But I think a big part of the reason I didn’t care about Soraya’s past was that I had one of my own. I knew all about regret.

SHORTLY AFTER BABA’S DEATH, Soraya and I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Fremont, just a few blocks away from the general and Khala Jamila’s house. Soraya’s parents bought us a brown leather couch and a set of Mikasa dishes as housewarming presents. The general gave me an additional present, a brand-new IBM typewriter. In the box, he had slipped a note written in Farsi:

Amir jan,

I hope you discover many tales on these keys.

General Iqbal Taheri

I sold Baba’s VW bus and, to this day, I have not gone back to the flea market. I would drive to his gravesite every Friday, and, sometimes, I’d find a fresh bouquet of freesias by the headstone and know Soraya had been there too.

Soraya and I settled into the routines – and minor wonders – of married life. We shared toothbrushes and socks, passed each other the morning paper. She slept on the right side of the bed, I preferred the left. She liked fluffy pillows, I liked the hard ones. She ate her cereal dry, like a snack, and chased it with milk.

I got my acceptance at San Jose State that summer and declared an English major. I took on a security job, swing shift at a furniture warehouse in Sunnyvale. The job was dreadfully boring, but its saving grace was a considerable one: When everyone left at 6 P.M. and shadows began to crawl between aisles of plastic-covered sofas piled to the ceiling, I took out my books and studied. It was in the Pine-Sol-scented office of that furniture warehouse that I began my first novel.

Soraya joined me at San Jose State the following year and enrolled, to her father’s chagrin, in the teaching track.

“I don’t know why you’re wasting your talents like this,” the general said one night over dinner. “Did you know, Amir jan, that she earned nothing but A’s in high school?” He turned to her. “An intelligent girl like you could become a lawyer, a political scientist. And, Inshallah, when Afghanistan is free, you could help write the new constitution. There would be a need for young talented Afghans like you. They might even offer you a ministry position, given your family name.”

I could see Soraya holding back, her face tightening. “I’m not a girl, Padar. I’m a married woman. Besides, they’d need teachers too.”

“Anyone can teach.”

“Is there any more rice, Madar?” Soraya said.

After the general excused himself to meet some friends in Hayward, Khala Jamila tried to console Soraya. “He means well,” she said. “He just wants you to be successful.”

“So he can boast about his attorney daughter to his friends. Another medal for the general,” Soraya said.

“Such nonsense you speak!”

“Successful,” Soraya hissed. “At least I’m not like him, sitting around while other people fight the Shorawi, waiting for when the dust settles so he can move in and reclaim his posh little government position. Teaching may not pay much, but it’s what I want to do! It’s what I love, and it’s a whole lot better than collecting welfare, by the way.”

Khala Jamila bit her tongue. “If he ever hears you saying that, he will never speak to you again.”

“Don’t worry,” Soraya snapped, tossing her napkin on the plate. “I won’t bruise his precious ego.”

IN THE SUMMER of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul, written mostly with the typewriter the general had given me. I sent query letters to a dozen agencies and was stunned one August day when I opened our mailbox and found a request from a New York agency for the completed manuscript. I mailed it the next day. Soraya kissed the carefully wrapped manuscript and Khala Jamila insisted we pass it under the Koran. She told me that she was going to do nazr for me, a vow to have a sheep slaughtered and the meat given to the poor if my book was accepted.

“Please, no nazr, Khala jan,” I said, kissing her face. “Just do zakat, give the money to someone in need, okay? No sheep killing.”

Six weeks later, a man named Martin Greenwalt called from New York and offered to represent me. I only told Soraya about it. “But just because I have an agent doesn’t mean I’ll get published. If Martin sells the novel, then we’ll celebrate.”

A month later, Martin called and informed me I was going to be a published novelist. When I told Soraya, she screamed.

We had a celebration dinner with Soraya’s parents that night. Khala Jamila made kofta – meatballs and white rice – and white ferni. The general, a sheen of moisture in his eyes, said that he was proud of me. After General Taheri and his wife left, Soraya and I celebrated with an expensive bottle of Merlot I had bought on the way home – the general did not approve of women drinking alcohol, and Soraya didn’t drink in his presence.

“I am so proud of you,” she said, raising her glass to mine. “Kaka would have been proud too.”

“I know,” I said, thinking of Baba, wishing he could have seen me.

Later that night, after Soraya fell asleep – wine always made her sleepy – I stood on the balcony and breathed in the cool summer air. I thought of Rahim Khan and the little note of support he had written me after he’d read my first story. And I thought of Hassan. Some day, Inshallah, you will be a great writer, he had said once, and people all over the world will read your stories. There was so much goodness in my life. So much happiness. I wondered whether I deserved any of it.

The novel was released in the summer of that following year, 1989, and the publisher sent me on a five-city book tour. I became a minor celebrity in the Afghan community. That was the year that the Shorawi completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan. It should have been a time of glory for Afghans. Instead, the war raged on, this time between Afghans, the Mujahedin, against the Soviet puppet government of Najibullah, and Afghan refugees kept flocking to Pakistan. That was the year that the cold war ended, the year the Berlin Wall came down. It was the year of Tiananmen Square. In the midst of it all, Afghanistan was forgotten. And General Taheri, whose hopes had stirred awake after the Soviets pulled out, went back to winding his pocket watch.

That was also the year that Soraya and I began trying to have a child.

THE IDEA OF FATHERHOOD unleashed a swirl of emotions in me. I found it frightening, invigorating, daunting, and exhilarating all at the same time. What sort of father would I make, I wondered. I wanted to be just like Baba and I wanted to be nothing like him.

But a year passed and nothing happened. With each cycle of blood, Soraya grew more frustrated, more impatient, more irritable. By then, Khala Jamila’s initially subtle hints had become overt, as in “Kho dega!” So! “When am I going to sing alahoo for my little nawasa?” The general, ever the Pashtun, never made any queries – doing so meant alluding to a sexual act between his daughter and a man, even if the man in question had been married to her for over four years. But his eyes perked up when Khala Jamila teased us about a baby.

“Sometimes, it takes a while,” I told Soraya one night.

“A year isn’t a while, Amir!” she said, in a terse voice so unlike her. “Something’s wrong, I know it.”

“Then let’s see a doctor.”

DR. ROSEN, a round-bellied man with a plump face and small, even teeth, spoke with a faint Eastern European accent, something remotely Slavic. He had a passion for trains – his office was littered with books about the history of railroads, model locomotives, paintings of trains trundling on tracks through green hills and over bridges. A sign above his desk read, LIFE IS A TRAIN. GET ON BOARD.