00:00There is a woman in Kabul who keeps her curtains drawn, not because the view is unpleasant,
00:06because habit does not ask permission before it becomes permanent. Her name is Zargona.
00:12She is 71 years old. She has lived through four different wars in the same city. She stopped
00:19counting which one was which a long time ago. They all felt the same from inside a house with
00:24the curtains drawn. If you have ever wondered what it means to grow old inside a country that
00:30has been at war for most of your adult life, this is Zargona's story. Zargona was born in Kabul in
00:391954.
00:40The Kabul she grew up in was a different city than the one the world came to know later.
00:44There were universities. There were women in the streets without coverings. There were cinemas
00:49in parks, and an ordinary middle-class life that believed, the way ordinary lives believe,
00:55that what was normal would remain normal. Her father was a schoolteacher. Her mother kept a
01:01home that was warm and full of people. Zargona studied to become a midwife. She wanted to be
01:06the first person a new life encountered. She delivered her first baby at 23. She delivered
01:12her last at 61. In between, she delivered babies through a Soviet invasion, a civil war, a Taliban
01:20regime, and another war after that. Life kept arriving regardless of what was happening outside.
01:28The Soviets invaded in December 1979. Zargona was 25 years old. She was pregnant with her first child.
01:36She remembers the sound of the aircraft the first morning, not as something frightening exactly, but as
01:42something wrong. The sound of something that should not be in that sky over that city. Her son, Tariq,
01:49was born 11 days after the invasion began. She held him in the delivery room and listened to the city
01:55outside and understood that the life she had planned and the life she was going to live were now two
02:01different things. The years of the Soviet occupation settled into the particular exhausted rhythm of a
02:09city learning to live around something it cannot remove. Zargona kept working. There was no alternative.
02:16The need for midwives did not pause for invasions. She delivered babies in apartments with the windows
02:21taped against blast. She delivered babies during curfews traveling to women in labor through streets she was
02:27not supposed to be in. She delivered babies in neighborhoods that had changed hands and would
02:32change hands again by morning. She memorized the faces of the soldiers at each one. She kept her bag packed
02:39at all times. Her husband, Daud, was a civil engineer. He spent the occupation years doing what engineers do
02:46in occupied cities, maintaining the infrastructure that keeps people alive while the infrastructure that
02:52kills people operates around it. They did not talk about what they each saw. They came home, they ate,
02:59they slept. They kept Tariq's life as ordinary as two people can keep a child's life inside an extraordinary
03:06situation. Tariq grew up thinking this was normal. That was the point.
03:12The Soviets withdrew in 1989. Zargona was 35 years old. She stood at her window, curtains open just this once,
03:21and watched the last vehicles leave the city. She felt something she thought was relief. It was not
03:28relief. It was the beginning of what came next. The civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal was
03:34in many ways worse than the occupation. At least during the occupation, you knew roughly where the danger
03:40was. The civil war had no geography. The rockets came from different directions on different days.
03:46Neighborhoods that were safe became unsafe. Factions changed allegiances. The city ate itself.
03:54Zargona's neighborhood was shelled in the spring of 1993. Their building was partially destroyed.
04:00They moved to her mother's house in a different district. Six people in three rooms. Her mother's
04:06hands shaking every time there was a loud sound. Tariq was 13. He had stopped flinching at explosions.
04:14That was the thing that frightened Zargona most. Not that he was afraid, but that he had stopped being
04:19afraid in the way that children should be afraid of things that are genuinely dangerous. He had calibrated.
04:25He had learned to measure. He was 13 years old and he was calibrating danger.
04:32The Taliban took Kabul in 1996. Zargona was 42 years old. She kept working. Women still needed midwives.
04:41Under the Taliban, women needed midwives more than ever because women could not access most other
04:47medical care. She kept her head down. She kept her bag packed. She kept going to the women who needed
04:52her. She did not think of it as courage. She thought of it as the job.
04:58Doe died in 1998. Not from violence. From a heart that had been carrying too much for too long.
05:05He was 51 years old. The doctor said cardiac arrest. Zargona sat beside his bed in the hospital and held
05:13his hand and thought about every conversation they had not had. Everything they had not said,
05:18because there was always something more urgent. And they believed, the way people believe when they are in
05:23the middle of things, that there would be time later. There was not time later. There is never
05:30time later. She kept working. Tariq married. He had children of his own. He tried to leave Afghanistan
05:38several times. Once during the Second American War. Once after. The first attempt did not succeed.
05:45The second did. He is in Germany now. He calls when he can. The calls are shorter than either of
05:53them
05:53want them to be because the distance makes certain kinds of conversation too painful to sustain.
06:02Zargona is 71 years old. She retired from midwifery at 61, when her hands could no longer be trusted for
06:11the work they had done for 38 years. She lives alone in Kabul. She keeps the curtains drawn. Not from
06:18fear
06:19exactly. From the particular tiredness of a woman who has looked at too much for too long and simply
06:25needs the view to be smaller for a while. She prays five times a day. She tends a small indoor
06:32garden.
06:33Pots of herbs on a table near the window. The window she keeps curtained. The herbs grow in the
06:40indirect light. They manage. Some evenings. Not every evening. But some. She allows herself to think
06:49about Tariq. Not about his absence. About the fact of him. That she kept him alive through all of it.
06:56That he exists in Germany with children of his own who have never heard an explosion and do not know
07:03to
07:03calibrate and flinch at things that are genuinely dangerous because they have never had to learn not to.
07:10that she made that possible. Not through heroism. Through 38 years of getting up every morning
07:17and doing the next necessary thing. On those evenings she sits with that knowledge. Just sits with it.
07:26And it is not peace exactly. But it is something. And sometimes something is enough.
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