Many would call me a dishonest man, but I've always kept faith with myself. There is an honesty in that, I think.
I am Ali's brother. We are from a village that no longer exists and our family was not large or prosperous. The war that came after the Russians but before the Americans killed our parents. Of them, I have only dim memories. There is my father's Kalashnikov hidden in a woodpile by the door, him cleaning it, working oiled rags on its parts, and the smell of gunmetal and feeling safe. There is my mother's secret, the one she shared with me. Once a month she'd count out my father's earnings from fighting in the mountains or farming. She'd send me and Ali from our village, Sperkai, to the large bazaar in Orgun, a two-day walk. The Orgun bazaar sold everything: fine cooking oils and spices, candles to light our home and fabrics to repair our clothes. My mother always entrusted me with a special purchase. Before we left, she would press an extra coin in my hand, one she’d stolen from my father. Among the crowded stalls of the bazaar, I would slip away from my brother’s watchful eye and buy her a pack of cigarettes, a vice forbidden to a woman.
When we returned home, I would place the pack in her hiding spot—the birchwood cradle where she’d rocked Ali and me as infants. Our mud-walled house was small, two thatch-roofed rooms with a courtyard between them. The cradle was kept in the room I shared with Ali. My mother would never get rid of the cradle. It was the one thing that was truly hers. At night, after we’d returned from the bazaar, she’d sneak into our room, her small, sandaled feet gliding across the carpets that lined the dirt floor. Her hand would cup a candle, its smothered light casting shadows on her young face, aging her. Her eyes, one brown and the other green, a miracle or defect of birth, shifted about the room. Carefully she would lean over the cradle, as she’d done before taking us to nurse. She would run her fingers between the blankets that once swaddled my brother and me and, finding the pack I’d left her, she’d step into the courtyard. And I’d fall back asleep to the faint smell of her tobacco just past my door.
This secret made me feel close to my mother. In the years since, I’ve wondered why she entrusted me with it. At times, I’ve thought it was because I was her favorite. But this isn’t why. The truth is, she recognized in me her own ability to deceive.
Like most men, my father farmed a small plot. He understood the complexity of modest tasks—how to tap the ever shifting waters of an underground karez, how to irrigate a field with that water, how to place a boulder at the curve of a furrow so the turning flow would not erode the bend. He taught these lessons to me and Ali. We grew, working by his side, our land binding us together, sure as blood.
In the warm months, my father would head to the mountains, to fight. His group operated under the Haqganis, and later joined Hezb-e-Islami, but loyalties shifted often. My brother told me that when my father was killed, his group was again with the Haqganis but now they all served under the Taliban. For a boy these things meant little. Sometimes I wonder how much they matter even to a man.
When I last saw my parents it was summer. Against the Taliban’s orders, my father’s group had returned home early. They’d disobeyed their commanders after being told to extort taxes along a certain road.