The Way Home

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.”

“Careful. I’ll start thinking you care.”

He turned his head slowly, chancing a glance at her then…intrigued by what he saw in the moonlit night.

She did care. She didn’t want to, but she did.

“I would care if you were caught and led the Taliban to us,” she said grumpily. “My father is old. I do not wish him to die at the hands of those barbarians.”

Yeah, there was that.

“Does your father know you’re up here?”

“He is asleep.”

The old man slept a lot. During the day, he napped quietly either in the back courtyard or in the shade of his front stoop, occasionally waking up to hold court with villagers who stopped to speak with him. He seemed oblivious to what went on inside his own house. It made him wonder if the old man might be ill.

Her father’s name was Wakdar Kahn Kakar. Kakar, she had told him one day when he’d asked, was their tribe’s name.

“Wakdar means ‘man of authority,’” she’d said, then added, “Do not speak to him unless he speaks to you first. Then you should address him as Shaghalai Kakar, to show respect.”

“So what is he? Some sort of tribal elder?”

“He is the malik, the village representative, and speaks for the people at the shura, the village council.”

“So everyone brings him their problems.”

“And he takes them to the mullah—the religious leader—who decides if they will be presented to the council.”

“How would the mullah like it if he knew an American askar was hiding in the malik’s house?”

She’d had nothing to say to that. But he suspected she thought about it a lot. Most likely, she thought about it tonight up on the roof.

“Maybe I should run and save you both a lot of trouble.”

It was her turn to look at the sky. “Where would you go? How far would you get?”

“That was a joke.” He could barely walk, let alone run. Even if his leg wasn’t a problem, the vertigo would take him down before he got ten yards. “Joke? A funny statement?” he clarified when she said nothing.

“I know what a joke is.”

“Yet clearly, it’s a concept you don’t understand.” He crossed his arms and made a pillow for his head.

He realized now that he could easily start living for the night when he could come up here and see the sky and not breathe air that smelled of strong spices and her father’s tobacco smoke. Up here, it smelled of living things instead of the bat shit and the must of the cave where he’d been for so long. Other foul smells hovered at the edge of his memory. Smells that he associated with pain but couldn’t pinpoint.

She started to get up. “We should go back inside. Come. I will help you down.”

“Not yet. Relax, OK? Even the bad guys snuggle up to their RPGs and sleep sometimes. They’re not looking for me tonight.”

She did not find his sense of humor remotely funny. He found it ironic that he had one.

The truth was, Rabia found nothing funny. Then again, how the hell would he know? It had only been a couple of weeks since he hadn’t been blitzed on opium.

“So if you’re not worried I’ll run, then why are you up here?” Unaccompanied women did not venture out after dark in this land of sharia law and public stoning. “Or are we back to the possibility that you were worried about me?”

The biggest joke of all. She might not know how to handle the sexual undertones rattling around between them, but she knew how to erect distance. When she again said nothing, he decided it was time to find out more about his reluctant nurse and host. That was the thing about opium. He had pretty much not given a damn about anything while he was on it. Now he had questions. Now his head was clear—empty but clear.

“What do you do, Rabia jana?” he asked surprising her by adding the formality used when addressing young women. “When you aren’t risking your neck hiding American soldiers? You speak English. You’re educated. That’s clear.” It was also unusual. Ninety percent of Afghan women were illiterate.

There went another one. A random piece of information he hadn’t known that he knew.

“I am a teacher of girls. My school is in Kabul.”

“Kabul?” This village was in the Kandahar Province, south of Kabul and west of the Pakistan border. Another mysterious nugget of information.

“You don’t normally live here?”

“I was born here. My father sent me to live with his brother in Kabul when I was sixteen. Right after the Taliban were removed from power.”

“In 2001, when the U.S. and Coalition forces launched an offensive.”

She looked at him sharply. “Do you realize what you said?”

Not until it had come out of his mouth. “Yeah. I do. Like I said, that’s been happening on and off lately.”

“Since you’ve been off the opium.”

“Yes. And it seems to happen when we talk. That day in the kitchen. Now. Conversation seems to trigger these… memories. Keep talking to me.” He worked to contain his excitement. This felt like a breakthrough. If he could remember things about Afghanistan, maybe he could remember something about who he was.

“You are right,” she said, and he could hear a barely contained excitement in her voice, too. “The American and Coalition forces defeated the Taliban in 2001. Radical sharia law was thrown out. Girls returned to school. Women went to work. At least, in some provinces.”

“But not in Kandahar?”

“No. Not in Kandahar.”