Shair emerged from the kitchen with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Beneath the blanket, I felt around for the ashtray but found nothing. I looked up and saw it in Shair’s hand. He tapped his cigarette so firmly against the ashtray’s curved edge that ashes scattered into the air.

Shair cleared his throat and summoned his children. He spelled out simple rules for them. No one was to mention me outside the home, nor were they to ask me any questions. They would not entertain any of my requests, nor would they approach me.

As her husband spoke, Tahera brought me a plate of bread and a cup of tea.

“Eat something,” she said.

I did not budge.

Tahera lifted the blanket to get a look at my foot. I grabbed fistfuls of wool in my hands, not wanting to be on display. Tahera pointed to the ring on my finger.

“What is that?” she whispered.

When she reached for my hand, I jerked back. The cup of tea she’d set beside me toppled, the tea disappearing into the carpet.

“Tahera!” Shair said sharply. “Don’t touch a thing on her.”

Tahera’s face flushed as if her husband had just called her a grave robber. She pulled her shoulders back indignantly and scowled at her husband.

“This is temporary,” Shair said. It was unclear if he was speaking to me or his wife or all of us in the room. “All you have to do is stay quiet.”

Over the next few days, I made several attempts at escape. I bolted for the balcony and for the front door. I tiptoed from the living room at night and waited for moments of distraction in the daylight. Each attempt succeeded only in inciting an argument between Tahera and Shair. Sometimes my attempts led to my being bound at the wrists for hours.

With each passing day, the soldier looked more haggard. Tahera remained tepid with me, sometimes kind but more often looking at me as if I’d robbed her of something. The apartment being a modest one, I was privy to most conversations between them. Shair railed at his own brothers for calling him a godless Communist. Tahera worried about her cousin whose loose tongue and political opinions might get him killed under this new regime. The radio announcer declared that the Communist Party would be installing a new government, one that would do more than pay lip service to the Afghan people.

I turned Shair’s name over in my mind. Shair meant “lion.” Neelab and I had called him a candle when he was, instead, a deadly jungle beast.

Sham. Shair. These two names said together became a new conjoined word, sham-shair, which meant sword. Feeling like I’d been sliced apart, this new name made more sense than anything I’d endured in the last days.