Atiq Rahimi - A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

Someone is banging on the door. It must be Mahnaz with my mother. Mahnaz? No, why would she be knocking on her own front door?

Yahya lifts his head out of the night and its creatures. The banging gets louder. Who on earth can it be? Another search party? Yahya’s uncle’s moaning can be heard along the corridor. Yahya leaves his invisible moth in its eternal night and heads for the corridor. I run after him. The banging gets even louder.

Yahya’s uncle stands in the middle of his room, his strangely arched arms wrapped around his scrawny skeleton, his wails increasing in their intensity. Will we have to go back into that hole again? I take his hand. It’s shaking. I’m shaking too. The banging still echoes around the courtyard. We reach the end of the corridor. Yahya’s uncle continues to moan.

“Don’t be scared, Uncle Moheb, it’s all right.”

But Uncle Moheb will not be reassured.

“Uncle Moheb, look, my father is here,” says Yahya, taking his other hand. “There’s no need to be frightened!”

Moheb wails even more bitterly. I drop his hand. The banging continues relentlessly.

“Uncle Moheb, it’s only my mother. She’s forgotten the key. I’ll go and let her in.”

Moheb calms down. His gaze, as always, set in the middle distance. Holding him by the hand, Yahya leads his distorted frame back into his room and sits him down on a cushion. And there we abandon him.

Once we’re back in the corridor, the banging stops. Whoever it was has gone.

“I think it was my grandma …”

Yahya is tempted to go outside.

“No, Yahya! Your mother told you not to open the door to anyone.”

“Not even to my granny?”

“But it might not have been your grandma.”

Looking puzzled, Yahya goes back to his uncle, and I return to my place in the room.

Yahya’s moth is completely invisible against paper that’s the color of the night. I find a piece of white chalk in his pencil case and draw a moth for him.

But why should this moth be visible?

I scribble over the moth with a pencil the exact shade of the paper: night.

I got off the bus outside the university to find Enayat waiting for me in the entrance. He asked me if I’d like to go for a drink. We went off to the tomb of Sayed Jamaluddin. A few couples were declaring their love in the hidden depths of the shrubbery. Propped up against the marble tomb, we drank some wine and talked about our lives.

We’d only been there a while when Enayat’s sister turned up — sobbing, utterly distraught — bearing the terrible news that their brother had committed suicide in prison. Enayat smashed the bottle of wine against Sayed Jamal-Udin’s sepulchre and immediately ran off home. I made my way back to my class.

A few days before the Revolution Day celebrations, a decree was issued ordering everyone in Kabul to either paint their front door red or hang a red flag from the window. Enayat’s brother and his friends went to the abattoir, anointed some sheets with sheep’s blood, and then sold them to their neighbors. By Revolution Day, the blood had turned black. Enayat’s brother and his friends were slung in jail.

I walk into the lecture theater. Above the huge blackboard they’ve rigged up a red banner on which a famous slogan has been written in white:

If I do not stand up,

If you do not stand up,

If he does not stand up,

Then who will light a torch in the midst of this darkness?

If Enayat’s brother hadn’t killed himself, maybe he’d have turned out like Yahya’s uncle. A young man with no youth. With no soul. A body suspended between two arches. I do not want to see what Enayat’s brother and Yahya’s uncle have seen. No! I do not want my mother to put her breast in my dry mouth for me to suck her blood; or like Enayat’s mother, to cry over her own son’s empty grave … I want to stay alive.

“My mother’s here!”

Yahya runs to the door. Once the door opens the house is filled with the smell of Mahnaz — and my mother too! I hurtle down the passageway. An old woman walks into the courtyard behind Mahnaz. But she is not my mother. Mahnaz doesn’t close the street door. She stands completely still, as if she wants the old woman to finish what she has to say and leave as quickly as possible.

“Grandma!”

Yahya tries to run out to the courtyard, but I hold him back.

“Yahya, your granny mustn’t see me!”

He stares at me with complete bewilderment. We fall silent. He drops his question, and his little head.

“One day grandmother said that you had died in Pul-e-Charkhi … but she can’t say that anymore, can she, if she sees you’re alive?”

“But, Yahya, I’m not really your …”

No, I can’t bring myself to say it.

“When I told her that you came to see me in my dreams and one day I would catch you, she laughed in my face and got cross with me … But if she sees you now …”

“I’ll go and tell her I’m back myself. Now, go and see how your uncle is doing …”

With a heavy heart, the child returns to Moheb’s room. The old woman has come nearly as far as the terrace. Stealthily, on tiptoe, I creep back to the room. Through the open window I can hear Mahnaz’s mother-in-law say, “You can do what you want, but I’m taking Yahya with me. I’m not leaving my grandson in the care of a madwoman!”

I lift a corner of the curtain and peer cautiously outside. Mahnaz is still standing by the open street door. Her face is rigid. She’s seething inside. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but I can guess. She pronounces the words very slowly, as if she were doling them out. Her mother-in-law sits on the steps up to the terrace. Her shaking voice echoes again:

“… Anwar will show you we have not yet completely lost our honor!”

As she makes her reply, Mahnaz points toward the door. Silenced and exhausted, her mother-in-law drags herself up from the steps, adjusts her veil, and heads for the street. Her voice echoes through the front yard of her dead son:

“So now you’re so important, you have the audacity to throw me out of my own son’s house! Mark my words, you’ll regret …”

Her voice follows her bent old body and disappears into the street. Mahnaz closes the door firmly behind her, and turns toward the house. I wait in the corridor. Yahya too.

The child opens the door to his mother. Like Yahya, I want to throw myself in Mahnaz’s arms. She smells of my mother. My heart pounds. My hands shake. My tongue manages, “Hello … how are you?”

Mahnaz takes off her shoes that have kicked up the living room carpet. This time she doesn’t tuck away the hair that has fallen in front of her eyes. With lowered gaze she draws her little son’s head into her arms.

Why won’t she look at me?

“I found your house. They’re all fine. I saw your mother. I told her everything. Thank God you didn’t go there. At prayer time this morning, they searched the house. They were looking for pamphlets. They said you were out distributing leaflets last night …”

“That’s not true! Believe me …”

“It’s OK, I know …”

“How’s my mother?”

“Everyone is fine. But anxious.”

“Why didn’t my mother come back with you?”

“She wanted to come, but I wouldn’t let her.”

Why not, I wonder. Mahnaz tells Yahya to go to his room. She answers my unspoken question:

“Your house may well be under surveillance. Your mother’s coming here would be incredibly dangerous. Meanwhile, she’s trying to come up with a plan to get you out of this mess. She wants you to leave Kabul as soon as you can. She’ll come over later this afternoon. I’ve told her where we live.”