Atiq Rahimi - A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

“Brother, quick, get up, come inside!”

Is that the angel of death or my sister? I can feel her warm hands stroking my face. My head shakes. My legs are trembling. I’m shivering inside. With pain. With cold. With the chill of the grave, with the ice of death …

The angel of death — or my sister — tries to lift me up. Her hair falls into my eyes. My head is spinning violently. I can feel my soul careering about inside me. Like water reaching boiling point, it surges up my throat and shoots right out of my mouth. I topple back into the filth.

The grave is even darker than the night.

As I knelt on the ground with my hands behind my head, the soldier went through my pockets. He found my ID card and my student card. He walked back to the jeep and handed them to the man in the front seat. They exchanged a few words, and then the soldier turned and shouted, “Come here!”

My legs turned to jelly. I felt as though my knees had sunk right through the tarmac. I couldn’t get up.

“Are you deaf? Get up! Come here!”

I managed to haul myself up off the ground. I even took a step toward them. But then I froze again, petrified.

“Hey! Don’t you understand? Come here!”

The soldier bellowed at me. His voice was so loud it shook the alley walls. And me. I turned from being a rock into a trembling leaf. I must have floated through the air since that’s the only way I could have found myself standing right next to the jeep. The officer sitting in the front seat was holding my documents. He shone his torch directly in my face. I screwed up my eyes against the light. But I opened them quickly at the sound of his voice.

“Name!”

I am dead. I died even before I was kicked and trampled on by men in jackboots. The gravestone crushed my ribs. My soul spewed from my mouth. The angels of death came to visit me in my grave with their blackened, twisted faces, their thick moustaches, and their heavy jackboots. Then they battered me with the butts of their Kalashnikovs.

I am dead. My next-door neighbor in the graveyard is a child who keeps on calling me.

“Father!”

I can feel his little hand smoothing my hair.

“Father, get up! This time I’m awake too. Like you!”

My grandfather used to say that Da Mullah Saed Mustafa often cited the teachings of Saed Bin Zobair who said that, when someone dies and goes to Barzakh, he sees his children who have died before him. But they are complete strangers to each other. As if the father had come from a distant universe.

I don’t remember having a child.

Why does the angel of death keep pouring water on my face? Is this yet another punishment to be endured in the grave? It’s never mentioned in the Book of the Dead! Maybe the angel of death is trying to keep me awake so I can experience the suffering of my soul all the more.

My eyes open. I can see the faces of the child and the angel. Behind them, there’s a doorway. But there’s no fire, nor any sign of hell, on the other side. Maybe this means I was never a real sinner. After all, I only drank alcohol. I never murdered anyone.

No, what you did isn’t important. What’s really important is what you didn’t do. That was another of Da Mullah Saed Mustafa’s lectures to my grandfather. You never prayed five times a day. You never made the Hajj. You never gave alms … You never fought jihad for God. You never became His martyr!

And all that means I’m not a true Muslim. That means I’m full of sin. Yet even so, it seems as though the angels haven’t yet cast me into the seventh circle of hell. Perhaps my name isn’t inscribed in the ledger of the damned, after all.

The angel of death tries to pour some water into my mouth. No. I mustn’t drink this water! “If anyone offers you water when you’re in the grave, do not drink of it,” Da Mullah Saed Mustafa told my grandfather. On the day of my grandmother’s burial, my grandfather recited this commandment so loudly his wife could hear it in her grave:

“Dearly departed! You burn with thirst in the grave. But beware! Satan will come to your grave with a pitcher of water. ‘If you want to drink this water, just tell me you have no Creator!’ he will whisper in your left ear. And if you keep silent, and if you refuse his water, he will stand on your right and whisper, ‘Don’t be afraid, I know you are thirsty — here, drink!’ But beware, dearly departed! If you drink of Satan’s water, you next will speak his words: ‘Jesus is the son of God.’ Dearly departed, shun Satan! Despise his speech! Cast his water to the ground!”

Satan’s water is foul in my mouth. It burns my tongue. I spit it out. The gloom and stench of the grave make my head spin.

I can feel hands stroking my head. They are warm and tender. They are nervous; they tremble.

“Mother, is that you?”

A lock of my mother’s hair caresses my face. So soft and gentle.

“Brother, are you awake?”

That’s not my mother. Who is it?

Despite all the pain, I force my eyes open. I can’t tell whether the blackness I see is her hair or the night. I move my head a fraction. Beneath the dark hair is a woman I do not know. To one side of her, I can make out the face of a child, who says, “Father!”

His hand is stroking my hair.

“Father! You woke up! You came back! Get up!”

Are these the same voices I heard before, the same faces? No, I’m still asleep. I’d better close my eyes again. I close them.

“Stop!”

I stopped. No, I didn’t just stop, I froze to the spot. I froze at the sight of a soldier aiming his Kalashnikov right at my head. The soldier was standing in front of a jeep. Its headlights shone straight in my eyes. I put up my hand to stop myself being blinded.

“Stop! Hands behind your head!”

I froze to the spot while the soldier, the gun and the jeep spun around and around in front of my eyes. Then, at the sound of a gun being cocked, everything suddenly lurched to a halt and I turned to stone. Another soldier came around the side of the jeep. His Kalashnikov ready, he walked right up to me and said:

“Password?”

And I said:

“No idea.”

“What’s the password?” the soldier behind him shouted.

“But what time is it?” I asked, trying to catch a glimpse of my watch.

“Don’t move!”

I felt the butt of a Kalashnikov ram into my guts. My mouth filled with blood and I spat out the words:

“The password for the curfew? Sorry, no, I’ve forgotten.”

I tried to lean close to the soldier so I could tell him I’d been drinking, that I was too drunk to remember the password. But the terror of being picked up by the soldiers and then whacked in the stomach by a Kalashnikov was too much for me. Everything went black.

“Down on your knees!”

Those hands that stroked my forehead, that hair brushing against my face, that child who called me “Father,” were they really real? Strange how, when you’re dreaming, the dream-reality always seems to be more real than reality itself. This is what we are like: our dreams seem more plausible than our lives. But if they didn’t, all those revolutions, those wars, those religions and ideologies, could never have been dreamed up …

“Brother, can you stand?”

Even though I’m terrified, I open my eyes. Nothing has changed. The same woman, the same child …

Morning never comes. Night is an eternity. That woman is here. I am dead. The woman — or angel — is dragging me away. Where is she taking me? To the abyss? How far to the bottom?

My breath stinks of booze, my mouth tastes disgusting. I have sinned. I can feel the wounds to my body that were given to me by Nakir and Munkar as punishment for my sins.