Page 20 (1/2)

Timur issues a groan, downs the rest of his drink. “Well, either you hate money, old friend, or you are a far better man than I am.”

Amra walks into the room, wearing a sapphire Afghan tunic over faded jeans. “Nabi jan!” she exclaims. Nabi seems a little startled when she kisses his cheek and coils an arm around his. “I love this man,” she says to the group. “And I love to embarra.s.s him.” Then she says it in Farsi to Nabi. He tilts his head back and forth and laughs, blus.h.i.+ng a little.

“How about you embarra.s.s me too,” Timur says.

Amra taps him on the chest. “This one is big trouble.” She and Markos kiss Afghan-style, three times on the cheek, same with the Germans.

Markos slings an arm around her waist. “Amra Ademovic. The hardest-working woman in Kabul. You do not want to cross this girl. Also, she will drink you under the table.”

“Let’s put that to the test,” Timur says, reaching for a gla.s.s on the bar behind him.

The old man, Nabi, excuses himself.

For the next hour or so, Idris mingles, or tries to. As liquor levels in the bottles drop, conversations rise in pitch. Idris hears German, French, what must be Greek. He has another vodka, follows it up with a lukewarm beer. In one group, he musters the courage to slip in a Mullah Omar joke that he had learned in Farsi back in California. But the joke doesn’t translate well into English, and his delivery is harried. It falls flat. He moves on, and listens in on a conversation about an Irish pub that is set to open in Kabul. There is general agreement that it will not last.

He walks around the room, warm beer can in hand. He has never been at ease in gatherings like this. He tries to busy himself inspecting the décor. There are posters of the Bamiyan Buddhas, of a Buzkas.h.i.+ game, one of a harbor in a Greek island named Tinos. He has never heard of Tinos. He spots a framed photograph in the foyer, black-and-white, a little blurry, as though it had been shot with a homemade camera. It’s of a young girl with long black hair, her back to the lens. She is at a beach, sitting on a rock, facing the ocean. The lower left-hand corner of the photo looks like it had burned.

Dinner is leg of lamb with rosemary and imbedded little cloves of garlic. There is goat cheese salad and pasta topped with pesto sauce. Idris helps himself to some of the salad, and ends up toying with it in a corner of the room. He spots Timur sitting with two young, attractive Dutch women. Holding court, Idris thinks. Laughter erupts, and one of the women touches Timur’s knee.

Idris carries his wine outside to the veranda and sits on a wooden bench. It’s dark now, and the veranda is lit only by a pair of lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. From here, he can see the general shape of some sort of living quarters at the far end of the garden, and, off to the right side of the garden, the silhouette of a car—big, long, old—likely American, by the curves of it. Forties model, maybe early fifties—Idris can’t quite see—and, besides, he has never been a car guy. He is sure Timur would know. He would rattle off the model, year, engine size, all the options. It looks like the car is sitting on four flats. A neighborhood dog breaks into a staccato of barks. Inside, someone has put on a Leonard Cohen CD.

“Quiet and Sensitive.”

Amra sits beside him, ice tinkling in her gla.s.s. Her feet are bare.

“Your cousin Cowboy, he is life of party.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“He is very good-looking. He is married?”

“With three kids.”

“Too bad. I behave, then.”

“I’m sure he’d be disappointed to hear that.”

“I have rules,” she says. “You don’t like him very much.”

Idris tells her, quite truthfully, that Timur is the closest thing he has to a brother.

“But he make you embarra.s.sed.”

It’s true. Timur has embarra.s.sed him. He has behaved like the quintessential ugly Afghan-American, Idris thinks. Tearing through the war-torn city like he belongs here, backslapping locals with great bonhomie and calling them brother, sister, uncle, making a show of handing money to beggars from what he calls the Bakhsheesh bundle, joking with old women he calls mother and talking them into telling their story into his camcorder as he strikes a woebegone expression, pretending he is one of them, like he’s been here all along, like he wasn’t lifting at Gold’s in San Jose, working on his pecs and abs, when these people were getting sh.e.l.led, murdered, raped. It is hypocritical, and distasteful. And it astonishes Idris that no one seems to see through this act.

“It isn’t true what he told you,” Idris says. “We came here to reclaim the house that belonged to our fathers. That’s all. Nothing else.”

Amra snorts a chuckle. “Of course I know. You think I was fooled? I have done business with warlords and Taliban in this country. I have seen everything. Nothing can give me shock. Nothing, n.o.body, can fool me.”

“I imagine that’s true.”

“You are honest,” she says. “At least you are honest.”

“I just think these people, everything they’ve been through, we should respect them. By ‘we,’ I mean people like Timur and me. The lucky ones, the ones who weren’t here when the place was getting bombed to h.e.l.l. We’re not like these people. We shouldn’t pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we’re not ent.i.tled to them … I’m rambling.”

“Rambling?”

“I’m not making sense.”

“No, I understand,” she says. “You say their stories, it is gift they give you.”

“A gift. Yes.”

They sip some more wine. They talk for some time, for Idris the first genuine conversation he has had since arriving in Kabul, free of the subtle mocking, the vague reproach he has sensed from the locals, the government officials, those in the aid agencies. He asks about her work, and she tells him that she has served in Kosovo with the UN, in Rwanda after the genocide, Colombia, Burundi too. She has worked with child prost.i.tutes in Cambodia. She has been in Kabul for a year now, her third stint, this time with a small NGO, working at the hospital and running a mobile clinic on Mondays. Married twice, divorced twice, no kids. Idris finds it hard to guess at Amra’s age, though likely she’s younger than she looks. There is a fading s.h.i.+mmer of beauty, a roughshod s.e.xuality, behind the yellowing teeth, the fatigue pouches under the eyes. In four, maybe five years, Idris thinks, that too will be gone.

Then she says, “You want to know what happen to Ros.h.i.+?”

“You don’t have to tell,” he says.

“You think I am drunk?”