The Swallows of Kabul
By Yasmina Khadra
Translated by John Cullen
Doubleday, 195 pages, $25.95
If you're in the habit of judging books by their covers, as I often am, the small size, flowery, impressionistic title and pastel-hued dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The Swallows of Kabul is terribly misleading. Held in hand, the book feels airy and insubstantial, but inside is a riveting story of terror and redemption, told with haunting power and captivating grace.
The novel is set some time before the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, in a Kabul crushed under dust and tedium and ravaged by 20 years of war. Taliban mullahs control everything. They stage brutal executions of errant souls, force women into mute submission beneath burqas, and suppress all worldly pleasures, even forbidding children to fly kites. "Men have gone mad," Yasmina Khadra writes of the city, "they have turned their backs on the day in order to face the night."
The city's least conflicted inhabitants are resigned, but the unhappiest of them long for freedoms and simple pleasures that have fled the city like "the terrified swallows dispersed under a barrage of missiles."
The novel focuses on six characters over the course of a few weeks. Perhaps the unhappiest of them is Atiq Shautaq, a jailer, whom we first see one morning wielding a whip to disperse a crowd as he rushes to prepare a prostitute for execution by stoning. Atiq is an angry beast of a man. His only saving grace may be the grain of gratitude that makes him unwilling to divorce and abandon his dying wife Mussaut, despite a friend's advice. Regardless, Atiq is enraged by the meagre scraps fate has doled out to him, and even his loyalty to Mussaut is grudging; he waits impatiently for her to die. Little does he suspect the depth of Mussaut's love and willingness to sacrifice for him.
Coincidentally, later that same morning, a young man named Mohsen Ramat finds himself trapped in the street mob set to stone Atiq's condemned prostitute. In a city where most have nothing, Mohsen seems to have everything, in the form of his beautiful wife Zunaira's adoring love.
Both Mohsen and Zunaira come from prosperous, middle-class families, and before the mullahs came to power, Zunaira studied to become a magistrate and campaigned for women's emancipation. Now she is housebound and must wear a burqa. When Mohsen begs her to go for a walk with him, she pleads to stay indoors, telling him that under the burqa, "I'm just an affront, a disgrace, a blemish that has to be hidden." When she finally gives in, the humiliation she suffers in the street leads her to a shocking, tragic renunciation.
Although neither couple is aware of the other leading up to this point, the lives of Mohsen, Zunaira, Atiq and Mussaut ultimately intersect like the branches of a ravenous, self-consuming vine. Orbiting their central story are Atiq's boss, Qassim Abdul Jabbar, and Atiq's old friend Nazeesh. Qassim, a grizzled veteran, has set his ambitions on Kabul's biggest prison, which he hopes someday to run, a position from which he'll be able "to rise in status, become one of the notables, establish connections, and go into business." Nazeesh, once a respected religious leader, now fallen on hard times, wants only to flee Kabul and "turn his back on the clamorous gunfire." These two men stand in complete opposition to one another, like the sun-and-moon, day-and-night motif that wends its ways poetically throughout the novel, symbolizing the extreme choice available to anyone facing adversity -- to hope or to lose hope.
Yasmina Khadra is the nom de plume of retired Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, who took the pseudonym to avoid military censors. Moulessehoul's Algerian background suits him to the task of making sense of Afghanistan's complexity. Algeria, like Afghanistan, was scarred by foreign occupation, and it too was embroiled in a recent vicious internecine struggle between secularists and fundamentalist Islamists. Knowledge of the price of such conflict has given Moulessehoul the courage to reach deep into the hearts of characters caught in the grip of unforgiving war and unyielding fundamentalism.
Patrick Lohier is a Toronto-based freelance writer. He is currently working on his first novel.