The Lovers (29 page)

Life in Kabul settled into a tedious waiting game for the couple and Anwar, and this time Zakia managed to have her way, insisting, usually successfully, that Ali stay at home and off the streets. It wasn’t easy for them, we knew, especially for the two men. Zakia said staying in seemed natural to her, and she did not mind it. She was busy growing a baby. The only time they all went out together was in Jawad’s company, when he picked them up in a car to bring them to the New Design Café, which Anwar particularly loved. We tried to get them there as often as we could, if only to give them some respite from the dreary monotony of hiding out in the two rooms they rented from an Afghan family. A sparsely furnished place with masonry walls and half a dozen bedrooms, that house had been divided up to accommodate three or four other
small families; more than twenty people shared the home and its tiny dirt yard behind a high wall made of cheap, crumbling brick.

The men did have to go out occasionally, to do the shopping, and they alternated such forays for safety’s sake. “When it is my turn, I go out and walk down to the road,” Anwar related. “I try to find someone to talk to, some stranger who wants to have a conversation. If I can’t, then I sit and watch the traffic and the people go by and get relief that way.”

The first glimpse I had of Ali at the New Design Café was startling—I had not seen him in person for weeks. The flashy, cheap new clothes were no surprise, but unlike the last time he came to Kabul, now he had taken some pains to change his appearance. The beard he once hated was growing in, still short but full. His long locks had been shorn to the skull, a military buzz cut—shorter than what he’d worn while in the military. He seemed nervous, too, glancing around a lot, fidgeting in his chair until I asked him what was wrong.

“I quit smoking,” he said.

Zakia’s insistence?

“Yes. She doesn’t like the way it smells.”

I repeated the old line that kissing a smoker was like licking the inside of an ashtray, which he found hilarious.

I asked Ali what his ringtone was that day, and he laughed. Though he did not know the name, he played it for us, and it proved to be another famous poem set to music, a verse by the thirteenth-century Persian poet Saadi Shirazi, who like many Persian poets was fascinated by nightingales and roses and often imagined a particular relationship between the two, one that was more literary than literal.

Love is what the nightingale does for the sake of the flower,

Enduring the hundreds of cruelties that come from its thorns.
⁴

Where on earth did he get so many ringtones? I wondered. He thought it was odd that I didn’t know.
⁵

During those weeks in the late summer of 2014, our long talks
grew increasingly interesting as all three of them loosened up. Ali had always spoken easily, but I learned more about him every time we talked. Anwar started to open up as well, and finally even Zakia surmounted the male-female divide—enforced in part by her husband—to confide some of her thoughts and to emerge, finally, as much more fully realized a person than she had previously seemed. We still could never speak to Zakia alone in person, but we were able to do so on the phone—although with her watchful husband’s knowledge and permission, which had been a long time coming. For a man to allow even that much access to his wife by another man was convention-breaking in Afghanistan. Zakia acquiesced in her husband’s control over her. She was still the girl who had scolded an older boy for riding on her donkey, but now she was careful to cloak that in the role of the self-effacing and even subservient wife. How did she like her husband’s new haircut? “I have to like it—he’s my husband.” (She clearly did not like it.) How did she feel when he rejoined the army? “That wasn’t a good thing to do.” (She was furious.) Was he staying home enough? “He is trying.” (Not well enough.)

When Ali enumerated her virtues, obedience was first on his list, followed by faithfulness and supportiveness. “I want my wife to accept what I tell her, when it is in her interest,” he would say. “She should be honest and straight, too, and I want her to be faithful. She should be a friend to her friends and an enemy to her enemies. She should know how to deal with everyone.” An idealized woman, in other words, but first of all an obedient one.

Zakia does not retire from the field; subservience seemed to be more of an obliging pose than an abject surrender. “I don’t like ordering her to do things. I would never order her to do work for me,” Ali said. “I request that she do things. I cooperate with her in the chores, I help her in cleaning the home, fetching water. I don’t like being tough with women at all. They are innocent and weak. It is unfair to be tough with women in any way.”

She takes that all in stride, sometimes with a light-up-the-room flash of smile but usually with no comment. When he starts joking around about taking a second wife, though, she speaks right up.

“Just go and do it,” she retorts. “I’m in charge of this family, and I’ll throw you out.”

“My liver,” he replies, chastised, “as long as I’m alive, I would never do that.” Calling a mate “my liver,”
jegar-a-mah
in Dari,
⁶
is a much more intimate term of endearment in Afghan culture than “my heart” or “my darling,” and by this time it had become the way Ali usually addressed Zakia. Talking about her to others, she was Zakia-
jan,
but between the two of them they were each other’s
jegar.
He only ever addressed her by name these days when, for whatever reason she might have, she decided not to answer him—like when she was angry at him for going out and risking this thing they had.

That happened less and less during this second sojourn in Kabul. “Married life is a good life,” Ali said. “When you’re a bachelor, you only have half a life. With a wife you become complete.” In what way? “When I was single, I was never home at night. Now I am always at home.” It is more than that, though, he concedes: a feeling of pain he says he had ever since childhood, that led him to seek out the flute, the pain of loneliness, the pain that drove him to music and poetry. “Music is a solace to the pain. To people who are in love, it is a balm,” he said. Lately he had even stopped playing the flute. “I don’t need to anymore, because I have reached my love.”

During these long conversations, Anwar sat quietly, but he was interested and attentive. At times, though, I felt he was brimming over with something to say, so one day I asked him, “Mohammad Anwar, we’ve heard their stories. Now what about your story? Did you marry Chaman for love?” It wasn’t an unreasonable guess, since I knew he and his wife had married quite late—he was in his mid-thirties by then, and while that might have been partly because of the disruptions of the civil-war years, it was still unusual.

“If you spend forty years with someone, how is it possible that you would not love them?” he said. “She is a good wife, respected me, obeyed me, provided me with children, made me tea, always looking after me, always thinking of me.” He seemed to be reaching for more nice things to say about her. “Always making me tea.” Afghans drink a lot of tea, usually green tea without sugar, and always without milk.

Was it always love between them? Anwar said it was. Zakia and Ali listened raptly to his father’s story of courting his mother, hearing it for the first time. Anwar was seated at the table, but his son and daughter-in-law were kneeling at his feet; they weren’t fond of chairs.

“In those days there were not so many love stories as there are today,” Anwar said.

“She was my maternal uncle’s daughter, and we used to go to each other’s home when we were children, and we liked each other. In my son’s story, I remembered what had happened to us and saw similarities in their story, and this is why in the end I could not oppose him.”

As her close relative, Anwar had plenty of opportunities to visit his cousin Chaman, and since the families were poor, their houses were one room shared by everyone. Once she was no longer a little girl, Chaman would be veiled during such visits, but there were many opportunities for furtive conversations, which they both looked forward to. One day he went to his uncle’s house knowing that the uncle was out, pretending to want to meet him, and instead found himself briefly alone with Chaman. “I said, ‘I love you, there it is.’” When she didn’t answer, he went on: “If you love me, I also love you.”

As they listened, Ali was wide-eyed and Zakia’s mouth was frozen into an open O.

Chaman made no reply to Anwar’s overture that day, but he soon came again. “She was shy. After a couple of days, I said to her, ‘What’s your response?’ and she said, ‘Okay, it’s fine.’” She didn’t say much, Anwar recalled, but it was plenty. Over the ensuing months, they would find ways to meet and talk secretly. “I would do it so no one would see me, but she could hear me,” he said. Finally he asked his paternal uncle (his father had long since died) and his mother to approach Chaman’s father and ask for her hand. No one else ever knew of the secret courtship, other than Anwar’s mother.

“I didn’t even touch her before we were married,” Anwar added. The couple burst into a peal of laughter, rocking back on
their haunches, and Anwar blushed right through his deeply tanned face, the furrowed, leathery skin turning a deep purple. Despite his embarrassment he seemed to get real pleasure from telling the story.

“Afterward I never thought of taking a second wife, even when harvests were good,” he said. “Second wives are an evil caused by arranged, loveless marriages. When a man cannot be happy with his wife, he seeks a second one to make him happy.”

It must be hard for him, then, away from Chaman these many weeks and facing the prospect of going abroad for months or years without her? “The loneliness is worth it, to gain happiness later,” he said. Meantime, thanks to his sons, Anwar had gotten comfortable with his cell phone. When we first met him, he had never made a call himself and received one only when one of his sons handed the telephone to him. Later he learned how to return a received call. Now he had four numbers stored that he could use: those of Jawad, Zakia, Ali, and Chaman. He called his wife every day, he said.

I asked him about his married sons and daughters—hadn’t their unions been arranged for them traditionally? Yes, he said, but he and Chaman had managed to make sure they were love matches nonetheless, by working behind the scenes. Ismatullah, his second-oldest son, he caught looking at a girl in a yearning way, confronted him, and then engineered the match with her father, with neither his son nor the father ever the wiser. Bismillah, the eldest son, and one of his sisters were married in a
baadal
arrangement with a sister and brother from another family. In this case, however, Anwar said, Bismillah had asked about the girl, and then Anwar made sure first that his daughter wanted the young man she would end up with, before proposing the
baadal.
She did not know him, but they connived to clandestinely check him out before she agreed.

“I suppose I am not that different from my father after all,” Ali said. “Like the saying, ‘Children are good students of their parents’ bad habits.’ But in that time it’s surprising. In those days these things were not so common and very hard. It’s really surprising. People weren’t educated then like they are now.” It was interesting that Ali often referred to Zakia and himself as educated
people, by which he perhaps might better have said “enlightened.” In this sense, though, in their willingness to defy social and cultural norms, in their insistence that they had rights of their own, Zakia and Ali were more enlightened than many of their more formally schooled countrymen.

Zakia smiled and looked at Anwar with admiration. Her amber eyes shone. It was a happy moment all around. “There’s a saying we have,” Ali said. “‘When you’re looking for it in the sky, you will find it at your feet.’”

They were starting to look forward to leaving Afghanistan. They each had their specific plans, quite modest. Zakia’s plan was to have “all the necessities that are needed for a home, like TV, computer, washing machine.” More long-term, she wanted to learn to read and write and then, someday, “If I had a chance to study, I would study law.” She had been impressed to learn during her time at Women for Afghan Women that there was such a thing as a woman lawyer and even, in the Kabul courts, a few women judges. Anwar wanted to be able to go out openly again and see his daughter-in-law’s child born and the two young people safe. He knew that his son would never have left without him along to help with his wife and to make life that much less lonely. Ali’s ambitions were specific. “First I want to work to save up the money to pay off my father’s debts. It will be better to work than to study, because we owe so much money and those debts have to be paid back, first. Second, I just want to have a life with my wife.”

In the relaxed mood at the New Design Café that day, Anwar began talking about those debts in detail that he had avoided before. His total indebtedness was seventeen lakhs and twenty-six thousand afghanis, or about thirty-one thousand dollars, he said. Some of that debt had been accumulated by family disasters—his son Ismatullah had crashed his police vehicle and then fled the scene, resulting in huge fines that Anwar had to pay for him. Family weddings and bride prices caused more debt. “We’re a big family of eighteen, and most of the time we were short of money and had to borrow,” Anwar said. Worst of all were the bribes associated with Zakia and Ali’s case, which totaled eleven lakhs of afghanis,
about twenty thousand dollars in all. To raise those funds, Anwar had in effect mortgaged six of his ten
jreebs
of land, giving the land over to creditors who farmed it until he could repay his debt.
⁷

I was aware that the family had paid bribes to support Ali and Zakia, but this was a huge amount for a poor family; where could it all have gone? Anwar detailed it, and while I have no way to prove what he said is true, he seemed so guileless and credible that it was hard to disbelieve him. There were bribes to the governor and the police chief not to pursue criminal charges against the couple, bribes to the Ministry of Women’s Affairs to take up their case, bribes to people connected with the shelter, on a weekly basis, to keep Zakia there rather than hand her over to her family. Having bribed the police chief, they had to bribe his subordinates as well.