Page 182 of Whisper

“I’m going to be their teacher. Like I was your teacher.”

“I still want to be your student.” Tears rolled down Behroze’s cheeks. “I won’t run anymore, I promise. I promise to Allah, I won’t run away anymore. I will always stay at your side. Please, please just don’t send me away.”

There was a unique pain in breaking a child’s heart. A very specific anguish that shattered the soul. He felt the moon fall from the sky, felt the sun reverse its course. “You won’t be safe, Behroze.”

“I’ll do everything you say, I promise.” Behroze’s sniffles turned to sobs. “I promise, I promise.”

Dawood hung his head between his shoulders. What was right? What did a shattered child need? Distance, a life far away, safe from war? Isolated, and with a hardened heart, with no family left in the world for him? Theqalawould care for him, of course. But how dark would his heart turn? Left alone?

Heknew, he knew what that felt like.

But to bring a boy into a viper’s nest? Into a war?

Where was the worse sin?

Behroze was on the cusp of teenagerhood. Could Dawood help him cross that threshold, shape him into the man he would become? What did he know about boys becoming men? He’d had to make that journey alone, with only American television and high school to help. A million miles away, another lifetime. What could he possibly do now?

“If you come,” he said carefully, “you must never pick up a rifle. Never,ever. You are not to become a fighter, Behroze! Your jihad is of the heart! Do you understand?”

Behroze nodded, his body shaking too hard to speak. He pitched forward, collapsing into Dawood’s arms. Dawood felt his tears run down his neck, felt his sobs against his skin.

They moved out the next day, to link up with the rest of Ihsan’s fighters. They were making a press across the border, heading south.

Into Afghanistan.

Afghanistan was a faded memory to Dawood, pictures in random sequence, scattered like postcards on the floor. He remembered half moments, frames from movies that felt like another person’s life playing in half-second loops. The sounds of the drone bay. Ryan’s scowl. Helicopter blades whirring, the tremble in his bones as the helos lifted off. Kris’s laugh. The light in his eyes. The warmth of his body in their shared bed. Morning kisses tinged with coffee and exhaustion.

A blast that burned his soul. Pain, so much pain. Thirteen still, unmoving bodies on the ground.

Kris. He hadn’t moved after the blast. He hadn’t movedonce.

Dawood pushed the memories away, smearing them across his mind.

He was not that man any longer.

Those memories belonged to someone else.

Kandahar City was a reflection of the soul of Afghanistan.

The province of Kandahar was an arid, desolate waste, as if the sun wanted to blast the land from the surface of the earth. The homeland of the Taliban was a place of extremes, of blinding light and too-thin air, of choking dust and lifeless, empty horizons.

Kandahar City was a fortress, an outpost in the endless stretch of nothingness. From nothing came a harsh and brutal siege fortress, a city built upon suspicion and the distrustful gaze against outsiders. A city that had turned its back on the world long ago, convinced that only danger came from the outside, thatOtherswere not to be trusted. That there was no future outside the city’s walls, or in trusting anyone or anything.

Ihsan and his fellow units linked up in the warrens of Kandahar City. The streets were dusty, unpaved, the inhabitants even mistrustful of such things like concrete and asphalt for they were of the outside world. Kandahar City had been a no-go zone for years for the CIA, for the military, for NATO.

Walking through the city felt like walking back in time, to Dawood.

With the odd juxtaposition of rifles and AK-47s, RPGs and homemade bombs sharing space with donkeys and bazaar stalls. Women in blue burqas whispered through the streets. Dawood’s heart ached for them, for the secrets they kept beneath their layers, for lives they could only half live. There was nothing in the Quran that required women to don anything close to the burqa. The requirement for modesty in the Quran spoke to menfirst, admonishing men to dress modestly as well, and to lower their gazes, to respect, to the ends of the earth,allwomen. Where had this come from, the imprisonment of half of humanity behind silence and cotton?

The first three generations that follow the Prophet will be blessed. And following that, the Muslims will lose their way. They will be confused, and take hold of evil things, and wickedness. The human soul is prone to darkness in the absence of Allah. Man will lose his balance between the good of Allah and the darkness.

Dawood followed Ihsan to the jihadist quarter of the city. Held his hand over his heart as he was introduced as Imam Dawood. “I am also a medic,” he said.

“Allahu Akbar,” Ihsan said, grinning ear to ear. “The Doctors Without Borders hospital has pulled out of Kandahar Province, and we have had no one to take our wounded to. Truly, Dawood, our meeting was meant to be.”

Ihsan gave him and Behroze a room in one of the many mudbrick homes the jihadists occupied in Kandahar City.

He had no idea what to do for the boy. He hadn’t had a father at Behroze’s age, didn’t have a model for how to take care of him. But hedidknow how the loss of a father shattered the soul, and how a boy without a future, and with the knowledge of evil in the center of his heart, was a crumbling sandcastle, a tree in the desert stripped of its bark by a punishing sandstorm.