After hanging up from her father, Sofia sat staring out into the square. Five years and no one had even begun restoring the timber houses with their fine fretwork. They had been put up for sale two years before, but no one had even come to look. The square was not a good commercial proposition.
She walked back into her bedroom and lay down. Sydney was not her home. She thought about Chief Wasim’s offer again and dismissed it. Sounded like her father needed her now. It was about time she did something for him.
Opening her phone, she scrolled through the photos until she found the one she had been looking for.
She could remember the boy who had taken the photo. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Neatly dressed and washed with his hair combed to one side, a thin chest and soft down on his upper lip. Had he been on his way to meet a girl or play with his friends when she had stopped him? Did he still remember the three people in Bagh-e Babur he took a photo of on a beautiful spring day? A serious boy, he’d been eager to make sure it was a good photo, and it had been, for he had captured their love. Why had that boy and that day remained so vivid in her memory when nearly everything else in life faded away to nothing? Was it only because of the photo? She thought not.
It had been one of those glorious early spring days heralding the end of the long Kabul winter. They had taken a picnic lunch to the gardens built by Babur’s famous namesake, and had been sitting on the grass on blankets under a tree, reading and talking of small, inconsequential things, when Zahra put her book down to ask where each of them wanted to go before they died.
‘Bali,’ Jabril piped up without hesitation. He wanted to go to a place where the water was deep blue and crystal clear, where the sand was warm and squeaky clean under his feet, and where palm trees swayed over his head. He would walk under waterfalls, get lost in jungles and every evening sit with a drink gazing out over green paddy terraces as the sun set behind the jungle. When Jabril had finished he was quiet for a moment. They both waited. ‘Yes, that’s what I want,’ he said, as if he had examined his choice again and still found it pleasing.
‘Nice,’ Sofia had said, imagining Jabril’s perfection, unspoilt by the possibility of black sand, hordes of rowdy Australian tourists and the overdevelopment that was destroying the paradise Bali had once been. She said none of this. It had not been a day to destroy dreams.
Sofia had chosen Ireland in her old age. ‘I want to sit contentedly in an Irish pub, drinking Guinness and eating mussels in white wine and cream sauce, surrounded by the sing-song lilt of Irish voices, and maybe a bit of live music in the evening. Definitely. Music would be good.’ She thought it had been an inspired choice, considering she’d really never thought about where she wanted to go before she died. Zahra did that sort of thing sometimes: hitting you with a searching question she’d obviously been mulling over for a while when all you’d been thinking about was what was for dinner, or what you had to get at the shops.
‘You don’t like beer,’ Jabril countered, ‘so I’m not sure why you’d want to drink it.’
‘Precisely,’ added Zahra. ‘Exactly what I was thinking. Besides, your choice is too ordinary.’
Sofia had laughed. ‘You didn’t say it had to be exotic, and I think you have to drink Guinness when you’re in Ireland whether you like it or not.’ How could she make it more appealing? ‘Okay,’ she started again, ‘I want to be living in an old white house somewhere on the Wild Atlantic Way that has ancient stone walls, and sheep on sodden clods of earth, and impossibly green grass that cushions bare feet, and open ridges of peat flowing down to the cliff ’s edge. Oh, and I want an old wrinkled face, and I will be smiling all the time because I have lived a life well and full of grace.’
Zahra sat looking at Sofia, as if trying to imagine her in this picture. ‘I could do that too,’ she said, nodding. ‘Sounds good.’
‘Then come and join me,’ Sofia offered with a smile.
‘No, I want Antarctica and slow travel.’ A working boat, where at night she would sit outside all rugged up, drinking hot tea and gazing up at a zillion stars. In the day she would venture out onto the ice floes in a rubber boat with a biologist. ‘Or maybe a marine geologist.’ Zahra wanted chattering colonies of nesting seabirds, sleek brown seals, ice walls breaking off glaciers. She wanted days that never ended. She wanted deep blue, cold and clear white as far as the eye could see.
‘And does this biologist or marine geologist have to be young?’ Jabril had asked as he moved to rest his back against the tree.
Zahra considered her answer as she began packing up the food containers. ‘I think that would be an essential part of the job description, don’t you, Sofia?’
‘Definitely.’
‘No room for me then on your little boat with your young men,’ he said, handing her his plate.
Zahra stopped and looked at her husband. ‘I didn’t see you inviting me to Bali, my love.’
‘Ah,’ he smiled, reaching out to touch her hand. ‘You must have missed the beach towel lying next to mine on the sand.’
Sofia had seen the smiles that passed between them and she had wanted that with all her heart. She wanted a relationship like they had.
Rolling over in her bed, she stared out the window. What would it be like to never see the sun light up
