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full covering of women at all times in public—was another. The Taliban rigorously enforced it during their five-year rule. Only in the sanctuary of the household and only in front of husbands or other women could women bare their faces. This was a prison sentence for Halajan. This was death in life. Being as old as she was, almost sixty, she’d experienced life before the Taliban and life after, and now, with the renewed violence, their presence on the streets at night, and the rumors sweeping Kabul that they were plotting their comeback, the rules were growing stricter. Halajan was worried for what might come. The taste of freedom was a strong and delicious elixir that never left her mouth.
    She pushed the door open and the cold air outdoors felt wonderful against her face after a busy morning in the café. She took a deep breath, sure she could feel her old bones creak as she gazed around the patio. A lone pomegranate tree poked out of a hole surrounded by concrete and the three generators hummed loudly. Ah, the beloved generators. When Sunny had wanted to move them to the rear of the coffeehouse, because they made conversation impossible on the front patio, Halajan had first said no. And she said no again and again for months, just to assert her authority, to let this annoying American newcomer know that she was the owner of the building and would make the decisions. But as she witnessed Sunny make one improvement after another, she, too, became frustrated with the complaints and inevitable empty tables, and agreed that the generators should be moved even though they took up room back here and valuable parking spots. Neighbors had become angry, but Sunny had bribed police to open up more parking areas on the street. There was no exaggerating the idiocy of those who ran Kabul.
    The great thing about Sunny, Halajan thought, was not her lousy Dari, not her blue jeans, not that loud voice of hers or her big whooping laughter or her crazy hair. The great thing about Sunny was her insistence on the generators. Electricity every hour of the day and night. It was as if a miracle of Muhammad had happened here.
    She looked around to be sure she was alone. Then she put a hand through her hair and smiled at her reflection in the door’s small window. Though her skin was brown and wrinkled like the walnuts in the marketplace, her short hair made her feel young and powerful. She mussed it up, enjoying its boyishness. She had given herself the drastic haircut one year before, when rumors drifted through Kabul that the Taliban were back, hiding in the hillsides of the Helmand province in the south. In a private act of defiance, her own personal statement of freedom—for she knew what would happen if the Taliban again gained control of her beloved people—she’d borrowed Sunny’s scissors and cut off her braids, which were, at the time, long enough to reach her waist. She put them in a box under a small table in her sleeping room, where they remained. And now, about every three months, she borrowed the scissors and gave herself a trim, keeping her hair just long enough to hide the truth when under a scarf.
    Under her brown dress, she wore an old blue-jean skirt that ended above her knees. A remnant of the pre-Russian era of the 1970s—when women were free to study, to work, to come and go as they pleased, to wear almost anything they wanted as long as it was respectful to Muhammad—the skirt had become soft and worn over time. Her skinny legs were covered in baggy pants to keep them warm, like the salvars her father wore before he’d died what seemed like a hundred years ago, when his house was transferred to her, his only child, then just a young woman. She dug into a front pocket and pulled out a box of Marlboros and a purple plastic lighter. She lit up, took a deep breath in, and let it out with intense satisfaction. And it wasn’t just from the nicotine. It was from the act itself—dangerous, contemptuous, and fearless. Out