SPECIAL FEATURE

AQR 2020Author IndexAQR Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2, Summer/Fall 2020Special FeatureNarrative EssayJ. Malcolm GarciaG

Oct 6

A Novella-length Narrative Essay Mother’s House by J. Malcolm Garcia

MOTHER’S HOUSE by J. Malcolm Garcia

Part One

Taj Begum Restaurant stands behind a gate on an exhausted dirt road, the crumbled asphalt exposing rock and tree roots and gaping potholes. Passersby walk on the road until they reach a stretch of sidewalk that, unlike the road, has somehow survived its own ruin and on days it rains the muddy water fills gaping potholes cars can do little to avoid, slaloming around one trench only to sink into another with a horrible bang of the undercarriage sending geysers of filth and dowsing anyone – on this morning me – outside the closed metal gates of Taj Begum. Upon seeing me drenched and mud-smeared outside the gate, a guard hurries to let me in, the gate’s rusty hinges creaking, sunlight blinking off the wet concrete drive and my soaked body. The guard hands me a towel and offers an apologetic smile.
Wiping my face, I enter a courtyard. The high white walls reduce the street noise to a whisper and it would be easy to think that I am no longer in Kabul but some peaceful place without war or trouble of any kind. Cats prance across a lawn and iron lanterns cast blue and orange light providing minimal heat for other cats to bask in, and roses stand to one side of the lanterns in pots, ready to be planted. I watch a barefoot man step across the grass with a hose. He ambles around tables and chairs that another man washes and stacks on a brick patio, and I’m reminded of scenes from a fairy tale where elves scurry in preparation for their monarch. I do not mean to sound pejorative. There is just something all so subservient about their behavior, stooped over, hurried. The restaurant, a two-story, brown brick building with white columns like something out of America’s antebellum South, casts a long, wide shadow over the laborers, enforcing the morning’s stillness with the quiet solemnity of its vacant windows and empty dining hall.
The proprietor, Laila Haidary, approaches me, wrapped in an orange and red sari. A scarf of the same color covers her black hair. She has a firm handshake and a warm smile and I feel her tired eyes search my face as if she is sizing me up, determining whether I can be trusted. Men, I will soon learn, have not treated her well. I follow her to two lawn chairs. We sit in the sun and observe the men working while two more men emerge from within the restaurant to assist them. They are all graduates of an alcohol and drug detox program Laila founded across town. The profits from Taj Begum keep the program open. Before I became a reporter, I had worked with homeless alcoholics in San Francisco. When I heard about Laila’s work with addicts from a friend with Amnesty International, I decided to look her up.
– Don’t forget the rose bushes, Laila calls to the man watering the grass.
– Yes, mother, he says, and jogs to the roses.
All the recovering addicts call Laila mother. She compares them to eager children who want to make their parent happy. Their behavior discomforts her a little, grown men behaving like needy kids, but she understands. Few people care about addicts. The men cling to the ones who do, their affection something so rare that it becomes almost as addictive as the drugs the addicts once used. They can’t let her go. Some refuse to leave even when they complete the program. So used to her care have they become that they make their way to Taj Begum and insist she continue to watch over them.
– C’mon, Laila urges them. You’re sober. You have your own shops to return to. You should help me. I have my own children to worry about.
– No, you’re our mother, we’re your kids, they tell her.
She insists they leave, hears their curses, their rants like spoiled brats and more often than not, she relents, lets them stay, assigning them tasks at the restaurant.
Her brother Hakim also cursed her but for different reasons. He became envious of her success. Hakim had been an addict for twenty-two years, hooked on heroin and hashish. As a family, Laila and her parents experienced the shame of his addiction until their father banished him from the house. She remembers seeing him on the street passed out. Alive or dead, as an addict her brother no longer existed, no longer mattered, an unwanted non-person as were other addicts like him and whom she would chronicle in the early 2000s as a documentary filmmaker. However, Laila increasingly became disillusioned with making movies. A film did not change lives. In 2010, she put aside her camera and established a thirty-day drug and alcohol recovery program. She offered a house, three meals a day and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. The first few clients began calling the program Mother’s House, and the name stuck. Hakim stayed for a month and now he no longer uses. After he left he started his own program. He considers Laila’s program competition. They haven’t spoken in years.
Two years after Mother’s House opened, Laila tried to help addicted women but she received so many death threats that she dropped the idea. The women and their children transported drugs and guns for the dealers they lived with, most of whom were their husbands, and the dealers confronted Laila and demanded that she stop encouraging their women to leave. You’re interfering with business, they told her.
One night, someone kicked in the door of her home. She woke with a start but saw nothing. Then two men emerged from the dark and one of them jumped on top of her and began choking her with a wire. Laila pushed the fingers of one hand beneath the wire and with her other hand reached for a gun she kept by the bed. The second intruder grabbed the gun and they struggled and Laila pulled the trigger once, twice, blasting holes in the walls, and the men beat her until she released the gun and passed out. When she opened her eyes, the men were gone. Above her stood a neighbor who’d heard the commotion and decided to investigate. When he entered Laila’s house, the startled intruders shoved past him and ran out the door. Laila did not call the police. An attack on a woman, even in post-Taliban Afghanistan, was of no consequence.
Another time, a taxi driver offered Laila a ride as she walked to the restaurant.Three men sat in the backseat. It is not uncommon in Afghanistan to share taxis with strangers. Laila opened the passenger door and got in. After she sat down, one of the men grabbed her scarf and jerked her head back and punched her while the two other men demanded that she stop helping addicts. Addicts bought their drugs, they shouted, hitting her again and again until they told the driver to stop. One of the men then stepped out and jerked Laila from the taxi. This time she went to the police, but they did nothing. Drug dealers, she suspects, paid the police to stay out of their way.
To this day, the threats never stop. Her phone rings in the middle of the night. When she answers, she hears only a taunting silence. She began to worry about her two sons, eighteen-year-old Murtaza and thirteen-year-old Mustafa, and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Zakia. It was one thing when they were small and stayed home but now they were old enough to wander about Kabul as they chose. These crazy people might kidnap them or worse. In addition, the children’s stepmother wanted Zakia to marry a man Laila felt was mentally unstable. Her children were just four, six, and eight when Laila divorced their father, but they stayed with him because according to Sharia law, Afghan children belong to the father. He married their stepmother a short time later. She resented having the responsibility of children not her own. Some days, she would lock them out of the kitchen and refuse to feed them. Laila became obsessed with worry until she arrived at a plan: She must get her children out of Afghanistan. Without criticizing his wife, Laila told her ex about the threats on her life and how their children might be affected, convincing him they would be better off in Europe.
Laila then paid a smuggler to make the arrangements. Laila put in 1,500 euro, her ex-husband 8,000 euro. She coached her children on what to say at the borders they would need to cross. Don’t tell anyone your father is alive and lives in Iran, she warned them. Say he disappeared. If border agents know your father lives in Iran, they might deport you to Tehran. Afghanistan is dangerous, Iran is not. The Europeans might think it’s no problem to send you to Iran. That would be terrible, Laila knew. Their father was a mullah. The Europeans would not understand how hard it would be for her children, especially her daughter, to live with a conservative man and his crazy wife. And because the children are part Afghan, they would suffer discrimination. Iranians consider Afghans inferior. Their father could not protect them.
Without money for a plane, Murtaza, Mustafa, and Zakia left by bus two days before I stood soaking wet outside Taj Begum’s gate. They should soon cross into Turkey. There a man the smuggler knows has promised to help them reach Austria.
– You will have a hard journey, Laila told Zakia before she departed.
– After what we passed through with our stepmother, this trip won’t be so bad, Zakia replied.

The man Laila and I watch watering the grass is named Ali. Like many Afghans, he does not have a last name. Long tangles of hair curl around his ears. He wears a light brown salwar kameez spattered with stains. He repairs chairs. After he finishes watering, he rolls up the hose and leaves it beside the roses. He then turns his attention to some chairs that need new legs.
Ali became an addict when he started using cocaine and heroin as a construction worker in Iran where many Afghans travel to find work. His experience has led him to the conclusion that people get addicted for so many reasons: joblessness, curiosity, associating with the wrong people. You see other people using and think, Hey, let me try that. At least that’s how he thought at the time. He had no idea that an impulsive notion would lead to a drug habit.
He left Iran for Afghanistan after the Taliban fell, joining the newly formed Afghan National Army because it was the only institution offering work. He spent eight months in the field near the Pakistan border in Pahtika, Sharona, Morgha, Barmal, Khatr-kot, Gomal and so many other places fighting remnants of the Taliban.
He saw friends die. They were shot and blown up. He got depressed and kept using, not for the fun of getting high but for the need to cauterize his mind from troubling thoughts. He liked the painkiller Tramadol, the way it numbed his whole body so that he felt nothing other than the emptiness of his mind. When he quit the army, he found he could easily buy it on the streets in Kabul. Opium, too. He was jobless and joined other addicts who lived under Pol-e-Sokhta bridge downtown. The name means “burned bridge” and indeed the people gathering beneath it had burned what bridges they had to anything other than their addiction. Men and a few women would lie passed out on heaps of putrid trash and torn plastic bags spilling more garbage, and families walking across the bridge would look down and point at the addicts as if they were an exhibit, jerking awake and stumbling over sacks of refuse, falling and rising, falling and rising like marionettes in the hands of a distracted puppeteer, staggering across black mud twitching from invisible currents, unable to keep still until they found someone with a pipe or a syringe and they joined them to sink into oblivion again, their skeletal bodies grimed and foul, and when they spoke in croaking voices spittle sprayed through the decay of what remained of their yellowed teeth.
It was under Pol-e-Sokhta in 2015 that Laila found Ali sprawled between rank puddles of water thick as ink. One month later, after he graduated from Mother’s House, he found work as a laborer. However, those kinds of jobs became scarce as the economy faltered under a revived Taliban insurgency. He asked Laila for help and she hired him at the restaurant. He lives here in a room with one window that looks out on a stack of chairs in need of repair. Every day, he concentrates on his work, avoiding thoughts of hash and opium and Tramadol and memories of combat. Memories like that of an officer who left his base in Wazir with six soldiers. Seven hours later only one soldier returned alive; the rest had been killed by a roadside bomb. The surviving soldier alternated between laughing hysterically at his good fortune and sinking into a deep silence tormented by thoughts Ali could only imagine. In his dreams he saw the soldier laughing and sobbing, laughing and sobbing until he woke up crying himself. He’d wipe his eyes and try to fall back asleep.
After a while, he had his own horrors to dream about. Like the time he was on patrol and the armored vehicle in front of him exploded from a roadside bomb, an erupting burst of flame, boom! just like that. One minute it was there, the next minute it wasn’t and he knew before he fully comprehended what he’d just witnessed that the four men inside, the kid he’d sat beside at breakfast, the guy who’d shared cigarettes, the other guy who’d laughed at his jokes, were burning alive if not dead already.
Thinking about things he’d rather not remember, his brain a torn screen with the bad memories entering like flies, he recalls one morning when his commanding officer told him, We have to leave on a mission. He instructed Ali to ride with the communications officer and three other soldiers. They drove through desert and then crossed an invisible line where for no reason Ali could discern the ground found sustenance and grass and trees emerged from the sand, so many trees that the trees soon became an overgrown wood so dense that Ali could not see through the low-hanging branches swiping at the windshield. The patrol stopped at an intersection and the commander decided to turn left. They had not driven more than 300 feet when the commander’s vehicle exploded, pieces of metal and body parts falling onto the hood of Ali’s car. Ali and three other soldiers with him started yelling and one of them got sick and the driver floored the accelerator, shifting into reverse, and the rear wheels spit dirt and then he stopped and no one said anything for a long time while the commander’s vehicle burned and charred chunks of metal and uniformed flesh smoldered on the ground. Ali and other members cleaned the vomit from their vehicle and then collected all the body parts they could find before they withdrew and returned to base.
When such a thing happens, Ali has concluded, a man goes crazy. A soldier sees their commander and friends die, they can’t bury them completely because they can’t find their legs and arms, or they find their arms but their hands are missing, and at that point of helplessness and futility they only want to kill the insurgents who set the bomb. No more searching for body parts. No more burials. Just kill and kill and kill. Nothing removes the pain of a soldier seeing their comrades killed other than more killing.
Ali gathered the body parts of the commanding officer but could not find his left leg. The officer came to him in a dream and said, You’re not a good friend. You did not bury my leg. Ali woke up determined to find the leg. He returned with a patrol to the spot where the explosion took place and after three days he found the remains of the leg in some bushes, rotting and maggot-filled and partially eaten by animals. He wrapped it in cloth and dug a small grave and buried it. The officer is now in paradise and no longer appears in Ali’s dreams. He has given Ali peace but not so much peace that Ali doesn’t dream of explosions and of dead soldiers whose body parts he never finds.

This evening, Laila can’t sleep. Her children called midafternoon to tell her they’d reached the Turkish border. They were shutting off their phones to conserve power and she has not heard from them since. Her blood pressure rises with worry. She wonders, Did they cross into Turkey yet? Were they stopped? Arrested? Are they well? She doesn’t want her daughter, Zakia, harmed, her sons either, of course, but a young woman is so vulnerable. Laila can only wait for them to call again. Waiting is so hard. Oh, God, she hopes her kids make it to Europe. Most Afghans who leave end up in Germany, but Laila would like them to live in Sweden. She has heard wonderful things about Sweden. If they think the journey they’re on now is difficult, just wait until they have to adapt to a foreign land, a foreign language, a foreign people. Laila knows how it feels to be uprooted. She was born to Afghan parents in Quetta, Pakistan, after they left Kabul during the Soviet occupation. Tired of the antipathy Pakistanis felt toward Afghans, they later moved to Iran but there, too, Afghans were treated as second-class citizens.
As a child, Laila wrote poetry to express her feelings of dislocation. However, as she grew older, she became disillusioned with verse. Her words did not adequately convey the pain she needed to express. How it was to live in a country and be treated as inferior. Laila saw Iranian police slap Afghans for no reason, shove them to the ground and kick them. It scared her because she was an Afghan. Would she, too, be pushed around and punished for being from somewhere else?
When the Taliban fell in 2001 to a U.S.‑led military coalition following the attacks of 9/11, her family returned to Kabul. It was there she met dozens of addicts under the Pol-e-Sokhta bridge as she searched for her brother, Hakim. She saw how people observed the addicts like animals in a zoo. They threw trash at them and laughed. The addicts reminded Laila of zombies. She stepped gingerly down steps that led beneath the bridge, the stench of garbage and unwashed bodies and human waste fogging her senses, and she almost turned back. When she reached the bottom step, the mud beneath her feet oozed thick and foul and she shook with disgust and fear. The addicts approached her like feral dogs, suspicious, curious, hesitant. To her surprise, they assumed she was an addict like them. What are you using? they asked her. Crystal? Hash? Opium? Heroin? Nothing, Laila told them. I just want to help you.
The addicts didn’t believe her. They accused her of being with the government.
– You are using us to campaign for office, they said. You are trying to use us for your gain.
– No, no, Laila protested. I am a simple person. I just want to help you.
One night, she wondered aloud to a friend how she could assist addicts. Her poetry and films wouldn’t help them. What would? Laila determined she’d need a place to get them off the street. A house where they could stay for at least four weeks and that would provide them basic necessities and daily Narcotics Anonymous meetings. If they needed more time, they could stay longer than thirty days providing they helped to maintain the house and did not use. She spoke to landlords but no one would rent to her. They considered addicts criminals, useless people, animals. Laila looked and looked until she found an empty wreck of a house far from downtown. Birds nested in the roof, darting in and out of rooms wet from rain and filled with the rubble of collapsed walls. The owner agreed to rent to Laila, however she would have to finance the repairs herself.
She raised money from friends. To get started, she intended to take only five addicts from under the bridge. Instead, she took twenty men, as many as could be squeezed into her rented van. Struggling to close the door against the press of their bodies with one hand, she waved off more men pleading to go with her.
Encouraged that so many addicts wanted help, Laila drove to a public shower owned by her uncle. Shopkeepers stared with mouths open as twenty squalid men stepped out of Laila’s van. She bought them soap and shampoo and while they bathed, she walked to a secondhand store and purchased clothes. Bathed, shaved and dressed, they were unrecognizable. Their skin so white, their hair wet and shining in the sun. Laila took them to a kabob kiosk and fed them.
The addicts and some of Laila’s friends helped repair the house. They borrowed ladders and tools and patched the roof, installed windows, laid carpet. Laila had little money left over for food. She boiled the parts of chickens that butchers threw away and made soup. What is this? the addicts asked her. Eat it, she told them, until I can afford to buy real food. That first winter, the house grew so cold the carpet made crackling sounds underfoot.
A former Taliban fighter stood out among Laila’s first clients. He was a short, thin man with dark hair and piercing blue eyes. His name was Esmat. He told her he had beheaded so many people at the orders of his commanders that he had lost count and could only cope with the memories by smoking opium. Without drugs, he slept little at Mother’s House. Every night he patrolled outside Laila’s window. What are you doing? she would ask him. Don’t be afraid, I’m protecting you, he replied. She believed him because he called her mother like everyone else. Laila has not heard from Esmat for some time. When he left, he worried the Taliban would kill him.
A few of her first clients tried to leave before they’d completed the program. They’d gained weight and felt much better but their nerves were fragile and they had grown tired of being cooped up. She stopped them as they were walking out and shamed them for what she called their ingratitude. All the money I spent on you, all the time, she scolded before she locked them in a room so they could not try to escape again. Later, she beat them with an orange rubber hose so they felt pain, a metaphor in her mind for the hurt they’d inflicted on their families as her brother Hakim had inflicted on her own. They stretched out on their stomachs and she struck their backs repeatedly and they cried out but they never tried to stop her. She warned the other addicts, Don’t let them leave or I’ll beat you, too.
At night, she listened for anyone unlocking the front door or climbing a wall, bolting out of her bed without bothering to put on her shoes and scarf to chase after them. Sometimes she called them by her brother’s name. Who? they asked her. A few men did escape. They fled to Chil Dokhtaran, a nearby mountain. Laila searched among the boulders for their hiding places until she found them.
Back at Mother’s House, she would try to sleep again but could not. She listened to the men tossing and turning on their mats, haunted by nightmares. Laila’s own dreams were filled with images of the dead addicts she’d come across, especially in winter when temperatures in Kabul plummet well below freezing. She’d look under blankets and sheets of cardboard and see a hand or a leg, the skin dark and frigid. Upon closer inspection, she’d discover a body curled into a ball barefoot and in tattered clothes, bare hands jammed between its legs, like something found in an archaeological dig. Sometimes the body was days old. No one cared about addicts when they were alive, why would they care about them dead? Because Laila was not related to the deceased, the police refused to allow her to bury them. She paid the police to make the appropriate arrangements.
– I don’t ask much, she told the police. Just care for the bodies.
She had no way of knowing how they spent the money she gave them.
Laila’s phone rings, interrupting these sad memories. It’s her daughter, Zakia. Are you in Turkey? Laila asks. Just past Turkey? In a village but you’re not yet in Istanbul? OK, call me again from Istanbul. She hangs up, the call kept short so Zakia would have enough units to call again. Laila sets the phone down, relieved. Her children are OK. Maybe now she can sleep.

The manager of Mother’s House, Naser Amini, knows all about the journey Laila’s children have embarked on. He was one of her earliest clients and she trusts and confides in him. He listens, rarely comments. He knows nothing he says will ease her concern. She needs his ears, not his mouth. She thanks him for listening and he bows his head slightly. Listening to her is a small thing he is happy to give. He would be dead if it were not for Laila.
Naser began using drugs when he joined the police in 2004 in the second administration of President Hamid Karzai. A fellow officer introduced him to opium. Every officer Naser knew, including commanders, smoked opium, heroin or hash. If they used, why not the rest of us? Naser thought. He was stationed in and around Ghazni, a Taliban stronghold. He got high regularly.
In one town, Salon, the Taliban attacked a military supply convoy and Naser saw more than a dozen soldiers struck in the face by gunfire. Among all the fleeing civilians, Naser could not tell who was a Taliban fighter and who was not. What are we doing? he screamed. Who are we fighting? He watched cars burn, ducked when a truck exploded, hunks of metal spinning overhead. He can’t explain how he felt seeing so many people shot, but he can describe how each person died: how this one had his shoulder shorn off, how that one lost his right arm at the elbow, how another one fell and convulsed for a long time before he lay still, blood oozing from his mouth.
The fighting made no sense. As a police officer, he swore an oath to protect civilians, but it seemed everyone saw him and his fellow officers as the enemy. They always caught fire from the people they wanted to help. The Taliban had ruled districts in and around Ghazni for years so perhaps the people were afraid they’d be killed themselves if they helped the police and army. For all he knew, they may have liked the Taliban. The Taliban railed against the Karzai government through static-filled speakers of nearby mosques. Afterward, when he patrolled the streets, Naser sensed the space existing between him and the quiet houses and the suspicious eyes he imagined peering at him.
One morning, high on hash, Naser caught a bus into Kabul to celebrate Eid, a religious holiday that marks the end of Ramadan. A police officer called him to say a firefight in Maiden-Shar in Wardak Province, about thirty miles outside Kabul, had left twelve dead policemen. An officer sympathetic to the Taliban had been on guard duty. He had called his Taliban contacts and they shot the policemen. The bodies had been removed by the time Naser arrived but he saw the bloodstained room where the men had died.
Naser returned to Kabul and didn’t eat for three days. He drank Pepsi to control his nausea. He had dreams of the dead policemen drowning in their own blood. Some people said the traitorous police officer had grown disillusioned because nothing ever changed. The police arrested the Taliban and the Taliban killed the police and the fighting dragged on and on. What was the point? What is the value of a life?
Naser didn’t know the answers to these questions but he knew he didn’t want to die. He quit the police force and spent all his time and money getting high. He recycled cans to pay for his habit and stole food to eat. He lived under the Pol-e-Sokhta bridge. One day he ran into a friend with whom he had smoked opium. The man had changed. His eyes were clear and his clothes clean and he had a deliberate stride that told Naser he had plans, goals. What happened to you? Naser asked. I’ve been to Mother’s House and stopped using, his friend said. When you see a small woman with a van stop here, go with her. She’ll be your mother and help you get well. The next time Laila made her rounds under the bridge, Naser followed her out.

Laila’s daughter, Zakia, calls again, this time in the middle of the night. She and her brothers have arrived in Istanbul. They’ll stay one or two days. It’s their good luck that Laila has Facebook friends in Turkey, Afghans who left Kabul years earlier and who are willing to put them up. However, the worst part of their journey awaits them. From Istanbul, they must use a raft to cross part of the eastern Aegean Sea to reach Greece. From news reports, Laila knows hundreds of people have died trying to reach Europe in an armada of flimsy rubber dinghies and rickety fishing boats.
– Get some sleep, Laila urges Zakia, choking back the worry in her voice.
When she gets up four hours later, Laila drives to Mother’s House. She lurches along the ruined roads, swerving one way and then another in a failed effort to save the undercarriage of her car from slamming against the ground as a wheel dips into a hole. Muddy water splashes the windshield and she turns on the wipers and a man driving past curses her.
– Woman, he shouts, do you not feel shame for driving?
– Is being a woman a crime? she shouts back at him and then swears. Do I not have the same right to drive as a man? Then she laughs, recalling how one addict she had helped moved to Canada where his family lived. He became so westernized that he had forgotten how it was to live in Kabul. When he returned for a visit, the noise of so many blaring car horns and the endless traffic jams and the furious drivers drove him to distraction.
– You’re no longer Afghan, Laila scolded him.
After maneuvering through traffic for half an hour, Laila parks outside a rutted alley. Runnels of sewage flow through trenches made by recent rains. A few clouds linger in an otherwise blue sky and the hot air steams her face. Laila walks down the alley, skirting the filth, and approaches the heavy metal door of Mother’s House. Concertina wire unfurls from one end of a wall to the other to prevent thieves from entering and hinder addicts from escaping. Laila presses a buzzer. As she waits for someone to open the door, she recalls those days years ago when she questioned the wisdom of buying a dilapidated house, as derelict in its way as the addicts she brought to it. Together, the addicts and the house improved and while some of her clients started using again, reducing their bodies to a new state of decay, the house remains, a testament to Laila’s determination.
Naser opens the door––Hello, Mother––and Laila smiles, pleased as always to see him, and she walks inside, slipping off her sandals. Men with shaved heads, some bleeding from small cuts made by the hand razors used to remove their hair, converge on her in the narrow hall where photographs of these same men as they looked when they first arrived––filthy, emaciated, covered in sores––look out at them as a reminder of who they’d once been and could become again if they resume their drug use.
– Who are you? Laila asks one man who won’t let go of her hand.
– The one getting better every day, he says and points to a photo on the wall. It shows a man with a sunken face and a hollow stare, his collar bone and ribs protruding.
– That was you?
– That was me, the man says.
Laila turns to another man.
– And who are you?
– I’m the one with the pregnant wife.
– Ah, and I beat you.
– Yes, Mother, the man says and looks at the floor.
When Laila accepted him into Mother’s House, he told her had a fifteen-day-old baby. Laila became enraged. You would rather smoke opium than take care of your child and wife? she shouted. She told him to get on the floor. She covered him with a blanket and then beat him.
– And how is your family? she asks him now.
– They are good. My wife comes with our baby to visit.
– You’re lucky she stays with you. You remember the pain from your beating?
– Yes.
– Think of it as their pain so you don’t feel sorry for yourself.
Laila continues down the hall like a ward boss greeting grateful constituents. She pauses by two men sitting on the floor chained together at their ankles. They had attempted to escape a few days earlier before some of the other addicts stopped them. They’ll remain chained together 24‑7, even when they use the toilet, until Laila trusts them to complete the program.
– He goes to the bathroom too much, one of the men complains of his partner.
– If you had not tried to escape, you’d not have this problem, Laila says.
Do they not understand what’s involved operating Mother’s House? Laila wonders. Of course not. Addicts have no sense of responsibility to anything other than their habit. To live here, they must think differently. She has rules and regulations. They must live like a family. Nothing else matters; ethnicity, religion, none of it. They all have addiction in common, and that makes them brothers, and like brothers they will argue and like children they will disobey and like a mother she will discipline them. She has become so used to being called mother that she feels toward them, even the new ones, as if they had emerged from her own body, their suffering her suffering, their struggles her struggles.
Laila turns her attention to another addict, a short, lean man who looks like a teenager with his rumpled hair and the smooth face of a boy. His name is Mohammad Nadir and at twenty-seven he has long left his childhood behind, no matter how adolescent his appearance. He sits beside the two shackled men, tapping the air with his feet with nervous energy, and when he speaks his words rush out of his mouth, revealing his impatience with his confinement.
– How do you feel?
– Very good, Mother, Nadir answers.
– You look good.
– Thank you, Mother.
– Do you still have nightmares?
– I dreamed I had a pocket full of heroin and was caught by the police. Please go away from me, I told the drug, you’ll get me in trouble, but the heroin would not leave me.
– Have good thoughts during the day and then you’ll have good thoughts at night.
– Yes, Mother, Nadir says, feet tapping ceaselessly.
Nadir lived a nomadic youth. His mother was Iranian, his father Afghan. The family moved back and forth between the two countries when he was a boy. After the Taliban fell, they stayed in Kabul. Nadir served in the Afghan National Army in 2005 when he was 17 and saw combat in Helmand Province. One time, an RPG struck his commander’s vehicle. After that day, he decided that movie directors didn’t understand war, at least not the war he experienced. When his commander’s vehicle exploded one hot afternoon, everything came rushing toward Nadir as if every bullet and rocket and piece of shrapnel was intended for him and him alone. He never saw anything like that in a movie.
He stayed in the army for one year. Then, as his parents before him, he moved between Afghanistan and Iran finding jobs in construction. In 2014, he began reading Facebook posts that ISIS was destroying Shia shrines outside Damascus. The posts showed videos of ISIS fighters beheading Shia people. As a Shia himself, he decided he must fight for his religion. He took a bus to Iran, an ally of Syria, and enlisted to fight ISIS. Officers with the Iranian army showed him how to shoot, use a grenade launcher, fire missiles. Nadir knew how to do all these things from his time in the Afghan army but he pretended not to because he did not want to upset the officers. After two weeks of training, he flew to Damascus with other foreign recruits.
Despite his service in Helmand, Syria left him feeling off balance, uncertain. No one appeared to know what they were doing. Foreign fighters wandered around like children without orders. His unit used three or four scouts and sometimes they made mistakes. They’d say such-and-such an area was clear and then when Nadir and his unit arrived, ISIS fighters would rise up from the ground like a myth and the fighters beside Nadir would panic and forget their training, flee and die. This sort of thing often happened. One time, a scout told Nadir that ISIS fighters had left a particular camp. Nadir entered with five other Afghan fighters. A tank stood amidst the rubble and ISIS fighters materialized from behind it and began firing and then the turret of the tank turned and Nadir and his men dashed into a building with a collapsed roof as the tank shelled it. Three men with Nadir died before he was able to withdraw. The scout answered to Nadir’s commander. Nadir doesn’t know what happened but presumes he was executed.
Nadir considers ISIS fighters to be more like rabbits than people. They seemed to breed on the battlefield. When he shot one, another fighter appeared. No matter how many he killed, more followed, walking over the rising piles of their dead comrades. Nadir estimates he killed 100, no 200 ISIS fighters. Some of the men at Mother’s House smirk when they hear him, but he won’t back down. He may have shot more, he insists. He used speed so that he would be hyperalert in battle and he smoked heroin at night to sleep. For seven months, he killed ISIS fighters before he returned to Kabul to see his parents. He continued using drugs, however, and Laila found him living under Pol-e-Sokhta bridge, a man who had fought for his faith in Syria now devoted to staying high. Nadir intends to return to Syria by way of Iran once he collects enough money. Fighting ISIS, standing up for his faith, gave him purpose. At Mother’s House, he attends N.A. meetings, eats, sleeps and kills time with a gnawing unease. He worries that if he leaves Mother’s House without the money necessary to reach Iran, he’ll use again. He hopes his father will give him the money.
Laila, Mohammad knows, does not want him to return to Syria. She opposes killing of any kind. Returning to a war makes little sense, she’s told him. Stay in Afghanistan if you need a war. Practice the twelve steps of N.A. and pray. Only when you feel secure in your recovery, should you decide your future.
– Where my heart steers me, I will go, Nasir said.

Part Two

After an hour, Laila leaves Mother’s House for Taj Begum. She drives through a bazaar and then onto a street in Pol-e-kote-e-sange, a district of Kabul squeezed with vendor’s stalls and markets not far from Pol-e-Sokhta bridge. Addicts collect on the median strip dividing the highway, plastic bags bouncing across the street and clinging to them. They cover themselves with prayer shawls in a failed effort to conceal the syringes they stick into their wrists, or the pipes they smoke. Other addicts sprawl out on the ground passed out, their faces red and blistered from the sun, and the residue of car exhaust peppers their bodies and clings to the cracked lips of their open mouths, and the putrid odor of their bodies in the heat amid all the diesel fumes becomes almost intolerable. Still they sleep and get high oblivious to the funk of this strip of wasteland, a settlement of their own making, young and old, bearded and shaven, clothes dust-covered and unwashed, and when they stir, bleary-eyed but alert, they recognize Laila creeping forward in the stalled traffic and they rise, waving their arms and lurching toward her like toddlers learning to walk.
– How come you’re here? one man asks. Are you collecting people?
– One week from this Friday, Laila shouts above the noise of beeping cars. I always come once a month.
– Put me on your priority list.
– I have no list.
– Will you be here before 12 o’clock or after?
– After.
– What is your place? another man asks, pushing aside the first man.
– It’s a place that protects you. All of you need such a place.
– Traffic breaks and Laila speeds forward to fill an opening between two cars.
– One of us died, the first man says, hurrying to keep up with her, shouting above everyone else and the noise of traffic.
– What’s his name? Laila asks.
– Zahir. He was hit by a car. Tell the family if you know them.
He stops running and Laila glances in her rearview mirror at his diminishing figure and then another knot of congestion forms. As she waits for traffic to move again, more addicts approach. One man with no shirt holds a syringe, the needle stained with blood.
– When are you coming, Mother?
– Friday.
– Do you have money? he demands, holding out a hand.
– I don’t. I have no medicine, no food. I’ll give you a house to live in. That’s all I have.
Traffic starts moving again. Laila accelerates, the hands of the addicts dragging off her car streaking the dusty windows, and they watch her leave and then they shamble back to the median and the dust and smell and their need.
When Laila reaches Taj Begum, Ali, the recovering addict who waters the lawn every morning, opens the gate. A sheep stands tied to a post, a metal pail filled with water beside it. Laila bought it for Mother’s House. The men will butcher it. Its meat will last just one day, but it will be a nice party for them.
Laila’s phone has been silent all day and in the quiet of the courtyard, away from the neediness of the men at Mother’s House and the addicts on the street, away from traffic and noise, the worries she has carried with her, briefly submerged beneath the tumult, rise to the surface. Why has Zakia not called? This morning, they were to have started traveling to an island between Turkey and Greece. Her children have never been on a boat. Who will steer? Will they know what they’re doing? What if they get stuck in the middle of the sea?
Sitting at a table, Laila waits for Ali to bring her tea. She supposes wearily that she will have to contact her ex-husband for money if her children require more than she can provide. He isn’t a bad man, he had loved her in his way. She had goals and could not live with a man who wanted her to remain in the house. A house can be like a box, Laila told him. If she must live in a box, then the world will be her box and nothing less. It wasn’t in her nature to live only for the love of a husband. She needed more: her poetry, her documentary filmmaking, her work with addicts.
Sipping her tea, she wonders how long her children will stay on the island between Greece and Turkey. One day, one week? They’re so young. Pray for my children, she says aloud to no one. Leaving your country is the worst thing in the world. On one side is Afghanistan, where the insurgents threaten Kabul every day. On the other side is Europe. The people living there don’t want Afghans. Stuck in the middle are the refugees. They only want to live.
Sometimes, Laila confides her worries to Naser Amini, the manager of Mother’s House. She has always appreciated his quiet gratitude. As a client at Mother’s House, he never fawned over her like the other men. He never tried to manipulate her affection. He thanked her not in words but by mopping the floors, repairing the electrical wiring, holding N.A. meetings and performing other tasks without asking or expecting anything. Still, they are not equals. When she talks about her children, he nods, says, Yes, Mother, and nothing more, as if it would be inappropriate for him to comment further. Laila does not doubt his devotion but her problems, she knows, remain hers alone. Nadir can no more share them than she can his. They live in the solitude of their own struggles.

At nine o’clock at night, Mohammad Nasim walks the hall of Mother’s House, looking in on sleeping clients. Like Naser, he also works for Laila and helps maintain the program. In the quiet of the night, Mohammad considers his life. He has concluded that what he calls gaps in his childhood contributed to the problems he would have later with drugs. The parents of children he knew as a boy loved them. They played with their children, took them to bazaars. His parents, however, showed little feeling. When he came home from school, his mother would slap him. What were you doing in school so long? she’d admonish. Who were you spending time with? You’re to come home and help me around the house. He first tried opium as a teenager. It made him happy in a joyless home.
Funny, how something so long ago remains so vivid. He shakes his head at the vagaries of memory, walking stiffly in the dark, swinging his prosthetic right leg forward, lurching to one side with each step. He had been a second lieutenant in Afghanistan’s police force in Kandahar in 2005 when he lost his leg. At the time, he had achieved the rank of second lieutenant and had been stationed in Helmand Province. Every night, he heard rocket fire, and while he knew he might die in the abstract way that the living imagine something as inconceivable as death, it never occurred to him he would lose a leg.
Mohammad didn’t enjoy being a policeman. He felt cocooned within the station. No one was permitted into the station unless an officer knew them. A stranger might be a friend, might be an enemy, who knew? Sniper fire, roadside bombs and assaults on the station interrupted the monotony. One hundred and twenty officers died during his time in Helmand. Mohammad and the other officers smoked crack, opium, hashish, whatever became available. They had no trouble rationalizing their need to anesthetize themselves from war.
Mohammad remembers one time he was on a patrol when his pickup struck a roadside bomb. He had just left Mussakala, a village in Helmand Province. An elder had told him, We don’t want you and we don’t want the Taliban. Mohammad and four other officers were smoking hash when the bomb exploded. The explosion filled his ears and his head felt as if it was inflating with cotton, and he was thrown from the car about fifteen feet, landing on the ground like a broken sack. The severed hand of another officer lay by his face, the fingers moving. When he tried to get up, he fell. He saw his right leg attached by a few strips of muscle and flesh. Mohammad didn’t feel pain. It almost seemed as if the leg no longer belonged to him. The army evacuated him to a military hospital in Kandahar. When doctors examined his leg, sharp, electrical-like jabs convulsed his body and he screamed. He remained in Kandahar for two months before he was sent to Bagram Airbase outside Kabul. There his leg was amputated. He had three subsequent operations. It took months for doctors to wean him off morphine.
After his discharge from Bagram, he stayed with his parents in Kabul, just one of many war-wounded in the capital. No one commented on his sacrifice. Mohammad felt lost in his parents’ house, resenting their pitying looks. He found comfort smoking opium and moved out. Making his way to the Pol-e-Sokhta bridge, he lived among people equally alone and so out of it they appeared as if they lived in another dimension, and he sought that other dimension with them. It was here that Laila found him.
– Come with me, she told him, extending a hand. Live again.

The Syrian war fighter Mohammad Nadir listens to Mohammad Nasim make his nightly rounds. Nadir can’t sleep. Troubling thoughts come to him for no reason, keeping him awake. He thinks of his service with the Afghan National Army and his time in Syria. He does not think fighting the Taliban compares with combating ISIS. He knows some of the men think of him as a braggart. The ego of an addict, Mohammad Nasim has cautioned him, can get you in trouble. It is not ego, Nadir insists, but the truth of his experiences. He’d fought in Helmand Province but Syria proved much more difficult. He makes no apologies for the skills he honed there. He could shoot any object as far away as 2,000 feet. He dampened the dust on the ledge where he rested his gun so soot would not rise and give away his position. The enemy would shoot and run and Nadir would follow and shoot them one by one. He’d watch the man’s head drop to his chest in the silence that followed after he pulled the trigger, and then he would shoot four or five other ISIS fighters who tried to help. Sometimes he struck a target in the arm or a shoulder and he presumes they lived. At other times, he missed completely, although this was very rare, and then he would run to another location so when the enemy returned fire he would be elsewhere and he would shoot again and this time he would kill them. His commanders handed out tablets. He didn’t know what they were but they made his heart race. He had no problem fighting high. Being high killed the stress. When the target got close he would shoot them without thought, his finger on the trigger doing his thinking for him.
Drones took photos and based on those images, Syrian commanders picked neighborhoods to attack. Every time Nadir fought, it seemed to him that more than 100 ISIS fighters would fall but they would not stop shooting until they had all been killed. It was good for Nadir that they fought so hard because then he could kill more of them. ISIS often attacked in one massive wave and Nadir fired his weapon until his hands burned on the hot metal. The assault, Nadir concluded, was not a tactic but a sacrifice. Afterward, he watched dogs and cats eat the dead while he rubbed water down his long rifle to cool it and then he collected the things of dead ISIS fighters he’d killed, their guns, clothes, food and photos. He considered the pictures and sometimes acknowledged that the dead man had a good family, a beautiful wife. He rubbed his thumb over the faces as if somehow this would help him learn more about them, and then he threw the pictures away. He did not need the eyes of a widow or an orphaned son or daughter watching him while he slept.
Nadir fought with other foreigners: Hezbollah, Iraqis, Pakistanis, even women from Chechnya who carried military supplies on their backs. All foreign fighters enlisted with units organized by the country they came from and all of them, Nadir thought, fought bravely. For each month he fought, he and the other foreign fighters earned $560. When they took a town or village, they earned a bonus of $300. Nadir sent his salary to his family. He fought not for money but his beliefs and killed with all his heart on behalf of his Shia faith. One afternoon, his commander told him, You’re taking too much fire. ISIS can see your position.
– It’s OK, Nadir replied. I’m here for Shia. I will kill whoever I can until I’m no longer alive.
– It is your life, his commander said. I’ll see you in paradise.

A Friday morning. Laila prepares to pick up new addicts for Mother’s House along the highway in Pol-e-kote-e-sange where she had seen them gathered on the median strip days earlier. A rented van stands in the driveway of Taj Begum damp with dew. Ali will drive. As Laila prepares to leave, her daughter, Zakia, calls. She tells her mother that she and her brothers had a good night’s sleep. But the excitement in her voice suggests something more important on her mind than this small talk. This morning, Zakia explains, they will leave for Greece in a raft. The smuggler will not travel with them. He knows no one in Greece or Europe. That worries Laila but she says nothing to Zakia to ruin her mood, her thrill at the idea that she will soon be in Europe, but once she gets off the phone, Laila calls the smuggler.
– All I have are my kids, she tells him. I want them alive. Take care of them. Put them in the center of the raft.
– It doesn’t matter where they sit, he explains. It will still be a very dangerous journey.
– I know, but for some reason, I think they will be safer in the middle.
– OK, the smuggler agrees.
– Whatever happens, no matter how tragic, tell me whatever you hear about their journey, Laila insists.
– Yes, the smuggler agrees.
– And get back to me with someone you know in Greece.
– I don’t know anyone.
– Think! You must! Laila insists.
Her mind conjures all sorts of horrors that might await her children, but Zakia’s high spirits for no good reason leave her feeling optimistic. Everything will work out. Zakia would not be this happy if crossing to Greece was as dangerous as Laila has heard. She must control her worry so her imagination does not get carried away with disastrous scenarios. Just get to Europe and Sweden, she thinks.
Laila slips her phone in her pocket and steps in the van, her mind racing with thoughts of Zakia and the day ahead of her. Sometimes, she feels she should do things differently. Rather than treating addicts, she should increase understanding of what addiction is to stop people from using drugs first. But then what would happen to the people already addicted? A philosopher should consider these questions, not her.
The drive to Pol-e-kote-e-sange takes forever. To avoid traffic, she should have left before eight o’clock. It’s after ten now. Congestion leaves roads in a twisted gridlock of cars and trucks jockeying for position. Laila curses while Ali maneuvers the van like a snake slipping into cracks by edging between cars and inching forward and blasting his horn as loud as the other drivers around him. Ali and Laila look at one another and laugh and then curse again and Ali moves forward once more, brazenly cutting off other cars, closing his window against the drift of black exhaust and wind-stirred dust.
An hour later, they reach Pol-e-kote-e-sange. They both feel as if they’ve been driving for hours. Before they even stop, addicts recognize Laila through her open window and swarm the van. Other addicts peer out from beneath prayer shawls and Laila returns their stares and tries to place names to their gaunt faces. Does she know them? Has she seen them here before? Have they been to Mother’s House?
Ali parks on the road, turns on the emergency lights. Drivers blast their horns, furious that he has blocked a lane, adding yet another hurdle to the confusion of traffic. Laila gets out to a chorus of woes.
– Mother, we need money!
– Mother, the police come here and take our money and our drugs and kick us out. They beat us. The police even took our cigarettes.
– Mother, the police took us to Logar province and left us in the desert. We are treated like criminals.
A policeman, overhearing the complaints, tells Laila that he does not target addicts. He only jails those people who behave badly. He complains that she is causing a disturbance. The next time she comes here she should alert the police so they can prepare for all this commotion. Laila ignores him. The addicts surge around her. She resembles a politician campaigning for votes, the policeman says. She pushes her way through the crowd. The policeman does not follow her but instead turns and faces the onslaught of drivers leaning out of their windows and raving about how Laila’s parked van impedes traffic.
– Who wants to quit drugs? Laila shouts, ignoring the problems she has created for the policeman. Who wants to come with me?
– I will, a woman cries, I will!
– No, Laila says, I can’t take you.
The woman’s eyes tear up. She wipes her face, smearing dirt across a cheek, and dabs her nose with a corner of her torn blue burqa. Holding up her worn slippers pebbled with holes, she looks at Laila without speaking another word.
– Give me your phone number, Laila says. I’ll find a place to help you.
– No, the woman tells her. It is always the same for women. I’ll stay here and take care of myself.
– Suit yourself, Laila says. I’m looking for a man with an injured leg.
– I don’t know such a man, the woman says.
The crowd shifts. More people vie for Laila’s attention. Mother! Mother! Mother! Laila appeals for order, waves her hands against knots of flies drawn to the odor of feces and the funk of sweating, unwashed bodies, and the heat drills down on all of them from a sun unhindered by clouds.
– Mother, children kick us.
– Mother, hospitals won’t take us.
– Mother, we need food.
She looks to see the faces behind each shout, but their pleas and faces blend into one long stream of words and among all the eyes turned toward her, Laila can’t identify even one speaker.
– Whoever wants to leave, follow me, Laila says to them all. Understand, I’m taking people with no family. Families expect to be supported and I can’t do that.
– What is the medicine you use?
– Cold water and food, Laila shouts. For one month, no more. I can’t support you for the rest of your life.
– Do you have a psychiatrist?
– No.
– Is treatment free? I went somewhere else but was beaten.
– I won’t beat you unless you break the rules.
The woman who spoke earlier pushes her way to the front of the crowd again.
– This is the fourth night I haven’t slept. I can’t sleep here. Under the bridge was better for me because no one saw me. Find me a place, Mother.
– I can’t take you to my program, Laila says, and you wouldn’t let me call anyone for you.
She rummages in her pocket and offers the woman fifty afghani, about one dollar.
– This money is for my lunch. Do something good with it, Laila tells her.
– Only fifty afghani. Is that all I’m worth? the woman asks.
– Can we go this afternoon? a man yells. I have a broken leg and have to see a doctor first.
– No, come now or wait thirty days, Laila insists. If I take you, I’ll make you a real human being.
– But I need a doctor.
– You say your leg is broken but earlier when you asked me for money you were walking just fine.
– You confuse me with someone else.
– No, I see very well, Laila says.
She makes her way back to the van and opens a side door. Despite the mob that follows her, only six men get in. Laila slams the door and pulls herself into the passenger seat. Ali starts the ignition. The honking indignation of drivers rises as Ali turns into traffic and the addicts Laila leaves behind plead for money as he pulls away, their voices fading as they recede in the rearview mirror and Laila stares ahead without blinking and without once looking back. She brushes dust off her body, makes a face against the odor of the men seated behind her. She still feels hands touching her, still hears the shouts of Mother, Mother, Mother so clearly that she almost wonders if Ali has not begun driving. Mother, Mother, Mother. Laila feels better about collecting people here than Pol-e-Sokhta bridge. Here at least she works in the open air, as squalid as the air may be. Under the bridge, she couldn’t breathe. She wonders about the man who asked for a psychiatrist. At some point, she has to cut herself off from all the problems faced by addicts; otherwise she would never rest or have a moment’s peace. He could have come with her. He didn’t. His choice.
Laila recognized the woman she turned away. She sold her children to her landlord because she needed money for drugs, or so Laila has heard. Who else did she recognize? An old man with one eye and another man, an amputee. They always ask for money but they never go with her.
For no discernible reason, traffic lightens and Ali reaches Mother’s House sooner than Laila expected. She tells the addicts to get out and they walk behind her in single file down the alley to the heavy steel door. Nadir lets them in. Laila leads them to an enclosed concrete courtyard behind the house. In one corner, a toilet. A laundry line sags from the weight of wet clothes. Shade stretches from the walls and some recovering addicts lounge in its cool breath watching with half-closed eyes the new addicts standing uncertainly among them.
– You will get a shower, haircut and then you’ll sleep, Laila shouts like a sergeant. You’re still high. It will take five days to detox to get rid of all the drugs in your bodies. You will sweat as if you’ve been exercising. You’ll take a cold shower every day to help with the sweats.
She tells them to strip to their underwear. They turn over their clothes and all personal belongings – cigarettes, money, prayer beads, drugs – to Nadir. Nadir flushes the drugs down a drain. He then distributes clean clothes but tells them not to put them on. Not yet.
– We have to wash you and cut your hair, he explains.
– If we catch you using, smoking opium from a pipe, we will beat you with the pipe, Laila warns. You can’t leave for thirty days. There is no going back. Whoever breaks the rules, we will talk to them with this.
She raises an orange rubber tube and slaps it against the ground.
Nadir tells the new clients to stand in a line and squat. Stepping behind them, he puts on plastic gloves, picks up a hose and runs cold water over the first man. Almost instantly, the man begins shivering, his body blossoming with goose bumps. Nadir shampoos his hair, massaging his head as the man washes his body with soap. When he finishes rinsing his hair, Nadir takes a hand razor and meticulously shaves the man’s scalp, working from his neck to his forehead. Clumps of lice-filled hair fall in clumps and the man flinches at tiny razor cuts inflicted by Nadir as he removes the man’s hair so that not even stubble remains, and blood runs down the man’s neck and around his ears and then Nadir rinses the now bare, white head, cold water and hair pooling at his feet. The man stands when Nadir finishes. He unwraps his bandaged left hand. Open sores fill his palm from a burn.
– What do we do? Nadir asks Laila.
Laila examines the wound.
– Apply some antiseptic cream, she says.
– It hurts, don’t touch, the man cries out, cringing.
– Let me wash it with water, Nadir says.
– It hurts!
– Just suffer this once, Nadir insists, gripping the man’s hand.
– This is my second time here, the man says between gritted teeth. I was here as a servant.
– We don’t have servants, Nadir says. We all have chores. That does not make us servants. You were not special. If this is your second time, I will shave your eyebrows to show it is your second time.
– Don’t shave my eyebrows, the man pleads.
– I have to, Nadir says. It’s the rules so that others will understand what happens if you start using again and come back.
The man closes his eyes and shakes with cold as Nadir rinses his hand.
– This reminds me of my first day, Nadir tells him. After a week or so you will feel much better.
– How was it for you?
– I tried to hide heroin in my cheek. I swallowed it, four and a half grams. Oh, I got so sick. Mother was angry but I was too sick for her to beat me. I have seen other addicts try to hide their drugs in drains. They think they can take it out later but when they look for it, it has been washed away.
Nadir releases the man’s hand. Shaking almost uncontrollably, the man covers his face with a towel. Nadir leads him past the laundry line and a water tank to a corner where he huddles in the sun. Nadir gives him a hand razor.
– You will shave your crotch and armpits. That is your responsibility.
When Nadir finishes bathing and cutting the hair of each new man, he takes the dirty towels and razors. The new clients watch him and then peer at the clear sky, mouths open, newly born into the world. Beside them sit the two shackled men who had tried to escape.
– Be careful here, she beats everyone, one of the chained men comments, referring to Laila without realizing that she stands behind him. She beat a guy who looked for a key to escape out the front door. There’s no humanity here.
– No humanity, an enraged Laila interrupts, stepping in front of him and looking down at where he sits. Where is the humanity out there? Here, you’re human again. We give you empathy. No humanity! I’m a mother in Afghanistan. I sent my children away so they could have a life! I know all there is to know about humanity!
The chained man leans away from her. She spins around and storms into an empty office, pacing furiously. The day had started so well and then this stupid man opened his mouth. That little, ungrateful man! Everybody wants more from her. Are her sacrifices not enough? Can no one appreciate her efforts? Do they not see how she struggles?
Searching for her phone, Laila dials Zakia. She wants to hear the voice of her real children. She wants to tell them how much she misses them and she wants to listen to them say how much they miss her, but Zakia doesn’t answer. Laila wipes tears from her eyes. Peering out the door, she sees the shackled men resume talking to the new clients. Let them say what they will. They’d been through Mother’s House once before. Laila took them back only because their families begged her to readmit them, and then they tried to escape so she beat them. Their wives and parents had no complaints. As far as we’re concerned, we don’t know where they are, they told her. Do what you must. They’re your responsibility now. Treat them and tell us they are well and only then will we remember where they are.
Everyone knows the rules and signs them with a thumb print, Laila reminds herself. She doesn’t like to beat anyone but she sees no other way. If you don’t have a fresh stick, donkeys and cows won’t do what they’re told and addicts can be just as stubborn as farm animals. She feels bad for two or three days after she beats a client and then when she sees them again, they apologize to her or she apologizes to them and they forgive her and she forgives them as any mother would.

Two days after their arrival, six of the new clients kneel in the courtyard naked except for their underwear while Nadir holds the hose above their heads and for twenty minutes rinses their bodies with frigid water. Laila believes cold showers help with detox and insists the men submit to this treatment their first week in Mother’s House.
– I get crazy with this cold water, a man complains. You do nothing but wash us in cold water.
– It is your sacrifice for being an addict, Nadir says.
– No, there have to be other steps like medication to help us not get sick.
– If I give you meds, you’ll repeat your addiction.
Water splashes off the men’s bowed bare heads and their pale bodies shine in the sun. Nadir remembers how he perspired every day his first week at Mother’s House and all the bone-chilling baths he took and how afterward he still sweated.
– What is that cap you wear? one of the new clients asks.
– I wore this in Syria, Nadir says. It’s the color of the desert as was my uniform.
– Why did you fight in Syria?
– Because I am Shia.
– In Pakistan, the police told me I should not use drugs. Drugs, they said, are not for Muslims, so I went to a church. I told them I wanted to convert. I went every Sunday. I didn’t really want to convert. I was lying so I could use and not be bothered by the police because I had become a Christian. I told the police I’d converted and they said, OK, it’s not against the church to drink and take drugs. That’s why Christianity is the faith of infidels, they said. I told them I didn’t care. I was tired of being Muslim.
– Once the drugs get out of your body, you’ll want to be a Muslim again, Nadir said.
– There is enough fighting in Afghanistan. If I were you, I’d stay home and fight here. It would be simpler.
– Mother tells me the same thing but one does not fight for convenience.
The new client waits for him to continue but Nadir says nothing more, his mind elsewhere. He had no rank in Syria. Foreign fighters like himself were given duties based on their skills but received no special recognition. Nadir’s skill: He could shoot. He carried a long rifle and an Uzi. He especially liked the Uzi. The gun fit his hand well and gave him confidence when he fired it. He didn’t have to aim like he did with a long rifle. Just point and shoot. Other soldiers carried PKs and RPGs and Kalashnikovs and sometimes he shouldered these weapons, too, but always he had an Uzi.
Nadir saw no chemical weapons in areas Assad’s forces took from ISIS but he noticed empty canisters that Syrian officers told him had held chemical weapons. He found American arms, M-16s mostly, and some M-49s. Nadir fought well. He felt he was born for war. When he received an order, he’d carry it out without thinking. He yearns to fight again. He feels he’s missing something, like a boy whose friends are outside playing while he must remain inside. His parents don’t want him to return to Syria but he has no money and he knows no one with a good job in Kabul. If he leaves Mother’s House without a job, he’ll get frustrated and use again. Besides, no job would match combating ISIS on behalf of all Shia people. So, he will return to Syria, fight and shoot, doing what he knows he does so well. He’ll be provided with food, a barrack, a weapon. It’s all he needs in this life. In some ways it will be like Mother’s House, but instead of Narcotics Anonymous meetings, he’ll meet with commanders and take his orders. He won’t get high. Using drugs in battle made him hyperalert but too unstable. He assaulted everything. He attacked the door of an empty house one afternoon, shooting it so many times that nothing was left but splinters and there was no one inside. More often, he didn’t remember what he did when he was high and when he did they were things he didn’t want to remember. Like wounded ISIS fighters bleeding from the neck, hands over their wound, blood pulsing between their fingers while Assad’s officer executed them. Perhaps he just thought he recalled these things because he was high. He doesn’t know. He thanks God he no longer uses. He thanks God for this second chance to reach paradise as a clean and sober fighter.

Part Three

Zakia, Laila thinks from a chair in the courtyard of Taj Begum, sounds so exhausted. The signal on her cell phone is weak but the weary tone of Zakia’s voice comes across clearly. However, the important thing is she and her brothers are safe. They’ve reached the Greek island of Lesvos.
The crossing had been as dangerous as Laila had feared. The smuggler pointed to the horizon and told her children, This is the direction of Greece. Follow the moon and stay to your left. Then he was gone.
Zakia, Murtaza and Mustafa sat in a raft for eighteen hours with thirty-seven people mostly from Syria. Laila spoke once to Zakia during the crossing. Don’t call me, a sobbing Zakia chastised her mother. Water is coming into the raft and we have to concentrate if we want to live! As they neared Lesvos, Greek fishermen approached and followed them in. The fishermen pulled the raft onto a beach and Zakia and her brothers got out soaking wet and aching with cold. They followed some Syrians to a police station where they registered as refugees and got bus tickets to a camp in Athens where Zakia called her mother.
There are so many refugees, Zakia tells her. Even the parks are full. Laila advises her to find a church but the churches, too, are full, Zakia says, and a simple room costs ten euro. Greek families brought water, food and pallets for the refugees to sleep on, but because so many people were in need, the throng became unruly with men and women grabbing what they could like dogs fighting over scraps and in the confusion Zakia and her brothers lost what food they’d been given. After the crowd had settled, a woman with a baby gave them some bread.
The behavior of the other refugees infuriates Laila. She did not raise her children to snatch food from others and as a consequence of their good behavior they now have nothing but bread. At least they reached Greece. Zakia promises to call again once she knows where they’ll travel next.
Noticing the gardeners watching her, Laila asks for tea. Ali hurries off while the others get back to work. All of them know about her children. They think she is rich because she owns a restaurant and sent her children to Europe. They don’t know she bought the restaurant on credit to support the work of Mother’s House and she borrowed more money to get her children out of Afghanistan. She trusts only a few people, and she wonders about them. The belief she has money changes how people think of her, even her friends. She knows how quickly addicts can turn against her with the promise of money. Sometimes she wonders if some of the men in Mother’s House are police informers. The authorities wouldn’t have to offer them much. Maybe nothing at all. Or maybe they’d promised them drugs. The informers could tell the police who has entered Mother’s House and the police could then pass on the information to drug dealers. To what end, she doesn’t know, but just thinking about it increases her suspicion and paranoia.
In 2012, a mullah accused Laila of operating a brothel. She was an independent woman with a business. What business other than a brothel would such a woman operate? the mullah asked, preaching from a mosque. He offered one of her former clients, an eighteen-year-old named Mateen, $100 to kill Laila. On a Wednesday night, Mateen climbed the restaurant walls and crept toward the main building where Laila slept. Ali and other recovering addicts cleaning the kitchen saw Mateen’s shadow stretching across the ground and wondered, Who’s that? They called to him and he ran but the men caught him. What do you want? Money? She will help you. No, Mateen said, I wanted to kill her and then he explained the mullah’s plan. They told Mateen never to come back and let him go. In the morning, before he watered the grass, Ali told Laila what happened. It’s not safe for you here at night, he told her.
Laila had wept at the mention of Mateen’s name. Of all people! She’d grown close to him at Mother’s House. He would hug her and sometimes curl up at her feet to sleep like a puppy. He’d had a difficult life. A man who’d quarreled with his father shot his parents when he was a boy. He lived with relatives who felt obligated to care for him but did not love him.
Considering his life and his time in the program, Laila composed herself with the thought that he was sick, an addict who had resumed using. He no longer was himself, not the clean and sober Mateen of whom she had grown so fond. He needed money for drugs. She’s not seen him and would say nothing to him if she did. She has no doubt he feels shame for his actions.
Had he found work, Mateen might have ignored the mullah’s offer. Addicts think detox is bad, but detox is nothing compared to leaving Mother’s House without a job. Laila asks shopkeepers to hire her clients but few people have a position to offer, or they do but don’t want to bring on an addict. So many people tell her, This is a mistake, your helping these people. They aren’t good. You should dig a hole and burn them. They’re of no use. Yes, you are right, Laila agrees, to avoid an argument. She moves on and appeals to the next shopkeeper.
One graduate of Mother’s House now owns his own shop and sells clothes and shoes yet he remains as needy as he was his first day in the program. He came to the restaurant one afternoon and asked for money. C’mon, Laila told him, you should help me. You have a good job. No, the man insisted. You’re the mother, I’m one of your children, help me. No, Laila said firmly. I have my own children. Stop being greedy or you can go back to your real mother if you need so much help.

As Laila waits at the restaurant for Zakia to call again, the recovering addicts at Mother’s House gather together after a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and kill time before lunch, leaning against the walls or sprawling on the floor, hands behind their heads. One man holds a radio and adjusts the dial but all he gets is static. Those around him stare at a TV, mesmerized by a wiggling white line across the screen. They all know about Laila’s children. More than a few of them made a similar trek to Europe only to be deported.
– I was in Copenhagen when I started using. I was twenty-two. I went through Iran, Turkey, Greece, Italy, Germany and France. It was 2005. There was too much fighting in Afghanistan. War, man, I didn’t want to die.
– I started using in Iran. My boss invited me to his home and gave me hash and opium. First only on Fridays and then later every day for seven years. When I returned to Afghanistan to be with my family, I used crack and crystal. I had a brother in the U.K. and I lived with him for seven months. I didn’t use then but after I was deported in 2011, I started using again this time with heroin and crack, too. I was depressed. I don’t want to be this way. I have a plan. I want to get back to the U.K. and work construction with my brother.
– I’m waiting to leave at a good time. I can’t live here forever. My family is in Pakistan but they don’t want me back. I got in a fight there and stabbed a guy. He was in a hospital for five months and twenty days. My family paid his expenses.
– We all want to leave but how many of us will do so successfully?
– Maybe Mother’s children will help us once they’re settled.
– If they make it, inshallah.
– Inshallah.
– My family is in Iran. My brother is in the U.K. I’ll go to Iran or the U.K., you’ll see.
– My family is in Pakistan. I’ll go to Pakistan.
– My mother came here from Iran. Where she lives I will live.
– In Denmark, drugs were really easy to find. I was working in a casino and a cop turned me in. I had been living there illegally for five months. There’re no rules in Denmark, man, it’s real free. I tried going back and made it to Turkey but caught got and was deported again.
– We all are thinking of leaving. If we stay, we’ll use again. There’s nothing here. It’s no life under the bridge. You know, when you’re high the time passes and you feel happy but when you’re not high, the time passes slowly. When you’re high, you close your eyes and when you open them again the day is gone.
– I quit once four months ago. I had no job and started using again.
– In Denmark, if you have work, you won’t use.
– I spent four years in Iran and never used any drugs. Just worked. It kept me busy. Eighteen months ago I was clean. I lost my job, started using. My family asked me for money but I had nothing.
– I worked for a bodyguard. He got high for sex.
– Our families, if we tell them we’re clean, they don’t trust us. They don’t accept us and we end up on the streets.
– We should be given jobs and if we use again, the employer can behead us.
– For me, I had a tailor shop, I made good money and I still used. I used for enjoyment. It’s about self-control. If I’m too happy or sad, I use.
– I can give the example of my uncle. His wife left him and his heart broke and he started using, begging and stealing. For me, it started when I saw a friend shot and killed. His name was Hamid. I haven’t forgotten. I fell down and prayed to God to help me forget but I cannot.
– I was in Iran with four friends. We were riding motorcycles and had an accident and three of my friends died. Ten days later, I started using again.
– I had a friend who got into a fight at a martial arts club in Kabul. The other guy lost. I’ll kill you, this guy said. My friend thought he was joking but the next day, this guy shot my friend. My friend’s brother killed him and his mother, too.
– We live in our own worlds of trouble. We don’t know anything outside of our lives. I didn’t know we had an election. Now, I see we have a new president, Ghani.
– We’re all disappointed. That’s why we want to leave Afghanistan.
Mohammad Nadir listens to the conversation but offers no comments of his own. He does not share the uncertainty and self-doubt of the other addicts. When he has the money, he will return to Syria. He has no doubts about his future. He assumes that he will have to go through training again in Iran since he has been away for so long, about thirty days of drills using a Kalashnikov and RPGs. He will have nothing to do with recruits who fight only for a salary. Those fighters he will not risk his life to save. But the holy warriors, he will die for.
From his first time in Syria, he remembers men who never mastered the most basic concepts of being a fighter. After one month, they still couldn’t hit a target or assemble a gun. You’re too nervous, Nadir told them. You’re thinking of what’s to come. Think only of today. What’s to come will be here soon enough and it will not be so bad. The first ten to fifteen minutes of your first battle, you’ll be scared but then you’ll get used to the noise and after you fire your first bullet all fear will leave you. The recruits agreed to relax but despite his encouragement, their fear continued to betray them and they were sent home.
Those days seem like a long time ago. Nadir wonders if American jets continue to bomb ISIS. Their attacks helped Assad’s fighters. He remembers his commanders ordering withdrawals while the Americans pummeled ISIS positions, supporting Assad’s troops whether they meant to or not. No one talked about the Americans much. They were fighting a holy war and the Americans were infidels but everyone appreciated American bombs.

On the second floor of Taj Begum, Laila and three women sit in a room stitching blue waitress uniforms with white trim. She feeds cloth into a sewing machine while cradling her cell phone against her left ear and shoulder. She waits for Zakia to pick up. No answer. She lets the phone slide to her lap and curses. The other women chuckle. Her children left Greece the previous night, she tells them. She wonders now if they’ll make it to Germany or stop somewhere in between.
– You’re sewing it upside down, she snaps at one of the women. You have to start from the other side.
Holland or Sweden, which one is better? Sweden, Laila thinks. She has heard Holland treats refugees well. Maybe her children should stop there. Or Norway. Friends have told her good things about Norway. Perhaps Norway. But doesn’t it get very cold?
A fight between government forces and the Taliban the previous day occupies her mind. Just a few hours north of Kabul, the Taliban took control of Kunduz, the sixth largest city in Afghanistan with a population of nearly 300,000, for twenty-four hours. The government regained control but what does that mean? Nothing. If it lost control once, can it not lose control again? She can envision the Taliban capturing Kabul. They did it before. She does not believe ISIS is in Afghanistan. What people call ISIS is the Taliban under a different name.
– What about you, Mother, Zakia had asked her before she and her brothers left Kabul.
– I’ll be fine, Laila assured her, but really she does not know. She can’t say what the future holds. She won’t go. Her life is here. Maybe she’ll fight. Maybe it will all come down to that.
Laila feeds more cloth into the sewing machine, glancing at her phone as if willing Zakia to call. She looks at the women seated around her. Their husbands are addicts. She knows the women think she should set up a house for them. She has explained why she can’t but still they expect her to. She has an upcoming meeting with the minister of health to discuss anti-narcotics strategy. She will tell him addicted women need help as much as the men. A waste of breath, she suspects, but she’ll mention it anyway.

At Mother’s House, the men listen to updates about Kunduz on TV.
– What kind of police force can be defeated by the enemy? Nadir asks. If I had been there, I’d have killed twenty Taliban with my long rifle.
It was not a defeat but a betrayal. How can a small number of Taliban take a city without the cooperation of the Afghan police and army? Sometimes in Syria, Assad’s forces took villages from ISIS and ISIS would pay the villagers to let them return. I think the same thing happened in Kunduz.
– I fought with the Americans in 2012 in Kunduz, says Ali Raza, a thirty-year-old addict new to the program. We fought for two days and two nights. I myself destroyed three guns. The Afghan National Army were good fighters then.
However, Ali continues, the Taliban were just as good. He fought with them before he joined the ANA. He had no choice because he grew up in Kandahar where the Taliban were strongest. On his fifteenth birthday, a Taliban commander came to his house and demanded one child for the insurgency, or his father could pay $140 as a protection fee. Ali was the oldest child and the only boy. His father turned him over to the commander. Ali knew this day could come as he had seen the same thing happen to some of his friends. Still, it was all he could do to prevent himself from crying. His mother wept and he did not look at her as the commander led him away.
From 1999 to 2001 he worked with the Taliban as a mechanic. He learned how to drive Jeeps, trucks and abandoned Soviet tanks. His commander was a short man with a heavy black beard. He had one good leg and a prosthetic leg. He was well connected with members of the Taliban government. He did not like to eat alone and often ate with his fighters.
One day while he was patching a flat tire, Ali saw his commander take the guns of six prisoners from a Pashtun tribe that opposed the Taliban. The commander showed them into a room and through a window Ali watched him serve them tea. Then he took them outside again and lined them up against a wall. He took out his PK and faced them.
– I have to kill you so others know if they fight me I will kill them, the commander said. He then shot each one in the head.
Seeing his commander kill the six Pashtuns disturbed Ali. In his dreams, he saw blood spurt from their heads like water from a fountain. The dead asked him, How could you watch us die and do nothing? He had no good answer and escaped them only by waking up. He smoked heroin and opium and while he was high he felt no need to respond to their questions, felt no responsibility to them or anyone. Some Taliban commanders owned poppy fields along the borders of Pakistan and Iran, and drugs were always available.
After 9/11, the commander told Ali and other fighters that the Americans were coming to kill Osama bin Laden. Should we turn him over, he asked? No! the men shouted. When they heard that Pakistan was cooperating with the U.S., his commander stopped talking about bin Laden. Instead, he asked his men if they should surrender. Never! they shouted.
– That’s right, we can’t surrender even though our friends have deserted us, the commander agreed.
Then he left for Helmand province and never returned and Ali’s unit capitulated to American forces about a month later. Rumors circulated that the Americans killed the commander and examined his organs because they wanted to see what made him such a good officer. Ali did not believe these stories but the commander’s nephew swore they were true.
In November 2001, Ali’s unit received orders from a Taliban commander in Kunduz to attack Mazaar-e-Sharif, a city in the north. His battalion flew from Herat in the western part of the country to Kunduz, about 105 miles east of Mazaar. Taliban commanders divided their fighters in two groups. The first group entered Mazaar but Abdul Rashid Dostum, a general allied with the American-led military coalition, annihilated the Taliban forces. He then surrounded the remaining group of Taliban fighters to which Ali was attached. Instead of killing them, Dostum ordered the 150 fighters into metal shipping containers pocked with bullet holes and locked them inside without food or water.
The heat drove the prisoners mad. They screamed and wept and prayed and clawed at one another to reach the bullet holes for air. The fighters remained in the containers for three days before they were shipped to Sheberghan prison, about a ten-minute drive away. By the time the containers arrived, dozens of prisoners had died. Ali does not remember being removed from the container. He woke in a prison cell with a headache from heat and dehydration. About two weeks later, the Red Crescent provided medical care. When he thinks about that time, Ali does not feel anger at Dostum because the Taliban did the same thing. He himself had put mujahideen fighters in shipping containers in which they later died. Dostum had more humanity than the Taliban. He did not dispatch the containers as far as the Taliban had theirs. Fewer Taliban prisoners died under Dostum than mujahideen died under the Taliban. Ali feels grateful for Dostum’s generosity.
Ali remained in Sheberghan for six months. After his release in 2002, he returned to his family in Kandahar. His parents told him that one of his cousins, a Taliban fighter, beheaded another cousin who had joined the new Afghan police force. I can’t trust you if you kill members of my own family, Ali told a Taliban commander who asked him to join the resistance to the Americans. I can’t even trust my own cousin now. He left Kandahar for Kabul and switched his allegiance to the newly formed Afghan National Army. He was stationed to Ghazni and although he was no longer with the Taliban, people still wanted to kill him. There was always a reason to light up a pipe.
None of the addicts speak when Ali finishes his story. The misfortunes of their lives don’t compare to being locked in a shipping container. Nadir, however, is not as impressed.
– I have been in jail, too, in Iran, he tells Ali.
When Iranians made fun of Afghans, Nadir fought them because he was half Afghan. One time, a woman was being teased by two Iranians. Nadir was in a taxi and he told the driver to stop and he got out and brawled with the men harassing the woman. Then four more Iranians joined the fight and one man stabbed Nadir in his right shoulder. He fought on and the Iranians ran away. At a hospital, a doctor examined his shoulder and told him to look away. The doctor then pulled the knife out. Nadir fainted but when he woke he felt fine.
Ali and the other men look at one another. A few have trouble keeping a straight face. Let Nadir talk, their smirks suggest. Sure, we don’t believe him, but we all must live together.
Nadir, giving no indication that he senses their doubt, launches into another story. This time the Iranian police stopped him when he was drunk. You’ve been drinking, you dirty Afghan, one of the officers yelled at him, and the second officer slapped him. Nadir punched him in the nose and both officers fled. As Nadir chased them into an alley, an officer in a parked police car shot at him and Nadir stopped running and raised his hands. The officers arrested him and shoved him into the car. In the front passenger seat sat the policeman he had punched, blood spilling from his broken nose. Officers beat Nadir at the station but he was so drunk he didn’t feel any pain until the next morning. A judge asked him, Why did you punch an officer? I thought he was a thief, Nadir lied.
– Well, you hit a policeman and broke his nose. You have to go jail.
Nadir served two months and twenty days.
– That’s my story, he says.
His listeners don’t respond. Perhaps he did punch a policeman. Perhaps not. Who can say? Who will listen to their stories when they leave Mother’s House? Who will care about their lives? Will they see one another again? How will they spend their time?
– What else? Ali asks, and Nadir launches into another story.

As the addicts entertain one another with their tales, Laila holds a party at Taj Begum to celebrate Eid and raise money for Mother’s House. More than 150 guests fill the courtyard, milling about the tables and drinking fruit juice and tea, the minister of health among them. Laila pulls him aside and asks him to establish a home for addicted women. The minister says he likes the idea but won’t make a commitment. It’s a matter of money and priorities, he explains. Laila suggests he speak with the minister of commerce. He could ask businesses to contribute money.
– In Islam, she reminds him, the prophet says the money you have that is not necessary for your survival should be given to the poor. Ask businesses to give me their extra money for a house for women.
The minister offers her a thin smile but promises nothing. Laila suggest they drive to the Pol-e-Sokhta bridge so she can show him where addicts live. The minister laughs and then offers another thin smile.
After an hour of mingling, Laila steps behind a lectern and asks everyone to be seated.
– Afghanistan is facing drugs, insecurity and unemployment, she says, the microphone crackling, interrupting her with volleys of static and hisses. We as citizens have a responsibility to everyone, including addicts, both men and women. No one but ourselves can help one another. The government is very weak, the private sector weak. Let this night, let this place become a place where a movement can start to strengthen our country by caring for the least among us.
She receives a strong round of applause, including from the minister of health, but afterward, with the applause nothing more than a fading memory, she sees him walking to the front gate without even saying good night.
Around eleven o’clock, when everyone has left, when napkins and glasses litter tables and the empty chairs form vague shapes in the darkness and the noise of idle chatter has given way to the hum of bugs, Laila stands to one side of the patio and considers what if anything the night has accomplished. Little, she concludes. Her guests were happy to talk about any problem she mentioned but they had no intention of dirtying their hands. Many of them did offer to make a donation. Today or tomorrow, they told her. So many promises. She’ll see how well they follow through. Others saw no reason to give her anything because they assumed donors supported her work. They looked surprised when she told them she used her own money and what little friends gave her. On Facebook, Laila posts appeals, Give to Mother’s House, and people she does not know accuse her of begging. Well, she admits, she is.
She turned off her phone during the party and of course Zakia had called and left a message. Good news: She and her brothers had reached Vienna by spending all their money on a taxi that drove them from Athens through Serbia and into Austria. They’d wanted to take a bus but the driver wanted to see their visas, which of course they didn’t have. In Vienna, they got into a shoving match with other refugees and lost their place in a food line.
In her message, Zakia promised to call again. They will need more money, Laila knows. Where will she get it? How many countries lie between Austria and Switzerland and how much will it cost to get there? Laila waits as if the noises of the night will provide an answer. Then her phone rings. She answers. Not Zakia but the smuggler who took them out of Afghanistan. He wants to know if her children reached Europe. Laila ignores his question.
– Do you know anyone who can send my children money in Austria? You do? Can you give me their number? Thank you.
She hangs up. The smuggler will call back with a contact. She hates waiting. What if he forgets to call? Or was lying to get her off the phone?
Her phone rings again. Laila snatches it up, expecting the smuggler, but instead she hears the voice of a woman she doesn’t know. Her husband is addicted to opium. Can you help? she asks. Come here, we can talk, Laila tells her. After we talk, I’ll give you the address to Mother’s House. Before I accept your husband, I need to see you to know if you’re serious and if you’re willing to kick him out of your house. Then he’ll feel vulnerability and see the consequences of his addiction. The woman says nothing. Call me again when you’re ready, Laila tells her.
She no sooner hangs up when her phone rings again. It’s Zakia. I talked to the smuggler, Laila tells her, and once I hear from him about how to send you money, I’ll let you know. Ask people around you how they get their money. Obviously they are getting money. Do they know anybody there we can send money to? You have to try to answer these questions as much as I do.
She has many more questions she wants to ask. How are you holding up? Where are you staying? But the connection is poor and Zakia doesn’t want to run low on minutes. Laila sets the phone down, half expecting it to ring again. When it doesn’t, she closes her eyes.
– I should sleep, she tells herself, but knows she won’t.

At Mother’s House, Mohammad Nadir sits with Ali Raza, the former Taliban soldier, eating bread and fruit. A man near them, a one-time police officer, comments that he will never leave Mother’s House. It has food, showers, a toilet. He won’t go into the world and be a donkey again to everyone who thinks they can tell him what to do. He refuses to tell the other addicts his name. He trusts no one, believes people are looking for him.
Nadir does not question his fears. He has probably earned them, who knows? Nadir doesn’t like being around crazy people. He worries he could become like them. He’s had bad dreams that distract him. He talks to himself sometimes, responding to the words of dead men. When he returns to Syria, the nightmares will go away. He’ll be fighting and the images in his head will be real and he’ll no longer remember bad things because there’ll be nothing to remember. The bad things will be all around him, leaving other things, good things, like his time at Mother’s House, left over for his dreams. He just needs money to reach Iran. He hasn’t heard from his father. Maybe he’ll ask Mother.
– Do you remember your first time in combat? Nadir asks Ali.
– Yes, of course, Ali says. The Americans used heavy weapons that could fire from behind their lines. Taliban fighters died, their bodies in pieces. I wanted to run but if I was caught, I’d have been shot. If you so much as duck, you’re not a warrior, my commander told me, so I looked straight ahead, my neck stiff with tension, and chewed tobacco. I’d rather have smoked but the flare of a cigarette might have given away our position.
Nadir nods. In his first fight, he entered a house and shot at an ISIS fighter. He missed and the man raised his hands and Nadir turned him over to his commander. His commander passed him on to an Iranian officer. Later that day, his commander gave Nadir a box. Inside lay a pair of amputated hands. Here is what’s left of your prisoner, his commander said. Nadir dreamed of those hands for a long time. He knew men who, after their first battle, never returned to their units. I won’t come back, they said. They stepped over bodies and kept walking until Nadir no longer saw them. He cleaned his weapon and stayed.
He remembers the first time a friend died, Khalid. He had been shooting video with his cell phone during a lull in fighting outside Damascus when Khalid raised his head to watch Nadir. Get down, Khalid, I’m filming, Nadir said, and then Khalid’s head exploded from a sniper’s bullet and Nadir dropped his phone and began screaming and then he went crazy and fired an RPG in the direction of the shooter. Gunfire pummeled Nadir’s position and someone shouted, Get down! and grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked him to the ground.
– When I was shooting, I told myself it was bullets killing people, not me, Ali says. What do you think?
– I think you and your bullets were killing people together, Nadir says.
– When I was fighting with the government of Karzai, after we captured a Taliban fighter, we’d take them to Bagram and beat them. I beat them myself with my gun. We hated them because their bombs killed our friends. We beat them with pipes and with the butts of our rifles. One time we had a Taliban commander. We kept him prisoner for a long time. Whenever we heard about a dead comrade, we beat him. I can’t blame bullets or anything else for that. I beat him.
– I didn’t harm prisoners, Nadir says. I just killed them. I told them, Face the wall, and then I shot them and released them from this life not with one or two bullets but with a complete magazine, but I never touched them. Once I had a hostage who said he had a key. He said it was the key to heaven. I told him to keep his key and shot him but he did not die. I said, OK, open the door to paradise and I shot him again. I could never beat anyone.
– Let’s talk about something else, Ali says. I don’t want to fight again.
– Where will you go after you finish here? Kandahar? Will the Taliban recruit you again?
– They will try, of course, Ali says.
– Will you use?
– I don’t know. I am confused.
– I went outside yesterday for the first time since I’ve been here. I called home. I wanted to be alone when I talked to my family. My father was out. I told my mother, I’m not addicted anymore. Are you coming home? she asked. Not yet, I told her. I’m going to Iran and then Syria.

The next morning, Laila speaks with Zakia. Through a Facebook friend, she has found an Afghan family in Vienna willing to give her children a room for no charge.They can shower and eat. Zakia says they’ve not bathed since they left Turkey and have eaten only what food strangers have given them.
– I will send you money, Zakia, but spend it carefully.
– Do you think we’re here for sightseeing? Zakia snaps, shocking Laila into silence. She knows Zakia is frustrated and tired, but Laila hasn’t slept either and her nerves feel brittle as sticks. She wishes Zakia could see beyond her stress and show a little appreciation. Afghans respect family and never talk to their parents the way Zakia just did. Is this the behavior of Western children? What will living in Europe do to Zakia and her brothers? Will their personalities change?
Some sleepless nights have been like one hundred nights for Laila. Where were her children? Were they all right? She saw a video on Facebook recently of Afghan migrants in Germany. Two girls were raped, a pregnant woman was shot and an eight-year-old boy jumped from a car and was in a coma. All Laila wanted was to get her children out of Afghanistan and to be safe. Did she make the right decision?
She gets off the phone and decides to visit Mother’s House. Some of the men like Mohammad Nadir are approaching their thirty-day mark and she needs to know what they intend to do. She’ll let them stay longer if they have a plan but they can’t just linger. Nadir, she knows, intends to leave for Syria. To get sober only to die in a war not his own makes little sense to her. She wishes he would change his mind. But like her own children, she has to let him decide for himself.
As she prepares to leave, a man calls and asks Laila if she has a room he can use for sex. I don’t provide what you want, she tells him. If you’re an addict, you can come here but for no other reason. I heard you have prostitutes, the man insists. Laila hangs up but he calls back demanding she provide him with a prostitute. I don’t have any girls but if you have a wife, a sister or a mother and send them to me, the next time someone like you calls I’ll provide them your family. The man hangs up.
Just because I’m a woman running a business, Laila mutters to herself. She wishes she could just shut her phone off but she can’t. Zakia might call.

Just as Laila reaches Mother’s House, Zakia calls again. She and her brothers are leaving Austria for Germany on a train. They’ve decided not to stay in Austria despite the offer of a free room. Tired of traveling, they want to finish their journey. Maybe they’ll go on to Sweden, maybe not. They’ll see. Zakia doesn’t know when she’ll contact her mother again.
– Call when you can, Laila urges.
Standing by her car, she stares at her feet. Germany. Why not push on to Sweden? Laila can’t make these choices. Her children are the ones traveling, not her. She takes a deep breath and locks the car. Another deep breath and then she walks down the dirt alley to Mother’s House and rings the bell. Nadir lets her in.
– How are you?
– I am good, Mother
– Just for today, stay clean. Then tomorrow, you can look back on today and say I have another day of success.
– Yes, Mother, that’s what I do.
Pointing to a new client, he says, This man wanted to escape this morning. I stopped him.
– No, no, the man insists. I thank you for this place.
– Never say you’re going unless I tell you or I’ll beat you, Laila says.
– I have no complaints, the man maintains.
Another new client complains about how cold he gets when Nadir hoses him down with cold water.
– Wrap yourself in a blanket, Laila advises him, and drink hot tea until 4 o’clock but not after or you’ll be going to the toilet all night.
– We’re not getting as much food, another man complains. I never have a full stomach.
– Accept what we have, Nadir interjects before Laila can respond. You’re here for treatment, not to party. I have been here almost thirty days. I don’t complain. I work hard to stay clean. Follow my example. Do as I do and you will stay clean.
– Don’t show off, Laila cautions Nadir. Don’t say I so much. Whenever you say I it shows you have too much pride.
Nadir stares at Laila, a furious look on his face for being reprimanded in front of others, especially new clients.
– You’ll give me respect and do as I advise, she tells him, returning his angry look.
He holds her stare.
– I’m going to Syria, he tells her.
– When?
– The end of this week. Money or no money. I’ll walk to Iran if I must.
– I have my own children to worry about. Don’t make me worry about you.
– I’m sorry, Mother.
– I wish you wouldn’t.
– Mother, it’s all I know.

While Laila visits Mother’s House, the maintenance man, Ali, finishes watering the grass at Taj Begum as he does every morning. A thirteen-year-old boy, Rohalluh Hussini, follows him, unsnagging the hose from chairs and tables. Rohalluh has worked for Laila for about a year. One Friday night, he saw people outside the restaurant and asked them for money. He returned the next day and the day after that and the day after that and got to know the regular customers. Then he began washing Laila’s car. After two weeks Laila told him, Come inside, and he began working for her.
– Why do so few people come to eat here anymore? Rohalluh asks.
Ali shrugs.
– The restaurant is not doing well.
– Why?
How do you discuss business with a boy? Ali asks himself. He tries explaining that jobs are a problem. So many NGOs have left Afghanistan because of the violence. The fighting in Kunduz has only made the problem worse. The NGOs had hired many Afghans but now they’ve left and people no longer have work and they, too, are leaving Afghanistan. Who goes out to eat when they intend to escape into Europe? Even Mother has sent her children away. When he turns on the news, all Ali hears about is Kunduz and whether the Taliban will retake it again and will Kabul be next? Most of Ali’s friends, even those who still use drugs, have fled the country.
Ali thinks he’ll stay and rejoin the army. Better than being jobless or leaving without any money. He can’t work for Mother forever. She allows him a place to sleep and gives him food but she does not pay him. In the military, he’d have a salary and respect but of course the military would have its problems, too. The stress of being shot at and of losing friends, that does something to a man. Commanders provided him with opium so he would not dwell on death. Once he got used to it, opium became part of his routine. If he ran out of opium, his commander gave him Tramadol, a form of speed. The drug made him feel awake and strong.
– If I had money I’d escape to Iran, Ali tells Rohalluh.
– Afghanistan is my country, Rohalluh says. We should stay and die here. I want to go to university and learn something.
– What you say is good but you can’t always find the job you want. Whatever door you knock on, you get a no and after a while you feel hopeless. You’re too young to imagine failure or the future. You don’t know if you’ll find a job or get in school. You are young and eager and ignorant. You don’t know what it means to go hungry.
– Everyone has his own ideas, Rohalluh says. You talk from your stomach. I talk with my mind.
Ali smiles. He won’t argue with a boy. And who knows? Rohalluh may get lucky. Luck is for the young. Endurance is for the old. Most recovering addicts like Ali have no family. If they stay, it is to join the army or fight in Syria. He has considered doing that, too. He knows it’s not a good thing to fight for a country not your own but for the money, why not? He has spoken to Nadir about this. Nadir told him ISIS is very strong.
– If you only fight for a salary, Nadir told him, you will not go to Paradise.
– Then I will stay here and eat, Ali said.
He doesn’t want to leave Laila. She counts on him and he likes being needed. The restaurant walls keep the world and all its problems far off. Ali enjoys this sanctuary but he can’t live behind these walls forever. Yes, rejoining the army makes the most sense. If not now, next week, or maybe in two or three weeks. At some point he will tell Mother goodbye. He’ll walk out with nothing but his clothes, his plans to reenlist and his recovery from drugs but not war. How can he do anything else in a country that has been at war since the 1979 invasion of the Soviet Union? War is as addictive as opium. He has grown used to it. When he was in the army, his Kalashnikov was as much a part of him as his arms and legs. When he fired at the enemy, his whole body shook with anticipation. He’d put in earplugs, find a target, aim, press the trigger and the Kalashnikov jerked in his hands like a living thing. So much pressure. M-16, Kalashnikov, whatever weapon was available he used. With an M-40 he could blow up cars and houses. He marveled at its power and how that power surged through him with every shot.
He would ask hostages, Why are you with the Taliban? They’d say, Why are you with the Americans? I fight for my country, Ali said. We don’t want America to take our land, the prisoners told him. We fight for our country, too. When Ali tried to help villagers with food, many refused to take it. No, it belongs to the Americans. We don’t want it. Ali dismissed these people as ignorant. To refuse food made no sense to him.
He turns to Rohalluh.
– You go to school and I’ll rejoin the army, he tells him.
– Yes, Rohalluh says. It’s better than leaving.
10
When she returns to Taj Begum later that morning, Laila notices Ali and Rohalluh talking. She raises a hand and waves. She knows Ali may return to the army. She does not like that idea any more than she does Nadir fighting in Syria. She’ll miss them. Young men at war who will probably return to her addicted again if they come back at all. They should all leave for Europe. Friends tell her fighting will start in Kabul. It is only a matter of time. She hopes not. If the war comes to Kabul, she will stay. She has Mother’s House and the addicts in her care, her children not by blood but by commitment, and she won’t abandon them. It’s in her nature to resist.
She prays her children have reached some good place by now. Are they in Germany or still traveling on a train? She listens to Ali watering the lawn. The sun shines and she sees mini rainbows above the wet grass. She closes her eyes and waits for Zakia to call.
Laila’s children reached Germany. As of this writing, they live in a refugee camp in Stuttgart. Mohammad Nadir has not been heard from since he left Mother’s House in October 2015.

J. Malcolm Garcia is the author of The Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul (Beacon, 2009), What Wars Leave Behind: The Faceless and the Forgotten (University of Missouri Press, 2014), Without a Country: The Untold Story of America’s Deported Veterans (Skyhorse Press, 2017), Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron’s Ghost: A Memoir of Friendship, Family and a Life Writing Stories (Skyhorse Press, 2018); and most recently, Fruit of All My Grief: Lives In the Shadows of the American Dream (Seven Stories Press, 2019). His work has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Best American Essays.

AQR 2020AQR Vol. 37, No. 1 & 2, Summer/Fall 2020Author IndexSpecial FeatureNarrative EssayJ. Malcolm GarciaG

Kate TWS

SPECIAL FEATURE

A Novella-length Narrative Essay Mother’s House by J. Malcolm Garcia

MOTHER’S HOUSE by J. Malcolm Garcia

DIENER by Teresa Milbrodt

CHAFF AND GRAIN TOGETHER by A. E. Payne