Andrea Busfield - Born Under a Million Shadows

So for the next few weeks that’s what we all tried to do.

James spoke to Georgie’s boss at the goat-combing company, and she was allowed to stay at home and still get paid. May forgot about the Frenchman and stayed by her friend’s side in the evenings, reading to her and trying to get her dressed. During the day my mother took on the job of sitting by her bed as May went out to do her engineering. She spent most of her hours up there just stroking Georgie’s hair and begging her to eat. But Georgie’s mouth was too full of grief to make room for food, and it was a daily battle even to get her to eat some Happy Cow cheese, and she used to love Happy Cow.

In the meantime—in between school, which had started again, and working at Pir Hederi’s shop—I stood at the doorway or sat on the floor of Georgie’s bedroom, watching the woman who had given me and my mother a new life get thinner and thinner until her pale face collapsed and her arms and legs became twigs under her clothes.

Finally, when it looked like a small breeze might be enough to snap her in two, James fetched Dr. Hugo to our house, who seemed to be a friend of his and who he said could help, although I had my doubts. Tall and a little thin himself with dark hair that was short but somehow messy and eyes as blue as sky, Hugo arrived dressed in jeans and a big coat that wasn’t even white. I’d seen the health advertisements on television; I knew what doctors were supposed to look like. Hugo didn’t even come close. However, James and May seemed a lot happier when a little later he came back downstairs and revealed that he had given Georgie “something to help her sleep.” I would have preferred it if he had given her “something to help her eat,” but what did I know? I was just a kid.

“She just needs time,” my mother said as we sat in the kitchen preparing chicken soup for Georgie. ‘She is very sad, and sadness doesn’t just disappear overnight. Georgie loved her baby very much because it offered her hope, and now she needs time to get used to the idea that her baby has gone and that her hope may have gone with it.”

“What do you mean ‘hope’?” I asked, carefully ladling the hot soup into a bowl.

My mother sighed, took the spoon from my fingers, and knelt down to take my face in her hands.

“I suppose Georgie hoped that the baby would mean the father would be in her life forever, Fawad. It is the kind of hope that nests in the heart of a woman very much in love. I pray that when you are older, if you ever see this hope in the eyes of a woman close to you, you take the very best care of it that you can because this hope is the most precious thing and the greatest gift God can give to a man. It means you are truly loved, son.”

Although we all knew who the father of Georgie’s baby was, we never talked about it in the house. It was as if the baby had been made by magic and taken by God, because it was wrong. There were rules to follow, and, although it doesn’t happen often in Afghanistan, if you break those rules you must be punished.

And Georgie was being punished: she had lost her baby, she had lost her hope, and she had lost her appetite. I was convinced that very soon we would lose her too—our punishment for having guarded Georgie and Haji Khan’s secret.

“What’s the matter with you?” Pir Hederi stopped loading the plastic bags on the counter to turn, almost, in my direction. “You speak less than a mute these days.”

“It’s nothing,” I replied. “I’m just feeling quiet, that’s all.”

“I may be blind, Fawad, but I’m not stupid,” he answered back. Then, moving to the doorway to hand me the bags of shopping, he slipped one hundred afs into the pocket of my coat. “Cheer up, boy. Here’s a bonus for all the delivery stuff.”

“Great,” I joked. “All of two dollars. I’ll go right ahead and retire then.”

“You ungrateful donkey!”

Pir playfully reached out to hit me on the shoulder, but as I’d started getting onto my bike he punched me in the head instead—a hazard of the job, I guess, when you work for a blind man.

It had been a long time since I’d made any kind of joke, and although it felt good to let the air of one into my brain, the guilt soon followed. I wondered how I could be such a bad friend to Georgie when I could return home at any time and find her stretched out on her bed, cold dead.

Despite all of her ways, Georgie wasn’t an Afghan like me and my mother, and therefore she wasn’t as strong as us. Just this one death of a baby that didn’t even have a name could be the end of her. And I couldn’t speak of my fears to anyone outside our house because it would have been wrong in so many ways. Georgie wasn’t married, and she was going to have a baby. Women used to get stoned for that kind of behavior in my country; in some parts they still do. And it wouldn’t only be Haji Jawid calling her a whore for not taking care of her body and for having sex with a man before marriage. So I couldn’t explain my bad mood, and I couldn’t hide it. For once in my life, I sort of wished I was a girl because girls are experts at hiding things, and as they never speak straight you hardly ever know what they’re thinking.

“Well, I’m glad you had such a good time,” Jamilla huffed one day after I accidentally told her about chasing Baba Gul’s goats with Mulallah. Despite her words, she didn’t look at all glad, and I realized something was up when she hardly spoke to me for the rest of the day. If I asked her a question, she would simply say, “Why don’t you go and ask Mulallah?”

My mother was exactly the same. Even though I felt she was beginning to like Shir Ahmad because he was now reading books about computers and going to a special class in the afternoons, whenever I asked her about it she would say, “My only wish is for your happiness, Fawad,” which I knew wasn’t strictly true because she had started wearing makeup on her eyes and taking better care of her clothes, and I wasn’t really bothered by what she looked like.

In fact, Georgie was the only woman I knew who seemed to talk real. After all, she had told me about her love for Haji Khan, and also that May was a lesbian. So to think she might just fade away into nothing was unbearable, especially as giving up smoking wasn’t really enough to get her out of Hell.

Therefore, when I’d dropped off the last bag of shopping close to a house by the hospital and saw him standing there in the street—as clear as day, laughing with a fat man and surrounded by all of his guards—a hot redness colored my sight, and suddenly I was off my bike and on top of him.

“You bastard! You lying fucking bastard! You’re killing her!”

My fists pounded at his chest and I felt his body tense at the blows, but he didn’t move, not one muscle, so I kicked and I beat him even harder, using all of my heart and all of my hate and letting it explode on top of him.

“She’s dying, and you’re laughing!” I screamed. “You’re killing her, and you don’t even care, you ugly bastard whore-fucking camel cock! You’re killing her!”

And I shoved myself away from him and ran.

IRAN FROM WAZIR Akbar Khan, stumbling through the chaos of people and cars, over the bridge covering the river, and into the dark of Old Makroyan. I didn’t know where I was running to until I arrived there, and it was the house of Spandi.

“You did what?”

“I beat up Haji Khan,” I repeated.