A House White with Sorrow

Photography in "A House White With Sorrow" by Debra Denker and Sheryl Shapiro

An Excerpt:

"Il y'a longstemps que je t'aime, jamais je ne t'oublierai."
Anique sings to Jeanette Crowell. To the white napkins she's folding into fans.
She sings to her grandmother's silver cutlery and polishes it with her sleeve. She cups her hand under the tea cozy, checks the pot's warmth, plumps the pillow on her husband's chair.

Ambassador Sayyid will soon be finished with prayers and hungry for the baguettes she buys at the Belgian market on K Street and the English mulberry jam from a small grocery run by Moroccans in Georgetown.

Even before Da'ud had freed women of purdah, Anique enjoyed flaunting her Frenchness. It was more important back then. And her husband defied everyone to let her have her way. It was not Mohammed – God bless him and grant him peace – who made the laws of purdah, but ordinary men who came after, he said. Akbar's mother had stuck her fingers in her ears to block this devil talk.

Anique raises her arms, stretches and glances about the garden to see if the servants are spying. She picks two roses and places them in a vase on the table.
In Washington, the servants care little about her activities. They are immigrants from Bolivia or Ethiopia. There are no reports from the cook to the KHAD, the Afghan Secret Service. Anique can't help looking around again anyway. She is not like Jeanette, who takes liberty for granted. Anique has learned the hard way to treasure fresh, free air.

In the beginning, the custom of sheltering women angered her. She regretted her marriage. She hated Akbar. She wanted to smother him under their blankets. To suffocate him. When they made love, she lay cold and gray and panicked. She struggled to keep her throat open, her lungs from shrinking, waiting for his last soft spasm.

She discovered pleasure in purdah when Shaer was born. Within the veil, she was secure and still. Nothing existed but a clear, compact outline of herself protected inside the filmy, impenetrable wall of silk or rayon. Nursing her baby boy under the chadri, she felt whole. Purdah was no longer a prison, but a welcome place of solitude.

That still surprises her.

In Kabul, the royal women and wives of high government officials crowded into overstuffed rooms. Gossiping and teasing, they sought solace from the turmoil of men. They talked of equal rights. Progress. Then, at the sound of footsteps, they quickly covered their faces.

When the unveiling was ordered, no one disobeyed Da'ud. No one ever did, though Allah and their brothers and fathers might strike the women dead for their bare faces and blasphemy.

Akbar was too permissive, the women said. Anique was too haughty. She would always be a ferenghi, a foreigner. She sneered at them and clamped the chadri's lace visor over her eyes. She had no friends.

Now she has Jeanette.

"Il y'a longstemps que je t'aime, jamais je ne t'oublierai."
With luck, the Foggy Bottom rain will wait until after breakfast. There are deep puddles in the cracked flagstone-and-cement courtyard, left from last night's downpour. Poor Akbar. He hates the rain.

 

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