Still Come Home. Katey Schultz

my dearest, my jewel / my shining smart one. But here, she faces a barrage of insults. No cushioned embrace. No clean, white steam and sweet melodies or even the basic company of another woman who believes in her. She barely believes in herself anymore, what with her naive hope for an education. Her petty obsessions about the past. Her private, pitiful habit of pinching her own arms until they bruise purple.

      Everything in life feels like a bargain between impossible choices. Just as soon as desire surfaces, forces larger than the desert rise against her. It makes her impatient, quick to judge. It’s easy to think everything is insufficient.

      But some good always remains.

      It has to.

      Even outside her window. Even in the middle of a war. Even in a village that insists on the wrongness of her life.

      The boy looks at the ground, hair flopping in front of his face, then quickly snatches something from the hole and walks across the street to stand beneath Aaseya’s window.

      “Well,” she says, “which is it—are you starving or homeless? Or both?”

      She thinks of her younger brother Alamzeb, perhaps the same age as this boy before he died. But Alamzeb never looked so sheepish or frail, so starved.

      “Muuuuh,” the boy grunts. He holds a small object toward her. It’s indecipherable at first, but as the boy twirls it in his fingertips, metal catches the light and sends a beam outward like a flare.

      “Put that away!” Aaseya scolds. It’s a brass shell casing, and by the look of the boy’s pockets, there are more. War scraps are a common sight, but these casings are shiny. Recent.

      The boy closes his fist around the brass and frowns, yet there’s still a query in his gesture. Some need to know.

      “You can’t sell it, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s worthless. It’s toxic. Boys used to get in trouble for playing with things like that. You want something to play with? Hold on.”

      She turns from the window and dashes toward her chest of belongings inside. An old carved cup. A swatch of fabric. A stick of incense. As she rummages through her thin collection, it strikes her that there’s nothing here a boy would want. She unfolds and refolds a sweater. The smell of wood smoke and old sunlight rise from the soft fabric. There’s not a single item here worth saving. The chest has been coveted and tucked away, but is effectively empty. She returns to the window, but the boy has disappeared. There’s only her ruined former home up the street—the one she thought she’d live in forever—and the sun, stretching across the sky in its slow climb. Her father Janan used to tease her about that, asking whether the sun chased the moon or the moon chased the sun. Though the war has continued since his death, Imar is the same. Loyalties still shift from block to block, day to day. Family feuds and Pashtun decrees still trickle down; it’s inconceivable to imagine a world where destiny doesn’t reign. Whether commanded by the sun or the moon or the heavy hand of Allah, life is endured.

      Thinking of her father, Aaseya feels a sudden bolt in her chest as though a bird tugs at her heart, beckoning outward, toward the street. She dresses quickly in her burqa before caution objects. On her way out, she grabs the empty water pail and curls a fistful of afghanis into her pocket. The bazaar awaits. Maybe some chai, some chickpeas, some raisins for a sweet delight later this week. Maybe even an apricot.

      Outside, the heat clings to Aaseya in an instant. The air feels soupy, three-dimensional. It envelops everything around her—gray buildings, crumbled walkways, tangled rebar—and fills the vacant lots with thick, pulsing space. She shifts the fabric of her burqa to create a cave between her eyes and the cloth where the breeze from her movement can eddy. She vaguely remembers when women didn’t have to wear burqas in Imar, though most still chose to. Fabric tangles at her calves as she walks briskly, hoping she’ll go unnoticed. A useless water tap stand sits at the edge of the street where the alley meets the pathway. The American military installed it years ago, trying to befriend her parched community—300 people largely cut off from outside contact. Within a few months, that tap stand was as dry as the well her mother’s aunt had thrown herself down in despair.

      A scent of spoiled rubbish wafts from one of the crumpled homes. Aaseya steps onto the street, passing a block of clay shacks with crooked roofs and sparse window curtains. It’s the walking more than anything that pleases her—the suggestion that she could just keep going. Growing up, her father, Janan, spoke of large cities like Kabul or other countries where women ran businesses, earned degrees. He even had a crank radio for a time, and the family would gather to listen to broadcasts from the BBC. Aaseya’s playmates said her dreams were far-fetched, on par with fables the elders liked to tell. But within the walls of her family compound, Aaseya felt as free as a skylark. Today, the bazaar will have to be enough.

      A few blocks along, she approaches Rahim’s sister Shanaz’s house where she’ll leave the water pail outside the compound gate. Shanaz’s sons fill it for Aaseya each day, walking an impossible distance over the ridge and back—a half day’s journey and heavy load. It’s no small kindness. Aaseya tried to thank her in-laws once but was only met with stony condemnation. “Don’t bother me with your overtures,” Shanaz had said. “If you really want to do good, you’ll give my brother a child.”

      But there was more to it than that. Aaseya’s unaccompanied forays to the bazaar were like a continual slap across their faces. Ba haya. It’s not as though she doesn’t understand what’s expected of her. Around her elders, she acted one way. A few years ago, to avoid notice from the Taliban, she acted another. As far as the Americans, if she saw them, she took what she could get and turned her back on the rest. But even these maxims didn’t save her family, and now, they’re hardly enough to make her stay inside. Remain obedient. Never dare to want anything and most especially to leave home without a man to protect her honor. Aaseya isn’t persuaded by any of it. What’s honorable about entrapment?

      She sets the pail outside Shanaz’s gate and picks up her pace. One blessing of her burqa is the narrow window it provides at this juncture in particular where she can spare herself the view of her old family home across the street simply by steadying her gaze straight ahead. Everyone knows about her early wartime tragedy, the hurried marriage to her father’s cousin, Rahim, at the age of fourteen, sparing her from orphanhood. That she can’t bear children is another story making her worthy, perhaps, of execution—had she any elders left to humiliate. Now, Aaseya behaves dishonorably, an embarrassment. Neighbors avoid her like a contagion.

      A playful cry breaks loose from within Shanaz’s courtyard, followed by a gaggle of children laughing. Through the melee, Shanaz barks instructions. Brief silence and then the wind-whisp-thwap of a switch across skin. Feet scuffle, and a child cries softly, then whatever game was interrupted seems to pick up again. Aaseya hears it all—young boys and girls roving within their family courtyards, a few older women directing children this way and that, and, of course, Shanaz, her voice loud and thunderous, hovering over them all.

      “Aaseya!” Shanaz shouts.

      Aaseya turns around to see the woman’s hooked nose pressed through the grate of the courtyard gate. She feels immediately sandwiched, condemnation on one side of the street and a horrible stain of loss on the other. Could the ground simply open up right here? Swallow her away? She’d likely let it take her, but then there’s Shanaz. Such righteousness. Aaseya won’t stand for it.

      “You get back here!” Shanaz shouts again.

      “I don’t have time,” Aaseya says. There might be bread left if she hurries. Maybe some ghee. Then again, she might only find maggot-riddled cucumbers. She hates the uncertainty, hates the apricot. Her foolish optimism. It would be easier to dispel hope entirely.

      “If you’re going to the bazaar, my brother should be with you.”

      Aaseya blushes and retreats to Shanaz’s gate. The woman stands squat and square, fists punched into her soft hips. Folds of skin gather around her jowls, contrasting with her tightly set headscarf. Several grown daughters have joined her inside the gate, carrying with them the scent of cumin and fresh mint. Their hands look greasy and charcoaled, marked by effort.