But why does it have to be a friend of Behnaz?
Exactly, thought Omar. Why can’t it be a friend of Chief Wasim or Dr Sofia? They live in the house too.
Or maybe it is Dr Sofia who needs to stop?
As Omar contemplated these new possibilities, he was unable to shake the feeling that he was missing some vital piece of information. Surely it could be for a friend of Chief Wasim or a friend of Dr Sofia as much as a friend of Behnaz? He realised that the only way to find the answer was to ask around the square, but just as he was thinking this was a very good idea and was rising from his chair to begin his investigation, he realised it was a very bad idea and sat back down again. How did he ask around the square about who this friend might be without people knowing he’d stolen the night letter? Omar sighed. He sincerely hoped another thought was on its way to the station to tell him how he should proceed.
Omar had been finding thinking very tiring work lately. Not only was he having more than the usual difficulty holding onto a thought for too long but now it seemed he had two voices in his head. The preferred explanation for these failings was that he’d been self-medicating a little too generously. The other option was not something he wished to contemplate too closely. What Omar was sure he was not confused about, though, was the fact that the night letter had become his responsibility and he needed to take action to discover who was being threatened, by whom and why, and then he would be able to warn them.
As Omar sat in his chair, waiting for the correct thought to arrive, he drifted off into a blissful sleep again.
11
SOFIA WATCHED THE family disappear under the awning to see them reappear again with the little girl holding one of Ahmad’s pink hats. Further out into the square Omar was asleep outside his shop, while Behnaz had just stepped outside her gate to throw a bucket of water over the remains of the donkey droppings as the United Nations SUV slowly manoeuvred its way into the square. Stepping away from the window, Sofia waited until it pulled up in front of Ahmad’s shop then leaned forward to catch a glimpse of Daniel getting out of the car before he disappeared under the awning.
As long-lost memories of Daniel in the village came flooding back, she was shocked at the power of feeling that just seeing him again could elicit, and yet, something was wrong. Sofia stood back from the window again. She had no idea what it could be.
* * *
AFTER LEAVING TAWFIQ in a lowland village, it had taken one and a half days for Sofia and her guide to reach the village in the highlands where the doctor she’d read about from Médecins Sans Frontières was working. At the end of the second day they had climbed a ridge to find themselves standing on a small plateau shrouded in cloud. In front of her were about twenty squat stone huts with flat thatched roofs and tiny windows. The ground around each hut had been swept clean, with a few scrawny bushes clinging to life between large grey boulders dotted around the village where woolly goats were scavenging for invisible scraps. It was a desolate place, dominated on all sides by menacing, razor-sharp mountain peaks.
An old man with a raggedy turban and a thin grey beard who was squatting outside his hut smoking watched as they approached. As word began to spread of the strangers’ arrival, other villagers began to appear, including a group of children who gathered around Sofia, giggling as their hands darted out to touch her arm or hand before being pulled back to safety again. When a severe-looking man with a long, hooked nose and a bushy black monobrow had appeared from one of the huts barking something at the kids, they quickly ran off, only to reappear around the other side of the village.
Mafuz, the village headman, informed Sofia’s guide that the male doctor from Kabul was in a village further down the mountain and was not expected back until the following day, but Sofia could stay as long as she liked. Making sure she was welcomed and protected by the headman, her guide had left, promising to return in four weeks’ time to take her back down to the lowlands where Tawfiq would be waiting.
While Sofia’s Dari had been passable for Kabul, the village spoke a dialect of Dari, which caused some confusion and had Sofia believing the small hut they were standing in front of was her lodging. With no one wanting to offend the strange Western woman, who seemed to prefer the grain hut to the women’s hut, it had been quickly swept clean and a bed pad laid out for her. The last thing Sofia saw as the door was closed behind her was the faces of the village children, each vying for a closer look at the curiosity that had arrived like magic in their world.
The hut had one tiny window covered by a rough hessian cloth and little light coming in under the door or through its rough-hewn timber planks. Sofia had no idea what to do. Lying down she had discovered the hut was too small to stretch out so she turned on her side, curled her legs up and fell into a deep sleep, only to wake freezing in the middle of the night. Noticing a weight on her legs, Sofia reached down to find a prickly goat hair blanket which she pulled up under her chin, and then fell back to sleep, only to be woken at dawn by the call to prayer.
Turning on her back, Sofia had stretched her cramped legs up the wall until she found a natural stone shelf to rest her feet on and lay listening to the sounds of the new day unfolding outside. In the distance a tiny bird was singing, while further afield a rooster began to crow. When she heard the tinkling of tiny bells around the hut, she was initially unable to place the familiar sound until she remembered the goats from the day before. With the grey light of morning creeping in through the cracks and under the door, Sofia had noticed a small bowl of rice, an earthenware pitcher of water, and a tiny piece of pale waxy soap sitting atop neatly folded clothes. As she picked up each garment and examined it, she decided the women must have thought these clothes were more suitable for her to wear in the village than those she had arrived in.
Wanting to wash but concerned about standing naked behind a door people had obviously been coming in and out of with their deliveries, she had washed under her clothes before changing into a roughly woven undergarment that possibly resembled something her great-great-grandmother wore back in Italy before the First World War. Pulling on a pair of long cotton pants, she had slipped a faded blue skirt over them before tying a rope around her middle to keep it from slipping down. Finally, she put on a thick padded jacket made of rough goat’s wool. After rolling the cold rice into balls and eating it with her fingers, Sofia threw a shawl around her shoulders, her scarf around her head, laced up her boots and stepped out into a fresh clear morning.
With the cloud gone she could see now that the tiny village sat precariously atop a rocky plateau that rose like an island in midair. Hardly breathing, Sofia stood perfectly still, and in that moment, as the chill of the air caressed her skin and she felt the weight of the peaks towering above her, she understood what few people ever do: her own insignificance. It no longer mattered whether she lived or died, for in the scheme of things, in the length and breadth of this living, breathing planet, what did it matter that she had ever existed? She was nothing, and in that moment of knowing this – that purest moment of perfect certainty – Sofia touched the divine. And yet, just as she was recognising this one, true thing she could feel it already slipping away. She wanted to call out to it, to grab it, to hold it, to know it just a little bit longer, but in the moment of recognition it was gone.
Sofia knew then that this was the reason she had come to Afghanistan. This was the gift her soul had always known was waiting for her here.