The Lovers Read Free Page A

pursued by a pack of barking dogs, then stopped under some birch trees on a traffic circle at the edge of the upper plateau and dialed Ali. There was no answer. Digging into her bag, frantic, she pulled out a loaf of bread and began breaking off pieces to throw to the dogs to stop the barking.
    Over in his village of Surkh Dar, Ali heard the phone ring on its nail outside and raced from his room, but by the time he reached it, the ringing had stopped. He called her back, and this time Zakia answered. Their situation was perilous. It was just past one in the morning, and she was a woman alone and therefore subject to arrest, not only by police but by any man who passed and wanted to take the law into his own hands—or worse. In a society where rape was often not regarded as a crime if the woman were found alone, worse was likely. Ali woke his father, Anwar, to tell him that the escape was on and then called a village friend, Rahmatullah, who had already agreed to help them elope by driving them to a hiding place higher in the mountains.
    Rahmatullah’s battered maroon Toyota Corolla wouldn’t turn over in the cold at first, but the engine finally caught. Ali stampedhis foot impatiently as his friend insisted on warming up the engine for a few minutes. The drive was only fifteen or twenty minutes down the unpaved road, along the front of the Buddha niches, through the old bazaar, and up the hill to the higher plateau, where Zakia waited. The sparse grove of birch trees at that spot was too thin to hide her, so she lay prone in a shallow drainage ditch beside the traffic circle. It seemed to Zakia that it took them nearly an hour to arrive, and by then she could see the alarm being raised at the shelter and hear the commotion there as searchers ran around the walls outside, only a few hundred yards from her hiding place. Hunkered down in the ditch, she did not see Ali in Rahmatullah’s car as it first arrived, until he alerted her with another phone call.
    When the car stopped near her, it set the pack of dogs to barking again, and Ali jumped out to help her put her bag in the trunk. Each spoke the other’s name, and in that small way they were—as they both understood—declaring their rebellion against their society’s strictures and customs. There are many husbands in Afghanistan who have never used their wives’ names, even when addressing them directly. When they address their own wives, often it will not be with the personal “you”— tu in Dari 8 —but with the formal you, shuma, 9 the same word one would use to address a stranger or an official. They never mention their wives’ names in conversation with others. There are many Afghan men who do not know the first names of their best friends’ wives. It is considered offensively intrusive to ask men the names of their daughters, let alone their wives. 10
    Ali led Zakia across the muddy lane, she all aswish in her full-length skirt and chador namaz, a long, flowing scarf, and he with a lightweight woolen scarf, a patu, pulled around his body against the cold but little else for warmth aside from his thin leather jacket. The snow had stopped and the skies cleared, but the moon was new and the night quite dark. As they got into the car, Zakia took his hand in hers and held it tightly. If she had kissed him it would hardly have been more unexpected and only slightly more subversive.
    They had been declaring their love for each other for years now in secret and then publicly for the past six months of her effectiveincarceration in the shelter. They had never been alone together indoors, let alone in the backseat of an automobile. Mostly they had seen each other only in glimpses and clandestine encounters in the fields of their families’ adjoining farms and on one day when they were taken to have their case heard in court. Zakia’s death sentence was decreed that day in court: implicitly by her judges and in screamed imprecations by her mother, father, and