MAZAR-E-SHARIF — At dusk, the woman of the house kneels on the edge of the tandoor built into the cement floor in the corner of her yard, slips her hand into a sleeve ripped off years ago from some old jacket, reaches in, and pulls.
Nothing. The loaf of nan is stuck; the clay oven refuses to release it. She straightens up, pulling her hand away, and hollers for one of the handful of grandchildren in her twilit yard to fetch a long knife from the kitchen. The heat from the coals has colored her full face the color of a ripe orange. She throws back her head, takes a swig from a tall plastic bottle in which a chunk of ice has begun to melt, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, spots me watching her, and laughs.
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My hostess has 13 children. For the last three weeks, I have been the 14th.
Every morning, after I pull on my shoes outside her front door, she throws water in my direction from a red plastic pitcher. A protective charm. The woman knows: This war has no front lines. Any highway or dirt road or city street or courtyard can become a battle zone at the clang of a bullet slipping into the breech of a Kalashnikov. The Taliban is nowhere and everywhere. Last week, insurgents wearing police uniforms set up a roadblock near a rotary I often take and searched passing cars for government employees and Afghan civilians working for NATO. A foreign journalist would have been a prize. Who knows whether one morning, the Taliban won't set up a checkpoint down the street?
If the Islamist militia finds out my hostess has been sheltering an American, the punishment will be severe. Unutterable. (That's why I will not publish the woman's name.) But she is a risk-taker. In 1997, when Hazaras and Uzbeks launched an ethnic cleansing campaign against Pashtuns in Mazar-e-Sharif, she provided sanctuary to a Pashtun family. In 1998, when the Taliban slaughtered and maimed Hazaras, she took in Hazara neighbors.
I know how these people felt inside the mortared walls of my hostess's compound.
Safe.
At home.
Mothered.
During the day, I keep the door to my room open because I know people will be filing in and out anyway, usually without knocking. That's how life happens in this family of 24 (or 27; the matriarch is not sure). Someone will come by to bring me a thermos of fresh green tea. A china saucer of green raisins, sometimes with tiny brown teardrops of almonds mixed in. A pewter tray with some apples, and a paring knife.
One of the woman's nine sons will stop by to see if I need anything else, and if I am feeling well. Another will borrow some stationery. The 8-year-old granddaughter will run in to give me a quick, firm hug, and then run off to the kitchen, where the women are always cooking something good in giant pressure cookers. The 2-year-old granddaughter, the baby of the family who calls me auntie, will stop by to raid the pistachios I keep on my magazine table.
One morning the grandchildren ambush me as I am headed out the door and spray me with deodorant, all over my clothes and headscarf. They want me to smell extra nice out there, in the hostile and unpredictable world beyond their grandmother's protective walls.
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