Yasmina Khadra - The Swallows of Kabul

MOHSEN RAMAT must admit that Mullah Bashir is powerfully inspired. Carried away by his diatribe, the mullah interrupts his rhetorical flights only to pound the floor or bring a small carafe to his burning lips. He’s been speaking for two hours now, impassioned, gesticulating, and his saliva is as chalky white as his eyes. His taurine breathing, rumbling like a tremor in the earth, resonates throughout the room. The turbaned faithful in the front rows are unaware of the stifling heat. Literally enthralled by the holy man’s verbiage, they listen openmouthed, unquenchably thirsty for the flood of words cascading down on them. Behind the first rows, opinions are divided; the mullah’s prolixity instructs some and bores others. Many in the congregation, here against their will and displeased at having to neglect their business, wring their hands and shift about continually. An old man has fallen asleep; a Taliban agent prods him with his cudgel. Barely awake, the poor devil bats his eyes like a man who can’t recognize his surroundings. Then he wipes his face with the palm of his hand, yawns, relaxes his birdlike neck, and goes back to sleep. Mohsen lost the thread of the sermon some time ago, and now the mullah’s words have stopped reaching him altogether. He can’t stop casting anxious glances over his shoulder at Zunaira, who’s sitting motionless on the steps across the street. He knows she’s suffering behind her curtain, both from the heat and from the mere fact of being there, an unmoving anomaly among all the passersby, she who detests making a spectacle of herself. He looks over at her, hoping she can make him out in this mob of stony-faced, incongruously silent individuals. Can she possibly understand how much he regrets his insistence on going out for a little stroll? In a city where things move about frantically without ever really advancing, their walk has taken a turn for the worse. Something tells him that Zunaira will hold it against him. She’s sitting there in a rigid crouch, like a wounded tigress compelled to go on the attack and gathering herself to spring. .

A whip hisses past his temple. “You’re looking the wrong way,” a Taliban agent reminds him.

Mohsen complies and, with a heavy heart, turns his back on his wife.

When the sermon is over, the faithful in the first rows rise euphorically to their feet and rush upon the holy man, striving to kiss the hem of his garment or a part of his turban. Mohsen must wait until the Taliban agents give the congregation permission to leave the mosque. When he finally manages to break free of the jostling throng, Mohsen finds Zunaira dazed by the sun. She has the impression that the world has grown darker, she hears the ambient sounds spin and slow down, and it’s hard for her to get to her feet.

“You don’t feel well?” Mohsen asks her.

She finds the question so daft that she doesn’t deign to answer it. “I want to go home,” she says.

Leaning against the remains of an entryway, she tries to recover her senses, then starts to walk, staggering along with blurred eyes and a boiling head. Mohsen tries to support her, but she pushes him away roughly. “Don’t touch me!” she cries out in a strangled voice.

Mohsen feels his wife’s cry as a sharp pain, like the one he felt a couple of hours ago, when two whips lashed him across the shoulders at the same time.

IN A DESPERATE EFFORT to avoid a huge boulder, the driver gives the steering wheel a violent jerk and sends the car swerving and skidding along the shoulder of the road. The defective brakes can’t slow the big 4 × 4, which bounces down an incline amid a burst of deafening pops from the shock absorbers before coming to a miraculous stop at the edge of a crevasse. Imperturbable, Qassim Abdul Jabbar merely shakes his head. “Are you trying to kill us, or what?”

The driver gulps as he realizes that one of his front wheels is about four inches from the precipice. Daubing his forehead with the tail of his turban, he mutters an incantation, puts the vehicle in reverse, and backs up.

“Where did that fucking rock come from?” the driver asks.

“Maybe it’s a meteorite,” says Qassim ironically.

The driver looks around, searching for a clue that might explain how the boulder could have rolled into the middle of the road. As he gazes up at the nearest ridge, he sees an old man climbing up the hillside. The driver furrows his brow. “Isn’t that Nazeesh up there?”

Qassim follows the man’s eyes. “I’d be surprised if it was.”

The driver squints, concentrating on the ragged creature clambering up the dangerous slope. “If that’s not Nazeesh, it must be his twin brother.”

“Stop worrying about him and try to get me home in one piece.”

The incorrigible driver nods and launches the 4 × 4 at full speed down the uneven road. Just before it curves around a hillock, he takes a last look at the rearview mirror, convinced that the old man in question is indeed the simpleminded graybeard who occasionally comes prowling around the little prison house where Atiq Shaukat spends so much of his time.

Exhausted, his throat burning and his calves knotty with pain, Nazeesh collapses on the crest of the ridge. Supporting himself on all fours, he tries to catch his breath, then lies down on his back and lets himself spin into vertigo. The sky, which seems within reach of his hand, inspires him with a rare sense of lightness; he has the sensation of emerging from a chrysalis, of slipping like a wisp of smoke through the mesh of his body. He stays that way for a while, lying on the ground with his chest heaving and his arms flung out in a cross. When the rhythm of his breathing slows to normal, he sits up and puts his drinking gourd to his lips. Now that he’s conquered the mountain, there’s nothing to stop him from taking on the horizon. He feels capable of walking to the ends of the earth. Proud of his exploit, unthinkable for a man of his age, he shakes his fist in the air and casts his vengeful eyes over Kabul, the old sorceress, lying there at his feet in the grip of her torments, twisted, disheveled, flat on her stomach, her jaw-bones cracked from eating dirt. Once upon a time, her legend rivaled those of Samarkand and Baghdad, and when her kings ascended to the throne, they immediately began dreaming of empires vaster than the firmament. . Those days are gone, Nazeesh thinks bitterly; you can’t bring them back by circling around their memory. For Kabul has a horror of memory. She has put her history to death in the public square, sacrificed the names of her streets in horrific bonfires, dynamited her monuments into smithereens, and canceled the oaths her founders signed in their enemies’ blood. Today, Kabul’s enemies are her own offspring. They have disowned their ancestors and disfigured themselves in order to resemble no one, especially not those creatures who wander about like submissive ghosts bowed under the Taliban’s contempt and the anathema of their holy men.

A stone’s throw away, a monitor lizard surveys his realm from atop a rock, his long tail lying at his side like a saber. Of course! A truce among predators is a serious miscalculation. And in Afghanistan, whether you’re a member of a tribe or a part of the fauna, whether you’re a nomad or the guardian of a mosque, you never feel really alive unless you’re close to a weapon. And so the big monitor is standing guard; he sniffs the air, on the lookout for traps. Now, Nazeesh does not want to hear any more talk about battles, sieges, swords, or rifles, nor has he any desire to expose himself further to the menaces of street urchins. He’s decided to turn his back on the clamorous gunfire, to go and commune with himself on some wild, unspoiled beach, to see the ocean close-up. He wants to go to the country he’s seen in fantastic daydreams, the one he’s built with his sighs and his prayers and his dearest wishes — a country where the trees don’t die of boredom, where the paths wander and drift like birds, where no one will look askance on his resolve to journey to the immutable lands from which he will never return. He gathers seven stones. For a long time, he glares tauntingly at the city, where his eyes can find no landmark. Suddenly, his arm uncoils and he throws his missiles as far as he can, determined to ward off ill fortune and to stone the Evil One in his tracks.