Åsne Seierstad - The Bookseller of Kabul

When Karim caught sight of Leila he was smitten. But Leila never returned to the hotel, in fact she had loathed being there that one time. Not a good place for a young woman, she thought.

Karim could not divulge his obsession to anyone. Mansur would only laugh and at worst ruin it all. Nothing was sacred to Mansur and he wasn’t particularly fond of his aunt.

Only Aimal knew and Aimal kept his mouth shut. Aimal was Karim’s go-between.

If he could get closer to Aimal, Karim thought, he might get to know the family through him. He was lucky; one day Mansur invited him home to dinner. It is normal to introduce friends to the family and Karim was one of Mansur’s most respected friends. Karim did his utmost to be well received: he was charming, a good listener, and showered the food with compliments. It was especially important that the grandmother liked him because she had the last say where Leila was concerned. But the one he came to see – Leila – never showed up. She was in the kitchen cooking. Sharifa or Bulbula carried the food in. A young man outside the family very rarely gets to see the unmarried women. When the food was eaten, the tea drunk and they were about to go to bed, he caught another glimpse of her. Owing to the curfew, dinner guests often stayed overnight, and Leila was making the dining room into a bedroom. She laid out the mattresses, took out rugs and cushions and made up an extra mattress for Karim. Her only thought was that the letter-writer was in the apartment.

He thought she was done and went in to pray before the others went to bed. She was there still, bent over the mattress, her long hair braided and covered by a simple shawl. He turned in the doorway, surprised and excited. Leila didn’t even notice him. All night Karim cherished the memory of her bent over the mattress. The next morning he didn’t see her, although she had prepared water for him to wash in, fried his egg and made his tea. She had even polished his shoes while he was sleeping.

The next day he dispatched his sister to the women of the Khan family. When someone finds new friends, it is not only he who is presented to the family, but his relatives also, and the sister is Karim’s closest relative. She knew about Karim’s fascination with Leila and now she wanted to get to know the family a bit better. When she returned home she told Karim what he already knew. ‘She is clever and a good worker. She is pretty and healthy. The family is quiet and decent. She is a good match.’

‘But what did she say? How was she? What did she look like?’ Karim listened to the answers time and again, even the rather tame answer describing Leila. ‘She is a decent girl, I’ve already told you,’ she said in the end.

As Karim no longer had a mother, the younger sister was obliged to take on the role of suitor for him. But it was still too early; first she would need to get to know the family better, as there was no kinship between them. Without kinship, they were bound to say no the first time.

After the sister had visited, everyone in the family started pulling Leila’s leg about Karim. Leila pretended not to notice when they teased her. She pretended not to care, although she burnt inside. They must not get to know about the letters. She was angry because Karim had put her in danger. She crushed the watch with a stone and threw it away.

First of all she was terrified that Yunus would find out. Of all the family, Yunus was the one who most lived up to the strictest Muslim way of life, although not even he followed it completely. He was also the one she loved most. She worried that he would think badly of her, if he got to know that she had received letters. When she was offered a part-time job on the strength of her knowledge of English, he forbade her to take it. He could not accept that she would work in an office alongside men.

Leila remembers the conversation they had had about Jamila. Sharifa had told her about the young girl’s death by suffocation.

‘What about her?’ Yunus exclaimed. ‘You mean the girl who died when an electric fan short-circuited?’

Yunus did not know that the bit about the electric fan was a lie, that Jamila was killed because a lover had visited her at night. Leila revealed the full story.

‘Awful, awful,’ he says. Leila nods.

‘How could she?’ he adds.

‘She?’ Leila exclaims. She had misunderstood the look on his face and thought it was shock, anger and sorrow over the fact that Jamila had been suffocated by her own brothers. But it was shock and anger that she could have taken a lover.

‘Her husband was rich and good-looking,’ he says, still shaking with indignation after the revelation. ‘What a disgrace,’ he says. ‘And with a Pakistani. This makes me more determined than ever to wed a young girl, young and untouched. And I’ll have to keep her on a short rein,’ he says firmly.

‘But what about the murder?’ Leila asks.

‘ Her crime came first.’

Leila, too, wants to be young and untouched. She is terrified of being found out. She does not perceive the difference between being unfaithful to your husband and receiving letters from a boy. Both are forbidden, both are equally bad, both are a disgrace if found out. Now that she is beginning to see Karim as a saviour, as a way of escaping from the family, she is frightened that Yunus won’t support her if he should propose.

On her part, there was no talk of being in love. She had hardly seen him, only peeped at him from behind a curtain, and seen him from the window when he came with Mansur. What little she had seen was more or less passable.

‘He’s so young,’ she said to Sonya a bit later. ‘He’s small and thin and rather childish looking.’

But he was educated, he seemed kind and he was without a family. Therefore he was her saviour, because he might get her away from the life that was otherwise hers. The best of all was that he had no large family, so she would not risk becoming a servant girl. He would let her study, or take a job. It would be just the two of them; maybe they could go away, maybe abroad.

It was not that Leila had no suitors – she already had three. All were relatives, relatives she did not want. One was the son of an aunt, illiterate and jobless, lazy and useless.

The second suitor was Wakil’s son, a big lout of a son. He was unemployed; now and again he helped Wakil drive.

‘You are lucky, you’ll get a man with three fingers,’ Mansur used to tease her. Wakil’s son, the one who blew off two fingers when he was fiddling with an engine, was not someone Leila wanted. Big sister Shakila pushed for this marriage. She wanted to have Leila around her in the backyard. But Leila knew that she would continue to be a servant. She would always be under her big sister’s thumb and Wakil’s son would always have to fall in with what his father demanded.

That will mean twenty people’s washing, and not just thirteen like now, she thought. Shakila would be the respected lady of the house; Leila would remain the servant girl. Whatever happened she would never get away; once again she would be caught within the family, like Shakila; chickens, hens and children around her skirts all day long.

The third suitor was Khaled. Khaled was her cousin – a nice, quiet young man. A boy with whom she’d grown up and who, on the whole, she liked. He was kind and his eyes were warm and beautiful. But his family – he had an awful family. A large family of about thirty people. His father, a strict old man, had just been released from jail having been accused of co-operating with the Taliban. Their house, like most other houses in Kabul, had been plundered during the civil war, and when the Taliban arrived and imposed law and order, Khaled’s father laid a complaint about some Mujahedeen in his village. They were arrested and imprisoned for a long time. When the Taliban fled, these men regained power in the village and avenged themselves on Khaled’s father by sending him to jail. ‘That will teach him,’ said many. ‘He was stupid to complain.’