Isabel and Rahim

The Meeting

Seven Pomegranates

The shop was still open at 22:15, which was the first thing Isabel had been told about it and the first thing she confirmed. A narrow door between a closed phone repair store and a laundromat that never seemed to close either, a hand-painted sign above it in English and a script she could not read, and a light inside that was yellower and older than the white light of the street.

She stood across the road for eleven minutes before going in. She watched three customers enter and leave. A woman with a stroller who bought onions. A teenager who bought a bottle of water and a single banana and was told something that made him laugh. A man in a construction vest who stayed longer, talked with his hands, and left with a heavy plastic bag and a lighter step than he had come in with. She watched the old man at the register through the glass. He did not get up for any of them.

When she went in, the smell reached her first: ripe mango, dust, cardamom, wet cardboard, the green sharpness of cut herbs. The aisle was as wide as her shoulders and a little more. Crates were stacked on both sides up to the height of her head, fruit in front, rice and lentils and tins behind, and the whole store ran backward into the building much farther than the storefront suggested, like a throat.

The register sat on a small folding table just inside the door. Behind it, on a folding chair, sat Rahim Gul.

He was older than she had expected from the way Sara had said his name. A white beard trimmed close, a white cap, a gray vest over a long shirt. A face that had been left out in weather for a very long time. His hands rested on the table, one over the other, and they were the largest part of him, broad and knuckled and very still.

He looked at her the way shopkeepers look at everyone. Then he looked at her a second time, briefly, at her eyes, and away.

"Salaam alaikum," Isabel said.

"Wa alaikum salaam." A pause, measured to the length of a thought. "You are not Muslim."

"No."

He nodded as though she had confirmed the price of something, and turned his attention back to a small notebook on the table where he was writing numbers in pencil.

She walked the length of the store once. She did not touch anything. At the back, past a humming refrigerator, the shelves ended and there was a patch of bare concrete with sacks of rice stacked against the wall and a door marked with a hand-written sign. She noted the size of the space, the ceiling, the single fluorescent tube, and walked back.

She waited until the store was empty. It took four more minutes; a girl came in for bread and left again.

"Mister Gul," she said.

He did not look up from the notebook. "Rahim."

"Rahim. I was told you could teach me to fight with a knife."

The pencil stopped. It did not stay stopped long. He finished the number he was writing, closed the notebook, and put the pencil on top of it, lining the two up with the edge of the table.

"You were told wrong," he said. "I sell vegetables."

"I was told you would say that."

"Then you were told right one time." He finally looked at her properly, from her tied-back gray hair to her plain black coat to her shoes, and back up. "I am an old man. I have a bad leg. Go to a gym. They have mats, they have teachers with certificates. Very good. Very safe."

"I don't want safe."

"Everybody who says this wants safe." He gestured toward the crates by the door with two fingers. "You want something? Pomegranates are good this week. From California, but good."

Isabel looked at the pomegranates. She picked one up, turned it once in her hand to check the skin, and put it on the table in front of him.

He weighed it on a small scale, told her the price, and took her money. He gave her change counted into her palm, coin by coin.

"Good night," he said.

"Good night," she said, and left.

---

She came back the next night, at the same time, and bought a pomegranate.

She came back the night after that. And the night after that. She did not ask again. She walked the store once, as she had the first time, waited while he served whoever was there, chose one pomegranate, checked the skin, paid, received her change coin by coin, and said good night.

On the fourth night the man in the construction vest was there again and made a joke to Rahim in a language she did not know, glancing at her. Rahim answered with one short word and the man stopped smiling and paid for his things without another sound.

On the fifth night it rained, a hard Miami rain that turned the street into a river of reflected light, and she came in soaked with the water running off her coat onto his floor. She apologized for the floor. He handed her a roll of paper towels from under the table without comment, and she dried the floor herself before choosing her pomegranate.

On the sixth night he had set one aside for her before she came in. It was sitting on the corner of the table, on a folded piece of newspaper. She looked at it, then at him. He did not look back. She picked it up, checked the skin anyway, and paid.

On the seventh night, when the store was empty, he spoke first.

"What do you do with them?"

Isabel was standing at the table with the pomegranate in her hand and her money already counted. She considered the question. Not whether to answer it; that was not a thing she could consider. Only how much of the answer he had actually asked for.

"There is a woman who sleeps in the doorway beside the laundromat," she said. "I give them to her."

Rahim looked at her for a long moment. His face did not do anything.

"You do not eat them."

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't eat fruit."

This was true. She did not add anything else to it.

He took her money, weighed nothing, and put the coins into the drawer. He did not give her change. The pomegranate was, she noticed, a little cheaper than the price she had paid for it every night before; he had simply stopped counting.

"Who told you about me?"

"Sara Khalil."

Something moved in his face then. Not much. The small tightening around the eyes that a man makes when he hears a name he has not heard in a while and had hoped, on balance, not to hear again.

"The lady in the suit," he said.

"Yes."

"She sent you."

"No. She said your name, and where your shop was. That's all she did. She didn't send me."

"But you came."

"I came."

He sat back in the folding chair. It creaked. He stretched his left leg out slowly into the aisle and rested his hands on his stomach, one over the other, and looked at her the way she had watched him look at the fruit when it came off a delivery truck: turning it over, checking for soft places.

"That woman came here one time," he said. "Years ago. At night, like you. She stood where you are standing. She bought nothing. She asked me questions. Where I am from. Where I fought. She knew already. I could see she knew already. She asked only to see what I would say." He shrugged one shoulder. "I told her I sell vegetables. She said thank you and left. She paid me for one bag of rice she did not take. Too much money."

Isabel waited.

"Some people," he said, "you meet them one time and you know, better not to meet them two times. You understand?"

"Yes."

"You work for her."

It was not quite a question. She answered it anyway.

"I did. I don't anymore. Not the way I did."

"And now you want to learn to kill men with a knife."

"I want to learn to fight with one."

He made a small sound through his nose, not quite a laugh. "Fight. Okay. Tell me why." He leaned forward a little. "Tell me it is for protection. A young woman, alone, the city is dangerous. Tell me this and I will think about it."

It would have been the easiest sentence in the world. She could see the shape of it: It's for protection. She could see how he wanted it said, and how he would nod at it, the way men nod at the answer they have already decided to accept or refuse.

The shape of the words sat in front of her and she felt the familiar pressure start behind her sternum, the wrongness of it, like a second floor laid over the first one at a slightly different angle. She did not reach for it. She let it go before it could become anything.

"That wouldn't be true," she said.

Rahim was silent.

"I'm not afraid of the city," Isabel said. "I'm not afraid of being alone in it. I can shoot. Well. Better than most people who carry a gun for their job. But there are situations where a gun is too loud, or too slow, or too far away. Places where I'll be close to someone who doesn't want me there. I want to be able to finish things in those places. Properly. Not the way people do it in movies."

"Finish things."

"Yes."

"Finish people."

She did not answer.

He waited, as he would wait many times later over tea, only long enough for a person to fill a silence if they meant to. She did not fill it. She held the pomegranate and stood straight and looked at him with her strange gold eyes and said nothing at all.

Rahim leaned back again. For a while he just looked at the street through the glass. The laundromat's light flickered. Someone's car alarm went off far away and stopped.

"Everybody who comes to an old man and asks this," he said eventually, "lies to him. Every one. Young boys who watched a video. Men who want to be dangerous for a girl. Men who are dangerous already and want to be more. They tell me: protection, sport, discipline, my father fought also. They tell me stories. Very nice stories." He looked back at her. "You do not tell me a story. I give you a very easy one and you do not take it. And when I ask you the real question you close your mouth."

"I won't lie to you," Isabel said. "I can't promise I'll answer everything."

"This is better," Rahim said. "Much better. A man who does not answer, you know where he is. A man who answers with lies, you never know where he is."

He picked up his pencil again, and turned it once between his thick fingers.

"I will tell you what it is," he said. "What I know. It is not a sport. It has no belts. No rules. It is what is left of a person after the mountains take everything else away. I learned it from men who are dead, most of them, and I learned it on men who are dead, all of them. It is ugly. It will make you ugly. Not your face. Here." He tapped his chest, once, with the pencil. "You are a very neat woman. I watch you. You count your money two times. You dry my floor. You check the skin every night on a fruit you do not eat. This will not like you. This will try to make a mess of you."

"I know."

"You do not know. But you will." He put the pencil down. "I do not want money. Money from that woman already I have too much, from one bag of rice. You pay for fruit like normal. That is all."

"Then what do you want?"

He thought about it. She had the impression it was the first time he had allowed himself to.

"Three things," he said. "One. You never bring a gun into my shop. Never. I don't care what you carry out there." He jerked his chin at the street. "In here, no."

"Agreed."

"Two. What I teach you, you do not use on anybody who does not deserve it." He held up a hand before she could answer. "I don't want to know who deserves it. I don't want to know anything. I say this for me, not for you. So I can sleep."

Isabel felt something settle in her, a small, precise click, like a key finding its lock. Anybody who does not deserve it. She thought of Sara's handkerchief. Of a father who kept files about unsolved things in a safe. Of a word from a clan she had not chosen and was still learning the shape of.

"Agreed," she said.

"Three." He picked up the pomegranate she had not yet taken, turned it over in his big hand, and set it down in front of her again. "You keep giving these to the woman by the laundromat. Her name is Marisol. She was a nurse before. Tell her they are from Rahim also."

Isabel looked at the pomegranate. Then at him.

"Agreed," she said.

"Tuesday," Rahim said, already opening his notebook, already picking up the pencil, already done with her. "After I close. Eleven o'clock. Bring clothes you can ruin." He wrote a number, crossed it out, wrote another. "And do not come in the rain again. You made a lake on my floor."

"I dried it."

"You dried it very well," Rahim agreed, without looking up. "Too well. Tuesday we will see about that."

She took the pomegranate. She said good night. He said good night without lifting his head.

Outside, the woman in the laundromat doorway was awake, wrapped in a gray blanket, watching the rain-slick street. Isabel crouched in front of her and held out the fruit.

"From Rahim," she said. "Also."

Marisol took it with both hands and looked past Isabel toward the narrow yellow door, and for the first time in seven nights, she smiled.

The Training

Third Night

The iron gate came down at 22:40 with the same sound it made every night: a long, complaining rattle that ended in a bang loud enough to be felt in the floor. Rahim Gul locked it from the inside with a padlock older than Isabel's human life, tested it twice with a tug, and walked back past the crates of mangoes and onions without looking at her.

The shop was narrower after closing. Isabel did not understand how that was possible, but it was. With the street light cut into stripes by the gate, the shelves seemed to lean inward, and the back of the store stretched deeper than it had any right to, past the sacks of rice and the cardboard boxes of dates, past the humming refrigerator full of yogurt and bottled water, to the small square of concrete floor where he had already pushed the stacked crates aside.

The mats were purple. Cheap, thin, the kind sold in supermarkets beside plastic dumbbells. He unrolled them with his foot.

"Shoes," he said.

She had already taken them off. She had done so on the first night because he told her to, and on the second night because she remembered, and tonight she had done it before he could say it, which he had noticed and not remarked on. Her socks were folded inside them. Her gray hair was tied back tight enough that nothing would come loose. She stood at the edge of the mats in black training pants and a plain shirt, arms at her sides, posture exact.

Rahim took off his sandals and set them side by side under the shelf. He did not roll up his sleeves. His forearms were already bare, brown and roped, the skin loose over them the way it goes on old men, but nothing underneath had loosened. There was a pale seam of scar tissue running from his left wrist almost to the elbow. His beard was white. His left knee did not bend all the way; she had watched him walk enough by now to know that.

He picked up two wooden knives from the top of a crate. Plain things, sanded smooth, the length of a hand and a half. He threw one to her underhand. She caught it by the grip without looking down.

He kept the other one for a moment, weighed it, and then put it back on the crate.

"Come," he said, and stood in the middle of the mats with his hands empty and hanging.

---

Isabel did not come.

She took her stance instead, the one she had been refining since the first night: weight low, knife hand forward but not extended, free hand high near her collarbone. She began to move to her left, slow, away from his good knee and toward the side where his step would be shorter. She watched his shoulders. Shoulders move before hands do. She watched his feet. She counted the distance in half steps. She considered the angle to his forearm, which was the nearest target, and the angle beyond it to the inside of the elbow, and the angle beyond that to the neck, and in the moment she spent choosing between them, Rahim walked into her.

He did not rush. That was what she would think about later. He did not lunge or feint or do anything she had prepared to see. He simply walked forward, the way a man walks into his own kitchen, and the distance she had been measuring stopped existing.

She cut at his forearm because it was there. The wood struck him hard across the wrist, right over the old scar. He did not flinch from it. He let it land, and in the same motion his hand closed around her wrist, not gently, and turned it outward, and his other forearm came across her chest like a bar, and his bad leg, the one she had so carefully circled away from, hooked behind her heel.

She hit the mat on her back. The breath that she did not need left her anyway, out of habit, a small ugly sound.

His knee was on her knife arm. His thumb was pressed under her jaw, just beside the windpipe, exactly where a blade would go.

"Dead," Rahim said.

He stood. He did not offer her a hand.

"You cut my arm," he said. "Good. My arm is cut. So?" He held it up, the one she had struck, and turned it so she could see there was nothing wrong with it. "You think the man stops because the arm is cut? The arm is not the man. You cut the arm, then you must be finished with him already. You were not finished. You were thinking."

Isabel got up. She retook her stance without being told.

"Again," he said.

---

The second time, she tried to go first.

She had understood the lesson, or believed she had: do not wait. So she stepped in and cut high, a clean line at the neck, and he leaned back from it by a finger's width and came forward again before her arm had finished its arc. His forehead met the bridge of her nose. There was no wind-up, no warning, just his skull, moving the short distance from where it had been to where her face was.

The world went white and loud. She kept her feet, barely. She felt his hand on her knife wrist again, his hip against hers, and then the floor again, harder this time, on her side.

"You come in," he said from above her, "and then you stop to see if it worked." He crouched, slowly, favoring the knee. "Never stop to see. If it worked, you will know. If it did not work, you are already dead from waiting. Cut, cut, cut. Push. Stab. Go until he is on the ground. Then maybe look."

Her nose was bleeding. She could feel it, thick and slow on her upper lip. She wiped it with the back of her hand and looked at the smear. It was darker than it should have been. She closed the hand.

Rahim looked at the hand, and then at her face, and then at nothing in particular.

"Again," he said.

---

The third time, he picked up the other wooden knife.

"Now," he said, "I am the one who is hurt."

He held his left arm against his stomach, folded and useless, the knife in his right. He dragged the bad leg slightly, more than he needed to, making a show of it.

"Bullet here." He tapped his thigh with the knife. "This arm, broken. Three days no food. You are young, strong, you have the knife, you have the legs. I have nothing." He shrugged. "Come kill me."

She came, because she had learned that much in two falls. She came fast, faster than she should have allowed herself, and a small, cold part of her mind registered it and pulled back on the reins even as she moved, keeping it to the speed of a quick woman and nothing more. That half-second of restraint was all he needed. He did not try to match her. He did not try to parry. He turned his body so that her cut landed on the dead arm he had offered up, and while her blade was still pressed into it he drove his own knife up under her ribs, once, twice, three times, short hard jabs that knocked the air out of her in a rhythm, like someone hammering a nail.

Then he hooked the injured leg behind hers anyway, the one with the bullet in it, and took her down with it.

She lay there and stared at the fluorescent tube on the ceiling. One end of it flickered.

"The man with the bullet in his leg," Rahim said, sitting down on a rice sack with a small grunt, "still has the leg. The man with the broken arm still has the arm. He can put it in front of your knife. It will be cut, it is already broken, so what. In Kunar, the Russians had rifles. Big rifles, long. We had many times only this." He lifted the wooden knife a little. "Long things are slow when you are close. Heavy things are slow when you are close. Everything is slow when you are close, except you. So you get close. You stay close. You do not go back to see. Going back is for people who will live anyway."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Many young men in the mountains fought very beautiful," he said. "Good stance. Good feet. They are all in the ground now. The ugly ones are old."

Isabel sat up. Her ribs ached where the wooden point had hammered her. Her nose had stopped bleeding. She realized she was holding the knife by the blade and switched her grip.

"You are fast," he said. "Very fast. Faster than you let yourself be." He did not look at her when he said it. He looked at the refrigerator, at the yogurt, at the date boxes. "Fast is good. Thinking is good. Thinking before, thinking after. In the middle there is no thinking. In the middle there is only the other man, and whether he is still standing."

---

They went eleven more times that night.

She lost all eleven. He took her down with his knees, his elbows, his forehead, once with nothing but his weight when she let him lean on her for half a second too long. He stabbed her in the kidney from behind after she had already "killed" him, and told her flatly that dead men are only dead when they stop moving, and she had not checked, and he had not stopped moving. He trapped her knife arm against his own body, under his armpit, clamped it there like a vise, and cut her throat with his free hand while she was trying to pull her blade loose. He told her: never pull your knife back from a man who is holding it. Let it go. Hit him with everything else. A knife is a knife; you have two hands, two elbows, two knees, teeth.

He made her fight from the floor. He made her fight with her left hand only. He made her fight after he had put his thumb hard into the nerve at the side of her thigh, so the leg went half numb, and he made her fight tired, which she was not, not in the way he meant, but she let herself move as if she were, because it was what he asked for.

On the twelfth time, somewhere in the middle of it, she did not think.

There was no decision. He came in the way he always came in, walking, and something in her simply went forward to meet him instead of sideways to evaluate him. She did not cut at the arm. She let the arm hit her. It hit her hard across the collarbone and she felt it and did not care, and her knife went in under his ribs, and again, and again, the way his had gone into her, a short ugly hammering rhythm, and her free hand was on the back of his neck pulling him down onto it, and her knee came up into his thigh, and she did not stop to see.

Then she felt his wooden point press into the side of her neck.

They stood like that, locked together on the purple mat, both of them holding still.

"Sha," Rahim said quietly. Good.

He let go of her neck and stepped back and rubbed his ribs where she had struck him. It was the first time in three nights she had seen him touch a place she had hit.

"Now we are both dead," he said. "This is better than only you dead. You understand? Sometimes this is the best. Both dead. You take him with you. It is not beautiful. It is not smart. But he does not walk home." He shrugged. "Next time, you will be the one who walks home. That is the rest of the lessons."

---

Afterward he made tea on a hot plate behind the register, black and strong with too much sugar, and poured two small glasses without asking whether she wanted one. He put hers down on the folding table and sat in his chair, stretching the bad leg out into the aisle so she had to step over it.

She did not drink it. She held the glass because it was warm, and because setting it aside would have been rude.

He drank his in three long sips and watched the street through the gate. A car went by. Someone laughed somewhere down the block.

"Your face," he said eventually. "Tomorrow it will be black here." He touched the bridge of his own nose. "Here, and here. Your ribs also."

Isabel said nothing.

Rahim waited, not long, only as long as a man waits to see if a question will be answered even when he has not asked it. Then he nodded to himself, as if something had been settled, and refilled his own glass.

"Some people heal very well," he said. "Allah decides these things. Not my business." He blew on the tea. "Thursday. Same time. Bring water. You never bring water."

She stood, set the untouched glass carefully on the table beside the register, and bent to put on her shoes. She tied them exactly, both loops the same length.

When she looked up he was holding the gate's padlock key out to her, and she understood that he was not going to get up again to let her out.

She unlocked it, raised the gate enough to duck under, and lowered it behind her, and heard him inside, alone in the narrow shop, saying something soft in Pashto that might have been a prayer and might have been nothing at all.