Refuge (38 page)

“You bastard,” he screams.

“May Allah have mercy on you.”

Tariq fires, and Salim Afridi slumps back onto the road. Tariq checks his father-in-laws’ pulse before putting the gun back in his holster.

He heads over to the body of the young boy and shifts it until it’s lying on its right side and facing Mecca. He closes the boy’s eyes with his fingertips and lifts his hands and face up to the sky.

“O Allah, raise this boy’s soul towards You and direct Your guidance to him. O Allah, pardon us, pardon us.”

He stands and takes one last look at Kabul.

Fuck this country
.

He goes looking for a ride back to Peshawar.

FORTY-SIX

NOOR LIES ON
her bed and reads
Bougainville,
a novel Elma’s lent her. It’s slow going but she’d read the Amsterdam phone book if she thought it’d make her Dutch better. She hears a knock and slides off the bed to find Nadeem, Elma’s houseboy, at her door. Down the corridor, she can hear the hustle and bustle of the party being prepared. Nadeem thrusts a plain manila envelope into her hands.

“A cripple in a wheelchair approached me on the street,” he says. “Offered me a hundred rupees if I’d give it to you.”

Noor’s pulse quickens. She glances at Elma’s bedroom door.

“Please don’t tell Miss Elma about this.”

“Not likely. He said if I kept my mouth shut he’d give me another hundred next week.”

Noor shuts her door and sits down at her vanity desk. She stares at the envelope.

Don’t open it. This is the Devil tempting you.

She takes a box of matches out of the desk drawer and lights one. She puts it up against a corner of the envelope, and it bursts into flames.

No, I can’t do this.

She waves the envelope in the air, but the flames only get brighter. She drops the envelope and stomps on it until the flames die out. A third of the envelope is gone.

She picks it up and extracts the letter. To her relief the letter was small enough to have escaped unscathed. She unfolds it and begins reading.

Dear Noor:

I thought I was over you, but I’m not.

The day after we arrived, a snowstorm hit us, and the temperature plummeted. The ground became so hard you’d think it was made of concrete - not something you want when you’re trying to probe for mines. I threw it out there that we could wait out the bad weather, but no one was up for that. The guys were right, we hadn’t come all this way to sit on our butts. So we set up a system where each team had a pot of boiling water near them at all times. Whenever a mine detector went off, we’d pour water on the ground to soften it up, and then one of the guys would get down and probe the soil. Our progress was slow, especially in the high frag areas, but we just kept going.

During those days if I thought about you it was only for the barest of moments. When it’s that cold and wet, all your mind is concerned about is somehow getting through those frigid days.

Ten days in, it finally warmed up. It was so unexpected it felt like a miracle. By nine I was looking to take clothes off not put more on. And as the ground thawed so did my mind. That morning I saw brief flashes of you – sitting across from me at breakfast, near the back of the group as I was giving out the orders for the day. At one point I thought I saw you walking towards me across an uncleared field, and I shouted out your name. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone thought I was going crazy – I sure as hell did.

At lunch, Osman approached me – he’d unearthed a mine he didn’t like the look of. Thank God he did. The guy who’d laid it had placed a couple of anti-tank mines underneath and linked them all together.

I ordered everyone back. The job wasn’t that complicated (I’d worked on far harder set-ups in the army), but as I lay there on my stomach, I began shaking. I tried to work out why, and the only reason that made any sense was because now my life meant something – and it meant something because you’re in it.

I should have pulled back, but my pride wouldn’t let me - every man on the team had taken a break to watch me. And then something happened. I felt your touch on my arm, and my hands became steady. I felt your cheek next to mine, and my body relaxed. ‘You can do this,’ you whispered in my ear, and thirty minutes later I had. From then on, I have felt your presence everywhere – it’s like you’re my guardian angel.

At the top of the village, I created an office for myself in an abandoned hut. One of its walls has a massive hole in it and through it I can make out not only the guys at work but also the river below and the mountains in the distance. It has this rough, old table on which I’ve pinned a map of the surrounding area, and every night I color in blue the areas we demined that day. Slowly but surely the blue areas have kept extending – we’re now down to the river to the west and across a field and irrigation channel to the north. Redrawing that map has been the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Last night I looked out the hole at the stars. I wanted to rename every one of them after you, and then I remembered how you’d prefer to have a shrub named after you than a galaxy. So the first shrub I saw today I named ‘Noor’. I hate to say it’s not much to look at, but come spring its flowers will bloom and it’ll be worthy of your name.

I’ve thought a lot about whether I should send this letter or not. Please don’t think I didn’t take seriously your request to leave you alone. But I believe two things made it necessary.

First, I believe, despite everything you wrote, that you love me. I have gone over and over the moments we spent together, and I’m convinced that something incredible emerged from that initial antagonism. A true love. Something real and timeless.

Secondly, I believe, that our love won’t hurt your dreams, if anything it will aid them. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to help you achieve yours, and if you love me as much as I love you, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do to help me achieve mine.

I’m not a fool, I know there will be complications, things to work through, but after you’ve read this, all I want you to ask yourself is whether you love me too. If you do we will work it out. I promise. If you don’t then I will respect your decision and never contact you again.

I thought I was over you, Noor, but now I realize I’ll never be.

I’ll love you forever.

Charlie.

Noor sits there, the letter shaking in her hands. She rereads it once, then a second time, and then a third, and with each read, every word and phrase begins to take on greater resonance as if the letter were some holy text. There is a knock on the door. Noor slips the letter into her desk drawer. The door opens. Elma stands there in a tartan cocktail dress and a sleeveless black top.

“Everything okay?” she says, sniffing the air.

“I was playing with matches.”

Elma smiles.

“You of all people. Come on, our guests will be here any moment, and I thought
‌…‌
well let me show you.”

Elma leads Noor to her bedroom. Laid out on the bed is a long grey skirt and a simple white shirt.

“I thought you could wear something other than a shalwar kameez for once.”

Noor stares at the clothes.

“Think of it as a practice run for Holland,” Elma says.

Noor realizes that Elma wants her to put them on right there and then. She pulls her kameez up and over her head.

“My God,” Elma says, “what a tatty old bra. We’re about the same size, wouldn’t you say?”

Noor blushes. Elma disappears into her closet and comes up behind Noor and unclasps her bra. Noor closes her eyes and imagines Charlie standing there. Her bra falls forward and she feels his hands on her breasts, the tips of his fingers encircling her nipples.

“Noor,” Elma says.

Noor eyes snap open. Elma is holding out a lacy white bra. Noor places it over her breasts, and Elma clips it at the back.

Elma helps her into the shirt, and Noor buttons it all the way up to the top. Elma leans in and undoes a couple of buttons.

“Now the skirt.”

Noor undoes her shalwar pants and grabs the skirt off the bed before Elma can suggest a new set of underwear. She wriggles into it. Elma tells her to sit on the bed and returns with a leather make-up case.

“When was the last time you wore make-up?” Elma says.

“I haven’t.”

“Well the secret is simplicity. You want to accentuate your beauty, but you never want a man to look at you and think you’re trying to impress him.”

Elma applies the foundation with her fingertips. Noor closes her eyes, and imagines Charlie caressing her face, standing in front of her as naked as the night she watched him from the tree. She breathes in sharply.

“Sorry, did I press too hard?” Elma says.

Noor shakes her head. She tries to think of something to say. Anything but think of Charlie right now.

The interview.
How self-absorbed could I be?

“How did your interview go?” she says.

“How do you know with these things?” Elma says.

Elma applies powder with a brush. Her touch is gentle and sensuous.

“I think I impressed them. It was good to see our work out here doesn’t go completely unrecognized‌—‌but I just got this sense that they’ve already made up their minds and decided to give the job to this other woman. It left me feeling so powerless.”

Elma applies blush to Noor’s cheeks.

“Maybe if you went to New York—” Noor says.

“I’ve thought about that, and if it’d make a difference I would‌—‌now open your eyes wide.”

Elma extracts an eye pencil and lines Noor’s eyes.

“Just before we escaped I asked my mother if she’d show me how to do all this,” Noor says. “‘Once we’re in America,’ she said. It was her answer to everything at the time.”

“Well, if you let me, I’d love to teach you.”

“You’re too kind to me, Elma. I’ll never be able to repay you.”

“Trust me, having you here, it’s been a blessing.”

Elma stands back and takes in the job she’s done.

“Good, now just the lips.”

She rummages through the make-up box until she finds a color she likes.

“So there’s nothing else that you can do?” Noor says.

“Who knows, maybe Rod’s article will help.”

“When will it be published?”

“In two weeks, I think. Pucker your lips‌—‌like this.”

Elma pushes her lips out. Noor giggles. It looks so silly. Elma smiles.

“Go on.”

Noor imitates her, and Elma applies her lipstick.

“Okay, go take a look.”

Noor looks at herself in the floor mirror. She doesn’t recognize the woman staring back at her.

“You’re going to be the hit of the party,” Elma says.

Elma finds Noor a pair of high heels, and Noor puts them on. She feels like a giraffe. They exit the bedroom, and she wobbles behind Elma to the kitchen. A team of Pakistani waiters are readying the drinks and appetizers. They stop what they’re doing and gawk at Noor. Elma snaps at them to get back to work and gives instructions to their slick-haired supervisor. Noor wishes she could run back to her room and read Charlie’s letter over again. The door bell rings.

“Our first guests,” Elma says.

Elma guides Noor into the sitting room and introduces her to a burly man and his boisterous wife. From what Noor can gather he runs the United States aid effort in Pakistan. From then on the guests keep arriving at a rapid pace until there are close to thirty Westerners crowded into the room. Every few minutes Elma guides Noor from one group to the next as if Noor were her most prized possession. Noor meets the Australian consul and a Danish journalist, a tanned American academic and the German head of the UN’s demining operation, a British charge d’affaires and a Canadian TV reporter. Everyone seems so interested in her, so eager to help. She remembers her father asking her how many Westerners they’d ever had the opportunity to interact with.

Oh, if only you could see me now, Baba.

She senses Elma stiffen, and turns in the direction she’s looking. A short, beady eyed man in a suit jacket and jeans is worming his way towards them.

“I don’t remember sending you an invitation,” Elma says.

“Came as Jeremy’s plus one,” the man says.

The man catches Noor staring at him and smiles.

“Ivor Gardener,” he says.

“Noor Khan.”

The man sucks on his straw. Noor feels as if he is dredging the contents of her mind.

“It’s funny, I feel like we’ve already met,” he says.

“That’s enough, Ivor,” Elma says. “No games tonight.”

Elma grabs Noor’s arm and begins pulling her away.

“Of course,” he says, “you’re the girl from the article, you just look so different I didn’t recognize you.”

Elma turns back.

“What are you talking about?”

“Rod’s article. It totally changed. Became about the plight of Afghan women. Noor, here, is a big part of it.”

“Oh, how delightful,” the English woman says.

Noor looks at Elma. Elma’s lower lip is trembling.

“It’s an amazing photo, really,” the man says. “Noor stares right into the camera, as if her eyes contain all the pain of the Afghan people. Least that’s what the blurb said. I can have someone at my office make you a copy if you want.”