Wade (3 page)

“I was younger and a mere girl, so my grandmother's responsibility. In any case, I was unworthy of schooling. Sometimes, when I look at my brother, I think it was just as well.”

The soft voice stopped abruptly, as if Treena could not go on. “Forgive me, sister of the heart,” Chloe said quickly. “I didn't mean to speak of things that cause you pain.”

“No. Still, I want you to understand. If our father had come home sooner, if he had not replaced our mother with a proud American woman who was more beautiful, more educated, stronger in every way than our dead mother, it might have been all right. If he had not brought home a new daughter in the same image that he obviously loved more than his own children…”

“That isn't true.”

“Isn't it? Ahmad saw it as the truth, and that was enough. It became the polish for the sharp blade of his wrath. That and many other things.”

“What things?”

“Oh, the intervention of foreigners, foreign government agents in our country and our politics.”

“The CIA, you mean.” The stories were whispered everywhere of money sent to back one faction or another in the endless war that had decimated the region, but it was almost impossible to separate truth from fiction.

“And the Soviets, the Chinese, the Pakistani, though these hardly matter. It's the Americans that he has turned into demons who seek to control our country or to bomb it into ruins. I only speak in hope you
will understand my brother's actions, both past and future.”

“Future?” Some shade of meaning in the other woman's voice sent a shiver over Chloe in spite of the close room that still held the leftover heat of the day.

“A friend spoke with Ahmad in the
hajra
two evenings ago, the young one known as Zahir.”

“I heard him arrive.” She had not seen the man, of course. Women were not permitted in this special room while male guests were being entertained.

“Just so. As I passed by the grill, they were talking in low voices. It caught my attention. As I listened, they spoke of money, of a dowry.”

Chloe stared at her. “What are you saying?”

“It cannot have been for Ahmad's sake as he has sworn never to marry, and my Uma is too young yet to be a bride.” She reached out and touched her daughter's cheek where she sat on Chloe's lap.

“But…you can't mean me. I'm so old!” Shock left Chloe numb, unable to think clearly. She'd feared this for years, since her stepfather had first broached the subject, but when nothing came of it she had allowed herself to believe it would never happen.

“This is true. But though a younger bride is preferred since she may be more easily trained, you are unusual with your fair skin and coloring. This is an attraction to many men.”

“Ahmad wants to be rid of me.”

“There is the bride-price.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Do not distress yourself, my dearest Chloe. Any
husband chosen will come to love you, for how could it be otherwise? You are kind and good and will give him intelligent children. They will be fair to look upon as well, for you are beautiful with your eyes as blue as the mountains and yards of hair like shining brown silk.” She touched her abdomen, barely rounded since she was only four months or so into her pregnancy. “Your children shall be your consolation.”

Children. Chloe tightened her arms around Uma and brushed her lips across the top of the small head as a slow surge of love moved through her for this child that she'd helped to bring into the world, tended daily and taught so many things already. She hadn't let herself think of children of her own, didn't dare even now. “I can't,” she said, her voice aching in her throat. “I can't do it.”

Treena gazed at her in alarm for a second, then turned to take Uma from her and put her to bed, drawing up the sheet to cover her small legs. “You cannot refuse. You saw the consequences today.”

“Ahmad made sure of that, didn't he.”

“Just so.”

Treena leaned over the pallet to remove a cloth doll from too near the face of the nine-month-old baby girl who lay sprawled with a thumb in her mouth. Then she put a hand across the small forehead. A gray cast appeared under the darkness of her skin.

“What is it?” Chloe asked sharply.

“She's hot, so very hot. Oh, I knew she should not be left with the poor, stupid housemaid while we were in Kashi. She only sits with her hands between her
knees while my little Anashita crawls everywhere and puts filth in her mouth.”

Chloe breathed a soft imprecation as she knelt beside her stepsister. The servant she spoke of was a widow who had come begging at the back door, offering herself as a servant in return for food and a pallet in a corner of a back room. Ahmad had agreed for the sake of the cheap labor and Treena out of pity, but the widow was barely able to function in her abject misery. Now it had come to this.

In Chloe's mind was the same terror that she'd heard in Treena's voice. She could not stand the thought of losing any one of the little girls. Yet children died so easily here where there were no vaccinations against childhood diseases, few antibiotics to be had at any price, and almost no means available to fight the stomach viruses and infections that were an inevitable part of growing up. Women like her stepsister bore many children because birth control was prohibited, but also in hope that a few would live to adulthood. They bore them in spite of the pain and danger of primitive methods of childbirth or dismal infant mortality rates. Chloe sometimes thought their courage put that of men to shame.

“A doctor,” she said. “Ismael must go.”

Treena shook her head. “Ahmad will not permit it.”

She should have known, would have if she'd stopped to think. With the corrosion of bitterness in her voice, she said, “Pray God the child you carry is a boy. Then he may think it worth a doctor's fee.”

“The old women have said it's so.” A dismal at
tempt at a smile quivered the corners of Treena's mouth as she touched her abdomen again.

“We can always say he's the sick one, then, so the girls can have medicine. For now, we must bring down the fever.”

They roused the nursemaid and set her to boiling water. In the meantime, they put the child in a cool bath, splashing her again and again. When the water on the stove was sterile, they added salt, sugar and lemon juice and stirred it until it cooled. Then they took turns spooning minute amounts of the liquid between the baby's pink lips. And all the time they worked, they prayed.

In the emergency, the subject of marriage was pushed aside. Treena might have been wrong about what she'd overheard in any case, Chloe thought. Or failing that, the prospective groom might prove uninterested, negotiation of the bride-price could break down or Ahmad might change his mind in disgust. Nothing was really official until she was told it was to happen. She would wait until then to moan about her fate.

S
he couldn't get the man who waited for her at the bazaar out of her mind on the following morning. She pictured him wandering through the stalls with their piles of multicolored spices, wilted vegetables, rugs, silver and hammered brass plates sheltered by windblown lengths of embroidered or handwoven cloth. He would stand head and shoulders above most men, so would be conspicuous even without his Western clothes, bare head and beardless face. If he ceased moving and stood back, leaning on some wall as he scanned the women in their burqas for her arrival, he still could not avoid notice. He would be stared at, whispered about, perhaps even harassed by the police.

It was unlikely that he would linger. He would tire before long and stride away, back to his hotel and his life in the States. She gave him an hour at most. In her experience, men had no patience with waiting on women.

She had been right in her decision not to meet him. It was foolish to think of it at all. Yet the regret that weighted her chest seemed to grow heavier with every passing minute.

The early morning was spent with cleaning chores and entertaining little Anashita who was querulous but recovering from her bout of stomach illness. As the sun climbed higher, Chloe gathered her books, lesson plan and carefully hoarded pencil stubs and sheets of scrap paper. Putting them in a cloth sack, she looped this around her neck, then donned her blue burqa. Ahmad had left at daybreak, as he often did, going to Kashi on the business of the Taliban. Treena's husband, Ismael, a quiet young man with the eyes of a poet, a pronounced limp and the slender, perpetually tarnish-grimed hands of a silversmith, would leave soon for the shop where he worked with his brother making jewelry and other items in a trade passed down for generations. First, however, he must do the family marketing. Treena and Chloe would go with him, Treena to advise on the food for a special evening meal ordered by Ahmad who was expecting visitors, Chloe to be dropped off at the home where the secret classes for girls were being conducted at present.

Ismael knew what she did there, of course. He was a special man, a gentle soul who had lost half a foot to infection after a childhood bicycle injury. Sometimes he praised his limp because it meant he was exempt from service with the Taliban militia, and Chloe thought he was only half joking. He did not subscribe to the stringent Islamic views that gave Ahmad such pleasure, and was deeply disturbed over the neglect and destruction of his country's few civ
ilized amenities. The policies of the current government that had brought on trade embargoes in the wake of the Afghan situation were abhorrent to him, but he despised the United States for its sanctions, which deprived the civilian population of food and medicine.

Ismael's disapproval of the restrictions imposed on women came in large part from his mother's experience. A woman barely fifty years of age, she had owned an export business during the previous regime, one inherited from her father. Chic, cosmopolitan and highly organized, she'd made frequent business trips to Europe and the States. Then the Taliban had taken away her business and given it to her father's younger brother. She had fallen into severe depression followed by dependency on the drugs used to alleviate it. Involvement in the RAWA had saved her sanity, as she put it, and it was she who had recruited Treena. Ismael never came right out and approved the RAWA affiliation, but he did not question Chloe's morning visits, ignored her hours spent over schoolbooks while Ahmad was away, and was incurious about the females who came and went, whispering over tea and walnut cakes in the women's quarters. If he knew no details of the activities of his mother, wife and stepsister-in-law, then he could always claim he had thought them busy with nothing more than gossip and female matters.

The class went much as usual. Young girls drifted in one or two at a time, some arriving with their brothers or younger male cousins, one or two escorted
by their fathers and accompanied by mothers who drank tea with their hostess while Chloe presided over the classroom. The methods she used depended, in the main, on rote learning since the oral tradition was strong among Hazaris and books and supplies were scarce. While she taught, she kept a copy of the Qur'an at her side. If any person outside the circle of RAWA sympathizers appeared, she could instantly switch to the recitation of holy writ.

Time melted away. It seemed there were never enough hours to teach everything she wanted the girls to know. All too soon, she had to close her book, make her polite and effusive farewells to the woman of the house who was risking so much by permitting the use of her back room, and be ready to meet Ismael and Treena when they came for her once more.

As she joined them in the entrance, her sister-in-law greeted her with eyes that shone behind their mesh covering. “We saw him, your American from the stadium,” she said as soon as they had left the house. “He was there in the bazaar.”

“Not mine,” Chloe said in instant denial as she reached to help with the string bags filled with grains and melons that her stepsister carried. “Do you think he saw you?”

“He stared at Ismael for an instant, but gave no sign of recognition. My presence he failed to acknowledge at all.”

Chloe frowned a little as she heard the trace of injury in her stepsister's voice. The feeling of being
beneath notice while wearing the burqa could be difficult to endure. She was oddly reluctant to have Treena think that her countryman had intended to compound the effect. “It's considered impolite to stare in my country,” she said. “Besides, the man might not wish to risk angering your escort.”

“You think he may have recognized us after all?”

“He managed somehow to pick me out of the crowd in Kashi yesterday. Since he could see nothing to go by, he must have zeroed in on Ahmad and Ismael.”

“But how would he know them?”

“I've no idea,” she answered. It wasn't something she wanted to think about, either, for fear she wouldn't like the answer. “Was he still at the bazaar when you left?”

“Indeed, and looked as if an explosion could not move him.”

“He'll go soon, when he is bored with the game.”

Treena glanced at her, turning her whole body to see through the burqa opening. “He didn't appear bored. Annoyed, perhaps, but not bored.”

“Too bad,” Chloe muttered, not entirely for Treena's benefit.

“Are you sure you don't want to discover what he has to say to you?”

“Quite sure.” As long as she didn't know, then perhaps she could remain fairly content.

Ismael had been listening as he limped ahead of them. Speaking over his shoulder, he said, “Let us
hope he gives up this attempt to speak to you soon, before Ahmad loses patience.”

“You think someone will tell my brother that the American has followed Chloe here?” his wife asked.

“Of course.”

The idea made the hair lift on the back of Chloe's neck. “He will be gone by that time.”

“Pray that it is so.”

“Yes.” In a firm change of subject then, she spoke of the amazing progress of a young pupil who had been unable to recognize her name only two weeks before but was now reading. They continued in that vein until they were home again.

Chloe busied herself for the rest of the day with ironing Ahmad's uniforms, tending the children so Treena could rest, and overseeing preparation for that night's all-male dinner party. In late evening, while Ismael, Ahmad and his friends were eating in the
hajra
and Treena was feeding the children, Chloe had her own scant portion of the lamb, rice and vegetable dish in the kitchen. Afterward, she picked up the bowl of kitchen scraps left on the counter and carried them outside into the walled garden.

The last colors of sunset were fading from the sky, leaving it to the lavender and gray of approaching night. She stopped for a moment to stand staring upward at the inexorable transformation. The day was almost gone. Soon the American would go away as well.

The ache of sadness brought by that idea was sur
prising. Yet why should it be? She might never again have contact with the life she'd left behind. Some small nostalgia was surely permitted? What mattered was her final decision, not her emotional reaction. This had been made and accepted, and no brief twilight reverie could change it.

Turning her gaze to the stone path again, she moved toward the fig trees at its far end. They were beginning to bear, and could use every bit of mulch she could scrape together to help them through the present stretch of dry weather. Rain fell more often around Ajzukabad than elsewhere in the desertlike country but never enough, and only household wastewater could be spared to help plants survive.

The town was nestled in a high valley formed by the Kashi River. Protected by snow-veined mountain peaks, its climate was subtropical. She grew a variety of other fruits, vegetables and herbs along the walls and in the beds separated by crushed stone walkways, including grapes, melons, apricots, tomatoes, beans, chili peppers, potatoes, turnips, carrots, onion, peas and cabbage in their different seasons. Her efforts added to the family larder and medicine cabinet, as well as providing a welcome excuse for solitude and outdoor exercise.

She emptied the bowl she carried, then she wandered among beds, pinching dead blooms, pulling a weed or two, and inhaling the fragrance of the mint and chamomile, sage and sorrel that rose as her skirts brushed against the sprawling herbs. She was putting
off the moment when she must go back inside, she knew, but couldn't bear to trade the peaceful dusk for the strained atmosphere that her stepbrother always brought into the house with his return.

As she neared the mulberry tree that shaded a rough table and chairs in the corner made by the house and the garden wall, she heard the quiet rasp of cloth, saw the shift of movement in the darker shade cast by the tree. She stopped with her heart beating high in her throat.

“Evening.”

That deep-voiced greeting in English rasped along her nerves. Instantly she caught the trailing end of the scarf she wore over her hair, drawing it across her face even before she made out the tall shape of the man that emerged from the shadows. “You!”

“Didn't mean to startle you. But you stood me up at the bazaar, and knocking on the front door didn't seem like the best idea under the circumstances.”

She barely controlled a shudder at the thought. “If you're discovered here, you could be killed.”

“I needed to see you.”

“Did it occur to you go back to the States and leave me alone?”

“Not possible,” he said with a decisive shake of his head. “I can't leave until we've had our little talk.”

She stared at him in the fading light, at the set of his features, the thick dark brows, sculpted facial planes, and chiseled mouth with firmly tucked cor
ners. It was a strong face, even in repose. The emerald glints in the hazel-brown of his eyes only added to the impression. “Do I know you? Did I ever know you back in the States?” she asked finally.

“No, but I've known you, or known about you, for a long time.”

“And that's why you're hounding me?” She was becoming used to his colloquial English with its many contractions, she realized. A few of her friends liked to practice her language, but theirs was a textbook-formal style and she'd fallen into a similar habit unconsciously in order to be better understood.

“I told you before that your dad sent me. You could call it a deathbed request if you wanted to be dramatic.”

“I don't want it to be anything—” she began, then stopped. “Deathbed? But that would mean…” Her throat constricted to a hard knot while trembling began deep inside her. She clasped one arm around her abdomen and stepped abruptly to the nearby wall, putting her back to its sun-warmed support.

He was silent for so long that she thought he didn't intend to answer. Finally he asked, “You didn't know? You've received no letters in the past six months saying that he had cancer and wasn't going to make it?”

She shook her head, a jerky movement.

“I guess that means you've had no contact with his lawyers, either.”

“None,” she said in compressed tones. “There
have been no messages at all. Not since I left the States.”

He whispered a soft imprecation. “No wonder you looked at me yesterday as if I'd dropped out of the sky.”

“I thought my father…I wasn't sure he knew where I was.”

“He had an address, but nothing sent to it was ever answered,” the American said. “I verified it for him. And I sent the most recent messages.”

“You.” The word was flat.

“At his request.”

“And you're positive they came here, to this house?”

“As positive as anyone can be considering the situation these days.”

Ahmad must have intercepted those messages, Chloe realized, just as he'd destroyed her letters years ago. The outrage of it moved through her like a poison. She let it take her, for otherwise she would disgrace herself by crying in front of this American who seemed to have no idea how much he had hurt her.

“So,” she said with a lift of her chin as she turned her gaze toward the glow of lights behind the high kitchen window. “I have the news now. You have completed your duty and are free to go. Leave at once, please, before you do something that will get me killed.”

“I hope I have more sense than that.”

“So do I, but I can't depend on it.”

“I promised your dad that I'd get you out of this country and back to the U.S. where it's safe,” he returned, his voice deliberate. “That's what I intend to do.”

“Impossible.”

“Everything is arranged. All you have to do is gather up what you need and come with me. Or come with nothing, for that matter.”

“I have no passport.” It was a weak objection considering all that she could have said, but the first thing to come to mind.