Yasmina Khadra: The Swallows of Kabul

The vehicle comes to a stop in front of the freshly dug hole. The sinner is helped down while shouts of abuse ring out here and there. Once again, waves of movement perturb the crowd, catapulting the less vigilant into the rear ranks.

Insensible to the violent attacks intended to eject him, Mohsen takes advantage of the agitation, slips through the gaps it opens in the throng, and gains a spot near the front. Standing on tiptoe, he watches a fanatic of colossal proportions lift up the impure woman and “plant” her in the hole. Then, to keep her upright and prevent her from moving, he buries her in earth up to her thighs.

A mullah tosses the tails of his burnoose over his shoulders, addresses a final glare of contempt to the mound of veils under which a person is preparing to die, and thunders, “There are some among us, humans like ourselves, who have chosen to wallow in filth like pigs. In vain have they heard the sacred Message, in vain have they learned what pernicious-ness lurks in temptation; still they succumb, because their faith is insufficient to help them resist. Wretched creatures, blind and useless, they have shut their ears to the muezzin’s call in order to hearken to the ribaldries of Satan. They have elected to suffer the wrath of God rather than abstain from sin. How can we address them, except in sorrow and indignation?”

He stretches out an arm like a sword toward the mummy. “This woman knew exactly what she was doing. The intoxication of lust turned her away from the path of the Lord. Today, the Lord turns His back on her. She has no right to His mercy, no right to the pity of the faithful. She has lived in dishonor; so shall she die.”

He stops to clear his throat, then unfolds a sheet of paper amid the deafening silence.

“ Allahu akbar! ” yells someone in the back of the crowd.

The mullah raises an imperious hand to silence the shouter. After reciting a verse from the Qur’an, he reads something that sounds like a judgment, returns the sheet of paper to an interior pocket of his vest, and at the end of a brief meditation proposes that his listeners arm themselves with stones. This is the signal. In an indescribable frenzy, the crowd rushes to the heaps of rocks placed in the square a few hours earlier for this very purpose. At once, a hail of projectiles falls upon the condemned woman, who, since she has been gagged, shivers under their impact without a cry. Mohsen picks up three stones and throws them at the target. Because of the tumult around him, the first two go astray, but on the third try he hits the victim flush on the head. In an access of unfathomable joy, he sees a red stain blossom at the spot where his stone has struck her. At the end of a minute, bloody and broken, the woman collapses and lies still. Her rigidity further galvanizes her executioners; their eyes rolled back, their mouths dripping saliva, they redouble their fury, as if trying to resuscitate their victim and thus prolong her torment. In their collective hysteria, convinced that they’re exorcising their own demons through those of the succubus, some of them fail to notice that the crushed body is no longer responding to their attacks and that the immolated, half-buried woman is lying lifeless on the ground, like a sack of abomination thrown to the vultures.

ATIQ SHAUKAT doesn’t feel well. He’s tormented by the need to go outside and breathe some fresh air, to find a likely wall and stretch out on it with his face to the sun. He can’t stay in this rat hole one more minute, talking to himself or trying to decipher the inextricable arabesques of words inscribed on the walls of the cells. The chill inside the little jailhouse revives his old wounds; sometimes his knee gets cold and stiffens up so much it hurts him to bend it. At the same time, he has a feeling that he’s becoming claustrophobic: He can’t stand the darkness any longer, nor the cubbyhole that serves as his office, festooned with spiderwebs and littered with the corpses of pill bugs. He puts away his hurricane lamp, his goatskin gourd, and the velvet-draped box where he keeps a voluminous copy of the Qur’an. After rolling up his prayer mat and hanging it on a nail, he decides to leave the jailhouse. In the unlikely event that his services are needed, the militia officers know where to find him.

The prison world is getting Atiq down. During the last several weeks, he has devoted much consideration to his position as a jailer. The more he thinks about it, the less merit he finds in it, and even less nobility. This realization has put him in a state of constant rage. Every time he closes the door behind him, withdrawing from the streets and their noise, he feels as though he were burying himself alive. A fantastic fear troubles his thoughts, and then he crouches in his corner, refusing to calm down; the act of letting himself go in this way brings him a sort of inner peace. Can it be that his twenty years of war are beginning to take their toll? At forty-two, he’s already worn out; he can’t see the end of the tunnel, and he can’t see the end of his nose, either. Little by little, he’s letting himself move toward some unthinkable renunciation. He’s starting to doubt the mullahs’ promises, and sometimes he catches himself feeling only the vaguest dread of being struck down by a bolt of lightning.

He’s lost a considerable amount of weight. Under his fundamentalist’s beard, the skin of his face sags and droops; his eyes, though outlined with kohl, have lost their keenness. The darkness of the walls has got the better of his reason, and his dark employment is taking root deep in his soul. When a man spends his nights guarding condemned prisoners and his days turning them over to the executioner, he doesn’t have high expectations for his leisure time. Now, completely at a loss, Atiq is unable to say whether the silence of the two empty cells or the ghost of the prostitute who was executed this morning is the reason why the jail’s shadowy corners are filled with the musty reek of the next world.

He goes out into the street. A collection of urchins is stalking a stray dog, and all are yowling in a dissonant chorale. Irritated by the noise and the turmoil, Atiq picks up a stone and throws it at the boy closest to him. The boy dodges the missile impassively and continues to scream himself hoarse. He and his fellows are trying to disorient the dog, which has plainly reached the limits of its strength. Atiq realizes that he’s wasting his time. The little scoundrels won’t disperse before lynching the animal, thus precociously preparing themselves to lynch men.

With his key chain under his vest, he walks to the market, which is overrun with beggars and porters. As usual, an overexcited throng, in no way disheartened by the blazing heat, boils around the vendors’ makeshift stalls. Potential customers examine secondhand clothes from every angle, rummage among used objects in search of no one knows what, bruise overripe fruit with their skinny fingers.

Atiq hails a young neighbor and hands him the melon he’s just bought. “Take it to my house,” he commands. “And don’t even think about dawdling in the street,” he adds threateningly, brandishing his whip.

The boy nods in reluctant compliance, tucks the melon under his arm, and directs his steps toward a surreal jumble of hovels.

Atiq thinks first of going to visit his uncle, a shoe-maker by trade. His den is located just behind a nearby pile of ruins, but Atiq promptly dismisses the idea; his uncle is among the most tireless talkers ever begotten by his tribe, and he’ll keep Atiq listening until late in the night to the same old stories, endlessly reworked, about the boots the uncle made for the king’s officers and the dignitaries of the former regime. At seventy years of age, half-blind and virtually deaf, Ashraf indulges in quite a bit of raving. When his customers, exhausted by his tirades, slip out of the shop, he fails to notice their absence and keeps haranguing the walls until breath fails him. Now no one has shoes made to measure anymore, and the rare, aging specimens brought to him for repair are so severely compromised that he doesn’t know where to begin. Atiq’s uncle Ashraf is bored, and he bores other people to death.