‘What’s he like?’
‘I haven’t met him yet.’
That didn’t surprise her. As far as she knew, her father hadn’t seen Michelle for two years, although her sister would ring him if she needed money. ‘Well, I hope he’s a good influence, Dad.’
‘That’s what I’m hoping too. I’m also hoping he might be a good father.’
Sofia could barely breathe. How was Michelle going to look after a child when she couldn’t even look after herself? She had no idea how to respond to this.
‘You might want to ring her,’ her father offered, breaking the silence.
‘I will.’ No point in reminding him that Michelle didn’t take her calls. ‘But in case I can’t get through, can you tell her how happy I am for her? Hard to imagine Michelle pregnant.’
Her dad cleared his throat. ‘Apparently, she’s already had him, a little boy called Jack.’
‘Oh god, Dad.’ There was no possibility of pretence now.
‘I know.’
‘Have you seen him?’
‘No, but she’s gonna bring him around tomorrow, and the boy’s father too – at least, I assume the man she’s marrying is the bub’s father.’
‘Oh god, Dad …’ Silence down the phone again. ‘Sorry, I’m sounding like a broken record. How about you ring me after you’ve seen them and we can talk?’
When Sofia hung up she sat on the edge of the bed, feeling a familiar sense of hopelessness. The little baby would be just one more worry her father added to the mountain he already carried around in his heart about both his daughters. My poor father, she thought. He didn’t deserve all this heartache.
All he had ever wanted for his daughters was a better life than he had been able to give them: a ‘normal life’, he used to say, where they found steady jobs, met nice young men to marry, produced one or two beautiful, well-adjusted kids and lived happily ever after. She understood why this was so important to him but he couldn’t understand why it wasn’t to her. Sofia wanted to experience more of life than ‘normal’, and now that she had there was no way she could ever step back into the ‘normal’ of Sydney. And yet, she often thought that if her father could see her days he would be shocked, not because they were extraordinary but because they were so ordinary – normal even – if you ignored the fact that it was Afghanistan.
When Sofia applied for the job in Kabul, Jabril had warned her things didn’t happen quickly, and he had been right. It had taken five months to clear her visa with the Afghan authorities, during which time she hired the Afghan refugee to give her conversation lessons. Most of these centred around him asking her in English why she wanted to go to Afghanistan when he had risked his life to get out of the place, followed by her halting replies in Dari about doing something exciting with her life, none of which impressed the refugee or was going to help her converse with her new patients. With the refugee spending much of his time telling her in English she was crazy, she eventually told him that it was okay to say that, but could he please at least say it in Dari. ‘It might be a sentence I have some use for in the future.’
The night before Sofia was to leave she had been sitting with her father and Michelle at the kitchen table. No one had eaten much of the celebratory pizza and cheesecake he had brought home after finishing his night shift early. It hadn’t much felt like a celebration, Sofia thought as she had looked from her father to her sister; more like a death in the family.
As Michelle concentrated on twisting her can of Coca-Cola around in circles in the little pool of condensation forming on the old formica table, Sofia realised her father had started crying.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Michelle had said when she dragged herself away from her Coke to see why they had suddenly gone quiet. Pushing back her chair, she stormed out of the kitchen.
For once her father ignored Michelle’s histrionics. ‘Why do you have to go to a place where there’s a war, Sofia?’ he had asked the daughter who, until the Afghan madness, had never given him a moment’s worry.
‘It’s not war, Dad. There’s no fighting in Afghanistan anymore. The Americans defeated the Taliban.’
‘If you believe that crap you have no right going,’ he had said, before apologising for the harshness of his words.
Like all taxi drivers, her father thought he knew everything about everything because he spent his waking life listening to parliament and talkback radio, or poring over the newspapers while waiting for customers, and when he had customers he talked to them about their lives and world events. He also spent a good deal of his time talking to other taxi drivers who, in turn, spent their days listening to talkback, reading newspapers and earbashing anyone who was unfortunate enough to get into their cabs. Sofia believed that while taxi drivers might not know everything, they did know a lot more about life and the world than most people.
‘It’ll be fine,’ she had said, reaching across the table to take his hand. The truth was, now the time had come to leave she was regretting her decision. Scarcely able to admit it to herself, she was not about to admit it to him. ‘I’ll be back in a year. Twelve months, that’s not too long. You’ll see.’
The following morning Michelle had left the house before Sofia woke so there could be no sisterly goodbye. After checking in her luggage and collecting her boarding pass, Sofia and her dad had sat sipping coffee and trying to make cheery conversation, none of which concerned Afghanistan. When the parting could no longer be put off they had stood together outside the departures gate. Their conversation had run dry. Pulling his daughter into his arms he had whispered how proud he was of her before abruptly letting go and pushing her away.
‘Go on, girl. Get out of here. The sooner you leave the sooner you’ll be back.’
Twenty-four hours later Sofia had been flying over Afghanistan in the freezing predawn, the folding black velvet night shadows of the barren central plains and valleys gliding by slowly below her. She knew the land was dotted with villages and crisscrossed by roads and dirt tracks but there was not a light to be seen.
An aid worker would later tell Sofia that the imagination was always worse than the reality when you were travelling to a new location. He had been right. On that first flight into Afghanistan, Sofia had felt herself riding a terrifying emotional rollercoaster – from fear, to wonder, to elation and back to fear, all in a matter of minutes. But then the dusty city of Kabul had come into view, and as the plane began its descent, dawn broke and Sofia saw the Hindu Kush for the first time and her heart soared. This was it: the place she had dreamed of.
Despite her outward enthusiasm on that first drive into the city with Jabril and Tawfiq, Sofia had found the city confusing, and would soon find it cold and unfriendly. It was impossible to hide her foreignness, and her rudimentary language skills were problematic, making it hard to diagnose her patients’ illnesses. In those first few weeks she had felt like she was sinking. She was also painfully, achingly lonely. She had made a mistake. The dream was a nightmare. Most nights she lay awake thinking about how she was going to tell Jabril and Zahra that she wasn’t the right person for the job and that they needed to get someone local. And then one morning, Ahmad and Hadi had smiled at her and then Omar had waved to her and Babur offered a free lunch, and as she was crossing the square one of her patients stopped to ask how she was settling in and her world began to change.