In Afghanistan, _yelda_ is the first night of the month of _Jadi_, the first night of winter, and the longest night of the year. As was the tradition, Hassan and I used to stay up late, our feet tucked under the kursi, while Ali tossed apple skin into the stove and told us ancient tales of sultans and thieves to pass that longest of nights. It was from Ali that I learned the lore of _yelda_, that bedeviled moths flung themselves at candle flames, and wolves climbed mountains looking for the sun. Ali swore that if you ate water melon the night of _yelda_, you wouldn’t get thirsty the coming summer.
When I was older, I read in my poetry books that _yelda_ was the starless night tormented lovers kept vigil, enduring the endless dark, waiting for the sun to rise and bring with it their loved one. After I met Soraya Taheri,
every night of the week became a _yelda_ for me. And when Sunday mornings came, I rose from bed, Soraya Taheri’s brown-eyed face already in my head. In Baba’s bus, I counted the miles until I’d see her sitting barefoot, arranging cardboard boxes of yellowed encyclopedias, her heels white against the asphalt, silver bracelets jingling around her slender wrists. I’d think of the shadow her hair cast on the ground when it slid off her back and hung down like a velvet curtain. Soraya. Swap Meet Princess. The morning sun to my yelda.
I invented excuses to stroll down the aisle–which Baba acknowledged with a playful smirk–and pass the Taheris’ stand. I would wave at the general, perpetually dressed in his shiny overpressed gray suit, and he would wave back. Sometimes he’d get up from his director’s chair and we’d make small talk about my writing, the war, the day’s bargains. And I’d have to will my eyes not to peel away, not to wander to where Soraya sat reading a paperback. The general and I would say our good-byes and I’d try not to slouch as I walked away.
Sometimes she sat alone, the general off to some other row to socialize, and I would walk by, pretending not to know her, but dying to. Sometimes she was there with a portly middle-aged woman with pale skin and dyed red hair. I promised myself that I would talk to her before the summer was over, but schools reopened, the leaves
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reddened, yellowed, and fell, the rains of winter swept in and wakened Baba’s joints, baby leaves sprouted once more, and I still hadn’t had the heart, the dil, to even look her in the eye.
The spring quarter ended in late May 1985. I aced all of my general education classes, which was a minor miracle given how I’d sit in lectures and think of the soft hook of Soraya’s nose.
Then, one sweltering Sunday that summer, Baba and I were at the flea market, sitting at our booth, fanning our faces with news papers. Despite the
sun bearing down like a branding iron, the market was crowded that day and sales had been strong–it was only 12:30 but we’d already made $160. I got up, stretched, and asked Baba if he wanted a Coke. He said he’d love one.
“Be careful, Amir,” he said as I began to walk. “Of what, Baba?” “I am not an ahmaq, so don’t play stupid with me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Remember this,” Baba said, pointing at me, “The man is a Pashtun to the root. He has nang and namoos.” Nang. Namoos. Honor and pride. The tenets of Pashtun men.
Especially when it came to the chastity of a wife. Or a daughter. “I’m only going to get us drinks.”
“Just don’t embarrass me, that’s all I ask.” “I won’t. God, Baba.”
Baba lit a cigarette and started fanning himself again.
I walked toward the concession booth initially, then turned left at the T-shirt stand–where, for $5, you could have the face of Jesus, Elvis, Jim Morrison, or all three, pressed on a white nylon T-shirt. Mariachi music played overhead, and I smelled pickles and grilled meat.
I spotted the Taheris’ gray van two rows from ours, next to a kiosk selling mango-on-a-stick. She was alone, reading. White ankle-length summer dress today. Open-toed sandals. Hair pulled back and crowned with a tulip-shaped bun. I meant to simply walk
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by again and I thought I had, except suddenly I was standing at the edge of the Taheris’
white tablecloth, staring at Soraya across curling irons and old neckties. She looked up.
“Salaam,” I said. “I’m sorry to be mozahem, I didn’t mean to disturb you.” “Salaam.”
“Is General Sahib here today?” I said. My ears were burning. I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye.
“He went that way,” she said. Pointed to her right. The bracelet slipped down to her elbow, silver against olive.
“Will you tell him I stopped by to pay my respects?” I said. “I will.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Oh, and my name is Amir. In case you need to know. So you can tell him. That I stopped by. To… pay my respects.”
“Yes.”
I shifted on my feet, cleared my throat. “I’ll go now. Sorry to have disturbed you.”
“Nay, you didn’t,” she said.
“Oh. Good.” I tipped my head and gave her a half smile. “I’ll go now.” Hadn’t I already said that? “Khoda hãfez.”
“Khoda hãfez.”
I began to walk. Stopped and turned. I said it before I had a chance to lose my nerve:
“Can I ask what you’re reading?”
She blinked.
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I held my breath. Suddenly, I felt the collective eyes of the flea market Afghans shift to us. I imagined a hush falling. Lips stop ping in midsentence. Heads turning. Eyes narrowing with keen interest.
What was this?
Up to that point, our encounter could have been interpreted as a respectful inquiry, one man asking for the whereabouts of another man. But I’d asked her a question and if she answered, we’d be… well, we’d be chatting. Me a mojarad, a single young man, and she an unwed young woman. One with a history, no less. This was teetering dangerously on the verge of gossip material, and the best kind of it. Poison tongues would flap. And she would bear the brunt of that poison, not me–I was fully aware of the Afghan double standard that favored my gender. Not Did you see him chatting with her? but Wooooy!
Did you see how she wouldn’t let him go? What a lochak!
By Afghan standards, my question had been bold. With it, I had bared myself, and left little doubt as to my interest in her. But I was a man, and all I had risked was a bruised ego. Bruises healed. Reputations did not. Would she take my dare?
She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. “Have you read it?” she said.
I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. “It’s a sad story.”
“Sad stories make good books,” she said. “They do.”
“I heard you write.”
How did she know? I wondered if her father had told her, maybe she had asked him. I immediately dismissed both scenarios as absurd. Fathers and sons could talk freely about women. But no Afghan girl–no decent and mohtaram Afghan girl, at least–queried her father about a young man. And no father, especially a Pashtun with nang and namoos, would discuss a mojarad with his daughter, not unless the fellow in question was a khastegar, a suitor, who had done the honorable thing and sent his father to knock on the door.
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“I would like that,” she said. I sensed an unease in her now, saw it in the way her eyes began to flick side to side. Maybe checking for the general. I wondered what he would say if he found me speaking for such an inappropriate length of time with his daughter.
“Maybe I’ll bring you one someday,” I said. I was about to say more when the woman I’d seen on occasion with Soraya came walking up the aisle.
She was carrying a plastic bag full of fruit. When she saw us, her eyes bounced from Soraya to me and back. She smiled.
“Amir jan, good to see you,” she said, unloading the bag on the tablecloth. Her brow glistened with a sheen of sweat. Her red hair, coiffed like a helmet, glittered in the sunlight–I could see bits of her scalp where the hair had thinned. She had small green eyes buried in a cabbage-round face, capped teeth, and little fingers like sausages. A golden Allah rested on her chest, the chain burrowed under the skin tags and folds of her neck. “I am Jamila, Soraya jan’s mother.”
“Salaam, Khala jan,” I said, embarrassed, as I often was around Afghans, that she knew me and I had no idea who she was.
“How is your father?” she said. “He’s well, thank you.”
“You know, your grandfather, Ghazi Sahib, the judge? Now, his uncle and my grandfather were cousins,” she said. “So you see, we’re related.” She smiled a cap-toothed smile, and I noticed the right side of her mouth drooping a little. Her eyes moved between Soraya and me again.
I’d asked Baba once why General Taheri’s daughter hadn’t married yet. No suitors, Baba said. No suitable suitors, he amended. But he wouldn’t say more–Baba knew how lethal idle talk could prove to a young woman’s prospects of marrying well. Afghan men, especially those from reputable families, were fickle creatures. A whisper here, an insinuation there, and they fled like startled birds. So weddings had come and gone and no one had sung ahesta boro for Soraya, no one had painted her palms with henna, no one had held a Koran over her headdress, and it had been General Taheri who’d danced with her at every wedding.
And now, this woman, this mother, with her heartbreakingly eager, crooked smile and the barely veiled hope in her eyes. I cringed a little at the position of power I’d been granted, and all because I had won at the genetic lottery that had determined my s*x.
I could never read the thoughts in the general’s eyes, but I knew this much about his wife: If I was going to have an adversary in this–whatever this was–it would not be her.
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“Sit down, Amir jan,” she said. “Soraya, get him a chair, hachem. And wash one of those peaches. They’re sweet and fresh.”
“Nay, thank you,” I said. “I should get going. My father’s waiting.”
“Oh?” Khanum Taheri said, clearly impressed that I’d done the polite thing and declined the offer. “Then here, at least have this.” She threw a handful of kiwis and a few peaches into a paper bag and insisted I take them. “Carry my Salaam to your father.
And come back to see us again.”
“I will. Thank you, Khala jan,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Soraya looking away.
“I THOUGHT YOU WERE GETTING COKES,” Baba said, taking the bag of peaches from me. He was looking at me in a simultaneously serious and playful way. I began to make some thing up, but he bit into a peach and waved his hand, “Don’t bother, Amir.
Just remember what I said.”
THAT NIGHT IN BED, I thought of the way dappled sunlight had danced in Soraya’s eyes, and of the delicate hollows above her collarbone. I replayed our conversation over and over in my head. Had she said I heard you write or I heard you’re a writer? Which was it? I tossed in my sheets and stared at the ceiling, dismayed at the thought of six laborious, interminable nights of yelda until I saw her again.
IT WENT ON LIKE THAT for a few weeks. I’d wait until the general went for a stroll, then I’d walk past the Taheris’ stand. If Khanum Taheri was there, she’d offer me tea and a kolcha and we’d chat about Kabul in the old days, the people we knew, her arthritis. Undoubtedly, she had noticed that my appearances always coincided with her husband’s absences, but she never let on. “Oh you just missed your Kaka,” she’d say. I actually liked it when Khanum Taheri was there, and not just because of her amiable ways; Soraya was more relaxed, more talkative with her mother around. As if her presence legitimized whatever was happening between us–though certainly not to the same degree that the general’s would have. Khanum Taheri’s chaperoning made our meetings, if not gossip-proof, then less gossip-worthy, even if her borderline fawning on me clearly embarrassed Soraya.
One day, Soraya and I were alone at their booth, talking. She was telling me about school, how she too was working on her general education classes, at Ohlone Junior College in Fremont.
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“What will you major in?”
“I want to be a teacher,” she said. “Really? Why?”
“I’ve always wanted to. When we lived in Virginia, I became ESL certified and now I teach at the public library one night a week. My mother was a teacher too, she taught Farsi and history at Zarghoona High School for girls in Kabul.”
A potbellied man in a deerstalker hat offered three dollars for a five-dollar set of candlesticks and Soraya let him have it. She dropped the money in a little candy box by her feet. She looked at me shyly. “I want to tell you a story,” she said, “but I’m a little embarrassed about it.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s kind of silly.” “Please tell me.”
She laughed. “Well, when I was in fourth grade in Kabul, my father hired a woman named Ziba to help around the house. She had a sister in Iran, in Mashad, and, since Ziba was illiterate, she’d ask me to write her sister letters once in a while. And when the sister replied, I’d read her letter to Ziba. One day, I asked her if she’d like to learn to read and write. She gave me this big smile, crinkling her eyes, and said she’d like that very much. So we’d sit at the kitchen table after I was done with my own schoolwork and I’d teach her Alef-beh. I remember looking up sometimes in the middle of homework and seeing Ziba in the kitchen, stirring meat in the pressure
cooker, then sitting down with a pencil to do the alphabet homework I’d assigned to her the night before.
“Anyway, within a year, Ziba could read children’s books. We sat in the yard and she read me the tales of Dara and Sara–slowly but correctly. She started calling me Moalem Soraya, Teacher Soraya.” She laughed again. “I know it sounds childish, but the first time Ziba wrote her own letter, I knew there was nothing else I’d ever want to be but a teacher. I was so proud of her and I felt I’d done something really worthwhile, you know?”
“Yes,” I lied. I thought of how I had used my literacy to ridicule Hassan. How I had teased him about big words he didn’t know.
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“My father wants me to go to law school, my mother’s always throwing hints about medical school, but I’m going to be a teacher. Doesn’t pay much here, but it’s what I want.”
“My mother was a teacher too,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “My mother told me.” Then her face red dened with a blush at what she had blurted, at the implication of her answer, that “Amir Conversations” took place between them when I wasn’t there. It took an enormous effort to stop myself from smiling.
“I brought you something.” I fished the roll of stapled pages from my back pocket. “As promised.” I handed her one of my short stories.
“Oh, you remembered,” she said, actually beaming. “Thank you!” I barely had time to register that she’d addressed me with “tu” for the first time and not the formal “shoma,”
because suddenly her smile vanished. The color dropped from her face, and her eyes fixed on something behind me. I turned around. Came face-to-face with General Taheri.
“Amir jan. Our aspiring storyteller. What a pleasure,” he said. He was smiling thinly.
“Salaam, General Sahib,” I said through heavy lips.
He moved past me, toward the booth. “What a beautiful day it is, nay?” he said, thumb hooked in the breast pocket of his vest, the other hand extended toward Soraya. She gave him the pages.
“They say it will rain this week. Hard to believe, isn’t it?” He dropped the rolled pages in the garbage can. Turned to me and gently put a hand on my shoulder. We took a few steps together.
“You know, bachem, I have grown rather fond of you. You are a decent boy, I really believe that, but–” he sighed and waved a hand “–even decent boys need reminding sometimes. So it’s my duty to remind you that you are among peers in this flea market.”
He stopped. His expressionless eyes bore into mine. “You see, everyone here is a storyteller.” He smiled, revealing perfectly even teeth. “Do pass my respects to your father, Amir jan.”
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“WHAT’S WRONG?” Baba said. He was taking an elderly woman’s money for a rocking horse.
“Nothing,” I said. I sat down on an old TV set. Then I told him anyway. “Akh, Amir,” he sighed.
As it turned out, I didn’t get to brood too much over what had happened. Because later that week, Baba caught a cold.
IT STARTED WITH A HACKING COUGH and the sniffles. He got over the sniffles, but the cough persisted. He’d hack into his handkerchief, stow it in his pocket. I kept after him to get it checked, but he’d wave me away. He hated doctors and hospitals. To my knowledge, the only time Baba had ever gone to a doctor was the time he’d caught malaria in India.
Then, two weeks later, I caught him coughing a wad of blood-stained phlegm into the toilet.
“How long have you been doing that?” I said. “What’s for dinner?” he said.
“I’m taking you to the doctor.”
Even though Baba was a manager at the gas station, the owner hadn’t offered him health insurance, and Baba, in his recklessness, hadn’t insisted. So I took him to the county hospital in San Jose. The sallow, puffy-eyed doctor who saw us introduced himself as a second-year resident. “He looks younger than you and sicker than me,”
Baba grumbled. The resident sent us down for a chest X-ray. When the nurse called us back in, the resident was filling out a form.
“Take this to the front desk,” he said, scribbling quickly. “What is it?” I asked.
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“For what?” “Pulmonary clinic.” “What’s that?”
He gave me a quick glance. Pushed up his glasses. Began scribbling again. “He’s got a spot on his right lung. I want them to check it out.”
“A spot?” I said, the room suddenly too small. “Cancer?” Baba added casually.
“Possible. It’s suspicious, anyway,” the doctor muttered. “Can’t you tell us more?” I asked.
“Not really. Need a CAT scan first, then see the lung doctor.” He handed me the referral form. “You said your father smokes, right?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. Looked from me to Baba and back again. “They’ll call you within two weeks.”
I wanted to ask him how I was supposed to live with that word, “suspicious,” for two whole weeks. How was I supposed eat, work, study? How could he send me home with that word?
I took the form and turned it in. That night, I waited until Baba fell asleep, and then folded a blanket. I used it as a prayer rug. Bowing my head to the ground, I recited half-forgotten verses from the Koran–verses the mullah had made us commit to memory in Kabul–and asked for kindness from a God I wasn’t sure existed. I envied the mullah now, envied his faith and certainty.
Two weeks passed and no one called. And when I called them, they told me they’d lost the referral. Was I sure I had turned it in? They said they would call in another three
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weeks. I raised hell and bargained the three weeks down to one for the CAT scan, two to see the doctor.
The visit with the pulmonologist, Dr. Schneider, was going well until Baba asked him where he was from. Dr. Schneider said Russia. Baba lost it.
“Excuse us, Doctor,” I said, pulling Baba aside. Dr. Schneider smiled and stood back, stethoscope still in hand.
“Baba, I read Dr. Schneider’s biography in the waiting room. He was born in Michigan.
Michigan! He’s American, a lot more American than you and I will ever be.”
“I don’t care where he was born, he’s Roussi,” Baba said, grimacing like it was a dirty word. “His parents were Roussi, his grandparents were Roussi. I swear on your mother’s face I’ll break his arm if he tries to touch me.”
“Dr. Schneider’s parents fled from Shorawi, don’t you see? They escaped!”
But Baba would hear none of it. Sometimes I think the only thing he loved as much as his late wife was Afghanistan, his late country. I almost screamed with frustration.
Instead, I sighed and turned to Dr. Schneider. “I’m sorry, Doctor. This isn’t going to work out.”
The next pulmonologist, Dr. Amani, was Iranian and Baba approved. Dr. Amani, a soft-spoken man with a crooked mustache and a mane of gray hair, told us he had reviewed the CAT scan results and that he would have to perform a procedure called a bronchoscopy to get a piece of the lung mass for pathology. He scheduled it for the following week. I thanked him as I helped Baba out of the office, thinking that now I had to live a whole week with this new word, “mass,” an even more ominous word than
“suspicious.” I wished Soraya were there with me.
It turned out that, like Satan, cancer had many names. Baba’s was called “Oat Cell Carcinoma.” Advanced. Inoperable. Baba asked Dr. Amani for a prognosis. Dr. Amani bit his lip, used the word “grave.” “There is chemotherapy, of course,” he said. “But it would only be palliative.”
“What does that mean?” Baba asked.
Dr. Amani sighed. “It means it wouldn’t change the outcome, just prolong it.”
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“That’s a clear answer, Dr. Amani. Thank you for that,” Baba said. “But no chemo-medication for me.” He had the same resolved look on his face as the day he’d dropped the stack of food stamps on Mrs. Dobbins’s desk.
“But Baba–”
“Don’t you challenge me in public, Amir. Ever. Who do you think you are?”
THE RAIN General Taheri had spoken about at the flea market was a few weeks late, but when we stepped out of Dr. Amani’s office, passing cars sprayed grimy water onto the sidewalks. Baba lit a cigarette. He smoked all the way to the car and all the way home.
As he was slipping the key into the lobby door, I said, “I wish you’d give the chemo a chance, Baba.”
Baba pocketed the keys, pulled me out of the rain and under the building’s striped awning. He kneaded me on the chest with the hand holding the cigarette. “Bas! I’ve made my decision.”
“What about me, Baba? What am I supposed to do?” I said, my eyes welling up.
A look of disgust swept across his rain-soaked face. It was the same look he’d give me when, as a kid, I’d fall, scrape my knees, and cry. It was the crying that brought it on then, the crying that brought it on now. “You’re twenty-two years old, Amir! A grown man! You…” he opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, reconsidered. Above us, rain drummed on the canvas awning. “What’s going to happen to you, you say? All those years, that’s what I was trying to teach you, how to never have to ask that question.”
He opened the door. Turned back to me. “And one more thing. No one finds out about this, you hear me? No one. I don’t want anybody’s sympathy.” Then he disappeared into the dim lobby. He chain-smoked the rest of that day in front of the TV. I didn’t know what or whom he was defying. Me?
Dr. Amani? Or maybe the God he had never believed in.
FOR A WHILE, even cancer couldn’t keep Baba from the flea market. We made our garage sale treks on Saturdays, Baba the driver and me the navigator, and set up our display on Sundays. Brass lamps. Baseball gloves. Ski jackets with broken zippers.
Baba greeted acquaintances from the old country and I haggled with buyers over a
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dollar or two. Like any of it mattered. Like the day I would become an orphan wasn’t inching closer with each closing of shop.
Sometimes, General Taheri and his wife strolled by. The general, ever the diplomat, greeted me with a smile and his two-handed shake. But there was a new reticence to Khanum Taheri’s demeanor. A reticence broken only by her secret, droopy smiles and the furtive, apologetic looks she cast my way when the general’s attention was engaged elsewhere.
I remember that period as a time of many “firsts”: The first time I heard Baba moan in the bathroom. The first time I found blood on his pillow. In
over three years running the gas station, Baba had never called in sick. Another first.
By Halloween of that year, Baba was getting so tired by mid-Saturday afternoon that he’d wait behind the wheel while I got out and bargained for junk. By Thanksgiving, he wore out before noon. When sleighs appeared on front lawns and fake snow on Douglas firs, Baba stayed home and I drove the VW bus alone up and down the peninsula.
Sometimes at the flea market, Afghan acquaintances made remarks about Baba’s weight loss. At first, they were complimentary. They even asked the secret to his diet.
But the queries and compliments stopped when the weight loss didn’t. When the pounds kept shedding. And shedding. When his cheeks hollowed. And his temples melted. And his eyes receded in their sockets.
Then, one cool Sunday shortly after New Year’s Day, Baba was selling a lampshade to a stocky Filipino man while I rummaged in the VW for a blanket to cover his legs with.
“Hey, man, this guy needs help!” the Filipino man said with alarm. I turned around and found Baba on the ground. His arms and legs were jerking.
“Komak!” I cried. “Somebody help!” I ran to Baba. He was frothing at the mouth, the foamy spittle soaking his beard. His upturned eyes showed nothing but white.
People were rushing to us. I heard someone say seizure. Some one else yelling, “Call 911!” I heard running footsteps. The sky darkened as a crowd gathered around us.
Baba’s spittle turned red. He was biting his tongue. I kneeled beside him and grabbed his arms and said I’m here Baba, I’m here, you’ll be all right, I’m right here. As if I could soothe the convulsions out of him. Talk them into leaving my Baba alone. I felt a wetness on my knees. Saw Baba’s bladder had let go. Shhh, Baba jan, I’m here. Your son is right here.
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THE DOCTOR, white-bearded and perfectly bald, pulled me out of the room. “I want to go over your father’s CAT scans with you,” he said. He put the films up on a viewing box in the hallway and pointed with the eraser end of his pencil to the pictures of Baba’s cancer, like a cop showing mug shots of the killer to the victim’s family. Baba’s brain on those pictures looked like cross sections of a big walnut, riddled with tennis ball-shaped gray things.
“As you can see, the cancer’s metastasized,” he said. “He’ll have to take steroids to reduce the swelling in his brain and antiseizure medications. And I’d recommend palliative radiation. Do you know what that means?”
I said I did. I’d become conversant in cancer talk.
“All right, then,” he said. He checked his beeper. “I have to go, but you can have me paged if you have any questions.”
“Thank you.”
I spent the night sitting on a chair next to Baba’s bed.
THE NEXT MORNING, the waiting room down the hall was jammed with Afghans. The butcher from Newark. An engineer who’d worked with Baba on his orphanage. They filed in and paid Baba their respects in hushed tones. Wished him a swift recovery.
Baba was awake then, groggy and tired, but awake.
Midmorning, General Taheri and his wife came. Soraya followed. We glanced at each other, looked away at the same time. “How are you, my friend?” General Taheri said, taking Baba’s hand.
Baba motioned to the IV hanging from his arm. Smiled thinly. The general smiled back.
“You shouldn’t have burdened yourselves. All of you,” Baba croaked. “It’s no burden,” Khanum Taheri said.
“No burden at all. More importantly, do you need anything?” General Taheri said.
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I remembered something Baba had said about Pashtuns once. We may be hardheaded and I know we’re far too proud, but, in the hour of need, believe me that there’s no one you’d rather have at your side than a Pashtun.
Baba shook his head on the pillow. “Your coming here has brightened my eyes.” The general smiled and squeezed Baba’s hand. “How are you, Amir jan? Do you need anything?”
The way he was looking at me, the kindness in his eyes… “Nay thank you, General Sahib. I’m…“ A lump shot up in my throat and my eyes teared over. I bolted out of the room.
I wept in the hallway, by the viewing box where, the night before, I’d seen the killer’s face.
Baba’s door opened and Soraya walked out of his room. She stood near me. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans. Her hair was down. I wanted to find comfort in her arms.
“I’m so sorry, Amir,” she said. “We all knew something was wrong, but we had no idea it was this.”
I blotted my eyes with my sleeve. “He didn’t want anyone to know.” “Do you need anything?”
“No.” I tried to smile. She put her hand on mine. Our first touch. I took it. Brought it to my face. My eyes. I let it go. “You’d better go back inside. Or your father will come after me.”
She smiled and nodded. “I should.” She turned to go. “Soraya?” “Yes?”
“I’m happy you came, It means… the world to me.”
THEY DISCHARGED BABA two days later. They brought in a specialist called a radiation oncologist to talk Baba into getting radiation treatment. Baba refused. They
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tried to talk me into talking him into it. But I’d seen the look on Baba’s face. I thanked them, signed their forms, and took Baba home in my Ford Torino.
That night, Baba was lying on the couch, a wool blanket covering him. I brought him hot tea and roasted almonds. Wrapped my arms around his back and pulled him up much too easily. His shoulder blade felt like a bird’s wing under my fingers. I pulled the blanket back up to his chest where ribs stretched his thin, sallow skin.
“Can I do anything else for you, Baba?” “Nay, bachem. Thank you.”
I sat beside him. “Then I wonder if you’ll do something for me. If you’re not too exhausted.”
“What?”
“I want you to go khastegari. I want you to ask General Taheri for his daughter’s hand.”
Baba’s dry lips stretched into a smile. A spot of green on a wilted leaf. “Are you sure?”
“More sure than I’ve ever been about anything.” “You’ve thought it over?”
“Balay, Baba.”
“Then give me the phone. And my little notebook.” I blinked. “Now?”
“Then when?”
I smiled. “Okay.” I gave him the phone and the little black notebook where Baba had scribbled his Afghan friends’ numbers.
He looked up the Taheris. Dialed. Brought the receiver to his ear. My heart was doing pirouettes in my chest.
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“Jamila jan? Salaam alaykum,” he said. He introduced himself. Paused. “Much better, thank you. It was so gracious of you to come.” He listened for a while. Nodded. “I’ll remember that, thank you. Is General Sahib home?” Pause. “Thank you.”
His eyes flicked to me. I wanted to laugh for some reason. Or scream. I brought the ball of my hand to my mouth and bit on it. Baba laughed softly through his nose.
“General Sahib, Salaam alaykum… Yes, much much better… Balay… You’re so kind.
General Sahib, I’m calling to ask if I may pay you and Khanum Taheri a visit tomorrow morning. It’s an honorable matter… Yes… Eleven o’clock is
just fine. Until then. Khoda hãfez.”
He hung up. We looked at each other. I burst into giggles. Baba joined in.
BABA WET HIS HAIR and combed it back. I helped him into a clean white shirt and knotted his tie for him, noting the two inches of empty space between the collar button and Baba’s neck. I thought of all the empty spaces Baba would leave behind when he was gone, and I made myself think of something else. He wasn’t gone. Not yet. And this was a day for good thoughts. The jacket of his brown suit, the one he’d worn to my graduation, hung over him–too much of Baba had melted away to fill it anymore. I had to roll up the sleeves. I stooped and tied his shoelaces for him.
The Taheris lived in a flat, one-story house in one of the residential areas in Fremont known for housing a large number of Afghans. It had bay windows, a pitched roof, and an enclosed front porch on which I saw potted geraniums. The general’s gray van was parked in the driveway.
I helped Baba out of the Ford and slipped back behind the wheel. He leaned in the passenger window. “Be home, I’ll call you in an hour.”
“Okay, Baba,” I said. “Good luck.” He smiled.
I drove away. In the rearview mirror, Baba was hobbling up the Taheris’ driveway for one last fatherly duty.
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I PACED THE LIVING ROOM of our apartment waiting for Baba’s call. Fifteen paces long. Ten and a half paces wide. What if the general said no? What if he hated me? I kept going to the kitchen, checking the oven clock.
The phone rang just before noon. It was Baba. “Well?”
“The general accepted.”
I let out a burst of air. Sat down. My hands were shaking. “He did?”
“Yes, but Soraya jan is upstairs in her room. She wants to talk to you first.” “Okay.”
Baba said something to someone and there was a double click as he hung up.
“Amir?” Soraya’s voice. “Salaam.” “My father said yes.”
“I know,” I said. I switched hands. I was smiling. “I’m so happy I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m happy too, Amir. I… can’t believe this is happening.” I laughed. “I know.”
“Listen,” she said, “I want to tell you something. Something you have to know before…”
“I don’t care what it is.”
“You need to know. I don’t want us to start with secrets. And I’d rather you hear it from me.”
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There was a long pause at the other end. “When we lived in Virginia, I ran away with an Afghan man. I was eighteen at the time… rebellious… stupid, and… he was into drugs…
We lived together for almost a month. All the Afghans in Virginia were talking about it.
“Padar eventually found us. He showed up at the door and… made me come home. I was hysterical. Yelling. Screaming. Saying I hated him…
“Anyway, I came home and–” She was crying. “Excuse me.” I heard her put the phone down. Blow her nose. “Sorry,” she came back on, sounding hoarse. “When I came home, I saw my mother had had a stroke, the right side of her face was paralyzed and…
I felt so guilty. She didn’t deserve that.
“Padar moved us to California shortly after.” A silence followed. “How are you and your father now?” I said.
“We’ve always had our differences, we still do, but I’m grateful he came for me that day.
I really believe he saved me.” She paused. “So, does what I told you bother you?”
“A little,” I said. I owed her the truth on this one. I couldn’t lie to her and say that my pride, my iftikhar, wasn’t stung at all that she had been with a man, whereas I had never taken a woman to bed. It did bother me a bit, but I had pondered this quite a lot in the weeks before I asked Baba to go khastegari. And in the end the question that always came back to me was this: How could I, of all people, chastise someone for their past?
“Does it bother you enough to change your mind?”
“No, Soraya. Not even close,” I said. “Nothing you said changes anything. I want us to marry.”
She broke into fresh tears.
I envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and
destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t. I suspected there were many ways in which Soraya Taheri was a better person than me. Courage was just one of them.
