Yasmina Khadra - The Swallows of Kabul

Then all that came to an end; that world of bold delight is gone, broken up and crumbled away. Dreams have veiled their faces. A hood with latticed eyeholes has come down and confiscated everything: laughs, smiles, glances, dimpled cheeks, fringed eyelashes. .

The following morning, Atiq is still sitting in the hallway, facing the prisoner. He realizes that he’s stayed up the entire night, and that he hasn’t taken his eyes off her for an instant. He feels completely odd, light-headed and sore-throated. He has the sensation that he’s waking up inside someone else’s skin. With the force of a sudden possession, something has overwhelmed him, invaded his innermost recesses. It animates his thoughts, quickens his pulse, regiments his breathing, inhabits his least tremor; sometimes he pictures it as a reed, but rigid and unyielding, and sometimes it’s like some sort of reptilian ivy, winding itself around his very existence.

Atiq doesn’t even try to make sense of all this. He feels no pain, but a vertiginous, implacable sensation, an exhilaration bordering on ecstasy, overcomes him, reducing him to such a state that he even forgets to perform his morning ablutions. It’s as though he were under a spell, except that this is no spell. Atiq ponders the seriousness of his impropriety, measures it, and dismisses it. He lets himself go somewhere— somewhere close and yet very far away — where he can listen attentively to his own most imperceptible pulsations while remaining deaf to the most peremptory calls to order.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER?” Musarrat asks. “That’s the fifth time you’ve salted your rice, and you haven’t even tasted it yet. And you keep on putting the water cup to your mouth without ever taking a sip.”

Atiq gazes stupidly at his wife. He doesn’t seem to grasp the meaning of her words. His hands are trembling, his heart is racing, and now and again his breathing is afflicted by a kind of suffocation. On wobbly legs, his head emptied of thought, he walked home, but he can’t recall how; he doesn’t remember meeting anyone on the streets of his district, streets where he can’t ordinarily venture without being hailed or greeted by many acquaintances. He has never before in his life known the condition in which he’s been languishing since the previous evening. He’s not hungry; he’s not thirsty. The world around him doesn’t so much as graze his consciousness. What he’s experiencing is at once prodigious and terrifying, but he wouldn’t be rid of it for all the gold on earth: He feels fine.

“What’s wrong with you, Atiq?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“God be praised, you can hear. I was afraid you’d been struck deaf and dumb.”

“What can you be talking about?”

“Nothing,” Musarrat says, giving up.

Atiq replaces his cup on the floor, takes a pinch of salt from a small earthenware bowl, and once again begins mechanically sprinkling the white granules over his dish of rice. Musarrat puts her hand to her mouth to hide a smile. Her husband’s absentmindedness amuses and worries her, but his radiant face, she must admit, is reassuring. She’s rarely seen him so endearingly awkward. He looks like a child just back from a puppet show. His eyes are sparkling, dazzled from within, and his agitation is almost unbelievable in one who never shakes, except with indignation, and then only when he’s repressing his anger and not threatening to destroy everything in sight.

“Eat,” she urges him.

Atiq stiffens. His forehead huddles around his eyebrows. Suddenly he leaps up, slapping his thighs. “My God!” he cries out as he snatches his great bunch of keys from its designated nail. “I’m inexcusable.”

Musarrat tries to get to her feet. Her thin arms give way, and she falls back onto her pallet. The effort has drained her strength; she leans against the wall, her feet out in front of her, and stares at her husband. “Now what have you done?”

Atiq feels badgered but replies nonetheless: “I just remembered — I didn’t give the prisoner anything to eat.”

He turns on his heels and disappears.

Musarrat remains where she is, deep in thought. Her husband has gone out without his turban, his vest, and his whip. Such a thing has almost never happened. She waits, expecting him to return for his things. Atiq doesn’t return. From this, Musarrat concludes that her husband, the part-time jailer, is no longer in full possession of his faculties.

ZUNAIRA IS ASLEEP, lying on a worn blanket. The sight of her makes Atiq think of a sacrificial offering. Around her, the cell, its corners spattered with unequivocal stains, sways in the pulsing light of the hurricane lamp. The night is thick, dusty, without real depth, its busy whir clearly audible. Atiq places a tray laden with skewered meats (bought with money from his own pocket), a flat cake, and some fruit on the floor of the cell. He squats down and extends an arm to wake the prisoner; his fingers hover above the curve of her shoulder. She must regain her strength, he tells himself. His thoughts, however, do not suffice to activate his hand, which continues to hesitate, suspended in the air. He creeps backward until he’s leaning against the wall. Clasping his drawn-up legs, he wedges his chin between his knees, then sits unmoving, with his eyes riveted on the woman’s body. Its shadow, fashioned by the bright lamplight and cast upon the wall as upon a canvas, delineates the landscape of a dream. Atiq is astonished by the prisoner’s composure. He doesn’t believe that tranquillity could reveal itself more plainly anywhere else than on that face, as limpid and beautiful as water from a spring. And that black hair, smooth and soft, which the least impudent of breezes would lift as easily as a kite. And those delicate, translucent houri’s hands, which look as soft as a caress. And that small round mouth. . “La hawla,” Atiq says, pulling himself together. He thinks, I have no right to take advantage of the fact that she’s asleep. I must go back home; I must leave her alone. Atiq thinks, but he does not act. He stays where he is, squatting in the corner, his arms embracing his legs, his eyes bigger than his conscience.

“IT’S VERY SIMPLE,” Atiq declares. “No words can describe her.”

“Is she so beautiful as that?” Musarrat asks skeptically.

“Beautiful? The word sounds commonplace to me — it sounds banal. The woman languishing in my jail is more than that. I’m still trembling from the sight of her. I spent the night watching her sleep. Her magnificence so filled my eyes that I didn’t notice the dawn.”

“I hope she didn’t distract you from your prayer.”

Atiq lowers his head. “It’s true — she did.”

“You forgot to perform your salaat ?”

“Yes.”

Musarrat bursts into tinkling laughter, which quickly gives way to a succession of coughs. Atiq frowns. He doesn’t understand why his wife is laughing at him, why she’s not cross. It’s not often that he hears her laugh, and her unusual gaiety makes their dark hovel almost habitable. Panting but delighted, Musarrat wipes her eyes, adjusts the cushion behind her, and leans back on it.

“Am I amusing you?” Atiq asks.

“Enormously.”

“You think I’m ridiculous.”

“I think you’re fabulous, Atiq. Why would you hide such generous words from me? After more than twenty years of marriage, at last you reveal the poet who’s been hiding inside you. You can’t imagine how happy I am to know that you’re capable of speaking from your heart. Generally, you avoid such words as though they were pools of vomit. Atiq, the man with the eternal frown, the man who could walk past a gold coin without deigning to notice it, this man has tender feelings? That doesn’t simply amuse me; it revives me. I’d like to kiss the feet of the woman who’s awakened such sensitivity in you in the course of a single night. She must be a saint. Or perhaps a good fairy.”