A Sister to Honor (28 page)

“I may not have been.”

“So it's just since incarceration.”

Afia remembered Maryam's wedding. She had spotted her cousin Gulnar wearing full niqab and had wondered how it happened, that those who went away came back more pious. “I cannot explain,” she said. “I believe the same as before. But this way”—she demonstrated her clothes, but she meant the Qur'an, the prayer rug, the rituals allotted to her—“I am not so lonely.”

“Well, when we go to trial, it would help a lot if you can find your way back to Western clothes. Meanwhile”—Sara opened a folder on the table—“I have some news about your case in Massachusetts.”

“Massachusetts,” Afia repeated. She had trouble keeping this straight. Shahid had been killed in the state of New York. The explosion at Gus's house and the failure of his brakes had happened in the state of Massachusetts. In Massachusetts no one was charging her with anything, not yet. But the Massachusetts people and the New York ones weren't different tribes, like the Baluchis and the Pashtuns. There was no reason for them to have different laws; they just did.

“No matter what you claim,” Sara was going on, “you're off the hook on the brakes. That's good news, sweetheart. Someone from the district attorney's office got hold of a surveillance tape, from the TrueValue just outside Devon.”

“I don't want to hear this,” Afia said. Like a child, she placed her hands over her ears.

“Honey, he tried to kill you for doing what comes naturally to young people all over the world. And you defended yourself, and now he's dead. You don't have to protect him anymore. He can't hurt you.”

Slowly Afia removed her hands. Her eyes widened. Could she mean Khalid, that Khalid was dead? Could the lawyer know about him? She had never mentioned Khalid.

But Sara was lifting another sheet of paper from the folder. “The tape shows your brother Shahid,” she said, turning the report in Afia's direction, “buying a wrench, a pair of metal cutters, pliers, a flashlight. Everything you need to drain the brake fluid from a car.”

Afia pushed away from the table. She felt blood drain from her face. “You are sure? There was Shahid on a tape? Buying these things?”

“We can't enter this into evidence here. But I've got a buddy over in the Berkshires, he sent me this report. They don't know if your brother was acting alone, but—”

Afia stood up. She walked in a tight circle. She had known, of course; in her heart, she had known. To scare her into acting as she should, Shahid had been ready to take Gus's life. The cruel twist being that she
had
been acting as she should, only when she learned Gus was injured her heart had flown from her chest and gone to him. Shahid had scared her in the wrong direction. “He did,” she managed now, emotion strangling her voice, “what he had to.”

“What, try to kill your boyfriend? Afia, honey, this sort of code is
primitive
. Believe me. I
know
. Before my family left Iran—”

“I am not from Iran. I am Pashtun.” Afia was surprised by the heat in her voice. Spinning around, moving in on Sara with her thick lips and dyed hair, her mud-brown eyes, she could have struck her a blow. She gripped the back of the chair to steady herself. “Gus was
makhtoray
. Our great poet, he says it, the Pashtun man must shoot the seducer of his sister and walk proud to British gallows. Only so do we keep the peace.”

“America,” Sara said steadily, tightening her red lips, “isn't a British colony. And that is a funny kind of peace.”

“My brother loved me.”

“All right.” Sara nodded, as if Afia had proposed a project. “He loved you. And I'm sure you wish you hadn't had to shoot him.”

“I did not—” Afia began. But she saw the trap before she stepped into it. “What is to happen now?”

“With this in hand,” Sara said, “I think the rest of the state's case collapses, in Massachusetts. We're left with self-defense. The trial should be scheduled soon.”

“And Coach Hayes will testify?”

“I'll subpoena her, if I have to.”

“And Gus? Will Gus speak?”

Sara had risen. “I think he has to, honey. Shahid threatened him, and now there's evidence that Shahid meant him harm. His testimony demonstrates your brother's capacity for violence.”

“Shahid is not violent!” Afia shouted. From the corner of her eye, she saw a guard, moving toward her. Painfully, she lowered her voice. “He . . .
was
 . . . not violent,” she managed. “He had to—” She looked away, at the high window, the bright blue of the sky.
Was
, she thought. She felt again how Shahid had pushed her aside, out of harm's way, when the gun flashed. She hadn't had the strength to push back. “He knew,” she said as if to herself, “where his duty lay.”

H
is sister's trial was like no kind of judgment Khalid had ever witnessed. Here was no
jirga
, no gathering of elders in equal and shared responsibility for the administration of justice. Here, the sides in the dispute—Afia as the wrongdoer and Shahid's supporters as the ones wronged—seemed voiceless in the proceedings. A woman sat high up behind a wooden wall, and the council that would decide the matter—not elders but people of all ages, women alongside men—sat silent and to the side. Those questioning the witnesses had no apparent role in determining the outcome, though they bullied and badgered the people called to the stand as if every word out of a witness's mouth were a snake to be ground beneath the heel.

The issue at hand, he saw immediately, was a foolish misapprehension of Afia for the murderer of Shahid. Somewhere the minions of the devil were laughing. From the bench where he sat, in the rear of the courtroom, Khalid could see the back of Afia's head, covered by a sheer scarf of lavender and blue. Next to her, a stocky Turkish-looking woman in heavy makeup rose to address the woman sitting on high as
Judge
, though she did not perform the role of a judge so much as an administrator, allowing certain procedures and disallowing others. The question at hand, as the stocky woman and her counterpart, a slope-shouldered man with a whine in his voice, made clear, was not who had committed the killing, but why. The stocky woman argued strenuously for self-defense.

Afia could not turn, could not see him seated behind the others in the room, a sparse gathering of the curious and the interested. Even if she could, she might not know him. He had bleached his hair to a cinnamon color and shaved his beard so that his sharp chin felt raw and exposed. Several rows in front of him, he recognized a boy he'd seen with Shahid, the first time he'd spotted his brother on the campus. The rest were strangers. By rights
he
should have been at the front, calling for justice for his dead brother, but no one in this place would understand his claim.

Why Afia was allowing these absurd proceedings to go forward, he thought at first he understood. If she told this assembly what had happened, she would be compelled to confess her own blackness—for it was that blackness that had brought the whole tragedy about. She should be the one dead and under the ground, and she knew it.

The officials at the front had gone through various procedural motions. They had called up two police officers to report on what they had found at the crime scene. They had called up a pinch-faced man who explained what he kept calling “primitive Pathan customs” about family honor and women. When this man had stepped down, the stocky woman stood. “The defense calls Felicity Hayes,” she said.

Through the side door came the yellow-haired woman who was Shahid's squash coach. Unbelievable, such a perversion of roles. Shahid had always said
he
when he referred to his coach; Khalid was sure of it. And to think Omar believed his nephew had world-class training! This Felicity Hayes spoke softly but with pride, like a wounded warrior. She had driven Afia to the garage in Devon, she said, and the explosion there had terrified them both. It was impossible that Afia should be involved in such a crime, and yet the thought of the police had panicked her. She had felt sorry for the girl, she said, and so she had given her what she thought was safe harbor.

“Safe from her brother?” the stocky woman asked.

“She wasn't afraid of Shahid.”

“You saw them together, that afternoon.”

“I did. They'd agreed she would return to Pakistan. She wasn't happy about it. But they loved each other.” Felicity Hayes looked around the courtroom, as if beseeching them to confirm this idea. “I can tell you, whatever happened at my husband's cabin, Afia could not have instigated it. She wanted to protect Shahid.”

“Because she knew he planted that bomb?”

There was a slight hesitation. “She . . . never said anything like that.”

“But you had known him to be violent.”

“No,” said the coach.

A look of mild disgust crossed the stocky woman's face. Leaning forward, Khalid almost smiled. This lawyer was not getting what she was after. “Tell us about the confrontation you had with Shahid,” she said, “the week before.”

The coach sat back in her chair. She sighed. She described suspending Shahid from play because he'd missed practices. “He was upset,” she said. “He wasn't violent. He went for counseling.”

“And three days later,” said the stocky woman, “he tried to blow up his sister.”

“Objection.” The slope-shouldered man had jumped up. “Leading the witness.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

The stocky woman sat down a couple of minutes later, and the man rose. As he asked Coach Hayes more questions about Shahid, Khalid's chest and neck began to sweat. They were like snapshots of his brother, her answers to the man's questions. How Shahid had resolved a feud between two other players, his second year at Enright. How he'd brought Afia to America, how he'd bought her the clothes she needed for the cold winters. His hopes for the future, a job at Harvard that would make his father proud. The ghost of Shahid vaulted into the courtroom—his quick grin, the spin of his hips when he feinted with the soccer ball, the light patter of his feet when he used to follow Khalid and the older boys down to the swimming hole. Dead, cold and dead, and buried in this strange land.

Four weeks, now, Khalid had mourned, and prayed, and waited. He had never been so alone. He had told Omar he had comrades in
Amreeka
, and indeed he had found them, a clutch of jihadists masquerading as students, in a dingy flat in South Boston where he had exchanged vague promises of action for a mattress in the corner. But that terrible moment had come when he had to put through a call to Peshawar. Had flames roared over the airwaves and scorched his chest, he could not have felt a hotter wrath than what Omar dealt out. He had been sent to save, and he had killed, he had destroyed everything Omar had built over a decade, he had put out the light of a shining beacon, he had ripped the heart from their family.
Our family
, Omar had said, and by that he meant not Khalid, even though Farishta and her children were meant to belong only to the Satars now—and, were it not for his millions, Omar would have no say in who lived or who died among the Satars. “It was the girl,” Khalid had protested. “It was Afia, she didn't care if he died, she thrust him before her, she knew the gun would go off, she was shameless, it was Afia.” But Omar could not, or would not, hear him. Told him only to rot in hell, and then the line went dead.

Now the lawyer was wheedling, pressing the coach. “In your view, then,” he was saying, “Shahid Satar would not have attacked his sister. Are you saying you see no reason she would have had to defend herself?”

“In my view,” the coach said—again her eyes swept the room, and seemed to stop for a fraction of a second on Khalid—“Afia didn't shoot her brother in self-defense or in murder. I don't think she shot her brother at all. I think something else must be going on.”

He needed air. Pushing his way past the others in his row, he slipped from the courtroom. He made his way down the circular staircase, past armed police who looked right through him. Outside, piles of dirt-browned snow lined the sidewalks. Traffic sped by, all automobiles, not a rickshaw or donkey cart in sight. He lit a cigarette—haram, but who was watching?—and inhaled deeply.

He would not rot in hell. He would pick up the shreds of his family's honor and stitch them together with the veins of this blackened sister. Before, yes, his motives had not been entirely pure. Envy had crept in, envy of Shahid, who had been so blindly preferred. Now there was only Afia and the shame she had brought upon them all, Shahid included. Omar had sent no more funds since that telephone call, but Khalid would get by, he would trust in Allah to guide him, his hand would be the hand of righteousness. All he needed was for these people to let Afia go, and he would be waiting for her.

He ground the cigarette under his shoe and returned through the metal detector they had set up in the lobby. Clean-shaven, russet-haired, he was unremarkable to these officers. When he returned to the courtroom, the coach had stepped down. At the tables toward the front of the room, people murmured together. Then the stocky woman straightened. She called a new witness. Gus Schneider.

A side door opened, and a young man entered the room, his torso canted forward, making his way on crutches. For the first time, Khalid's gaze fixed on Afia. Her body strained in the young man's direction, like a plant toward the sun. Yes, this was the one—the one from the hospital, the one whose empty makeshift apartment Khalid had entered by an open window to see the unmade bed, the women's underthings on a chair, the caged creatures staring at him with their glassy eyes while he strung wires around the door frame.

Letting go of one crutch, the young man raised his hand and pledged to tell the truth. His sister's seducer. The Jew.
Gus.

“Tell us,” the stocky woman was saying when he'd made his way clumsily into the witness seat, “about your relationship with Afia Satar.”

“She was my girlfriend.”

“Meaning you saw a lot of each other?”

Gus's eyes shifted toward Afia, then back. He wore a sport jacket and tie that seemed to squeeze his neck. “She was at Smith. But you know, it was normal. A normal dating relationship.”

“And your relationship with Shahid Satar?”

Pressing against the tie, Gus's Adam's apple pulsed. “We were roommates once. We were on the team together. The squash team.” Another glance, this time toward the mannish coach in the third row.

“Were you friends?”

“Friends?” Gus's voice slid upward. “Sure. Friends. He was an awesome guy.”

“But you fought.”

“Once, yeah.”

“Over Shahid's sister, Afia.” The stocky woman paused a beat, for effect. “The accused,” she added.

The boy had begun to sweat. Good. Let him sweat. Let the world begin to see his shame. Khalid made himself breathe. His fingers clutched the front of the wooden seat.

“Yeah,” Gus said. “I guess. He didn't like it. You know. The dating. He, uh”—his eyes flicked around the room, trying to follow whatever story he'd been coached to tell—“he could be a pretty scary guy. Jealous, you know.”

“So you imagine he could get violent.”

“Objection!” This was the slope-shouldered man, jumping up from the table where he sat. “She's asking the witness to speculate.”

“I withdraw the question,” said the stocky woman. Extraordinary, Khalid thought. That the so-called judge and the council should sit silent while these two hired lawyers spoke in place of the people who were truly involved. Someone should have been demanding atonement from this Gus creature. Not all this thrashing about with words.

Slowly the stocky woman led Gus through the accumulation of lies that would lead his passive audience to think Shahid Satar was a jealous fiend whose intent to harm would be stopped only by a bullet. When she had finished, the slope-shouldered lawyer rose. He had a few questions, he said, and Gus's Adam's apple bobbed again. He should be strangled, Khalid thought. Slowly, with picture wire, until his round eyes bulged in his head and his tongue stuck out like a serpent's.

“About your relationship with the accused, Afia Satar,” the lawyer said. “Was it intimate?”

Gus looked confused. His eyes darted to Afia. Khalid's fingers gripped harder. “Could you repeat the question?” Gus asked.

“Was your relationship intimate?” the lawyer said, almost gently. “Was it sexual?”

Shame was a tide, sweeping from Afia back over the courtroom, blanketing Khalid. He barely heard Gus answer, “I don't really want to talk about that.”

“So,” the slope-shouldered man said, “the answer is yes.”

“Objection!” The stocky woman, leaping up next to Afia. “Leading the witness,” she said.

“Given what we heard earlier about Pathan customs,” said the slope-shouldered man, “the degree of partner intimacy is crucial to the facts in this case.”

At last, the judge spoke. Gray-haired and jowly, her elbows in their black sleeves planted wide on the table, she leaned forward. “The court will strike prosecution's inference from the record,” she said. “The witness will answer the question.”

Gus's cheeks were burning red. “Yes,” he said softly. “It was . . . intimate. But not like you're saying. It was—it was normal. That's all.”

Normal.

And did the accused, the prosecutor wanted to know, ever complain of her brother's treatment of her? “No, but—” Did she not, in fact, mention that she might prefer her own death to dishonor? “Look, she didn't put it exactly that way. She just said, you know, maybe she'd rather be dead.”