The Secret Sky: A Novel of Forbidden Love in Afghanistan by Atia Abawi Page B

ground. The pain in my feet is nothing compared to everything else I am feeling. I hear Sami jump down after me.
    “I’m so sorry. What did I say? Are you okay?” Sami kneels in front of me, his arms half outstretched, as if he wants to hold me but is afraid. I’m not afraid. Not anymore. I wrap my arms around his neck and bury my face in his shoulder, trying to hide my tears. He reaches his arms around me, holding tight. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “Just take a deep breath.”
    Our bodies stay enfolded for what seems like ages. I begin to catch my breath, and my tears stop streaming like the winter snow melting from the mountaintops; they instead become little droplets of rain. As we unwrap our arms and bodies, I immediately want that warmth and comfort back. I begin to feel silly for what I did and just look at the ground. “I’m sorry” is all I can say.
    “For what? Don’t be sorry.” Sami sounds genuinely concerned. “But you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
    I tell him everything, starting with my mother’s plan to marry me off. I don’t know if I’m just imagining it, but I think he looks distraught. I go on to tell him about my father and what he did when he was in Kabul. I tell him about the baby, but Sami doesn’t seem surprised. And this begins to upset me too. “Why aren’t you outraged?” I ask him.
    “Fatima, your father is a good man,” he says, picking more
toot
and settling on the rock beside me. “He loves you. He is even fighting your mother so she’ll stop trying to marry you to a stranger. Not many fathers love their daughters that way.”
    “But how can you call him a good man? He killed people!” I notice my voice rising.
    “This country, our people, that’s all some of them know,” Sami says. “Maybe that is all your father knew until he was taught something different. I’m not defending what your father did; it was wrong. I’m just saying that he probably didn’t know better or he was forced to do it so he wouldn’t be killed himself. I don’t know. But I do know he isn’t the only guilty person in our country.” He reaches his hand out to offer me some of the berries, but I don’t take them.
    “What do you mean?” I ask, almost disappointed in Sami for defending such horrific acts. We’re talking about taking lives! Taking lives of the innocent. Of a baby! “Do you think it’s okay just to kill people? Would
you
kill someone?”
    “Of course not!” Now Sami’s upset too. “I’m just saying that maybe your father didn’t want to do what he did. But he had to. Maybe he was forced to! Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing!”
    I’m suddenly caught off guard and become silent. I look at Sami and try to figure out his expression, but I can’t. His voice is full of rage, but his face seems so sad.
    “I’m sorry,” he says, breaking the silence. But I still can’t find the right words to respond to him. I feel like there’s something I should be figuring out in the silence.
    “It’s okay,” I finally say. But I don’t know if it really is okay. He looks like a lost little boy; it makes me want to hold him the way he just held me.
    “It’s not okay,” he responds. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.”
    “So why did you?” seems like the best question I can ask right now.
    “I’m just saying that life isn’t always what we see in our small village,” he says. “There is a lot going on out there that’s scarier than what we experienced yesterday, and it’s scarier than what we face on any day.”
    I know Sami has seen and experienced more than I have and has been to more places than I have been. Even before he went off to the
madrassa,
he and his father would travel from village to village delivering goods. But he, like my father, barely talks about it. And when they do, it is all about how great our village is compared to the rest of the country. I’m beginning to feel the distance between us.
    “There are people