If Tilly had much to learn about Afghanistan, I also had much to learn about America. One night I had sat on the balcony with Antonia as she studied the script for the show the Americans were putting on. I asked her to explain the story to me. At first she said it was a love story, but then, after chewing her lip for a second, she amended her description.

“Two love stories,” she’d said. “Set in a time long ago, the beginning of a new state in America—Oklahoma. At that time, it was Indian country.”

“We have Indian people in Afghanistan too. And a Hindu temple,” I replied.

“Not that kind of Indian,” she’d explained, and then went on to tell me that the people who lived in America before Europeans settled there were called Indians too, and that American cowboys had ventured into that land to grow America.

Surely there must have been a war. No people gave their land up without a fight. While I wondered why people would sing and dance about war, she sighed and explained that it was really a story about a woman choosing a husband.

“You are not married?” I’d asked. There was no trace of a man in Antonia’s apartment. I didn’t know any women her age who were not married with children. She was a beautiful woman, and I could not imagine why no one had courted her.

Antonia had shaken her head.

“I don’t think I could be someone’s other half. I move from country to country. Men don’t like it when their wives aren’t home to greet them,” she’d explained. “I suppose that’s why they used to make women resign from the service if they got married.”

I had never thought of my parents as two halves. I saw them as two individual wholes, but also as a single organism that lived and breathed for me. And maybe because of me. It almost seemed as if I’d brought them to life instead of the other way around.

I jumped when the swirling sound of a siren began, drowning out whatever it was that Tilly was trying to say to me. Flashing lights, red as the smoke that engulfed the palace the night of the coup, poured into the room and cast ghostly shadows on Tilly’s face and on the map of the world.

Yet again, I hadn’t seen the danger coming.

The door of the office was flung open, and two soldiers stepped in, faces half hidden by helmets and fingers poised on triggers.

Chapter 24