I hope you discover many tales on these keys.
General Iqbal TaheriI sold Baba's VW bus and, to this day, I have not gone back to the flea market. I would drive to his gravesite every Friday, and, sometimes, I'd find a fresh bouquet of freesias by the headstone and know Soraya had been there too.
Soraya and I settled into the routines--and minor wonders-- of married life. We shared toothbrushes and socks, passed each other the morning paper. She slept on the right side of the bed, I preferred the left. She liked fluffy pillows, I liked the hard ones. She ate her cereal dry, like a snack, and chased it with milk.
I got my acceptance at San Jose State that summer and declared an English major. I took on a security job, swing shift at a furniture warehouse in Sunnyvale. The job was dreadfully boring, but its saving grace was a considerable one: When everyone left at 6 P.M. and shadows began to crawl between aisles of plastic-covered sofas piled to the ceiling, I took out my books and studied. It was in the Pine-Sol-scented office of that furniture warehouse that I began my first novel.
Soraya joined me at San Jose State the following year and enrolled, to her father's chagrin, in the teaching track.
"I don't know why you're wasting your talents like this," the general said one night over dinner. "Did you know, Amir jan, that she earned nothing but A's in high school?" He turned to her. "An intelligent girl like you could become a lawyer, a political scientist. And, Inshallah, when Afghanistan is free, you could help write the new constitution. There would be a need for young talented Afghans like you. They might even offer you a ministry position, given your family name."
I could see Soraya holding back, her face tightening. "I'm not a girl, Padar. I'm a married woman. Besides, they'd need teachers too."
"Anyone can teach."
"Is there any more rice, Madar?" Soraya said.
After the general excused himself to meet some friends in Hayward, Khala Jamila tried to console Soraya. "He means well," she said. "He just wants you to be successful."
"So he can boast about his attorney daughter to his friends. Another medal for the general," Soraya said.
"Such nonsense you speak!" "Successful," Soraya hissed. "At least I'm not like him, sitting around while other people fight the Shorawi, waiting for when the dust settles so he can move in and reclaim his posh little government position. Teaching may not pay much, but it's what I want to do! It's what I love, and it's a whole lot better than collecting welfare, by the way."
Khala Jamila bit her tongue. "If he ever hears you saying that, he will never speak to you again."
"Don't worry," Soraya snapped, tossing her napkin on the plate. "I won't bruise his precious ego."IN THE SUMMER of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul, written mostly with the typewriter the general had given me. I sent query letters to a dozen agencies and was stunned one August day when I opened our mailbox and found a request from a New York agency for the completed manuscript. I mailed it the next day. Soraya kissed the carefully wrapped manuscript and Khala Jamila insisted we pass it under the Koran. She told me that she was going to do nazr for me, a vow to have a sheep slaughtered and the meat given to the poor if my book was accepted.
"Please, no nazn, Khala jan," I said, kissing her face. "Just do zakat, give the money to someone in need, okay? No sheep killing."
Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt called from New York and offered to represent me. I only told Soraya about it. "But just because I have an agent doesn't mean I'll get published. If Martin sells the novel, then we'll celebrate."
A month later, Martin called and informed me I was going to be a published novelist. When I told Soraya, she screamed.
We had a celebration dinner with Soraya's parents that night. Khala Jamila made kofta--meatballs and white rice--and white ferni. The general, a sheen of moisture in his eyes, said that he was proud of me. After General Taheri and his wife left, Soraya and I celebrated with an expensive bottle of Merlot I had bought on the way home--the general did not approve of women drinking alcohol, and Soraya didn't drink in his presence.
"I am so proud of you," she said, raising her glass to mine. "Kaka would have been proud too."
"I know," I said, thinking of Baba, wishing he could have seen me.
Later that night, after Soraya fell asleep--wine always made her sleepy--I stood on the balcony and breathed in the cool summer air. I thought of Rahim Khan and the little note of support he had written me after he'd read my first story. And I thought of Hassan. Some day, Inshallah, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.
The novel was released in the summer of that following year, 1989, and the publisher sent me on a five-city book tour. I became a minor celebrity in the Afghan community. That was the year that the Shorawi completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. It should have been a time of glory for Afghans. Instead, the war raged on, this time between Afghans, the Mujahedin, against the Soviet puppet government of Najibullah, and Afghan refugees kept flocking to Pakistan. That was the year that the cold war ended, the year the Berlin Wall came down. It was the year of Tiananmen Square. In the midst of it all, Afghanistan was forgotten. And General Taheri, whose hopes had stirred awake after the Soviets pulled out, went back to winding his pocket watch. That was also the year that Soraya and I began trying to have a child.THE IDEA OF FATHERHOOD unleashed a swirl of emotions in me. I found it frightening, invigorating, daunting, and exhilarating all at the same time. What sort of father would I make, I wondered. I wanted to be just like Baba and I wanted to be nothing like him.
But a year passed and nothing happened. With each cycle of blood, Soraya grew more frustrated, more impatient, more irritable. By then, Khala Jamila's initially subtle hints had become overt, as in "Kho dega!" So! "When am I going to sing alahoo for my little nawasa?" The general, ever the Pashtun, never made any queries--doing so meant alluding to a sexual act between his daughter and a man, even if the man in question had been married to her for over four years. But his eyes perked up when Khala Jamila teased us about a baby.
"Sometimes, it takes a while," I told Soraya one night.
"A year isn't a while, Amir!" she said, in a terse voice so unlike her. "Something's wrong, I know it."
"Then let's see a doctor."
DR. ROSEN, a round-bellied man with a plump face and small, even teeth, spoke with a faint Eastern European accent, some thing remotely Slavic. He had a passion for trains--his office was littered with books about the history of railroads, model locomotives, paintings of trains trundling on tracks through green hills and over bridges. A sign above his desk read, LIFE IS A TRAIN. GET ON BOARD.
He laid out the plan for us. I'd get checked first. "Men are easy," he said, fingers tapping on his mahogany desk. "A man's plumbing is like his mind: simple, very few surprises. You ladies, on the other hand... well, God put a lot of thought into making you." I wondered if he fed that bit about the plumbing to all of his couples.
"Lucky us," Soraya said.
Dr. Rosen laughed. It fell a few notches short of genuine. He gave me a lab slip and a plastic jar, handed Soraya a request for some routine blood tests. We shook hands. "Welcome aboard," he said, as he showed us out.I PASSED WITH FLYING COLORS.
The next few months were a blur of tests on Soraya: Basal body temperatures, blood tests for every conceivable hormone, urine tests, something called a "Cervical Mucus Test," ultrasounds, more blood tests, and more urine tests. Soraya underwent a procedure called a hysteroscopy--Dr. Rosen inserted a telescope into Soraya's uterus and took a look around. He found nothing. "The plumbing's clear," he announced, snapping off his latex gloves. I wished he'd stop calling it that--we weren't bathrooms. When the tests were over, he explained that he couldn't explain why we couldn't have kids. And, apparently, that wasn't so unusual. It was called "Unexplained Infertility."
Then came the treatment phase. We tried a drug called Clomiphene, and hMG, a series of shots which Soraya gave to herself. When these failed, Dr. Rosen advised in vitro fertilization. We received a polite letter from our HMO, wishing us the best of luck, regretting they couldn't cover the cost. We used the advance I had received for my novel to pay for it. IVF proved lengthy, meticulous, frustrating, and ultimately unsuccessful. After months of sitting in waiting rooms reading magazines like Good Housekeeping and Reader's Digest, after endless paper gowns and cold, sterile exam rooms lit by fluorescent lights, the repeated humiliation of discussing every detail of our sex life with a total stranger, the injections and probes and specimen collections, we went back to Dr. Rosen and his trains.
He sat across from us, tapped his desk with his fingers, and used the word "adoption" for the first time. Soraya cried all the way home.
Soraya broke the news to her parents the weekend after our last visit with Dr. Rosen. We were sitting on picnic chairs in the Taheris' backyard, grilling trout and sipping yogurt dogh. It was an early evening in March 1991. Khala Jamila had watered the roses and her new honeysuckles, and their fragrance mixed with the smell of cooking fish. Twice already, she had reached across her chair to caress Soraya's hair and say, "God knows best, bachem. Maybe it wasn't meant to be."
Soraya kept looking down at her hands. She was tired, I knew, tired of it all. "The doctor said we could adopt," she murmured.
General Taheri's head snapped up at this. He closed the barbecue lid. "He did?"
"He said it was an option," Soraya said.
We'd talked at home about adoption. Soraya was ambivalent at best. "I know it's silly and maybe vain," she said to me on the way to her parents' house, "but I can't help it. I've always dreamed that I'd hold it in my arms and know my blood had fed it for nine months, that I'd look in its eyes one day and be startled to see you or me, that the baby would grow up and have your smile or mine. Without that... Is that wrong?"
"No," I had said.
"Am I being selfish?"
"No, Soraya."
"Because if you really want to do it..."
"No," I said. "If we're going to do it, we shouldn't have any doubts at all about it, and we should both be in agreement. It wouldn't be fair to the baby otherwise."
She rested her head on the window and said nothing else the rest of the way.
Now the general sat beside her. "Bachem, this adoption... thing, I'm not so sure it's for us Afghans." Soraya looked at me tiredly and sighed.
"For one thing, they grow up and want to know who their natural parents are," he said. "Nor can you blame them. Sometimes, they leave the home in which you labored for years to provide for them so they can find the people who gave them life. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, never forget that."
"I don't want to talk about this anymore," Soraya said.
"I'll say one more thing," he said. I could tell he was getting revved up; we were about to get one of the general's little speeches. "Take Amir jan, here. We all knew his father, I know who his grandfather was in Kabul and his great-grandfather before him, I could sit here and trace generations of his ancestors for you if you asked. That's why when his father--God give him peace--came khastegari, I didn't hesitate. And believe me, his father wouldn't have agreed to ask for your hand if he didn't know whose descendant you were. Blood is a powerful thing, bachem, and when you adopt, you don't know whose blood you're bringing into your house.