A bullet struck Neelab in the chest. Rostam caught her, but the breath had already been knocked from her. The wounded moaned with pain. Blood streaked the floors. They tore curtains apart to make bandages and cried for help. In the middle of the night, soldiers caught Rostam attempting to escape and shoved him back into the room with the end of a rifle.

Kill me before they do, he heard his cousin beg. Rostam’s uncle had only held his son tighter.

When the second round of gunshots erupted, Rostam’s father had fallen but not before he told his son to try to get out through the gardens. Rostam had tried to do just that but slipped before he could get out of the room. He fell to the floor, a sharp pain in his leg. He touched his pants, wet over the wound. He couldn’t tell how much blood was his and how much was Neelab’s. When two soldiers approached him, he’d looked back at his father’s dying face and waited for the bullets that would end his life.

But they didn’t shoot him.

As they lifted him, Rostam’s hands had slid over the wet floor. He realized the bullet had struck a nearby boiler and only grazed his leg. The wetness he felt was water, not his blood.

Rostam would never know why they had taken him to a hospital for treatment when they had executed so many of his family members. He spent a month and a half in the hospital, visited by the chief doctor and guarded over by soldiers. When he was deemed well enough, he was shackled and sent to Pol-e-charkhi, where he was reunited with other family members who had been spared—uncles, aunts, and cousins.

“We lived seven to a cell in that dungeon,” he says. “We were allowed outside only to relieve ourselves. The rest of the time, we listened to the cries of the tortured through the stone walls. I hardly slept, wondering when it would be my turn to keep the others awake.”

“How long were you there?” I ask.

“Six months. Then one day, it was over. The shah of Iran sent a plane and put us up in a hotel in Tehran for a month before we went to Switzerland.”

Just before the coup, Rostam’s mother had gone to Europe for treatment of a lung condition. News of the attack on Arg reached her, and she’d been warned not to return. From what she had been told, there was no one for her to return to anyway.

When Rostam reached Switzerland, he’d fallen into her arms and apologized profusely that he’d not been able to protect Neelab. She’d apologized for not being with them that night. They live in Germany now. Rostam returned to Kabul three months ago when he heard about the commission to locate the bodies.