“Never again!” he cried, gasping for breath. “If you ever touch this girl again, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me? With God as my witness, I’ll kill you! You might be my son but I will kill you!”
He continued to drive his fists into his son until he collapsed to the floor. Bezir sprang to his feet and grabbed his father. He raced out of the apartment. Derdâ ran after him. Bezir took the stairs—he’d forgotten all about the elevator. He held his father close to him; in a way that only a son could know, he knew that he was on the verge of death. The old man had never had such difficulty breathing before.
“God!” Bezir cried. “Oh, God!”
Tears filled his narrowed eyes and there was a thin trail of saliva from his lower lip to his chin. He didn’t notice Derdâ behind him. He didn’t see anything at all—only a door, a double door at the entrance to the building. He kicked it open and ran through the garden to the parking lot. Derdâ hardly had time to realize that this was the very door she’d come through five years ago. It was the first time she’d left the building in five years. She also had tears in her eyes. She didn’t know why, maybe for everything, for the past five years, for Ubeydullah, for Rahime, for herself.
For a moment, she couldn’t see Bezir. She was confused by her surroundings. The open sky made her head spin. But quickly adjusting to the light, she found her husband in the parking lot and ran over to him. Bezir was strapping his father in the back seat. Derdâ tried to open the front door but couldn’t. She didn’t know how. For a moment, their eyes met above the car. Bezir’s and Derdâ’s eyes. They saw each other crying. Derdâ’s vision came into focus: it was the first time she’d seen her husband cry.
Bezir shut the back door and walked around the car. Derdâ took two steps back and covered her eyes with her hands in self-defense.
“Get in,” said Bezir.
Opening her eyes, she saw that he’d opened the door. She got in the car. Bezir sat next to her in the driver’s seat and started the engine. They pulled out onto the street. Ubeydullah moaned in the back seat, regaining consciousness.
“Promise me, Bezir!”
“Dad!” Bezir said. “For God’s sake!”
He couldn’t bring himself to swear that he’d never hit Derdâ again. He pounded his calloused palms onto the steering wheel.
“Dad, for God’s sake …” he kept saying.
Ubeydullah was insistent.
“I can’t swear!” he whimpered, but Ubeydullah didn’t hear him and pushed him further.
“Swear! Swear that you’ll never hit her again! Swear …”
He stopped mid-sentence. His anger, his life, everything was suddenly cut short. Overcome by the labor of beating, his heart stopped like a bullet lodged into his flesh. It would have passed clear through him, but his son wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t let the bullet pass through …
Ubeydullah died at the second intersection, just four intersections away from the hospital. Derdâ knew he was dead.
“He isn’t moving!” she cried, shaking the old man’s inert body. Bezir slammed on the brakes and a taxi crashed into the back of the car. Derdâ’s forehead slammed into the dashboard. Bezir jumped out of the car, opened the back door, and pulled his father out of the car. Ubeydullah crumpled on the ground like a blanket. Bezir knelt down by the car and took his father in his arms. His voice echoed off of the buildings at the intersection: “God!”
Bezir didn’t touch Derdâ for forty days after his father’s death. He didn’t even know she was there. He didn’t leave the house for forty days. He was hardly aware of his own body. He didn’t eat, he only drank water. When his kickboxer friends came over, he locked his wife in the bedroom and held meetings in the living room. At nights he sat in a corner of the room and cried with his hands over his face.
Meanwhile, Derdâ wrote a short letter using the English she’d recently learned, folded it seven times, and pushed it under Stanley’s door. She finished the letter with the words “do not come.”
Derdâ couldn’t decide whether she pitied Bezir or simply despised him. One morning she thought she felt something like pity and approached Bezir who was sitting on the bed silently sobbing. She put her hand on his shoulder. The sleeve of her chador was partially rolled up and she could see the dark brown skin over her wrist. Then she saw scars—the work of Bezir’s hands. She remembered everything he’d ever done to her and pulled back her hand. Bezir continued to sob and Derdâ returned to not caring.
On the forty-first day, Bezir got dressed and left the house. His mourning was done—now it was time for rage. With his profits from the heroin trade he would have the Afghans make him bombs. He’d set them off in underground stations during rush hour. He’d fuck England, home of infidels. This was the plan he’d worked out over the last forty days as he wept and grieved. A plan to fuck England! He was going to avenge his father. He wasn’t able to seek retribution in himself; he had to take it out on the rest of the world. But the fact was that he was the only person in the world truly responsible for his father’s death. Bezir was like his father in this way. He was just like Ubeydullah, a man who beat his own son because he
