We looked down at the darkening beach and at Nazeer, sitting straight-backed beside his little fire. One of my small victories over Nazeer, when I was still weak and dependent on his strength, had been with language. I'd learned phrases in his language faster than he'd learned them in mine. My fluency had forced him to communicate with me in Urdu most of the time. When he tried to speak English, the words came out in awkward, truncated couplets, top-heavy with meanings and tottering on small feet of blunt sense. I taunted him often about the crudity of his English, exaggerating my confusion and demanding that he repeat himself, that he stumble from one cryptic phrase to another until he cursed me in Urdu and Pashto, and withdrew into silence.
Yet, in truth, his scissored English was always eloquent, and often a cadenced poetry. It was abbreviated, to be sure, but that was because the superfluous had been hacked from it, and what remained was a pure and precise language of his own-something more than slogans and less than proverbs. Against my will, and unknown to him, I'd begun to repeat some of his phrases. He said to me once, while grooming his grey mare, All horse good, all man not good. For years afterward, whenever I encountered cruelty and treachery and other kinds of selfishness, especially my own, I found myself repeating Nazeer's phrase: All horse good, all man not good. And on that night, holding Karla's heart against my own as we watched his fire dance on the sand, I remembered another of his English iterations. No love, is no life, he used to say. No love, is no life.
I held Karla as if holding her could heal me, and we didn't make love until night lit the last star in our wide window of sky. Her hands were kisses on my skin. My lips unrolled the curled leaf of her heart. She breathed in murmurs, guiding me, and I spoke rhythm to her, echoing my needs. Heat joined us, and we enclosed ourselves with touch and taste and perfumed sounds. Reflected on the glass, we were silhouettes, transparent images-mine full of fire from the beach, and hers full of stars. And at last, at the end, those clear reflections of our selves melted, merged, and fused together.
It was good, so good, but she never said she loved me.
"I love you," I whispered, the words moving from my lips to hers.
"I know you do," she replied, rewarding me and pitying me. "I know you do."
"I don't have to go on this trip, you know."
"Why are you going?"
"I'm not sure. I feel... a sense of loyalty to him, to Khaderbhai, and I still owe him, in a way. But it's more than that. It's... have you ever had the feeling-about anything at all-that your whole life is kind of a prelude, or something- like everything you've ever done has been leading you up to this one point, and you knew, somehow, that one day you'd get there?
I'm not explaining it well, but-"
"I know what you mean," she interrupted quickly. "And yes, I have felt like that. I did something, once, that was my whole life- even the years I haven't lived yet-in one second."
"What was it?"
"We were talking about you," she corrected me, avoiding my eyes.
"About you, not having to go to Afghanistan."
"Well," I smiled, "like I said, I don't have to go."
"Then don't," she said flatly, turning her head to look at the night and the sea. "Do you want me to stay?"
"I want you to be safe. And... I want you to be free."
"That's not what I meant."
"I know it's not," she sighed.
I felt the small stir of restlessness in her body, against mine, that said she wanted to move. I didn't move.
"I'll stay," I said quietly, fighting my heart, and knowing it was a mistake, "if you tell me you love me."
She closed her mouth, and pressed her lips together so tightly that they formed a white scar. Slowly, cell by cell, it seemed, her body drew back into itself all that she'd given to me a few moments before.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked.
I didn't know why. Maybe it was the cold turkey, what I'd been through in the last months, and the new life I felt I'd won.
Maybe it was death-Prabaker's death, and Abdullah's, and the death I secretly feared was waiting for me in Afghanistan.
Whatever the reason, it was stupid and pointless and even cruel, and I couldn't stop wanting it.
"If you say that you love me," I said again.
"I don't," she murmured, at last. I tried to stop her, with my fingertips on her mouth, but she turned her head to face me, and her voice was clearer and strong. "I don't. I can't. I won't."
When Nazeer returned from the beach, coughing and clearing his voice loudly to announce his arrival, we were already showered and dressed. He smiled-such a rare thing, that smile-as he looked from me, to her, and back again. But the cold sorrow in our eyes drove the downward curves of his face into willow wreaths of disappointment, and he looked away.
