A House Without Windows (2 page)

IF ZEBA HAD BEEN A WOMAN LESS ORDINARY, KAMAL MIGHT HAVE
seen it coming—a gnawing feeling or at least a few hairs standing on end. But she gave him no warning, no reason to believe that she would be anything more than she had been for the last two decades. She was a loving wife, a patient mother, a peaceful villager. She did nothing to draw attention to herself.

On that day, the day that changed an unchangeable village, Zeba's afternoon was a bland repetition of the many afternoons before it. The clothes hung on the line outside their home. Stewed okra simmered in an aluminum pot. Rima, the puffy tops of her feet blackened from crawling around the house, slept a few feet away, a dark, wet circle where her innocent mouth met the bedsheet. Zeba watched her daughter's back rise and fall and smiled to see the soft pout of her lips. She traced her finger through a mound of freshly ground cardamom. The scent lingered on her fingertip, sweet and soothing.

Zeba sighed and flicked the end of her white head scarf over her shoulder. She tried not to wonder where Kamal was because that inevitably led to wondering what he was doing, and Zeba was in no mood to entertain such thoughts today. She wanted today to stay an ordinary day.

Basir and the girls were on their way home from school. Basir, Zeba's eldest son, was only sixteen years old but more hardened than
other boys his age. Adolescence had gifted him with the unfortunate insight to see his parents for what they were. Home had not been a refuge. Home had been, for as long as Basir could remember, a broken place—broken dishes, broken ribs, broken spirits.

At the heart of the problem was Kamal, Zeba's husband, a man who had disintegrated over the years. Now he survived only by believing that the man he was for minutes at a time could make up for the man he was the rest of the hours.

Zeba watched the embers flicker beneath the pot. Maybe Kamal would bring home a cut of meat today. They hadn't had any in half a month. Last week, he'd brought a bag of onions, so fresh and sweet Zeba's eyes had watered just looking at them. She'd cried tears of gratitude into everything she cooked for days.

Rima shifted languidly, her pale leg twisted back under the knit blanket and her arm pulled back to her side. She would be waking soon. Zeba brushed the cardamom grinds into a small empty jar. She took one deep breath before sealing the lid, letting its scent tingle her lungs.

Some days were difficult. Food was often scarce and the children sometimes ill. Zeba had already lost two little ones and knew just how easily God could take away. Kamal had moods she didn't understand, but she'd learned to weather them, like an experienced pilot navigating through stormy skies. She numbed herself with housework. She focused on the good. The girls were attending school. Basir, her first and only son, was bright, and his help around the house was a relief to her aching back. Rima, the baby, had survived illnesses that had claimed others before her, and her pink cheeks buoyed Zeba's spirit.

Rima. Incredibly, it was the youngest of the household who changed the course of history. Most children had to start walking before they could do such a thing.

Had Rima not shifted her leg at that moment, had the scent of cardamom not breathed life into Zeba's weary lungs, had there been anyone else around to see or stop her, perhaps the life that transpired
in their humble courtyard and within the solitude of their mud walls would have continued on for another year, another decade, or their entire lives. As it were, a soft breeze drifted through the open window and Zeba thought it best to bring the laundry in before Rima awakened, before Basir and the girls came home.

Out the back door, into the courtyard, and over to the clothesline where she stood for a few moments before hearing something she couldn't deny.

It was the kind of sound no one wanted to hear. It was the kind of sound people would much rather walk away from.

Zeba's chest tightened. A white heat flushed her face and made her jaw clench tightly on a day that could have been so wonderfully ordinary. Zeba debated for a moment before deciding she—a wife, a woman, a
mother
—had to see.

BASIR AND HIS SISTERS ENTERED THROUGH THE GATE IN THE
clay wall that separated their home and courtyard from the street and neighboring houses. At the sound of Rima's wailing, the cry of a child with outstretched arms, Basir's stomach lurched. The girls hurried into the house and, in a flash, Shabnam had Rima balanced on her narrow hip, the baby's face runny and red. Kareema looked at her sisters wide-eyed, the smell of burnt okra thick and ominous in the air. There was no sign of Madar-
jan
. Something was wrong.

Basir said nothing to the girls. He scanned the two bedrooms and the kitchen quickly. He felt his hands tremble as he reached the back door. Pantaloons, head scarves, and shirts flapped on the clothesline. A soft whimper pulled Basir's attention to the far corner of their courtyard, where the outhouse backed against the neighbor's outer wall.

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 ad
justment 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 any
more. 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.

Yusuf's family settled in New York, in a Queens neighborhood that was home to the Afghan diaspora. They took it all in: the elevator buildings, the swarms of people walking to work, the reliable tap water, the grocery stores so bountiful that their fruits and vegetables practically spilled onto the sidewalks. The reunion with family was thick with embraces, tears, and meat-laden meals. They stayed with an uncle and his family in their three-bedroom apartment until they were able to secure assistance and enough work to rent an apartment of their own. Yusuf and his sisters were enrolled in school; his father and Fazil started working at Kaka Rahim's pizza shop.

YUSUF'S ELDEST SISTER, SITARA, FELL IN LOVE JUST AFTER FINISH
ING
high school. She had met an Afghan boy who lived in the same
apartment building. Flirtatious looks in the dank elevator turned into stolen moments in the humidity of the basement laundry room. Yusuf's parents warned their daughter to stay away from the boy, who worked part-time as a bank teller and whose parents were of a different ethnicity. Doors were slammed, phone calls were intercepted, and seething looks were exchanged. Predictably, the young lovers grew all the more desperate for each other and embraced on public buses, caring less and less that their parents would learn of their improprieties.

To stave off rumors, the families agreed to have the two married, and after a modest ceremony, Sitara moved in with him and his family to start her new life just two floors above her parents and siblings in the apartment the boy's family had occupied for years. Yusuf's second sister, Sadaf, opted to stay in school and pursue accounting at a city community college. His brother, removed from books for too long, sharpened his English by repeating lines of dialogue from television sitcoms. He rose quickly through the restaurant ranks and became a bartender. Yusuf's mother enrolled in ESL classes at the local library and began working as a clerk in a department store. Yusuf's father, grateful to Kaka Rahim for getting them on their feet, decided it would be safest not to mix work and family and driving a taxi, resigning himself to a flightless future. Almost overnight, Yusuf became an adolescent who had mastered the nuances of the English language and the crowded subways. He excelled in school and impressed teachers who urged him to apply for scholarships and pursue college.

He did well by day but woke in cold sweats at night at least once a week. He simply couldn't go seven nights without fumbling in the dark to change his panic-soaked shirts and pillowcase without waking his siblings.

The family lived modestly but comfortably. They had one, then two televisions. Their closets filled with new clothes. They replaced their lost possessions with new ones. Yusuf's mother burst into tearful laughter when his father came home with a silver tray, almost identical
to the wedding tray they'd left behind. They watched television together, one person always with a ready finger on the remote should the actors and actresses fall into a love scene. Yusuf's father followed Afghanistan in the newspapers and on the news. They all braced themselves after September eleventh and were shocked that strangers on the street would shout angrily at them in the disaster's aftermath. Yusuf's father cheered the U.S. decision to invade Afghanistan though he had no intention or hope of returning there.

Only fools run into burning buildings,
he would joke
.

When Yusuf was a freshman at NYU, news about Afghanistan was everywhere. It was tedious. Afghanistan was suicide attacks, battered women, and corruption. In his second year, Yusuf had enrolled in a course on human rights on a whim, thinking it would be an easy way to bring up his grade point average. By the second lecture, a fire was lit. In a flood of memories, Yusuf was back in Afghanistan. Death tolls. Small boys working as blacksmiths. A promising journalist murdered along with his wife and children. Dehumanizing refugee camps. A young girl sold to pay off a poppy crop debt. Untouchable warlords.

How could he turn his back on all that?

Others did not. Others were brave. Others championed the cause of the voiceless.

Yusuf had lived and breathed the American belief that one person could make a difference. Flyers in the student union and the optimistic rhetoric of professors swelled in him. He attended his first protest and liked the way it felt to chant with the crowd. He raised his voice. He developed a taste for the fight, the fury it brought out of him. Feeling angry was better than feeling afraid.

Two semesters passed, and Yusuf realized it had been weeks since he last woke in a cold sweat.

Yusuf chose law because it was the difference between right and wrong—because the law was the only way to protect the weak and punish the aggressors. He studied for weeks and burned through books of practice LSAT exams until he sat for the test and scored sur
prisingly well. He filled out a dozen applications but kept his fingers crossed that he would get accepted into a program in New York. With nervous excitement, Yusuf tore open a thick packet from Columbia. It was good news, but his parents shook their heads in disappointment.

Are you sure you don't want to be a doctor? Doctors save lives every day,
they reminded him.

I don't want to save one life at a time,
Yusuf declared.
There are better ways.

His parents shrugged their shoulders and hoped for the best. At least he would be a professional, more accomplished than his siblings who had little interest in graduate school. They would have done more to stop him had they known what he would go on to do.

Yusuf took courses on human rights law and immigration law. He volunteered as an interpreter and sharpened his native Dari. He had professors make phone calls on his behalf to land internships with human rights organizations. He was thankful his family had settled in New York where opportunities abounded. He kept his nose buried in books.

You'll be blind before you're thirty,
his mother had lamented. She was proud of her son but worried about him, too. Some weeks it seemed he barely slept at all.

Yusuf graduated from law school and was hired by the advocacy organization where he'd interned for two years. They'd been impressed by his drive and created a position for him. He wasn't making as much as his classmates who had gone the corporate route, but it was more than he or anyone in his family had ever made and he was thrilled to have purpose. He worked hard and turned no project away.

Yusuf did carve out time to socialize, though he felt compelled to tell himself he was networking so he would not feel as though he was wasting time.

IT STARTED WITH HAPPY HOUR, A CHEERFUL EXCUSE TO DRINK
upon exiting an air-conditioned office building. Over time, Yusuf
acquired a taste for dark lagers. A cold beer in his hands made him feel like he was bonding with his colleagues. He kept this part of his life private from his parents and siblings. Though they'd shared tight living spaces all their lives, he still felt compelled to keep his sins to himself. It was not a matter of deceit, as he saw it, but a show of respect for his parents' ideals.

Happy hour was where Yusuf had started dating. It had taken him that many years to feel like the girls around him wouldn't see him as foreign or inferior. When an Asian girl named Lin leaned across a bar table and rested her hand on his forearm flirtatiously, Yusuf felt his confidence soar. He went out with a few girls but never let anything go further than five or six dates. If he sensed they were interested in more, he would slip away, letting a few phone calls go unanswered or confessing his reluctance to commit to any one person.