LITMIR.BIZ

      Seven months later, families were allowed to go back. We rode together in a convoy of U.S. Marines. Those men looked indestructible, and yet I knew—we all knew—that the fight in our city had been their hardest yet. I worried for my fellow Fallujahns who stayed behind. We moved slowly along the road and part of me wondered if the convoy was a farce, if the Fallujah I had always known would be completely erased from the Earth.

      It took almost fourteen hours to re-enter the city. A fence encircled the perimeter with only three secured gates for thousands of Fallujahns. But these were my people! I felt certain we could thrive again. In line together, we prayed for a new time of peace. I could hardly stand the waiting. I wanted to see my beloved city again, the city of mosques. I could almost taste our famous kabobs and hear vendors singing their prices into the streets. The only blessing while we waited was reuniting with friends we hadn’t seen since the invasion. Malik the butcher. Hakim the street vendor. Uday the chai boy. Little slices of our neighborhood returning home like so many migrating birds. Almost as many were missing: Mohammed, Jamail, Abida the barber with the funny Western moustache.

      Finally, we neared the gate. I peered through a ticket window and spotted half a dozen soldiers and shelf after shelf of hardware. It sounded like a swarm of electronic flies, beeping and humming in a generator-powered cacophony. The Marines took our daughters first, and pressed their tiny fingertips onto a curious electronic pad. Then they took profile photos and bantered with a translator about our names and street address. Next, they scanned our eyes and turned the images into code. Finally, they led us, exhausted and thirsty, over to a waiting area along the fence. Already, elders fainted in the sun. When the Marines tried to help, their boss came out and hollered at them to stop.

      Thirty minutes later, we received biometric badges. “Welcome to the 21st Century,” the Marine said. A translator repeated in Arabic. “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. These identification cards can’t be misplaced. They’re your only pass for this gate. They give you permission to enter your neighborhood. You’re prohibited anywhere else. If you lose your cards, you’re suspect. If you disobey the boundaries, you’re considered hostile.”

      I stuffed the cards into my breast pocket. The girls could hardly move, so I carried Salia on my back, her tiny brown legs flopping as we walked. When we got to our block, I knew immediately we should not have come. The wall surrounding our small apartment lay crushed into hunks of jagged concrete and stone. The entire roof had been cleanly peeled away, as though someone lifted jam off the top of a pastry. Crooked spires of rebar poked into the sky where our second story bedrooms used to be. I made my family wait in the street while I ducked beneath a crumbling archway and into the remains of our kitchen.

      Alone amidst the rubble, I thought about the old man from the tents at al-Hadhra, the one who couldn’t be quieted. I curled my fists and pounded, till my knuckles bled into the stone. I would have to face my family empty-handed. To tell them we had nothing, that the tents at al-Hadrha offered more than our very own home. I thrashed and kicked, and the ID cards tumbled from my pocket onto the floor. They shone brightly against the dark rubble. I could still smell the fresh plastic lining each card, a toxic omen for the new Fallujah.

      Into Pure Bronze

      Now that schools are open again and there’s government and voting, we spend our days inside reciting numbers and studying legendary Afghans: our first king, Ahmed Shah Durrani; or the martyr Massoud, an anti-Soviet fighter killed by Al Qaeda; and our latest hero, Rohollah Nikpai, Olympic Bronze Medalist in taekwondo. Kabul Stadium even has new grass in anticipation of Nikpai’s welcome party.

      Sometimes, our schoolteacher turns to the blackboard, and my friend Hadir and I thrust leopard fists into the air, saluting Nikpai. When she snaps to look at us, we sit on our hands and stare at our ledgers, pretending. We are thirteen, oldest in the class, so the other boys don’t point or tell. When the teacher turns again, we roll our eyes and snicker. The day goes faster this way, even though occasionally I feel bad for disrupting.

      Hadir knows a secret way into Kabul Stadium. He believes practicing soccer on that field will one day make him a star, just like Nikpai. Some weeks there’s a night guard, but none ever keep the job for long. Nobody wants to go near, nobody but Hadir. At first, I tell him it isn’t right. That it’s strange wanting to be so close to the dead. But he calls me sissy, which he knows I hate even more than juggling the ball by myself, so I go with him. There isn’t actually anybody buried there, but so many Afghans were tortured inside the stadium, everyone knows it’s haunted.

      At night, Hadir dribbles the ball down the alley between apartments and tosses pebbles onto the roof where my family sometimes sleeps. Once, a pebble hit my baby sister, and she had a fit, keeping my mother awake the rest of the night. “Hurry up, Pirooz!” Hadir will shout, “Let’s go!” And I’ll dash away, ignoring mother. My father works at night for the local police. Sometimes all he does is sit in a cement block building with other officers. Hadir is an orphan. We do as we please.

      Inside the stadium, row after row of bleachers form a bowl around bright green grass that glows, even in the dark. There’s nothing else in Kabul this color, “the color of prosperity,” our newspaper called it. They didn’t mention how so much blood leeched into the soil, the top foot was dug up and replaced before officials got anything to grow. Hadir and I play barefooted, kicking up soil and clumps of grass. We make long passes with the ball, panting up and down the sidelines to train both legs for well-aimed kicks. “Faster, Pirooz, faster,” Hadir calls, and together we get lost in the work of it.

      Our teacher used to wear a burqa, but now she doesn’t. I study her lips when she speaks, two plump dates that open and close in this way I can’t forget. I’ve never seen skin that looks so soft. Like you could press her lips with your fingertips and they would sink, as if into a pillow. I watch her silently and wonder. The Taliban executed teachers like her. Or sometimes, the Taliban amputated their hands. When our teacher moves up and down the aisles of the classroom, she runs her hands along the edge of each desk. I hold my breath when she comes near, imagining her wrists as puffy stumps, no hands or fingers with which to write.

      Everybody knows the Taliban used to hang body parts from the stadium goal posts as an example. I never went to see the torture, but men in my neighborhood did. “Allahu Akbar!” they would shout when they returned home from the frenzy. I heard them talking, the bloodshed they described. They fired AK47’s and danced in the streets, sometimes chattering for hours as the families on my block tried to sleep. I was tiny, four or five, but their tone made an impression on me; men’s voices echoing through the alleys, a wretched, powerful kind of laughter that I understood had nothing to do with comedy.

      Hadir often asks me to play goalie during our secret practices in Kabul Stadium. I stand in front of the repainted white goal posts that seem to float in the moonlight against the darkened stadium benches. He takes aim and kicks full strength, the leather ball slapping into my palms, against my chest, off my forehead. When I miss, I have to chase the ball to the outer edges of the field where I feel spooks trying to grab at me. Still, Hadir aims again and again, as though he can see a crowd roaring just for him all night long.

      Later, we lie on our backs and look at the star-pocked sky. Hadir plucks fistfuls of grass from the field. Each clump radiates an infused, lime light from his palms, like he’s holding an electric gem.

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