Nadia Hashimi - A House Without Windows

Basir took another step. And another. How much he yearned to go back to this morning, when everything was ordinary and normal. How much he yearned to go back into the house and find his mother stirring green beans in a heavy pot and worrying that her children hadn’t enough to eat.

But nothing would be ordinary again. Basir knew this as he turned the corner and the life he knew melted into a bloody, brutal mess. Zeba, his mother, looked up at him, her face drained and empty. She sat with her back against the wall, the air toxic. Her hands were dark and bloody, her shoulders shaking.

“Madar- jan, ” Basir started. A crumpled shape lay a few feet away by the outhouse.

“ Bachem, ” Zeba’s voice faltered. Her staccato breaths quickened. Her head sank between her knees as she began to sob.

“Go back into the house, my son. . go back into the house. . your sisters, your sisters. . go back into the house. .”

Basir felt his chest tighten. Like his father, he hadn’t seen this coming.

YUSUF, AS A YOUNG BOY, NEVER DREAMED HE WOULD ONE DAY BE a lawyer, much less a lawyer in America. He was like any other child and gave little thought to the many days beyond tomorrow.

He remembered well afternoons spent rustling through the low-hanging boughs of the pomegranate tree in his grandfather’s orchard. Plump red balls hung like ornaments on outstretched arms. Three proud trees grew enough fruit to keep Boba- jan ’s children and grandchildren with red-stained fingers through the fall. Yusuf would pluck the heaviest and roundest pomegranate he could reach and slice through its leathery peel with a knife he’d snuck from his grandmother’s kitchen. He would crack the globe in half, careful to catch any loose ruby-colored gems. A careful fingertip wiggled each seed free from its white membrane. He worked diligently, painstakingly. Sometimes he ate the pearls one by one, feeling the tart burst on his tongue. Other times, he popped a handful in his mouth and teased the juice out before mashing the fibrous pits between his teeth.

Yusuf would throw the peels over the adobe wall that separated his grandfather’s yard from the street — not because he shouldn’t be eating pomegranates but because he didn’t want his siblings or cousins to know how many he’d devoured.

The youngest of four children, Yusuf adored his brother, who was six years older, handsome, and quite self-assured. He loved his two sisters, too, sitting by them while they crumbled stale bread between their palms and tossed it to the grateful pigeons and sparrows outside their home. Yusuf was a boy who loved stories, particularly ones that frightened and surprised. When he slept, he imagined himself a hero, chasing djinns into the jungle or finding treasures at the bottom of a well. Sometimes he was brave in his dreams, rescuing his family from the grips of evil villains. But more often than he cared to admit, Yusuf would wake to a mattress wet with a child’s fear.

When Yusuf was eleven, his father decided it was time to leave Afghanistan. The rockets were nearing their town, a village that had escaped the past decade relatively unscathed. Yusuf’s mother, who had worked as a teacher for just one year before the schools were closed, was glad to leave. She carried a few token items into their new life: a handful of photographs, a sweater her mother had knit, and an intricate peacock-blue shawl her husband had brought for her from his travels in India when they were first married. Her copper urns, their crimson hand-knotted carpets, and her silver wedding tray were all left behind, along with most of her clothing. Yusuf’s father, a trained pilot, hadn’t flown in years because the airlines had been grounded. He still made certain to pack his diplomas and certificates as well as the children’s. He was a practical man and did not lament leaving the rest behind.

The journey from Afghanistan to Pakistan was treacherous. The family crossed mountains, sometimes in the darkness, and paid suspicious-looking men large sums of money to help them. All four siblings, close in age, huddled with their parents in the darkness, in the back of a truck, as they climbed over rocks. They trembled when gunshots echoed through the valleys. Yusuf’s mother, stumbling beneath her burqa, urged them to press on and insisted the guns were too far away to reach them. Yusuf might have believed her had her voice trembled a bit less.

In Pakistan, Yusuf’s family settled in a refugee camp. Though they were far from wealthy in Afghanistan, the camp was a harsh adjustment for them. Pakistani police officers shouted and waved off any questions. They stood in lines for food, for housing, for documents that never seemed to materialize. They lived in an open field, a dust bowl full of tents and listless souls. They slept side by side, trying to ignore the stench of poverty, loss, and destitution. “The devil finds work for idle hands,” Yusuf’s mother would warn her children. They kept to themselves and spoke to no one in the camps of anything more than the interminable waiting and the abominable heat. This refugee camp was temporary, Yusuf’s parents promised, and soon enough they would join their relatives in America.

Weeks passed and no news came. Yusuf’s father searched for work, but the airline office scoffed at his appeals. He couldn’t find work as a mechanic or even as an assistant to one. Disheartened and with dwindling funds, he took a job as a brick maker.

“Dignity is not in what work you do,” he insisted to his wife and children who were unaccustomed to seeing him covered in mud and dust. “It’s in how you do that work.”

But his shoulders hung low as he washed the clay from his hands. Yusuf’s mother bit her lip and rested her hand on his arm in the thin privacy of their tent. Dignity was hard to find in the camp. They insulated themselves as much as possible and kept away from what went on: cockfights, opium clouds, the stench of unbathed masses, and the moans of mourning for a child who’d succumbed to disease.

Yusuf’s older brother worked alongside his father. His two sisters stayed with their mother, and Yusuf was sent to the local school, twenty boys sitting under a log shelter, open on three sides. There was a weathered chalkboard and a teacher who distributed small, stapled notebooks with onionskin paper. Yusuf’s relatives in America swore they were doing all they could to bring them to the United States — they had filled out forms, submitted bank statements, and even hired lawyers they could barely afford. The local consulate officials told Yusuf’s father his application was still being considered.

“Padar- jan, I can go work with you and Fazil. I’m not a child anymore. I can earn money, too.” They sat in their tent at dusk, drinking bowls of thin soup his mother had cooked over an open fire.

Yusuf’s father had stared at the ground, as if he expected it to drop from under him.

“Padar?”

“Yusuf- jan, ” his mother interrupted softly. “Let your father eat his dinner.”

“But Madar- jan, I want to help. That school is crowded and the kids are. .”

“Yusuf.” The unmistakable edge in her voice silenced him. Yusuf’s father slept that night without saying another word.

Weeks stretched into months. They grew despondent as they watched the camp swell with new families. When they finally received the letter saying they had been granted visas to the United States, Yusuf’s mother pressed her face into her husband’s chest to muffle her sobs. Kaka Rahim’s persistence had paid off. They were among the fortunate few who would turn their backs on this camp; but years into their lives in America, the mark was still on them, heaviest on Yusuf’s father who never managed to walk as tall as he had when he was an out-of-work pilot in their village.