Atiq Rahimi - A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear

Tottering gingerly to the back of the shop on his unsteady legs, he tugged back a black-and-white curtain and invited us into his den.

“Always drink in secret, for those they find they punish cruelly!”

He laughed loudly, closing the curtain behind us to hide us from sight, then plumped himself down in front of two clay pitchers.

“Do you fancy the blonde or the redhead?” he asked, turning to me.

“The redhead.”

“Well chosen!”

He poured red wine from the pitcher into a cheap metal cup and, taking the first mouthful himself, shook his old head and said, “Oh, if only Hafez were here, he’d dedicate a poem to me! Drink deeply and see what miracles can be found in the world.”

He refilled the cup with red wine and handed it to me. Then he turned to Enayat.

“Redhead or blonde?”

“The blonde.”

“Another excellent choice.”

He poured out white wine from the other pitcher, drank it himself, as before, and shaking his head again said, “Oh, if only I’d lived in the time of Babur, he would have planted half of Kabul with vines just for me!”

Then he refilled the cup with white wine and handed it to Enayat. We drank until nightfall, then we took Moalem home, holding him up between us. His sleepy wife opened the door and swore at her husband, and us. She told us to dump him on the terrace, grumbling, “I can never tell whether you go around there to buy drink from him or just to get him drunk.”

Moalem’s laughter floated over his small backyard.

“There was a man … a rotten drunk … who traded wine …”

“Like Shams,” his wife shouted back at him, “God will never let you rest on this earth!”

But Moalem continued his slurred performance:

“Someone asked … That’s strange … If you’re selling wine … what could you want in return?”

Moalem’s wife threw us out of the house and we fetched up near Enayat’s place, in the middle of the garden belonging to the Party headquarters. It was pitch dark. Enayat decided we should piss on the roots of this big cherry tree, so our piss would find its way into the red cherries. So we pissed at the tree, and pissed ourselves laughing.

But the night watchman spoiled our fun and, waving his gun at us, chucked us out of the garden. I parted with Enayat by the gate and he vanished off into the night. The curfew went clean out of my head. Halfway home, a soldier’s command froze me to the spot.

“Stop!”

I’m running. I’m running through the night. Quick as a breeze. Carbonized trees bearing desiccated cherries line both sides of the road, leading me on. The road is endless. I run. A soldier runs after me, pounding the ground with his big heavy boots, bellowing, “STOP! STOP!”

But I do not stop. I run. Faster than an arrow. I grow bigger with each stride. Bigger and bigger. I’m taller than the trees. The soldier dwindles away. He gets smaller and smaller. I stop to piss on the soldier. But, as I piss, the soldier starts getting bigger. Bigger and bigger! I can’t piss anymore. The soldier is laughing at me. I am crying. My sniveling sounds as though it’s coming from somewhere small inside my chest. The soldier’s laughter booms through the night. He claps his big hand on my shoulder. My shoulder feels paralyzed. He shakes me like a doll.

“Brother!”

The night is even darker than when my eyes are closed. I move my head in the direction of the sound. Then, out of the dark, suddenly lamplight illuminates strands of hair that have fallen in front of my face. I pull back my head. And, once again, I see the same woman whose child calls me “Father.” I look around. I’m where I was before. On a small terrace under a window.

The woman tucks her hair behind her ear. The lamplight reveals her face.

“Brother, get up! Quick!”

“What …”

What should I say? The woman wants to tell me something.

“Quick, get inside! The soldiers have come back!”

A sudden cacophony of slammed jeep doors, barked military orders, and jackboots hitting the cobblestones ricochets round the street below. The mother of the child whose name I still don’t know extinguishes the lamp. Crouching down beside me, she goes completely still. In the dark, in agony, I try to heave myself onto my feet.

She rises up next to me and, gingerly, silently, glides toward the entrance to the house, beckoning me with the two fingers that had scooped back the hair from her eyes. I stagger to my feet and drag my broken body along after her, into the absolute darkness of the corridor. She closes the door behind us and is lost in the dark.

“Come in here!”

Blindly, I follow the rustle of her skirts. The sound moves into a room. And stops. A struck match flares up, canceling the dark. She lights an old candle whose wax has spilt an extravagant fringe all over the windowsill. It is a small room with a black-and-red carpet and two big floor cushions, one by the door, the other under the window. I kick off my shit-caked shoes and lower myself onto the cushion by the door as the woman goes back to the corridor.

“Stay here a minute.”

“Sorry to …”

Why did I say that? The woman has vanished.

I feel as feeble as the faltering candle.

Night has finished the candle. In the pitch-black room, my anxiety grows so extreme that, eventually, shaking with fear, I force myself to raise the curtain a tiny bit to see if the soldiers are down in the courtyard. But it’s dark, silent, utterly deserted. Where has the woman gone? What made the soldiers come here? Are they looking for me? But what am I supposed to have done?

I must get out of here. My mother hasn’t the faintest clue what’s happened to me. Right this very minute she’s sitting behind our front door in the hope of hearing my footsteps coming up the street. But she doesn’t hear me. Now and then she peers around the door, straining this way and that, desperate to see me emerge from the gloom. But she doesn’t see me. She wrings her hands. She recites verses from the Koran under her breath. She frowns. She bites her lip. She solemnly promises to make offerings at the Shah-Do-Shamshira Mosque if I turn up safe and sound. I must go.

I feel my way to the door. I know where my discarded shoes are from their terrible stench and, holding them in one hand, I creep on tiptoe into the corridor.

“Where are you going?”

I drop the shoes in shock. The woman is standing behind the glass door of the corridor.

“I must get out of here!”

“Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“Now? The street is full of soldiers!”

The woman walks past me toward a half-opened door from which pale yellow lamplight spills out into the gloom of the corridor. Before going through it, she looks back for an instant through her disheveled hair; then she speaks to me softly, in a way that suddenly makes me long to hear my mother’s voice:

“Put your shoes on.”

In the time that it takes me to put on my shoes, she goes into the room and returns with the oil-lamp in one hand. With the other, she leads the phantom I saw earlier, his arms still strangely arched from his sides. Now I can see his face. His hair and his beard are pure white. But he’s not old. He’s very young. Maybe even younger than I am.

“Come on, follow me.”

At the sound of her voice I stop staring at his prematurely whitened hair, and instead try to make out the far end of the corridor from where I can hear her skirts rustle. She opens a little door that leads to the back of the house. We climb down a narrow flight of stairs. At the bottom of the staircase she sweeps straw and earth with her bare hands from a secret trapdoor. Easing it open, she asks me to go down first.