THE LAST TIME I saw Father was on a sunny morning when he bent down to stroke my hair and kiss me on the cheek, and the beard he had trimmed a few days earlier prickled my face. He put on his coat and then slipped on the shoes that were outside in the yard, just by the door to the street.
At first I was told that he had gone away for work and that he might not be back for a few days. Then, when he had still not come home, that he might be away for some weeks. But after a while I guessed, from the tears I saw in the eyes of Mother and Grandmother, that all this was a lie. I thought of the many times I had hoped Father would return late to the house because I hadn’t done the homework he had given me. Now the wait was too long, and I felt guilty for having wished his absence.
Mother would try to hide away from me to cry in secret, but I could always tell that she had been crying. I stopped sleeping with Grandmother and shared Mother’s bed, and late at night I could feel her body shaking slightly as she wept when she thought I was asleep. I pretended to sleep. I did not want her to know that I was listening to her. I could no longer smell perfume on her. She had stopped using it.
For days we did not sit down together for meals. Sometimes Mother and Grandmother would forget to feed me, and I would go to the kitchen to help myself. They were so kind to each other, united by a common knowledge that they did not want to share with me. We had no visitors. Perhaps because they wanted to protect me, no relatives called at the house. I wanted to ask Mother and Grandmother what had happened to Father. Was he in prison? Had he fled Afghanistan? Was he lying wounded in a hospital? Was he dead? I thought I understood what had happened, but I was not certain. I did understand, however, that I should not discuss it. I respected their decision not to tell me anything.
No one went into Father’s study, and the books remained on the shelves, their pages unopened. I knew I would never again feel Father’s hand on mine as he helped me guide a kite.
We lived off the money Grandmother had inherited when her husband died. Whenever Mother was at home, I stayed by her side and did not go into Grandmother’s room as often as I used to, because I wanted to show her that she was not alone. Mother did not have the patience to play childish games with me. She had to continue her work. But she started taking me with her. I accompanied her to some committee meetings, but one day I made the mistake of repeating something I had heard to a friend, and she left me at home after that.
I WASN’T EVEN in Kabul when Mother disappeared some time after Father. I had gone to visit a friend, Shaima, in a small town near Jalalabad. Shaima and her family did their best to make me happy, but I could not stop thinking about Mother. I lay awake at night worrying about her. I pictured her sick in bed needing help. And I remembered that Father never liked me to stay away from the house for very long. Shaima and her parents asked me to stay on, but after four days I left, anxious to go back to Kabul and Mother.
But when I got back home, the house felt different to me.
I found Grandmother in bed. She looked sick. She had tied a scarf around her head the way she did when she had a bad headache. I looked into her eyes and saw that they were bloodshot. She had been crying.
She didn’t give me time to ask her anything. She gestured for me to come closer, reached out toward me, and put her hands on my cheeks. Her hands were burning hot. She had a temperature. She pulled me down so that she could kiss my eyes, the top of my head, my hands. Then she drew me to her chest in an embrace.
My head buried in her breasts, I heard her say as she began to weep again, “Daughter, what will become of you now?”
I pulled back from her in alarm and shouted at her, “What has happened? Tell me what has happened!”
But her only answer was to cry louder. Then she said, “Your mother, your mother.” I fled to my room to be alone.
Later that day, when I asked her where Mother was, she did not answer. Over the days and weeks that followed, I asked her perhaps only two or three more times, never expecting her to answer.
I locked myself in my room. I refused to see the relatives who called at the house. I didn’t want to hear their conventional expressions of sorrow or pity.
I huddled up on my bed to make myself as small as possible, or marched up and down like a robot from one end of my room to the other. I thought of the perfumes still on Mother’s table, that I would never smell them on her again. I would never feel her hand, with the gold engagement ring, massaging oil into my hair.
I felt that I had lost everything. I could still picture before me the smiles on my parents’ faces, and the way they would look at me with tenderness and love. I wished I could have spent longer, much longer, looking into their eyes the last time I saw them. From those days on, and still today, memories of Mother, of Father—a game of blindman’s buff we played together, Father checking on my homework—will come back to me like a film and make me start.
I began to write letters to friends, but I gave up after a few lines and tore up the paper. I put on a cassette to listen to some music, always switching off after only a few seconds.
I felt I had loved my parents more than my own life, and I thought of committing suicide. I had heard of many girls killing themselves when they had lost their families or after they had been raped. I thought it was the easiest way available for me to get rid of everything—the war, the Mujahideen, the killings, everything. But after a few hours I felt ashamed of thinking such thoughts. I was too young to give up on the world. My parents would have disapproved. Suicide was a sign of weakness. It ran against all they had taught me. I would have been throwing it all away.
The only people I agreed to see were some friends of Mother’s from RAWA, who came to my door, said something brief, and left me in peace. They did not say empty words like “We are sorry.” They told me that although I had lost my mother, they would try to help me the way a mother would. They told me that I must realize I was lucky to still have Grandmother and other people like my parents’ relatives, because so many girls had lost everything, and there was no one to help them bury their mothers or their fathers. They urged me to think about the others who were suffering and to turn my grief into strength. I respected them for that. They took care of Grandmother and brought food for our meals.
It was a long while before I found out that my parents had been killed on the orders of the fundamentalist Mujahideen warlords, like thousands of other people. I cannot say what I know about their deaths, or when they took place, because this would be too risky for me. We were never given their bodies, and no funeral was ever held for their passing. Grandmother said the warlords had robbed us not only of two lives but also of two graves at which we could mourn. Still today, there is no grave at which I can mourn my parents.
One night soon after their disappearance, I swore that I would avenge them, not only my parents but all those people who had been killed without anyone knowing where, how, or why they had died. I would not avenge them with a Kalashnikov but by fighting for the same cause Mother had fought for.
“HAVE YOU HEARD? I can’t think of anything worse!” Khadija exclaimed as she rushed into my house. She was wearing a scarf, and there was fear in her eyes.
It was the summer of 1992, a couple of months after the Mujahideen had taken over Kabul. Without stopping to take off her scarf, she took me into my bedroom and closed the door behind us. Her story came out in fits and starts as she marched up and down my room, unable to stand still. A Mujahideen commander, escorted by armed men, had burst into the home of a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl called Naheed in the middle of the previous night. She was the daughter of a shopkeeper and lived in a block of flats in Mikrorayon, an eastern neighborhood of Kabul that was wealthier than ours. Perhaps the soldiers had heard about her from one of the old beggar women they paid to work for them as spies.
They demanded that Naheed’s father give her to them so that she could marry one of the soldiers. The father refused. “Leave this house,” he told them. “How dare you come here in this way in the middle of the night? Let the soldier send his parents to me, and if my daughter agrees, I will give her to you.”
But the soldiers refused to do as he wished, and they tried to catch hold of Naheed. She somehow found a moment to run out onto the balcony of the fifth-floor apartment and throw herself into the air.
Khadija paused to stare at me. “You understand? They wanted to take Naheed by force, and she had to kill herself.” I noticed that she did not dare to use the word rape.
“You know what it means?” she went on. “We’ll have to wear the burqa. We can’t go out anymore. It’s too dangerous. And even in our houses we are not safe. At any time a Mujahideen could beat the door down with a Kalashnikov and take us away.”
I had heard and lived through so much suffering that all I could say was “Why are you telling me all this? What can I do?”
“Who else am I going to tell? You think I can shout this in the street?” she shot back. Then she hugged me tightly and left, saying only, “I must go to my house.”
I found Grandmother cooking rice in the kitchen and told her all that I had heard. Her eyes filled with tears, and she started praying aloud. I had never seen her pray so fiercely. When she had finished, she told me, “It means that we are close to the Day of Judgment.”
“What is the Day of Judgment?” I asked, stumbling over words I had never heard before.
“It is a day on which everyone has to go before Allah, and you have to tell Him all the good things and the bad things you did in your life. And then He decides whether you go to Heaven or to Hell. In Heaven, there are rivers of milk and lots of fruit trees, and you can eat anything you like. You don’t even have to ask for anything. You just think of something you want and it comes immediately.”
“And what happens in Hell?”
“There’s a huge fire, and there are two kinds of pain: either you burn and die immediately, or you burn for a long, long time. Or the bad people are forced to sit on giant thorns. The bad people are given only very little toast to eat, and no water.”
Naheed had committed suicide, which was usually considered a sin, but because she had been under threat, she would surely be forgiven, Grandmother told me.
She told me that to go to Heaven, I had to be honest and kind, help the poor, and respect my elders. But I never did understand why Grandmother, when she heard of a new tragedy, always said that we were being punished for our sins. I used to feel I had done something wrong, that all my family and my neighbors were guilty of something, but I did not know what. I asked them all, and my friend Khadija. But no one knew the answer.
THE DAY AFTER Naheed killed herself, some RAWA friends of Mother took me to see her. Her father had put his daughter’s body on her bed soon after her death. He had wanted his friends to help him carry it through the streets to show everyone what the Mujahideen had done to her, but some soldiers stopped him. When we arrived, many people were crowding around her body, but they let me get close to her. I saw that she was dressed in a white sheet. She had an oval face and high cheekbones. Her skin was almost yellow. There was no trace of blood. Someone had tied a piece of string around her head and under her jaw to keep her small mouth closed.
I didn’t touch or kiss her, but I spoke to her under my breath. I promised her that I would bring the people responsible for her death to justice and that I would make sure they were punished for the terrible thing they had done. It was no empty promise—I knew that one day I would fulfill my promise to her.
Not even the Russians had done this to us. We heard that one man who had seen Mujahideen soldiers arrive at his home to steal his daughter had killed her before they could take her away. I imagined my fate if the Mujahideen, with their horrible faces, came for me during the night.
The violence that the Mujahideen inflicted on the women of Kabul and all the reports of tortures and killings affected Grandmother a great deal. She was devastated by the knowledge that a nail could be driven into the skull of a human being in the name of her Moslem faith, and that a girl like Naheed could die in such a way.
She was not the same Grandmother I had known throughout my childhood. I often heard her crying, and when I wiped her eyes with tissues, it seemed to me that every time there were fresh little wrinkles around them.
She lost weight, and when I saw her eating like a bird, drinking only a glass of milk in the evenings, I told her that she must eat more or the medicine she was taking would hurt her. “I don’t want anything now. Later. I will eat later,” she replied.
I tried to comfort her. “Don’t cry. Why are you crying? You are only making me more sad,” I said.
After some time, she stopped crying and said to me, “If you are alive, then I am happy. That is all that matters.”
She stood up, wincing at the pain in her bones, and made her way to the kitchen, where she busied herself for a while. When she came back to me, she was holding a frying pan in her hand, and smoke was coming from some little brown seeds that she had apparently been cooking. She moved around me, the wisps of sweet-smelling smoke touching me as she said a prayer to ward off evil. “Bless her, take care of her, save her life,” I heard her say.
The Koran, which until then used to lie on her table most of the day, was always open now on the carpet, and Grandmother prayed from morning until night. Her beliefs changed. All she said to me was that yes, she did believe in Allah, although I should also count on my own strength to achieve things.
But at night I heard her pray to Him in a voice full of self-pity and bitterness: “Oh, protector of the entire world, I am a Moslem, Afghanistan is Moslem, and now these criminals have come to kill us. Allah, what sin have we committed that you are allowing this? Allah, please help us.”
Until then I had accepted Grandmother’s verdict when a relative or a neighbor died: “It is in the hands of Allah. For some reason that we do not know, He called this person to Him. It is all for the best.” Now, when even Grandmother was questioning her God, I no longer knew what to believe.