Jamila brought over a woman whose face was covered with a scarf. She held it close to her, allowing only one eye to be seen.
Jamila whispered something in her ear. Haliya looked at her, and Jamila nodded. Then Haliya removed the scarf from her face.
Isabel’s stomach turned. Haliya’s face had been hideously disfigured. One eye was gone, the skin on that side of her face bunched and ribbed like a sock that had fallen around an ankle. The corner of her mouth blended into her cheek, leaving a gaping hole in the side of her mouth.
“Because she ran away, they did this to her, they threw acid on her, saying, ‘Now you’re too ugly for anyone.’ They are worse than dogs, these things that would call themselves men.”
Isabel looked at Haliya, trying to keep her eyes on her so as not to make her feel ashamed that she couldn’t be looked at. But she couldn’t help but feel relieved when Haliya covered her face again.
“Can you help us? Will you?” pleaded Jamila.
“We will try.”
“Is this your friend?” She pointed to Candace, who by now was at Isabel’s side, having so charmed the guard that she’d backed off and was standing in the doorway.
Isabel looked up at her and felt strongly that, yes, she was her friend, even with their differences. It was Candace who’d encouraged her to come, to help. It was Candace who believed in her. “Yes,” she said, “and my partner. We work together.”
Candace put a steady hand on the woman’s shoulder. “We will be back for you. Don’t be afraid.”
“Please don’t go. Take us with you!”
“It’s not as easy as that. But we will be back,” Candace said, not taking her eyes off the woman. “I promise you that.”
Wakil made the arrangements for a car to drive them to his valley. Candace had called him to let him know that she was coming with a friend, a journalist for the BBC who wanted to write a story about his school. (At least the BBC part was true.) She had a feeling he’d be pleased to get the media coverage, and she was right. In return, she hoped to enlist his help for the women in the prison. She thought that with his contacts he’d be able to get the necessary food and supplies, and then bribe their way through the gauntlet of officials and guards. In the meantime she could focus on raising enough money and finding a place to shelter them once she got them out.
He was there waiting for them, wearing his best shalwaar kameez, Pashtun vest, and expensive silk turban when they pulled up. His beard was neatly trimmed, he was as tall and fit as ever, and he looked strikingly handsome. Candace felt the hollowness of yearning in her chest. It had been over a month since they’d been intimate, but sex with Wakil wasn’t something she’d ever forget. He greeted her in his usual publicly stolid fashion, with a small bow and a cool smile, and when he was introduced to Isabel, he smiled broadly and became expansive as he talked about his achievements. Candace was both proud to be a part of what was going on here and hurt that he didn’t appreciate her anymore beyond her ability to bring in money. But she did her duty and brought up the rear as Wakil took them on a tour. As he talked, Isabel taped him with her recorder and stopped to take photographs. Candace couldn’t wait to hear what Isabel had to say.
The clinic was even more impressive than the last time she was there. It was clean, well staffed, brightly lit, and amply supplied. There were more doctors now because Candace had raised extra funds from private donors and had loosened up some American money from health organizations.
The school was another thing altogether. It was afternoon, so the girls had gone home and the boys were studying. Before they entered, Wakil asked Isabel to turn off her tape recorder so she wouldn’t inadvertently interrupt the boys’ studies. She was to stop taking pictures so as not to cause a distraction. Candace noticed Isabel frown, unhappy with the restrictions but polite enough to adhere to them. She watched Isabel jot down some notes, her eyes narrowed with suspicion. Then she looked out at the serious young faces in the room, and she made some notes again. Candace had a feeling that Isabel was going to be critical of the school, probably accuse it of being too serious, overly disciplined. The boys were studying the Koran, sitting on their knees on carpets, swaying forward and back as they read along with the teacher at the front of the room.
There was one boy, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, following her with his eyes. He smiled thinly at her, and she smiled back. And then his smile disappeared and all that was left were his dull, dark eyes, a bitter look on his face.
When she mentioned him to Wakil later, he responded, “You’d look like that, too, if your entire family was killed by an American bomb dropped on your village. These are all sad boys. They are lost and we provide a home for them.”
During the tour of the grounds, Isabel whispered to Candace, “It’s a little quiet here, no? For all these kids? Very disciplined.”
“Wakil’s a serious guy. He’s intent on teaching these kids something so that they’ll have more of a future than selling some rugs in the market with a MADE IN CHINA label on them.”
“Well then, he’s doing a good job.”
What Isabel didn’t mention was the notion that was gnawing at her insides. She’d seen reports on similar places in Pakistan. Schools, madrassas, that were covers for terrorist training. The school had an extremely rigid feel to it: no talking, all prayer, nothing childlike about these children. Could it be a training ground for the boys? That there were girl students here felt disingenuous. She’d have to do some research when they got back to Kabul. She’d have to find out more about Wakil and his pursuits. He seemed too slick to be in this for the kids alone.
Candace finally got Wakil alone, in his office, while one of his assistants continued to show Isabel around the compound. Candace locked the door from the inside and said, “When will I see you again?” She walked up to him, daringly close. She could feel the warmth emanating from his body.
“Soon, my love, soon. I’ve been unable to get away. But do you see how much we’ve accomplished here?” He took a strand of her hair between his index and middle fingers.
She took that as an invitation and stood on her tiptoes and whispered into his ear. “When soon? Will you come to Kabul? Wakil,” she said, her lips fluttering against his skin, “it’s been too long. What about us? Can I stay here with you?”
He lifted her chin and kissed her softly, his full mouth lightly on hers. “My dear Candace, nothing has happened, only that critical things have taken precedence. I will come to Kabul very, very soon—to see you.” He kissed her again, more firmly this time. “And also, because our resources are running low and we need to invest in some major supplies, such as computers and better Internet.” He took her in his arms and kissed her hard and passionately. “Will you help me?”
“I was just going to ask you the very same thing,” she said before feeling his tongue in her mouth and his arms circling her and then one hand on her breast and then down her side to her legs, and then between them. Her knees weakened, and she let her hand roam until she felt his hardness and there, against the wall of his office in the school he’d built from nothing, Candace made love to Wakil with the hope that this meant he did truly love her, knowing all the while he didn’t.
When Wakil escorted the two women to their car, he was formal and distant, as if the last hour they’d spent together hadn’t happened. Candace knew he had to keep up appearances, but sometimes, just sometimes, a smile or a knowing look would be nice.
As they approached their car, she noticed another parked on the other side of the building. Two men were getting in the front, and a third turned their way. It was that same sullen, dull-eyed boy she’d seen earlier. Wakil waved to him and turned to her and Isabel and said, “Excuse me one moment, please,” and walked over to him. They spoke, the boy nodded, he got into the car, and it sped off.
Candace turned to Isabel, who was watching as well. It was nothing, a word, a good-bye. She hoped hers with Wakil would be warmer, that for her he would say
something to remember. But as he walked back their way, stiffly, his chin high, his expression blank, she knew she was going to be disappointed. She’d keep helping him—how could she turn her back on the children?—but she was going to shoot herself if she ever, ever again expected more from him than a periodic smile and a roll in the hay.
The bottle of scotch was heavy on Isabel’s lap as her car made its way through the city to the home of the Last Jew of Kabul. She knew to take a gift, and since it was Friday night, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, this was the most appropriate one she could imagine. Since she was a little girl, she’d watched her father have a shot every Friday night. It was the end of the workweek, he’d said. Time to relax. Jewish Brits were more assimilated than most, probably as a defense against the prevailing anti-Semitism. She grew up knowing she was Jewish but never observing much tradition other than her father’s weekly shot of scotch. It was a huge hypocrisy, she felt, given that her mother’s family had been mostly wiped out in the Holocaust.
The irony to Isabel was that so much of what made her who she was—being Jewish, having been raped, being a journalist—was undercover. But after meeting Jamila, and hearing from Sunny about the Last Jew, Isabel realized undercover was overselfish. People took moral stands every day: The Last Jew against religious persecution, and Jamila against sexual persecution. Isabel felt she was headed toward a stand of her own.
His home was located on Flower Street, adjacent to the old gray-white synagogue, now cracked and in decay, looking more like an old house than a place of worship. It had been very difficult to find. But finally, the car pulled up, and she told the driver to wait for her. Then she ascended the stairs to the second floor, which led to a dark hallway and his door. She knocked. A balding, stout man wearing glasses and a woven yarmulke opened it and said, “Come in.”
She held out her hand, which he took firmly in his. “This is for you,” she said, after introducing herself. She handed him the bottle in the thin plastic bag. His shoes were worn, his shirt so thin at the elbows that she could see through it, and his pants were fraying at the ankles.
He took it, opened the bag, and nodded. “Want a shot?” He smiled. He went to the back to his tiny kitchen and brought out two glasses.
His name was Zablon Simintov. His small room with its red threadbare carpet contained only a toshak, a low table with a pile of old Jewish prayer books, a bokhari to ward off the winter chills, and a small table with a couple of white plastic chairs. They sat and Isabel asked him about the things that were burdening her. When Sunny first told her about him, she’d Googled him and there’d been many stories. But no one had asked the questions she was most interested in, or if they had, he hadn’t answered. So she asked them now.
“Your wife and daughter are in Israel. Your business has been destroyed. You are alone. Why are you still here?”
The forty-five-year-old former carpet trader smiled and said, “Stop or you’ll make me depressed!” and he sucked back another shot of scotch.
For eight hundred years, he said, Afghanistan had had a vibrant Jewish community, which shrank after 1948, when many families left for Israel, and then again in 1979 after the Soviet invasion. And now Simintov was alone, his wife and daughter having moved to Israel in 2001, and his best friend and worst enemy, Ishaq Levin, with whom he shared the synagogue, having died a few years before. He’d been jailed and beaten several times by the Taliban, who ransacked the synagogue and carried off its four-hundred-year-old handwritten Torah scroll. Simintov blamed the loss of the Torah on Levin, who’d told the Taliban that it was worth millions. That was the two men’s falling-out. Now Simintov was on a mission.
“I stayed to find the Torah. To save the synagogue.”
“But how do you live? The Taliban stole your carpets and everything you—”
“Everything I owned of value. My entire business. So can you help me?” He put out his hand as if begging.
She laughed uncomfortably.
“I’m not kidding. I rely on the kindness of strangers,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.
“But wait, Mr. Simintov. How do you propose finding the Torah? And don’t you think the same guys who destroyed the giant Buddha statues probably destroyed your Torah, too?”
“Not if they thought it was valuable. There’s some guy being held in Guantanamo who knows exactly where it is. We just have to ask him.” He smiled, knowing how foolish he sounded.
Isabel looked at him and wondered if he was insane or just a little crazy.
And then he said, “Don’t you see? If I leave, there are no Jews left in all of Afghanistan. And Hitler and Osama bin Laden and every other madman bent on the decimation of an entire people will have won. ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?’ as the saying goes. If I leave, the crazies win.”
They drank to that, and Isabel realized there was crazy and then there was crazy, and Simintov’s brand wasn’t so bad. She gave him a hundred American dollars, kissed him on the cheek, and promised him she’d come back to visit before leaving Kabul.
On the way home the driver took a circuitous route to avoid the police checkpoints because of the traffic. Sitting in the back of the car, Isabel leaned her face on her hand and looked out the window. And then she did something that hadn’t happened to her in months, maybe years. Isabel let herself cry. She wasn’t sure why or what had moved her so, but she had a feeling that, as darkness fell across the city, she was crying for Simintov, living lonely and apart from his family, who’d locked himself in his own prison of sorts—his stubborn defense of his heritage—alone in the synagogue. She cried for Jamila living in squalor in the prison, for Jamila’s friend imprisoned by the violence to her horrible face, and in frustration because the only way to be sure that Jamila would not be killed would be to get her out of the country, and that was an almost impossible task. She cried for Layla, who could at this moment be sitting in a similar prison if she hadn’t already been sold to someone as his third wife. She cried for herself, for in her freedom she, too, was behind bars—the bars that blocked her from feeling connected to her family, from finding love, from facing her painful past.
Ahmet couldn’t stand it any longer, so he walked stealthily upstairs to his mother’s apartment and slipped inside, knowing that she was in the coffeehouse getting it ready for the dinner hour. What was she thinking, this mother of his? She’d always been a rebel, with her smoking, her jean skirt under her dress, and, of course, her unique way of seeing the world. (And, though she tried to hide it, he knew she’d cut her hair, having seen her more than once smoking in the back courtyard without a scarf on her head.) On the one hand he was proud that she was so intelligent and had her own mind. On the other, he was angry that she had no respect for tradition, no worries that she’d shame the family by her actions, or more to the point, that she’d shame him most, since he was the man of the house. And after all the sacrifices he made for her, staying with her, watching over her, protecting her.
He knew the importance of carrying on the traditions of one’s people. That’s why he was waiting for his mother to choose a bride for him. Though, given her rejection of such “nonsense rules,” as she called them, he might be waiting forever. The front room was neat, but he checked under the toshaks and in the drawers of her small cabinet, where he found nothing.
And besides, he thought, there was Yazmina. A widow, yes, but those eyes made him forgive all that had gone on with her before. But is forgiveness enough? he wondered.
In the sleeping room, there was one toshak covered in pillows and blankets. There was also a cabinet for his mother’s clothes. He opened it, his hand first touching the exterior wood, engraved with a traditional Islamic design, which he had loved to follow with his fingers when he was a young child. He knew that inside were three drawers with blue ceramic pulls. And he knew that in one was the mosaic box that his father had bought when Ahmet was born, an offering to her of thanks for bearing him a son.
But
the box was empty except for a beaded necklace with an amulet and a few wrist bangles and earrings.
Where was the letter? He turned to look out her window from which he could see over the walls and out into Kabul. Where would his mother hide a letter from a man whom she hardly knew? A man whose reputation was in question? He replayed the meeting he’d witnessed in his mind: the quick walk through the marketplace until she reached his shop. Him standing outside, waiting for her. Him slipping his hand into his pocket and pulling out a note. Then her pulling her hand from her coat, taking it, her fingers lightly touching his, and putting it in her pocket.
He went through every article of clothing, careful to put each one back exactly as he’d found it. Nothing. Frustrated, he decided to look through everything one last time to be sure he hadn’t missed something. He methodically opened one drawer and then closed it, moving one by one. When he arrived at the third drawer, he found he couldn’t close it all the way. He put his hand in the back to clear what was blocking it, pulling out a stack of letters, and then another, and then another. And the next drawer and the next, in the back, more letters. They’d been stacked neatly, until his slamming the drawers had caused a stack to fall over. The letters were tied, and there were many more than he’d ever expected.
Ahmet untied them and began to read.
My dearest Halajan,
Today is a day of mourning, declared by Karzai, the hypocrite, for the forty Pashtun killed at the wedding up in the Uruzgan province. The Americans raid the hiding places of the Taliban and in so doing, kill many innocents, celebrating love and family. You tell me, please, my Halajan, why the Helmand River survives but all those lives are taken.
And yet today, life goes on in Kabul. I ate my bread and tea for breakfast, some sweet oranges with seeds for lunch and my beloved eggplant, and tonight I wish I were eating with you. Here is life as Rashif sees it: We eat breakfast, we get bombed, and if we’re lucky we survive to look into the eyes of loved ones. My children loved ones are far away. My heart loved one is a mile away and yet a lifetime. One day, Halajan, one day.…