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nothing seemed to be working.
    The first thing I’d done was to convince James during the rare moments my mother left us alone in the house to hand over his flowers to the guard so that he might pass them onto her. Both men hesitated at first, not liking the idea of giving and receiving flowers from each other, but when I explained using a mixture of hand gestures and pieces of English that my mother might feel more comfortable getting gifts from a foreigner through an Afghan, they both agreed to try it. And although my mother now accepted the flowers, which she arranged in old coffee jars and placed around the windows, she didn’t seem to be moving any closer to accepting Shir Ahmad’s company beyond quick conversations during the handover of teapots and food plates.
    My next tactic involved making Shir appear interesting. “Oh! That Shir! He’s a funny man!” I’d laugh, collapse, and shake my head with the hilarity of another made-up story or joke he’d never told, hoping to arouse my mother’s curiosity. “Here, listen to this!” I ordered one evening, coming to sit by my mother’s side as she washed one of Georgie’s white shirts in a bowl of soapy water. “One day, a mental fell asleep by the side of the road. He was wearing a brand-new pair of boots. A man walked up to him and decided to steal the snoring mental’s boots. Carefully, the thief removed them and put his old pair of shoes on the crazy man’s feet. Not long after, a car came up the road and stopped in front of the mental. The driver woke him and told him, ‘Move your feet out of the road so that I may pass by.’ The mental then looked at his feet and said, ‘Brother, pass by. These feet don’t belong to me!’ ” I slapped my thighs, threw my head back in laughter, and waited for my mother to join in. But she didn’t. She simply gave me a look and asked, “Have you been drinking beer again?” before returning her attention to Georgie’s wet, soapy shirts.
    After the jokes failed to work, I slowly began to gather the threads of Shir Ahmad’s life, from the short conversations we shared as I left for and returned from school.
    “He used to have a wife,” I told my mother after I had collected all the facts and pulled them into something thatmight show him to be more than a man who just stood at the door.
    “Who did?”
    “Shir Ahmad.”
    Mother put down the knife she was using to saw up the fatty flesh of one of Afghanistan’s big-bottomed sheep.
    “So?” she asked. “What happened to her?”
    “It’s a sad story, Mother. A very sad story.”
    “Don’t be dramatic, Fawad.”
    She turned back to the raw meat and carried on hacking.
    “Okay,” I hurried, worried that I’d lost her so early on in the tale, “but it
is
sad.”
    I threw her a stern look to remind her that a good Muslim woman should have more sympathy.
    “Shir told me that he was married very young to an even younger girl from his village and that he loved her very, very much. Every day he would bring her flowers.” I paused, watching my mother as I stressed the word
flowers
, but she didn’t even blink. “So, he brought her
flowers
every day, and he would sing to her every night as she prepared their dinner. They didn’t have much because Shir only had a small job learning how to file paperwork at the offices of the Department of Agriculture. He was educated, you see. He could read and write; that’s how he got the job with the department, where you have to know your numbers. Anyway, Shir and his wife were planning on having a big family. They wanted at least five sons and as many daughters, but when the first child came—he was a boy—he got stuck inside Shir’s wife. For two days the women of the village tried to pull the baby from her stomach, and their house became filled with her blood and all of Shir’s tears. For those two days he never left his wife’s side, staying instead to hold her hand and press cold, wet cloths onto her head. Then