“Good,” Amra says. “All right.” She pulls the bedsheet that has been nailed to the ceiling as a makeshift curtain and lets them in.

The girl—Roshi, as Amra had called her, short for “Roshana”—looks to be nine, maybe ten. She is sitting up on a steel-frame bed, back to the wall, knees bent up against her chest. Idris immediately drops his gaze. He swallows down a gasp before it can escape him. Predictably, such restraint proves beyond Timur. He tsks his tongue, and says, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” over and over in a loud, pained whisper. Idris glances over to Timur and is not surprised to find swollen tears shivering theatrically in his eyes.

The girl twitches and makes a grunting sound.

“Okay, finished, we go now,” Amra says sharply.

Outside, on the crumbling front steps, the nurse pulls a pack of Marlboro Reds from the breast pocket of her pale blue scrubs. Timur, whose tears have vanished as swiftly as they’d materialized, takes a cigarette and lights both hers and his. Idris feels queasy, light-headed. His mouth has gone dry. He worries he’s going to vomit and disgrace himself, confirm Amra’s view of him, of them—the wealthy, wide-eyed exiles—come home to gawk at the carnage now that the boogeymen have left.

Idris expected Amra to reprimand them, at least Timur, but her manner is more flirtatious than scolding. This is the effect Timur has on women.

“So,” she says, coquettishly, “what do you say for yourself, Timur?”

In the States, Timur goes by “Tim.” He changed his name after 9/11 and claims that he has nearly doubled his business since. Losing those two letters, he has said to Idris, has already done more for his career than a college degree would have—if he’d gone to college, which he hadn’t; Idris is the Bashiri family academic. But now since their arrival in Kabul, Idris has heard him introduce himself only as Timur. It is a harmless enough duplicity, even a necessary one. But it rankles.

“Sorry about what happened in there,” Timur says.

“Maybe I punish you.”

“Easy, pussycat.”

Amra turns her gaze to Idris. “So. He’s cowboy. And you, you are quiet, sensitive one. You are—what do they call it?— introvert.”

“He’s a doctor,” Timur says.

“Ah? It must be shocking for you, then. This hospital.”

“What happened to her?” Idris says. “To Roshi. Who did that to her?”

Amra’s face closes. When she speaks, it is with the pitch of maternal determination. “I fight for her. I fight government, hospital bureaucracy, bastard neurosurgeon. Every step, I fight for her. And I don’t stop. She has nobody.”

Idris says, “I thought there was an uncle.”

“He’s bastard too.” She flicks her cigarette ash. “So. Why you come here, boys?”

Timur launches into it. The outline of what he says is more or less true. That they are cousins, that their families fled after the Soviets rolled in, that they spent a year in Pakistan before settling in California in the early eighties. That this is the first time back for them both in twenty years. But then he adds that they have come back to “reconnect,” to “educate” themselves, “bear witness” to the aftermath of all these years of war and destruction. They want to go back to the States, he says, to raise awareness, and funds, to “give back.”

“We want to give back,” he says, uttering the tired phrase so earnestly it embarrasses Idris.

Of course Timur does not share the real reason they have come back to Kabul: to reclaim the property that had belonged to their fathers, the house where both he and Idris had lived for the first fourteen years of their lives. The property’s worth is skyrocketing now that thousands of foreign-aid workers have descended on Kabul and need a place to live. They were there earlier in the day, at the house, which is currently home to a ragtag group of weary-looking Northern Alliance soldiers. As they were leaving, they had met a middle-aged man who lived three houses down and across the street, a Greek plastic surgeon named Markos Varvaris. He had invited them to lunch and offered to give them a tour of Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, where the NGO he worked for had an office. He also invited them to a party that night. They had learned about the girl only upon their arrival at the hospital—overhearing two orderlies talking about her on the front steps—after which Timur had elbowed Idris and said, We should check it out, bro.

Amra seems bored with Timur’s story. She flings her cigarette away and tightens the rubber band that holds her curly blond hair in a bun. “So. I see you boys at party tonight?”

It was Timur’s father, Idris’s uncle, who had sent them to Kabul. The Bashiri family home had changed hands a number of times over the last two decades of war. Reestablishing ownership would take time and money. Thousands of cases of property disputes already clogged the country’s courts. Timur’s father had told them that they would have to “maneuver” through the infamously sluggish, ponderous Afghan bureaucracy—a euphemism for “find the right palms to grease.”

“That would be my department,” Timur had said as if it needed saying.

Idris’s own father had died nine years before after a long bout with cancer. He had died at his home, with his wife, two daughters, and Idris at his bedside. The day he died, a mob descended on the house—uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, and acquaintances—sitting on the couches, the dining chairs, and, when those were taken, on the floor, the stairs. Women gathered in the dining room and kitchen. They brewed thermos after thermos of tea. Idris, as the only son, had to sign all the papers—papers for the medical examiner, who arrived to pronounce his father dead; papers for the polite young men from the funeral home, who came with a stretcher to take his father’s body.

Timur never left his side. He helped Idris answer phone calls. He greeted the waves of people who came to pay respects. He ordered rice and lamb from Abe’s Kabob House, a local Afghan restaurant run by Timur’s friend Abdullah, whom Timur teasingly called Uncle Abe. Timur parked cars for elderly guests when it started to rain. He called a buddy of his at one of the local Afghan TV stations. Unlike Idris, Timur was well connected in the Afghan community; he once told Idris that he had over three hundred contact names and numbers on his cell phone. He made arrangements for an announcement to run on Afghan TV that same night.

Early that afternoon, Timur drove Idris to the funeral home in Hayward. It was pouring by then, and traffic was slow on the northbound lanes of the 680.

“Your dad, he was all class, bro. He was old-school,” Timur croaked as he took the Mission off-ramp. He kept wiping tears with the palm of his free hand.

Idris nodded somberly. His whole life he’d not been able to cry in the presence of other people, at events where it was called for such as funerals. He saw this as a minor handicap, like color blindness. Still, he felt vaguely—and, he knew, irrationally—resentful toward Timur for upstaging him back at the house with all the running around and dramatic sobbing. As if it was hisfather who had died.

They were escorted to a sparely lit, quiet room with heavy darktoned furniture. A man in a black jacket and hair parted in the middle greeted them. He smelled like expensive coffee. In a professional tone, he offered Idris his condolences, and had him sign the Interment Order and Authorization form. He asked how many copies of the death certificate the family would desire. When all the forms were signed, he tactfully placed before Idris a pamphlet titled “General Price List.”

The funeral home director cleared his throat. “Of course these prices don’t apply if your father had membership with the Afghan mosque over on Mission. We have a partnership with them. They’ll pay for the lot, the services. You’d be covered.”