And where are those goats now?
I don’t see them looking after you.
It disturbed Omar that there were now two voices in his head. His first wife, who he believed understood him better than the others, used to say that if he took the voice out of his head and sat it down beside him and listened to its incessant jabbering for just five minutes he would never listen to the voice again. ‘That voice is not your friend,’ she had warned him. What would she think if she knew there were now two voices? While Omar had never been able to understand how she knew so much about the voice in his head, he had thought it excellent advice and had gone to great lengths to impart his new-found wisdom to his friends and customers until she had suggested he stop.
‘You old fool,’ she had said not too kindly, her hands planted firmly on her hips. Omar couldn’t quite remember when she had first started addressing him as such, but it was the only way he could remember her now. He was sure she had not been like that when he had first taken her as a young bride.
Too late Omar realised that all these bad thoughts about voices and his first wife had chased away his pleasure, his thoughts returning to the problem he had: discovering the secret of the shabnamah from the Taliban he had taken off Behnaz’s gate. Everyone knew the Taliban’s night letters meant only one thing, and if Behnaz or Dr Sofia were in danger then he must take action, for had he not seen the destruction of the great Buddhas of Bamiyan by the ignorant zealots? The Taliban must never be allowed in Shaahir Square.
Yes, yes, he said to his second wife who was in his ear. I know the women of Afghanistan suffered greatly under the Taliban too. Have we not had this conversation a hundred times already?
Even from Jannah she would not let him be. Surely she had better things to do in paradise than torment him.
Poor Afghans like the village boy Omar didn’t travel for the sake of travelling. Travelling was for necessity only, not something one did for pleasure, but when Omar had left his uncle’s shop in Shaahir Square, safe in the knowledge that the apothecary shop would one day be his, he had taken a detour on his way home to visit his cousin in Bamiyan Province. Although Omar had been intoxicated with the capital and all it had to offer, what he saw in Bamiyan he believed was the closest anyone could ever come to knowing Allah in the work of men. Omar had stood in front of the giant Buddhas carved out of the cliff face with tears pooling in his eyes.
Since that day Omar had witnessed, with a degree of equanimity, the assault on his beloved capital by the Russians and the mujahideen during their five years of civil war and the abuses of the ignorant Taliban, but when those fanatics destroyed the great Buddhas of Bamiyan they had gone too far. Retreating to his bedroom for three full days and four nights, Omar had been inconsolable for he understood that not one other human being on this planet would stand before the work of Allah again as he had. The enormity of that realisation had crippled him. In the confines of his room he had raged against the horror of that unspeakable, ungodly act and then, when all his passion and rage had been spent, he emerged with a deep and abiding hatred of the Taliban that he would carry with him until his dying breath.
Omar could not let the Taliban and their threats destroy the square or the people he loved.
* * *
IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE for Sofia to cross the fifty metres of the square that separated her apartment from her surgery without little diversions, and she would not have had it any other way. The charm of living and working in the incessantly noisy and sometimes smelly square was always the people.
While she had fascinated the men when she first arrived, they had been wary. Over time, and with Afghans’ natural disposition for hospitality and respect, the men of the square had come to trust that this tall, exotic Australian doctor with the astonishing hair was not going to shame or shock them, or corrupt their wives and daughters, and they had welcomed her into their world as their ‘dear sister’.
Unlike the men, the women had never hidden their fascination with Sofia and would frequently arrive at the surgery with make-believe symptoms of confusing illnesses. With only eleven months of experience in an inner-city Sydney hospital before arriving in Kabul, and fumbling her way through a new language, communication and understanding had been somewhat problematic, making it difficult for Sofia to diagnose the women’s problems. In her search for answers her questions had moved haltingly from physical symptoms to life in general, and as the women’s natural reserve began slipping away, they moved on to family and home life and marital concerns. As a result, these increasingly convoluted consultations often lasted more than an hour, and when Sofia’s patients told her they no longer felt the ache or pain they had arrived with she was often left puzzled as to how she had helped.
It didn’t take long for the word to spread among the women of Shaahir Square that the new foreign doctor they had originally told Dr Jabril they did not want was a sympathetic ear who could be trusted with their secrets, and the floodgates of female dissatisfaction descended upon Sofia’s surgery. Although the women were soon arriving with legitimate and mostly diagnosable illnesses, a precedent had been set and the women came to expect their consultation time to exceed an hour, covering a wide and varying range of concerns, which might or might not include the marital, familial, social and political. What the new doctor wasn’t told about a neighbour’s wayward son, a cousin’s useless no-good husband or Afghanistan’s corrupt politicians was not worth knowing. Unwittingly, Sofia had become a therapist for the women of Shaahir Square.
At first Jabril could not understand why his new partner’s consultations were taking so long until Sofia confessed she was not up to the task of diagnosing Afghan women’s health issues. After a couple of questions Jabril had guessed what the problem might be, but when the curious husbands began to worry about the time their wives were spending with the new doctor, he smiled and shook his head, as if the ills of women, and the harmless ministrations of a Western doctor, were beyond a simple Afghan man’s powers of reasoning. With Sofia continuing to apologise for her deficiencies, Jabril decided the time had come for him to share his insights. Lowering his bulk into one of the seats on the opposite side of her desk, he had told her what he saw as the reality of the situation.
‘My dear Sofia, the women of Shaahir Square leave your surgery far happier than when they arrive. Is that not true?’
Sofia considered this. ‘Mostly, yes.’
‘Precisely. Which means that their husbands are happier and their children are happier.’ Sofia had watched the smile light up the face of her quirky boss. ‘Which means all the people who live in the square are happier. Everyone is happier! You are doing Afghanistan a glorious service.’ Jabril laughed, shaking his head at his powers of reasoning. ‘You’re a saint. Truly, we should call you Saint Sofia of Shaahir Square. Yes,’ he had said, rising from the chair, ‘that has a certain pleasing ring to it. Afghanistan will soon have its first Catholic saint. I must inform the Pope immediately!’ Sofia could still hear him chuckling as he made his way back through her reception area to his surgery.
Like everybody in the square, Sofia loved Jabril. It also helped that he really didn’t seem to care that the duration of her consultations meant she often failed to contribute her fair share of income to the business, an inconvenience that was exacerbated by the fact that some of her patients couldn’t afford to pay while others paid a random amount, and still others only paid every other visit. In time Sofia would learn that the viability of both of their surgeries was not reliant on this income but on subsidies from Jabril’s seemingly bottomless bank account.