A Cup of Friendship (25 page)

T
he bottle of scotch was heavy on Isabel’s lap as her car made its way through the city to the home of the Last Jew of Kabul. She knew to take a gift, and since it was Friday night, the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, this was the most appropriate one she could imagine. Since she was a little girl, she’d watched her father have a shot every Friday night. It was the end of the workweek, he’d said. Time to relax. Jewish Brits were more assimilated than most, probably as a defense against the prevailing anti-Semitism. She grew up knowing she was Jewish but never observing much tradition other than her father’s weekly shot of scotch. It was a huge hypocrisy, she felt, given that her mother’s family had been mostly wiped out in the Holocaust.

The irony to Isabel was that so much of what made her who she was—being Jewish, having been raped, being a journalist—was undercover. But after meeting Jamila, and hearing from Sunny about the Last Jew, Isabel realized undercover was overselfish. People took moral stands every day: The Last Jew against religious persecution, and Jamila against sexual persecution. Isabel felt she was headed toward a stand of her own.

His home was located on Flower Street, adjacent to the old gray-white synagogue, now cracked and in decay, looking more like an old house than a place of worship. It had been very difficult to find. But finally, the car pulled up, and she told the driver to wait for her. Then she ascended the stairs to the second floor, which led to a dark hallway and his door. She knocked. A balding, stout man wearing glasses and a woven yarmulke opened it and said, “Come in.”

She held out her hand, which he took firmly in his. “This is for you,” she said, after introducing herself. She handed him the bottle in the thin plastic bag. His shoes were worn, his shirt so thin at the elbows that she could see through it, and his pants were fraying at the ankles.

He took it, opened the bag, and nodded. “Want a shot?” He smiled. He went to the back to his tiny kitchen and brought out two glasses.

His name was Zablon Simintov. His small room with its red threadbare carpet contained only a
toshak
, a low table with a pile of old Jewish prayer books, a
bokhari
to ward off the winter chills, and a small table with a couple of white plastic chairs. They sat and Isabel asked him about the things that were burdening her. When Sunny first told her about him, she’d Googled him and there’d been many stories. But no one had asked the questions she was most interested in, or if they had, he hadn’t answered. So she asked them now.

“Your wife and daughter are in Israel. Your business has been destroyed. You are alone. Why are you still here?”

The forty-five-year-old former carpet trader smiled and said, “Stop or you’ll make me depressed!” and he sucked back another shot of scotch.

For eight hundred years, he said, Afghanistan had had a vibrant Jewish community, which shrank after 1948, when many families left for Israel, and then again in 1979 after the Soviet invasion. And now Simintov was alone, his wife and daughter having moved to Israel in 2001, and his best friend and worst enemy, Ishaq Levin, with whom he shared the synagogue, having died a few years before. He’d been jailed and beaten several times by the Taliban, who ransacked the synagogue and carried off its four-hundred-year-old handwritten Torah scroll. Simintov blamed the loss of the Torah on Levin, who’d told the Taliban that it was worth millions. That was the two men’s falling-out. Now Simintov was on a mission.

“I stayed to find the Torah. To save the synagogue.”

“But how do you live? The Taliban stole your carpets and everything you—”

“Everything I owned of value. My entire business. So can you help me?” He put out his hand as if begging.

She laughed uncomfortably.

“I’m not kidding. I rely on the kindness of strangers,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

“But wait, Mr. Simintov. How do you propose finding the Torah? And don’t you think the same guys who destroyed the giant Buddha statues probably destroyed your Torah, too?”

“Not if they thought it was valuable. There’s some guy being held in Guantanamo who knows exactly where it is. We just have to ask him.” He smiled, knowing how foolish he sounded.

Isabel looked at him and wondered if he was insane or just a little crazy.

And then he said, “Don’t you see? If I leave, there are no Jews left in all of Afghanistan. And Hitler and Osama bin Laden and every other madman bent on the decimation of an entire people will have won. ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?’ as the saying goes. If I leave, the crazies win.”

They drank to that, and Isabel realized there was crazy and then there was crazy, and Simintov’s brand wasn’t so bad. She gave him a hundred American dollars, kissed him on the cheek, and promised him she’d come back to visit before leaving Kabul.

On the way home the driver took a circuitous route to avoid the police checkpoints because of the traffic. Sitting in the back of the car, Isabel leaned her face on her hand and looked out the window. And then she did something that hadn’t happened to her in months, maybe years. Isabel let herself cry. She wasn’t sure why or what had moved her so, but she had a feeling that, as darkness fell across the city, she was crying for Simintov, living lonely and apart from his family, who’d locked himself in his own prison of sorts—his stubborn defense of his heritage—alone in the synagogue. She cried for Jamila living in squalor in the prison, for Jamila’s friend imprisoned by the violence to her horrible face, and in frustration because the only way to be sure that Jamila would not be killed would be to get her out of the country, and that was an almost impossible task. She cried for Layla, who could at this moment be sitting in a similar prison if she hadn’t already been sold to someone as his third wife. She cried for herself, for in her freedom she, too, was behind bars—the bars that blocked her from feeling connected to her family, from finding love, from facing her painful past.

Ahmet couldn’t stand it any longer, so he walked stealthily upstairs to his mother’s apartment and slipped inside, knowing that she was in the coffeehouse getting it ready for the dinner hour. What was she thinking, this mother of his? She’d always been a rebel, with her smoking, her jean skirt under her dress, and, of course, her unique way of seeing the world. (And, though she tried to hide it, he knew she’d cut her hair, having seen her more than once smoking in the back courtyard without a scarf on her head.) On the one hand he was proud that she was so intelligent and had her own mind. On the other, he was angry that she had no respect for tradition, no worries that she’d shame the family by her actions, or more to the point, that she’d shame
him
most, since he was the man of the house. And after all the sacrifices he made for her, staying with her, watching over her, protecting her.

He knew the importance of carrying on the traditions of one’s people. That’s why he was waiting for his mother to choose a bride for him. Though, given her rejection of such “nonsense rules,” as she called them, he might be waiting forever. The front room was neat, but he checked under the
toshak
s and in the drawers of her small cabinet, where he found nothing.

And besides, he thought, there was Yazmina. A widow, yes, but those eyes made him forgive all that had gone on with her before. But is forgiveness enough? he wondered.

In the sleeping room, there was one
toshak
covered in pillows and blankets. There was also a cabinet for his mother’s clothes. He opened it, his hand first touching the exterior wood, engraved with a traditional Islamic design, which he had loved to follow with his fingers when he was a young child. He knew that inside were three drawers with blue ceramic pulls. And he knew that in one was the mosaic box that his father had bought when Ahmet was born, an offering to her of thanks for bearing him a son.

But the box was empty except for a beaded necklace with an amulet and a few wrist bangles and earrings.

Where was the letter? He turned to look out her window from which he could see over the walls and out into Kabul. Where would his mother hide a letter from a man whom she hardly knew? A man whose reputation was in question? He replayed the meeting he’d witnessed in his mind: the quick walk through the marketplace until she reached his shop. Him standing outside, waiting for her. Him slipping his hand into his pocket and pulling out a note. Then her pulling her hand from her coat, taking it, her fingers lightly touching his, and putting it in her pocket.

He went through every article of clothing, careful to put each one back exactly as he’d found it. Nothing. Frustrated, he decided to look through everything one last time to be sure he hadn’t missed something. He methodically opened one drawer and then closed it, moving one by one. When he arrived at the third drawer, he found he couldn’t close it all the way. He put his hand in the back to clear what was blocking it, pulling out a stack of letters, and then another, and then another. And the next drawer and the next, in the back, more letters. They’d been stacked neatly, until his slamming the drawers had caused a stack to fall over. The letters were tied, and there were many more than he’d ever expected.

Ahmet untied them and began to read.

My dearest Halajan
,

Today is a day of mourning, declared by Karzai, the hypocrite, for the forty Pashtun killed at the wedding up in the Uruzgan province. The Americans raid the hiding places of the Taliban and in so doing, kill many innocents, celebrating love and family. You tell me, please, my Halajan, why the Helmand River survives but all those lives are taken
.

And yet today, life goes on in Kabul. I ate my bread and tea for breakfast, some sweet oranges with seeds for lunch and my beloved eggplant, and tonight I wish I were eating with you. Here is life as Rashif
sees it: We eat breakfast, we get bombed, and if we’re lucky we survive to look into the eyes of loved ones. My children loved ones are far away. My heart loved one is a mile away and yet a lifetime. One day, Halajan, one day.…

They were sometimes serious and sometimes nothing, simple stories of what happened on a given day, where the tailor went, what he saw. A fat old man needed a new
kameez
. His grown son asked for some money. A family of birds built a nest in a tree in his backyard. Some refugees greeted him with
chai
when he delivered ten new
shalwaar kameez
es to their tents outside Kabul. They were full of details, and some even made him chuckle from the truths of an observant eye.

This man, this stranger to his family, this
modernist
had been writing his mother letters for several years, going against every teaching, threatening their position in the world and their place in the afterlife. Everything Rashif represented went against Islam and therefore, everything Ahmet believed. Without the proper introductions, without Ahmet’s agreement—for he was the authority of his mother’s house—there could be no letters, no communication whatsoever! If anyone were to find out, his mother would be called a whore and he an infidel. Women were sent to prison—or worse—for smaller offenses than this. Wasn’t a woman stoned to death just recently for leaving a husband who had beaten her? This man, this Rashif the tailor, deserved punishment. How dare he violate his mother like this? He was godless and he could ruin her.

But what bad thing did his mother really do? Receive some letters that she couldn’t even read?

And was Rashif really so bad? Helping the Afghans who could not help themselves? He worked hard; he was thoughtful, if not religious enough for Ahmet’s taste.

And then Ahmet realized something far more illuminating than finding these letters: He was arguing with himself about the right and wrong of his mother’s liaison with Rashif. He was truly a mix of his mother’s son, a child of the Koran, and an Afghan. His heart saw gray when his brain saw only black and white.

But a man does not go unpunished for such a violation. Ahmet knew what had to be done. He put the letters back very carefully in their neat stacks and tucked them in the back of their drawers.

But one he kept for himself. It wasn’t a recent one, but one from the middle of a stack, one that wouldn’t be missed. He folded it in half and put it deep into the pocket of his pants.

Halajan made her way on the bus, across the dry riverbed on foot, and into the Mondai-e. Something made this trip, on this day of this week, more urgent than ever before. Her concern about Ahmet seeing the letter on the floor or Yazmina and her pregnancy or that stupid old Candace talking about love and men or Sunny having taken that stupid trip to Mazar-e Sharif with Tommy … something. She walked as fast as her two spindly legs would carry her, looking down at the rough ground, careful not to turn an ankle, until she got to Rashif’s shop.

She entered. He stood. He walked to her, and, alone in the shop, he took her hands in his and put his forehead against hers. She backed away, looked around to be sure no one was watching. She couldn’t help but smile.