Memory of a Tree: Logar Afghanistan

 

Memory of a Tree

 

I am old now, and I feel it.

The small stream that once fed my roots has slowed to a trickle, then to memory. My leaves, which once blazed gold and amber each autumn, hang pale and thin. My trunk, which sheltered generations beneath its shade, trembles now when the wind comes strong from the mountains. Even the birds have mostly gone — where once hundreds gathered at dusk, filling the garden with a chorus that rivaled the water, now only a few arrive, glance about as though disappointed, and leave.

I am a tree in a locked garden.

The man who inherited this place comes occasionally. He walks the paths without looking at anything, collects the overripe apples and a handful of grapes, and leaves. I hear the iron gate clang shut. I hear the lock catch. And then silence, until the next time.

But it was not always this way.

— — —

The property belonged to a widow named Shirin Gul.

Her husband died when she was still young, leaving her with one hundred acres, twenty peasants who worked the land, two small sons, and a choice that most women of her time and place would not have recognized as a choice at all. She recognized it. She chose resolution.

She ran her estate without apology and without softness. The peasants who worked her land came to her only at the gate — they would not presume to enter her presence without being summoned, and she rarely summoned them. They stood at the iron bars and she stood on the other side, and between them they conducted the business of the land. She was known throughout the surrounding villages as the Iron Lady, and this was not said unkindly — it was the particular respect that people reserve for those who refuse to be diminished by circumstance.

What she wanted above all else was that her sons should not need to rely on inherited land alone. She insisted on education — not the casual kind, but the serious, capital-requiring kind. Baqi Khan became an army officer and rose to become an elder of his tribe. Zaher Jan became a doctor. Neither outcome was an accident. They were the sons of Shirin Gul.

They grew up under my shade — all three of us, my companions and I, standing together along the garden's heart like cousins who had never been asked to leave. When the brothers returned from Kabul, I watched Shirin Gul watch them, and I thought I understood something about iron: that it does not mean the absence of love. It means that love has decided not to collapse.

— — —

At the center of our shade stood the chootra — a raised platform of packed earth, broad and flat, dressed with carpets and cushions and bolsters worn smooth by years of use. This was where the world gathered.

Zaher Jan's gift was apparent whenever he arrived from the capital: villagers appeared quietly at the gate, describing ailments, hoping. He listened to each one without impatience, and they left looking lighter than when they came. But Baqi Khan had a different kind of practice.

People brought him the kinds of wounds that no medicine could reach — disputes over irrigation channels that had curdled into hatred across generations, boundary stones moved in the night and denied in the morning, questions of honor that, left unanswered, would end in blood. They came from the surrounding villages and sat beneath me on the chootra, and Khan Jan, the family's nazer and keeper of affairs, would appear with green tea before anyone thought to ask, and then it would begin.

Baqi Khan listened the way a mountain listens: without interruption, without hurry, without any visible effort that might embarrass the man unburdening himself. He asked questions so mild they seemed almost beside the point. Then, when the air had been cleared enough to breathe, he spoke.

I witnessed quarrels over water rights dissolve into handshakes beneath my branches. I watched men who had arrived unable to look at one another leave side by side, their voices low and reconciled. Once, two families arrived separately — each with its own grievances, its own witnesses, its own barely contained fury over a matter of land and a young woman's honor — and they sat at opposite ends of the chootra, the air between them taut as wire. Baqi Khan said little for a long time. He poured his own tea. And then something in the garden shifted — the way the air changes just before rain — and by the time Khan Jan brought the second round of tea, the men were no longer sitting on opposite ends of anything.

I have sheltered many things in my time. But I think I was proud in those moments.

When no grievances were waiting, the sessions became what they had always been beneath the surface — gatherings of men who simply enjoyed one another's company. Jokes replaced testimony. Laughter rolled through the garden, and the little riverit ran fast over its stones in the background, its voice like music played softly so as not to interrupt.

— — —

The weddings are what I remember most vividly — the way one remembers the brightest light.

Shirin Gul watched both of her sons marry beneath these trees, a year apart, and I watched her watch them. She stood to one side at each ceremony with the composure of a woman who has already done the harder work and is now permitted simply to witness. For each wedding the garden was transformed. The chootra vanished beneath guests. Qorma and rice were passed in great quantities, and the smell of meat and saffron drifted through my branches for days. The celebrations lasted more than a week.

After dark, music rose — rubab and tabla — and men danced in the firelight while the night sky opened wide above them. Gunshots rang into the stars, not in violence but in joy, the way people in that part of the world have always punctuated their happiness with a sound that could also mean its opposite. The echoes faded. The silence that followed seemed satisfied.

— — —

Summer was for the boys.

When Baqi and Zaher came from Kabul for weekends, they brought their nephews — Babrak and Zmarak, both in their teens — and the garden became a kingdom of noise and speed. Shirin Gul watched them from wherever she happened to be sitting, with the expression of a woman who has decided that children running is the finest sight the world has to offer.

Sultan Mohammad was the same age. His father, Mohammad Jan — husband of Baqi and Zaher's aunt, and therefore a man who considered this garden at least partly his own — had a gift for being exactly where ease was to be found. He was a short, stocky man, dense through the shoulders, bald in the way that looks not like loss but like a decision. He held no official position; his wife periodically insisted that he find work, and he periodically agreed, and then somehow found himself here, beneath my shade, seated cross-legged on the carpet, his turban set to one side, rubbing a slow palm across his bare head as though reading something written there.

He sang when he was alone. A Farsi song, low and unhurried: Oh Crow oh lonely bird — what are you doing here? The flowers are gone. The garden is aging. What are you watching? There is nothing left to watch.

I did not know, then, that he was singing to me.

His son Sultan ran with Babrak and Zmarak through the trees as though the garden were infinite, as though time had agreed to be patient. On summer evenings, when the heat finally relented, Sultan would stride into the cornfield with the ease of a boy who has never doubted his welcome — long-armed, broad through the back — and emerge with armloads of corn that he laid over the slow fire. Each ear crackled, darkened, and filled the air with a sweetness that I carry in my bark still. The boys ate five or six each, laughing too much to eat efficiently, while the fire threw its light up into my branches.

— — —

It ended, as so many things in Afghanistan ended, in 1978.

The coup that toppled the Daoud regime did not arrive with the sound of wedding-night gunshots — it arrived with a different sound altogether, and its echoes did not fade into contented silence. The country's institutions collapsed one after another. Baqi Khan and Zaher Jan left the farmhouse. The gate was locked. The chootra sat empty beneath us, its cushions losing their shape slowly, until eventually they too were gone.

That was nearly half a century ago.

Shirin Gul is long gone. The brothers, I have heard, are dead. Most who ever sat beneath my shade have left this world. The riverit is almost dry. The birds are few.

But on my trunk, if you know where to look, Sultan's name remains — carved one summer evening, probably while the corn was on the fire, probably while the other boys were running somewhere between the apricot trees. He pressed the knife slowly into my bark, the way boys do when they want something to last.

It has faded. The letters have softened at their edges, the way all things do.

But I guard it. It is all I can do — stand here, hold the scar, and remember what this garden was when Shirin Gul's sons came home, when the riverit ran fast and clear, when Baqi Khan spoke and old feuds relented, when the fire burned low and the corn was sweet and Sultan's laughter rose into my branches like it had no intention of ever coming down.

 

Oh Crow, oh lonely bird — what are you watching?

Everything. I am watching everything, still.