He motioned again, and I leaned in. I felt his cold, rough, uneven breaths on my cheek. I heard the sound of his tongue struggling in his dry mouth as he collected himself. Somehow, perhaps through sheer force of will—his last—he managed to whisper in my ear.
The air whooshed out of me. I forced the words around the lump that had lodged itself in my throat.
“No. Please, Suleiman.”
You promised.
“Not yet. I’m going to nurse you back. You’ll see. We’ll get through it like we always have.”
You promised.
How long did I sit there by him? How long did I try to negotiate? I cannot tell you, Mr. Markos. I do remember that I finally rose, walked around the side of the bed, and lay down next to him. I rolled him over so he faced me. He felt light as a dream. I placed a kiss on his dry, cracked lips. I put a pillow between his face and my chest and reached for the back of his head. I held him against me in a long, tight embrace.
All I remember after was the way the pupils of his eyes had spread out.
I walked over to the window and sat, Suleiman’s cup of tea still on the platter at my feet. It was a sunny morning, I remember. Shops would open soon, if they hadn’t already. Little boys heading off to school. The dust rising already. A dog loped lazily up the street escorted by a dark cloud of mosquitoes swirling around its head. I watched two young men ride past on a motorcycle. The passenger, straddling the rear carrier pack, had hoisted a computer monitor on one shoulder, a watermelon on the other.
I rested my forehead against the warm glass.
The note in Suleiman’s drawer was a will in which he had left me everything. The house, his money, his personal belongings, even the car, though it had long decayed. Its carcass still sat in the backyard on flat tires, a sagging hulk of rusted-over metal.
For a time, I was quite literally at a loss as to what to do with myself. For more than half a century I had looked after Suleiman. My daily existence had been shaped by his needs, his companionship. Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift.
I found I could not sleep in the house any longer; I could hardly stay in it. With Suleiman gone, it felt far too big. And every corner, every nook and cranny, evoked ripe memories. So I moved back into my old shack at the far end of the yard. I paid some workers to install electricity in the shack so that I would have a light to read by and a fan to keep me cool in the summer. As for space, I did not need much. My possessions amounted to little more than a bed, some clothes, and the box containing Suleiman’s drawings. I know this may strike you as odd, Mr. Markos. Yes, legally the house and everything in it belonged to me now, but I felt no true sense of ownership over any of it, and I knew I never really would.
I read quite a bit, books I took from Suleiman’s old study. I returned each when I had finished. I planted some tomatoes, a few sprigs of mint. I went for walks around the neighborhood, but my knees often ached before I had covered even two blocks, forcing me to return. Sometimes I pulled up a chair in the garden and just sat idly. I was not like Suleiman: Solitude did not suit me well.
Then one day in 2002 you rang the bell at the front gates.
By then, the Taliban had been driven out by the Northern Alliance, and the Americans had come to Afghanistan. Thousands of aid workers were flocking to Kabul from all over the world to build clinics and schools, to repair roads and irrigation canals, to bring food and shelter and jobs.
The translator who accompanied you was a young local Afghan who wore a bright purple jacket and sunglasses. He asked for the owner of the house. There was a quick exchange of glances between the two of you when I told the translator he was speaking to the owner. He smirked and said, “No, Kaka, the owner.” I invited you both in for tea.
The conversation that ensued, on the surviving section of the veranda over cups of green tea, was in Farsi—I have, as you know, Mr. Markos, learned some English in the seven years since, largely thanks to your guidance and generosity. Through the translator, you said you were from Tinos, which was an island in Greece. You were a surgeon, part of a medical group that had come to Kabul to operate on children who had suffered injuries to their face. You said you and your colleagues needed a residence, a guesthouse, as it is called these days.
You asked how much I would charge you for rent.
I said, “Nothing.”
I recall still how you blinked after the young man in the purple jacket translated. You repeated your question, perhaps thinking I had misunderstood.
The translator drew himself forward to the edge of his chair and leaned toward me. He spoke in a confidential tone. He asked if my mind had gone to rot, whether I had any idea what your group was willing to pay, did I have any notion of what rentals were going for now in Kabul? He said I was sitting on gold.
I told him to remove his sunglasses when he spoke to an elder. Then I instructed him to do his job, which was to translate, not give advice, and I turned to you and offered, among my many reasons, the one that was not private. “You have left behind your country,” I said, “your friends, your family, and you have come here to this godforsaken city to help my homeland and my countrymen. How could I profit off you?”
The young translator, whom I never saw with you again, tossed his hands up and chuckled with dismay. This country has changed. It was not always like this, Mr. Markos.
Sometimes at night, I lie in the dark privacy of my quarters and I see the lights burning in the main house. I watch you and your friends—especially the brave Miss Amra Ademovic, whose enormous heart I admire to no end—on the veranda or in the yard, eating food from plates, smoking cigarettes, drinking your wine. I can hear the music too, and at times it is jazz, which reminds me of Nila.
She is dead now, this I know. I learned it from Miss Amra. I had told her about the Wahdatis and shared with her that Nila had been a poet. She found a French publication on the computer. They had published online an anthology of their best pieces of the last forty years. There was one about Nila. The piece said she had died in 1974. I thought of the futility of all those years, hoping for a letter from a woman who was already long dead. I was not altogether surprised to learn that she had taken her own life. I know now that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.