The Lovers Read Free

center of pilgrimage and the spiritual capital of the Greco-Buddhist Kushan Empire, the eyes of the great Buddhas Solsal and Shahmama comprised hundreds of precious stones, rubies and sapphires especially but diamonds and emeralds as well. Fires were kept lit at night behind those yard-wide orbs. The gemstone lenses magnified the light and sent multicolored rays across the valley, where they would have been seen sparkling at night from many miles away, particularly on the upper plateau, which lay at nearly eye level opposite the behemoths’ gaze.
    Tonight on this same plateau, a male guard was on duty in thecourtyard of the women’s shelter in a small guard shack that was just big enough for him to lie down inside. The girls knew that he was ill and would probably have fallen asleep on duty, which indeed he had done. Zakia had the SIM card for her cell phone, but the phone itself was in the hallway, hidden in a cupboard. Inside the shelter building, there was a woman guard whom they had expected to be asleep, but she wasn’t. The guard challenged Zakia when she heard her stepping outside her room. Zakia quickly ducked into the bathroom, making up a story that she wanted to take a late shower. This delayed her another twenty or thirty minutes as the two other girls waited for her and Ali kept trying unsuccessfully to get through on the phone.
    Safoora, younger than Zakia, was excited for her but sad to see her go—she was along just to help Zakia and the other older girl, Abida, escape. Zakia had been not only an older sister to her but also the sparkler that lit up their shabby existence: colorful, vivacious, and, in the privacy of the company of other young women, contemptuous of the social rules that had driven them all to this refuge. Abida, an overweight girl about Zakia’s age, married as a child to an abusive husband whose beatings drove her here, had decided the day before that she would flee with Zakia to return to her husband. They agreed to help one another over the wall of the shelter and run together.
    It was a shelter from the harm that awaited them outside, but it was also a prison; one of the terms under which all such facilities in Afghanistan operate is that they promise not to allow the girls and women to leave until their cases are settled, if they can be settled. Many of them are in the shelters indefinitely, with few future prospects except to return to whatever family hell drove them there in the first place.
    Zakia was determined that would not be her fate. The girls hugged and said their good-byes to Safoora and then began dragging mattresses out to the wall at the back of the courtyard. The mattresses were stiff, full of cotton tick; doubled over and piled one atop the other, they made a ledge halfway up the eight-foot-tall wall, so Zakia could clamber up. Later on she would insist, asshe had agreed with the other girls to say, that no one had helped her escape, that she had simply walked out the unlocked front door when everyone was asleep and hopped the wall on her own. From the top of the wall, she reached down to pull Abida up as well, but the girl was too weak to pull herself up and too much deadweight for Zakia. Abida later claimed that her friend had abandoned her to save herself. Zakia insisted that the girl was too heavy to make the climb, but she also was aware that Abida wanted to return to an abusive husband. Zakia thought it was probably just as well that the girl did not do so. Abida was not driven by love but by desperation and might well have been killed for her efforts.
    Looking back from the top of the wall for a brief second, Zakia saw that she had let go of Ali’s photo on the way up; it had been clutched in her hand and was crumpled badly. She did not hesitate, though, and at about one in the morning Zakia dropped to the ground outside the wall, in her high heels, carrying a plastic bag full of clothes. She ran lightly down the hill in the direction of the Great Buddhas,