Can He Be Forgiven?

I remember how my classmates and I had made plans to go to the cinema together. There was something magical about watching a film on the big screen. Those were the Soviet years, when Indian films were all the rage, their appeal impossible to resist. The poster outside the cinema advertised a film called Artist.

My father might have appeared quiet and mild-mannered, but beneath that calm exterior lived a stern man. He was strict with my mother and with us children, and at times he could be merciless. I often thought of a painful scene between the fearsome Jahandar Agha and his son Shamkhal in the film Dəli Kür. I would compare it with life in our own home and find far too many similarities. Even so, a small spark of hope flickered inside me: surely my father would not turn down a request made by twenty-seven children who had studied together for years, most of them our neighbors.

At last, the day arrived.

The doorbell rang. My heart pounded so violently that my knees seemed ready to give way. I could not bring myself to open the door. Pretending I had heard nothing, I thought, Better if Mother answers it. I stood hidden behind the door, waiting for the sound of her footsteps.

When she opened it, my classmates poured inside as though they were rushing into our classroom, jostling one another in their excitement. Their eyes shone with hope—whether from innocence or sheer happiness, I could not tell. But when they came face-to-face with my father in the hallway, they hesitated. They exchanged glances, gathering the courage to speak. As usual, it was Zaur, the most mischievous boy in our class—perhaps in the whole school—who spoke first, without so much as a greeting.

“Uncle Ali, we’ve come to go to the cinema. All of us got together so we could watch the film as a group. School finishes in a week, and we wanted to...”

Before Zaur could finish, Bahar stepped forward. Cheerful, smiling Bahar, who danced at every school celebration, now stood before my father as though she were pleading for mercy.

“Please, Uncle Ali, don’t say no. Let Dilbar come to the cinema with us. She’s never gone anywhere with us before. She doesn’t even take part in school events. Let us have one happy memory from our final school year.”

Her voice trembled, almost breaking into tears.

That was all the encouragement the others needed. They began pleading in a chorus.

“Please let her come, Uncle Ali! Please! Just this once. We’ll be back from the cinema early...”

I hid behind my mother, afraid to meet the forbidding gaze beneath my father’s knitted brows. Yet somewhere deep inside I believed that his heart would soften. He would call me to him, heave a long sigh, stroke my hair and say, “Go on. Get ready.”

In my imagination, I was already painting the dreary gray walls of our hallway yellow. Yellow was my favorite color.

I tried to avert my eyes, but I saw my father’s rough, calloused hand reaching toward me.

Was it mercy—or anger? Had kindness finally taken the place of cruelty?

A moment... Sometimes a single moment decides everything. If we want every moment of life to hold its own beauty, mystery and wonder, we must not allow clocks, calendars and the pressures of the world to rule us and rob us of that miracle. Least of all when those moments are shared with the people we love.

My hands trembling, I held out the cinema ticket to my father without looking him in the face. Everyone waited anxiously for his answer. My mother, meanwhile, seemed to have been born for the role of a lifelong spectator. She would neither try to coax my father into changing his mind nor take a single step to help me. She was indifference made flesh—a figure carved from ice.

My father cleared his throat quietly and walked to the door. He hung the ticket on a nail above it, the same nail from which we usually hung our house keys.

“That’s all the cinema and concerts this girl needs. She’s not going anywhere.”

The children froze. Seeing how desperately I was struggling not to burst into sobs, they looked at one another in embarrassment. Then, heartsick at being unable to help me, they lowered their heads and began to leave. Not a trace remained of the bright smiles they had worn when they came in.

The last ship carrying my hopes was sinking.

After the children left, my parents got ready to visit relatives and went out as though nothing had happened. I stayed where I was, curled up on the floor upon our old carpet, staring at my ill-fated “cinema” hanging from a nail. In years to come, that sorrowful picture of my childhood dreams, stifled before they could take flight, would change into something else entirely.

The real film of my life had yet to begin.

The years flashed past like lightning. I became a university student, but the doors of cinemas, theaters and concert halls remained closed to me. My father’s authoritarian rule had forbidden even the simplest pleasures. The joys of student life I had never been allowed to know gave way to a family life in which happiness had no place.

If only I hadn’t escaped one storm merely to find myself in another...

The man I married was ten years older than I was, yet in spirit he belonged to a generation older still. We had three daughters. But the family longed for a son, and a cloud of dissatisfaction hung over our home. Some even said that bearing a son made a husband love his wife more.

Years passed and, for reasons known only to Him, God seemed at last to soften His heart and take pity on me. A son was born into our family. Everyone was beside themselves with joy. For forty days our home was filled with guests, celebrations and such noise and merriment that it made my head spin. There were so many gifts that we could scarcely find room for them. You would have thought that in those forty days the baby had already started school, graduated, served in the army, entered university and was preparing for his wedding.

But that happiness did not last. As the months went by, I—and eventually everyone in the family, relatives included—began to see that our son had intellectual and physical disabilities.

Perhaps my happiness had drawn the evil eye. At our son’s most recent examination, the doctor gave us a bleak prognosis and little reason to hope. Soon afterward, my husband abandoned us and moved to Ukraine.

Ukraine! You would have to be terribly naive not to know why so many Muslim men were drawn there, traveling under the pretense of visiting a sanatorium while secretly dreaming of romantic adventures. Day after day, newspapers reported that Ukraine had one of the highest rates of AIDS in the world, particularly in the former Soviet region. But to people ruled by their appetites, neither a healthy society nor the well-being of their children seemed to matter. If only they could at least leave their children a healthier world...

There I sat at home, helpless, with my three daughters and my little son, who understood none of what was happening and looked up at me with innocent eyes. I kept asking myself what I could do, how I could possibly find a way out. Every time I looked at my children, my heart broke into a thousand pieces. I fought to hold back the tears hanging heavily from my lashes, afraid that if they rolled down my cheeks, the children would see me cry.

There has to be a way, I told myself. God is great.

I tried to take comfort in those words and make plans for the future.

We lived in a country where a woman had to work until her fingernails were worn to the quick to provide for her children, to make them forget the absence of a father in a world stripped of fairy tales. She had to shoulder that crushing burden without letting anyone see its weight or allowing her knees to buckle. She had to endure suffering of body and soul. Even when she was ill, she had to forget the comfort of a warm bed and a cup of tea brewed with cornelian cherries and raspberries. And she had to smile, however deep the sorrow around her, while pulling with all her strength at the rope of a destiny that had turned its back on her, trying somehow to drag it forward.

For the sake of her children.

Because neither the state nor their father would look after them. Nor would time heal everything. Time could not even make the wounds fade from memory. It was time itself, the faceless society around her and the men who refused to value her labor that left a lonely woman thrashing in a whirlpool of fear, trapped her in a vise of troubles and drove her toward despair, even suicide.