Rohollah Nikpai, Olympic Bronze Medalist in taekwondo. Kabul Stadium even has new grass in anticipation of Nikpai’s welcome party.
Sometimes, our schoolteacher turns to the blackboard, and my friend Hadir and I thrust leopard fists into the air, saluting Nikpai. When she snaps to look at us, we sit on our hands and stare at our ledgers, pretending. We are thirteen, oldest in the class, so the other boys don’t point or tell. When the teacher turns again, we roll our eyes and snicker. The day goes faster this way, even though occasionally I feel bad for disrupting.
Hadir knows a secret way into Kabul Stadium. He believes practicing soccer on that field will one day make him a star, just like Nikpai. Some weeks there’s a night guard, but none ever keep the job for long. Nobody wants to go near, nobody but Hadir. At first, I tell him it isn’t right. That it’s strange wanting to be so close to the dead. But he calls me sissy, which he knows I hate even more than juggling the ball by myself, so I go with him. There isn’t actually anybody buried there, but so many Afghans were tortured inside the stadium, everyone knows it’s haunted.
At night, Hadir dribbles the ball down the alley between apartments and tosses pebbles onto the roof where my family sometimes sleeps. Once, a pebble hit my baby sister, and she had a fit, keeping my mother awake the rest of the night. “Hurry up, Pirooz!” Hadir will shout, “Let’s go!” And I’ll dash away, ignoring mother. My father works at night for the local police. Sometimes all he does is sit in a cement block building with other officers. Hadir is an orphan. We do as we please.
Inside the stadium, row after row of bleachers form a bowl around bright green grass that glows, even in the dark. There’s nothing else in Kabul this color, “the color of prosperity,” our newspaper called it. They didn’t mention how so much blood leeched into the soil, the top foot was dug up and replaced before officials got anything to grow. Hadir and I play barefooted, kicking up soil and clumps of grass. We make long passes with the ball, panting up and down the sidelines to train both legs for well-aimed kicks. “Faster, Pirooz, faster,” Hadir calls, and together we get lost in the work of it.
Our teacher used to wear a burqa, but now she doesn’t. I study her lips when she speaks, two plump dates that open and close in this way I can’t forget. I’ve never seen skin that looks so soft. Like you could press her lips with your fingertips and they would sink, as if into a pillow. I watch her silently and wonder. The Taliban executed teachers like her. Or sometimes, the Taliban amputated their hands. When our teacher moves up and down the aisles of the classroom, she runs her hands along the edge of each desk. I hold my breath when she comes near, imagining her wrists as puffy stumps, no hands or fingers with which to write.
Everybody knows the Taliban used to hang body parts from the stadium goal posts as an example. I never went to see the torture, but men in my neighborhood did. “Allahu Akbar!” they would shout when they returned home from the frenzy. I heard them talking, the bloodshed they described. They fired AK47’s and danced in the streets, sometimes chattering for hours as the families on my block tried to sleep. I was tiny, four or five, but their tone made an impression on me; men’s voices echoing through the alleys, a wretched, powerful kind of laughter that I understood had nothing to do with comedy.
Hadir often asks me to play goalie during our secret practices in Kabul Stadium. I stand in front of the repainted white goal posts that seem to float in the moonlight against the darkened stadium benches. He takes aim and kicks full strength, the leather ball slapping into my palms, against my chest, off my forehead. When I miss, I have to chase the ball to the outer edges of the field where I feel spooks trying to grab at me. Still, Hadir aims again and again, as though he can see a crowd roaring just for him all night long.
Later, we lie on our backs and look at the star-pocked sky. Hadir plucks fistfuls of grass from the field. Each clump radiates an infused, lime light from his palms, like he’s holding an electric gem. Grass blades scratch at my back and tickle my nose.
“This must be what it smells like at the World Cup,” Hadir says and tosses grass into the air.
“Maybe,” I say. I think about the souls of Afghans trying to claw their way out of the ground. “Maybe not.”
“By the time we’re old enough, things will be different,” he says.
“They already are.”
“Not really, Pirooz, not like our teacher promises.”
“Well, what do you mean?” I wonder if he’s thinking about his parents, whatever his life was like before.
“I mean, there could be people celebrating and people forgetting to be afraid,” he says. “Like all the infighting just disappearing so the rest of us can live our lives. There could even be soccer teams, coaches.”
“Sounds good to me,” I say. Hadir tosses the ball straight into the air a few times, catching it just above his nose. The wind blows and sweat cools on my skin.
“I came here once before the war,” he finally says. “The Taliban were rounding people up. I got swept into the crowd. A man picked me up and carried me into the stadium. There were other kids in there too, waving their hands. We filled all the rows in that first section.” He sweeps his arms in a circle around the stadium, indicating several thousand close-range seats.
“Hadir?” I say.
“They tortured women on the soccer field for adultery that day.”
“Hadir, I don’t want to know.”
“But there’s no way to tell if the women really did anything wrong.”
“I remember,” I say. I hated the trials the Taliban used to hold. They made it a game with rules that changed for convenience.
“I can still see them sometimes,” he says, and the way he carries on, I can see them, too. Half a dozen mothers buried up to their waists in the penalty box, helpless against the stoning, their blood-stained burqas flapping in the wind like wings that could never quite lift them to safety.
We walk home slowly that night, passing the ball in short punts across the narrow streets. Hadir likes to aim for the base of streetlights, aligning the ball so it will bounce my direction and set me up for the next, easy pass. A few stray dogs linger behind, limping and skinny. They’d probably eat Hadir’s soccer ball if we left it. Nights like this, I can almost forget our dim-lit city was the center of a warzone. The fighting moved north, so everyone calls this the good time. Some men linger outside their homes. Beggars sleep restlessly in old cars, under shop awnings. Mostly, though, people rest at this hour.
During recess the next day, Hadir and I show the other students our grass-stained feet. They cluster around, marveling at the color, bright green streaks against dusty, brown toes. One boy, Waafiq, doesn’t believe our adventures.
“That’s not from grass.” He points. “You found your mother’s makeup.”
But as soon as he says it the other boys laugh and point at him. “How would you know?” they jeer.
Waafiq shushes and sulks unsteadily toward the schoolhouse.
“Wait. Come back this way.”
“If you’re going to poke, I’m not coming,” Waafiq says. He’s younger, maybe nine. He limps when he walks, because there’s a piece of shrapnel in his calf the size of a cashew. Everybody knows.
“I won’t poke. I have an idea,” I tell him. “We need you.”
Hadir
