This is the second of two pieces looking at resistance and Afghanistan. The first, an exclusive look inside the ongoing armed resistance to the Taliban, appeared in Guernica last week. This piece runs in collaboration with the latest issue of Adi Magazine, “Afghan Women: A Polyphony.”

The first time I’d seen Malali was in Tehran, three years earlier. Afterward she insisted I meet her in Kabul. But I wanted no part of going to Kabul. I told her that if she wanted to put me in front of the camera, she had to come to Iran. This was where I lived, not in Afghanistan. We continued to exchange emails. She kept harping about wanting to make a film about refugees and wanted me, a refugee, in her film. That was fine, I told her.

But first she had to explain to me what and who, exactly, a refugee is to her. I, for one, didn’t feel like one.

She had received this plum project from the Afghan government at the time. Flush with money from the Americans, the government was giving her wads of cash to make a documentary on second- and third-generation Afghan women refugees, especially those who were educated and maybe had realized a modicum of success or integration wherever they happened to live. It was, I suppose, one way of coaxing us back to the motherland, and through internet searching, Malali had eventually gotten around to me.

She was a second-generation emigrant herself, born to Afghan parents who had fled to Germany during the Soviet occupation years. She’d studied cinema in Berlin, and now, with the hard-to-resist dollars that the Afghan government was offering, she had decided to return to Afghanistan for “work.”

That first time she came into the bookstore-café that I manage in the heart of Tehran, she seemed to me a young European woman, freckles and all, with a very poor Persian Dari accent. The color of her skin and her hair was so light that it was truly difficult for me to imagine I wasn’t talking to a German. During her six days in my city, we sat for hours every day in my café and just talked, a mile a minute. Mostly the conversation had little to do with her project. Now and then we would correct each other’s vocabulary in order to show off our knowledge of Persian. We talked about the realities of the refugee life, about our worlds in Tehran and Berlin, really about anything — except the documentary that I dreaded. Mostly, I had no idea what I wanted to say in front of Malali’s camera.

She insisted that I speak on camera in the Dari accent and tone down the Persian of Iran that I had grown up in. To me, it seemed like what Malali was really asking for was a refugee actress rather than the refugee writer I supposedly was, or am. What point was there in me speaking in that accent when, in my daily life, the Dari version of Persian was simply not there?

Truth is that our ideas on just about everything hardly matched. She described an emigrant as someone flying a balloon, able to see the host country with a measure of needed distance. I didn’t feel this way at all. Maybe it was because I lived next door to Afghanistan, had grown up in a province a short drive from the border, and more or less spoke the same language here that we spoke over there. I told her that, for me, to be an emigrant was more like drinking coffee — bitter, maybe, but also soothing. A successful emigrant was someone who could dissolve into their host like sugar into the bitter drink, lending taste and body to the place that had taken them in. We went back and forth like that. Then, on the last day of her stay, before she flew off to Berlin, I at last sat in front of that camera inside Laleh Park and spoke. In answer to her last question — whether I’d be willing to return to Afghanistan — I laughed and said, “No, their accent is hard on my Iranian boy.”

My response seemed to sadden Malali. She waited a few more seconds before turning the camera off. Finally she shook her head in resignation and said, “Finished!”

I never did figure out if by shaking her head Malali meant she felt disappointed in me, or disappointed for her film, or for all of those supposedly liberated Afghan women who’d watch the clip end with such an uninspiring response from one of their own. I was wondering how much I really understood Malali. Maybe she had her own reasons for returning to Afghanistan, and those reasons were bigger than American dollars.

Malali’s documentary was edited back in Berlin and was even used as her university thesis. During this whole time, we stayed in touch, and eventually she invited me for the first screening of her film in Kabul. I was curious. It wasn’t that I was all that attracted to seeing Kabul again after all these years; it was more that I wanted to see other women like myself who had also been invited for the screening — women with passports or dual citizenships from other places, women whose Dari Persian was questionable at best, women who had been living placelessness their entire lives.

I arrived at Kabul’s airport with my Iranian passport and offered a wide smile to the customs agent, who without any fanfare stamped the entry and said, “Welcome.” Just beyond the transit area, my cousin, the last of my relatives still living in Kabul, spotted me and shouted a loud “Allah Akbar,” causing a woman to drop her handbag for fear of her life. I laughed.

At my cousin’s house, I finally called Malali and told her I was in Kabul. We planned to meet the next day.

This was my second visit to Kabul since the Taliban had been kicked out that first time around, in the early 2000s. The city was in a building frenzy, it seemed, and the shops and malls didn’t look all that different from the ones in Tehran. Even the way women did their makeup and colored their hair nowadays could have been lifted from the streets of Tehran.

Malali was excited. Whatever cream she was using on her face these days made her look a shade or two darker than she had when we met. Her hijab was neat and straight. From her social media posts, I knew this was an especially busy time for her. She jumped in right away: “One day you, too, will realize this. If for nothing else, you have to come back here for the sake of the women of this country.”

I pretended to be contrite and said, “There’s not much I can do in this place.”

She didn’t let my answer get to her. Instead she began telling me about the history of the café we’d come to. Before the Taliban, it had already existed; after the Taliban, its second incarnation began. Everything inside the place was new now, though the walls were covered with photos of war going all the way back to the time of the Russians. “There are endless archives of photos and videos from all our wars,” she offered. “I’m going to tap into that stuff for my work.”

I realized that something about those pictures on the walls was bothering me. They were black-and-white photos of unbearable suffering, and yet someone had drawn on them, with a red Magic Marker, outlines of kites and hearts. It wasn’t just in poor taste; it was hideous. Maybe it was meant to be art, showing that even in war there could be love and games. But the juxtaposition was nothing short of repugnant.

Pointing to the photographs, I said, “They’ve made a mockery of so many dead. I guess now that it’s the era of reconstruction, this is their way of wanting to make people happy?”

“There were two suicide attacks in the city yesterday,” she said. “One of them in this neighborhood.”

Her quick riposte made me realize I was grasping at straws. From the very beginning of our acquaintance, I had tried to convey to her that she, who had been born and bred in Europe, knew nothing about calamity and that all she was doing now was taking the American-supplied cash of the Afghan government to make her own questionable film. But she was too smart to let me get away with this; she was telling me that it was she, not me, who was here now in the middle of ongoing war.

She ordered tea; I ordered coffee. Then she went on to describe her film, scene by scene. I had to give it to her — she had really done her homework and followed people’s trails as far away as places like Stockholm, Melbourne, and Toronto. She peppered her speech with the Persian word for homeland — vatan — a word that I honestly don’t think she had known how to use when we met in Tehran. “We cannot all be runaways from our vatan and expect to rebuild this country,” she insisted.

She was brimming with excitement and had big ideas for fixing Afghanistan’s ills. She took a notebook out of her bag and showed me the names of some forty or so women, Afghan females from the world of politics, culture, and sports — women whom, now and then, I had even written about. But the more I focused on those names, the more I wondered where I fit into all of this.

I thought of going philosophical, waxing on about how no one really knows their place in life and in the world. But it wouldn’t work. Malali was going on and on, giving me the news on what this and that woman had accomplished. She had really pulled me all the way to Kabul to impress on me that I should be ashamed for not having a share in rebuilding our so-called vatan from scratch. I stayed quiet. This damn word was as much a nonstarter for me in Kabul as the label “refugee” was for me in Tehran.

Foreigners could never rebuild this or any nation. That much was clear to me. From the moment I’d stepped inside the airport of this city and seen all those armed-to-the-teeth soldiers from other countries, with their bulletproof vests and dead eyes, I’d asked myself who was really at fault for bringing such soulless scarecrows into our land. Had it been the fault of our Communist fathers, or the guerrillas who fought the Russians, or the Taliban and their medieval ways? Motherland, homeland, vatan — these were all empty words that lost even more meaning in this pathetic café in the center of Kabul, with its caricatured photographs of war and Malali’s perfect notebook of wishful ideas on powerful women. Motherland was something without content or form, something utterly abstract — something that, in relation to a country like this, could only occupy the minds of those who’d never had it.

Yet Malali simply wouldn’t stop working on me, talking about how her real project was only in its infancy and how she needed to find more second-generation refugees and bring them back to remake the country. I thought to myself: To this place? A country that has to draw kites and balloons and heart shapes on photos of war to make itself feel better?

“Malali, believe me when I tell you, I don’t know this place at all. Not at all!”

“So stay! Stay so you can get to know it better. I felt the same when I first came back.”

“Maybe. But there’s a difference between you and me. I have a child.”

“A child can grow up here too.”

“The kid’s father is Iranian.”

“These things don’t matter anymore. Talk him into coming here with you.”

We were getting nowhere, and I felt frustrated. “Let it go please. I wouldn’t know how to live here.”

I felt like crying. In the cool breeze of a spring afternoon in Kabul, I realized that, truly, I didn’t know this place even a little bit. And what was worse was that I didn’t know myself in this place. This young woman was after an authenticity that didn’t exist, and I couldn’t pretend alongside her that motherland was other than a fantasy. As we were leaving, Malali made me promise that I’d give her a real tour of the city the next time she was in Tehran. I promised. Laughing, I told her that, in Tehran, at least we wouldn’t need security details everywhere we went.

My cousin was waiting for me across the street in his car. Another car waited for Malali.

The next day I showed up at the University of Kabul’s literature department to see the film’s screening. My last time here, I’d been with my father, who had promptly recalled all of our dead. He’d spoken about his dead uncles, who had been instrumental in building the faculty of medicine from the ground up, and about eight men in the family who had been called back from Europe during the Communist era, only to be eventually put in front of a firing squad. It was interesting listening to my father and finally understanding that he spoke about the left and leftists in our country with a measure of nostalgia — the same left that brought the country to the brink of extinction by inviting the Soviets into the country, and the very same left that ultimately pushed it over the edge of the precipice, possibly forever. When I’d confronted him about this, he’d answered, “Whoever’s attended college at some point dabbles in leftism, only to realize later what an appalling mistake they’ve made.” His answer was shocking. It made me think of my own university years in Tehran and the struggles us university students (all of us leftists to the bone) had had to bring a modicum of reform to the revolution.

But, really, there was no comparison to be made here. The left in Afghanistan had gone way beyond reforms, allowing the Soviets and their broken Communist ideology and the mutilation of Afghanistan. I finally saw why my father and men like him could not accept that their generation had been the cause of the destruction of their country. Who in the world can accept guilt of this magnitude and still go on living?

Inside the auditorium, Malali was busy at work onstage. She was already thanking President Ashraf Ghani for his support — Ghani, the Johns Hopkins wonk and World Bank apparatchik who was selling off the country he would go on to hand back to the Taliban before hightailing it to safer pastures.

Everyone clapped for Malali. Why shouldn’t they? Her Persian, I heard, had improved, and as she thanked her many other sponsors, I saw that she’d become adept at working the patron market. When she also thanked her mother and father for bringing her into the world as an Afghan, I knew that she had managed to craft her fictions into perfection.

The documentary began at a café in Berlin. A young woman speaking German said that she was born in Romania and now lived in Germany. She spoke a little about her Afghan parents and her education, and finally, to the question of whether she was willing to go back to Afghanistan, she replied no; she was about to marry a German and was living her life there in Berlin.

The auditorium was silent. The screen went black for a moment. The next interviewee was in Tehran: a young woman sitting on the grassy area by the Freedom Monument. She spoke with a Dari accent, telling us that she was in college studying nursing — in love with her professor, a medical doctor who taught at the university in the city of Esfahan. The doctor’s family was against their marriage because she was Afghan. To the question of whether she might return to Afghanistan, she replied, “If I can’t marry him, I’ll return.”

A woman living in Istanbul came next. She worked in a garment workshop. She was strikingly beautiful, a painter in her earlier life. She’d been born in Iran and had left for Turkey. She hardly knew Afghanistan. “My father didn’t fight for Iran during their war,” she said, “so we couldn’t stay.” Asked if she’d return home, she said, “It depends on the money they offer me. If it’s too little, no.”

Nineteen women came and went before the camera. They lived all over the world, and pretty much all said the same thing: they would not return unless they were given special privileges. I was number twenty. When I first saw myself on-screen, I understood how at ease I appeared in Tehran. I was home. To that last question, I gave my own no: my child could not speak the Afghan dialect.

The camera was zoomed on my face now. I was smiling, but my eyes gave me away. I looked vexed and trapped in front of that lens.

The film ended, the audience duly clapped, and I got out of there before people came onstage to give their usual speeches. Seeing myself and my smile, hearing my inadequate answer, had completely unbalanced me.

Walking down the stairs of the college, I was no longer the tough woman who had arrived hours earlier. I was my late uncle and his students, who had once walked down these same stairs with trepidation. I was Dr. Nasser Khan, who had been gunned down at the hospital by the Communists. I was my uncle’s wife, who would not stop searching for her disappeared son in the cafeteria so that she might keep him alive. I was my father and his comrades, who had promised not to sell each other out and then gone ahead and done just that, every last one of them. I was who I was, a frustrated immigrant. If you never had a choice in leaving your country, no one should claim the right to ask why you don’t go back. How should I know where my home is! I suppose home is where you grew up, where you went to school, where your son grows up, where your name sits inside some birth certificate.

That night at my cousin’s house, I refused to talk to anyone. I just wanted to get back “home” as quickly as possible. It is not easy to know who you are in the midst of despair. How many countries can a person belong to? I needed clarity on this and couldn’t come up with any answers.

The following day, I left Kabul, leaving the dead of our family where they were. Back in Iran, my kid waited, as did my husband, my job, my friends, and my house. Malali, as far as I was concerned, could stay in Afghanistan for as long as she liked. But eight months later, I got a call from her. She was coming to Tehran for the city’s documentary film festival. She reminded me I’d promised to give her a tour of the place and its endless cafés.

Malali had brought me a shawl from the Badakhshan Province and was wearing one herself. By chance, we both happened to be wearing Afghan bracelets too. Laughing, we sat in a taxi and decided to complete our “Afghan look” by penciling three little beauty marks on our chins. We were going to have fun that day, from ten in the morning till ten at night — two young Afghan women in Tehran, my city, the city where I’d spent most of my adult life, the place I had convinced myself I had melted into.

We started from Jomhuri Avenue and Café Naderi, the old haunt of Tehran’s intellectuals back in the day. Around the corner, we lunched at Gol-e Rezaieh, with its colorful posters of 1970s rock stars and its famous borscht and cutlets. I took her to the University of Tehran’s art department. We compared my art department with hers in Berlin. We were loving this. For one day, at least, there was no talk of refugees and immigration and homeland and war, or any of the dozen themes that forever straitjacketed our belonging-to-no-place lives. This was Tehran, the capital city par excellence. Fifteen million souls strong. As we walked, café owners would call out to us and ask us to come in because they served Afghan green tea. Merchants wanted to buy the shawls we wore and made offers for our Afghan bracelets. I was showing off to her what it meant to be in the great Persian-speaking capital of the world. Where but here could we find so many people who spoke our language?

The whole time I was talking Tehran, Malali was talking Berlin. She went on about how much freer emigrants felt there and what great times she’d had with her college friends during these last few years. Then she added, “You were right, Aliyeh. An emigrant can’t stay alive unless she’s like sugar that dissolves in coffee. Afghanistan was alright for a while, but its ambience began to depress me.”

Seeing that she was finally able to meet me halfway, I said, “I think you, too, had a point. I get what you meant when you said people like us have more clarity; we see things from a distance. I’m like that balloon you mentioned; I’m up there seeing Tehran better, more clearly, than its own people.”

It was finally getting to be twilight. By then we were walking up Amir Abad near the Technical College. Three young men, noticeably on drugs or most probably drunk, were coming in our direction. One of them drew right up to us and then turned to his friends: “Guys, where do you think these ladies are from?”

They all laughed. We stepped back in fear and held on to the railings along the wall. The same guy brought his face to mine, stinking of alcohol. Before I could make a move, he low-punched me in the gut. I doubled over for a moment, heaving, not able to breathe.

“Look at what they’re wearing,” one of them said. “They must be from Balochistan or something.”

Malali screamed, “We’re Afghans!”

I was lost. Still, I had enough presence of mind to realize you didn’t necessarily show off your Afghan identity in a city like Tehran. The traffic on the highway was bumper to bumper, but no one was getting out of their cars to help us. They were probably thinking this was a personal matter and didn’t want to get involved. By now, Malali was fighting them with everything she had, cursing, biting, kicking, and screaming at the top of her voice in German. I watched her in disbelief, thinking how little I really knew her.

Finally I dragged myself into the middle of the traffic, begging for help. Several men got out of their cars. Malali’s face was soaked in blood. Mine couldn’t have been much better. I’d taken another punch and could barely keep one eye open. Malali’s Persian was gone completely, only German now. The way she fought and screamed made me think of another Malali — Malalai of Maiwand, the Joan of Arc of Afghanistan, who had given such a terrible time to the British invaders in a previous century.

The men who had gotten out of their cars were soon delivering a sound beating to the three thugs who’d attacked us. One of those goons shouted, “They are Afghans! They deserve it. They’ve been raping our women and children forever. What do they want here in our country!”

I could tell it was the first time Malali had come across the weight that that word, Afghan, carries in a place like Tehran. And I didn’t know how to explain all of this to her. Our shawls had disappeared in the scuffle, and when the police came and took us away, they had to dig up a pair of simple white hijabs at the station.

We were asked for our identity cards. I offered my Iranian passport, Malali her German one.

The officer seemed puzzled. “Why did you two tell those brutes you were Afghans, then?”

A woman walked in and told the officer that the medical doctor in charge had to check our wounds and register them. “We have dual citizenships,” I offered. Then we followed after the woman. Upstairs they checked me first.

When it came time for Malali to be examined, she held my hand and pressed it. “Stay, please. I’m scared.”

They let me stay with her in the examination room. She had two chipped teeth, and her face was smashed pretty badly. She was asked to take her clothes off. There were bruises across her arms. But the thing that really stuck out was an actual hole in one arm, as if something sharp had dug itself in there and taken a part of her flesh.

The doctor asked, “What is this here?”

Malali was shaking. I could hear the chatter of her damaged teeth. She explained this was an old wound. She’d been born in a refugee camp in Germany. When she was two, another refugee, a Serb who hated Muslims, had gotten into a dispute with her father and later tortured Malali for it. The hole in her arm was from that time.

I couldn’t listen anymore. It was as if someone had grabbed hold of me and smashed me against the wall of the examination room. No, I had not known Malali. I had not known this girl at all.

Our next rendezvous was to have been in Berlin. In front of the camp for Afghan refugees who were still, after all these years, running from war.

Originally published in Persian in the collection کورسرخی, by Cheshmeh (2020). Translated for Guernica by Salar Abdoh. Copyright © 2020 by Aliyeh Ataei.