Cindy Gerard - The Way Home

HE MADE HER nervous. He was sorry about that, but he was also tired of avoiding her. No easy task, given the size of the little house that consisted of this kitchen, the sleeping/social room, Rabia’s sleeping room, and little else. They generally took their meager meals outside in the back, in a courtyard shaded by fruit trees and surrounded by the same type of brick and straw walls that had been used in the construction of the house. The head was a separate building out back and very primitive.

He thought of all of this and tried not to think about the soft body hidden beneath her long dark blouse and skirt or about the hair she had covered with a white scarf as she worked over the stove.

So he took some time to get his head back together and study the room. A heavy black iron stove with three cooking tops had been pushed against a wall. A stove pipe extended outside. A worn and dented bucket sat on the floor beside it. A dwindling supply of coal and wood chips lined the bottom.

The room was summer-hot, but the aromas actually had his stomach growling. He thought he might have gained a little weight during the past week. He knew he’d gained some strength. Their belongings were meager, as were the meals Rabia prepared, and he felt guilty for taking food from her mouth and her father’s.

“What are you cooking?” he asked, to break the tension that felt as uncomfortable as it felt edgy.

For past meals, she’d made thin barley and rice soup, the occasional serving of fresh yogurt, and small loaves of bread she baked in her oven. Fruits, nuts, tomatoes, and potatoes filled in at every meal.

“Tonight we will have yakhni pilau, mutton steamed in rice. And oabili—pilau again but with raisins and shredded carrots. Perhaps also some almond and pistachio nuts if I have them.”

“What’s the occasion?” This he knew was a special meal, one that must have cost her a fortune.

“I exchanged favors for the meat and the raisins,” she said simply.

“What kind of favors?”

“Only some sewing.”

So that’s what she’d been doing in the night when he’d awakened and seen a light on in her room.

“Is that what smells so good?”

“Perhaps it is the bread. It is almost done baking.”

It seemed odd, suddenly, that she represented his entire life and he knew very little about her. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”

She shook her head and continued stirring her pot. “My aunt. My mother died giving birth to me. I was my father and mother’s only child.”

Which explained why there was no extended family living with them, which was the Pashtun way—another tidbit he hadn’t known that he knew.

While there was no self-pity in her tone, he felt her sorrow and her loss. “I’m sorry.”

“As am I. She was my father’s second wife. His first wife bore him no children. I am told she died of a sudden illness. Like my mother, she was very young,” she said softly. “I am told my mother was a beautiful woman. I miss not knowing her.”

“I didn’t know my mother, either.”

The world inside the small room skidded to a screeching halt. Rabia froze at her stove, then slowly turned to look at him.

“I don’t know where that came from,” he said, his eyes wide, his heart pounding. “I don’t know why I know that.”

“This is a good thing. Do you remember any more?”

He resisted the knee-jerk urge to shake his head, catching himself at the last second. He’d had an actual memory, not a piece of information that he couldn’t attach to anything. It was short and incomplete, but it was real, and he didn’t want to cloud it by launching a vertigo attack. “No. That’s it. I just know that I didn’t know my mother.”

“Then I, too, am sorry.”

He closed his eyes and tried to will the thought to flesh out, to develop, to do something more than lie there like a lead weight to compound the other weights pressing down on his shoulders.

So. He didn’t know his mother. Why? Was she dead, too, like Rabia’s mother? Or had she left? What about his father? Did he have a sister? A brother? A wife? He’d wondered all of this often, but today a tangible piece of his past was within reach, and he felt the need for answers much more urgently.

His head started to hurt again, so he thrashed around for another diversion.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?”

She moved to her work space beside the stove and started chopping vegetables. “I am twenty-eight years.”

Despite her hard life, she looked younger. “Why aren’t you married?” The question had been rumbling around in the back of his mind for a long time now.

She hesitated with her back to him, then let out a breath. “I was.”

Was.

Divorce was uncommon in Afghanistan because of the social stigmas. Marriages were also generally arranged social and economic contracts between families. More nuggets of intel he had no idea that he’d known.

He wanted to ask what had happened, but he’d infringed on her privacy so much already that he let it go.

As it turned out, she volunteered the information.

“Rahim was a policeman in Kabul. He was killed by a Taliban fighter posing as a fellow officer.”

What a world. What a country. “Again. I’m sorry. How long ago?”

“Four years. We had passed our second year as husband and wife.”

He felt very tired suddenly. And didn’t think he could bear to ask her any more questions. He wasn’t the only one who had lost. This war had cost her dearly.

Without another word, he slowly rose to his feet and left her alone with her thoughts.

HE DIDN’T TURN his head when Rabia joined him on the flat roof of her father’s house. He lay still on his back and stared into a sky that was obsidian-black and sprayed with stars shining over a land as foreign to him as his own face.

“You should not be up here, askar. You could be spotted.”

“And what would they see? A crippled-up old Pashtun scarecrow of a man with threads of gray in his hair. Even if I was spotted, no one would give me a second look.”

She sat down beside him, folding her feet beneath her hips. “The village is small. You are a stranger.”

“I’m your long-lost uncle visiting from the big city, remember?”

She didn’t think much of that, even though the cover story had been her idea, but she didn’t say anything, at least not for a while.

“How did you get up here?”

“Same way you did.” He’d painstakingly climbed the wooden ladder propped up against the back of the house.

“I meant, how did you get up here by yourself? You could have fallen.”

“I didn’t.”

“But you could have. The dizziness still comes and goes.”

That it did. The vertigo and piercing headaches crippled him more than his bad leg and the loss of vision ever could. Earlier this morning, he had moved too fast, and it had taken him down. He’d needed more than an hour before the room stopped spinning and the nausea had backed off to tolerable. So, yeah, climbing up here was probably a stupid risk. But he still couldn’t tolerate bright sunlight and couldn’t risk being seen in the daylight, anyway. This was the second night he’d ventured out on his own—but it was the first night she’d come looking for him.

“The house is warm. I felt caged in.” More than caged. He’d felt restless and edgy. He’d needed space. He’d needed distance from where she slept in her bed on the floor in a room not five feet away from him.

He never should have touched her that day. He never should have kissed her hand. Everything had changed between them in that moment. He was aware of her now. She was aware of him, and she kept her distance because of it, which was just as well, because there wasn’t a damn thing he could or should do about it, anyway.

He needed to get out of here. And there was the rub. Go where? Go how?

“Perhaps you wish you were back in the cave,” she said, breaking into his thoughts.

He laughed bitterly. “Or maybe you wish you had me chained up again so you could keep better track of me.” He didn’t know why he was angry with her.

“The chain was for your own protection. I could not be with you all the time. You were often disoriented. You could have wandered off. Fallen off the side of the mountain. Walked into a Taliban patrol.”