Prologue
Until now, my history has remained buried in me the way ancient civilizations are hidden beneath layers of earth and new life. But people insist on digging into the past, poking at relics of yesterday to marvel at the simplicity of extinct creatures. We display the evidence of our superiority in glass cases, housed in grand buildings sometimes half a world away from where they were found.
In London, I saw the Elgin Marbles, lifted from the Parthenon, the Gweagal Shield stolen from Aboriginal Australians, and the brilliant Koh-i-Noor diamond. In the language of my childhood, Koh-i-Noor means Mountain of Light, a name that obscures the diamond’s dark history.
But I cannot be too critical. Not while I have my own plundered treasure in a box, far from where it was unearthed. How it came to be with me is the story that I have never wholly told, not to the woman who helped me flee a country on fire, not to the woman who raised me as an American, and not to the man I almost loved.
Were it not for the day my buried life appeared before me unannounced, I might have kept it all hidden forever. And I might not have asked those questions I’d stifled to preserve this unexamined life.
What are you? I have been asked as I pay for my coffee, as I check out a book at the library, as I explain to my last patient of the day how I will remove the tumor growing inside him. As if I am a species, not a person. People throw identities at me and look to see if one will stick: Greek, Italian, Lebanese, Argentinian, Eastern European. I trigger a railroad switch and divert their questions away from crates of ammunition and streams of pity and preserve for myself the first and only peaceful decade of my life.
But untold histories live in shallow graves. Some nights, the cold wakes me and I find I’ve clawed my way out from under the covers. I count the stars to catch my breath.
Once upon a time, a little girl with velvet ribbons in her hair crouched deep in the belly of a palace, tucked behind copper pots and urns and cartons heavy with treasures of a lost world. Each time she was shaken by the urge to scream, she plunged her teeth into the soft flesh of her forearm. She knew only that she should remain perfectly silent and prayed no one would hear the thin echo of the song her father would sing when he found her awake well past her bedtime.
While I slumber, you are open-eyed
I am naïve but you are ever wise
Because of him—in spite of him—she did not wail in the dark.
Meters above her, soldiers wandered, some solemnly and others less so, through the warren of hallways. Walls were marked with crimson splatters—the fingerprints of revolution. A general, feeling presidential, slid into a plush Victorian sofa and traced the curves of its lacquered arms. His chest puffed to think that people would soon come to appreciate the sacrifices he’d made tonight for the greater good. He stood and walked across a hand-knotted burgundy carpet, delicate white flowers laced through an elephant’s foot motif. He checked the sole of his left boot, then his right. He needn’t have worried, though. An Afghan carpet, perhaps by design, conceals blood just as well as it conceals spilled tea.
The city, a halo around the palace, waited on an announcement from the president to explain the sight of Sukhoi jets and the sound of gunfire. American diplomats stationed in Kabul, some still fuzzy from cocktails, wondered what bizarre conflict had befallen their peaceful and exotic post. One silver-haired American woman, teetering from the effects of a stubby cigarette she’d purchased off a hippie couple, tried to touch the paper airplanes that soared over her head. She applauded the flash of fireworks, as Americans do.
Never, that little girl in the palace knew with brutal certainty, had any child in history been more alone.
On that night, giants were felled. A dizzying void swallowed all that had once been. But the trembling little girl could not succumb. She would be brave because her father had once told her that the world lived within her. That her bones were made of mountains. That rivers coursed through her veins. That her heartbeat was the sound of a thousand pounding hooves. That her eyes glittered with the light of a starry sky.
I am that girl, and this is my story.
Part I
April 1978
Chapter 1
A string of vehicles pulled into the circular palace driveway, disappearing one by one as their engines and headlights cut off. I watched silhouettes emerge and approach the main entrance of the palace.
“Neelab, they’re here,” I whispered.
“How many cars?”
“Fifteen, maybe. It’s too dark out. Hard to tell.”
“We’re going to have to go soon,” Neelab warned.
Mother must have seen the cars approach too. Her voice echoed from down the hall. The palace buzzed as it did on those special occasions when its grandest rooms filled with the most important guests.
“Sitara! Where are you?”
I could not hide my disappointment. I looked at Neelab, sitting on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest. The lamplight cast a yellow glow on her cheeks.
“It’s a weekend,” I groaned.
“They want all the little children in bed when they open that box downstairs,” Neelab said, repeating what her mother had told her. “You might as well go to her before she finds you.”
But surrender had never been my style.
“What about you? I bet your mother is looking for you too.”
Neelab shook her head.
“No way. I’m a young woman now. The rules have changed.”
This amused me. “You’re barely a full year older than me. And you’d have to wear heels to look me in the eye.”
“Go ahead and tease, but if I wanted to, I could throw on one of my dresses and join them downstairs and no one would say a thing,” Neelab declared, arms folded across her chest. I loved her too much to point out to her how flat it still was.
“Is Neelab with you?” Mother called, as if she’d forgotten that Neelab and I had been inseparable since I had learned to walk. “It’s past time for her to turn in too.”
Neelab avoided my eyes then. She hated to be wrong almost as much as I relished being right.
My best friend and I had ducked into the presidential library so I could thumb through a text I’d discovered last week. The Book of Fixed Stars was written a thousand years ago by an astronomer named al-Sufi. Like me, he’d been fascinated by constellations, stories written in a pen of light. I’d drawn the velvet curtains so I could match the constellations on the page with the stars of the night sky. One by one, I found them and marveled that time hadn’t stolen a single flickering gem.
“I’m here, Madar,” I replied, glancing at the pages splayed before me. Al-Sufi had sketched the serpentine tail of Draco, a fork-tongued dragon, circling Ursa Minor. I had read, but had yet to confirm through observation, that it was visible all year long from Kabul’s latitude.
Our months were named after constellations, and soon it would be the month of Saur, or Taurus. I drew lines between stars and saw the bull’s swordlike horns piercing the sky. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled to picture the giant beast leaping down from the heavens and galloping on this land.
Mother poked her head between the French doors of the library.