A House Without Windows

  “I . . . I have known them for years, indeed. Kamal-jan, may Allah forgive his sins, gave me no trouble. He looked after his family, he was . . . oh, what can I say? His widow now sits here. She has four children to look after. My wife knows her well. I cannot believe she would commit such a heinous crime.”

  There were groans and shouts and fists pumping in the air.

  “Enough!” Hakimi cried, feeling a trickle of sweat trace his spine. He felt his breath catch to think how the gathering mob would react to any plan he might propose. They hated him, he knew. Why oh why had he agreed to take on this job?

  “I want to hear what Agha Rafiqi has to say.” He turned again to Agha Rafiqi, who looked more than a little uncomfortable with the power vested in him.

  Agha Rafiqi cleared his throat and started cautiously.

  “I am no judge but . . . I . . . I would say, as a matter of decency, that she should be allowed to stay here and tend to her children until these matters can be sorted out.”

  The women buzzed in agreement.

  Hakimi nodded authoritatively. People respected Rafiqi and wouldn’t question their neighborhood elder. The accusing shouts fell to a grumble. Hakimi cleared his throat, fidgeted with his police belt, and took a step away from Zeba.

  “Very well, then I suppose there’s the issue of the body . . .”

  “We will wrap his body and move it closer to the back door of the house. His family can tend to his washing there,” one of the men called out.

  Basir felt his stomach settle a bit. Hakimi looked all around, peered into every corner of their home, and examined their courtyard one square foot at a time. He had two officers with him, young boys barely older than Basir, bushy haired and smooth faced.

  Someone pulled a bedsheet off the clothesline. Hakimi, hands on his hips, thanked them for helping with a nod. He avoided Zeba’s eyes.

  Basir could see the neighbors were more than a little interested in the gory scene. The women filed out in respect but found reason to linger in the street, necks craning as they hoped for a glimpse. Was it really as bad as people had said?

  It all might have ended there had Fareed not stormed in, breathless and enraged. Fareed, Kamal’s young cousin. A man who could curse and exchange pleasantries in the same breath. Fareed’s tunic hung from his body, and his face was flushed. Agha Hakimi was startled and nearly dropped his pocket pad.

  “What happened here? Where’s my cousin?”

  Fareed’s eyes fell upon the four men carrying the rolled bedsheet. The pale floral pattern was darkened with splotchy red stains.

  “So it’s true? Is that him? Let me see my cousin! What happened to him?”

  He pushed his way closer, but three men held him back, muttering words of condolence.

  “Somebody tell me what happened here!” Fareed roared.

  All faces turned to Hakimi. The police chief straightened his shoulders and summarized what he’d learned thus far.

  “Your cousin was found in the courtyard. We are not sure who killed him at this moment. No one heard anything until Khanum Zeba came out screaming. We believe she’d found her husband’s body. So while we investigate this further, we’ll leave Zeba to look after the children for tonight.”

  Fareed looked at his cousin’s wife, whose shaking had worsened since he entered the gate. She was rocking with eyes half closed. Fareed turned to stare at the circle of onlookers, some shifting under his grief with a guilt they could not explain. His nostrils flared and his brow knotted with fury.

  “Have you lost your minds—all of you?” The men looked at one another.

  Fareed did not wait for an answer. In that second, he pounced on Zeba, and before anyone could stop him, his hands closed around her neck.

  CHAPTER 4

  ZEBA, LIKE A TODDLER WITH A FEVER, YEARNED FOR HER MOTHER in those bleak hours. But she did not cry out for her. After the venomous words they’d exchanged, Zeba was not yet desperate enough to reach out to Gulnaz. She would wait.

  It was a shame, really. Once upon a time, Zeba and her mother, Gulnaz, had been as close as a flower to its stem. Zeba had been a radiant child, a manifestation of the name her father had bestowed upon her. She would slip from her father’s lap to her mother’s side, giggling as her parents took turns tickling her tummy, kissing the top of her head, or tossing her in the air.

  Zeba’s brother, Rafi, was five years older and more serious by nature. He was a simple and docile son who gave his parents neither reason to boast nor to complain.

  While most of the women around Gulnaz grew round with their next child by the time the previous had taken its first steps, Gulnaz was not like any other woman. She thrived on having control—control of her emotions, her body, and her family. Her husband was content to let her exert her will. She drew much envy for that, which further fueled her need to be in command.

  Gulnaz would have a child only when she wanted. Whether she did this by denying her husband’s attentions or by some trickery of herbs was not known. She simply smirked when her sisters-in-law dared to ask.

  It was 1979 and the Soviet troops had started to roll into the country, the end result of a flirtation between Afghanistan and the great power that had begun when Gulnaz was born twenty years earlier.

  Rafi, her firstborn, was old enough to bathe, dress, and feed himself when Gulnaz decided she was ready for a second child. Nine months after she declared her desire, Zeba was born. Gulnaz loved Zeba all the more because her cherubic existence was proof that Gulnaz was the captain of her own ship.

  Afghanistan changed hands that year, one president replacing another who had either died of natural causes or had been smothered by mutinous hands. The truth would remain elusive. Since chaos breeds chaos, the new president would be replaced before the year was over. It was an inauspicious time to bring new life. Gulnaz wondered if even Zeba had been a mistake.

  Imagine a home led by three different patriarchs in one year, she thought to herself. No, this kind of home could not survive, nor could a country.

  We will have no more children, Gulnaz had declared to her husband and their family. No one doubted her when she made the vow. They knew, by then, that she could circumvent nature to make it so.

  GULNAZ WAS A SORCERESS, A SKILLFUL TEASER OF FATE JUST AS her grandmother had been. While Gulnaz maintained that her grandmother had never taught her any of the trickery she was known for, it was obviously not true. What Gulnaz practiced was an intricate and complex art honed over generations, not one that could be picked up casually.

  She hummed as she concocted, which made it seem all the more innocent to her children and husband. They, after all, only benefited from her skills. When the children burned hot with fever, she dripped holy water into their mouths and placed amulets beneath their pillows. When Rafi writhed with pain as a boil the size of a tomato grew on his calf, Gulnaz set off for the lake. She found a frog, sliced it open with a paring knife, and butterflied it onto the mass, wrapping its bleeding corpse in place with strips of fabric. Within an hour, Rafi shouted loudly. The boil had erupted and pus flowed freely down his leg. Gulnaz tossed the frog’s body outside, and Rafi’s leg was completely healed two days later. Gulnaz was as loving and devoted as any wife or mother could be—she was just a bit more potent. Her children took comfort in their mother’s magic even when it hurt.

  When Rafi was six, he broke his leg. It happened the day after his aunt had commented on his remarkable height. Cursing under her breath, Gulnaz held a sewing needle over a flame and used it to pierce Rafi’s earlobe, tears in her eyes as he writhed and screamed beneath her. And until he turned fourteen years old, she left one lock of hair uncut until it reached the middle of his back.

  “To protect you from nazar,” she’d said grimly. The evil eye was powerful. These things had to be done.

  The rest of the family was discomfited by Gulnaz. The cousins, sisters-in-law, and aunts bit their tongues and clung to their prayers like they were antidotes. The green-eyed beauty made
them quite anxious.

  Zeba sat at her mother’s side and watched as she plunged hot needles in chunks of animal fat or boiled eggs that she would leave at an unsuspecting doorstep. These habits became as routine to her as washing the bedsheets or peeling potatoes. This was life with Gulnaz. Zeba recited multiplication tables along with other children her age but understood the mathematical property even better when Gulnaz showed her how a knot threaded five times was five times as powerful in its ability to turn friction between two resentful women into a fire so angry it could burn a house down.

  But Gulnaz used her powers only when necessary or when those closest to her called upon her for help. She was judicious about it because she knew it made her husband uneasy, though he never outright forbid it. Her trickery, like everything else in her life, was under her control and she could exercise it as much or as little as she saw fit.

  All that changed when Zeba’s father disappeared. Gulnaz recalled a shift in her mother, a tightening of the jaw that never eased.

  Zeba’s father had disappeared just as she’d learned to read. She remembered it only as a time when a string of letters made more sense than the happenings in her small home. Gulnaz told Rafi and Zeba only that their father had gone off to fight the godless communists. The children wished quietly for him to come home but quickly learned it was not a topic to discuss with their mother. When relatives did bring up his sudden departure, Gulnaz would spend the rest of the day beating the dust from the carpets or scrubbing the blackened pots with vengeance. It was best not to mention Padar, even if his absence was a window left open in the winter. The war was bloodier each day, and soon, it seemed, the martyred would outnumber the living.

  Gulnaz withdrew from the rest of her husband’s family within their shared compound and pulled her children in closer, taking on the appearance of the sullen, abandoned wife. When enough time passed that some began to refer to her as a widow, Gulnaz took advantage of their assumptions. She dressed in black, drew the curtains on the windows, and spoke in hushed tones. She stayed up when the children slept and watched over them by the wan light of a flickering candle. With her children, she was cheerful and loving but only when they were alone. The children had loved their father and missed him sorely. Rafi grew more subdued than he already was by nature, emasculated by his father’s absence. Zeba, with a child’s magical thinking, believed her father would return. She’d fallen asleep to the soothing rhythm of his heartbeat too many nights to think she would never lay her head on his chest again.

  Gulnaz and the children drew looks—some sympathetic, some suspicious. Gulnaz despised them equally and added those people’s names to her list of enemies. She doled out bits of retribution to them all. Sheltered by her mother, Zeba grew accustomed to being an outsider. Rafi, though quiet and reserved, became her best friend. He was the only other person in the world who could possibly understand what it meant to have Gulnaz as a mother.

  WHEN A MAN’S HAD ENOUGH, HE’S HAD ENOUGH, ZEBA’S AUNT HAD once commented at a holiday dinner, as the conversation turned to a neighboring couple whose arguments could be heard from the street. The women, while clearing the dinner dishes, had been arguing that the husband was a stubborn brute deserving of his wife’s near-public berating, but Ama Ferei, her father’s sister, considered other possibilities. No wife or husband is without fault. Only those two know the truth of their story.

  Zeba had not thought much of the conversation, and Gulnaz had only nodded and smiled. Her aunt had been the voice of reason, she’d believed. But once Gulnaz and her children were within the confines of their own home with the curtains drawn, everything changed.

  “He’s had enough, she thinks,” Gulnaz snapped at no one in particular. “Of course he’s had enough. What a terrible wife she must be!”

  “What’s wrong, Madar-jan?” Zeba had asked cautiously. She was around twelve at the time, hovering in the space between childhood and adolescence. She and the other cousins her age spent their time with the women, learning the nuances of gossip and etiquette.

  “Your aunt always says what’s on her mind with that look that she’s being so noble and above gossiping. I don’t know what’s more insulting—the way she hints that I drove your father away or that she thinks I’m too stupid to know what she’s really talking about!”

  Rafi never knew what to do when their mother went into one of her fits. Hating to feel helpless, he would busy himself with work outside the house. On this particular occasion, he picked up the yellow plastic container and headed out the door to draw water from the well. Zeba watched him go. She had no such escape, especially in the evening hours.

  “But Madar-jan, I didn’t hear her say anything about our father,” Zeba protested cautiously. If she had, she would have been duly offended. She missed him still, even as the memory of his face was starting to blur.

  “You didn’t? Oh, Zeba.” Gulnaz sighed. “My daughter, a one-inch scorpion can be just as deadly as a hulking tiger. You’ve got to learn to pay attention and respect every threat for what it is. And the way she watched you! I’m sure she’s jealous because you’re much taller than her daughter and your skin is so much fairer. Your cousin is sweet, but she doesn’t have your looks and her mother knows it.”

  Zeba didn’t feel that much prettier than her cousin. As a matter of fact, she’d felt distinctly less pretty than her and everyone else. It felt good to think she might have been wrong about how her own looks compared to others.

  “To think, I spent two days making dumplings for tonight’s dinner because she asked me to—not to mention that I cooked for them every day last week while she was ill and bedridden. But your aunt doesn’t remember any of that. She’s too busy thinking that I sent her brother off into the mountains—as if I had that much control over that man! She doesn’t know what she’s talking about and should bite her tongue before something else does.”

  It stung to hear her mother speak about her father so distantly. He’d been gone six years, but Zeba still held out hope that he might return. She dreamed of crossing paths with him in the markets. Would they recognize each other? Would he run to her and kiss her forehead? Zeba had less optimistic thoughts, too. Maybe they’d been within a stone’s throw of him already and he’d ducked out of view before they could spot him. There were times when her thoughts drifted further and further in that mournful dejected direction and Zeba’s world became colored with loneliness, suspicion, and doubt.

  And maybe Gulnaz was right. She did catch Ama Ferei eyeing her and her mother strangely once in a while. Just last week, when she’d dropped off a pot of her mother’s soup at their home, Ama Ferei had asked her if her mother was taking good care of her and her brother. Zeba had not mentioned the question when she returned home, shrugging it off as concern, but it was quite possible that there was more to it than she’d realized.

  Four weeks later, Zeba sat beside her mother as she chopped a molted snakeskin into tiny flakes and folded a pinch of it into a pot of spinach and leeks simmering over a ringed flame. They cooked in the roofless room at the back of the house, where the smoke and fumes drifted into the outside air. All the while, Gulnaz chatted casually with her daughter, commenting on how pretty Zeba looked that day and that she, as a mother, could not have asked God for a more perfect daughter. Zeba swelled to hear her mother’s words and to see the glimmer of pride in her green eyes.

  Gulnaz fried some homemade cheese separately and layered it into the spinach when the leaves had melted smooth. She moved the mixture around with a fork to confirm the snakeskin had disappeared completely.

  “What will this do, Madar-jan?” Zeba had asked her mother as she stared into the pot.

  “It will square things with your aunt for trying to skin us with her eyes. This will keep her busy enough that she won’t have time to say such awful things about us again.”

  Gulnaz put the top on the pot and wrapped it in an old wool blanket to keep it warm. She and Zeba delivered it to Ama Ferei.

  “O
h, Gulnaz-jan, for me? Why did you go to such trouble?” she’d asked, eyeing the small pot carefully.

  Zeba wondered if she suspected something. She held her breath.

  “You’re like a sister to me, Ferei-jan. You’ve been looking quite anemic lately, and I thought some spinach would do you good.”

  “I have been feeling very weak lately. God save your husband, he would always say that you were quite a doctor with nothing more than vegetables and herbs at your disposal. So tell me. What did you put in this sabzee?”

  Gulnaz’s eyebrows pulled upward.

  “Did my husband say that?” she said demurely. “Ah, he was too generous with his words. But to be honest, I added a little fresh ginger. My mother always told me there was nothing ginger couldn’t fix.”

  “I’ve heard the same thing,” Ama Ferei said, nodding. She tried her best to sound playful. “Now, I’m not one for gossip but everyone knows about your tricks, my dear. What else have you put in here?”

  Gulnaz put her hands on her narrow hips. Her back straightened and she inhaled sharply.

  “Really, Ferei. I thought better of you,” she said in a huff. The corner of her blue head scarf fluttered in the breeze.

  Ama Ferei laughed easily before turning her attention to Zeba.

  “Zeba-jan,” she said, her voice sweet despite her accusing countenance. “What did your mother really put in this food? You’re not going to be deceitful like her, are you? I don’t think our family could handle it.”

  Zeba watched her mother smile gracefully and touch her aunt’s forearm gently. Zeba’s face flamed red with shame and anger.

  “My dear, I know you’re not well. There’s no reason to say such things, especially in front of my daughter, who’s barely a young woman. Feed the spinach to the dogs in the street, if that’s how you feel. I was only trying to help.”