Free The Lovers by Rod Nordland Page A

he decided to preempt the inevitable gossip and telephone Zaman, Zakia’s father. One of his sons dialed for him, since he did not know how.
    “Your daughter came over to my house, and she may now want to run away with my son,” Anwar told him. “It’s better that you agree, because if that happens, it will be too late.”
    “If that happens, I will demand five hundred thousand afghanis, and I know you are in debt already. You’re standing looking down the edge of a cliff, and this will put you over it,” Zaman replied.
    That was an impossible sum, more than nine thousand dollars.
    “My debts are not your problem, but if they run away, there will be nothing for you.”
    Zaman still refused.
    Over the next month, Ali and Zakia were rarely able to speak to each other, because Zakia’s family watched her so closely. When they did manage to get a few words together, she told him she would come again and that if his family would not take her, they would run away. She said she was now legally an adult and no one could stop her. “We agreed that if Ali’s family did not accept this, then we will go somewhere secretly that no one knows—just somewhere, we didn’t have any idea where. After the first time I went to their home, I said that they could send me ten times back and still I would come again. It’s because I really loved him. I was very determined. I really loved Ali, and my decision was final. It was a strong decision.”
    The next time she saw an opportunity, she made her move, heading to Ali’s uncle’s house rather than to his own, thinking to evade pursuers that way. His uncle called Anwar, while Ismatullah restrained Ali from leaving to join her. Ali fought back against his older and much bigger brother, and finally Ismatullah, infuriated, smashed him in the face with a rock to subdue him, leaving a bruise that would take many months to heal. (It was still prominent when I first met Ali the following February.)
    Anwar reached his brother’s house and confronted Zakia. “Youcannot do this,” he said. “What are you thinking? Daughter, why are you doing this?”
    She pleaded with him openly to take her in to his family so she could marry his son. “We love each other, and we want to marry, and no one should stop us.” She was dry-eyed and determined not to cry.
    “That is not your decision. It can never be,” Anwar said. He took her by the arm and forcibly walked her back to her own home, with two of his sons helping and Ismatullah still holding Ali back from intervening. It was nearly midnight, and the Zaman household was already aroused, aware that Zakia had bolted. Gula Khan was on the rooftop with another brother.
    “Let’s go before they attack us,” Anwar told his sons as they left Zakia in front of her house. “You can see how angry they are.”
    When he got back home, Anwar, too, beat his son, shouting at him that he was bringing disgrace and humiliation to both his own family and Zakia’s. “We didn’t want their family to be disgraced,” Ali said. Months later part of him agreed with the punishment he received and part of him was still angry about it.
    “That night was very bad,” Zakia said. The following day was the first day of the main potato harvest, and everyone would have to be in the fields, but the entire family stayed up late screaming at her. “That night my father and my mother both beat me,” Zakia said. “It was the first time they had ever done that to me.” Gula Khan and her other brothers had always been the enforcers of her virtue. In the course of that parental beating, she finally realized how dire her situation was. “While they were beating me, they were saying, ‘We will kill you if you don’t listen to us. We have to do this. We have to kill you.’”
    The next day both families were in their fields, side by side, both Zakia and Ali bruised. Harvesting potatoes by hand is back-breaking work, and no one spoke across the low mud walls and sometimes