“We have waited so long for this moment,” a bald man announced.
“Which minister is he?” Neelab asked.
“He’s from the Department of Very Important Matters,” I said.
“Oh, right—the one that will handle your punishment when you get us in trouble tonight,” she replied. Then the minister began speaking.
“This is a sampling of the treasures excavated from the ancient city of Ai-Khanoum over the past twelve years. Imagine it, my friends, a great civilization found under layers of earth! Tonight we say our sincerest thanks to the Russians and to the French for retrieving this history. Tonight, the future of Afghanistan meets its gilded past.”
Ai-Khanoum, in the northern part of the country, was one of the farthest reaches of an ancient Greek kingdom. I’d been reading so much about the constellations and the myths associated with the Greek gods that I’d gotten Neelab interested as well. We tried to guess at what treasures might have been left behind centuries ago.
The room stirred with polite applause, the clinking of glasses, and celebratory drags on cigarettes.
The minister picked up a crowbar that had been placed next to the crate and placed it in the hands of the Russian.
“Finally!” Neelab said, squeezing my arm softly. We’d waited a month for this crate to arrive and then another week for these thirty people—a mix of Afghan, French, Russian, and American nationals—to gather for the revealing of what lay inside. My mother and father were now standing side by side, speaking with foreigners I didn’t recognize.
“I bet they pull out a sculpture of a bull. Taurus, right? Or what was the one you found today, a dragon?” Neelab whispered to me.
“Shh! I can’t hear what the Russian is saying.”
The Russian spoke in halting Dari, his accent so thick that I could barely make out his meaning.
“. . . These pieces of old Afghanistan . . . a new home in the Kabul Museum . . . all that remains of a civilization . . .”
A hum of approval moved through the room, while I sat back with my arms folded. How could a kingdom capable of erecting cities in far-off lands be reduced to a few trinkets in a crate?
I wanted to get a closer look.
The Russian man lifted a velvet-lined box into the circle and opened it. He pulled back a square of fabric and tilted the container, arms extended above his shoulders and the heads of the guests so everyone could see its contents. When he swiveled slowly and by degrees to the right, I nearly slipped down the steps, struggling to get a better view.
It was a gold ring with inset teardrops of turquoise and garnet. The stones were nearly the size of my fingernails and easily seen even from a distance. The room thrummed with wonder.
“Centuries . . . centuries old . . . beautiful Bactrian gold,” the Russian explained. “Proof of the long history between Greeks and Afghanistan.”
“And of the longer relationship between women and jewelry!” shouted a jovial voice. My mother laughed. The mood was bubbly. Even the president’s usually stoic face had lightened.
The Russian continued retrieving items from the crate. He held up coins, a bone figurine, and a small statue. My father and President Daoud slipped away from the festivities, coming together to stand side by side beneath the tapestry with half-emptied glasses in their hands.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the image of them with their backs to that woven buzkashi scene. The two men who loomed tall as mountains in my world were suddenly dwarfed by rearing stallions and their whip-clutching riders, a stampede ready to storm this very room.
Chapter 3
Arg was guarded by a handful of soldiers who were meant to be seen, not heard. I once asked my father if they had ever considered replacing the soldiers with uniforms on sticks. My father pondered my ridiculous questions with the same attention that he gave my more earnest ones. He would narrow his eyes and turn my words into an image in his head, an X-ray revealing the carefully aligned bones of my reasoning. I stood inches taller in his presence. And for a child to feel grand in the storied, soaring halls of Arg was no small feat.
Because the soldiers were present, we found ways to turn them into props for our play. To engage in some amateur espionage, Neelab and I tracked their movements and assigned each one a secret code name. The soldier with green eyes we called Sabzi, or spinach. When we were his only audience, he would make his eyes cross and pinch his nose as if he’d just smelled a foul odor. Our parents and all the other adults in the palace only ever saw a solemn face on him.
The other soldiers were too fearful of being reprimanded to risk a moment of lightness. We gave them even more teasing names, perhaps out of spite. The guard who was forever squinting we named Kishmish, because his entire face took on a wrinkled appearance when he looked at anything farther than his outstretched arm. A soldier who sniffled with allergies we called Darya, for his nose seemed to run like a river. Shair, or Sham, was a soldier who always stood straight and silent as a candle. Perhaps the most disciplined of the soldiers, he was quickest to click his heels together in salute. Rostam, on the rare afternoons when he was not with his private tutor, did a most perfect impression of Shair’s deep and deferential voice.
The day after the party, Neelab and I were still anxious for a closer look at the velvet-wrapped treasures from Ai-Khanoum. I was certain we could find the collection, but a thorough search of the palace had left us exhausted and empty-handed. Over a breakfast of fried eggs and tomatoes, Neelab suggested we ask Boba to open the crate for us. I cringed at admitting defeat, but I knew the relics would soon be moved to the museum and I would lose my chance to see them up close. We planned to soften up Boba by emphasizing our keen interest in this newly discovered piece of Afghan history. I studied my parents’ interests and habits and knew that if I could tug at our mutual love for history, I could get Boba to break some rules too.
We raced down a hallway bathed in morning light. Arg sat on eighty-three glorious acres in the heart of Kabul. With its many buildings and open green spaces, it was a city within a city with stories upon stories. Neelab’s grandfather had become the country’s first president by self-declaration, ending the rule of the king, his own cousin, while the monarch visited Europe. But the deeper story, true or not, was that people were planning on ending the king’s life as well as his rule, so Neelab’s grandfather had done him a favor.
“Do you think he will let us hold it in our hands?” Neelab asked, biting her lip.
“Yes, but only if we don’t tell a soul about it.”
A man’s voice interrupted our chatter.
“Don’t tell a soul about what?”
We whirled around to see who had overheard us. It was Sham, or Shair, which made sense. No one else could have approached us so noiselessly.
“A sparrow,” I replied swiftly. Any pause would have suggested I was lying, so I blurted out the character from the nursery rhyme about a sparrow served for dinner. The verse had been trapped in my mind since morning. I’d watched my mother hold Faheem’s hand in her own and trace circles in his palm, bending in each of his fingers and turning them into characters of the song:
Lilly lilly the little pond
Where algae grew round and round
And caused a slick that in a wink
Slipped a sparrow who’d come to drink