It hadn’t taken Sofia long to discover that being a doctor in a small community – even if it was in the middle of a large city – was a balancing act between intimate secrets and public behaviour. Routinely needing to forget the secrets she was told if she wished to maintain some semblance of normality in day-to-day life with friends and neighbours, Sofia was also required to recall every exacting detail when the next instalment arrived, for her patients would have been deeply offended if she had forgotten some pivotal piece of information and needed to be reminded. Rarely did she make a mistake, which was another thing that endeared her to her patients. They may have felt differently if they had known that, having long ago discovered she was not capable of remembering all the intimate minutiae that found their way into her surgery, Dr Sofia had taken to privately recording notes of their conversations in a secret file on her laptop. She hoped she would not live to regret this.
‘It feels like it might be a bit cooler today, Behnaz.’
‘I think it’s not so hot today.’ It was always not so hot that time of year in Kabul.
‘You’re out early,’ Sofia offered, without receiving a reply.
If Behnaz had nothing to say she simply said nothing. It was a skill Sofia had long admired but failed to master for, contrary to popular opinion, silences said a lot, and in this regard, Behnaz’s silences were usually commanding.
‘You know, I think this canary could use a mate.’ Sofia stopped and crouched down in front of the cage, making useless cooing noises that only ever succeeded in silencing the bird.
‘No mate,’ Behnaz said, still leaning on her broom.
‘It might be lonely,’ Sofia said, looking up at her.
‘No mate.’
‘I’ll pay for it,’ Sofia said hopefully as she got to her feet again.
‘No mate.’
‘Okay.’
When Behnaz had first returned from the bird market with a canary it had taken her twenty-four hours to decide that her bird was defective because it didn’t sing half as loudly or as long as her friend’s canary. Marching back to the bird market with the hapless bird swinging wildly in its cage, the furious Behnaz had demanded a bird that wasn’t ‘broken’. The stall owner distinctly remembered this particular woman, who had haggled him down in price until his profit had all but disappeared. Normally he would have explained to a customer that he charged more for male canaries because they sang better than the females, but all this woman had been interested in was paying as little as possible. Faced with the impenetrable wall of Behnaz’s fury, and a growing crowd of curious onlookers, he had swapped the female for a male canary free of charge, sending a little prayer to Allah that he would never have the misfortune of dealing with the woman again.
Opening the gate to reveal the square beyond, Sofia was assailed by familiar sounds and the unwelcome smell of fresh donkey droppings. Looking down she saw the offending item sitting warm and grassy in a patch of sunlight on the dusty old cobblestones just outside the gate. Behnaz, who had been following close behind Sofia, registered the mess and promptly began cursing in her native Pashto.
* * *
OMAR, WHO HAD been sitting patiently in the middle of the square waiting for Behnaz to come through her gate to discover the donkey’s calling card, smiled to himself when she began to swear. Not many people got one up on his cantankerous neighbour, but the donkey always did. It was a small pleasure he would accept on this worrisome morning.
In wintertime Omar could be found sitting at the counter in his apothecary shop in front of his dusty old electric bar heater with a warming blanket wrapped around his shoulders. During the height of summer, when the Kabul days were unbearably hot and sticky, he would be sitting in front of the new electric fan he bought from Ahmad for what he considered an acceptable price, but when the power went out – which it did on a regular basis – he would take his sandals off and rest his feet in a bucket of water. As the mornings became cooler, but not yet too cold, Omar carried a plastic chair out into the middle of the square in search of a spot of sunshine to warm his old bones, but as the sun began to move across the square, Omar would pick up his chair and follow it until by mid-morning he could be found sitting back in a patch of sun by the front door of his shop where, more often than not, he would be sleeping.
On this morning, Omar settled back in his chair in the middle of the square, and as he turned his leathery old face to take the full measure of the sun’s meagre warmth, he found himself contemplating a nap. Old age had a few small pleasures, but youth, Omar thought as he drifted off, now that was something else.
As a young boy growing up in a desolate village in the hills of northern Afghanistan, and lacking any formal education, Omar believed he could see his future. He would build a square mudbrick house with two rooms next to his parents’ home, and like his father, he would become a goat herder. In time he would marry a local girl and, insha’Allah, she would be beautiful and he would have many fine sons. With his easygoing manner and the much admired green eyes he had inherited from his Iranian mother, it was often said that Omar would marry well, although even Omar could see that marrying well in such a poor community might not mean very much. When he was fifteen fate had intervened and Omar had been summoned to Kabul by his father’s wealthy brother. With no children, the brother had decided to test each of his nephews to see who might be smart enough to inherit his apothecary business in Shaahir Square.
In time Omar won the coveted prize, but what he had experienced during his two years of training with his uncle in Kabul had changed him forever. He had seen more food in the city’s markets in one day than he had seen in his entire lifetime. He had smelled smells and his eyes had seen sights that he had found both thrilling and frightening but also hard to understand. The exoticism and sheer size of Kabul had made the young Omar’s head spin. There were more people in that great city than he had thought possible in the entire world. He saw women and young girls walking the streets in short skirts with painted faces and their hair hanging free. When one of these beauties smiled at Omar he would often stumble, unable to find the appropriate response, for nothing in his village had taught him how to react to such wanton seduction.
After returning to his village Omar had been restless. The place was too small and the people backward, and yet he had no choice but to wait until his uncle summoned him back to Kabul, or the man died, at which time the apothecary shop would become his. The villagers quietly noted these changes in the once carefree young man and began to speculate about what terrible things must have happened to him in the city until he became a cautionary tale for their children, a warning of the dangers lurking in the streets of Kabul and the modern world. In 1976, five years after he had left Shaahir Square, Omar’s uncle had died and he had returned.
As the square’s apothecary for more than four decades, Omar took pride in moving with the times by stocking over-the-counter Western drugs, although his heart of hearts belonged to the ancient art of the apothecary. His uncle’s beautiful old cabinets, made from the magnificent cedars of Lebanon nearly a century before, and the exquisitely crafted timber drawers lining the shop’s walls were still crammed full of all manner of herbs, spices and mysterious tonics and potions, some of which dated from before his uncle’s time, and while they were mostly a mystery to him, he could not bring himself to throw them out.