‘You’re right, my friend,’ Ahmad said, lifting the rolled, flat pakol off his head and scratching through the thick head of hair underneath. ‘If it’s His will that I don’t have enough customers then insha’Allah.’
Not for the first time, Sofia thought insha’Allah had a lot to answer for.
‘What to do? What to wish for?’ Ahmad said to no one in particular as he replaced his hat and drew on his cigarette again.
‘Better not to wish for anything,’ offered Hadi. ‘Better not to draw Allah’s attention.’ Ahmad nodded.
Ahmad, his wife, Badria, and their four small children lived in two cockroach-infested rooms in the alley behind his shop, and in six months’ time another baby would arrive. Sofia had known this before Ahmad because she was his wife’s doctor. She also knew Badria was happy with her new pregnancy: proud to be raising children, proud to be a good wife and mother, happy to be living in a world uncomplicated by godless possibilities. For Badria it had always been thus, and always would be. She didn’t believe in education for girls; it upset the natural order of things. ‘They want to leave home and work in a shop. Stupid girls. They dream all the time of a life they’ll never have,’ she had told Sofia. ‘It’s better that they have children and let their husbands work and not waste time on foolish dreams.’
Badria, who was not quite thirty, had her future written for her at the time of her conception back in her village. It was the same future that had waited for generations of women before Badria, and all those who would come after her, until someone in that long line of female history rebelled. As Sofia had delivered each of Badria’s daughters she had wondered whether this might be the one, whether this girl child would be history in the making.
Ahmad and Badria were cousins and had married because that was what was expected. From what Badria had told her one emotionally charged day in the sanctity of the surgery, Sofia was not sure Ahmad knew what love was but he would have known what right was, and it had been right to marry Badria. She also had not questioned her fate, but unlike her cousin, Badria knew what love was. When she was thirteen years old a young boy had come to work in the neighbour’s field. Watching him through the crack in the wall of her mudbrick home, Badria had experienced the first breathless quickening of love, but then, as mysteriously as the boy had arrived, he had disappeared, taking her heart along with him. Badria’s pain had been so cripplingly raw and all-consuming that she vowed she would never suffer such a thing again. Badria was very sure she knew what love was and it was not for her.
Sofia was aware that Ahmad had not been so happy with this new pregnancy. Another baby would mean another mouth to feed, but if Allah wanted them to have more children then insha’Allah. Like so many Afghans, the future for Ahmad was a fear he carried around in the pit of his stomach.
‘Old before their time,’ her father had once said when Sofia had told him about her friends’ woes. Her father’s casual dismissal of their struggles had hurt her deeply. It had also taught her a valuable lesson: to keep her own counsel. For completely different reasons she had also learned not to talk with her Afghan friends too much about life in Australia.
‘You’re talking crazy,’ Hadi had said when she once told them about the pension system. ‘Our government can barely pay people for the work they do. There’s no money for pensions.’
‘There used to be,’ offered Ahmad, ‘before we had the wars.’
‘That’s true,’ nodded Hadi thoughtfully. ‘Pensions are a luxury of peace.’
There had been nothing in either man’s frame of reference that would allow him to compute life in modern Australia. Why would a family of four need a house with eight rooms and two bathrooms when three rooms were an extravagance and two would do well enough? Who would need more than one perfectly good pair of comfortable shoes, or twenty-eight different brands of shampoo to choose from? Such things made your head spin. Sofia’s world in Australia was wanton, extravagant, debauched, and she could see this as clearly as they could. She also knew it was a wanton, extravagant and debauched life most of them would have sold their souls for. And she, the strangest of all creatures, had left all this to live and work among them in Shaahir Square. They loved her all the more for it.
Before Sofia had arrived in Kabul, Western extravagance had come to the city with a glittering new shopping mall that rose phoenix-like out of the rubble and poverty of the city. Nine storeys high, the Kabul City Centre mall was all shiny chrome and glass, with high-fashion shops stocking handbags that cost more than ten years’ hard work for the average Afghan. It had moving stairs and glass elevators to effortlessly carry the residents of Kabul from one dazzling floor to the next. The stores inside displayed things that many residents had never seen before and, as was to be expected, the poor residents of Kabul treated it like an amusement park. On weekends families came to gawk at the glass and chrome and all the pretty things they could never have, while the teenagers of Kabul hung out, dreaming of the day when this life of iPhones and designer plenty would be theirs.
With Ahmad and Hadi beginning a familiar discussion about the cost of educating their sons, a potential customer arrived and Hadi retreated inside his shop while Sofia headed off to her surgery. It hadn’t escaped her attention that neither man had mentioned educating their daughters. Nor did it escape her attention that she had not questioned this, even though the issue of female education was something she was passionate about.
The subtext of so many of Sofia’s conversations with her Afghan friends was that she should not interfere. She understood and accepted this. What right did an outsider have to tell people how they should live and behave in their own country? From the moment she knew she was going to Afghanistan, Sofia had made the decision not to become involved, even though she knew there would be things she would find confronting and hard to accept. Initially she had been able to rationalise the decision by telling herself it would only be for a year. When the option came for a second year she told herself it would only be for one more. After five years of living in Afghanistan she was finding her silences harder to hold, and yet remain silent she did. The stakes were simply too high to do otherwise.
Silent and invisible was what Sofia needed to be.
9
‘AS-SALAAM ALAIKUM, DR Sofia,’ offered Rashid, the security guard who Jabril had hired three years previously to keep watch at the bottom of the stairs that led up to her surgery. When Sofia had questioned whether the business could afford to carry another salary, Jabril had explained that the ex-soldier was there to protect her and her patients, because without patients, or her, there would be no business. Sofia suspected Rashid’s hiring had more to do with Jabril’s good heart.
Rashid, who was Hazara and related by marriage to Babur, had lost his two eldest children to a Taliban suicide bomber on a school bus and had been desperate to get his Hazara wife and surviving twins out of the country. When Jabril heard the story, he not only hired Rashid but had given him a small ‘appreciation’ payment to take care of the expenses for his surviving family to travel to Iran, plus the first six months’ rent on an apartment.
It had been Rashid’s first security job and Sofia thought he was taking it all too seriously. When she had complained to Jabril he had patiently explained that Rashid was supposed to take his job seriously. Security was a serious business in Afghanistan. It had taken a while for Sofia to dissuade Rashid from waiting outside Behnaz’s gate each morning to escort her across the square with his AK-47 pointed at her friends, but once he was convinced that they were not a threat to her he had become a welcome fixture in her days and the life of the square. Sitting at the bottom of the stairs every day, Rashid seemed happy enough listening to the Kabul security situation on the little transistor radio Dr Jabril had given him for this purpose, but when Dr Sofia was not in her surgery he would venture further afield, talking to the bazarris and shopkeepers, who Rashid believed were far more reliable sources of the city’s pulse than whatever came over the radio.