In her first six months in Afghanistan the poverty and desperation had worn her down, causing her to question whether she should stay. It had been her trip to the village that had changed everything, but not just because of the reasons she had told Daniel. That trip had truly shown her the people of Afghanistan: the highlanders who had embraced her; the guide who had risked his life to bring her back down from the mountain; Tawfiq, the driver she had barely known who cried when he saw her walking back into the village; and the people of the square who had welcomed her home with open arms, as if she was one of their own. Despite everything she had told Daniel, and for all her rationalising, her decision to stay had been because of the people.
Each year, as the seasons changed, Sofia had watched the snows melting on the mountains from her window overlooking Shaahir Square, and each year she had thought about returning to the village. She told herself she had never made the trek because she would probably never find it again but she knew it was because he would not have been there. Sofia thought again of the man now sitting in the seat in front of her, the lover who had left without a hint or word of goodbye. The memory of that betrayal still had the power to hurt.
* * *
THE DAY DANIEL left the wind had whipped through the village, chasing away the last breath of autumn and bringing with it the bitter winter cold. Winding Daniel’s woollen scarf more tightly around her neck, she had breathed in the scent of him and waited. He had not come back that night, or the night or day after that, or the one after that. When her guide from the lowlands arrived unexpectedly to take her back down the mountain, she asked if they might wait one more day. When Daniel had not returned that day she pleaded for another, but the guide would not be moved. The snows would cover the mountains any day now and they would be trapped for months. He would be leaving the following morning, he told her. She could come or she could stay.
The trek back down to the lowlands should have taken a little more than two days at the most. It took four. On the journey down Sofia was so cold she wore most of the clothes she owned, including a blanket the village women had given her, which she had wrapped tightly around her shoulders until it too became heavy with damp. While it snowed every night, by lunchtime the snow had turned into a filthy brown mud that clung to the bottom of her boots, sucking at her every step until the leather had become sodden and the skin on her feet had begun to peel. The wind and horizontal rain that whipped up the mountain passes and between the boulders caused her lips to crack and bleed, while her thick cotton trousers, frozen with damp, rubbed rough against the soft flesh of her inner thighs until the skin became so chafed and raw that it too bled. She dreaded walking, she hated stopping, and whenever she slept she woke frozen from dreams of Daniel.
‘How far now?’ she began asking the guide on the second day, when they still had not reached the village they’d slept in on their way up.
‘Nazdik,’ he would answer, until ‘near’ became meaningless and he stopped answering and she stopped asking.
By the third day the land had grown eerily quiet. A heavy fog rolled in, blocking out the thin grey light of the wintry sun, but by late that afternoon the wind had picked up again and blown the fog away, bringing with it sheets of horizontal rain and snow that cut their faces like icy blades. Sofia and the guide had wrapped their wet blankets up over their heads until only their eyes were visible, but she had seen the fear in his eyes. It was mirrored in her own. They had left it too late. On the third day they finally made it to the village for their only respite from sleeping out, covered in layers of wet blankets.
With every kilometre they moved away from the highland village her sense of loss grew. She told herself that whatever she felt for Daniel had been illusory. She told herself that, despite her memories of that last night, nothing had passed between them. She told herself she was a fool to think otherwise. And yet, that was not how her heart felt. She had told herself to forget him. Her heart would not.
* * *
SOFIA LOOKED UP at Daniel sitting in the seat in front of her. His elbow was resting on the car window frame and his shirtsleeve had slipped down to expose the tan mark under the fine dark hairs of his arm. She knew what touching that skin felt like. She knew what the curl of his hair felt like as it slipped through her fingers. She knew the scent of him. Sofia turned to look out the window. He was here with her again. He had returned. She had no idea what that meant or whether it meant anything at all.
There had been times, late at night in her bed or if she found herself alone for another weekend, when she would question the trade-off she was making living in Afghanistan against the possibility of a long-term relationship and a family back in Sydney where nearly all her friends were married and having children. Recently she had begun to feel her biological
