Читать книгу Still Come Home - Katey Schultz - Страница 8

1

Taking Flight

It’s market day, and the streets of Imar beckon. There may be nuts, fresh bread, produce—an apricot—and there it is, a craving for fruit seeping from Aaseya’s mind to her mouth, her taste buds springing to life. It would taste like candied moisture, a wet slice of sunlight in the mouth. But imagining is hardly enough, and what is a life if not lived fully? She wants the fruit. She wants her freedom. She wants to do everything she shouldn’t. She shoves back her purple headscarf and walks to the open window of her small, second-story apartment. She sticks her torso out and leans, hanging her head upside down. Her hair dangles like a black flag in the breeze. Positioned like this, she won’t have to look up the street at the remains of her family compound. She won’t have to wish she’d died in there three years ago either.

She hoists herself upright and sees sun splotches. A molten feeling fills her skull as blood drains downward and rights itself throughout her body. She leans against the windowsill and looks toward the sky.

The taste is still there.

An apricot.

Sweet and earthy.

Warm.

Amazing how a single thought can bloom like a saffron crocus, infusing the body. Her body. Seventeen years old and no one would have guessed this life for her. Not her father, not her mother or her siblings. All of them gone, leaving only an obstinate Afghan girl in a rushed marriage to Rahim, a desire for fruit, and a village the size of a flea.

“Silly woman!” a child’s voice taunts from below.

A different child giggles. “She’s the dishonorable one. The one who’s shameful.”

Aaseya rights her headscarf and studies the two boys standing across the narrow street, their brown eyes as wide as grapes. Behind them, a smaller boy with a dense crop of hair crouches against the corner of a building, examining the dirt. The sun throws light across their bodies in a wash of pale yellow, illuminating their black-topped heads into little, golden orbs, somewhat like desert flowers. But there’s nothing lovely about these boys and their accusations.

Ba haya.

Shameful.

“Go home to your mothers!” Aaseya shouts. “You’re useless to me!”

The two bigger boys cackle and run quickly out of sight. The small boy remains, engrossed in digging. “If you think you’ve got something to say to me, you might as well get out of here too,” Aaseya shouts. “I won’t hear any of it.”

The boy stands, his face soft and thin. A desert flower, after all. His eyelids blink slowly open and closed. He looks about six years old and sickly, covered in dirt. For a moment, she remembers the communal bathhouse where her mother scooped water over her head and sang: Aaseya comes from the village of sun / 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.

“Rahim’s working the creek beds. You know as much,” Aaseya says. She folds her arms across her chest and waits for what may come.

“Just look at you,” Shanaz says, “letting the heat of the day spoil your womb! Walking around unattended! What next?”

Aaseya holds herself steady. Admonition or otherwise, attention of any kind provides an odd balm. If it weren’t for Shanaz, Aaseya might feel invisible most days. When no further insults come, Aaseya nods bitterly at the remains across the street. There it sits, a historic stain marking her as a Western sympathizer. Piles of rocks avalanche onto the sidewalk—the only reminder of her childhood home. Seeing it always feels like another explosion. So much had been lost, though Aaseya remembers finding part of the radio afterward, sifting through the rubble. Sometimes, she imagines that if she could get it to work again, she could tune in and hear the voices of her family, their laughter.

But she can’t bring them back. She can’t piece her parents together out of pebbles and mud. Here, her father with his wide palms. There, her mother’s soft face. Alamzeb’s dusty knees. Her cousins, aunts, uncles, reconstructed from chalky remains. She’ll never know why she was spared but certainly not just to be subjected to Shanaz stomping her foot or the ridiculing stares of her daughters aimed like arrows at Aaseya’s throat. Certainly not to spend the rest of her life in Imar, a place weighing on her like so many stones over a grave.

“Well,” Aaseya says, growing brave, “look at it!”

“I look at it every day,” Shanaz says. She takes in a sharp breath. “But you should know, Aaseya, there are worse things than losing your family.”

Aaseya studies Shanaz’s face—how suddenly slack it appears. The old woman’s cheeks burn with color. The only thing worse than death is shame, but what would Shanaz know about that? Aaseya has felt her share of shame. Someone had tipped off the Taliban, certain Janan was colluding with the Americans. True, her brother, Alamzeb, had angered a squad one afternoon, but he was so young. True, Janan had welcomed soldiers into his family compound but only for cultural conversation. Could kindness get you killed? An Afghan prided himself on hospitality and good impressions. Janan modeled that—perhaps too much. Many nights, Aaseya lies awake trying to guess who might have spread the rumor. Sometimes, she even imagines it was Shanaz, whose meddling authority extends from block to block, surrounding their homes. There’s an odd logic to it—the way one family can bring down another, though there was never anything afoul between Janan and his neighbors. Trying to pinpoint blame in a village that’s at the mercy of history and culture seems about as effective as praying for rain. Aaseya hustles away from the gate, and already, Shanaz has turned her back, a dark cloud in retreat.

Aaseya reaches the crossroad and knows she should turn around. Leaving the water pail with Shanaz is a necessary exception—even Rahim grants her permission. But it wasn’t so long ago she left her burqa at home and walked in public with her father. Now, to remain outside the home unattended, Aaseya should shrink at the thought. She’s one of only a few women who still pushes this boundary in Imar. It’s not in her nature to hold anything back. Not hope. Not fear. Perhaps most of all, not ambition.

She turns down the main thoroughfare where a few rusted cars are parked haphazardly, half on the pedestrian pathway, half in the road. A blue scooter lies in a ditch, its kickstand mangled. She crosses the street to avoid its path; no one has dared go near it for years, the prevailing rumor being that it was planted with a bomb. Imar had only seen two such ambushes in Aaseya’s lifetime, both manned by a suicidal mujahideen on a scooter aiming for Americans who patrolled the village frequently during those early years of fighting. Seeing the scooter sets Aaseya’s suspicions reeling again. She’s heard about fellow villagers swapping allegiances throughout the war. Her father was resourceful enough to outwit such dishonesty, though in the end, what did his skill matter? The abandoned scooter—in a village with no gas stations, no electricity—only confirms one thing: betrayal and indignation share the same bed in Imar.

The neighborhood itself remains quiet today. Hardly a hint of human occupancy other than the occasional tails of smoke rising from courtyards. Like little prayers. So many women tend those fires amidst various daily tasks. Most of them never knew Ms. Darrow, the visiting English teacher who came about the time the tap stands were installed. Most of them weren’t born to such a worldly father. Most don’t look at the horizon and see a line to follow either. Aaseya longs to have classmates again, or at least another girl with whom to share her dreams of progress. She can’t afford to let go of hope, its private comfort like the lead thread in an embroiderer’s hand. Lose that and the entire pattern gets disrupted. So much gone to waste.

A few blocks ahead, Aaseya hears the cries of animals for slaughter, sons bargaining on behalf of their mothers. It’s a spectacle of activity: the smell of dung, the dry taste of the desert, people coming and going—enlivening the mud-cooked pathways in flashes of teal, maroon, sun gold, deep purple. Men loiter, scuffing their dirt-coated sandals against the ground. At the edge of the bazaar, beggars wait.

“Food?” a girl pleads. Her bone-thin back presses against the corner post of a bazaar tent. The girl stares at Aaseya and whimpers her incantation, “Allah. Allah. Allah.”

Behind the girl, narrow rows of tents and tables form a humble economy. Aaseya remembers studying her father as he bargained kindly but firmly, Aaseya often the only young girl in sight. Walking arm-in-arm with Janan through the bazaar, she thought then she might marry a man like him. Someone who is respected and lives openly, escaping ridicule. Someday, she might even command as much independence herself.

“Please,” the begging girl speaks again. “Sister, please.”

Aaseya brushes past, unnerved. The girl’s voice rings like a threat in her ears. Where are those English teachers now? Where are any teachers for that matter? No one cares to educate girls in Imar anymore. Finding water. Raising boys. Hatching rumors. Exacting revenge. These things matter. An orphan girl is just another kicked up rock along the road.

Aaseya tries conjuring the bird in her chest. Its gentle tugging and sweet song. My shining smart one. With the bird, she can draw herself out. She can press her heels into the warm skin of the Earth, open her lips to the sun, and keep walking—ba haya be damned. She can make purchases or trade. She can even wander home the long way just to remind herself that another way is possible. One step at a time. Block by block. Like verbs forming at the tip of her pencil, lead pressed hard into the pages: ran, run, ran, run, run.

She placed her hand over a particularly ripe apricot when she saw them. Both stand nearly six feet tall, lean and limber as the cougars rumored to patrol the nearby slopes. How many years has it been since she has seen Taliban fighters in public? They’re even laughing as though one fighter has just told the other a joke. It’s not so much their ammo and weapons as their iron stares and meticulously draped turbans that give them away, black kohl ringing their eyes. Both men have bundled their turbans at the top, swooped them below their chins, then swaddled them across their faces, leaving only a slit for the eyes. She doesn’t dare look directly, but that tiny opening of fabric, that suggestion of identity makes her feel fused to its possibility. If given the chance to show only one thing about herself, what might she reveal?

The fruit vendor tisk-tisks, and Aaseya feels a slap across the top of her hand. So few vendors will sell to her—this un-right, supposedly Pashtun woman wandering the streets—and certainly not this vendor, not now that she’s lingered too long, coveting the apricot immodestly. She turns from the booth and crosses to the other side of the path. Here is Massoud. Maybe he will sell to her today. The naan smells so fresh she can almost taste it, and she’s drawn to its doughy, charcoaled musk. She reaches out to select one of the toasted loaves. Of all the people she suspects could have started the false rumor about her family, she has never considered Massoud. His daughters also went to Ms. Darrow’s language lessons. He even speaks to Aaseya sometimes if there’s no one in line, and he can busy himself with tasks as they whisper. But Massoud has spotted the fighters too, and as quickly as Aaseya approaches, he turns his back. She angles her body closer to his table display as if the loaves of bread might stand in for her family, but Massoud offers no indication that he’s going to help her.

From the corner of her eye, she sees the fighters make purchases several booths away. The apparent leader moves deftly, his hands bloodied at the knuckles. He selects cucumbers, dates, and a satchel of almonds. Only a portion of the exchange is visible through the screen of Aaseya’s burqa, and she shifts on her feet to bring a different view into focus. Money flashes—crisp, green US dollar bills—passed like poison seeds from the fighter to the vendor. Two-days walk from a US base, a handful of years since any occupation, and here—an Afghan vendor taking American dollars without pause? She hasn’t seen that currency since Ms. Darrow showed the schoolgirls her purse one day, all the womanly items it contained. Such a treasure then. Now, the image sends shrapnel through Aaseya’s chest. The money can mean only one thing: the Americans are coming, and if the Americans are coming, these Taliban will be waiting. Imar will become a mere backdrop to their battle with one inevitable outcome.

Aaseya wouldn’t believe she has even seen the bills if it weren’t for what happened next, the vendor casually making change and the little boy from outside her window rounding the corner at top speed, running into the fighters, and knocking the currency to the ground.

“Pest!” the leader kicks at the boy tangled in the fabric of his dishdasha. Several more bills drift through the air, and coins tumble from his pocket.

“You dog!” shouts the other fighter. Both grab for the money.

The boy stands and dusts himself off. In the scuffle, a fresh date has fallen from his pocket and rolled into the dirt. He reaches for it but not quickly enough.

“What’s this?” the Taliban fighter says mockingly. He swoops down and takes the date. “Looks like we have a thief here.”

The boy’s eyes widen.

Aaseya leans toward Massoud’s booth. “Do you see this? Friend, you have to do something.”

“Get,” Massoud says, barely a whisper. He won’t look at her.

“I’ll leave,” she says. “Just forget I was here. Go help that boy.”

“You get!” Massoud says again. “Get back and away. I refuse to let you endanger me, you dishonorable whore.”

The fighters look up, curious, and Aaseya’s breath escapes in a wave. She rushes toward the boy.

“There you are!” she says, grabbing his bony shoulders. She looks at the ground, addressing the fighter humbly. “I’m sorry. My son was only doing errands for me.”

“Muuh-uuuh,” the boy blathers. He empties his pockets—shell casings, old springs, a broken pair of sunglasses, a plastic button. The stash tumbles from his hands as he tries offering it to the fighters.

“Over here,” Massoud calls. “One free loaf for any servants of Allah, the most merciful, the most powerful.”

The fighters look up, and with that, Aaseya and the boy are gone, slipped behind the nearest booth, between the side flaps of tents, past the hookah stand and the butcher’s table, through a small huddle of goats, ducking under a display of headscarves, pushing through the line for the kebab vendor. And then it’s just Aaseya—the anonymity of her burqa, the stifling air, the bird in her chest beating its wings.

Where did the boy go? Disappeared again, as elusive as water. She knows he made it through the butcher’s station where they both slowed down to dodge hanging carcasses above the slippery ground. Maybe he hid amidst the scarves and keffiyehs.

Aaseya looks for him briefly, then hurries out the far end of the bazaar toward the dead end of town where the old schoolhouse looms like a bad memory. It hurts to think how many days she spent believing Ms. Darrow would come back, certain studying was not only her privilege but her right. Beyond the schoolhouse, an overflow block for vendors’ booths and tents opens up. It’s quiet now, more like a park or garden space for nomads. At the end of the park, the tight walls of mountains forming either side of the Imar valley meet in a U-shaped trap. Aaseya has heard that another village lies not too far beyond that ridgeline, though nobody she knows ever traverses the upper slopes. Imar has always been described as cut off, physical isolation a part of her daily existence for as long as she can remember. But before the upslope begins its steep climb, the loop road arcs along the base of the valley and back around the bazaar, paralleling the edge of town and wrapping round to the entrance of the village. She meets the road and walks steadily, occasionally checking over her shoulder to see if she is being followed.

Before long, the loop road ends and opens toward the wider road leading out of the valley. It’s a junction Aaseya knows well, occasionally allowing herself to walk this far from the apartment. From here, the view widens down the length of the valley and outward to the uninterrupted desert, and she can imagine how it will be when they first arrive—tails of dust, the reek of gasoline, the strangeness of some of them with pink skin and a different language. Do the Americans know what’s waiting for them? How little it takes to disrupt a life? There’s no stopping whatever those dollars have set in motion.

She studies the view one last time, considering. She’s never stepped past this point, but she imagines it would be the beginning of something better. Somewhere in the near distance, Rahim must be digging in the creek beds, his makeshift job of forming bricks only possible in the wake of war’s destruction as families slowly rebuild. Somewhere else nearby, there must be Taliban too. She recoils at the thought, as if something is being pulled from her grasp and sucked into a vacuum of cold. She turns her head from one side to the other, letting the panorama of horizon in through the screened view of her burqa. Some mornings, the sky here fills with pink and orange tendrils that unreel like spools of yarn, stretching from north to south. But now, the sun sits mid-sky, the world hyper-saturated in blues and browns. Aaseya folds her arms and pinches the flesh where her forearms crease at the elbows, a slight twinge across her skin. She pinches again and thinks of the apricot. How promising its texture. Hardly a spot of mold. She pinches again, recalling Shanaz’s admonitions, the possessive timbre of her voice. Heat blooms across her forearms, and she pinches again, so tender. She imagines sinking her teeth into the apricot, holding the pit in her mouth. How she would clean the sweet flesh away with her tongue and find the pit in the center. She can see it clearly—that apricot pit like a missile careening from her mouth through the screen of her burqa with piercing speed as she yells every curse imaginable in the face of those Taliban. Those imposters. Those loathesome creatures riddled with more lice than the roadside carcass of a dog. She’s lucky she survived. That’s what Rahim always tells her. That’s what Shanaz wants her to believe. Just as surely as Aaseya imagines that apricot pit zeroing in on its target, Aaseya feels the skin across her forearms break beneath her fingertips, bleeding into clarity.

There’s no denying it: Shanaz is the one who tipped off the Taliban. And the Taliban must have believed her, mistaking Aaseya’s family compound for an American hideout. The Taliban reduced her fate to one moment of dust and vibration that stole everything from her but her own heartbeat. They hurt Ms. Darrow, hurt everybody, and although the Americans may be coming soon with their own measure of fate, it’s too late. It’s not enough. Aaseya has her own explosions to carry out, and now she envisions Shanaz with black kohl around her eyes. She wants the Taliban to rape Shanaz, to kill her, but then Aaseya’s vision shifts, and her enemies turn to face her. Warmth moves across her fingertips—blood is the only proof she’s still alive—and as her accusers point their fingers at her mockingly, the apricot pit explodes on target. Body parts pepper the open desert like so many seeds of war.

As Aaseya approaches her apartment, she hears the sound of bare feet not far behind. How bad will it be if the fighters followed her? She sees herself tossed onto the ground, legs spread. Sees them spit on her, burn her hair and her eyes. Maybe it’s her due—catching up. She never should have survived the blast. Rahim and Shanaz might even be grateful if she died now, released from association with her disobediences.

“What is it?” she says and turns to face her follower.

The boy must have stayed close, after all. Feeling floods her limbs, and she looks at her burqa, noticing a few small dots of blood where the fabric sticks to her arms. She almost rushes to him in relief.

He points to the tap stand near Aaseya’s apartment steps.

“There’s not any water,” she shrugs.

The boy crosses the street, and Aaseya marvels at his little brown calves, as flat as kebabs, his twiggy arms hanging from shoulders that jut outward like wings. There’s some measure of peacefulness about him or, at least, possibility. Maybe it’s his innocence she finds charming—his age alone permitting unawareness of what’s headed their way. He moves the pump slowly, tiny frame working hard against the pressure, but nothing comes. He looks at her again, untrimmed hair flopping around his eyes and ears.

“What’s your name?” she asks, and when he points with excessive gestures toward his chest, she understands that he must be mute.

“Oh. Zra?” she asks, pointing at her heart.

He shakes his head, then points back and forth between his heart and his mouth.

“Shpeelak,” she says, meaning whistle.

Wrong again. The boy moves his hands from his lips to the air in front of him, as if pulling something from his mouth.

“Ghazél!” she says at last, quieted by the irony—a mute boy named “song.”

He nods enthusiastically, then does a little dance in the street, his face opening into a charming grin.

“Wait here.”

She heads toward her apartment and up the stairs. And so it begins—Aaseya tossing down a stuffed date and Ghazél catching it skillfully, the two connected mid-air by an invisible thread.