And then the door opened and closed with a slam.
Sunny assumed it was Ahmet, who came in every night to walk his mother safely up the outside stairs to her home, so she didn’t even look up.
Ahmet said, “Miss Sunny—”
And Halajan said, “Ma khoda.” Oh my God.
And Poppy barked and ran over to the door.
And then a man’s voice said, “Hey, babe.”
Only one man would dare call her that. Sunny was so startled that she knocked over her bottle of water. She stood and pushed her stool back so hard that it fell over with a loud bang onto the floor. She could have lit half of Kabul if her shock could’ve been converted to electricity.
“Miss me?” And there was that kilowatt smile that Sunny had fallen in love with so many years before.
She tried to answer but her throat was full. Her heart was beating so loudly she imagined everyone could hear it.
“Tommy” was all she could say.
“So you’re not dead, after all,” Sunny said to him later, when everyone had gone home. She sipped from her teacup of wine. She was calming down now and starting to feel pissed off. Perhaps stage two in the Seven Stages of Reaction When a Person You Love Returns After Months of No Contact, stage one being Shock, stage two Pissed Off, and she’d know the next stage when she got to it.
“You sound disappointed.”
“It’s been five months!”
“It was my job. I had no choice if I wanted to get paid.”
“You could’ve called, maybe. Sent an email, for Christ’s sake. Let me know you’re okay. Give me a hint about when you’d be back.”
“I’m not denying the money wasn’t terrific—unbelievable is the shit’s honest truth. But it was more than that. It was important. The first time in my life. I knew you’d underst—”
“It’s been five months!” She knew she’d said that already but she said it again anyway.
“But you sure look good,” he said with that smile of his. “Younger, even, than when I left. I like your hair longer.” He reached out to touch it. But Sunny backed away.
“You didn’t call, or email, or anything. What was I to think?”
“I couldn’t. Orders.”
“You sound as if you were on a CIA mission or something. Get over yourself.” She was angry now.
He was, too. “But if we had married like I’d wanted to—”
Sunny was doing everything in her power to not jump across the table and tear his eyes out. Not that it would be wrong. It would just give her feelings away, and she didn’t want to give him the pleasure of that. He didn’t deserve it.
“Are you telling me that if I had been your wife, you could’ve called? But because I was your girlfriend of a million years you couldn’t? That is so much bullshit.”
“Sunny, that’s the military. I couldn’t tell you. Had you married me when I asked, everything would have been different.”
“But I didn’t, and it’s not. Besides, you’re not in the military.”
“I was doing the military’s dirty work, okay? But I still had to follow their fucked-up rules. Like no girlfriends. But it can be different now. I’m back. Here, for you.” He paused, looking at her. “That is, if you still want me.”
Sunny stood up. She could hardly look at him, he was still so gorgeous. His blondish hair long over his eyes, those startling blue eyes, his skin tanned, and his body lean and long, and she had to look away. “You think you can go away for so long, not tell me where you’ve gone, not communicate in any way, come back and everything will be the same?”
“Yeah. Why not? This wasn’t so much longer than usual. I love you, you love me—or you did. At least I think you did.”
She turned back to him. “You know I did. But for some reason this time it felt longer. It felt different.”
“Why? Why this time?”
She looked away.
“Oh, Jesus, is there someone else?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, which was the truth. And then she added, “There’s no one else,” which wasn’t. She sat back down. “But so much has happened.”
“You don’t know, huh?” He looked around the coffeehouse. “Well, it looks better in here. You’ve done some work, right? You’re painting the wall—hey, and you made it higher, going after those UN rights, huh? You’ve got a new Afghan woman working. You have a dog! Come here, boy!”
Poppy didn’t move from her bed.
“It’s a female.”
“Then come here, girl,” he said. But Poppy stayed where she was. Tommy laughed and sat back in his chair, tilted it back on its rear legs, crossed his arms over his chest. “I knew you’d be fine. I never had to worry about Sunny.”
He reached over and put his hand on hers. His shirt was rolled up to the elbows and his forearms looked strong, his hands beautiful. She could barely breathe.
But she stood again. She was not going to let this happen. “It’s late. You gotta go.”
“What do you mean, go? I live here—”
She shook her head. “It’s too much. You’re here one minute. Then you’re gone for three months. Then you’re gone for five. Next time … who knows? And you don’t live here. You’ve stayed here between going everywhere else. I think you have one shirt here. Maybe.”
Now Tommy stood up. “But I’m here now, Sunny. I want to stay.” He went to her, held her firmly by her arms, pulled her to him, and kissed her hard and long.
She didn’t even try to pull away. She had waited so long for this moment to come. They went to her room, where the Kabul moon shone through the windows. He kissed her again, he unbuttoned her shirt, he put his hands on her breasts, between her legs. It was almost as if nothing between them had changed after all this time, except for one big thing: Tommy was here with her, but her mind was somewhere else, with someone else. And so she pulled away, kissed him on the cheek, and showed him to the door.
Isabel had to let her eyes adjust to the darkness before she could make out the long corridor of small cells with blue-painted bars. In the dank Pul-e Charkhi prison, lighting was poor, the ceilings were low, the windows had no glass, there was no electricity, the food was sometimes only two pieces of flatbread a day—and yet it sat right near Chicken Street, across from shops of souvenirs, blue lapis, and leather jackets. There were at least eight women in a cell, along with their children. Isabel could hear a baby crying. She could smell urine and unwashed bodies.
She’d gotten inside Pul-e Charkhi with the help of Sunny, who’d introduced her to the women’s minister and then helped her bribe the warden. Past the barbed wire and the heavily guarded front entrance, she’d been taken inside, where she was searched for guns and weapons and told to leave her bag in the front room. There were to be no pencils or pens, no cameras. She was provided with a “guide,” a large woman with huge, sagging breasts and a gray, dull face.
It was difficult to see their faces, even those without burqas. They wore heavy, crudely woven head scarves, but the faces she could see were dirty, and they pulled their scarves low to hide them in embarrassment. Isabel could see their eyes, boring through her like a laser. There were several women who suffered from leishmaniasis, the sores on their faces scabbing and oozing; others looked as gaunt as the concentration camp victims her mother had showed her photos of when she was a girl; one was nursing her baby, which was screaming, unable to satisfy itself with the meager milk the mother’s breasts provided; and others just stared, hollow-eyed and pleading.
But among the faces, Isabel did not see the woman who was beaten at the poppy farm. She hadn’t really believed she’d find her, if she were even still alive. But her journalistic training compelled her to keep searching for the story that was bigger than one woman’s disappearance, certainly bigger than the story about the spraying of the poppies. So, from Kabul, she planned to fly north to Mazar-e Sharif and even to Lashkar Gah, the capital of the Taliban-controlled Helmand province, where their prisons held hundred
s of women.
She felt a tug on her kameez and looked down. A young woman, a girl, dirty, quite thin and pale, who’d obviously been a beauty, was sitting at the bars of her cell, looking up at her, her hand stretched out. She said something inaudible. Isabel squatted to hear her.
“Please,” she whispered. “Please help me.”
The girl knew English. But her guide and the other women did not, so she and the girl could speak freely.
“Why are you here?”
“I was sold.” She turned her face away, embarrassed.
“It’s okay. You can tell me. Were you sold to be a—?”
The woman couldn’t speak. But tears welled in her eyes, and then, as Isabel watched, they spilled over her black lashes onto her cheeks.
Finally the girl said, “For men. I was sold for men.”
“Then why are you here? What happened?”
“One day I … I just couldn’t … any longer, I—” She put her face in her hands.
But Isabel pressed on. “How long have you been here?”
“Six Ramadans,” she said.
Isabel fought not to raise her voice. “Six years? You can’t be more than eighteen!”
“I am nineteen now.”
“Is anyone helping you? Has anyone been here?”
The girl nodded. “A foreign lawyer comes, but the only thing that gets you out is money. I am an orphan. I have no one.” She looked away, and then directly at Isabel, and she pleaded desperately, “Please. We are hungry. We have no clean water. They hurt us, they do things—”
The guide then pushed Isabel’s shoulder, urging her to move on.
But she turned to look back at the young woman. Her black eyes spoke centuries of pain.
“Please help me,” she said, which made Isabel’s whole body shudder under the weight of responsibility and the desire to act on her behalf, right here, right now.
But again, she felt the nudge on her back and heard the guide’s angry voice telling her to move.
So Isabel left the young woman with a nod and a strong clasp of her hand in hers and a whisper, “I will try. I promise.”
In another room, there were several women with older children, one holding a three-year-old who, the mother showed her, was unable to walk. “Look around,” the mother said in Dari.
The combination of Isabel’s limited knowledge of Dari and the woman’s gestures helped Isabel understand what came next.
“Do you see a place for a child to move? But what choice do I have? I have no family. I have no one.”
Isabel had heard of women who jumped into the river, drowning themselves and their children, rather than be imprisoned. Only now did she understand. It was better to live on the streets begging.
Isabel left shortly after. Knowing that trying to find her woman at another prison was bloody futile, she returned to the poppy fields where she’d first seen her and was told that she and her baby were both gone, though nobody knew where. But the look from the man who’d hit the woman told Isabel everything she needed to know: The woman was probably dead; the baby, if it was a boy, would be taken care of until it could be trained to fight for the Taliban and then die as a martyr. If it was a girl, she’d be dead already, or sold to become a sex slave within a few years.
Now Isabel had a story to write. It wasn’t about poppies or spraying or the collusion of the government and drug lords, or the corruption of drug enforcement officials, or the billions of dollars made in opium production. It was about the women held for years behind bars for refusing sex, for being victims of rape or of abusive husbands, or for becoming opium addicts. It was a story about the children being raised behind bars with them. The story was summed up in one young woman’s three simple words: Please help me.
“Sunnyjan, besyar, I have made something for you,” Yazmina said.
Sunny looked up from her laptop, where she was placing a new order from her meat guy in Dubai. Bashir Hadi’s burgers had become famous, and it was sometimes difficult for Sunny to keep ground beef in stock. The higher wall had worked its magic and the foreigners, bored with the same old places, were happy to try a new menu and drink a real latte.
Yazmina stood on the other side of the counter, with a garment of the loveliest lavender fabric folded over her arm.
She held it out to Sunny. “As my tashakur for all you have done for me.”
Sunny looked into Yazmina’s eyes and knew not to argue. “It’s very beautiful,” she said as she gently touched the silky material.
“I made it myself, Sunnyjan. I made it by hand. For you. Please,” she said, holding it out again, shyly. “Loftan, put it on. I want to see if it fits.”
So Sunny took it and lovingly touched the handmade embroidery. It was such a personal, beautiful gift. She kissed Yazmina three times. “Tashakur, Yazmina. I’ll go put it on now.”
“Bali, loftan,” Yazmina answered, lowering her eyes. Her face was flushed.
Sunny went to her room, took off her boots, jeans, and sweater, and put on the pants that were meant to be worn under the dress and then slipped the dress over her head. She looked at herself in the mirror and smiled. The dress fit her perfectly. The pants under it did as well. It was not like any other dress in all of Kabul, with its liquid folds and sculpted neckline, its beadwork and simply perfect structure. She smoothed the dress down over her hips, adjusted the collar at her neck, slipped on her dressy shoes, and returned to the café.
Yazmina was waiting for her, anxiously pacing. When she saw Sunny, she stopped and stared at her.
“What do you think?” asked Sunny.
“Wah, wah, wah, Sunnyjan very beautiful,” Yazmina whispered.
Sunny twirled and posed and the two women laughed. Yazmina pulled on the wrists to straighten the garment over Sunny’s arms and checked the hem at the knee to be sure it was straight. She fussed over the unusual neckline so that it sat as she must have envisioned it.
“Yazmina, how did you learn to sew like this? To design such a dress would take much training for even an experienced seamstress.”
“My madar taught me how to sew a regular dress. But this, I don’t know. It is something from my heart, something that Allah has given me. I have only needed someone to sew for. So I tashakur for giving me the opportunity.”
“I will wear it tonight and show it off to everyone who comes to the coffeehouse. What do you say to that, Yazmina?”
“Az shuma tashakur.” Then Yazmina turned and went back to setting the tables.
Later that evening, when the March winds freshened the dusty Kabul air, the coffeehouse was bubbling with talk and good smells from the kitchen. Bashir Hadi stood at the counter, lording over his domain, grinning ear to ear, proud of what he’d accomplished.
“Miss Sunny, in only another week we can buy the film for the windows and start construction on the safe room. We’re cooking with gas!”
Sunny laughed at the expression. “And look—we only had to rebuild the wall twice. It could’ve been worse.”
Then Candace walked in. She handed her coat to Ahmet, who was working inside tonight because of the crowd. His friend Khalid was once again handling the outside gate.
But when Candace asked for a “good table, away from the front door and the kitchen—I mean, it’s just so hot and loud, and I can’t think,” Halajan, for whom the expression “suffer no fools” had been coined, had absolutely no patience for Princess Candace’s attitude.
“This is the only table available,” Halajan said as she leaned on the back of one of its chairs. It was right at the front door.
“Then I’ll wait for another,” answered Candace, crossing her arms as she looked around the room calculating which table might be paying its check and leaving shortly.
“Wait until Jesus returns if you want,” said Halajan as she walked away.
“Trust me, for me, he’ll be here before you know it.” Candace laughed, as if fully aware of her own self-centeredness.
Sunny watched this scene
with much bemusement. That Candace would be treated by Halajan with the same disdain with which she treated others was perfect justice.
“Come on, Halajan,” pleaded Candace at Halajan’s back.
Halajan turned to her and said, “Listen, American woman, if you’d like a good table and good service, all you have to do is be nice. Sunny likes you. Otherwise, I’d—”
“She does? You think she likes me? I adore Sunny!” Candace responded, walking over to Sunny and giving her a kiss on each cheek. “How are you? Have I had a week!”
Of course she has, Sunny thought. And yet, she was glad to see her.
Then Candace held Sunny’s wrist, took a step back, and looked at Sunny from head to toe. Her voice rose nine decibels. “What are you wearing? Where did you get that? Stand still. Let me see that.” Candace walked around Sunny as if she were an alabaster statue in a museum.
“It’s to die for,” declared Candace.
“It is, isn’t it? Made by our very own Yazmina.”
Candace looked at Yazmina, whose face had turned red with embarrassment.
Ahmet turned to look at Yazmina as well. Then he looked at Sunny’s dress and back at Yazmina.
She smiled at him, then bowed her head.
He looked away.
When Candace saw Ahmet look at Yazmina and Yazmina smile, she raised her brows and said, “Interesting. Wouldn’t those two be perfect together?”
Halajan said, “Mind your own business.”
“Well, look at them. Both are young, single, and gorgeous,” said Candace.
“They’re fine. Just leave them alone,” said Halajan.
“Oh, really? Well, they don’t look so fine to me,” she continued. “Maybe they’re not so fine. Maybe they need you to help them figure out a way. Why don’t you help this along?”
“Candace, please stop,” Sunny intervened.