned home and finished her household duties, she weeded the gardens of families who didn’t have time to do it themselves. She also milked cows for extra money and picked up other odd jobs, anything she heard about that she thought she could do, no matter how little it paid. Not only did she need to earn enough money to make up for the salary her husband had once provided, but she also had to save enough money to be reunited with her children and move away from their house filled with memories. Every time she walked out of her home to find work, she was risking her life.
After a month away from three of her children, she was ready to make the first of many major moves away from her home, out of Badaghshan.
A man who had known her husband had a message delivered to Jamila through the widow’s closest neighbor. That man would be waiting for her at the Tajikistan border. She was to meet him there in three days. They would cross into Tajikistan as late in the day as possible and settle in a home just on the other side. Once she and the children were settled, the man would cross back over into Afghanistan. How long she stayed and what she did next would be up to her. She was to tell no one about her disappearance—not her other neighbors, not her boss at the school, not fellow teachers. It was hard for them to know who to trust. She had to make it to the border on her own.
She sent her niece to a neighbor, and that neighbor gave the family who was looking after her children one simple message: the time had come for Jamila to be reunited with her kids. She didn’t tell them why.
Yet again she was faced with the heart-wrenching task of figuring out what was important enough to take. But this time she wasn’t closing a lucrative chapter on a high-end home that she and her husband built together. She wasn’t surrendering any perks that came with working for a government she fully believed in. Instead, she was turning her back on tragedy.
Jamila looked forward to starting over in a much more peaceful province with virtually the same name (Gorno-Badaghshan) in Tajikistan. She packed all the money she had saved inside a small bag. In a separate bag she placed a few items of clothing for herself and her youngest child.
As she grabbed her son’s hand, she closed the door on her Sheghnan home for the last time. Jamila walked toward the car waiting for her and thought about seeing her three other children again. Her heart filled with joy, she felt the corners of her mouth curl into a smile, and a rush of tears flowed.