The boy Churagh ran to Todd, waving his newspapers. "How are you?" he said in over-enunciated English. Churagh had identified Todd as a soft touch; he bought a paper and gave the boy's arm a friendly squeeze. Sometimes they chatted and Todd bought a second newspaper. Today Churagh seemed to sense Todd's preoccupation; he followed but kept a distance. Though he wouldn't admit it to Amin, Todd was having trouble shaking the unease brought on by the conflict between his desire to help Zarlasht somehow and the strength of Amin's arguments. He wanted to play Zarlasht's visit over in his mind without Amin's voice in his ears.
This had been Zarlasht's third visit to Todd's office— too many for simple courtesy calls. Mostly, he was the one who called on government officials, and the visitors he did have at the Kabul office were usually NGO representatives, not hospital administrators like Zarlasht, so he'd been vaguely uneasy about what she might want from him. When she'd arrived, she had not been shown to the meeting room full of cushions; instead, she'd sat on a chair in front of his desk. Amin stood in the corner so that Zarlasht would not suffer any harm to her reputation by being alone with a Western man. She wore, as always, a headscarf, no burqa. He guessed she was about forty years old, although he'd found that the stress and want of their lives took a toll on Afghans, and he knew she could easily be a decade younger.
The first time she visited, Zarlasht chatted without making any specific request; she said she'd heard good things about him and wanted to meet, since she worked as an administrator in Maiwand Hospital and often dealt with refugees. The next time, she told a story about her grandfather, a story of captivity and separation, her grandfather taken away by the Soviets and she a child, so scared, hanging on to his robe, chanting, "Please don't go, don't go, Granddad."
"Not to worry, my dear," the grandfather had said, a soldier flanking him on each side.
" Where are you going?"
"Only out to buy you a television set," the grandfather said, a story so improbable only a child would believe it. "I'll come back with it soon."
"When?"
"An hour. Two at most. Before dark, surely."
So she released her hold on him. And did not see him again for two and a half years— infinity in the life of a child— until he appeared one afternoon in the home she shared with her mother and grandmother. Sitting at the table, her grandfather smiled and raised his hand in greeting. But she didn't recognize the frail stranger. "Who is this man? Why is he here? What does he want?" she asked her grandmother, and at that, his smile slid away and he began to weep. They'd pulled out his nails in prison, roots and all, so he had only the soft ends of his fingers, and he'd received electric-shock torture so many times it had left a hole in his tongue. He couldn't eat, couldn't bear food in his damaged mouth, so he was fed intravenously until his death, less than two years later.
Political discord in this land had always been marked by blood and pain. The stories were unending, shocking the first time, sad but predictable after that. Still, Todd had been moved not only by her story but by the simple way in which she told it, without melodrama or any apparent attention to its effect on him. On the way out the door, almost as an afterthought, Zarlasht had mentioned a cousin who was being beaten by her husband.
That cousin was the focus of her visit today.
"Things are worsening for her," Zarlasht said, starting in even before the cup of chai arrived. "She can stand that her husband beats her, but she cannot stand the beating of her only daughter. Last week he poured boiling oil on the girl's legs. They will be scarred. We are lucky it was not her face."
"I'm so sorry."
"My cousin is determined to stop him," she said.
"She is brave."
Zarlasht turned her head away as she nodded. "My cousin's father went to the elders," she said, gazing as if at someone no one else could see. "He asked that a jirga be held to hear her complaints against her husband. They agreed at first, but now her husband has gone to them and sought their support, and they are threatening to cancel the hearing and instead punish her for speaking against her husband."
"Can't her father help?"
"He is not as powerful as her husband," Zarlasht said. "It is whispered that
the jirga wants to stone her for defying her husband and encouraging other
women to do the same. Also as a show of strength, so the foreign occupiers—forgive me, but this is how they speak— can see that sharia holds sway less
than seventy kilometers from Kabul. It's not her own life that she considers.
She doesn't want her daughter left alone with a father who views her as an object. In this case, the girl will have no future at all."
Zarlasht did not cry during this small speech, but her eyes were tight with an anguish that seemed so personal Todd felt sure she was speaking of herself, not a cousin. His natural impulse was to reach to squeeze her hand, but he knew this would violate all kinds of cultural protocol. He looked out the window for a minute instead, and then turned back. "I'm so sorry about all this, Zarlasht. But why come to me?"
"Because I know your reputation," Zarlasht said. "I think if you summon Haji Mulak, and you mention the name of my . . . my cousin's husband, it might make a difference. Say you want to know about the case of Hamid, his wife and daughter."
Todd smiled. "I fear your confidence in my reach is unrealistic."
"I don't think so. They talk about how you go to see the refugee camps, and how more food and doctor visits follow." Zarlasht paused, then spoke in a slightly softer voice. "And I have nowhere else to go."
That sentence hung in the silent room for a moment, sucking out its air. Todd glanced briefly at Amin, whose eyes carried a clear warning. "Give me a few days," he told Zarlasht. "Let me see if I can help. Come back Wednesday."
"Tashakor," she said, putting her right hand to her chest. "Ma salaam."
She barely looked at Amin as she left, and no sooner had she walked from the building than Amin began to argue. "This is not your business, Mr. Todd. It is a local affair. To interfere in this matter is not only useless but perilous. She must know this. So I wonder why she comes to you."
Though Amin was a private man, Todd had heard something of his past, enough to reinforce his trust in Amin's political instincts. As a teenager, Amin had waited on Najibullah while the ousted president was held in the UN mission. With the Taliban takeover, he'd fled over the mountains to Pakistan, joining other refugees. Eventually he got a scholarship to be educated in the States, then returned to Afghanistan. He had a wife, three daughters, and a son who lived outside Kabul and whom he saw only at week's end, leaving his brother to look after them day-to-day. Amin believed the best future for Afghanistan lay in an alliance with America, but he also believed Americans were blind to Afghan cultural nuances, failing to understand how telling someone what they wanted to hear had become a survival skill and how quickly and violently apparently seamless alliances could be shattered.
Todd generally followed Amin's advice; in fact, he wasn't sure he'd ever before resisted this insistent an argument. But Amin was all logic and reason, lists of pros and cons, risks to be considered, unlikely gains to be weighed. Todd knew all that; he knew what was allowed here, what wasn't, and still, in these last of his remaining days on the job, he wondered about the advantages of simply speaking out, trying to do the right thing. He knew better than to express that aloud; Amin would invoke cultural differences and surely call him naive besides.
From a half-block away, Todd could see a longer-than-usual line at the ice-cream stand, jammed not with the children who generally gathered there— even Churagh had given up trailing him— but with men, maybe a dozen. Odd; he wondered about it for a moment. Outside the enclosed marketplace, crowds were rare. Fear of suicide bombers always rumbled in the subconscious, and beyond that, of course, a group of any size drew the unwelcome attention of passing troops, whether Afghan or foreign.
He quickly dismissed his worry