The Swallows of Kabul
novel by Yasmina Khadra
The Swallows of Kabul (2002) is a novel by Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra originally written and published in French. The novel is set in the early 2000s during the reign of the Taliban, and explores the lives of two couples: Mohsen and Zunaira, and Atiq and Musarrat. Both couples find themselves trapped in the oppressive and violent realities of Kabul under Taliban rule. The city, once vibrant and full of life, has been reduced to a desolate and destitute place, where public executions and harsh punishments are the norm.
- On souk day, people act as if in a trance.
- "You can't stay there!" a vendor shouts at them, furiously brandishing a long stick above their heads. "You're bringing my stall bad luck, not to mention all kinds of bugs."
- Mohsen Ramat hesitates for a long time before he decides to join the crowd gathering in the square. The authorities have announced the public execution of a prostitute: She is to be stoned to death.
- Mohsen loathes public executions. They make him conscious of his vulnerability, they sharpen his perception of his limits, they fill him with sudden insight into the futility of all things, of all people.
- The first time he watched someone put to death--a murderer, whose throat was slit by a member of his victim's family--the sight made him sick. For many nights thereafter, his sleep was dazzled by nightmarish visions.
- But time has passed, and scaffolds have come to seem more and more a part of ordinary life, so much so that the citizens of Kabul grow anxious at the thought that an execution might be postponed.
- For him and everyone else, death is only a banality. Moreover, everything is banality.
- Kabul has become the antechamber to the great beyond: a dark antechamber, where the points of reference are obscure; a puritanical ordeal; something latent and unbearable, observed in the strictest privacy.
- In the old days--that is, several light-years ago--he loved to take an evening stroll along the boulevards of Kabul. Back then, the windows of the bigger stores didn't have very much to offer, but no one came up to you and struck you in the face with a whip. People went about their business with enough motivation to envision, in accesses of enthusiasm, fabulous projects.
- And the women, despite wearing long veils and peering through netting, pirouetted in their perfumes like gusts of warm air.
- this is the reason why the wearing of the burqa has become a necessity, more to preserve women from malicious eyes than to spare men the temptations of infinite allurements. . . . How far off those days seem.
- These days, the boulevards of Kabul are no longer amusing.
- The formerly blacktopped streets are now only beaten tracks scraped by clogs and sandals all day long. The shopkeepers have put their smiles in the storeroom. The chilam smokers have vanished into thin air. The men of Kabul have taken cover behind shadow puppets, and the women, mummified in shrouds the color of fever or fear, are utterly anonymous.
- "There are some among us, humans like ourselves, who have chosen to wallow in filth like pigs. In vain have they heard the sacred Message, in vain have they learned what perniciousness lurks in temptation; still they succumb, because their faith is insufficient to help them resist. Wretched creatures, blind and useless, they have shut their ears to the muezzin's call in order to hearken to the ribaldries of Satan. They have elected to suffer the wrath of God rather than abstain from sin. How can we address them, except in sorrow and indignation?"
- "This woman knew exactly what she was doing. The intoxication of lust turned her away from the path of the Lord. Today, the Lord turns His back on her. She has no right to His mercy, no right to the pity of the faithful. She has lived in dishonor; so shall she die."
