For the Love of a Son: One Afghan Woman's Quest for Her Stolen Child

get to know each other, and
share the details of our lives in all those lost years.
    Duran muttered, ‘I saw a photo of you once
with my father. You were wearing a white dress. I told my father it
looked like a wedding photo to me, and that you looked like a
bride.’
    ‘What did your father say to that?’
    ‘Oh, he said he had attended a wedding in
America and everyone had wanted their photo taken with him. He said
you were a crazy girl who was there. But I never saw that picture
again. My father took it away.’
    I nodded, feeling that Duran was opening a
door for us to talk about his father and the lies that had driven a
wedge between us. But I avoided saying anything negative about
Kaiss. Perhaps the moment was a test. I thought Duran might be
looking for a reason to push me away.
    On this day I would concentrate on the
positives.
    I smiled, staring at my son. I could not get
enough of his face and hair and hands. ‘Please talk some more,’ I
said, ‘I want to hear your voice.’
    He grunted.
    I bit my lip, feeling myself dangerously
perched above an abyss. One misstep and all would be lost.
    ‘How was your stepmother, Duran? Was she nice
to you?’
    He shrugged. ‘She was OK. She was stupid. She
could be kind. She could be mean. When my father beat me, she would
sometimes try to protect me.’
    ‘Oh.’ I buried my head in my hands. I should
have been there to protect my baby. I swallowed with difficulty,
then asked, ‘Was your father mean to you, Duran?’
    ‘Only if I didn’t do what he told me to do.
Then he would beat me.’
    That was Kaiss. His answer to any loss of
control always was to use his fists. I took a deep breath. ‘Tell me
everything, Duran, everything, the good and the bad.’
    And so the dam of silence burst, and my son
began to talk.
    I heard that when my son was around six years
old, he had been looking out of a second-floor window in his
father’s house when someone pushed him from behind. He tumbled out
of the window. He would have been killed but some high bushes broke
his fall. He never found out who pushed him, whether it was his
father or his stepmother.
    I learned that one cold day when Duran had
failed to do his homework, his father lost his temper and hit him
repeatedly about the head before opening the front door to throw
his small son bodily out into the snow. While my son lay there
shivering, his father shouted that he should stay out in the snow
and sleep there that night. Perhaps that would teach him a
lesson.
    I learned that my sad little boy had somehow
walked all alone for miles to his uncle’s house, where he was
finally taken in to be thawed. I saw my baby struggling through
snow drifts dressed only in lightweight pajamas.
    I learned that after Kaiss joined the
Russians, my son had watched his father repeatedly get drunk on
alcohol.
    I learned that Kaiss had purchased a
beautiful piano, and that he had made sure my son learned to
play.
    I learned that after the Soviet withdrawal
when the Taliban came to power, the alcohol was barred and the
piano was trashed.
    I heard that with the Taliban Kaiss had
pretended to be a man of religion. Clerics were hired to teach my
son to recite the Koran by heart.
    I learned that a Taliban leader had come to
Kaiss and told him that the Taliban had plenty of people who could
recite the Koran, but what they needed was an English-speaking
student like my son to learn everything there was to know about
computers. And so my son became a computer expert for the
Taliban.
    I learned that my son grew to hate the
Taliban. He had loved the piano and singing and dancing and
watching movies, and when the Taliban had come to power, all those
pleasures had been forbidden, disappearing from Afghanistan
life.
    I learned that my son so hated the Taliban
that his hatred had turned him against Islam. I learned that my son
was even thinking of becoming a Christian, a thought that caused my
Muslim heart to grieve.
    As the stories poured out of him, my son
began to sweat and look increasingly unwell.
    To change the subject that was so troubling,
I asked my son to sing to me. I felt my heart swell when he opened
up his mouth and I heard his beautiful voice.
    That night I slept more peacefully than I had
slept since the night before my baby was stolen.
    But the following day one of the smugglers
took me aside and tried to warn me against my son, whispering to
me: ‘You know it is possible that his father sent him to you to get
an American passport.