A Sister to Honor (32 page)

T
he imam at the Al-Hidaya mosque in Albany gave Khalid directions to the grave they had established for Shahid, off a lonely stretch of road outside the city. Only a handful of plots set the field off from the surrounding copse. Shahid's was the newest and simplest, with a verse of the Qur'an and Shahid's name, both in Arabic, on the small stone. With his money dwindling, Khalid took to going there on Fridays. He drove the roads in the rental car he'd never returned, though Uncle Omar had surely canceled the credit card by now. He sat on the stone bench by the side of the graveyard and addressed his brother. Sometimes he waxed angry. What sort of smug bastard was it who thought his selfish successes would rain joy on everyone around him? What had Shahid done with his life? He played a game, that was all, a child's amusement, when everywhere around him were great issues to be addressed. His one job, his one holy responsibility when he came up with the insane notion of bringing their sister to
Amreeka
, was to protect her, and in that he had failed. Now she would die on account of it—and worse, Shahid had caused searing pain to their family, for nothing. Nothing!

Other times, Khalid swept the lingering snow off the bench and sat there, his head hanging heavy from his neck. How had this fate befallen him, that his brother should lie here under the ground while their foul sister was out there unchecked, fornicating with whomever she pleased? What had he done, that he should deserve this fate—to be shaking with cold and hunger in a strange land, his righteous
badal
thwarted, his precious younger brother lost to him, unable to go home? He had tried—oh, he had done everything to achieve the best outcome. Finding the proofs of Afia's shame, planting those proofs carefully so as to properly humble Shahid and wipe away the shame before anyone outside the family heard of it. If only his father could know what Khalid had done, how carefully he had thought it all through, he would want to carry him on men's shoulders through Nasirabad, proclaiming him as a pillar of
pashtunwali
, the son every father dreamed of! But his father could not know because Khalid could not finish the task. And if he failed to track Afia down before his money ran out, he never would. What did Shahid, listening under the ground, think of these events? Was he pleased at Khalid's failure? Why should he so hate Khalid that he would wish such a fate upon him? Did he not remember, or care, about those years Khalid was his big brother, protecting him, teaching him to fly a kite, to properly dribble a football, to behave at school so the teacher would not bring the ruler down on his hands?

Finally, his thoughts would leave Shahid, stubbornly silent in his tiny grave, and roam over Afia. She had disappeared from the coach's house, he was sure of it—he had parked a quarter mile from there after dark and come to look in the windows, and there were only the coach and her husband and child. That husband—he had known, he could tell what Khalid was after. Maybe he had wanted Afia for himself. They were like that, these people, perverse in their desires. Maybe the coach was up to her old tricks, hiding Afia away. He could kidnap the coach's child, force them to reveal the place. No—they'd catch and kill him. Anyway the futility of following both their cars for three days proved that Afia had simply run off, flouting their kindness as she'd flouted her own traditions. Back to the Jew? No, he too seemed alone, moving from his mother's house to the university and back again, and then once or twice with a different girl, big-breasted and fair-skinned. Afia's breasts were not that big, though they must have grown since that time Khalid saw her bathing in the stream. And if she was not with the Jew, who was she with? When he shut his eyes he saw her most vividly, not as she had looked in the courtroom, dressed as demurely as she could in Western clothes, her glasses reflecting the lights; but as she had stood at the cabin in the headlights of the Hyundai, her eyes wide and her hair free, her blouse open at the throat. He had wanted to kill her just like that, just as her high, pleading voice and her half-clothed body called to him. But Shahid, as always, got in his way.

This Friday, as he took to the now-dry bench, he saw that daffodils had emerged from the cemetery's poorly tended grass. Spring. At home, the mulberries would have ripened; the cotton would be thick in the fields. His trail by now had gone cold. Classes had begun again at Smith College, but no Afia in the classrooms where she should have been, and no Afia coming or going from the dorm. At the grocery where she had that filthy job, only older women with brightly dyed hair worked the checkouts. He had asked one of them about Afia Satar, and she had shaken her head sadly. “Don't know where that girl's gone to,” she said. “Such a sweet little thing. You aren't a relation, are you?”

No, he had said, only a friend. And he had haunted the Enright campus too, in case one of Shahid's teammates had sheltered her—she would fornicate with one of them in exchange for a safe bed, perhaps, he could envision it but he would not allow himself—but he saw no sign. Strangely, though, in the week since he had given up finding her, he had begun to feel himself followed. A vague unease as he left his motel room. The sound of the door to the men's room at the diner opening and shutting, but when he whipped around from the urinal, no one there. He had left the flat in Boston just as they were drawing up plans to place a bomb at the Homeland Security office there. A few days, he had promised them, then he'd be back to help.

Perhaps they had sent someone after him. Perhaps they thought he was betraying them to the Americans. Perhaps—it occurred to him as a car sloshed down the long dirt drive to the cemetery; he had never seen anyone else at this place—they had tracked him here. A holy place, a place of death. He steeled himself. Standing, he reached for the gun tucked into his waistband. He was a fighter, he tried reminding himself. He had been trained.

The car was a black SUV. It pulled onto a patch of muddy grass, and the imam from the Albany mosque stepped out. He was dressed in black shalwar, with a down vest over his kurta. He was not very old, but overweight, with bags under his eyes; his skin was dark and his nose flattish, African blood. He greeted Khalid with
Asalaam aleikum
and went around to the passenger side. When he had opened the door, Afia stepped down.

Khalid's heart filled his throat. He took a step back. His stepsister was dressed as she had been in the courtroom, but with the scarf wrapped closer so no trace of her thick hair was visible. In muddy boots she stepped gingerly across the terrain. The imam followed. “Asalaam aleikum, Khalid lala,” she said. Her voice was breathy.

“What are you doing here?” he said in Pashto, and to the imam in English, “Why you have brought her?”

“Our daughter,” the imam said, “is in pain. Your mutual brother”—he gestured toward the cold stone—“is with Allah. But she's asked to be reconciled to you. She is ready to ask forgiveness.”

At these words Afia took a step forward. Her glasses were misted over; he couldn't see the expression of her eyes. The flesh of her face looked waxy with fatigue. Slowly she sank to her knees in the mud and bent her head forward to the ground, so all he saw was the silky spread of the dupatta over the back of her shoulders. He could kick at the head right now, kick hard enough to break the neck, and never have to see her face.

“You see,” said the imam.

“I do,” he managed to say.

“You remember what our Prophet, peace be upon him, said to his enemies at Mecca.”

Khalid nodded. His eyes were fixed on the prostrate figure of Afia. What sort of trick was she playing?

“Say it, my son. Repeat what our Prophet said.”

“He—he quoted Joseph. He said, ‘Let no blame fall upon them.'”

“Exactly. Now, here is your sister. She comes to you of her free will, to seek your forgiveness and love. Up we go.” The imam bent with some difficulty and took Afia's upper arm with his thick hand.
Touched
her. A quick flame of rage licked at Khalid's chest, but he tamped it down. This was an imam,
Amreekan
yes, but still a holy man. “You've said,” the imam went on, speaking to Afia as she stood, her knees caked in mud, “you want to be left alone with him. Is that still what you want?”

“It is, Imam,” she said, her head turned away from Khalid.

The cleric turned to Khalid. “You will keep her safe,” he said. “You will do her no harm. She has come to you in peace, brother.”

Khalid managed to say he understood, though he couldn't think past the imam's words to anything that made sense. Glancing at Shahid's headstone, the imam expressed condolences for their mutual loss. Then he turned back to Afia. “You sure?” he said.

“I am. Thank you.”

The SUV spun its wheels in the mud as it backed out. When it had gone, Khalid took a long time to regard Afia. She stood with her hands folded in front of her. They were chapped, the cuticles bitten raw. He felt the cold butt of the gun against his waist. So much he wanted to know—where had she gone? What had possessed her to return? When had she first committed the sin, and how many times after? But he said only, in Pashto, “How did you find me?”

“I wanted to find where Shahid was buried.” Her voice was stronger now. She directed her gaze somewhere to the left of him. “They told me at the police station that the imam would know. He told me you had been coming here on Friday mornings. I waited for Friday, and asked him to bring me. To—to deliver me into your keeping.”

“You are a black whore,” he said. “You know that.”

She nodded. “As you say, Khalid lala. I understand everything now, you see. I understand all that happened, from the start. And I am not running, anymore.”

What did she mean, from the start? Did she mean from the call he received from Uncle Omar in the mountains? Or did she mean the moment she first toddled with her mother and brother into the courtyard in Nasirabad and his doom was sealed? “You'll obey me, then,” he said.

“I will.”

The vision came to him, and he acted on it. “Get in the car,” he said.

•   •   •

T
hey drove east and then north, toward the Hudson River. As he navigated the car, quickly checking the map he had been given at the rental place, Afia asked nothing about where he was taking her. She talked, instead, in a stream of soft words, about where she had been and what she had decided, about how much Shahid and Baba had always loved Khalid, and always, always, of how the blame was hers, not for what she had done but for what she had failed to do, to keep them all first in her heart, to understand what the consequences would be. She spoke almost like one talking in her sleep, the words falling soft and steady as leaves.

He tried to close his ears. He didn't want to hear her voice. At the same time, he couldn't help interrupting: “Nasirabad? You went all the way to Nasirabad? How long were you there?”

“One day only. I saw Moray, and Panra told me about Uncle Omar, how he sent you here and why, it was Shahid's future, I see that now, he had me to fret over and that derailed his future, and I could not go back home. Moray told me this. There is no marriage for me now, no place for me there. So I left—”

“After one day?”

“And a day in Peshawar. I tried to stay with the nuns. But they wouldn't have me, I was not at risk the way their other women were at risk. And then there was nowhere to stay, and I went to Islamabad, and then back to America. And then I knew. I knew you would come back eventually, and you would find me. I would always be looking over my shoulder, all my life, and I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. You know the story, Khalid, don't you? Of the man who encounters Death in Damascus, and then he flees overnight to Aleppo?”

Khalid shook his head. He saw the bridge just ahead of them, and a place to pull off. He didn't remember the story. He didn't seem to remember anything. It was all he could do to concentrate on driving, on easing the car off the road, on the next step in the plan that had come to him.

“It's a long, awful journey to Aleppo,” Afia went on, still in her dreamy monologue, the words not rushed but not choked back either, floating into the air, “but the man makes it. He's in the market, congratulating himself on having escaped Death. Just then Death comes and taps him on the shoulder, and the man says, ‘But you can't be here! I saw you in Damascus yesterday!' And Death says that's why he looked so surprised at their encounter before, because he had an appointment to come for the man the next day, in Aleppo.”

Khalid put the car in park. He remembered the old tale now. So she knew what she had come back for. Nothing he could do would surprise her. All her talk amounted to a deathbed confession; she was ready for her fate. “Get out,” he said.

There was room for them to walk abreast on the pavement that went by the road and led onto the bridge alongside the traffic. The bridge was painted the color of algae. They were high over an abandoned parking lot, then over bare trees just tipped with green, then over the dark water. This was the wide river he had crossed going to Afia's trial, and returning east, trying to apprehend her. Clouds scudded across the sky. A cold wind had picked up. Afia was still talking. “I want you to know this, Khalid lala,” she was saying. “I cannot regret the things I did for their own sake. I am not a believer in that regard. I have studied biology, and we are biological creatures, we feel these desires as other creatures do, and I do not find a place where the Prophet, peace be upon him, ever said we should not feel such things. I read my Qur'an in the prison, Khalid lala. But where Baba is right about love, you know? About love being a disease? It is that when you are in love you forget that what you do in private does not create a world. The world is the world and you are in it. Gus and I, we loved each other like young creatures, but we were in the world. And when I meet Shahid I will tell him I tried. I tried to go home and marry Zardad, and it was too late. And that, you know, was not my doing. So I hope I may hold my head up when I meet him, when I meet Shahid lala.”