Atig Rahimi

In Afghanistan, a woman finds herself beside the body of her husband, gravely wounded and seemingly in a coma. > Outside, a little shooting, a little praying, a little silence... the room is small. Rectangular. It is suffocating, despite the pale walls... the room is empty. Empty of all ornament . In a claustrophobic situation, isolated from the world and at the same time immersed in the whirlwind of war, the woman, hitherto silent and submissive, begins to speak, to confide her secrets to her husband. And she is able to do so > because you could answer me nothing, you could do nothing against me... I was at peace . A kind of exchange takes place. On the one hand, the woman cares for her husband and thereby takes possession of his body, now entirely dependent on her. On the other, the husband appropriates his wife's secrets > No one can believe it, no one! You don't eat, you don't drink, and you are still here! In fact, it is a miracle. A miracle for me, thanks to me, your breath is bound to the telling of my secrets. She stands up, weightless. Then she pauses in a gesture full of grace, as if to say: but do not worry, my secrets have no end . Outside, the world is shattered: a mad old woman wanders through the rubble, soldiers burst into the house and the woman pretends to be a prostitute to avoid being raped, but then (out of compassion?) gives herself repeatedly to a stuttering adolescent. Inside, within the suffocating enclosure of the room, we learn that the woman was forced to marry while still a child, without knowing her bridegroom, who was always away at war. We learn that she was menstruating when she had her first sexual encounter, and this was fortunate because it proved she had come to the consummation of the marriage a virgin. We discover that the woman, to avoid being repudiated, bore her daughters with another man, because her husband was sterile. > This voice erupting from my throat is the voice buried for thousands of years... if every religion is the story of a revelation, the revelation of a truth, then, my sang-e sabur (my patience stone, who listens), our story too is a religion A religion expressed in the body. We readers would wish that from this extraordinary encounter between a male body and the secrets of a female life, a communion between man and woman might be born, because > when it is hard to be a woman, it becomes hard to be a man as well! . Yet this is not the case. The husband awakens from his coma (or had he been conscious all along?) and hurls himself furiously upon the woman, killing her only to be killed in turn. The fragile unity has shattered into pieces. This tale is not an Afghan story—that is, one conceivable only within that specific social and cultural context. The author addresses a universal theme, in a situation possible, allowing for the necessary differences, across all latitudes: the distance between man and woman, their mutual incommunicability, is bridged only exceptionally, in a moment of profound suffering: beside the bed of a terminal patient, in solidarity over the loss of a child, in the midst of war or destruction. From this perspective, it is a quintessentially Western novel, drawing upon its existential dilemmas, narrative themes, and even literary devices: for instance, the opposition between inside and outside. And it is precisely this intellectualized imprint that disappoints and renders the entire narrative predictable. The narrative style effectively captures the opposition between inside and outside. External events are recounted in an objective, alienating manner, as though the woman were indifferent to them. The recounting of the secrets and of the woman's relationship to her husband's body is entrusted to a prose rich in evocative power, religious resonance, and poetic effect. The divergence in narrative styles reflects the acceptance of violence as a given and, at the same time, the woman's determination to liberate herself by confiding her secrets to her husband's inert body. Why read it? Brief and effective.