made a prior appointment and even then were thoroughly checked by his guards. "Your safety is a matter of our honor," Amin had explained. Todd understood, but this meant that everything in his Kabul environment was tightly controlled, which was not the way he functioned best. To do his job well, he needed to walk down narrow, dusty roads as they descended into yet unknown villages and to visit the overfilled refugee camps. In fact, he came to life visiting homes fashioned of war rubble and roofed with UN-provided tarps, eating unimaginable food he hoped would not make him ill, witnessing the tremendous grace and imagination of the vulnerable. He loved the unexpected adventure of every day spent in the field. He got to do little enough of it as regional director, given all the desk work combined with safety concerns. And he'd soon be giving up even that.
But today he still had the ice-cream run.
Over the five and a half years that he'd been coming to this office, Todd had posited and reposited compromises to ease the restraints he faced in the name of security. At last his grumblings had evolved into a discussion: Todd, Amin, Farzad and Jawwid sitting on floor mats, drinking chai, Todd offering that both his job and his personal needs required more relaxed access to Kabul, at least occasionally, and the Afghan men talking among themselves at a speed that defied his limited Pashto. Finally, a little over a year ago, they had reluctantly agreed to let him walk the block and a half from the office to the ice-cream stand, no Jawwid at his side, no Farzad following in the car. But, equally firmly, nowhere else. So this had become his nearly daily outing, the only moments when he could imagine himself free in this teeming ancient city of conflict and joy and loss that enchanted him.
"How are you, Mr. Todd Barbery?" Mustafa asked in English as he opened the gate, making the second word sound elongated. Mustafa was the only Afghan who insisted on calling Todd by first and last name.
"Teh kha, manana," Todd responded, as was their practice. One in English, the other in Pashto, and sometimes they expanded their respective vocabularies in a fleeting language lesson. At the moment, though, Todd desired no further words. He kept moving, waved good-bye, and heard the gate clang shut behind him. The sound of freedom.
The air was golden, which really meant full of dust, but Todd chose to see it in more romantic terms. He walked slowly, lingering, stretching his leash to its ends. He admired the energy of this mountain-ringed city— founded, it was said, by Cain and Abel, visited by Genghis Khan, loved by Babur, beaten down over and over, but with a core of perseverance and unlikely optimism. He found the faces of its people beautiful, a human mosaic of endurance creased with dark but resilient humor. These were qualities he valued; Afghanistan had found its way into his blood. The ice-cream run was the most dependably enjoyable part of his Kabul day. He was grateful for the break from those who both helped him in uncountable ways and made him feel chained. And Afghan ice cream, seasoned with rosewater and cardamom and topped with grated pistachios, was a small miracle in a land that desperately needed miracles.
The boy Churagh ran to Todd, waving his newspapers. "How are you?" he said in over-enunciated English. Churagh had identified Todd as a soft touch; he bought a paper and gave the boy's arm a friendly squeeze. Sometimes they chatted and Todd bought a second newspaper. Today Churagh seemed to sense Todd's preoccupation; he followed but kept a distance. Though he wouldn't admit it to Amin, Todd was having trouble shaking the unease brought on by the conflict between his desire to help Zarlasht somehow and the strength of Amin's arguments. He wanted to play Zarlasht's visit over in his mind without Amin's voice in his ears.
This had been Zarlasht's third visit to Todd's office— too many for simple courtesy calls. Mostly, he was the one who called on government officials, and the visitors he did have at the Kabul office were usually NGO representatives, not hospital administrators like Zarlasht, so he'd been vaguely uneasy about what she might want from him. When she'd arrived, she had not been shown to the meeting room full of cushions; instead, she'd sat on a chair in front of his desk. Amin stood in the corner so that Zarlasht would not suffer any harm to her reputation by being alone with a Western man. She wore, as always, a headscarf, no burqa. He guessed she was about forty years old, although he'd found that the stress and want of their lives took a toll on Afghans, and he knew she could easily be a decade younger.
The first time she visited, Zarlasht chatted without making any specific request; she said she'd heard good things about him and wanted to meet, since she worked as an administrator in Maiwand Hospital and often dealt with refugees. The next time, she told a story about her grandfather, a story of captivity and separation, her grandfather taken away by the Soviets and she a child, so scared, hanging on to his robe, chanting, "Please don't go, don't go, Granddad."
"Not to worry, my dear," the grandfather had said, a soldier flanking him on each side.
" Where are you going?"
"Only out to buy you a television set," the grandfather said, a story so improbable only a child would believe it. "I'll come back with it soon."
"When?"
"An hour. Two at most. Before dark, surely."
So she released her hold on him. And did not see him again for two and a half years— infinity in the life of a child— until he appeared one afternoon in the home she shared with her mother and grandmother. Sitting at the table, her grandfather smiled and raised his hand in greeting. But she didn't recognize the frail stranger. "Who is this man? Why is he here? What does he want?" she asked her grandmother, and at that, his smile slid away and he began to weep. They'd pulled out his nails in prison, roots and all, so he had only the soft ends of his fingers, and he'd received electric-shock torture so many times it had left a hole in his tongue. He couldn't eat, couldn't bear food in his damaged mouth, so he was fed intravenously until his death, less than two years later.
Political discord in this land had always been marked by blood and pain. The stories were unending, shocking the first time, sad but predictable after that. Still, Todd had been moved not only by her story but by the simple way in which she told it, without melodrama or any apparent attention to its effect on him. On the way out the door, almost as an afterthought, Zarlasht had mentioned a cousin who was being beaten by her husband.
That cousin was the focus of her visit today.
"Things are worsening for her," Zarlasht said, starting in even before the cup of chai arrived. "She can stand that her husband beats her, but she cannot stand the beating of her only daughter. Last week he poured boiling oil on the girl's legs. They will be scarred. We are lucky it was not her face."
"I'm so sorry."
"My cousin is determined to stop him," she said.
"She is brave."
Zarlasht turned her head away as she nodded. "My cousin's father went to the elders," she said, gazing as if at someone no one else could see. "He asked that a jirga be held to hear her complaints against her husband. They agreed at first, but now her husband has gone to them and sought their support, and they are threatening to cancel the hearing and instead punish her for speaking against her husband."
"Can't her father help?"
"He is not as powerful as her husband," Zarlasht said. "It is whispered that
the jirga wants to stone her for defying her husband and encouraging other
women to do the same. Also as a show of strength, so the foreign occupiers—forgive me, but this is how they speak— can see that sharia holds sway less
than seventy kilometers from Kabul. It's not her own life that she considers.
She doesn't want her daughter left alone with a father who views her as an
