KABUL WAS ALWAYS more beautiful in the snow. Even the piles of rotting rubbish in my street, the only source of food for the scrawny chickens and goats that our neighbors kept outside their mud houses, looked beautiful to me after the snow had covered them in white during the long night.
I was four years old that December, and I had been playing in the snow with some other children. We pushed and shoved one another, trying to dodge the snowballs—not an easy thing to do in a street that was so narrow only three adults could walk down it shoulder to shoulder. We stopped playing because one of us wanted to buy something; not me, I didn’t have the money, although the shopkeeper near my house usually let me pay for something the following day. We all piled into the small shop.
There was a Russian woman soldier in the shop when we entered. Like the soldiers I had seen marching in the city, she wore a dark green uniform and big boots. She saw me and stretched out her hand to offer me a chocolate in shiny yellow wrapping. It was one of my favorites.
The woman soldier towered over me and said something that I did not understand. It was the closest I had ever gotten to a Russian invader.
I had no idea what to do. I stared at her face. She looked just like the doll I had named Mujda (good news)—yellow hair, white skin, and green eyes. The kind of face that Grandmother had warned me about. “You should be scared of them,” she would say sternly. “They are the invaders who have occupied Afghanistan. Their hands are stained with red, with the blood of our people. If an invader from Russia offers something to you, don’t accept it, and don’t go anywhere with them.” But she had always talked about the men. She had never said anything about women.
The woman soldier came closer, thrusting the chocolate at me. I looked for the blood on her hand. I was afraid that if I touched it, my hand would have blood on it too. I thought that the blood would never come off me, however much I washed. But there wasn’t any blood on her hand. I said no to her, but she just laughed. She said something to me, but I didn’t understand.
She said something to the shopkeeper, and he spoke to me. “She says she likes you and she just wants you to accept this chocolate as a present from her. Why won’t you accept it?”
I repeated what Grandmother had told me to say if a Russian ever spoke to me. “Well, if she is Russian, tell her to get out of my country.” Then I walked out into the street.
But the woman soldier followed me. I stopped, and she just stood in front of me, and I could see that she was crying. She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket and pressed it to her eyes.
I had never seen an invader cry before. I felt sorry for her. I would have liked to accept her present, but at the same time I was afraid of what Grandmother would think of me. I wanted to say, “Please wait. I will go ask Grandmother if I can have her permission to accept this chocolate or if I have to say something else to you.” But the words stuck in my throat, and I scurried away home.
I jumped over the tiny smelly stream that ran past our house and that we all used as our sewer, pushed open the blue metal door with the flaking paint, and crossed the yard that I called our garden, even though flowers never grew there.
I kicked off my shoes and rushed across the brightly colored carpets to the spot where I knew I would find Grandmother. She spent almost all her day in a corner of the main room of our house, wearing a small veil over her hair and sitting on the floor on a toshak, a kind of mattress big enough for five people to sit on that was placed on top of the carpets. Sometimes she would lean against the wall of dried mud.
She was surrounded by her taspeh prayer beads, which she had in her hand all day long, the spray for her asthma, and the medicine she took for her rheumatism. No one else I knew prayed for as long as Grandmother. I had seen other people pray for two minutes and then get up again, but Grandmother would spend half an hour on the special prayer mat that she usually kept rolled up against the wall. I would be wanting something from her or to go out for a walk with her, but I would have to wait and wait until she finished.
The copy of the Koran, which she let me touch only after I had washed my hands, was also within easy reach on a small wooden table, protected by a cloth. She was weak and she had trouble getting up, so she did everything in the same place, from peeling vegetables to praying to Allah five times a day. When she did work in the kitchen, she moved so slowly that it was a long time before meals were ready.
But she was taking her early-afternoon nap on the mattress, and I didn’t dare to wake her up because she had difficulty sleeping. I sat in front of Grandmother and tried to keep quiet. The minutes ticked by, so slowly. I picked up her brown beads and played with them for a while. When Grandmother prayed, she would mutter something under her breath, and the beads would go click, click, click as she ran them through her fingers. I had once asked her what she was saying, and she told me that she repeated my name, over and over again. I believed her and was happy that Grandmother would say my name all day long.
I kept thinking about the woman soldier. I felt ashamed as if I had done something wrong. When Grandmother woke up at last, I told her what had happened: “Grandmother, the woman was crying. I felt sorry for her. I refused because you always told me to refuse, but perhaps I should have accepted?”
“Daughter,” Grandmother said—she always called me “daughter”—“it’s not because she was a woman and she was crying that you should accept. You should have said thank you to her, but you did right to refuse the chocolate. Of course, not all Russians are bad. Some are like you and me. But never forget that they have entered your country without being invited and that they are forcing you to do what they want. They want you to be their servants. They want to steal the most precious things from our great mountains. But we want to decide our own future.”
The Russians had been occupying Afghanistan for the past three years. They had invaded in December 1979, when I was one year old, with the excuse of bolstering a Marxist-Leninist government that had seized power in a bloody military coup because they feared that Moslem fundamentalists, backed by the Americans and the Chinese, would overrun the country as they had done in Iran, where they overthrew the Shah. The invasion dragged Afghanistan into the cold war, as the Mujahideen turned to America for help to fight the occupiers.
MY PARENTS’ FAMILIES could not have been more different. Father was from a town in the south of Afghanistan. Like Mother, he was a member of the Pashtun tribe, the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, and spoke Persian. But Mother, whose parents had sent her to school and planned to send her to university as well, didn’t think highly of his family. She thought they were backward, and they never came to our house.
“All the women in his family wear the veil,” Mother told me. “They think it is quite normal to sell a girl into marriage for the price of a few cows or some sheep. Your father quarreled badly with his own father because he took two more wives when your father was still a child.”
My parents were distant relatives, and their marriage was arranged by their parents, which was customary. But there was nothing customary about the way they celebrated the wedding. Usually the celebrations last a whole week. Even the poorest families will borrow huge sums of money to hold separate parties for the bride and the groom and offer meals to more than a thousand guests. Three hundred guests is considered too few. And each day the bride has to wear a new and expensive dress—each day a different color, as if she has to work her way through the rainbow.
Mother, who was eighteen years old when she got married, thought all this was ridiculous, just like the tradition in the more isolated villages that the couple must hang out the bed-sheet after their first night so that people can tell from the blood stains that the bride was a virgin.
She insisted on a small celebration. She said the success of the marriage would not be measured by how much was spent on the wedding. She even decided not to go to the beauty salon on the day of her wedding. She joked that they would put so much makeup on her that she would be five kilos heavier.
The bride’s ideas were too advanced for Father’s relatives. Some of them said that small celebrations were held only when the bride was a widow or when there was something wrong with her—for example, if she was sick. But Father was the first in his family to get a proper education, having studied biology in Kabul, and he supported Mother. He liked simple things, and I can’t remember him ever talking about money. My parents got their way, and there were forty guests at the wedding.
They were married in the house I grew up in, just four dark rooms with walls of hard mud—sometimes old, dry bits of mud would fall down on me from the ceiling as I played—and it was over very quickly. There’s a tradition that the bride and groom must sit side by side and that the first they ever see of each other must be their reflections in a mirror that is held in front of them. But my parents’ families arranged for them to meet a few weeks before they were married. They exchanged only a few words, and Father gave her a gold engagement ring.
There was no mirror at their wedding. Mother just sat next to Father. She wore a simple pale pink dress, and her only jewels were the ring that he had given her and some earrings. She didn’t even use henna on her hands.
The mullah came in, dressed in clean white clothes, and asked the bride and then the groom whether they were willing to be married. The rule is that he asks each of them three times—even if they remain silent, it counts as a yes. Then they signed a piece of paper, and that was it. The celebrations lasted just one day. The guests got kabuli rice, which is our national dish—rice with chicken, cabbage, carrots, raisins, almonds, and pistachio nuts; bolani, which are fried potato cakes; and then dessert and fruit. According to Grandmother, Father’s relatives said the wedding was like a funeral.
Although their wedding had been arranged, my parents grew to love each other. He respected her rights from the start. Many Afghan men believe that if their wives have been studying or working, they should drop everything and stay at home from the moment they get married. Father made no such condition, and Mother was free to continue literature studies at the university built by the Russians. She had rejected a couple of rich suitors who had much land and many horses because they were too traditionally minded. Father would never have dreamed of having more than one wife.
My parents rarely showed their affection in front of me. Mother liked to read love poems, and sometimes she would read them aloud to Father. They never let me see them kiss, but when Mother was tired late in the evenings she would ask Father to give her a massage. They would let me sit nearby as she stretched out on the bed, and he would start by massaging her head. Then he would massage her neck and shoulders as well, his hands over her nightshirt.
Grandmother told me that Father’s relatives complained some more when I was born. Many of them were disappointed that I was a girl. I was my parents’ first child, and for most Afghans it is important that a first child be a boy. In the traditional families in the villages, if the newborn is male, the family starts shouting, “A boy is born! A boy is born!” and the men fire guns into the air to celebrate. Relatives and friends bring money as a present and push it into the bed of the baby or the mother. In some families, boys would be given more to eat than their sisters.
When a girl is born, there is no shouting, and no one rushes to the house to congratulate the parents. And there isn’t as much money in the bed. People go up to the mother and say, “Don’t worry. Your next child will be a boy.”
Father’s family wanted a boy because he would grow up stronger than a girl, and when my mother grew old she would be able to go and live in her son’s house—there was no such tradition with a daughter. But Father argued with his relatives and said he would love me just as much.
Father always told me, “When you grow up, you must become a doctor. Or you could become a good teacher, who would go out and educate the people.” He had so many plans for me that Mother would laugh at him and say, “I have only one daughter, and you want her to do so many things. She can’t realize all your dreams.” Father would look serious and reply, “You’ll see. She will do something good. She has what it takes.”
When I asked Grandmother what she thought about me being a girl, she said to me, “I am happy about it. I feel that you are like both a son and a daughter to me, and I want you to be so strong in the future that no one will think that you are a woman.”
I asked her how I was born.
“One day I was walking in the street,” she replied, “and I saw this beautiful baby in a shop window. I stopped and stared at it, then I went into the shop, and I told the shopkeeper that I had no money, but please could he give me this beautiful daughter? But he said no, you were very expensive. So I went begging in the street, I got the money, and I bought you. That’s how you were born.”
I was proud that I had been an expensive baby.