I had never seen such a filthy gray sky—sagging, worn out, with scattered stains and fissures like the linoleum in Muezzin Rashid’s apartment.
The sky of Kabul.
Sixteen hours in the air on a dilapidated TU-134, an hour and a half of circling over the airport defrosting the landing gear, hoping for the wheels to lower before the plane ran out of fuel.
And before the Mujahideen could shoot us down with their American missiles. How ironic it would be to come here and be blown up by missiles from Tahir’s jazz mecca. Do they listen to Billie Holiday as they melt and mold lead into bullets to make them as flawless and penetrating as her voice? If so, we are doomed.
The TU-134 plunged onto the runway, raising a dust cloud the size of a nuclear mushroom.
“Welcome to Kabul International,” screamed a large poster in Russian, garnished with a hammer and sickle, a hammer so massive it threatened to squash visitors into the ground.
The Kabul International terminal reminded me of Taza Bazaar’s Beggars Corner. It was a busy beehive of human misery. Men, only men, everywhere, cursing, haggling, begging, praying, waving their stumps—fresh relics of the war.
Outside, two wrecked buses waited—a fat yellow cylinder with shattered windows and a small, windowless tin canister punctured with bullet holes.
“I’m splitting you into two groups,” yelled Lieutenant Medvedev. He had collected us from the terminal and now counted us like sheep.
Twenty-eight of us, mostly dancers from the Belarusian folk group, Zabava, and singers from the Georgian Rustavi Choir. The rest, like me: outsiders—classical musicians. The man in charge, Captain Vassil Popovich, a Siberian force of nature, a polar bear with a shiny, bold head and a thick, walrus mustache, got drunk before the plane took off in Moscow and slept peacefully throughout the duration of our rocky flight. He also didn’t take orders from anyone.
“Fuck off, Medvedev,” Captain Popovich shouted back. “My artists are delicate people. They go by bus. Their gear—suitcases, instruments—ride in that fucking tin canister.”
“I’m in charge here, and this is my order.” The much younger and lower-ranked Lieutenant Medvedev attempted to stand his ground.
“Wipe your soiled zhopa with your order.” Captain Popovich pushed the lieutenant aside and gestured to us. “Gospoda artists, what are you waiting for, a special invitation? You got it. Board the yellow bus.”
“But I have orders,” Lieutenant Medvedev almost whimpered. “And orders are orders. In case one bus blows up, the other goes on. And so does the show tonight.”
“Ai-yi-yi.” Captain Popovich stuck his sausage finger in Medvedev’s sullen face. “Where did you grow up, mudak, to become so callous-hearted? These artists are our national pride. Our majesty, I can even say. They interrupted their valuable artistic schedules and risked their lives to come here and entertain assholes such as yourself, and all you worry about is your damn order.” He heartily spat on the ground and rubbed it into the cement with his boot. “Let’s get moving, gospoda artists. It’s dinnertime.”
A platoon of heavily armed troops escorted us through the city of Kabul. A city? A long time ago, maybe. Now it was just one big pile of rubble rising like a fatigued Mount Vesuvius in the aftermath of the eruption. And dark. Daytime dark, the sun buried alive in a thick shroud of smoke. A few passersby dashed away from our motorcade. Faceless women wrapped in heavy, opaque burkas pulled their barefoot kids inside, slamming doors and windows shut.
The motorcade passed by another larger-than-life Soviet placard. “Welcome to Kabul International!”—the same stern Russian letters and hemorrhaging Red Star.
“That’s where you perform.” Comrade Medvedev pointed behind the sign toward a large area filled with debris, where hundreds of Afghanis in turbans and tunics moved in slow processions, cleaning, raising stands and rows of seats, piling rocks and sandbags. “They’re setting up for your show. Used to be their football stadium.”
Our final destination was a partially demolished three-story villa with walls of muted olive-gray pebbledash, a tiled white ribbon beneath the cupolas, and arched Islamic windows, just like in our Gargoyle Castle but blocked with wood. Two ancient-looking marble columns guarded its entrance. Between them, another sign in Russian—“Hotel Kabul International.”
While everyone rushed to their rooms, I lingered in the foyer—a windowless basement with cracked walls, shredded gold-leaf wallpaper, a dusty bronze chandelier, and a folding metal table encircled by a dozen chairs. Lieutenant Medvedev sat at the table, our documents piled in front of him. I needed to start a conversation with him. To get on his good side.
“You probably have been here for a while,” I said, reverently, dropping into one of the chairs.
“My seventh month,” he replied without lifting his head, so all I could see was the hay-tinted crown of his buzz-cut head.
“And where do you come from?”
“Ural.”
“My best friend’s brother has been here for almost sixteen months.”
“Ohhh.”
“She asked me to look for him.”
“What division is he in?”
“She told me but I forgot.”
“Then it’s like looking for piss in a ditch.”
“What if I give you his name? Could you find him?”
“I guess.”
“I really—really—need to find him.”
Lieutenant Medvedev sized me up, a twinkle in his eye. “Not just your girlfriend’s brother, ah?”
I nodded, biting my lip.
“All right, give me his name. I’ll ask around.”
• • •
That evening, I played piano for ten thousand barely-out-of-their-teens boys who filled the Kabul stadium. Boys with pimples and crew cuts in oversized military uniforms, holding on to their toy guns. Toy guns that killed. I played as if there was no tomorrow. Because for many of them there wouldn’t be, other than inside a coffin draped with a Soviet flag. Or on the Beggars Corner among the new veterans, showcasing their wooden limbs and glossy government medals.
But on this night, we celebrated life, surrounded by the snow-crowned summits of the soaring Kabul Mountains, safeguarded by dozens of helicopters hanging in the starless sky like luminous planets. With boisterous, patriotic Tikhon Khrennikov’s Five Pieces for Piano, loud enough to drown out the dissonant sforzando of the not-so-distant artillery explosions.
I played with all my might, plunging into thunderous passages, my fingers striking the keys like falling rocks.
I stopped abruptly, hid my hands in the folds of my skirt, the aftershock of my chords still hovering in the air. The unaware audience of boys broke into a stormy ovation, shouting, stomping their feet, asking for more. I didn’t deserve their admiration at all. I had given them nothing but a stream of musical slogans. I had cheated them. I had used them to come here and get what I wanted—redemption.
What had I been thinking? That I would just show up in Kabul, find Tahir in this very real, very brutal war, and together we would fly to the Eiffel Tower on his magic carpet? How poetic, how convenient it looked from a distance. But here and now, that fantasy sounded as disjointed and obtuse as Tikhon Khrennikov’s opus.
I closed my eyes and stroked the keys up and down the keyboard again and again, chasing away the spirits of deceit. Then I dipped my fingers into the opening theme of Rachmaninoff’s Third. My first public performance of this defiant piece with the ephemeral, bitonal revelations I had been rehearsing for the last two years and still couldn’t grasp.
I played the piano part and sang the orchestral sections to myself. With my fears and muse taking turns, I spilled out my soul through my music.
The Legend of the Stone Heart
A thousand and thousand-times-over moons ago, a maiden with skin as dark as chocolate lived in a small village in the Caucasus Mountains. One day, Div—a wicked demon—came to the village. In his traveling bag he carried a shining piece of the moon.
“Sell me your goods,” the maiden begged Div. “I want my skin to become as white as the moon.”
“If you marry me, you’ll receive not only the gift of the moon, but all the treasures in my Moon Cave,” replied Div.
“I can’t marry you, Div. My heart belongs to Ali the shepherd.”
“The choice is yours—if you marry me you become Mistress of the Moon Cave; if you marry Ali you stay a shepherd’s wife and clean up after the sheep.”
The temptation blinded the maiden’s soul, and together with Div she rode away to his Moon Cave and its treasures. There, as she anointed herself with shining pieces of the moon, her skin became moon-white, but the everlasting darkness of night devoured her soul.
“Take your moon treasure back,” she pleaded with Div. “Take your Moon Cave. Let me go to Ali.”
“As you please,” he replied. “Go to Das Sehra—Stone Desert—and there you will find your Ali.”
The maiden traveled many moons before she reached Stone Desert and found her lost love.
“Ali, it’s me,” she cried. “I came back to beg your forgiveness.”
Ali didn’t move. He sat, silent, looking at the sky, counting the stars.
She came closer. “Ali, don’t you recognize me?”
Ali lowered his eyes, his stone-cold eyes.
“You are a beautiful maiden,” he said, “and your skin is as white as the moon, but I don’t know any maidens with white skin.”
In despair, the maiden reached to touch his heart, but all she felt was the chill of Stone Desert. Her love’s heart had turned into stone.
What about Tahir’s heart?
• • •
I lay on the crude, dark-stained backseat of a UAZ-469 military jeep, dressed in a long, blue Afghani dress with a gray shawl covering my hair. Under a pile of uniforms saturated with stagnant sweat and cigarette stench. The small opening I’d created for my nose kept closing with each of the car’s jerks and shudders.
“You all right?” Medvedev’s voice cut through the crusty layer of uniforms. “We’re almost there. Another maybe fifteen minutes. Keep tight. And like I told you—if anybody talks to you, don’t say a word. Act as if you don’t understand Russian.”
Medvedev had come to me after the concert as our artists’ brigade waited for the convoy to be transported to President Babrak Karmal’s palace for a lavish dinner. “I found your friend’s brother,” he whispered furtively. “He’s with the 108th Motor Rifle Division stationed near Bagram, the air base where you arrived. I can take you there tonight after dinner. You just have to wear Afghani dress…you look dark, like them…I’ll get one for you. But don’t tell anyone. I’m risking my head, you know.”
“Why? Why would you do this for me?” I asked, stunned.
Medvedev shrugged. “Your piano music touched me, you know. Really touched me. Like it pinched me all over my skin. You’re a real talent. It’s not every day that I meet real talent. Like my girl back home.” A pale scar above his left eyebrow stood out as his face turned red. “She did it to me too, you know. With her voice…sweet, sexy, you know. She’s also dark like you. The first time I brought her home, my grandma crossed herself against the devil.”
“Is she waiting for you?”
Medvedev dropped his head. “I’ll bring the dress,” he said, avoiding my eyes. “And don’t speak Russian under any circumstances or both of us will stand before a tribunal. Understood?”
Suddenly, the vehicle jerked to the side and came to a brusque, tire-screeching stop.
“Documents,” I heard a high, nasal voice.
The door of the jeep opened, then slammed shut. Medvedev seemed to have gotten out. A few pairs of boots stomped on a gravel road.
“Hey, mudak, don’t you see? It’s Medved with his fucking whores,” shouted another voice, grumpy and boorish, swearing and slurring the words. “Let’s see what kind of meat he’s got tonight.”
I heard the sound of a tarpaulin being hurled up. Then someone shoved aside the uniform stack, and the bright, penetrating beam of a flashlight struck my eyes before assaulting the rest of my body. From behind the blinding shaft of light, a square, pimpled face with elephant ears peered in, grinning lasciviously, glazed eyes examining me closely, the breath of a rotten mouth turning my stomach.
“Medved, you’re fucking God’s gift. How much do you want for her?” The rough fingers of a probing, calloused hand thrust beneath my skirt and groped my thigh.
It was a trap.
Medvedev hadn’t acted out of the kindness of his heart. He’d brought me here to sell. Tears of anger and despair burst out of my eyes. I wanted to scream, to scratch my way out of this horror. But the beefy hand bandaged my mouth while the other hand kept busy drilling a tunnel between my legs.
“No, Kolya, not this one,” said Medvedev sheepishly, pulling the soldier away from me. “She’s for Colonel Prokhorov himself. She’s a virgin. You know how he is—a family man, always careful. He wants them clean.”
The hand continued to try to separate my legs but with less conviction. “Virgin, you say.” The thumb managed to squeeze and probe itself all the way. Then, suddenly, it was hastily pulled aside. Followed by the sound of something—of someone?—thumping into the gravel. I was free.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” yelled the slurred voice. “Why didn’t you tell me before? What am I gonna do now? Walk around with my dick on fire?”
“Go jerk off in a bucket,” replied the first—the nasal voice—cackling. “What’s the big deal? It’s what you usually do, pederast.”
“I’ll show you the bucket. I’ll stick it in your ass.”
A fight broke out, accompanied by grunts and shouts, intercepted with the dull thuds of punches landing while I lay immobile as a lamb waiting to be slaughtered.
“Okay, that’s enough, you assholes,” shouted Medvedev.
“Not enough. That blyad broke my nose.”
More scuffling, gradually subsiding beneath muttered curses and obscenities.
“What’s the difference if I do her in the mouth?” the slurred one tried to reason. “Nobody’s gonna know. I’ll give you two bags of poppy.”
Pause. Then the flick of a lighter. Another one. “I can’t, pal. Prokhorov will hang me.”
“He won’t know.”
“You’ve got a dick that smells like a dead horse—and you think he won’t know?”
Coarse laughter. “I better get moving before fucking churki blow up the crossing.”
“Be safe, bratok.”
The door banged shut; the vehicle was heaved into gear and drove off. Shaking violently, I pulled myself into a sitting position and looked back. Two small figures in long overcoats—just like the boys in my audience at the Kabul stadium—stood with their guns in the middle of the dirt road wrapped in a cloud of dust, looking after our UAZ speeding away. Behind them nothing but a void-black sky.
I pushed the tarpaulin aside and quietly vomited over the side of the fast-moving jeep.
“I’m sorry,” Medvedev said without taking his eyes off the road. “It’s the war, you know. No promise of tomorrow. So you take what you can today.”
We drove in silence as I tried to still jabs of sickness coursing through my abdomen. We drove along a too-narrow road edging a cliff: on the left, austere snow-peaked mountains fading into the sky; on the right, a deep gorge shrouded in darkness. In front of us, a blizzard of insects twirled in their final suicidal dance, smashing into blurred streaks across the windshield of our jeep.
I was alone in a vast foreign space with a very bad person who traded women for drugs. And who, tonight, had chosen to be my hero.
Air, crisp and cold, tasted heavenly. Just like the air in Swallow Nest, a resort in the Caucasus Mountains where Mama used to take me every summer to drink narzan from the mineral water stream and stock up on its magical, curative energy for another year. We used to wake at dawn and hike through the Valley of the Rising Sun and up the mountain trails to Swallow Grotto, carved out over the centuries by the stream’s ancestor, the feral, fast-flowing mountain river, Baksan.
Once there, Mama placed her glass armud under the thin stream, filled it with cool, crystal clear water, and watched me drink it, a contented smile on her face. Then we sat on a rock coated with spongy moss and watched the birth of the sun. How it drew apart the sea and the sky and emerged bashfully from behind the regal snow fedora of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in all of Europe.
I remembered one morning. Mama, her golden hair spilled across her shoulders, wearing my favorite sarafan with daisies, stood against a backdrop of stern glaciers and deep green valleys. The toe of her sling shoe probed the edge of the cliff, sending a few small rocks on a tumbling journey downward. Fear seized my throat, buckled my knees. What if she slips and falls down into the abyss? What if I never see my mama again?
“Don’t worry,” she said, moving away from the precipice, her sky-blue eyes smiling. “I’ll always be there for you.”
A wave of guilt surged through me. What was I doing here in the middle of the night, hiding like a thief in the back of a military truck? How could I have planned this crazy mission? What if I never saw Mama again?
A few minutes later, as we descended to a level plain, a cascade of blasts shook the earth, killing the fragile stillness of the night, slicing the black canvas of the sky into red shreds of flames.
“Bad luck. Churki shooting their fireworks,” Medvedev shouted against the wind, speeding up. “Might be a problem.”
He was right. Our journey ended at the next checkpoint, a makeshift shed at the side of the road surrounded by a dozen busy soldiers. Erecting barricades, arguing with the drivers of trucks and jeeps, they directed every vehicle to reverse direction and head back the way they had come. A scraggy, gray-haired officer with the withered face of a retired accountant—so out of place amid the squad of young soldiers, most of whom seemed no older than me—approached our jeep.
“Ai-yi-yi.” He waved a finger at Medvedev in a fatherly gesture. “These recruits are fighting the war here, and you’re still driving around in your mobile trading post.”
Medvedev leaned out of the car holding a fresh pack of Belomorkanal cigarettes. “Listen, Ivan Anatolievich. The thing is, I gotta get through to Bagram. Very big deal.”
“Can’t let you through.” The gray-haired officer hastily stuffed the cigarettes inside the pocket of his coat. “Dushmans blew up the bridge. As for your very big deal”—he waved mockingly in my direction—“it will have to wait.”
We arrived back at the hotel long after midnight. Saying good-bye, nervously pacing from one foot to the other, Medvedev held out the day’s edition of the military newspaper with my photo on the front page.
“Will you give me your autograph? Please? And would you write”—he hesitated for a moment—“‘with love’? You know, we’re not bad…not really…not in real life. The brute—Kolya—is from a village in Siberia, just like me. And he saved my life, you know…six months ago.” Medvedev touched a scar on the side of his forehead. “A stray bullet grazed my head, you know. And he covered me, kept me going until we could find a safe place in a cave. With no food, no ammunition. Only three of us survived, out of twenty. So I owe him.”
I took the pen, drew a heart, and wrote in big letters: “To my dear friend Lieutenant Medvedev—From Leila with Love!”
• • •
A single kerosene lamp dangled on a chain from the ceiling, dispersing murky shadows across the long, narrow corridor. I dragged my feet toward a room at the very end, a whirlwind of regrets spinning in my head. I had done the Zümrüd Qusu part—spread my wings and leaped into unknown. And the result? Never got to see Tahir. Instead, I could have been raped by a Siberian village boy with pimples, my fire wings chopped off and thrown into Panjshir Valley for the hyenas.
Stupid, childish me. Princess Zümrüd belonged in Tahir’s legend, not in the middle of an ugly war. Oh, how I wanted it all to be a dream, to wake up from this nightmare in my own bed, to smell the fresh Baku morning air instead of the vapor of vomit and the stench of moldy uniforms. A spasm clenched my stomach. The back of my throat tasted bile.
I rushed to the room and started to use my key, but the door opened the moment I touched it. I surely remembered locking it when I left. No time to worry about that. The spasm overwhelming me, I groped my way in the darkness, found the sink and threw up, emptying my guts of the rest of Babrak Karmal’s dinner. Then, a drip at a time from the rusty faucet, I rinsed my mouth. And the fear returned.
The door. Why was it open?
I turned around. A silhouette. Someone sitting on my bed.
“Princess Leila.” The silhouette rose, stepped toward me.
Tahir?
In the million possible visions of our reunion, this was the one I’d missed. Tahir in my hotel room, waiting for me to come back from my expedition to find him. An absolutely irrelevant expedition as it turned out. Because there he was, standing in front of me. All I had to do was just reach out and hold him.
But I couldn’t. In some bizarre way, I felt that by making it so easy he had minimized my heroic task, dismissed my daring efforts to find him. To save him. To redeem myself.
He had changed. Taller, broader in the shoulders than the lanky boy I remembered from almost three years ago. Almost an eternity. What if the war had changed him in other ways too? What if he’d become like the pimply-faced monsters on the road? They too had probably been nice, idealistic boys before life presented them with the miseries of Afghanistan.
Except Tahir had more reason to be angry than any of them. Angry at me. After all, I was the sole reason for him being here.
“It’s so nice to see you,” my mouth muttered, stupidly, just to say something. The words so banal and clumsy. And so out of place. My feet did no better, tripping over a Kalashnikov rifle leaning against the wall.
“I’m sorry.” Tahir rushed to move the weapon aside and help me keep my balance.
Tahir. So close. His warm breath brushed against my neck, sending fireworks up my spine.
“I saw you in the concert,” he said. “It brought back good memories.”
Good memories?
“I…I played the Rachmaninoff…tonight. My first public performance. At first, I couldn’t find any focus. Lots of different emotions, you know. The flight and the sense of danger.” No. The anticipation of seeing you. The thrill of finding you and the fear of being rejected.
“I know what you’re saying.” Tahir paused. “It was the same with me. With my art here at the beginning. No matter how I mixed paints, the images kept coming out gray.” He smiled wistfully, his eyes taking on a shape of a crescent. “I enjoyed your Rach 3, the way you blended conflicting reds and blues into harmonies…”
How sad. There we were, two strangers in a dark room, desperately trying to keep our disjointed, reserved conversation alive. One long pause after another, interrupted only by the buzz of a hungry fly spinning in circles. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, I studied the new Tahir. Head shaved, dressed in a neat uniform with a sailor shirt peeking out. I wouldn’t have recognized him in a crowd with the other boy soldiers.
“So…I guess I better get going.” Tahir reached for his Kalashnikov. “You had quite an eventful day. With the flight and the show and the fancy dinner at the Puppet’s palace,” he said, a touch of the old Tahir sarcasm in his voice.
I felt rejected. I knew I should stop him. Ask his forgiveness. Tell him that I had come to Afghanistan to make his wish for me come true. That I had grown wings, traveled with a stranger on a dangerous road in my quest to find him. That he had become my obsession, my destination.
“Good-bye, Princess Leila. Have sweet dreams,” he said and hastily left the room.
I watched as he disappeared in the dark corridor. Tahir the stranger in heavy combat boots, their clumping hobnails echoing his footsteps.
How could I have come here to meet him, to save him, to share the rest of my life with him, and then let him go? What was it—fear? Pride?
He stopped for a brief moment, then the sound of his steps resumed. But now the echoes grew louder and louder. Tahir was walking—no, he was running—back to me.
“You know, I was thinking,” he stammered, out of breath. “Would it be too rude if I asked you to sit for me? Now?”
“It would be more rude if you didn’t,” I said, my heart ripping through my chest.
“Oh, great. I brought really good paper with me. Traded it for poppy.”
“Poppy? Do you still smoke hashish?”
“Not once in the past year. You know me, I don’t like being part of a crowd.”
Opening his bag, he retrieved a wood palette and a few sheets of paper. He obviously had come prepared. The same old Tahir, obsessed with his art.
“Touch it, doesn’t it feel like canvas?” he said. “The best German paper for oil painting. It’s saturated with a special chemical that will keep the texture and the vividness of color forever.”
“How will you paint me in the dark?”
“In the dark? Look at this.” He reached over and gently turned me toward the window. Outside, a half-moon with a misty halo fought its way through the dense clouds.
“I couldn’t see it like this before,” he said, “beauty in its rudimentary way. Remember how I used to be obsessed with creating my own unique formula? Too much ego gets in the way when you’re young and stupid. Here, though, in this dreadful place, life reduces your most powerful ambitions to mere shades of gray, yet it frees you from your own self-imposed boundaries.”
“‘Who can say that today’s key will not be tomorrow’s lock, or today’s lock not tomorrow’s key?’” I recited an ancient verse.
“That’s true. Nothing ever stays the same.” Tahir carefully organized his brushes. “Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes clichéd. And vice versa. Isn’t it weird? All those experiments I did with colors and techniques. Looking for the perfect greens, blues, and violets that would express the transparent beauty of the Zoroastrian fire. And I found them here. Right here, in the middle of macabre fighting in this war-torn country. They have been here for a thousand years. Juno irises. Growing on the top of the Kabul Mountains. Waiting for me. The precise cocktail of hues breathing with life. You see, if I didn’t come here, I wouldn’t have found them. So it was all worth it.”
He placed a chair next to the window and urged me to sit down, holding my shoulders for a brief moment, taking me back to the night at the top of Maiden Tower when I offered myself to him and he refused.
“Here you’ll be bathed in a natural light—like Caravaggio’s light, remember?” he said, walking around the dark room, considering the best spot for himself, checking the light and angles, moving the table to different positions before settling near the sink. Rubbing his hands in delight, he commanded, “Do not move.”
Then he painted in total silence.
Was this the only reason he came to see me?
I sat motionless for a long time, my body itching, my head swarming with half thoughts, waves of sadness rising inside my heart until I wanted to scream it all out, to let this self-centered stranger know that I had gone through hell to find him and to be with him. Not to pose like a lifeless mannequin for his painting.
I moved slightly, just enough to let a lock of hair fall across my face. Will he notice?
He did. He leaped across the room and gently pushed the hair behind my ear. I wrapped my arms around him, stroking his porcupine head, bringing him close to me. To break the wall between us. To give us a chance. Now or never.
Tahir hesitated. He might have changed, but the taut energy of rejection coming from him felt the same as two years ago. I released my embrace. Tears clogged my throat. The pain concealed inside me had no remedy. His heart, after all, was made of stone.
He didn’t move. Stayed next to me, uncertain. Torn. Feeling sorry for me? Then he kissed me on the back of my neck. Soft legato. Reached for my hands and pressed them against his burning face, his dry lips, his moist tongue.
Stop. Stop right now. I heard the voice of reason. This is not the right time nor the right place. Look around. Look where you are.
I did. I looked around Room Number 12 of the Kabul International Hotel. A dingy room with fatigued saffron flowers on the stained wallpaper, with washed-out gazelles dragging their feet across a bedspread spotted with cigarette burns.
And with a magical painting on the table. A half girl and half bird with chiffon wings at the crown of Maiden Tower, ready to soar into the sky. Against the misty moon—my face. The face of love.
“‘Every passing breeze carries the rose fragrance of your breath to me,’” Tahir whispered an ancient ghazel. “Every splendid sunrise reflects the golden glow in your eyes for me. Every rustling leaf and every fleeting rain whisper your name to me. My heaven is yours; your sorrow is mine, I am forever drunk with your love’s wine…”
It didn’t happen the way I was told “the first time” would be. With pain and embarrassment. Giving in to a man’s unleashed desire, submitting to his male dominance. Exercising the only power given to a girl by nature—the ability to keep her man just hungry enough so he would return for more. That was the axiom we Azerbaijani girls were raised to believe.
No, what happened between Tahir and me was the Dance of Love created by two partners equal in every way—tenderness, longing, vulnerability. Two souls who met in the dark to spark the glow. Two halves of a pomegranate that joined, kernel to kernel, to form one beautiful whole. Two dreamers—Princess Zümrüd and her Knight in Lion’s Skin—who discovered a magical world of love hidden underneath a stinking Afghani bedspread.
“Will you remember me tomorrow?” Tahir whispered in my ear as we lay afterward, sweaty, naked, and shameless, his scrubby head rubbing against my neck.
“Of course not.” I giggled. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not.”
“Then tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Will you remember me tomorrow?”
“Well, it’s hard to remember every adolescent girl who falls for me,” he said, failing to suppress a smile, a mischievous smile sweeping all the way beyond the margins of his thin face.
I made a half-playful gesture to tear myself from Tahir, but he tightened his arms around me and stroked my hair, hypnotizing me with the infinite luster of his lavender eyes.
“You are the only one, Leila,” he whispered. “You are the love of my life. You are mine as I am yours. Forever.”
And he kissed me feverishly, bringing the taste of arousal to my lips, making my every cell explode with new desire. A much stronger desire. Because now I had known the blossoming garden of lovers’ oblivion—our private paradise. And I craved more.
With our eyes locked, caressing each other with words and sighs of love, we slowly danced our way back, following the accelerando rhythm of our hearts until there was no more him and me. Only us, the eternal us. Free like water rushing down an overflowing mountain stream. Weightless like a bird soaring in the air on her fire wings of love—higher and higher—over the barren deserts, snow peaks, and into the clear sapphire sky.
And, sadly, toward the new sun seeping from behind the Kabul Mountains. Night had slipped away so fast.
“I’ve come here to find you, Tahir,” I whispered hurriedly before we were lost to sleep. “I’ve been planning this for a long time, since your grandmother gave me her Firebird, Zümrüd Qusu. I’ve never parted with her, and finally she led me to you. I have a plan. We’ll defect. Together. It’s not that difficult. We’re less than three hundred kilometers from the Pakistan border. You speak Farsi, and with this”—I showed the platinum ring with a sapphire—“we can bribe some nice Pashtun—”
“Shhh.” Tahir didn’t let me finish, touching my lips with his finger. “Not now. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
• • •
I woke up alone to a biting grayness. The sun, after all, didn’t make it through the clouds. The painting was gone—gone with the palette and paper sheets and every possible trace of Tahir’s presence.
Except for his smell. Intoxicating. Evocative. Torturous.
I didn’t see him throughout the day, and I didn’t hear from him the next night or the morning after. Ashamed, I sat in my hotel room guarding the crime scene. Me and Miriam’s washed-out vermilion bird.
Zümrüd Qusu? A Firebird?
Nonsense. More like an evil lenet. A curse. The sole reason Miriam ended up in the gulag. I threw the bird in the trash can. Then, struck by guilt, took it out and put it back inside my suitcase. At dawn, we were loaded into the buses and driven to the airport in a heavily shielded cortege. But not until the plane lifted into the sky and the city disappeared beneath a blanket of smoke did I accept the reality—Tahir had painted me, made love to me, and then walked away. Free and unattached as always. I’d been used and discarded.
And my heart shattered into a thousand tiny pieces scattered all over the Afghani wasteland.