Laila
In a paper bag, Aziza packed these things: her flowered shirt and her lone pair of socks, her
mismatched wool gloves, an old, pumpkin-colored blanket dotted with stars and comets, a splintered
plastic cup, a banana, her set of dice-It was a cool morning in April 2001, shortly before Laila's
twenty-third birthday. The sky was a translucent gray, and gusts of a clammy, cold wind kept rattling
the screen door.
This was a few days after Laila heard that Ahmad Shah Massoud had gone to France and spoken to
the European Parliament. Massoud was now in his native North, and leading the Northern Alliance,
the sole opposition group still fighting the Taliban. In Europe, Massoud had warned the West about
terrorist camps in Afghanistan, and pleaded with the U.S. to help him fight the Taliban.
"If President Bush doesn't help us," he had said, "these terrorists will damage the U.S. and Europe
very soon."
A month before that, Laila had learned that the Taliban had planted TNT in the crevices of the giant
Buddhas in Bamiyan and blown them apart, calling them objects of idolatry and sin. There was an
outcry around the world, from the U.S. to China. Governments, historians, and archaeologists from all
over the globe had written letters, pleaded with the Taliban not to demolish the two greatest historical
artifacts in Afghanistan. But the Taliban had gone ahead and detonated their explosives inside the
two-thousand-year-old Buddhas. They had chantedAllah-u-akbar with each blast, cheered each time
the statues lost an arm or a leg in a crumbling cloud of dust. Laila remembered standing atop the
bigger of the two Buddhas with Babi and Tariq, back in 1987, a breeze blowing in their sunlit faces,
watching a hawk gliding in circles over the sprawling valley below. But when she heard the news of
the statues' demise, Laila was numb to it. It hardly seemed to matter. How could she care about
statues when her own life was crumbling dust?
Until Rasheed told her it was time to go, Laila sat on the floor in a comer of the living room, not
speaking and stone-faced, her hair hanging around her face in straggly curls. No matter how much she
breathed in and out, it seemed to Laila that she couldn't fill her lungs with enough air.
* * *
On the way to Karteh-Seh, Zalmai bounced in Rasheed's arms, and Aziza held Mariam's hand as she
walked quickly beside her. The wind blew the dirty scarf tied under Aziza's chin and rippled the hem
of her dress. Aziza was more grim now, as though she'd begun to sense, with each step, that she was
being duped. Laila had not found the strength to tell Aziza the truth. She had told her that she was
going to a school, a special school where the children ate and slept and didn't come home after class.
Now Aziza kept pelting Laila with the same questions she had been asking for days. Did the students sleep in different rooms or all in one great big room? Would she make friends? Was she, Laila, sure
that the teachers would be nice?
And, more than once,How long do I have to stay?
They stopped two blocks from the squat, barracks-style building.
"Zalmai and I will wait here," Rasheed said. "Oh, before I forget…"
He fished a stick of gum from his pocket, a parting gift, and held it out to Aziza with a stiff,
magnanimous air. Aziza took it and muttered a thank-you. Laila marveled at Aziza's grace, Aziza's
vast capacity for forgiveness, and her eyes filled. Her heart squeezed, and she was faint with sorrow
at the thought that this afternoon Aziza would not nap beside her, that she would not feel the flimsy
weight of Aziza's arm on her chest, the curve of Aziza's head pressing into her ribs, Aziza's breath
warming her neck, Aziza's heels poking her belly.
When Aziza was led away, Zalmai began wailing, crying, Ziza! Ziza! He squirmed and kicked in his
father's arms, called for his sister, until his attention was diverted by an organ-grinder's monkey
across the street.
They walked the last two blocks alone, Mariam, Laila, and Aziza. As they approached the building,
Laila could see its splintered fa9ade, the sagging roof, the planks of wood nailed across frames with
missing windows, the top of a swing set over a decaying wall.
They stopped by the door, and Laila repeated to Aziza what she had told her earlier.
"And if they ask about your father, what do you say?"
"The Mujahideen killed him," Aziza said, her mouth set with wariness.
"That's good. Aziza, do you understand?"
"Because this is a special school," Aziza said Now that they were here, and the building was a
reality, she looked shaken. Her lower lip was quivering and her eyes threatened to well up, and Laila
saw how hard she was struggling to be brave. "If we tell the truth," Aziza said in a thin, breathless
voice, "they won't take me. It's a special school. I want to go home."
"I'll visit all the time," Laila managed to say. "I promise."
"Me too," said Mariam. "We'll come to see you, Aziza jo, and we'll play together, just like always.
It's only for a while, until your father finds work."
"They have food here," Laila said shakily. She was glad for the burqa, glad that Aziza couldn't see
how she was falling apart inside it. "Here, you won't go hungry. They have rice and bread and water,
and maybe even fruit."
"Butyouwon't be here. And Khala Mariam won't be with me.""I'll come and see you," Laila said. "All the time. Look at me, Aziza. I'll come and see you. I'm your
mother. If it kills me, I'll come and see you."
* * *
The orphanage director was a stooping, narrow-chested man with a pleasantly lined face. He was
balding, had a shaggy beard, eyes like peas. His name was Zaman. He wore a skullcap. The left lens
of his eyeglasses was chipped.
As he led them to his office, he asked Laila and Mariam their names, asked for Aziza's name too, her
age. They passed through poorly lit hallways where barefoot children stepped aside and watched
They had disheveled hair or shaved scalps. They wore sweaters with frayed sleeves, ragged jeans
whose knees had worn down to strings, coats patched with duct tape. Laila smelled soap and talcum,
ammonia and urine, and rising apprehension in Aziza, who had begun whimpering.
Laila had a glimpse of the yard: weedy lot, rickety swing set, old tires, a deflated basketball. The
rooms they passed were bare, the windows covered with sheets of plastic. A boy darted from one of
the rooms and grabbed Laila's elbow, and tried to climb up into her arms. An attendant, who was
cleaning up what looked like a puddle of urine, put down his mop and pried the boy off.
Zaman seemed gently proprietary with the orphans. He patted the heads of some, as he passed by,
said a cordial word or two to them, tousled their hair, without condescension. The children
welcomed his touch. They all looked at him, Laila thought, in hope of approval.
He showed them into his office, a room with only three folding chairs, and a disorderly desk with
piles of paper scattered atop it.
"You're from Herat," Zaman said to Mariam. "I can tell from your accent."
He leaned back in his chair and laced his hands over his belly, and said he had a brother-in-law
who used to live there. Even in these ordinary gestures, Laila noted a laborious quality to his
movements. And though he was smiling faintly, Laila sensed something troubled and wounded
beneath, disappointment and defeat glossed over with a veneer of good humor.
"He was a glassmaker," Zaman said. "He made these beautiful, jade green swans. You held them up
to sunlight and they glittered inside, like the glass was filled with tiny jewels. Have you been back?"
Mariam said she hadn't.
"I'm from Kandahar myself. Have you ever been to Kandahar,hamshira1? No? It's lovely. What
gardens! And the grapes! Oh, the grapes. They bewitch the palate."
A few children had gathered by the door and were peeking in. Zaman gently shooed them away, in
Pashto.
"Of course I love Herat too. City of artists and writers, Sufis and mystics. You know the old joke,
that you can't stretch a leg in Herat without poking a poet in the rear."Next to Laila, Aziza snorted.
Zaman feigned a gasp. "Ah, there. I've made you laugh, littlehamshira. That's usually the hard part. I
was worried, there, for a while. I thought I'd have to cluck like a chicken or bray like a donkey. But,
there you are. And so lovely you are."
He called in an attendant to look after Aziza for a few moments. Aziza leaped onto Mariam's lap and
clung to her.
"We're just going to talk, my love,"Laila said. "I'll be right here. All right? Right here."
"Why don't we go outside for a minute, Aziza jo?" Mariam said. "Your mother needs to talk to Kaka
Zaman here.Just for a minute. Now, come on."
When they were alone, Zaman asked for Aziza's date of birth, history of illnesses, allergies. He
asked about Aziza's father, and Laila had the strange experience of telling a lie that was really the
truth. Zaman listened, his expression revealing neither belief nor skepticism. He ran the orphanage on
the honor system, he said. If ahamshira said her husband was dead and she couldn't care for her
children, he didn't question it.
Laila began to cry.
Zaman put down his pen.
"I'm ashamed," Laila croaked, her palm pressed to her mouth.
"Look at me,hamshira "
"What kind of mother abandons her own child?"
"Look at me."
Laila raised her gaze.
"It isn't your fault. Do you hear me? Not you. It's thosesavages, thosewahshis, who are to blame.
They bring shame on me as a Pashtun. They've disgraced the name of my people. And you're not
alone,hamshira We get mothers like you all the time-all the time-mothers who come here who can't
feed their children because the Taliban won't let them go out and make a living. So you don't blame
yourself. No one here blames you. I understand." He leaned forward."Hamshira I understand."
Laila wiped her eyes with the cloth of her burqa.
"As for this place," Zaman sighed, motioning with his hand, "you can see that it's in dire state. We're
always underfunded, always scrambling, improvising. We get little or no support from the Taliban.
But we manage. Like you, we do what we have to do. Allah is good and kind, and Allah provides,
and, as long He provides, I will see to it that Aziza is fed and clothed. That much I promise you."Laila nodded.
"All right?"
He was smiling companionably. "But don't cry,hamshira Don't let her see you cry."
Laila wiped her eyes again. "God bless you," she said thickly. "God bless you, brother."
***
But "when the time for good-byes came, the scene erupted precisely as Laila had dreaded.
Aziza panicked.
All the way home, leaning on Mariam, Laila heard Aziza's shrill cries. In her head, she saw Zaman's
thick, calloused hands close around Aziza's arms; she saw them pull, gently at first, then harder, then
with force to pry Aziza loose from her. She saw Aziza kicking in Zaman's arms as he hurriedly turned
the corner, heard Aziza screaming as though she were about to vanish from the face of the earth. And
Laila saw herself running down the hallway, head down, a howl rising up her throat.
"I smell her," she told Mariam at home. Her eyes swam unseeingly past Mariam's shoulder, past the
yard, the walls, to the mountains, brown as smoker's spit. "I smell her sleep smell. Do you? Do you
smell it?"
"Oh, Laila jo," said Mariam. "Don't. What good is this? What good?"
* * *
At first, Rasheed humored Laila, and accompanied them-her, Mariam, and Zalmai-to the orphanage,
though he made sure, as they walked, that she had an eyeful of his grievous looks, an earful of his
rants over what a hardship she was putting him through, how badly his legs and back and feet ached
walking to and from the orphanage. He made sure she knew how awfully put out he was.
"I'm not a young man anymore," he said. "Not that you care. You'd run me to the ground, if you had
your way. But you don't, Laila. You don't have your way."
They parted ways two blocks from the orphanage, and he never spared them more than fifteen
minutes. "A minute late," he said, "and I start walking. I mean it."
Laila had to pester him, plead with him, in order to spin out the allotted minutes with Aziza a bit
longer. For herself, and for Mariam, who was disconsolate over Aziza's absence, though, as always,
Mariam chose to cradle her own suffering privately and quietly. And for Zalmai too, who asked for
his sister every day, and threw tantrums that sometimes dissolved into inconsolable fits of crying.
Sometimes, on the way to the orphanage, Rasheed stopped and complained that his leg was sore.
Then he turned around and started walking home in long, steady strides, without so much as a limp.
Or he clucked his tongue and said, "It's my lungs, Laila. I'm short of breath. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel better, or the day after. We'll see." He never bothered to feign a single raspy breath. Often, as he
turned back and marched home, he lit a cigarette. Laila would have to tail him home, helpless,
trembling with resentment and impotent rage.
Then one day he told Laila he wouldn't take her anymore. "I'm too tired from walking the streets all
day," he said, "looking for work."
"Then I'll go by myself," Laila said. "You can't stop me, Rasheed. Do you hear me? You can hit me
all you want, but I'll keep going there."
"Do as you wish. But you won't get past the Taliban. Don't say I didn't warn you."
"I'm coming with you," Mariam said.
Laila wouldn't allow it. "You have to stay home with Zalmai. If we get stopped…Idon't want him to
see."
And so Laila's life suddenly revolved around finding ways to see Aziza. Half the time, she never
made it to the orphanage. Crossing the street, she was spotted by the Taliban and riddled with
questions-What is your name? Where are you going? Why are you alone? Where is yourmahram? -
before she was sent home. If she was lucky, she was given a tongue-lashing or a single kick to the
rear, a shove in the back. Other times, she met with assortments of wooden clubs, fresh tree branches,
short whips, slaps, often fists.
One day, a young Talib beat Laila with a radio antenna. When he was done, he gave a final whack to
the back of her neck and said, "I see you again, I'll beat you until your mother's milk leaks out of your
bones."
That time, Laila went home. She lay on her stomach, feeling like a stupid, pitiable animal, and
hissed as Mariam arranged damp cloths across her bloodied back and thighs. But, usually, Laila
refused to cave in. She made as if she were going home, then took a different route down side streets.
Sometimes she was caught, questioned, scolded-two, three, even four times in a single day. Then the
whips came down and the antennas sliced through the air, and she trudged home, bloodied, without so
much as a glimpse of Aziza. Soon Laila took to wearing extra layers, even in the heat, two, three
sweaters beneath the burqa, for padding against the beatings.
But for Laila, the reward, if she made it past the Taliban, was worth it. She could spend as much
time as she liked then-hours,even-with Aziza. They sat in the courtyard, near the swing set, among
other children and visiting mothers, and talked about what Aziza had learned that week.
Aziza said Kaka Zaman made it a point to teach them something every day, reading and writing most
days, sometimes geography, a bit of history or science, something about plants, animals.
"But we have to pull the curtains," Aziza said, "so the Taliban don't see us." Kaka Zaman had
knitting needles and balls of yarn ready, she said, in case of a Taliban inspection. "We put the books
away and pretend to knit."One day, during a visit with Aziza, Laila saw a middle-aged woman, her burqa pushed back, visiting
with three boys and a girl. Laila recognized the sharp face, the heavy eyebrows, if not the sunken
mouth and gray hair. She remembered the shawls, the black skirts, the curt voice, how she used to
wear her jet-black hair tied in a bun so that you could see the dark bristles on the back of her neck.
Laila remembered this woman once forbidding the female students from covering, saying women and
men were equal, that there was no reason women should cover if men didn't.
At one point, Khala Rangmaal looked up and caught her gaze, but Laila saw no lingering, no light of
recognition, in her old teacher's eyes.
* * *
"They're fractures along the earth's crust," said Aziza. 'They're called faults."
It was a warm afternoon, a Friday, in June of 2001. They were sitting in the orphanage's back lot, the
four of them, Laila, Zalmai, Mariam, and Aziza. Rasheed had relented this time-as he infrequently
did-and accompanied the four of them. He was waiting down the street, by the bus stop.
Barefoot kids scampered about around them. A flat soccer ball was kicked around, chased after
listlessly.
"And, on either side of the faults, there are these sheets of rock that make up the earth's crust," Aziza
was saying.
Someone had pulled the hair back from Aziza's face, braided it, and pinned it neatly on top of her
head. Laila begrudged whoever had gotten to sit behind her daughter, to flip sections of her hair one
over the other, had asked her to sit still.
Aziza was demonstrating by opening her hands, palms up, and rubbing them against each other.
Zalmai watched this with intense interest.
"Kectonic plates, they're called?"
"Tectonic,"Laila said. It hurt to talk. Her jaw was still sore, her back and neck ached. Her lip was
swollen, and her tongue kept poking the empty pocket of the lower incisor Rasheed had knocked
loose two days before. Before Mammy and Babi had died and her life turned upside down, Laila
never would have believed that a human body could withstand this much beating, this viciously, this
regularly, and keep functioning.
"Right. And when they slide past each other, they catch and slip-see, Mammy?-and it releases
energy, which
travels to the earth's surface and makes it shake."
"You're getting so smart," Mariam said "So much smarter than your dumbkhala"
Aziza's face glowed, broadened. "You're not dumb, Khala Mariam. And Kaka Zaman says that,sometimes, the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but all
we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor."
The visit before this one, it was oxygen atoms in the atmosphere scattering the blue light from the
sun.If the earth had no atmosphere, Aziza had said a little breathlessly,the sky wouldn 't be blue at all
but a pitch-black sea and the sun a big bright star in the dark
"Is Aziza coming home with us this time?" Zalmai said.
"Soon, my love," Laila said. "Soon."
Laila watched him wander away, walking like his father, stooping forward, toes turned in. He
walked to the swing set, pushed an empty seat, ended up sitting on the concrete, ripping weeds from a
crack.
Water evaporates from the leaves-Mammy, did you know?-the way it does from laundry hanging
from a line. And that drives the flow of water up the tree. From the ground and through the roots, then
all the way up the tree trunk, through the branches and into the leaves. It's called transpiration.
More than once, Laila had wondered what the Taliban would do about Kaka Zaman's clandestine
lessons if they found out.
During visits, Aziza didn't allow for much silence. She filled all the spaces with effusive speech,
delivered in a high, ringing voice. She was tangential with her topics, and her hands gesticulated
wildly, flying up with a nervousness that wasn't like her at all. She had a new laugh, Aziza did. Not so
much a laugh, really, as nervous punctuation, meant, Laila suspected, to reassure.
And there were other changes. Laila would notice the dirt under Aziza's fingernails, and Aziza
would notice her noticing and bury her hands under her thighs. Whenever a kid cried in their vicinity,
snot oozing from his nose, or if a kid walked by bare-assed, hair clumped with dirt, Aziza's eyelids
fluttered and she was quick to explain it away. She was like a hostess embarrassed in front of her
guests by the squalor of her home, the untidiness of her children.
Questions of how she was coping were met with vague but cheerful replies.
Doing Jim, Khala I'm fine.
Do kids pick on you?
They dont Mammy. Everyone is nice.
Are you eating? Sleeping all right?
Eating. Sleeping too. Yes. We had lamb last night Maybe it was last week.
When Aziza spoke like this, Laila saw more than a little of Mariam in her.Aziza stammered now. Mariam noticed it first. It was subtle but perceptible, and more pronounced
with words that began with /. Laila asked Zaman about it. He frowned and said, "I thought she'd
always done that."
They left the orphanage with Aziza that Friday afternoon for a short outing and met Rasheed, who
was waiting for them by the bus stop. When Zalmai spotted his father, he uttered an excited squeak
and impatiently wriggled from Laila's arms. Aziza's greeting to Rasheed was rigid but not hostile.
Rasheed said they should hurry, he had only two hours before he had to report back to work. This
was his first week as a doorman for the Intercontinental. From noon to eight, six days a week,
Rasheed opened car doors, carried luggage, mopped up the occasional spill. Sometimes, at day's end,
the cook at the buffet-style restaurant let Rasheed bring home a few leftovers-as long as he was
discreet about it-cold meatballs sloshing in oil; fried chicken wings, the crust gone hard and dry;
stuffed pasta shells turned chewy; stiff, gravelly rice. Rasheed had promised Laila that once he had
some money saved up, Aziza could move back home.
Rasheed was wearing his uniform, a burgundy red polyester suit, white shirt, clip-on tie, visor cap
pressing down on his white hair. In this uniform, Rasheed was transformed. He looked vulnerable,
pitiably bewildered, almost harmless. Like someone who had accepted without a sigh of protest the
indignities life had doled out to him. Someone both pathetic and admirable in his docility.
They rode the bus to Titanic City. They walked into the riverbed, flanked on either side by makeshift
stalls clinging to the dry banks. Near the bridge, as they were descending the steps, a barefoot man
dangled dead from a crane, his ears cut off, his neck bent at the end of a rope. In the river, they melted
into the horde of shoppers milling about, the money changers and bored-looking NGO workers, the
cigarette vendors, the covered women who thrust fake antibiotic prescriptions at people and begged
for money to fill them. Whip-toting,naswar-chew'mg Talibs patrolled Titanic City on the lookout for
the indiscreet laugh, the unveiled face.
From a toy kiosk, betweenapoosieen coat vendor and a fake-flower stand, Zalmai picked out a
rubber basketball with yellow and blue swirls.
"Pick something," Rasheed said to Aziza.
Aziza hedged, stiffened with embarrassment.
"Hurry. I have to be at work in an hour."
Aziza chose a gum-ball machine-the same coin could be inserted to get candy, then retrieved from
the flap-door coin return below.
Rasheed's eyebrows shot up when the seller quoted him the price. A round of haggling ensued, at the
end of which Rasheed said to Aziza contentiously, as if itwere she who'd haggled him, "Give it back.
I can't afford both."
On the way back, Aziza's high-spirited fa9ade waned the closer they got to the orphanage. The hands stopped flying
up. Her face turned heavy. It happened every time. It was Laila's turn now, with Mariam pitching in,
to take up the chattering, to laugh nervously, to fill the melancholy quiet with breathless, aimless
banter-Later, after Rasheed had dropped them off and taken a bus to work, Laila watched Aziza wave
good-bye and scuff along the wall in the orphanage back lot. She thought of Aziza's stutter, and of
what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes
all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.
* * *
"Getaway, you!" Zalmai cried.
"Hush," Mariam said "Who are you yelling at?"
He pointed. "There. That man."
Laila followed his finger. Therewas a man at the front door of the house, leaning against it. His head
turned when he saw them approaching. He uncrossed his arms. Limped a few steps toward them.
Laila stopped.
A choking noise came up her throat. Her knees weakened. Laila suddenly wanted,needed, to grope
for Mariam's arm, her shoulder, her wrist, something, anything, to lean on. But she didn't. She didn't
dare. She didn't dare move a muscle. She didn't dare breathe, or blink even, for fear that he was
nothing but a mirage shimmering in the distance, a brittle illusion that would vanish at the slightest
provocation. Laila stood perfectly still and looked at Tariq until her chest screamed for air and her
eyes burned to blink. And, somehow, miraculously, after she took a breath, closed and opened her
eyes, he was still standing there. Tariq was still standing there.
Laila allowed herself to take a step toward him. Then another. And another. And then she was
running.