Silent Hearts Read online

  “As I have said, they are no longer wealthy. The father’s family opposed Partition,” Nur Muhammed said. “He teaches some courses at the university, but because of his background, he will never be full faculty. This presents difficulties, financial difficulties.” He filled his mouth with raisins and chewed noisily. “You understand that this is a man accustomed to fine things, who wants his own family to have those things. To get them, he works as an interpreter and allows his children to do so, also.”

  “Who do they work for?”

  “Embassies. Journalists. NGOs. Amriki corporations.”

  “Wait.” Gul talked past his father as the thought occurred to him. “The daughters, too?”

  His father’s mouth twisted. “The family is considered very advanced.”

  “But she will not work after—” Gul stopped. The thought of marriage still seemed so unreal that he could not speak the word aloud.

  Nur Muhammed’s eyes flashed a warning. “She will work if we need it.” Gul thought of the shame, even as his father continued. “Allowances will be made.”

  Already, Gul disliked this girl and her American connections, useful though her family surely would be. She would be more than just difficult to control. She would be impossible.

  “Her father has been working for some time now for an Amriki corporation that wants the oil. You know the oil I mean.” Gul did. A pipeline across Afghanistan would be the most efficient way to transport oil from the north to Pakistan and the waiting tankers at the port in Karachi—a lucrative investment, if only peace could be guaranteed. But that meant dealing with the Taliban, as well as the various groups struggling to overthrow them.

  Gul had watched as his father’s once-prosperous smuggling network—chiefly opium, depending upon the severity of occasional, halfhearted crackdowns—grew more difficult every year to manage from afar, although still providing a comfortable living. If Nur Muhammed could attach himself to this family, with its links to the oil corporations, it might ease his quest for more cordial dealings with the Taliban—or whoever replaced them. And Gul, through his new wife, was to be Nur Muhammed’s entrée into that world. He had longed for the day his father would bring him fully into the business. But like this?

  Nur Muhammed spoke again. “At first, the girl’s father was very much against this match. I had to work many months. There were sacrifices. Many sacrifices.” Gul wondered how large the bride price had been.

  “He said she would not want to leave her family. She would not want to come to Peshawar to live with us. A ‘dusty frontier town,’ I believe her father called it. She would not want to marry an uneducated Pashtun.”

  Gul stiffened.

  Nur Muhammed stopped for another handful of raisins, and when he resumed speaking, his voice had lost some of its harsh tone. “She will be homesick. You will be a cooperative husband. You will bring her often to see her family. You will go with them to visit all of their old friends. She will be happy that you do this for her. She will try to bring you deeper into her own world. You will go. You will become part of it. For her—and for us.”

  Gul nodded even as he wondered what life would be like with such a wife, one who had spent so much time among the British and maybe even the Amriki. Their women were said to presume themselves to be men’s equal. Islamabad had its contingent of expats, and Gul had seen their women striding beside their husbands—or maybe even men not their husbands—heads uncovered, voices abrupt, laughing immodestly or sometimes even arguing. Women who confronted their men, demanded things of them. How did these men tolerate such humiliation?

  No matter how much his father needed this girl’s connections, he vowed he would never become that sort of man.

  Three

  PHILADELPHIA, AUGUST 2001

  By eight that night, two hours after she’d expected her husband home, Liv Stoellner had worn a visible track in the living room rug, pacing, pacing, each step bringing her perilously closer to becoming a cliché.

  Headlights swept the street outside. Muted sunlight filled the sky, the harsh glare of summer softening as darkness intruded, the street already in deep shadow. Surely that was Martin. Liv reached for the door, the knob cool beneath her fingers. Fine lines threaded its porcelain, the knob an original that, along with the warm cherry woodwork throughout, had drawn Liv to the house over the self-righteous Colonials dominating the neighborhood. Their bungalow, with its deep front porch, its dormer frankly admitting to the tucked-in nature of the second floor, cheered her with its reminder of her Midwest girlhood, when things—and people—weren’t quite so . . . striving. Like Martin.

  She backed away from the door, forced herself into one of the wingback chairs, propped her feet on a footstool—so casual!—and picked up a book. Martin’s dissertation on the end table sought the attention of the rare visitor. She opened to a page of maps. India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, borders drawn and redrawn, shaded areas indicating various factions depending upon the decade, the century. Martin had just been rejected—again—for a federal grant to travel back to the region, which was considered such a key strategic area when he’d started his career that his adviser had steered him toward it.

  “Forget academia,” the man had said. “Get yourself one of those sweet State Department jobs, regular raises, great benefits, retire after twenty years.” But by the time Martin had worked his way to a doctorate, the U.S. government had already turned its attention away from Afghanistan, and Martin’s sporadic attempts to get the funding that would allow him to update the book went nowhere. His dissatisfaction was a vibrating hum in the background of their marriage, one Liv strove to drown out with encouraging words about the next grant application, and the one after that.

  The door sighed open. Liv turned a page with exaggerated slowness, took a breath, and worked on her voice.

  “Martin?”

  “Liv.” A purposeful bustling at the door as he untied his shoes and kicked them off, and removed the lightweight blazer he insisted upon wearing, even though the college relaxed its standards during summer sessions. He padded across the rug and brushed her cheek with a kiss.

  She breathed in. No cigarettes. Or booze. Or anything musky, damp, and dangerous. Martin just smelled like himself: soap, a hint of sweat, and in a nod to tradition she found endearing, Old Spice. She jerked her head back—she was pissed, after all—but he’d already pulled away, oblivious of her inner turmoil. In the fading light, she saw him as he’d been when they first met, the lanky frame, the extravagant curls. Morning sunshine would reveal the curls gone gray and steel-wool coarse, the fold of flesh beneath his neck, the unavoidable paunch. The voice, though, that hadn’t changed, still pitched low, intimate.

  “What’s up?”

  Dinner’s in the fridge. Why didn’t you call? Where have you been? Who have you been with? Or was it With whom have you been? It didn’t matter. She wouldn’t say it. Would not play the shrew.

  “Who’s Mandy?” Hello, shrew.

  Give him credit. No rearing back in bafflement, hands raised, mouth agape. No exaggerated “What?” or “Mandy who?”

  Martin tilted his head, knitted his brow. “Mandy Tarkio?”

  Was that it? Liv hadn’t caught the last name of the girl standing on the step, hip cocked, manila envelope in hand. Liv had just gotten home from work, hadn’t had time to loosen her shirt, unhook her bra, trade skirt for shorts and shoes for sandals.

  “Is Professor Stoellner here?”

  Not one of the scary girls, slouching in Martin’s office chair, cropped T-shirts riding up over hard tanned torsos, their lazy up-and-down inspections taking in Liv’s longish skirts and boxy blazers. She’d endured their condescending smiles, the incredulous laughter that followed as she closed the door behind her on her way out. She always felt she had nothing to fear from those girls, who commanded plenty of attention from boys their own age. It was the needy ones, the ones just shy of pretty, she had to watch out for. Like this one.

  The girl had sandy
hair carelessly pulled back, a lot of it still hanging about her unremarkable face. Watery blue eyes, a crooked front tooth. A little pudge of flesh peeking between shirt and shorts. Strong legs, though. Field hockey, maybe. Or softball. Girls all played sports now.

  “He’s at school.” Liv’s tone dropped the temperature of a sultry day by a good ten degrees. No need for that cool drink now. “Did you try his office?”

  “I did? But he wasn’t there? And my paper’s due?”

  Tell them, Liv had often begged her husband, not to talk in questions. They came to her in the college library, these students, looking for help with their research. “About this Bede guy? A monk?”

  “The Venerable Bede. Seventh-century Northumbria,” Liv would say, in much the same way she’d just frosted Mandy. The girl lingered on the step, sweat beading a full upper lip, shiny with some sort of gloss.

  “Why didn’t you just email it to him?”

  Mandy twirled a tendril around her finger, her eyes looking everywhere except at Liv. “My stupid computer’s down.” She thrust the envelope toward Liv. “Would you give this to him? And tell him I was here?”

  “He’ll know that, won’t he, when he gets this.” No question mark on Liv’s end.

  An uncertain laugh. “You’re funny?”

  Liv passed the envelope, damnably sealed, to Martin, who remained standing. “Mandy dropped off her paper. She said her computer wasn’t working and that she couldn’t find you on campus.” Even though Mandy could simply have emailed the paper from one of the library computers. Or slid the envelope under Martin’s closed office door.

  He tore open the envelope, eased a paper-clipped sheaf partway out, and nodded. “Hers is the last one in. Par for the course.” He shook the paper back down into the envelope.

  Liv held out her hand. A test.

  He handed her the envelope. Test passed.

  “The Effects of Five Years of Taliban Rule on Afghanistan,” she read. She grudgingly revised her opinion of Mandy upward. The girl was smart enough to play to Martin’s main expertise: Central Asian history and politics. “Will it be any good?”

  Martin shrugged. “These days, I just pray that their papers are in English and they didn’t plagiarize. That alone gets a C. If she did anything resembling real research, I’ll bump her grade up. But I’m not holding my breath. Wonder why she didn’t just leave it at the office?”

  Exactly the right thing to say. Liv set the envelope aside. She worked her jaw, clenched since her encounter with Mandy, and rolled her shoulders, unkinking the tension there. She reminded herself that she had it better than many faculty wives. They were an occupational hazard, these girls, hopped up on hormones and hope, still young enough to mistake pomposity for stature, craving for caring.

  She should know. She’d been one of them. Except she’d married her professor, a rare enough occurrence that earned her the occasional raised eyebrow—suspicious from the women, assessing from the men. These days, there were rules against such things. Which didn’t stop them from happening.

  Liv considered herself impervious, her wedding band a shield of sorts, proof that her union with Martin was the exception to the rule. That, and the fact that his specialty was sufficiently obscure to attract the dullest of students, the ones who waited too late to sign up for their electives and found themselves consigned to Martin’s class. Maybe that’s how Mandy had ended up there.

  “I can nuke our dinner,” Liv said finally. “It’ll only take a minute. I picked up something from the Thai place.”

  “You waited for me? You didn’t have to do that. Come here.”

  So he summoned her, and so she went, turning her face to him for a real kiss this time.

  She forgot to ask why he was late.

  * * *

  Midnight. Liv slumbered beside him, her breathing low and even. She’d fallen asleep almost immediately after their lovemaking. Martin had been smart enough to take her straight to bed, to hell with the Thai takeout.

  His stomach gurgled. He eased out from beneath her arm. Waited. Assured himself of her unchanged breathing.

  He stole from bed and eased downstairs to the kitchen and extracted a white cardboard container from the fridge. He examined the contents with relief. Liv occasionally tried to nudge him toward her own choices, fiery with chilies, but tonight she’d gone with his reliably bland favorite, pad Thai.

  He grabbed a fork and walked naked down the hall to his office. He leaned over his desk, scooped up a forkful of noodles, and switched on his computer. Blue light filled the room, along with a welcome chime, too loud in the hushed house. He swallowed the rice noodles without chewing, hit Mute, and clicked on his email account.

  Not the one from the college, his in-box cluttered with reminders of endless faculty meetings, nor his personal account, the one whose password he shared with Liv, even as she told him hers, a bit of nonsense he’d immediately forgotten. He sometimes went days without checking that one. But these days he often hurried back to his office between classes to check [email protected].

  Tonight, he had mail.

  “You didn’t tell me she was pretty.”

  The sum total of the message. Only one possible response.

  “Nowhere near as pretty as you.” Send.

  He sat, the chair warming beneath him, and ate his way through half of the pad Thai as he waited for a response to blink onto the screen. Well. Mandy was probably asleep, too. His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He’d had another note in mind, a severe one about propriety and boundaries and for God’s sake, are you crazy?

  But he could hardly deliver that message now, not given the flirtatious one he’d just sent. Besides, he knew how Mandy would respond, pale eyes darkening in wounded protest: “But we haven’t done anything wrong.”

  And they hadn’t. Just office appointments where the conversations quickly veered off topic. One moment stayed with him. Her hand with its bitten nails, offering a mock-formal shake as she rose to leave after one of those early visits and her shocked laugh as he took it and lifted it to his lips. Heart knocking against his chest with the boldness of it all—despite his calculation that, with a girl like Mandy, he was probably safe. Though even with the safe girls he’d never dared it. Not since Liv. “They’ll forgive you one,” a colleague had said early on. “Make it good. Otherwise, learn how to say no.”

  He’d made it good, all the way to the altar, and without the push of incipient scandal, either. Marriage, he’d quickly and correctly ascertained, would be the only way to keep someone like Liv, even as over the years he’d come to realize that what he’d initially seen as an arousing insolence was just her natural reserve, the teasing half-smile merely shyness. The thrill of challenge was long gone; natural enough in a marriage nearing two decades, he told himself. And he knew Liv well enough now not to take her seeming complacency with their settled life for granted. But sometimes it frustrated him.

  Goddamn. He’d been stuck in this place forever, done his research, published his papers and his book, kept his nose clean, and what had it gotten him? Another grant application shitcanned. Time for some yes in his life. And this was but a dalliance, nothing more, a welcome reminder that the loins could still tingle, the step could still spring. Still, it could have gone wrong. A complaint to the dean, a warning. Publicity—the worst-case scenario.

  Instead, he heard Mandy’s laugh, followed a half second later by his own—of relief. She freed her hand and pressed her own mouth to the spot where his lips had been but seconds before.

  So they continued their occasional, ostensibly accidental meetings. They exchanged notes. Martin had set up this new email account just for them, mumbling something about it being more reliable than the college email system.

  “Sorry I was late to class today. I couldn’t find anything clean to wear this morning and I know you didn’t want me coming in naked.”

  His response: “Try me.”

  But she hadn’t. Yet. With Mandy, everything was yet.


  He unmuted the computer, awaiting the mail alert. Nothing.

  He wondered, not for the first time, if he should get a cell phone, a second one. She’d given him her number, more than once. But he’d never called her and he didn’t want her calling him, even on a hidden phone, leaving a trail that, even if yet never came, could too easily be misinterpreted.

  He stared at the glowing screen, willing the chime.

  Though he counted to a hundred, it didn’t come. He turned off the computer and plodded through the kitchen to drop the take-out container in the sink, tiptoed up the stairs, and fell into bed with his back to Liv, who in the morning would shake her head in bewilderment over the discarded carton of perfectly good pad Thai.

  Four

  ISLAMABAD, AUGUST 2001

  Her bare arms were the first thing Gul noticed about his bride.

  The scandalous short sleeves of her crimson-and-gold wedding finery revealed soft flesh the color of milky chai, swirled with the cinnamon-red mehndi designs spiraling up from her palms to her knobby, childlike wrists. If he shifted his vision, he could follow the line of her forearm, burdened by engraved gold bangles, up past the crook of elbow to the tender place just above it. Unnerved by the sight, he caught his breath and jerked in his seat, ruining the wedding photograph.

  His uncle, posing with them, leaned close. “Save the looking for later,” he chortled into Gul’s ear. Loud enough, apparently, for Farida to hear. Gul felt the heat of embarrassment rising from her. So, despite the exposed arms, she was modest after all. Good.