Page 10 of What Remains

“How will he know you?” the American asked Baba.

“Easy.” Baba grinned. “Tell him I’ll be the man with blonde hair and black glasses and who looks like he needs to work out.”

They had laughed, and that made Poya wonder about Baba—and that study.

Poya would see the American again the very next spring. That was when he went on a secret mission with Mami and her students. The American drove one of the trucks and Poya sat next to him all the way to Herat.

That time, the American’s look was different. Not by much, but enough to call what he wore a disguise. Baba said the American’s name was Mr. White. But Poya thought that was a lie because he had seen the American’s true face the night his father shook the man’s hand.

And Poya never forgets a face.

Now,it is August, and his father has gone in search of his American, who will spirit them out of Kabul ahead of the Taliban.

“What will happen when we go to America?” Poya’s tongue skims salty pearls of sweat from his upper lip. “What will happen to the bees?”

“Nothing.” Mami’s voice is curiously hollow as if she’s fallen into a pit much deeper and darker than one for a stoning. “There was a terrible drought twenty years ago, and the hive lived through that. So long as there is no disease or some bandit steals all their honey, the hive will survive indefinitely.”

“So, when we come back, they will still be here?”

“B-back?” The word wobbles as if suddenly so slippery, his mother’s tongue has lost control. Closing her eyes, she says, “We will not be back. We will never see this house again?—”

There is a sudden, oddcrump. The sound isn’t that of a rocket hitting a building, which Poya has heard before. This is a much duller and distant explosion. They both flinch and then Mami lurches to her feet, her stool toppling to the hard earth, as they turn to look north.

“Oh!” Mami clasps both hands to her heart. “Oh, your father!”

A distant pillar of black boils into a clear, cloudless sky though, weirdly, Poya’s nostrils fill with the scent of a burning girl and roast meat and crackling fat laced with the fainter tang of gasoline and hot metal and scorched rubber.

No, that’s not right.How can he smell ruined machines or people blasted to bits?Something’s wrong, this isn’t right.Thesky above Kabul is a surreal blue: as intense as the center of anazar, an evil eye, which has grown swollen and fat with men’s evil.

“That was theairport!” Mami wails. Her keening is the shrill scream of a rabbit in a wolf’s jaws, a stray dog being bludgeoned to death by a crowd of men taking bets on when the creature will finally have the good grace to die—or a young girl, stoned by herfather because she has had the great misfortune to fall in love with a man he would never choose.

“Oh, my husband!” Mami beats her breast and tears at her hair. “My husband, myhusband?—”

“Baba!”Poya gasped?—

And startled awake to a different nightmare.

2

Now.

Poya was on his right side, in darkness, his head on a crude pillow made of a cloth sack stuffed with lumpy clots of wool. Humid from his breath, the darkness stank of sweat, singed grass, and the fusty odor of pee. One thing he’d learned since coming to live in this place was that sheep’s wool, when damp, smelled of urine.

For several long moments, he lay still, swallowing back salt from the tears he’d shed in his sleep. Weirdly, the sound, which Poya’s sleep-addled brain turned into a bee, was still there: that buzz, muffledbrrr.

Quiet.Lifting himself on an elbow, he slipped a hand beneath his pillow and fished out Mami’s still-vibrating cellphone. Killing the alarm with a tap, Poya lay back and cradled the cell against a chest that was no longer quite so flat, a fact which often worried him because of what that would mean here.

Don’t think about now. Remember who you are. You are Poya Durrani. You are the son of Benyamin and Soraya. You are Poya.

This was a mantra he recited upon awakening every morning, his own and very private fadj as devout and fervent asany prayer. His parents, neither of them religious, insisted he learn as a matter of course.You need to blend in, they’d said. How they justified the many lies he had to tell and live back in Kabul, they never said, but they made him study with amullahwho marveled at his memory and easy facility with languages.

How quickly he has picked up the Fusha!the mullah once said to his parents.Not a slip, not a mistake! Far faster than any of my other students and quite a few of the adults. He switches so well between Pashto and Dari, even English…have you ever given thought to his becoming an imam? Sending him to study at a private madrasa? No?The mullah had worked his arthritic fingers through the tangles of his long, henna-stained beard.Give it thought, give it thought. He is too quick, too bright and he would languish at a state school. A private madrasa will expose him to studies he will never receive anywhere else. How else to counter impiety?

His parents knew better than to send him anywhere and, regardless, Poya certainly didn’t need religion to blend in withthesepeople. In this place, so far removed from any true town or even small village, there was noadhan, no one to announce when prayers were to be said. The family he lived with weren’t sticklers either. The closest Amu Alazar came to a prayer was a perfunctoryOmindelivered before a meal and offered more out of superstition than actual gratitude. Anything Amu ate or wore came from sweat, hard work, and a cool head when bartering for supplies. No one studied Quran either. Poya had an idea this was because none of them could read. Amu and his fellow clansmen had televisions and DVD players and cell phones, but there were no schools, and no one had books.

Well, almost no one.

Poya was a boy with secrets. Look at it a certain way, andhewas a secret.

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