The Somber Side of a Scientific Mind. Christian Tyoder

      Twenty-Eight Years Later

      It was Wednesday, February 26, 1997, a sunny but fairly cold day for the season in Queens Borough, New York. Hans, a bank manager, came home from work earlier than usual today. His American-born wife, Shelly, sitting in the den near the window, was typing on her newly acquired Apple a report to the school board on ways to improve the school children’s behavior.

      As Hans was hanging his cashmere garment in the coat closet, Shelly approached him and deposited an affectionate kiss on his dry lips. “Are you all right? You came home early today.”

      “The annual meeting of Manhattan Bank Managers in Bronx ended a few minutes after four, and I decided to come home directly from there instead of going back to my office and having to fight with the traffic.”

      Shelly poured two cups of jasmine tea kept warm since 5:00 p.m. under an ornate red thick fabric cozy their son brought back a few years earlier from Sweden. Husband and wife sat down on two Queen Ann-style chairs near the bay window. They were enjoying the fragrant tea. Hans reached out to his wife’s gorgeous, slender, long-fingered hand, cheerfully uttering, “I love you.”

      “I love you too, darling.” Both turned their head toward the window glass panel and looked down onto the traffic-jammed streets of Queens from their comfortably warm twelfth-floor, two-bedroom apartment. The desk phone on the narrow kitchen table rang. Shelly quickly got up to answer. She placed the handset to her right ear. It looked as if she was frowningly trying to figure out who was calling and where the call was coming from. She quickly handed the handset to her husband, saying, “Honey, all I could make out was that someone wants to talk to you.”

      Hans said to the caller who continued to jabber in English with a strong foreign accent, “Hallo, hallo.” Sensing that the lady on the phone had perhaps French as her mother tongue, Hans politely suggested. “S’il vous plait, parlez votre propre langue” (please speak your own language).

      Hans finally realized after a few seconds that it was Martine, Abd’s wife, whom he never met. She was calling him from La Rochelle, France. They spoke in French, and their conversation lasted over an hour. Hans mentioned that he had not heard from Abd since their separation at Basel main railroad station in January 1969, even though his address and his phone number were given to Abd at the last minute. He also told Martine that he had tried several times during the subsequent four years to locate her in Tarbes, Midi-Pyrenees district, but his attempts by phone calls and letters were in vain. Martine explained to Hans that she had moved back to La Rochelle to be near her family after Abd passed away on February 14, 1969. Hans quietly listened to her while jotting down a few details of the story that went like this.

      At the end of January 1969, Martine received a telegram from Ali, her brother-in-law who lived as a war refugee in Vienna, notifying that Abd had finally arrived in Bamyan, Afghanistan, and that he was very sick with his leukemia in exacerbation. She managed to get a visa for that country and then for Pakistan within seventy-two hours; she then flew to Islamabad. From there she switched buses three times to arrive a week later at the house in Bamyan where Abd was born and now occupied by his oldest brother, Zekirullah. Martine found Abd moribund to the point that he could barely recognize her. She went into details about the remaining thirty-six hours she spent at his bedside, weeping.

      A month and a few days earlier, Ali was quite surprised to see his brother show up in Vienna alone, without announcement. Apparently, around the time Abd arrived in Vienna, his illness took a fast downhill course. He had to be admitted urgently to the university hospital for several days. He received blood transfusions that had helped him regain some strength. Instead of taking a convalescing rest at Ali’s home, he stubbornly made the most difficult trip of his life to Bamyan by trains then by buses less than a week after he was discharged from the hospital. The interaction between him and Abd was rather limited during the short visit, probably because of the latter’s illness. But at the inspection of the plastic bag containing items belonging to Abd that one of the nurses at the hospital handed over to him, he found, among others, garnet-colored rosary beads with crucifix and a validated Linz-Vienna train ticket. From subsequent rare and brief conversations with Abd, Ali learned that his brother did not dare to drive alone anymore because of frequent episodes of headache and dizziness by the time he reached Kirchdorf am Inn in southeast Germany. He abandoned his car there. From there he hitchhiked all the way to Linz, then finished the rest of his trip by train.

      “I am curious. How did you find out that your husband and I met in Paris?”

      “Are you ready to hear the real but intricate circumstances leading to this call to you? I will not be surprised if you are befuddled by what I am about to recount.”

      “Please, continue.”

      The French lady thanked Hans and went on to tell him the long story with each episode in detail and in chronological order. Abd arrived in Bamyan sometime at the end of January 1969. He became weaker by the day. His brother Zekirullah sent an urgent request to their uncle Faisal, a general medical doctor, to make a house call. The latter lived three hours away by donkey transportation or two hours by bike on rough country roads. Facilities for blood transfusion, commonly used in Western European countries as a supplement in the care of patients with leukemia, were out of the question. Zekirullah reported that Faisal could only give Abd injections of “bismuth for his relentless bloody diarrhea,” of “vitamins to maintain his waning physical strength,” and of “antibiotics to ward off hidden infections.”

      Being the only Catholic in the whole county of Bamyan, Martine had to administer the last rites to her dying husband just before he took his last breath. The funeral was quite simple. The day after he died, his body was placed in a hard cardboard box, as coffin, and then carried by an ox wagon to the ancestral cemetery where a freshly dug grave lay next to his father’s tomb. Her brother-in-law Zekirullah, his wife, and their two sons were at the burial site. The silk flower from Martine’s coat was placed on the casket. Zekirullah recited a Buddhist prayer, and silently Abd’s remains were slowly lowered into the ground. On the next day, painfully bereaved by the loss of her companion of thirty years, Martine returned to France to find solace through close contacts with her family in La Rochelle.

      Hans, noting that she became extremely emotional at times, with sentences repeatedly interrupted by audible sobbing sounds, interjected, “I am very sorry. I should not have asked you to go through your suffering again. Perhaps it would be better that I call you in a couple of days and then you can tell me the rest of the story.”

      “No, no, please let me finish it now. It shouldn’t be much longer. I need your sympathy and your help, as you will know why in a moment.” Then Martine continued to keep Hans interested in her unfinished story.

      After the death of Abd, she remained in touch with his surviving siblings and their family for years, in particular with Zekirullah and Ali. They exchanged letters and occasional phone calls. Not able to take risky trips back to Bamyan during the subsequent years to visit her husband’s tomb, she wanted to be certain that it was well marked and well taken care by Zekirullah, his wife, and their two sons. To express her gratitude, twice a year she sent them financial assistance that had undoubtedly helped improve their living condition, as Afghanistan was, during the period preceding the Russian War, impoverished by interminable battles between warlords. Depressed and feeble by his illness, Abd had been very little communicative after he returned to his parents’ home in Bamyan. He spent the most part of the day indoor, either in bed or on the upholstered couch, writing off and on in his tattered notebook. Neither Ali nor Zekirullah knew what was going on with Abd once he left Tarbes for Afghanistan.

      Then in March 2004, a shocking surprise startled everyone in Rasulov’s family. The oldest son of Zekirullah was about to move out of his parents’ home with his newlywed wife to live in the neighbor town Dokani. The only couch in the house was given to them as a part of the dowry.