Nabi smiles at the look of surprise on Timur’s face. “I served Mr. Wahdati here from 1947 until 2000, when he passed away. He was kind enough to will the house to me, yes.”
“He gave it to you,” Timur says incredulously.
Nabi nods. “Yes.”
“You must have been one hell of a cook!”
“And you, if I may say, were a bit of a troublemaker, as I recall.”
Timur cackles. “Never did care for the straight and narrow, Nabi jan. I leave that to my cousin here.”
Markos, swirling his glass of wine, says to Idris, “Nila Wahdati, the wife of the previous owner, she was a poet. Of some small renown, as it turns out. Have you heard of her?”
Idris shakes his head. “All I know is that she’d already left the country by the time I was born.”
“She lived in Paris with her daughter,” one of the Germans, Thomas, says. “She died in 1974. Suicide, I think. She had problems with alcohol, or, at least, that is what I read. Someone gave me a German translation of one of her early volumes a year or two ago and I thought it was quite good, actually. Surprisingly sexual, as I recall.”
Idris nods, again feeling a little inadequate, this time because a foreigner has schooled him on an Afghan artist. A couple of feet away, he can hear Timur engaged in an animated discussion with Nabi over rent prices. In Farsi, of course.
“Do you have any idea what you could charge for a place like this, Nabi jan?” he is saying to the old man.
“Yes,” Nabi says, nodding, laughing. “I am aware of rental prices in the city.”
“You could fleece these guys!”
“Well …”
“And you’re letting them stay for free.”
“They’ve come to help our country, Timur jan. They left their homes and came here. It doesn’t seem right that I should, as you say, ‘fleece them.’ ”
Timur issues a groan, downs the rest of his drink. “Well, either you hate money, old friend, or you are a far better man than I am.”
Amra walks into the room, wearing a sapphire Afghan tunic over faded jeans. “Nabi jan!” she exclaims. Nabi seems a little startled when she kisses his cheek and coils an arm around his. “I love this man,” she says to the group. “And I love to embarrass him.” Then she says it in Farsi to Nabi. He tilts his head back and forth and laughs, blushing a little.
“How about you embarrass me too,” Timur says.
Amra taps him on the chest. “This one is big trouble.” She and Markos kiss Afghan-style, three times on the cheek, same with the Germans.
Markos slings an arm around her waist. “Amra Ademovic. The hardest-working woman in Kabul. You do not want to cross this girl. Also, she will drink you under the table.”
“Let’s put that to the test,” Timur says, reaching for a glass on the bar behind him.
The old man, Nabi, excuses himself.
For the next hour or so, Idris mingles, or tries to. As liquor levels in the bottles drop, conversations rise in pitch. Idris hears German, French, what must be Greek. He has another vodka, follows it up with a lukewarm beer. In one group, he musters the courage to slip in a Mullah Omar joke that he had learned in Farsi back in California. But the joke doesn’t translate well into English, and his delivery is harried. It falls flat. He moves on, and listens in on a conversation about an Irish pub that is set to open in Kabul. There is general agreement that it will not last.
He walks around the room, warm beer can in hand. He has never been at ease in gatherings like this. He tries to busy himself inspecting the décor. There are posters of the Bamiyan Buddhas, of a Buzkashi game, one of a harbor in a Greek island named Tinos. He has never heard of Tinos. He spots a framed photograph in the foyer, black-and-white, a little blurry, as though it had been shot with a homemade camera. It’s of a young girl with long black hair, her back to the lens. She is at a beach, sitting on a rock, facing the ocean. The lower left-hand corner of the photo looks like it had burned.
Dinner is leg of lamb with rosemary and imbedded little cloves of garlic. There is goat cheese salad and pasta topped with pesto sauce. Idris helps himself to some of the salad, and ends up toying with it in a corner of the room. He spots Timur sitting with two young, attractive Dutch women. Holding court, Idris thinks. Laughter erupts, and one of the women touches Timur’s knee.
Idris carries his wine outside to the veranda and sits on a wooden bench. It’s dark now, and the veranda is lit only by a pair of lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. From here, he can see the general shape of some sort of living quarters at the far end of the garden, and, off to the right side of the garden, the silhouette of a car—big, long, old—likely American, by the curves of it. Forties model, maybe early fifties—Idris can’t quite see—and, besides, he has never been a car guy. He is sure Timur would know. He would rattle off the model, year, engine size, all the options. It looks like the car is sitting on four flats. A neighborhood dog breaks into a staccato of barks. Inside, someone has put on a Leonard Cohen CD.
“Quiet and Sensitive.”
Amra sits beside him, ice tinkling in her glass. Her feet are bare.
“Your cousin Cowboy, he is life of party.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“He is very good-looking. He is married?”
“With three kids.”
“Too bad. I behave, then.”
“I’m sure he’d be disappointed to hear that.”
“I have rules,” she says. “You don’t like him very much.”
Idris tells her, quite truthfully, that Timur is the closest thing he has to a brother.
“But he make you embarrassed.”
It’s true. Timur has embarrassed him. He has behaved like the quintessential ugly Afghan-American, Idris thinks. Tearing through the war-torn city like he belongs here, backslapping locals with great bonhomie and calling them brother, sister, uncle, making a show of handing money to beggars from what he calls the Bakhsheesh bundle, joking with old women he calls mother and talking them into telling their story into his camcorder as he strikes a woebegone expression, pretending he is one of them, like he’s been here all along, like he wasn’t lifting at Gold’s in San Jose, working on his pecs and abs, when these people were getting shelled, murdered, raped. It is hypocritical, and distasteful. And it astonishes Idris that no one seems to see through this act.
“It isn’t true what he told you,” Idris says. “We came here to reclaim the house that belonged to our fathers. That’s all. Nothing else.”