The Night Letter

Chapter 50

Chapter 50

Roshina cradled her cheek in her hand, wet with tears, more from despair than pain. It had been so long since she cried and Safiq had never struck her before. Someone had seen her with the rifle, had started a rumor that she was the one who killed the American, a rumor that spread until Safiq heard of it. He noticed that his rifle had been disturbed. He looked down the barrel, swabbed it. It had been fired recently. He was furious. People had been so proud they had gotten one of the Americans; men wanted to take credit for it. But when they found it she had done it, it was a shame, an embarrassment.

"I saved your oldest son and avenged your youngest," Roshina had pleaded but that was when he struck her. Vengeance was for men to administer and enjoy; she had humiliated him in the eyes of the village. There was no justice for women in this world. Hekmata delighted in her fall.

"That's nothing. I got kicked by a donkey once. You'll survive," her mother in law told her; the first words she had ventured to say to her in years.

Roshina had her own pride and she kept it whatever they might do to her. She was the daughter of an educated man, a major in the old Aghan army, Soviet trained. She thought Omar would be proud of her. That carried her through. He had taught her much of what he knew and she held on to it, reading any scraps of printed mater she could find, writing notes to herself when she could find paper and writing instruments and, when she couldn't, reciting the words to herself, poetry literature, whatever she could remember. Whenever they heard her whispering, mumbling to herself they thought she was praying. She was not. It was her secret. He had taught her not only culture but the arts of war. By the time she was ten she had disassembled, assembled and fired handguns, the Enfield, even an AK.

She had not passed the words or the skills on to her son. Then it wouldn't be her secret anymore and the secrets were what sustained her. Raham worked with his hands now. He stayed in Kandahar but he seldom came to the house. He found work in construction when he could get it but the projects were run by foreigners, either American or Chinese. He did not want to work for the Americans or thought it would not be possible for him to work for them. Roshina never really knew what he had been doing all those years apart but she knew it had been violent and that was why the Americans had been after him. The Chinese brought their own labor with them. But Raham found enough work to keep him from going back to the life he had been living.

He could not forget Sultana. He thought the only way to get her out of the asylum was to save enough money to buy her out. She would have died of old age before that happened. Safiq avoided any contact with his son after he lost his new wife and son, as if blaming Raham for his loss, as if he had brought the violence with him from wherever he had come from. But Roshina knew that Safiq had been mixed up with the Americans, too. It was a long time before there was any peace in the house again. Even when no one spoke the shadow of the violence hung over them, a stain that couldn't be washed away. But Roshina kept working at him.

With time, Safiq agreed to give his son enough money to secure Sultana's release from the insane asylum. Sultana's step father, Talal, had died in the attacks. He had been at the police barracks when it was stuck by the suicide bomber and had been one of the first ones to die. She had no family to try to keep her there. But the person that Raham took home from the hospital was not the image he had carried around in his head during their years apart. Time had not stood still for either of them. She had not only endured the suffering, she had absorbed an awful lot of it and what survived in her he had trouble recognizing. Going to work was a relief. Work was the only thing that ever made sense to him. For most of his life, he only wanted to be with Sultana; now he found her and he looked forward to leaving the house every morning. The dreams that kept him going for so long vanished, replaced with only reality but he was still alive; it didn't destroy him and now he had knowledge as his reward. He still returned home every night. He had nowhere else to go and no one else and she had no one else. They leaned together like two crumbling pillars to keep from falling.

Raham noted that Mullah Jan had not tried to coordinate the attack to kill Safiq; he had only wanted him to do it for his own perverse reasons. Laboring at a job site, walking the streets of Kandahar or smoking in a tea and Pepsi cafe, Raham could often be seen to jump and start like from a sudden attack of nerves or electric shock. He would turn his head to follow the path of big men who happened to walk by, big men with full, black beards, wearing beige or cream colored thobes or black bisht. Few knew it was the phantom of Mullah Jan that followed him. But Mullah Jan had disappeared and none knew his location. It was very unusual not to hear rumors or tall tales about Mullah Jan. Raham had no doubt he would return some day.

At night Roshina always said a prayer. It was her own secret prayer after her formal prayers had been recited and she asked god to protect her son and the rest of her family and to remember to show a little mercy to her father's poor soul. The prayer went, "thank you, god for another day. You have been very generous with my days. Please don't give me too many more. Give them to someone who can make better use of them."