“You mean stop visiting.”
“We leave in a week, bro. You don’t want to get her too attached to you.”
Idris nods. He wonders if Timur may not be slightly jealous of his relationship with Roshi, perhaps even resentful that he, Idris, may have robbed him of a spectacular opportunity to play hero. Timur, emerging in slow motion from the blazing building, holding a baby. The crowd exploding in a cheer. Idris is determined not to let Timur parade Roshi in that way.
Still, Timur is right. They are going home in a week, and Roshi has started calling him Kaka Idris. If he arrives late, he finds her agitated. She ties her arms around his waist, a tide of relief washing over her face. His visits are what she looks forward to most, she has told him. Sometimes she clutches his hand with both of hers as they watch a tape. When he is away from her, he thinks often of the faint yellow hairs on her arms, her narrow hazel eyes, her pretty feet, her rounded cheeks, the way she cups her chin in her hands as he reads her one of the children’s books he has picked up from a bookstore near the French lycée. A few times, he has allowed himself to fleetingly imagine what it would be like to bring her to the U.S., how she would fit in with his boys, Zabi and Lemar, back home. This last year, he and Nahil had talked about the possibility of a third child.
“What now?” Amra says the day before he is scheduled to leave.
Earlier that day, Roshi had given Idris a picture, pencil-drawn on a sheet of hospital chart paper, of two stick figures watching a television. He’d pointed to the one with long hair. This is you?
And that one is you, Kaka Idris.
You had long hair, then? Before?
My sister brushed it every night. She knew how to do it so it didn’t hurt.
She must have been a good sister.
When it grows back, you can brush it.
I think I’d like that.
Don’t go, Kaka. Don’t leave.
“She is a sweet girl,” he says to Amra. And she is. Well-mannered, and humble too. With some guilt, he thinks of Zabi and Lemar back in San Jose, who have long professed their dislike of their Afghan names, who are fast turning into little tyrants, into the imperious American children he and Nahil had vowed they would never raise.
“She is survivor,” Amra says.
“Yes.”
Amra leans against the wall. A pair of orderlies rush past them, pushing a gurney. On it lies a young boy with blood-soaked bandaging around his head and some kind of open wound on his thigh.
“Other Afghans from America, or from Europe,” Amra says, “they come and take picture of her. They take video. They make promises. Then they go home and show their families. Like she is zoo animal. I allow it because I think maybe they will help. But they forget. I never hear from them. So I ask again, what now?”
“The operation she needs?” he says. “I want to make it happen.”
She looks at him hesitantly.
“We have a neurosurgery clinic in my group. I’ll speak to my chief. We’ll make arrangements to fly her over to California and have the surgery.”
“Yes, but the money.”
“We’ll get the funding. Worst comes to worst, I’ll pay for it.”
“Out of wallet.”
He laughs. “The expression is ‘out of pocket,’ but, yes.”
“We have to get uncle’s permission.”
“If he ever shows up again.” The uncle hasn’t been seen or heard from since the day Idris gave him the two hundred dollars.
Amra smiles at him. He has never done anything like this. There is something exhilarating, intoxicating, euphoric even, in throwing himself headlong into this commitment. He feels energized. It nearly takes his breath away. To his own amazement, tears prickle his eyes.
“Hvala,” she says. “Thank you.” She stands on tiptoes and kisses his cheek.
…
“Banged one of the Dutch girls,” Timur says. “From the party?”
Idris lifts his head off the window. He had been marveling at the soft brown peaks of the tightly packed Hindu Kush far beneath. He turns to look at Timur in the aisle seat.
“The brunette. Popped half a Vitamin V and rode her straight to the morning call for prayer.”
“Jesus. Will you ever grow up?” Idris says, irked that Timur has burdened him again with knowledge of his misconduct, his infidelity, his grotesque frat-boy antics.
Timur smirks. “Remember, cousin, what happens in Kabul …”
“Please don’t finish that sentence.”
Timur laughs.
Somewhere in the back of the plane, there is a little party going on. Someone is singing in Pashto, someone tapping on a Styrofoam plate like a tamboura.
“I can’t believe we ran into ol’ Nabi,” Timur mutters. “Jesus.”
Idris fishes the sleeping pill he had been saving from his breast pocket and dry-swallows it.
“So I’m coming back next month,” Timur says, crossing his arms, shutting his eyes. “Probably take a couple more trips after that, but we should be good.”
“You trust this guy Farooq?”
“Fuck no. It’s why I’m coming back.”
Farooq is the lawyer Timur has hired. His specialty is helping Afghans who have lived in exile reclaim their lost properties in Kabul. Timur goes on about the paperwork Farooq will file, the judge he is hoping will preside over the proceedings, a second cousin of Farooq’s wife. Idris rests his temple once more against the window, waits for the pill to take effect.
“Idris?” Timur says quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Sad shit we saw back there, huh?”
You’re full of startling insight, bro. “Yup,” Idris says.
“A thousand tragedies per square mile, man.”
Soon, Idris’s head begins to hum, and his vision blurs. As he drifts to sleep, he thinks of his farewell with Roshi, him holding her fingers, saying they would see each other again, her sobbing softly, almost silently, into his belly.
On the ride home from SFO, Idris recalls with fondness the manic chaos of Kabul’s traffic. It’s strange now to guide the Lexus down the orderly, pothole-free southbound lanes of the 101, the always helpful freeway signs, everyone so polite, signaling, yielding. He smiles at the memory of all the daredevil adolescent cabbies with whom he and Timur entrusted their lives in Kabul.
In the passenger seat, Nahil is all questions. Was Kabul safe? How was the food? Did he get sick? Did he take pictures and videos of everything? He does his best. He describes for her the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it’s like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. Kabul’s vivid, arresting details—the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window. Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.