UNLIKE THE TEACHER I had for such a short time in Kabul, the women at the school seemed to live for their work. I sensed that Hameda especially would have been bitterly disappointed if I had wasted an hour of class without learning something. She was about thirty years old, not married, and her brother had been killed fighting the Russians. I had great respect for her.
One morning, class was suddenly interrupted and all the girls in the school were called out into the courtyard. Hameda lined us up in rows and stood before us looking solemn.
“Some money has gone missing from the teachers’ room,” she announced. “It is not the first time this has happened, but this time it has got to stop. I know who did it, but I want that girl to come forward now and tell me that she did it. I will wait here until she comes forward.”
No one spoke. I had no idea who had stolen the money, and I wondered why Hameda, if she knew who had stolen the money, wanted the girl to come out in front of everyone else.
After what felt like a very long time, Hameda walked up to a tree in the courtyard, reached up with her long arms, and snapped off a thin branch. “All right,” she said, “if the culprit refuses to come forward, then the whole school will be punished.”
Saima and I looked at each other, struck dumb. Even a group of teachers who were standing to one side looked at one another in surprise. No one apparently had expected Hameda to say such a thing.
One by one, Hameda called out each girl’s name. When my name was called, I walked up to her as briskly as I could. I avoided her eyes as I stretched out my hand, palm upward. The switch hit me hard, but not hard enough to draw blood. I did not feel pain so much as anger that Hameda had punished so many innocent girls when only one was guilty. I could not understand what she had done.
A few days later, another assembly was called. I wondered what we would be punished for this time, but I soon realized that it was Hameda who was being put on the spot. The assembly was called “the complaints session,” and my friends explained to me that we girls were encouraged to make any criticism we wanted of the school and of the teachers. To me it seemed a crazy idea. Surely everything we ever said to the teachers should show our respect for them?
At the assembly, several teachers stood up to say that Hameda had done wrong. She had let her desperation cloud her thinking, and she had risked losing authority. I was embarrassed for her and stayed silent when the teachers asked what we all thought about the incident. In any case I was too shy to speak in front of so many people.
But Saima did stand up. She said Hameda’s attitude had been a mistake, and that it would have been much better to find the guilty girl and punish only her.
I expected Saima to be admonished or caned again for daring to say such a thing. But instead Hameda stood up, admitted she had been in the wrong, and apologized to us all. I had never seen an adult apologize before. Grandmother and my parents had never apologized to me for anything.
Later Hameda explained to me that there was nothing strange about children criticizing adults. “That is how a democracy works,” she told me. “Everyone has to be free to say what they think.” The complaints sessions were held once a month, but I never spoke at them. Several teachers even criticized me for my lack of participation. “You mustn’t think that you are getting yourself good marks by staying silent,” they said. “It is your duty to criticize people in authority if you believe in your heart that they are doing something wrong.” But I was stubborn and stayed silent.
Even the films we were shown were usually about some form of resistance. I saw Spartacus perhaps a dozen times, I also loved Julia, in which Jane Fonda played a Jewish writer on a mission to smuggle money across Nazi Germany, and The Fifth Offensive with Richard Burton. He played Marshal Tito in the film, and I thought that the war he was fighting in Yugoslavia was very similar to the war in my homeland. I had no idea of this at the time, but scenes that showed lovers kissing too passionately were cut before the film was shown to us.
It was the fact that there was always a guard at the school gate that made me realize what was special about my school. I never found out whether he was armed, but the other girls told me that he had been given shooting practice. I started asking myself what he was defending, and gradually I came to understand that he was defending what the school stood for.
The school was funded by RAWA, thanks to donations made to it by supporters both in Afghanistan and elsewhere and to the money it raised through the sale of carpets and handicrafts that were made mainly by women in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. The school defended the ideals that Mother had fought for when I was a child. It was RAWA that chose the teachers, that selected the children, and that decided how the subjects would be taught. What we were being taught there put us in danger of attacks from Afghan fundamentalists living in Pakistan, so much so that we needed to be protected day and night. Quetta and its outskirts were full of Afghan refugees, and many of them were dangerous men.
None of us were ever allowed to go out on our own. Whenever I went to visit Grandmother, I was taken by a RAWA driver, and I was always told to get into the car before we went out of the gate. School outings were rare. Once, when we had a day at Jaheel, a lake in a park in Quetta, where we sat on carpets spread out on the grass to have a lunch of boiled potatoes and boiled meat, we were watched over all the time by men who were supporters of RAWA—often relatives or friends of members.
It was because we could not go out easily that we had two hours of sports, including gymnastics and badminton, every afternoon. The teachers tried to make us spend as much time as possible in the open air. Whenever it was warm enough, we put carpets down in a corner of the courtyard and sat outside to do our homework.
Some of us would invent diseases for ourselves, hoping to be taken to RAWA’s Malalai Hospital for a few days. But the teachers usually found out when we were pretending to be sick. Malalai was no ordinary hospital. There were RAWA posters in its wards, and the staff told women patients about their rights and encouraged the illiterate women to learn to read and write.
During the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, Pakistan, hoping to forge an Islamic bloc that would range to Central Asia, had allowed the fundamentalist Mujahideen factions to use its territory as a base of operations. These factions had set up offices and thousands of madrassa Islamic schools in the refugee camps and across the country, which meant that hordes of turbaned students wanted to punish RAWA not only as a threat to their values but also as the most outspoken critic of the crimes of the Mujahideen. Entire areas in the Pakistani towns where we were present, including Quetta and Peshawar, had been turned into no-go zones by the most violent Afghan exiles. RAWA was never allowed to put its name on the sign outside the school.
But despite all this, I felt freer at the school than in Kabul, although I never forgot the suffering I had seen in my city. When I wanted to be alone, I would go and sit in the dust in my corner of the courtyard. History and geography lessons especially made me homesick. The teacher would speak about Afghanistan’s resistance to foreign invaders throughout the centuries, about its beautiful mountains, and I would remember the stories I’d heard as a child. Once a girl said to the teacher, “But there is nothing in our country today. Why should we love it? Shouldn’t we just love Pakistan, where we live?”
I never had such doubts. Afghanistan was mine and I should love it, and if there was nothing there now, then I should help to build something, although I did not know what. I spent many hours sitting in the courtyard thinking about what I had left behind. I imagined a country where people were afraid. But I never loved Pakistan. I never felt that it could replace my homeland.
OF ALL THE CLASSES, it was the ones in which I could find out about RAWA that interested me the most. I was fifteen when I learned more about the association from Soraya, who taught us political studies. She was older than the other teachers, and as kind as Mother had been. I knew little about her except what the older girls always whispered to new ones—that she was very much involved in RAWA’s clandestine activities. We knew her as a brave woman whom we must look up to.
From Soraya I learned the meaning of democracy, of human rights, of feminism. I was told that if men were not allowed to become members of RAWA, it was not because we were against men—we needed their help for the organization to continue working—but because of its very nature.
Soraya wanted us to read as much literature as we could, and to read about the two world wars, about Nazism and about fascism. She never referred to herself as our teacher, saying that we had much to teach her. We called her “Sister.”
When I asked her, “How long does it take to make a democracy?” she said to me patiently, “There is no magic recipe”—words similar to those Mother had used when I asked her how she could help Afghan women. Soraya never laughed at any of my questions, and she never used a red pen to mark my essays, preferring blue or black because, she said, “I am not here to judge you.”
Sometime after I had settled at the school, the distant cousin who had gone to Canada to study and then decided to settle there came to see me. He had found out where I was through RAWA. He told me about his new life and offered to take me back with him and help me continue my studies there. I would learn English, he said, and then study anything I liked. He was against the idea of resistance. He said it was useless to try to change things in Afghanistan.
I thought of the thousands of girls in the furthest villages of Afghanistan who were much more talented than I was but who would never be offered such an opportunity. I could not imagine leaving Grandmother, or my classmates.
My cousin was shocked when I told him that I wanted to stay where I was, that I could not conceive of living so far from my homeland. When I told him I believed that “to love your country, you must be ready to die for your country,” he shook his head in disbelief. “You are only a child,” he said. “Where did you get ideas that are so much bigger than you?”
I did not tell him that I thought his heart was as small as that of a bird.
WE GIGGLED when Soraya announced that we must all change our names. “You must know that there are security problems at this school, that we have enemies,” Soraya said. “One day you will understand. Soraya, for example, is not my real name. But please continue using it.”
For us it was only fun. I was pleased—I thought it meant that perhaps I was becoming important. All the girls at the school, from the age of twelve upward, were told to use false names, so we older girls felt superior to the younger students. We were no longer children now because we had new names.
It took time for me to get used to mine, which Soraya had chosen for me, writing it on a piece of paper that she gave me. Over the first few days, the teacher would have to call me several times before I finally realized that I was the one who was supposed to go up to the blackboard. Many of us made the same mistake again and again, and the whole class would laugh.
I chose the name Zoya much later. A Russian journalist had come to see us, and I spent some time with her because she wanted to find out about women’s rights in Afghanistan. I half expected her to be blond with green eyes, like the woman-soldier who had offered me a chocolate in Kabul, but she was dark-haired with brown eyes, and because she was so interested in our work for women, I quickly forgot that it was her nation that had occupied Afghanistan for so long.
When I accompanied her back to her hotel and we said good-bye at the door, she kissed me and started walking away, but then she stopped and turned back.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but I have one last thing to ask you.”
I smiled at her and waited.
The Russian writer had tears in her eyes. “I had a daughter. She got sick with cancer and she died. Her name was Zoya. I miss her, and I would like to ask you to take that name for yourself. Nothing would give me more pleasure.”
I was moved by her request and did not hesitate. I said that yes, I would take the name Zoya. I did not even think of the Russians who had invaded Afghanistan—I knew there was a huge difference between a country’s government and its people. A few weeks afterward, I found out that Zoya was also the name of a woman who had taken part in the Russian Revolution. Asked by the czar’s police whether she knew where Stalin was, she had answered, “He is here, in my heart.” The officer answered, “Well, if he is there, that is where we will kill him.” He pointed a gun at her heart and fired.