Yasmina Khadra - The Swallows of Kabul

Atiq stops walking, but he keeps his neck bowed. He reflects for a moment, then raises his chin and asks, “Is it really so obvious that I’m going through a bad time?”

“If you want my opinion, it’s written all over your face.”

Atiq nods and goes away.

Sadly, Qassim watches him leave. Then he scratches his head under his turban and goes back to rejoin his driver in Khorsan’s little eating place.

LIFE IS NOTHING but an inexorable process of erosion, Musarrat thinks. Whether you neglect yourself or take care of yourself, it makes no sort of difference. The fact of birth dooms you to death; it’s the rule. If the body could choose, people would live for a thousand years. But the will doesn’t always have the power to enforce itself, and an old person’s wits, however sharp, can do nothing to support his knees. The fundamental human tragedy derives from the fact that no one can outlive the most hopeless of desires, which is, moreover, the main cause of our misfortune. As for the world, isn’t it a human failure, the monstrous proof of human paltriness? Musarrat has decided to face the evidence. Putting a veil over her face won’t do any good. She has fought against the evil thing that’s gnawing her life away; she’s refused to lower her fists. But now the time has come to drop her guard, to resign herself to her fate, because that’s all that’s left; she’s tried everything else. Her only regret is that she must falter at an age when all the chimeras have been tamed at last. At forty-five, her life is still ahead of her, but more nuanced, more carefully measured; her dreams are less fantastic, her impulses more serene, and her body, when desire claws it out of its indolence, quivers with such discernment that lovemaking makes up in intensity for whatever it may have lost in freshness. The fifth decade is an age of reason, and that’s an advantage when one has to negotiate challenges. In her forties, her certainty about the end she’s coming to is too strong to admit a second’s doubt. Musarrat has no doubts; everything will come to an end, except this certainty. There will be no miracles. The thought grieves her, but not excessively. Excess would be useless, perhaps ridiculous, and surely blasphemous. Of course, she would like to make herself beautiful, to put mascara on her lashes and open her eyes so wide that nothing in Atiq’s eyes could escape her notice. But such resorts are no longer possible for her. That’s a hard truth to admit at forty-five years. And, alas, admitting the hard truth doesn’t exempt her from very much. There is no appeal from the reflection she sees in the small chipped mirror: she’s decomposing faster than her prayers. Her face is nothing but a fleshless skull with furrowed cheeks and pinched lips. Her eyes are glazed, icy, glimmering with a faint, deathly light, as though shreds of glass lie deep in her pupils. And, my God , her hands. Bony, covered with thin, drab skin, crumpled like paper, they have trouble recognizing things by touch. This morning, when she finished combing her hair, she found she was holding a fistful of it in her hand. How can you lose so much hair in so little time? She wound the hair around a bit of wood and thrust it into a crack in the wall; then she slid down to the floor with her head in her hands and waited for a tear to well up and bring her back to herself. When no tear came, she crawled on all fours to her pallet. There, sitting cross-legged on the mattress, she faced the wall for a full hour. Had her strength not abandoned her, she would have spent the whole day with her back to the room. But she was felled by her own obstinacy; she lay down on the floor and fell asleep at once, her mouth open in a long, drawn-out groan.

When he found her lying in a heap on the floor, Atiq immediately feared the worst. Curiously enough, he didn’t drop the package he was carrying, and his breathing was untroubled. He remained standing in the doorway, one eyebrow higher than the other, careful to make no noise. For several long minutes, he gazed at her body attentively — the hand turned toward the ceiling, the curled fingers, the open mouth, the rigid chest — looking for a sign of life. Not a hair on Musarrat’s head moved. After putting his bag on a low table, Atiq swallowed hard and approached his wife’s inert body. Cautiously, he knelt beside her, and at the moment when he bent over her pallid wrist to take her pulse, a soft sigh sent him lurching backward. His Adam’s apple began furiously twitching. He listened carefully, imagining he had heard some ordinary rustling sound, then brought his ear close to the still face. Once again, a faint breath touched his cheek. He pressed his lips together to hold his anger in check, straightened up, and with closed eyes and clenched fists backed away until he was sitting against the wall. Sternly setting his jaw and folding his arms across his chest, he stared at the body stretched out at his feet as if he were trying to pierce it with his eyes, through and through.

MOHSEN RAMAT can take no more. The endless hours and days he regularly spends in the cemetery have exacerbated his distress. However much he may wander among the graves, he can’t manage to put his ideas in order. Things are escaping him at a dizzying speed; his bearings are irretrievably lost. Instead of helping him concentrate, his isolation weakens him and magnifies his suffering. Every now and then, a mad desire to grab an iron bar and destroy everything in sight surges through him; curiously, however, as soon as he takes his head in his hands, his rage turns into an irresistible urge to burst into tears. Thus, with clenched teeth and sealed eyelids, he abandons himself to his prostration.

He thinks he’s going mad.

Since the incident in the streets of Kabul, he can no longer distinguish day from night. The penalty for that accursed little outing is harsh and irreversible. If only he had listened to his wife! How could he have believed that lovers’ promenades were still possible in a city that looks like a hospice for the moribund, overrun with repellent fanatics whose eyes stare out of the dark backward and abysm of time? How could he have lost sight of the horrors that punctuate daily life in a nation so contemptible its official language is the whip? He shouldn’t have deluded himself. This time, Zunaira refuses to forgive and forget what happened. She holds it against him; she can’t bear the sight of him, much less the sound of his voice. “For the love of God,” he begged her, “don’t complicate things between us.” Zunaira looked him up and down, her eyes baleful behind the netting in her mask. Her chest rose, lifted by a wave of indignation. She searched for the harshest, most malicious words she could think of to tell him how terribly she suffers from what he now represents for her, how incapable she is of distinguishing him from the turbaned thugs who have transformed the streets into an arena and the days into a deathwatch, how utterly the proximity of a man, any man, both disgusts and overwhelms her. Unable to express her bitterness and her affliction with sufficient venom, she shut herself in a room and started howling like a madwoman. Terrified by his wife’s deafening screams, Mohsen hurriedly left the house. Had the earth opened under his feet, he wouldn’t have hesitated to jump in and let it close over him. It was horrible. Zunaira’s cries echoed through the district, brought out the neighbors, stalked him like a raging flock of predatory birds. His head spun. It seemed like the end of the world.

Zunaira is no longer the woman she once was, the courageous, vivacious woman who helped him hold on, who supported him every time he stumbled. Now, having decided never again to remove her burqa, she has quite deliberately sunk into an odious world, and she doesn’t seem about to emerge from it. From morning until night, she haunts the house like a ghost, obstinately wrapped up in her shroud of misfortune, which she doesn’t even take off to go to bed. “Your face is the only sun I have left,” Mohsen pleaded with her. “Don’t hide it from me.”