On the cusp of the summer solstice in Kabul, a foreigner looks out his window. He watches an ice cream man push his cooler along the street, its wheels turning a music box that plays Christmas carols. There are three songs in a loop, Jingle Bells, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and Santa Clause is Coming to Town. Next door, three carpenters and one bricklayer pick away at the construction of a house day in and day out. Even on Jumma they work. Yet the foreigner swears the house looks exactly as it did when he first arrived, half resurrected from a pile of rubble. He hears one hammer hammering on a frame, tap-tap-tap, pause, tap-tap-tap. He sees one pair of hands handing up one brick. He cannot fathom their goal is to actually build the house. Work, he supposes, is the thing. Across the street a candidate holds a political rally. There is singing. Men and women and children of all ages are dressed in traditional clothing, brightly colored. A bus pulls up. The dignitary emerges. He is one of forty-two people running for President of Afghanistan. “It is a show,” people say. “The election is over before it has begun.” This is the world from the foreigner’s window today, and though it permeates irony it feels to him anything but ironic. It just is. Maybe he is so disposed because this week it became clear the word is out. An American is living in a girl’s orphanage in a section of the city no westerner is allowed to roam. He hides in the back seat of a white Toyota station wagon, covers his head with a green and black scarf as he is transported to another orphanage. The government intelligence agency stomped its feet, tried to intimidate, made threats, then washed its hands and made it clear it takes no responsibility for his safety. Whoever is corrupt is able now to mull over the possibilities, the security guards along the street exclaim their disapproval; most assuredly every Taliban wannabe or gangster or police officer in the neighborhood with hate or dollar signs in his eyes has become fully aware of the infidel’s presence. Still, like a field with a beehive here or a street with a dark alley there, Kabul does not seem to this foreigner to be so terribly dangerous. By definition an acquired East-wise indifference to irony evaporates the need to ask how or why it was acquired. He turns from his window and absently runs his fingers through his hair. Just before he came to this place a woman in Brooklyn, New York who spoke only Ukrainian somehow took one inch to be three. But the foreigner’s hair is once again long. Dust has settled into his curls. He’d take a shower but now is too late. It is after all an orphanage. A small fist is knocking on his bedroom door, and an even smaller voice is calling, “Kawka-jan?” He takes a deep breath and unlocks the door. It is Frishta the bumblebee. “Kawka, pleeeeez pleeeeez. I come in, see my pikcher?” Before he can say yes or no she is in his room, rifling through a pile of photos on his desk. Then Fatima enters. She wants to know the word in English for bamia. Zainab shouts from the hallway. “It is lady’s finger.” That is right, says the foreigner, but most often it is called okra. Fatima wrinkles her nose. “Noooo! No okra! Lady’s finger!” The foreigner tries to argue his point but Fatima dislikes the sound of okra and that is that. Besides, he soon has to convert inches to centimeters for Malalai, explain the word enthusiastic to Leema, and stop Sadaf from nosing through his papers. What is it with these kids? he thinks almost out loud. Must they go through everything? Farzana Norey wants a guitar lesson, Frishta continues being Frishta, (Oh pleeeez!) and Sara needs him to edit a letter she has written to her sponsor. The foreigner obliges them all. Though it has not quite dawned on him why he lost interest in irony’s cause or comeuppance, there are rumblings. The future, he thinks, will be there tomorrow and the past will be in his dreams when he sleeps tonight. He questions if what he’s feeling is a kind of love.
Oh how this foreigner clung to Lancelot and Guinevere. Through relationship after relationship he childishly searched for love that would be a continuous, exclusive, daring and intimate falling (what he thought to be growing). Here, there is a grander throne for love than romance and marriage and even family and friends; a man or a woman is merely bound to them as a tree is to its roots. Because it is impossible to discern between this throne and even the shoes lined up on the steps to the orphanage, waiting to be slipped onto their respective feet, nor the miles those shoes have treaded, the puddles and pavement and insects, nay, the very mountains stepping up to the roof of the world.
One of the children brings the foreigner his breakfast. Frishta, Sadaf, Malalai, all of them leave his room; they know enough to let the man eat in peace. He sips his warm milk, nibbles his nan, pours his green tea.
There are ways to try and try and not see this love, like the time the foreigner thought, maybe if I throw a pack on my back and stick out my thumb. Then he thought, maybe if I sit and close my eyes and meditate for three years. Then he thought, maybe if I force myself to hallucinate, build a house, run a marathon, write a book; all to no avail. It is by accident he will find this love, beginning only yesterday, early evening, when seven orphan girls entreated him to a huge pile of wild chives that had been picked from some empty lot in the city. He joined them, gathered a handful of the onion grass, began to wipe it clean one blade at a time. A toddler named Marwa sat down in his lap, making it difficult for him to work. Everyone laughed. A debate commenced over the foreigner’s hair, whether or not it should be cut. Voting split fifty-fifty. They looked at Sahar, the quiet Uzbek; she would break the tie. She smiled, turned red, and looked down at the greens in her hand. “Noooo,” she finally said. “Do not cut your hair.” Even so, majority rule carried no weight. The foreigner was embarrassed and flattered as opposing forces vehemently re-positioned their arguments. He moved Marwa to another lap and stood up to leave. I will flip a coin he said, but this upset both sides. It seemed the idea of throwing the decision up to chance was on a par with shooting a gun without aiming. He was saved in the end by Marwa; she waved at him and, something he had taught her just the other day, blew him a kiss. “Bye-bye!” she squeaked. They all laughed again, charmed by the bond between this foreign man and Afghan child who knows only a handful of words, one of them in English. As the foreigner climbed the stairs to his room, the thought occurred to him for the first time that love is not a precious feeling; it is a place.
Now, after a restless night he writes it down, refills his cup of tea, considers what he has written and writes it again in different words. Someone opens his door slowly. It is Marwa. She toddles over to him, humming to herself. She climbs into the chair next to him and reaches for a piece of nan. Soon one of the older girls magically responsible for her appears at his door, calls to her. “Maaarwa!” she says. Marwa shakes her head. No, she is not leaving just yet. The foreigner does not mind. He tells the girl it is fine with him if Marwa stays, takes another bite of his nan, sips his tea and resumes scribbling his notes. He has three classes with the boys this morning, each an hour long. Today he wants to focus on Shiraz, a boy who was not long ago a wild thing living in the streets. He is twelve or thirteen, buzz cut head like all the other boys, with the scarred, smudged face of a delinquent. He tears the sleeves off his shirts; he could be taken for a homeless native of Manila, Mexico City, Katmandu. In one breath he could be a thug for a drug dealer. A different wind blowing and he could be a star on television, a professional kick-boxer or the stunt man for a comedy team. Every night they pull him off of a smaller hapless boy, his fists flying. But he is showing signs of improvement. The foreigner has been teaching him slowly about power. Today he wants to drive the point home, because the opportunity won’t last for long. Shiraz, he knows, has until recently not understood the difference between good and evil. He wears a metal ring on his right middle finger that ostentatiously displays the head of a wolf. But he has seen Spider Man on television; this, together with the foreigner’s dispelling of tall tales concerning the wolf, has given Shiraz a way out of his identity problem. All he needs now is hope, and of that there is plenty. It is written on the faces of all the veteran orphans. So on this day the foreigner will divide his class between the “power” team (Shiraz’s) and the “strong”. He will have them face-off, answer questions in English about the world. Where, for example, does the penguin live; what two countries border both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shiraz, he knows, will constantly butt in, his fist pumping in the air. The foreigner will not call upon him. Shiraz will complain, but he doesn’t really care one way or the other if his team lives or dies. There are plenty of battles beyond this one in which he can flex his muscles. The score for the day will be nine to ten. The Power team will now have an opportunity to leap ahead of the Strong team. The foreigner will ask one final question: name the seven continents. Nobody will want to answer this question, even Shiraz. He’ll shrink behind his weaker teammate. The foreigner will call upon him. The class will fall silent.
Well, Shiraz?
“Continents?” he’ll ask, stalling.
Yes, con-ti-nents.
“What continents?”
Seven con-ti-nents. A minute will go by. Strong team will get riled up. Yak! the countdown will have begun. Shiraz will muddle through a few complaints. Doo!
Shiraz will try to bluff his way out. He cannot, will not lose face. “Antarctica,” he’ll murmur tentatively, just in time.
Yes. The foreigner will nod.
“Europa?” Shiraz will ask. Already he will have gotten the two most difficult names out of the way. The rest will trickle off his tongue.
The game over, Power team will have gained two points for their effort. When the boys file out, Shiraz will be last to go. He will smile a good smile. Evil, at least for one single handshake, will not be present in his eyes. “Power team is a good team,” he will say.
Yes, Shiraz. Power today is good.
Every week someone asks who is smartest in this class or that, and more frequently who is smarter, the boys or the girls. The foreigner never picks the same student twice, but he always says the girls are smarter than the boys. He has “A” group and “B” group this afternoon. He’s going to teach the girls how to write a letter. First, a letter to a close friend, then a letter to a teacher asking for a recommendation, then a letter of interest in a job. What will strike him is not the success or failure of this lesson. Malalai, who he calls “butterfly” from Nuristan will flutter into class, stop, hold up her finger and yell, “Wait!” She will run out of the room and return extending to him a card the size of a menu. She will smile. “Open!” He will open it and a music chip will play the same medley of songs the ice cream man plays. There are roses and hearts and best wishes. “Happy Father’s Day!” Though in his life he helped raise a boy, the foreigner has no child of his own. Tashakur, he will say, and will place the card beside his bed on the nightstand. He senses the girls have been concerned about him, and Malalai’s gesture will support this notion. Sosan, for example, sent him a one sentence Email. “Are you ok in our orphanage?” Just the other night Mahbooba looked up from her plate at dinnertime. “Are you liking it,” she asked, “here in the orphanage?” Sara asked him too, after he gave her a short guitar lesson. “Are you happy?” He doesn’t know if they are simply amazed he could be happy in this place, or if he truly has been walking more heavily on his feet. He didn’t teach his Internet class this week. The electricity kept going off and on. He missed two classes at the third orphanage where the youngest ones live. It is farther away and therefore a “greater risk”. He wonders if the girls are right to be worried. He looks at his calendar. It occurs to him summer solstice is here, and that he is halfway through his stay at the orphanage. Ten weeks to go. He doesn’t know what he feels. Strange. He feels strange.
The early morning sun streams through a wide crack in the curtains. The foreigner puts his pen down and looks over at Marwa. She swings her legs, chews a piece of nan into soft dough. She looks at him with button eyes. He feels something leaving him. He wants to hold on, but can’t.
“Kawka-jan, may I come in?”
It is Nabila. She knows the answer but waits for it. She is eleven years old, has short straight black hair parted down the middle, is skinny as a stick, and has slight almond shaped eyes, pink cheeks. She received new eyeglasses this week. They are granny glasses, but she wears them with pride. The foreigner has given her a nickname too, “songbird”.
Yes, yes he says. Come in.
She enters the room and, collecting Marwa, scolds her in Dari for bothering the foreigner while he is working and eating his breakfast. She stands there for a moment. “Kawka,” she says, her glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose. “We practice today?” The foreigner has been teaching her a song, one it seems to him he wrote a long time ago. The words, once innocent, are prescient of the course love has taken in his life.
Yes, he says. We will practice today, but not that song.
“No?” Nabila cocks her head in just such a way, like a bluebird sitting on his windowsill, looking in.
I’m writing a new song, he says. I would like you to sing it.
“Oh,” Nabila says excitedly. The foreigner bends over his notes, picks up his pen.
“Kawka, look!”
He looks up. Nabila stands in the doorway. Marwa, in her arm, blows a kiss. He blows her a kiss.
“Kawka?”
Yes, Nabila?
“Love you.”
Nabila closes the door behind her as she leaves. My pen hovers over yellow lined paper. Words are about to spill. The ice cream man pushes his cart once again around the block. The carpenter taps a nail. The candidate’s bus pulls away. They spill.
