Clay looks at me, his face shadowed with uncertainty too.

The driver pulls over and takes the keys out of the ignition. He points to a gate and tells us we can disembark.

“They are waiting for you inside,” he tells us. One by one, we exit the vehicle and assemble by the passenger side. Mom adjusts her headscarf, pulling one end across her mouth to block the dust.

“I suppose we’re going in,” she says.

The driver walks to the gate, cups his hands around his mouth, and hollers for someone to open the door. A guard appears and eyes us slowly through the metal bars before turning a key. With a grating sound, the door swings open.

The guard motions with his head for us to follow him into a building smaller than the one beside it. It’s an austere structure with windows a ten-year-old child couldn’t fit through.

Inside, three uniformed men sit around a wooden table. One holds a cigarette between two fingers; he squints as he exhales a cloud of smoke into the room. The men eye us curiously while I take in the layout of the room. There isn’t much to look at. There’s a calendar on the wall, a desk with a shoebox on it, and a filing cabinet shoved into a corner of the room.

The men stand, and I note that each has a handgun holstered at his hip.

“Please sit,” the smoking man says. The driver is gone. One of the soldiers opens three folding chairs and sets them at the table. We slide into the seats, positioned with our backs to the door. Not that it matters. If we were to run outside, we would run into an open dust bowl. “Tell us, please. We hear you have been asking about the bodies of President Daoud Khan and his family.”

I sit with my legs crossed, my back straight. I imagine myself in an operating room and try to feel like I have some control.

“We’ve already discussed our situation with the Ministry of the Interior. They arranged for the driver to bring us here, so surely they must have told you that my family was killed along with President Daoud Khan’s family.” I repeat my story, leaving out the detail of my presence at Arg the night of the coup. When I finish, there is a long pause.

The smoking soldier stubs his cigarette out in a glass ashtray.

“It is true,” he says gruffly. “We have found a grave with bodies in it.”

I feel my heart thumping. I sit forward in the chair.

“But this is nothing new. Every year at least one grave is found. Sometimes five, sometimes five hundred anonymous skeletons.”

“And they all deserve a proper burial. Surely the remains of the people who died in the coup aren’t only of interest to me.”

“It was long ago,” he says.