Seven
Summer 2009
“Your father is a great man.”
Adel looked up. It was the teacher Malalai who had leaned in and whispered this in his ear. A
plump, middle-aged woman wearing a violet beaded shawl around her shoulders, she smiled at
him now with her eyes shut.
“And you are a lucky boy.”
“I know,” he whispered back.
Good, she mouthed.
They were standing on the front steps of the town’s new school for girls, a rectangular light
green building with a flat roof and wide windows, as Adel’s father, his Baba jan, delivered a
brief prayer followed by an animated speech. Gathered before them in the blazing midday heat
was a large crowd of squinting children, parents, and elders, roughly a hundred or so locals
from the small town of Shadbagh-e-Nau, “New Shadbagh.”
Eight
Fall 2010
This evening, I come home from the clinic and find a message from Thalia on the landline
phone
in my bedroom. I play it as I slip off my shoes and sit at my desk. She tells me she has a cold,
one she is sure she picked up from Mamá, then she asks after me, asks how work is going in
Kabul. At the end, just before she hangs up, she says, Odie goes on and on about how you
don’t
call. Of course she won’t tell you. So I will. Markos. For the love of Christ. Call your mother. You
ass.
I smile.
Thalia.
I keep a picture of her on my desk, the one I took all those years ago at the beach on
Tinos—Thalia sitting on a rock with her back to the camera. I have framed the photo, though if
you look closely you can still see a patch of dark brown at the left lower corner courtesy of a
crazed Italian girl who tried to set fire to it many years ago.
Six
February 1974
EDITOR’S NOTE,
Parallaxe 84 (WINTER 1974), P. 5
Dear Readers:Five years ago, when we began our quarterly issues featuring interviews with
little-known poets, we could not have anticipated how popular they would prove. Many of
you asked for more, and, indeed, your enthusiastic letters paved the way for these issues to
become an annual tradition here at Parallaxe.
Five
Spring 2003
The nurse, whose name is Amra Ademovic, had warned Idris and Timur.
She had pulled them
aside and said, “If you show reaction, even little, she going to be upset, and
I kick you out.”
They are standing at the end of a long, poorly lit hallway in the men’s wing
of Wazir Akbar Khan
Hospital. Amra said the only relative the girl had left—or the only one who
visited—was her
uncle, and if she’d been placed in the women’s wing he would not be
permitted to visit her.
Four
In the Name of Allah the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful, I know that I
will be gone when
you read this letter, Mr. Markos, for when I gave it to you I requested that
you not open it until
after my death.
Three
Spring 1949
Parwana smells it before she pulls back the quilt and sees it. It has smeared
all over Masooma’s
buttocks, down her thighs, against the sheets and the mattress and the quilt
too. Masooma
looks up at her over her shoulder with a timid plea for forgiveness, and
shame—still the shame
after all this time, all these years.
“I’m sorry,” Masooma whispers.
Two
Fall 1952
Father had never before hit Abdullah. So when he did, when he whacked
the side of his head,
just above the ear—hard, suddenly, and with an open palm—tears of
surprise sprung to
Abdullah’s eyes. He quickly blinked them back.
“Go home,” Father said through gritted teeth.
From up ahead, Abdullah heard Pari burst into sobs.
One
Fall 1952
So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one. But just the one. Don’t
either of you ask me
for more. It’s late, and we have a long day of travel ahead of us, Pari, you
and I. You will need
your sleep tonight. And you too, Abdullah. I am counting on you, boy, while
your sister and I are
away. So is your mother. Now. One story, then. Listen, both of you, listen
well. And don’t
interrupt.
