Translated from the Dari by Parwana Fayyaz
Ranna was standing behind the two concrete barrier walls when the explosion took place—the one that had thrown everything up into the sky. On the way back down to earth, half her body had come to rest between the two walls, which ran parallel only a meter apart from each other. That was where she’d returned—or half of her at least. The other half never came back down from the sky. Maybe it did, and was collected by the ambulance, or maybe the water of the Kabul River swept it away. But the half that did come back down was lying still between the walls.
Her face was covered in blood and her eyes had been turned red by it—or maybe by staring at the blood around her. From Ranna’s viewpoint, one of the walls looked as if it had been covered in a great red veil. As the blood ran, and dried, and paused, it made lines in that great veil. And though Ranna’s eyes were still, it seemed that the lines were moving. They formed a shape—an imprint of a short, fat man, the manager of the architect’s firm where Ranna worked. If he had seen Ranna absent from work like this, he’d have docked her pay. Her co-workers used to say, “The manager has no education and resents it, and that’s why he treats everyone so terribly. His wife is related to the wife of the company president, and when the new president was appointed, he asked the manager to join him.”
Ranna pictured the face of the president in the lines on the wall. A shaved face with no turban atop it. But if the lines ran to form a long beard from his stubble, and if others made a turban on his head, he would look just like her father. She had seen photos of him from years ago, standing with men in their perahan tunban, their trousers rolled up. With their turbans and well-cut beards, they stood leaning against their Kalashnikovs, or with a rocket resting on their shoulders. Amid the rocks and trees, they stood smiling.
When she had first seen those photos, her mother had explained to her, “When you turned four, there was a revolution. Your father smuggled us into Iran, and then he returned to the country for jihad.” He had sent a few photos in his first year back in Afghanistan, her mother said. But mostly they heard about him through rumors: sometimes, people brought the news that he had become a mujahid; others said he had married another woman and had children with her. A few years later, no one brought any news from him. Now she thought about her mother, suffering with her Alzheimer’s, and worried: what would become of her?
She stopped thinking about her parents, because there were voices coming from the walls: officials, who worked for the manager, were introducing her colleague Amir. The officials were all a little slimmer and taller than the manager, and Amir was slimmer and taller still. The lines on the wall moved accordingly. Ranna’s colleagues used to say, “When the manager first came, he seemed tall. But after a few years he became fatter. Then he bought a car, married for good, sent his parents on pilgrimage to Hajj and two of his brothers abroad.” A short, fat imprint on the wall.
Another voice joined the echoes between the two walls: Takbeer, who had been absent for three days. The manager had reduced his pay. There was another echo—the sound of the explosion that had silenced them. And then the voice of her father. “My wife could not give me a son, so I married for a second time. I just could not leave my inheritance to my daughter.” And then the sound of the ambulance that had arrived to wash the streets.
Half of her body, her purse, her mother’s memories, her father’s photographs—the water had washed them all away.
Her eyes were still, open wide, her pupils big. Her arms had fallen to her sides; they had lost all feeling and were lying motionless. The blood had spattered on the ground between two walls, clotted, and was slowly drying. The flies were congregating, their eggs slowly transforming into larvae. The little larvae, dressed in white, crawled around one another. A line of yellow ants was busy cutting and eating. The task of decomposition had started.
Two parallel lines of blood on the wall had turned perpendicular as they dried with time, becoming the lines of a crossroad.
That day, on the side of the street, she said her goodbyes to everyone.
Ranna had chosen her path a long time ago: that if she did not succeed in the Kankor examination, she would not accept a path in life that would take her to a place where she would feel foreign. She had made her decision while she was still in Iran, long after her father was taken captive by the communists for his beliefs. She was living with her family in Mashhad, where, by then, they had been for years.
One day, after school, as she was sweating under her black chador, feeling weary, her friend said that she was tired of the place and wanted to leave. Ranna had agreed. “I would like to go, too—to find my father, my forebears, my identity.”
Her friend had laughed at her and said, “I am going to Germany to find myself an identity. I am tired of this chador, of this hijab, of everything here. I want to build everything anew.”
“I wish to go to Kabul,” Ranna had said. “My father is alive. He is not Taliban anymore—he’s in Parliament. He’s the people’s representative. I will find him. And I am sure that my wounds of loneliness will heal.”
In time, she did find him—when she returned to Afghanistan at twenty-one, a year before she started her studies in architecture. His appearance had changed. The white hairs of age could not be hidden by him shaving his beard and mustache, and she doubted if she had ever seen her father in a white shirt, suit and tie, the way he was dressed that day. She had asked him, “Do you have a daughter with the name Ranna?” But he had changed only in appearance, not in belief. He was silent, and the memory of his words ran through her head: “I just could not leave my inheritance to my daughter.”
She left him and went to Sangcharak, to the village she had left seventeen years before. She found that almost everything had fallen to the ground: the graves of the nameless remained intact, but the houses, the streets and the gardens were now dust and stones.
In Mashhad, in her first few years of wearing a scarf, Thirty Metres Street on which they lived had seemed like it was a hundred meters long. In the early evenings, when she carried the yogurt bowl in two hands across the crowded street, she kept hold of her scarf with her teeth. She was always anxious. She was a seven-year-old girl convinced that the anxiety would never leave her.
Back then, the wall in front her was in the underground three-by-four-meter room she inhabited with her mother. She saw imprints on them all through childhood. She faced the same wall every time she slept, to avoid disturbing her mother as she wove carpets. Her mother’s shadow, a figure bent over the carpet, was always on the wall. She wove all day long. She wove for the neighbor’s wife, for the carpet businessman. It seemed as if all the world’s yarn was gathered in Ranna’s mother’s home; she never paused her weaving until Alzheimer’s finally stilled her hands.
In her sadness and loneliness, Ranna had made imprints of her life on that wall for seventeen years. She would find their old house in Sangcharak in the middle of the stains. It looked warm, with thick white curtains. Inside, she saw her father. He was just like her neighbor in Mashhad, who bought his daughter dresses.
One day, Ranna and the daughter had gone to buy bread together. “Let’s take fruit leather from Haji’s store,” Ranna had said. “Haji won’t be able to see us—he’s inside the shop.”
“My mother said that it is a sin,” her neighbor said. “God does not like thieves. God is great. He can always see us. He is powerful. He can do anything He wants.”
Ranna said, “Then he is just like my father. He is also powerful—he is doing his jihad. He is doing whatever he wishes. I want to become like him.”
The largest stain was always her father. He was tall; his hands were big; he was larger than anything else. He was powerful. Like God, he was not afraid of anyone. He could do whatever he wanted.
Later on, when she was a teenager, the largest stain had begun to divide into smaller ones. Ranna understood it then: her mother was much bigger. She was much stronger. In her silence, she too was like God, who saw things and said nothing. In silence, she too turned bags of yarn into carpets. Maybe God was like her mother. She never raised her voice—not even in fights, not even when Ranna stole fruit leather from Haji’s shop.
Today too, as Ranna lay between the bloodied walls and thought of her mother, God was silent. When the explosion had happened and everyone was thrown together into the sky, once again, God did not say a thing.
She wanted to cry. From morning until now, she had felt the need to, but she could not. Only a few drops of tears would flow before immediately drying inside her eyelids. The rest of the drops seemed to be stuck, as if her eyes didn’t have the power to let them out.
The voices stopped reaching her ears as her head became slowly empty. The only sounds she could hear were the siren of the ambulance and the noise of the washing of the street.
She had taken everything with her that day. Maybe it was all buried, maybe it was still up in the sky, or maybe the water had taken it down to the Kabul River, flowing towards the Mahmood Khan Bridge, then reaching Macroyan, and finally wishing itself on to Pakistan.
Half of her body was not there. But her purse, half-burnt, sat in the water. Her tazkera was floating on the surface, only one of its corners still intact. A business card had also slipped out of the purse. On it, a few letters, muh… di…, from “muhandis,” were visible, not yet washed away. It was all there, all still floating on the surface.