ONE MORNING a few days before my seventh birthday, Mother called me to her side as she sat in front of her dressing table. She lifted me up and sat me on her knee. I treasured such moments. I would ask her to let me have a few drops of her perfume, or at least to smell it on her from close up. I wanted to know where exactly the smell of perfume came from. On the table there was a cloth that Grandmother had embroidered with flowers, and on top of the cloth, alongside her toiletries, Mother kept her perfume. There were never more than two small bottles because it was so expensive. Mother always said that if perfume was cheap and no good, she would rather go without.
Perfume was the best present you could give Mother, and I once bought her some in the bazaar. It cannot have been one of her favorites, but she covered me in kisses all the same. She always said to me that the ones from Paris were the most famous in the world. Charlie was one of her favorites.
Usually Mother would not let me anywhere near her bottles. Many times she scolded me for putting some of her perfume on when I was all dirty after a day spent playing in the garden or in the street. “You’re a bad girl. Have a bath and then use the perfume!” she would say.
But on this morning of 1985 she let me use a little, and then she looked serious and stared into my eyes. “Zoya,” she said, “would you like to come with me when I leave the house to do my work?”
I felt so proud I said yes immediately, without thinking of asking what I should do. I found out soon enough. She asked me to fetch my backpack, one that had a picture of a bear on it. Then she packed some toys, my bottle—until the age of seven, I refused to drink milk unless it was in a bottle—and some papers I had never seen before, and sat me on her knee again to give me my instructions.
“If anyone stops us and asks where we are going, you must say that we are just going shopping. You must never say anything else, and you must never mention the papers in your knapsack. If someone finds them, you must say that you knew nothing about them. Will you remember all this?”
I nodded. Mother looked satisfied, and put on the horrid burqa.
“Why are you wearing this? I thought you hated it,” I said.
“I do hate it, but I have to wear it because otherwise it is impossible for me to do my work,” she answered.
We went hand in hand into the street. We went to different houses, and she would stop a few minutes at each of them. Sometimes she took me into the house with her, and I saw her talk hurriedly with people and give them one of the papers. Other times she left me in the street. “Look out for any soldiers, or for anyone you think might be a spy for the police,” she would tell me.
Grandmother knew that I was running only a small risk given my age, and approved of my new job. Father did not want to interfere; he respected the work that Mother was doing. Mother seemed to be happy with my contribution, although sometimes I would forget that she had asked me to do something, and she would be angry with me.
It was strange and tiring work because Mother’s trips sometimes lasted for hours. I didn’t think my job in itself was very important, but I was only a small child and already I was helping Mother; that was all that mattered. And Mother had chosen me—I had heard Grandmother offer to help her, but Mother had turned her down.
MY OUTINGS with Mother were rare, and I looked forward to them with impatience. There was nothing I loved more than being with adults, whether it was Grandmother or my parents. I never enjoyed the company of other children. I thought their games were stupid, and I didn’t like the way they would mock me about silly things the way children do.
I preferred staying in the house with Grandmother. Other children, my cousins, would ask Mother, “Why is she like this? Why does she not play with us?” This irritated Mother. “Be a child,” she would say. “Don’t sit here with Grandmother and me.”
But I would lock my door when the children came looking for me shouting that the toy seller—who carried a stick from which he hung all sorts of balloons, little dolls, and model Russian helicopters and tanks—had arrived in our street. I never had a “best friend.” My best friend was Grandmother, who liked to tell me, “You are a lion in the house but a mouse outside.” Years afterward, I met a girl who had known me as a child in Kabul. “Whenever I came to see you, you just refused to talk to me,” she told me. Perhaps the problem was that I was used to being alone or with adults, and I expected other children to behave like adults. I found it boring if they behaved like children.
I was curious about only one girl in my street. Her father, who had a long beard, didn’t want her to play with any of us, and she would stand away from us outside her house, always wearing a heavy scarf that covered most of her head and face. I asked Grandmother about her. She told me that the father had four wives and rarely allowed them out of the house. “They’re all stupid in that family,” Grandmother told me. “Don’t bother trying to talk to any of them.” Later, when I could understand what the word meant, she told me the father was probably a fundamentalist.
The only girl I played with was Khadija, a girl who lived three doors away from me and whose mother was a schoolteacher. Like me, she usually preferred the company of adults, and that bound us together. She had a lot of dolls, and she would bring them to my room where we would put them together with Mujda and organize a birthday tea for her. I had seen adults offer tea to their visitors many times. It was a tradition that a cup should be handed to a person who entered your home. I had seen adults insist again and again, while the visitor continued to refuse politely.
Once, Khadija told me we would use a burqa for a game. I didn’t like the idea, but Khadija insisted, and she dragged me to the house of a neighbor where she said we would find one because a relative who was visiting that week always wore one outside. We would have great fun with it, she said.
Khadija, who had also recruited a couple of friends of hers, was in charge. “Zoya, you put on the burqa,” she told me. “You will pretend to be a ghost, and you will run after us making a lot of ghost noises. We will run away from you, and you have to try and catch us.”
It did not sound like fun to me. Although I was afraid of crossing the yard at night to go to the toilet, I did not believe in ghosts. But Khadija and the other children made me sit down and dropped the burqa over me. I had no idea how to put it on, but the girl who lived in the house knew because she had seen her relative change into it. It was big and heavy. I couldn’t breathe or see properly, and I swayed from side to side as I tried to get up.
“Go on!” Khadija shouted. “Chase us!”
I tried to pick up as much of the thing as I could in my hands, and took a couple of steps. I couldn’t even see where the other children were. I felt someone give me a big push in the back, and I fell flat on my face, the mesh over my eyes slipping to the side of my head.
I could see only darkness. I had become blind. “I can’t see! I can’t see!” I shouted over and over again until they helped me fight free of the burqa. “I hate this game,” I said. “I don’t want to wear it again.”
KHADIJA TOLD ME a lot about the school where her mother taught, and although I wasn’t keen on the idea of being with a lot of other children, I would have liked to find out what it was like. In the streets, I had often seen the girls in their uniforms, laughing and ringing their bells as they rode their bicycles to school. I would have liked to ride a bicycle of my own, carrying my books the way they did.
But my parents made me study at home. Every evening when Father returned home, he would impose the same ritual on me. He would call me over, sit me on his knees, hug me close, and kiss me. He was very affectionate with me, and I hugged him more often than Mother. His beard prickled; he was lazy about shaving and did it only once a month.
He always asked me what I had done that day and set me a task for the next. The task was always the same: I had to write a few lines in Persian, the language we spoke in my family, on a subject he had chosen, such as Spring, Kites, or Respect for My Elders. The next evening he would want to read what I had written, and correct my mistakes.
It was all he ever wanted to talk about with me, so I stopped wanting to see him. I came to dread his return and his request for me to bring him tea so that we could discuss the homework he had given me. If I hadn’t done it, I would hide and hope that he would forget. Or I would rush to Mother and ask her to help me write something quickly.
But he could tell when I had written something in a hurry. “This is not very interesting,” he would say. “I wanted to see you thinking hard, to see that you are reading things with attention, not just writing the first thing that goes through your head.”
The same subjects kept coming back to haunt me, and there was a limit to what I could say about Sand, or The Ventilator. Every day I hoped that he would arrive later and later and that I would be asleep in bed by the time he came back. Years later I was to regret that I had ever wished such a thing.
The closest I came to seeing what school might be like was with Sima, a woman teacher that Grandmother, with the money her husband had left her, paid to come to the house. For a while she came three times a week. We would sit on the floor, Sima would take out her book and her knitting, and right through the two or three hours we spent together she would never stop knitting, the needles darting and clicking in front of me.
With Sima I never got much beyond learning to read and write in Persian and doing arithmetic. She never seemed to care whether I learned anything or not. She would give me a Persian book and tell me to copy ten pages of it. It didn’t matter to her that I didn’t understand the meaning of what I was copying.
Whenever she saw me getting bored, she would start chatting with me and telling jokes. Although I was only a child, I knew this was not good for me. Soon her visits became very irregular, and then she stopped coming altogether. I did not miss her. My parents tried a few other teachers, but two years after I had started having lessons at the age of seven, nobody came to teach me anymore.
It was only much later that I found out why my parents refused to send me to school. They feared that the Mujahideen might set off bombs at the schools or at other buildings on my way there, and in any case they had no patience for the way the schools were run. The subjects were all taught according to the guidelines laid down by the puppet regime, and many of the books given to the children were translations of Russian textbooks. My parents thought the children learned more about Russia than about Afghanistan.
Grandmother insisted that I study at home as much as possible. She was so adamant about this that she quarreled often with a neighbor who sometimes called on us. “I’m not saying that she should grow up to become a housewife,” the neighbor would say, “but this girl should know something about cooking and keeping a clean house. Otherwise how can she live with a husband?”
“Wrong,” Grandmother would retort. “She should do the work that boys do. There’s no future in cooking and cleaning. Education and knowledge, that’s what she needs. Zoya, get out of the kitchen and go read a book.”
I never did learn how to cook.
I HAD BEEN helping Mother with her work whenever she would allow me to for little more than a year when one afternoon, after we had finished our lunch of beans and rice and I had wiped clean and put away the destarkhan, the plastic tablecloth that we spread on the carpet, Father gathered us around him and said he wanted us all to listen to something.
He put a tape in the cassette player and said that a friend had recorded this when he had gone to the main prison in Kabul to see some official notices that were displayed there for the public. As far as I could tell, it was just a list of names—many, many names, so many I could never have counted them.
But the way Father, Mother, and Grandmother froze as they sat on the cushions made me realize that something terrible was happening. The list went on and on.
A shout from Father suddenly broke the monotony of the list. He shouted bad words about the Russians, about the puppet regime. “Watan Jrosh,” sellers of the country, he shouted, as well as other words I had never heard him use. I started to ask what it was all about, but I was told to be quiet.
The tape ended, but the adults just sat in silence, until Grandmother got up and said she was going to bed. Father and Mother went on sitting there, not talking and taking no notice of me, so I left them to follow Grandmother.
I found her praying aloud, saying over and over again, “Allah, bless the martyrs who try to free our country.” She explained that my parents knew several of the people on the list, that they were politicians, writers and poets, professors from the university where they had studied, courageous people who had taken a stand against the invaders.
“Listen, daughter. All these people, they wanted to get the Russians out of our country. And the Russians tortured them and killed them,” she said. It was the first time Grandmother had told me the truth about life under the Russian occupation. That night I fell asleep with the sound of her praying in my ears.
What happiness there had been in my house vanished from it. The next day Father went out of the house early, and Mother was silent. I spent most of the day with Grandmother, whom I watched as she took her clothes out of the rusty iron trunks that she kept along the wall of her room, and then put them back again.
“Think of the mothers and the wives of these poor people,” Grandmother said to me. “Now they have only the graves.” I did not tell Grandmother, but I thought about how I would feel if the names of my parents appeared on such a list when I was sitting at home waiting for them to come back.
For the first time I realized that people were being killed for their ideas, and fear entered my house as never before. My parents worried that the Russians had recruited spies among the people of Kabul and that even our neighbors might betray them. Again and again Mother told me not to speak to anyone about the work we had done together.
From that moment on, Mother left the house even more often. Father was sadder than I had ever seen him. When I asked whether I could go outside to fetch something from the shops, I was told it was too risky. “Don’t go out on your own. There is danger outside” were words that became stamped on my brain.
A FEW WEEKS after Father had brought the tape home, after I had badgered him for permission for days, I was allowed to go out for an afternoon to visit Aunt Naseema, who lived in the city. She came to fetch me at home, and later persuaded me to stay the night, although I wasn’t able to warn my parents that I would be staying longer than expected. I knew that I was heading for trouble. From my earliest childhood, I can remember Father saying time and time again: “Where you spend your day is up to you, but at night you must always be in your own house.” But Aunt Naseema said that she would have a word with Father when she brought me back home.
The next morning Aunt Naseema accompanied me as promised. Father kissed me in front of her, but I could tell he was angry. He asked Aunt Naseema where I had been, and as soon as she had left, he called me into his room and asked me in a quiet voice why I had disobeyed him.
“Aunt Naseema said it would be all right, that she would explain,” I stammered. I felt very small and stared at my feet, not daring to look him in the eye.
“Don’t you realize you are living in an occupied country? Now listen. I have never slapped you before, but now you have done something that I forbade you to do. What should I do to you?” he asked.
I said nothing. I had never seen him so angry. I thought of running to Grandmother. Perhaps I could hide behind her and use her as a shield. Surely I would be beyond Father’s reach.
“What should I do to you?” he repeated.
The slap burned a hole through my cheek. But I stood still as a second slap hit me on the other cheek.
When I went in tears to find Mother in the kitchen, she dropped what she was doing, hugged me close to her, and left me to find Father. I heard them arguing. Mother told Father that I was only a child, I had understood I had made a mistake, and there was no need to slap me.
But Grandmother said he had been completely right to punish me. She told me I could have been hit by a bomb in the street, and no one would have known.