The Way Home

Chapter 11

RABIA STARTLED AND SLAPPED a hand to her breast when she realized the askar had joined her in the cooking room.

“You are up and walking,” she said when she had regained her composure.

“Barely. I feel like a toddler taking his first steps.”

“Toddler? I do not know this word.”

He made his way to a low bench in the corner of the room and eased down onto it. “A baby. Learning to walk.”

“You are no baby,” she said, then immediately regretted it when his gaze held hers for a long moment.

She quickly turned back to her stove and the meal she was in the middle of preparing. But she could not stop the thoughts of that moment by his bed several days ago, when he had kissed her hand. Or thoughts of the way she had held him during the withdrawal tremors, the way she had bathed his face and cooled his brow when it felt as though he were burning up with fever.

Memories of her hands on his feverish skin, of his warm body pressed against hers, of his face pressed against her breasts as she had held him in the dark and willed him through the worst of it would not leave her alone.

Her face flushed hot, and not from the heat of the summer day or the cookstove. It was not acceptable to be thinking of him that way. She had already broken many Pashtun laws because of him. Every time she was alone with him or touched him, she went against her tribal customs. Every time he met her eyes and she did not look away or spoke to him without being spoken to, she violated another law.

Now was not the time to be reminded that she was a woman who had once lain with a man. This was not the man who should remind her.

Her hands trembled as she reached for her special and treasured blend of spices to season the small piece of lamb she had managed to barter for. To even think such things was a sin. To act on those thoughts would bring shame to her and her father and her people.

That was why she had worked hard to keep her distance from him when possible. She did not attend to him as she once had. She let him bathe and dress himself. She allowed him to test his physical limits, even as she knew his struggle was difficult.

It had taken him a full week after the opium was out of his system to be able to walk from one end of the small social/sleeping room to the other. Another few days before he ventured out of the room.

Now, today, he sought her out in the cooking room.

From now on, it would become more difficult to avoid him.

She wondered if he had been thinking about the same things she had. Then she realized he had become very quiet, and she could not resist looking back over her shoulder at him.

His dark eyes studied her with a heat and intensity that had her spinning quickly back to her cooking and praying for forgiveness and strength.

HE MADE HER nervous. He was sorry about that, but he was also tired of avoiding her. No easy task, given the size of the little house that consisted of this kitchen, the sleeping/social room, Rabia’s sleeping room, and little else. They generally took their meager meals outside in the back, in a courtyard shaded by fruit trees and surrounded by the same type of brick and straw walls that had been used in the construction of the house. The head was a separate building out back and very primitive.

He thought of all of this and tried not to think about the soft body hidden beneath her long dark blouse and skirt or about the hair she had covered with a white scarf as she worked over the stove.

So he took some time to get his head back together and study the room. A heavy black iron stove with three cooking tops had been pushed against a wall. A stove pipe extended outside. A worn and dented bucket sat on the floor beside it. A dwindling supply of coal and wood chips lined the bottom.

The room was summer-hot, but the aromas actually had his stomach growling. He thought he might have gained a little weight during the past week. He knew he’d gained some strength. Their belongings were meager, as were the meals Rabia prepared, and he felt guilty for taking food from her mouth and her father’s.

“What are you cooking?” he asked, to break the tension that felt as uncomfortable as it felt edgy.

For past meals, she’d made thin barley and rice soup, the occasional serving of fresh yogurt, and small loaves of bread she baked in her oven. Fruits, nuts, tomatoes, and potatoes filled in at every meal.

“Tonight we will have yakhni pilau, mutton steamed in rice. And oabili—pilau again but with raisins and shredded carrots. Perhaps also some almond and pistachio nuts if I have them.”

“What’s the occasion?” This he knew was a special meal, one that must have cost her a fortune.

“I exchanged favors for the meat and the raisins,” she said simply.

“What kind of favors?”

“Only some sewing.”

So that’s what she’d been doing in the night when he’d awakened and seen a light on in her room.

“Is that what smells so good?”

“Perhaps it is the bread. It is almost done baking.”

It seemed odd, suddenly, that she represented his entire life and he knew very little about her. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”

She shook her head and continued stirring her pot. “My aunt. My mother died giving birth to me. I was my father and mother’s only child.”

Which explained why there was no extended family living with them, which was the Pashtun way—another tidbit he hadn’t known that he knew.

While there was no self-pity in her tone, he felt her sorrow and her loss. “I’m sorry.”

“As am I. She was my father’s second wife. His first wife bore him no children. I am told she died of a sudden illness. Like my mother, she was very young,” she said softly. “I am told my mother was a beautiful woman. I miss not knowing her.”

“I didn’t know my mother, either.”

The world inside the small room skidded to a screeching halt. Rabia froze at her stove, then slowly turned to look at him.

“I don’t know where that came from,” he said, his eyes wide, his heart pounding. “I don’t know why I know that.”

“This is a good thing. Do you remember any more?”

He resisted the knee-jerk urge to shake his head, catching himself at the last second. He’d had an actual memory, not a piece of information that he couldn’t attach to anything. It was short and incomplete, but it was real, and he didn’t want to cloud it by launching a vertigo attack. “No. That’s it. I just know that I didn’t know my mother.”

“Then I, too, am sorry.”

He closed his eyes and tried to will the thought to flesh out, to develop, to do something more than lie there like a lead weight to compound the other weights pressing down on his shoulders.

So. He didn’t know his mother. Why? Was she dead, too, like Rabia’s mother? Or had she left? What about his father? Did he have a sister? A brother? A wife? He’d wondered all of this often, but today a tangible piece of his past was within reach, and he felt the need for answers much more urgently.

His head started to hurt again, so he thrashed around for another diversion.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

She moved to her work space beside the stove and started chopping vegetables. “I am twenty-eight years.”

Despite her hard life, she looked younger. “Why aren’t you married?” The question had been rumbling around in the back of his mind for a long time now.

She hesitated with her back to him, then let out a breath. “I was.”

Was.

Divorce was uncommon in Afghanistan because of the social stigmas. Marriages were also generally arranged social and economic contracts between families. More nuggets of intel he had no idea that he’d known.

He wanted to ask what had happened, but he’d infringed on her privacy so much already that he let it go.

As it turned out, she volunteered the information.

“Rahim was a policeman in Kabul. He was killed by a Taliban fighter posing as a fellow officer.”

What a world. What a country. “Again. I’m sorry. How long ago?”

“Four years. We had passed our second year as husband and wife.”

He felt very tired suddenly. And didn’t think he could bear to ask her any more questions. He wasn’t the only one who had lost. This war had cost her dearly.

Without another word, he slowly rose to his feet and left her alone with her thoughts.

HE DIDN’T TURN his head when Rabia joined him on the flat roof of her father’s house. He lay still on his back and stared into a sky that was obsidian-black and sprayed with stars shining over a land as foreign to him as his own face.

“You should not be up here, askar. You could be spotted.”

“And what would they see? A crippled-up old Pashtun scarecrow of a man with threads of gray in his hair. Even if I was spotted, no one would give me a second look.”

She sat down beside him, folding her feet beneath her hips. “The village is small. You are a stranger.”

“I’m your long-lost uncle visiting from the big city, remember?”

She didn’t think much of that, even though the cover story had been her idea, but she didn’t say anything, at least not for a while.

“How did you get up here?”

“Same way you did.” He’d painstakingly climbed the wooden ladder propped up against the back of the house.

“I meant, how did you get up here by yourself? You could have fallen.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you could have. The dizziness still comes and goes.”

That it did. The vertigo and piercing headaches crippled him more than his bad leg and the loss of vision ever could. Earlier this morning, he had moved too fast, and it had taken him down. He’d needed more than an hour before the room stopped spinning and the nausea had backed off to tolerable. So, yeah, climbing up here was probably a stupid risk. But he still couldn’t tolerate bright sunlight and couldn’t risk being seen in the daylight, anyway. This was the second night he’d ventured out on his own—but it was the first night she’d come looking for him.

“The house is warm. I felt caged in.” More than caged. He’d felt restless and edgy. He’d needed space. He’d needed distance from where she slept in her bed on the floor in a room not five feet away from him.

He never should have touched her that day. He never should have kissed her hand. Everything had changed between them in that moment. He was aware of her now. She was aware of him, and she kept her distance because of it, which was just as well, because there wasn’t a damn thing he could or should do about it, anyway.

He needed to get out of here. And there was the rub. Go where? Go how?

“Perhaps you wish you were back in the cave,” she said, breaking into his thoughts.

He laughed bitterly. “Or maybe you wish you had me chained up again so you could keep better track of me.” He didn’t know why he was angry with her.

“The chain was for your own protection. I could not be with you all the time. You were often disoriented. You could have wandered off. Fallen off the side of the mountain. Walked into a Taliban patrol.”

“Careful. I’ll start thinking you care.”

He turned his head slowly, chancing a glance at her then…intrigued by what he saw in the moonlit night.

She did care. She didn’t want to, but she did.

“I would care if you were caught and led the Taliban to us,” she said grumpily. “My father is old. I do not wish him to die at the hands of those barbarians.”

Yeah, there was that.

“Does your father know you’re up here?”

“He is asleep.”

The old man slept a lot. During the day, he napped quietly either in the back courtyard or in the shade of his front stoop, occasionally waking up to hold court with villagers who stopped to speak with him. He seemed oblivious to what went on inside his own house. It made him wonder if the old man might be ill.

Her father’s name was Wakdar Kahn Kakar. Kakar, she had told him one day when he’d asked, was their tribe’s name.

“Wakdar means ‘man of authority,’” she’d said, then added, “Do not speak to him unless he speaks to you first. Then you should address him as Shaghalai Kakar, to show respect.”

“So what is he? Some sort of tribal elder?”

“He is the malik, the village representative, and speaks for the people at the shura, the village council.”

“So everyone brings him their problems.”

“And he takes them to the mullah—the religious leader—who decides if they will be presented to the council.”

“How would the mullah like it if he knew an American askar was hiding in the malik’s house?”

She’d had nothing to say to that. But he suspected she thought about it a lot. Most likely, she thought about it tonight up on the roof.

“Maybe I should run and save you both a lot of trouble.”

It was her turn to look at the sky. “Where would you go? How far would you get?”

“That was a joke.” He could barely walk, let alone run. Even if his leg wasn’t a problem, the vertigo would take him down before he got ten yards. “Joke? A funny statement?” he clarified when she said nothing.

“I know what a joke is.”

“Yet clearly, it’s a concept you don’t understand.” He crossed his arms and made a pillow for his head.

He realized now that he could easily start living for the night when he could come up here and see the sky and not breathe air that smelled of strong spices and her father’s tobacco smoke. Up here, it smelled of living things instead of the bat shit and the must of the cave where he’d been for so long. Other foul smells hovered at the edge of his memory. Smells that he associated with pain but couldn’t pinpoint.

She started to get up. “We should go back inside. Come. I will help you down.”

“Not yet. Relax, OK? Even the bad guys snuggle up to their RPGs and sleep sometimes. They’re not looking for me tonight.”

She did not find his sense of humor remotely funny. He found it ironic that he had one.

The truth was, Rabia found nothing funny. Then again, how the hell would he know? It had only been a couple of weeks since he hadn’t been blitzed on opium.

“So if you’re not worried I’ll run, then why are you up here?” Unaccompanied women did not venture out after dark in this land of sharia law and public stoning. “Or are we back to the possibility that you were worried about me?”

The biggest joke of all. She might not know how to handle the sexual undertones rattling around between them, but she knew how to erect distance. When she again said nothing, he decided it was time to find out more about his reluctant nurse and host. That was the thing about opium. He had pretty much not given a damn about anything while he was on it. Now he had questions. Now his head was clear—empty but clear.

“What do you do, Rabia jana?” he asked surprising her by adding the formality used when addressing young women. “When you aren’t risking your neck hiding American soldiers? You speak English. You’re educated. That’s clear.” It was also unusual. Ninety percent of Afghan women were illiterate.

There went another one. A random piece of information he hadn’t known that he knew.

“I am a teacher of girls. My school is in Kabul.”

“Kabul?” This village was in the Kandahar Province, south of Kabul and west of the Pakistan border. Another mysterious nugget of information.

“You don’t normally live here?”

“I was born here. My father sent me to live with his brother in Kabul when I was sixteen. Right after the Taliban were removed from power.”

“In 2001, when the U.S. and Coalition forces launched an offensive.”

She looked at him sharply. “Do you realize what you said?”

Not until it had come out of his mouth. “Yeah. I do. Like I said, that’s been happening on and off lately.”

“Since you’ve been off the opium.”

“Yes. And it seems to happen when we talk. That day in the kitchen. Now. Conversation seems to trigger these… memories. Keep talking to me.” He worked to contain his excitement. This felt like a breakthrough. If he could remember things about Afghanistan, maybe he could remember something about who he was.

“You are right,” she said, and he could hear a barely contained excitement in her voice, too. “The American and Coalition forces defeated the Taliban in 2001. Radical sharia law was thrown out. Girls returned to school. Women went to work. At least, in some provinces.”

“But not in Kandahar?”

“No. Not in Kandahar.”

“No wonder you prefer Kabul.”

“What I prefer are basic human rights. The Taliban have been ousted from political power, but they still rule by terror here in Kandahar Province. Women here are expected to follow sharia law. We have no rights. We are chattel. Only because of my father, only because he is a malik, was he able to send me to Kabul, where I went to school.”

“To become a teacher.”

“Yes. And to become active in the Afghan women’s movement. Because of us, there are women in parliament now. Some of us even drive.”

Her statement triggered another memory. “You were driving when you found me.”

“Yes.” Pride filled her tone. He understood why. She was a trailblazer.

“Isn’t it dangerous for you to drive in this part of Afghanistan?”

“Because of the heavy Taliban presence, yes. But I studied hard to pass the test and earn the right to drive as any man does.”

“That doesn’t explain why you risked driving through Taliban territory.”

“My father called me home. I drove during daylight hours to avoid the night patrols.”

She was not only beautiful, she was also smart and brave, and she honored her father. Here a daughter obeyed her father with no questions asked.

“Your father is ill, isn’t he?”

She drew a long breath. “He is old. And yes, he is not as well as he once was.”

He had noticed that the old man barely picked at his food. And then there was the excessive sleeping. “He should see a doctor.”

“He refuses. He is a stubborn man, my father. Like you, I believe, are a stubborn man.” She stood then and held out her hand. “Do not tell me no again. We must go inside. And you will accept my help.” Sheer determination filled her eyes.

“And if I say no?” Because she looked so stern, he couldn’t resist baiting her.

“Then you will be responsible for me not getting any sleep this night.”

She’d known exactly how to get to him. “That’s not playing fair.”

“What about life is fair?”

Didn’t he know it? And yet this exchange made him smile.

He took her hand and slowly rose to a sitting position. Standing had gotten easier, but he always had to take extreme care with sudden movements, or he’d land on his ass, sweating like a marathon runner in the last mile, swallowing back his dinner, and hanging on to the world while it spun out of control.

“Wait until you are steady,” she said when he finally had his feet beneath him.

They stood side-by-side in the moonlight, his weight on his good leg, his world fairly level. It struck him then that for a woman of such strength, she was neither tall nor heavily built.

“How tall are you?”

She told him in Pashto.

That calculated in English to five feet four inches, which made him around five-foot-eight or -nine since the top of her head was level with his nose.

“Ready?” she asked uncertainly.

Ten feet separated them from the edge of the flat roof. “I can do this.”

Only the first step out of the gate proved he couldn’t. His bad leg promptly cramped, and he started to go down. Rabia moved in fast. She tucked herself under his shoulder and wrapped an arm around his waist, steadying him.

“That went well,” he gritted out as he rode through the burning ache in his shin.

“I suspect your leg was once broken and did not heal well,” she said, as he leaned on her for support.

“Bastards wouldn’t set it. They just dumped me in that hole and—”

He stopped, felt his gut tighten, as a wrenching memory of a hole in sand-colored soil crystallized through a murky fog.

Four feet deep, four feet wide, six feet long.

Covered with a crude lattice hatch of rough wood that only opened once a day when they threw starvation rations of food and water at him. If he was quick enough, he tossed out the contents of his waste bucket.

Snow and ice covered him.

Rain washed in.

Sun burned and baked.

He carved lines into the dirt wall with his knuckle to mark the time that crawled like the snakes that sometimes slithered into the hole with him.

Two hundred fifty-five lines that he counted over and over again so he wouldn’t ever forget, wouldn’t ever forgive.

A cold fear gripped him. A cold sweat enveloped him.

Two hundred fifty-five lines? Two hundred fifty-five days?

It couldn’t be. He wasn’t thinking straight. And yet he knew the number was significant.

“Askar?” Rabia. Her voice sounded far away and full of concern.

“My God.” He dropped to his knees, dragging her down with him. Horrible, excruciating memories shot across his mind’s eye like tracer rounds in a sky lit up with RPGs.

Two hundred fifty-five lines.

Not twenty-three lines in a cave.

Not another twenty-eight days in Rabia’s father’s home.

Somewhere, somehow, had he really survived two hundred fifty-five days in a hole in the ground where he’d been caged like an animal?

No. He wouldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be true.

He wouldn’t let it be true. He couldn’t let it be true, because that meant he hadn’t merely survived a month or two before Rabia found him. It meant he’d been lost for nearly a year.

Or was it even more than a year?

“My God, my God.” He started shaking uncontrollably.

How much of his life had he lost? And how many more lines had he made in other holes that he didn’t remember?