Nadia Hashimi - A House Without Windows

“We aren’t a good match, so I would get that idea out of your head. You know, Khala Zainab hadn’t even told Meena that she was giving her number to you.”

“Is that what Meena said? She was probably just embarrassed about it and made that up. How could you not be a good match? You were so cute together as children, and you’re both lovely adults. What more do you need?”

Yusuf shook his head.

“And, Yusuf, you can’t make a decision on one conversation.”

“It wasn’t one conversation, Madar. We just reached a conclusion that it wasn’t meant to be.”

“What would I know anyway? I’m just a woman who’s been married for thirty-something years.” Yusuf’s mother exhaled sharply. “Ay-ay, bachem . When are you going to have enough of that place? The stories you tell me and the chaos we hear about on the news are disturbing. How can you stand to be around these kinds of things?”

Were it not for the static on the line and the specifics of the case, Yusuf could almost have felt like he were only a train ride away from his mother, the way he had been when he lived in Washington. He could picture her, sitting on the living room couch, a basket of his father’s white undershirts in front of her, still warm from the basement’s coin-operated laundry machines. He knew when she hung up, there would be lines on her face from where she’d pressed the receiver against her ear. He pictured the furrows in her forehead and knew she was probably cupping her right hand over the speaker, a habit she’d developed from when conversations across continents traveled across tenuous fibers instead of satellites.

He could almost see out their apartment window, thick metal bars gridding the scene from the fourth floor. Though the view hadn’t been much, Yusuf had spent hours at the window’s edge staring at the building across from theirs and the others that flanked it. When he was twelve, Yusuf’s father had given him a pair of binoculars, hoping he would use them to develop an interest in the airplanes that flew low over their heads. But Yusuf wouldn’t become an engineer, despite his father’s encouragements. Instead, he’d used the binoculars to spy into other windows.

He watched the woman who would undo her pink bathrobe to breast-feed her baby in the mornings. He saw the gray-haired man who flipped through channels with one absentminded hand down the crotch of his pants and another on the remote. He saw the thin, teenage girl who stuck as much of her arm and face as she could through the window grate to keep the cigarette smoke out of her apartment. Yusuf did not feel like a voyeur in watching these private lives. He felt more like a guardian of secrets.

But that wasn’t why he was in Afghanistan. He hadn’t come this far from home because he wanted to be privy to the sordid details of people’s lives here. People had equally sordid lives in New York or Washington. His friends, his cousins, his parents, his colleagues — a hundred voices had echoed the very same question as soon as he’d booked his tickets to Afghanistan.

Why do you want to work there?

“Madar- jan, this is where I can do something real. The country needs a real justice system if it’s going to survive as a society. I want to be part of that. It’s rebuilding a nation and not just any nation — our nation. How shameful is it to leave it all for foreigners to do?”

“I’m proud of you, Yusuf. We’re all proud of you. You should hear the way your father talks about you with his friends or with your uncles. Just last weekend we went to a wedding and he ran into an old classmate from high school. ‘My boy is a hero.’ That’s what he said, honestly.”

Yusuf’s throat tightened. He rubbed his forehead and admitted to himself that he really missed home. He missed the smell of fabric softener on his undershirts and the feel of a gas pedal under his foot. He missed the paved roads and complicated parking signs detailing street cleaning schedules.

He missed Elena. He thought she might reach out to him even after they’d broken up. She never did, even when she knew he’d be leaving for Afghanistan. It was as if she’d agreed with him that they were too different to think they could be together. He’d not regretted his decision. He’d only regretted that he’d let things get as far as they had because it had caused them both unnecessary pain.

Sitting in the terminal at JFK airport waiting for his flight to Dubai, Yusuf had taken out his cell phone and deactivated his Facebook account. It was a sharp-edged moment, dulled only slightly by the number of people who passed him without noticing the bright young lawyer who had just disconnected himself from that world. Maybe it wasn’t such a monumental decision after all. He deleted the app from his phone. He would immerse himself in his work, he’d resolved, and it would be best not to be distracted by pictures of his former classmates clinking glasses in dimly lit lounges in the East Village of New York City or biking through Rock Creek Park in D.C.

“I’m not going to stay here forever, Madar- jan . I’ll be home once I feel like I’ve accomplished something here.”

He could hear her tired exhalation, the acquiescence to her son’s whims.

“I know that country better than you do,” she said. “You’ll accomplish a lot there, but the second you step away, it’ll seem that you’ve accomplished nothing at all. You’ll be the poor ant who drags grains of dirt three times his size to build a home only to have it trampled over with one person’s careless footstep. It’ll break your heart, and that’s what I’m most worried about.”

When he hung up, Yusuf felt the weight of quiet in the room. He rose from the bed and went to the radio on the dresser, flipping it on and turning the dial to scan through the stations. At the sound of a young man’s voice, his fingers paused.

“You’ve called Radio Sabaa,” the host announced. “Go ahead and speak whatever is in your heart.”

“This is the first time I’m calling.” The voice was nervous and Yusuf closed his eyes. He could picture the caller, a young man in dark denim and sneakers, a polo shirt with Coca-Cola embroidered on the pocket. He was on his cell phone, ducking into a side room of his home so his sisters and parents would not overhear his confession. “I’ve been in love with a girl since I was a boy. I love everything about her. The shape of her eyebrows, the sound of her voice, the way she smiles. I used to follow her whenever she left her home, just so she’d know how much I cared about her. When she noticed, she looked back and smiled at me and it was as if. . as if in that moment our hearts became stitched to each other.”

“Ah, young love.” The host sighed. “Please go on.”

“In the last two years, we’ve talked nearly every day. We talk about our studies and our families and our hopes for the future. I want, God willing, to own a business one day, maybe a restaurant or a furniture store.”

Yusuf smiled to himself, let go of the dial, and wandered back to the bed.

“I can only imagine doing all this if she’s with me, by my side. I can’t imagine life without her. I’ve never loved anyone else. I’ve never even looked at another girl the way I look at her.”

“It sounds like she loves you as well. Is something standing in the way of your being together?” the host nudged, his voice thick with sympathy.

“There is a big problem. Her family has recently engaged her to another, a boy she does not love. He is in Germany and will be coming in two weeks for a wedding. After that, it’s only a matter of time before she leaves to join him in Europe. She doesn’t want to go. She told me that, but her family is insisting.”