When the seed was big in her stomach, a wealthy family arrived on the street and wanted to build a home near the hedge. There was so much room, and so few houses. At first the builders left Mother alone, but after a while, they told her she would have to leave. They were going to pour the foundation for the house and sow seeds for grass. The wife, a beautiful lady with henna hair and a waist like a wasp, stopped them. Let her stay here, she said. And so the house was built around the tent, and the garden, trees, and walls all came up around Mother. When Boy was born, a special doctor came, and the house-dwellers brought candy and clothes. Mother kept some of the candy, although it had turned so hard you couldn’t eat it anymore, and a lock of his baby hair, a single curl in a metal tin. She painted the lid with swirls of green and blue, using watercolors that the rich man’s children had thrown away. She told Boy she envied the people in the house not for what they had, but for what they could give away. They are so generous, she said. She would really never know if she was generous, because she would never have anything she could give away.
The tent is near the rosebushes in the garden. In the spring and summer, Boy wakes up to the smell of flowers and goes to sleep to the smell of freshly cut grass. He lies on the ground at night and looks at a sky full of golden things. But now it is winter. Boy hates the winter.
The house-dwellers have two daughters, and they are in the garden tonight, wearing their sheeplike coats. They’re throwing snowballs and chasing each other in circles around the man they made out of snow. Boy’s mother pulls him into the tent and tightens his coat over his chest, and they warm themselves by the small fire. A pot of lentils is cooking on a rack.
The girls sneak up to the tent. Boy hears the crunch of their steps, their muffled giggles. All of a sudden, chunks of snow come through the opening, one after another. They land on the blankets, his coat, the flames. The fire dies.
Mother runs outside and shouts after the girls. Boy is five or six years old, old enough to start a new fire by himself. But the snow melts faster than he can remove it. Everything is wet. He leaves the tent and calls after Mother, who comes back crying, and he pulls her back inside. They curl up together. After she stops crying, she tells him to remember that he is lucky to be living in a garden with walls because many people do not have them at all, and Boy thinks of the people he sees living in tents in fields, people called Kochis, and he thinks they must be walking across the whole country looking for a big garden with walls. Yes, Boy is lucky.
3
Rebecca must have heard Daniel come in, but she didn’t turn to face him. She was watching the city, which was suspended by lamplight in the hotel window. The sight reminded Daniel of the windshield just before the crash. The way the glass warped the road just a little, making the asphalt ripple in the sun.
He had brought up their suitcase and lodged it in a corner. When he slipped his arms around his wife, it was like embracing a column of marble.
“It went fine,” he responded to a question she hadn’t asked.
She loosened his arms from her waist. “What happened?” she whispered, not turning toward him.
He told her he had met with the elders and been absolved, the fee accepted as compensation.
She turned and looked closely at him. “Why did you go? And why did it take so long?”
“I’m so sorry.” Daniel stroked her hair. “How are you? Have you had anything to eat?”
She gestured dismissively to a tray full of untouched cakes and cold tea. “The owner sent this up.” She asked again why he’d been gone so long.
“You know how these things are.”
“Actually, I don’t.”
“It’s over now.”
Rebecca nodded slowly. On the other side of the door, a couple in the hallway prattled on about their lovely evening. The woman spoke with the inflection of a girl newly in love, her high heels languidly striking the tiles. This was how Daniel and Rebecca’s anniversary should have been. Dinner on the town. Returning to the room light-headed from illicitly acquired wine, laughter, expectations.
“I came back as fast as I could,” Daniel said. The couple’s door clicked shut, their honeyed voices fading. Daniel sank to the bed and took off his shoes, arranging them by the nightstand. The softness of the mattress had a surreal quality to it, as if his body had expected to find only hard, inflexible things. The telephone was on the pillow, the receiver slightly off the cradle, its cord tangled. “Did you call someone?”
“Laila.”
“What did you do that for?”
“Because she’s my friend. And your friend. And I wanted to talk to her.”
Daniel had known Laila all his life, and as a doctor she had helped Rebecca through that terrible time, so why shouldn’t she know what had happened? Rebecca had needed to talk to someone. That he could understand, but it rattled him that anyone else should know what he had done. He asked Rebecca to tell no one else about the accident. When she asked why, he said, “It’s nobody’s business.”
They held each other’s gaze until her expression softened and she curled up beside him. She touched his face with the back of her hand, her wedding ring cold on his cheek.
“I canceled the hotel in Herat,” she said.
He nodded.
“Daniel?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you change your clothes?”
He was prepared for this question. “I spilled something. Tea. They gave me tea.”
“Tea.” She inhaled sharply. Rising from the bed, she ambled about the room, alternating between nodding and shaking her head. “Tea,” she repeated. “Sounds like a pleasant gathering.”
She pushed open the window, the city’s sounds invading the room. A frantic bicycle horn. A flock of sheep. The unmistakable laughter of teenagers, carefree yet somehow discernibly self-conscious. She inhaled deeply, then came back to the bed and sat beside him, extending her hand. “Daniel,” she whispered, “talk to me.”
He rose. “I need a shower.”
She dropped her hand in her lap as he walked away.
In the bathroom, Daniel undressed and stepped into the blue-tiled stall. He raised his face to the water and pressed his fingers into his temples, desperate to quiet Telaya’s voice.
Are you going to look up? she said.
He ignored her. But what sort of man did this make him? Was it not enough that he’d taken her life? Now he was trying to expel her from his head, silence her. A final act of annihilation. He turned the hot-water knob as far as it would go, and steam enveloped him. He thought of the dead Kochi boy in the shack, elegized only by the wind. A boy plucked from a crowd of thousands who could have died in a poppy field just as easily and invisibly as he could have grown old in one.