Chapter 4: What We Are to Each Other

December, 2010

The morning after the second patrol the house woke up different.

Omar felt it before he understood it — a change in the quality of the movement above him, the footsteps unhurried for the first time since he’d been brought down those stairs. Nobody was listening for the valley anymore. The grid had come up empty twice and the men who ran it had crossed this house off whatever list they carried. The trail had gone cold and the women above him knew it and the house had let out a breath it had been holding for thirteen days.

He sat up against the wall and worked the leg through its slow extensions and took inventory of himself.

The thigh held his weight now. The arm had closed over, the fragment wounds knitting under Yasmin’s careful dressings into the puckered pink of new scar. He could stand without the wall. His body had done what bodies do when you keep infection out and give them time — it had repaired itself, quietly and stubbornly, while everything else went on around it.

Which meant he could bathe himself now.

He understood that without being told and he understood what it ended. The rotation had run its course. All of it had been care and all of it had been something else underneath the care, and now the practical reason for it was gone.

What remained was the question Mariam had left him with in the lamplight. Time to decide what we are to each other.

He drank from the water skin and looked at the gray rectangle of light at the top of the stairs and waited for the house to tell him what it had decided.

They gathered at the kitchen table after the breakfast dishes were done.

It was where everything got decided in that house and they came to it the way they always did — Mariam at the head, Nadia closest to the east window with her left arm resting in her lap, Yasmin beside her, Dina folding her long frame into the chair across from them with her elbows on the table.

Mariam didn’t sit. She stood the way she stood when a thing was serious, her hands resting on the back of her chair, and she looked at each of them in turn before she spoke.

“He can care for himself now,” she said. “The leg holds. The arm is closed. The reason we had for going down those stairs is finished.” She let that settle. “So we decide. Today. What he is to us and what we are to him.”

Nobody spoke right away.

It was Dina who broke it, the way Dina broke most silences — head on, no edges filed off. “We all know what’s happened down there.” She looked around the table. “Every one of us. We’re not children and we’re not going to sit here and pretend.”

Yasmin’s hands tightened in her lap. “I’m not pretending,” she said quietly. “I just — I never thought I’d want it. After Faheem.” She said her husband’s name the way you’d set down something that had cut you. “I never thought I’d want a man near me again as long as I lived. And then there’s this one downstairs who tells me he’s scared too, and calls me Doe-eyes, and I—” She stopped. Her ears went pink. “I think about him when he’s not in the room. I didn’t know I could still do that.”

Nadia had been quiet, her eyes on the table. Now she looked up.

“He looked at my face,” she said. “Not my wrist. The whole time. He looked at my face.” Her voice was steady but there was something underneath it, something two years in the building. “My husband couldn’t do that. Couldn’t even look at me. And this man looks at me like—” She searched for it. “Like I’m whole.”

She lifted her left arm slightly off her lap, the wrist that ended where a hand should be, and looked at it, and then set it down again.

“I want him,” she said simply. “I decided in the basement. I’m only telling you now because we’re supposed to say it out loud.”

Mariam looked at her youngest for a long moment.

“And if the Americans come,” she said. “Because they will come, sooner or later. What then? We give our hearts to a man who has a country waiting for him on the other side of the world?”

It was the hard question and she’d put it on the table herself because that was Mariam — she made you look at the worst of a thing before she let you want it.

“Then we have him until we don’t,” Dina said. “And we’ll have had something. Which is more than this house has had in a long time.”

“He won’t leave us,” Nadia said. “Not the way you mean. I don’t believe it.”

“You can’t know that,” Mariam said.

“No,” Nadia agreed. “But I don’t believe it.”

Mariam looked around the table — at Dina with her jaw set and her dark eyes steady, at Yasmin who wanted to be loved and was terrified of it in equal measure, at Nadia who had decided in a basement and would not be moved.

She thought about the years. About a husband who’d walked out one day and never come back and left her his house and his secrets and his iron ring in the wall. About the girls she’d collected one at a time because she knew what the world did to women like them, women like her, discarded and invisible and waiting to become someone’s problem. She thought about a man who’d murmured Farsi in a fever and chosen his team over his own rescue in the dark of the Waygal Valley and pulled her back when she’d only meant to tend his wounds and looked at her like she was something other than a function.

“All right,” she said finally. “Then it’s decided. He becomes our husband. All of us. Equally. No one above another.”

“Equally,” Dina said.

“Equally,” Yasmin echoed.

Nadia just nodded, once, her decision long since made.

Mariam straightened. “I’ll tell him tonight,” she said. “It should come from one voice the first time. After that—” something moved at the edge of her veil that might have been the ghost of a smile, “—after that he can hear it from all of us.”

She began clearing the cups from the table.

“Go on,” she said. “There’s a day to get through. The field won’t turn itself.”

And the household rose and scattered to its work, and the question that had hung over the house since the bathing began had an answer now, and the only thing left was the telling.

She went down after the house had gone quiet.

No lamp. She knew these stairs by heart, knew the place the seventh step dipped, knew the dark of this basement the way she knew the dark of her own room. She came down slowly, deliberately, and she could hear him breathing before she reached the bottom. Awake. Waiting for her the way he’d learned to wait.

She crossed the floor and lowered herself onto the blankets beside him. Close. Closer than she sat when she came to tend his wounds.

For a moment neither of them said anything. The dark held them both.

Then Mariam spoke, quietly, in Farsi, into the space between them.

“We had our council today,” she said. “All four of us. We decided something, and I’ve come to tell you, because the first time a thing like this is said, it should come from one voice.” She paused, and when she went on her voice was lower. “We want you to be our husband. All of us. Equally. No one above another. If you are willing.”

“All four of you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And Mariam?” he asked.

A silence opened between them that was different from her other silences — the silence of a woman who had not let herself be counted in a thing like this for ten years and did not quite know how to stand inside the question.

“Yes, Omar, me too,” she said, very low.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I’m willing.”

Omar put his arm around her and she was whimpering. He put his head next to hers and asked, “Are you offering yourself to me as my wife?”

She sniffled and nodded. He could feel her shaking a little and asked, “Are you afraid?”

“I am hoping for something I have thought for ten years I was undeserving of. To be loved.

“I know I’m not pretty like the younger girls. I’m fuller, and not as firm as they...”

“Mariam, stop. I am accepting you as you are, sight unseen. When you asked me to be your husband, and Dina’s, Yasmin’s and Nadia’s also, I said I will. I will love all of you, honor all of you and when the U.S. soldiers come, I will fight to have all of you — all of my wives brought to America to be with me.