Amra snorts a chuckle. “Of course I know. You think I was fooled? I have done business with warlords and Taliban in this country. I have seen everything. Nothing can give me shock. Nothing, nobody, can fool me.”
“I imagine that’s true.”
“You are honest,” she says. “At least you are honest.”
“I just think these people, everything they’ve been through, we should respect them. By ‘we,’ I mean people like Timur and me. The lucky ones, the ones who weren’t here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We’re not like these people. We shouldn’t pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we’re not entitled to them … I’m rambling.”
“Rambling?”
“I’m not making sense.”
“No, I understand,” she says. “You say their stories, it is gift they give you.”
“A gift. Yes.”
They sip some more wine. They talk for some time, for Idris the first genuine conversation he has had since arriving in Kabul, free of the subtle mocking, the vague reproach he has sensed from the locals, the government officials, those in the aid agencies. He asks about her work, and she tells him that she has served in Kosovo with the UN, in Rwanda after the genocide, Colombia, Burundi too. She has worked with child prostitutes in Cambodia. She has been in Kabul for a year now, her third stint, this time with a small NGO, working at the hospital and running a mobile clinic on Mondays. Married twice, divorced twice, no kids. Idris finds it hard to guess at Amra’s age, though likely she’s younger than she looks. There is a fading shimmer of beauty, a roughshod sexuality, behind the yellowing teeth, the fatigue pouches under the eyes. In four, maybe five years, Idris thinks, that too will be gone.
Then she says, “You want to know what happen to Roshi?”
“You don’t have to tell,” he says.
“You think I am drunk?”
“Are you?”
“Little bit,” she says. “But you are honest guy.” She taps him on the shoulder gently, and a little playfully. “You ask to know for right reasons. For other Afghans like you, Afghans coming from West, it is like—how do you say?—stretching the neck.”
“Rubbernecking.”
“Yes.”
“Like p**n ography.”
“But maybe you are good guy.”
“If you tell me,” he says, “I will take it as a gift.”
So she tells him.
Roshi lived with her parents, two sisters, and her baby brother in a village a third of the way between Kabul and Bagram. One Friday last month, her uncle, her father’s older brother, came to visit. For almost a year, Roshi’s father and the uncle had had a feud over the property where Roshi lived with her family, property which the uncle felt belonged rightfully to him, being the older brother, but which his father had passed to the younger, and more favored, brother. The day he came, though, all was well.
“He say he want to end their fight.”
In preparation, Roshi’s mother had slaughtered two chickens, made a big pot of rice with raisins, bought fresh pomegranates from the market. When the uncle arrived, he and Roshi’s father kissed and embraced. Roshi’s father hugged his brother so hard, his feet lifted off the carpet. Roshi’s mother wept with relief. The family sat down to eat. Everyone had seconds, and thirds. They helped themselves to the pomegranates. After that, there was green tea and small toffee candies. The uncle then excused himself to use the outhouse.
When he came back, he had an ax in his hand.
“The kind for chopping tree,” Amra says.
The first one to go was Roshi’s father. “Roshi told me her father never even know what happened. He didn’t see anything.”
A single strike to the neck, from behind. It nearly decapitated him. Roshi’s mother was next. Roshi saw her mother try to fight, but several swings to the face and chest and she was silenced. By now the children were screaming and running. The uncle chased after them. Roshi saw one of her sisters make a run for the hallway, but the uncle grabbed her by the hair and wrestled her to the ground. The other sister did make it out to the hallway. The uncle gave chase, and Roshi could hear him kicking down the door to the bedroom, the screams, then the quiet.
“So Roshi, she decide to escape with the little brother. They run out of the house, they run for front door but it is locked. The uncle, he did it, of course.”
They ran for the yard, out of panic and desperation, perhaps forgetting that there was no gate in the yard, no way out, the walls too tall to climb. When the uncle burst out of the house and came for them, Roshi saw her little brother, who was five, throw himself into the tandoor, where, only an hour before, his mother had baked bread. Roshi could hear him screaming in the flames, when she tripped and fell. She turned onto her back in time to see blue sky and the ax whooshing down. And then nothing.
Amra stops. Inside, Leonard Cohen sings a live version of “Who By Fire.”
Even if he could talk, which he cannot at the moment, Idris wouldn’t know the proper thing to say. He might have said something, some offering of impotent outrage, if this had been the work of the Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or some megalomaniacal Mujahideen commander. But this cannot be blamed on Hekmatyar, or Mullah Omar, or Bin Laden, or Bush and his War on Terror. The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word senseless springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It’s what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.
He thinks of the girl, Roshi, back at the hospital, curled up against the wall, her toes knotted, the infantile look on her face. The crack in the crown of her shaved head, the fist-sized mass of glistening brain tissue leaking from it, sitting on her head like the knot of a sikh’s turban.
“She told you this story herself?” he finally asks.
Amra nods heavily. “She remember very clearly. Every detail. She can tell to you every detail. I wish she can forget because of the bad dreams.”
“The brother, what happened to him?”
“Too many burns.”
“And the uncle?”
Amra shrugs.
“They say be careful,” she says. “In my job, they say be careful, be professional. It’s not good idea to get attached. But Roshi and me...”
The music suddenly dies. Another power outage. For a few moments all is dark, save for the moonlight. Idris hears people groaning inside the house. Halogen torches promptly come to life.