When the Moon Is Low

by Nadia Hashimi

If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought it would be hard to grieve a stranger. I would never have thought it was something I could do my entire life.

loving father, knew the needs of a young man. A young man needs someone to tousle his hair, to put a hand on his shoulder, to watch him fiddle with a broken watch. A young man needs to be someone’s boy.

It was not a boy’s question. It was the question of a young man who needed to know what to expect of tomorrow and what tomorrow would expect of him.

“You are a mother and a mother’s heart never guides her children down the wrong path,”

unable to believe that I’d actually set off on a journey so dangerous with three small children.

Saleem watched his baby brother growing and wished his own metamorphosis into manhood would come with the same speed.

To Saleem, it was a look of pity and he resented

Saleem paused, wanting to be sure he was not being

This was the dark side of Athens, the secret world of people who did not exist.

They were neither immigrant nor refugee. They were undocumented and untraceable, shadows that disappeared in the sun.

But in Greece, police officers stopped them and asked for “papers.” “The papers do not mean anything,” Jamal explained. “They gave us ‘papers’ in Pagani and told us to keep them on us at all times. Be careful with the police here. Even with those papers, we are targets for them, like dogs in the street. Even at some of the churches that give out food, the police may be there. There is no asylum here.”

He was wholly responsible for them now. The feeling overwhelmed him. Was this how Madar-jan felt or was it different for her as their mother? If she did feel overwhelmed, she hadn’t really let on.

He had stepped out of his story and into theirs, away from the privilege of a passport and family.

Can a mother commit a greater sin than ignoring her intuitions?

Maybe that was the moment a child became an adult, he thought—the moment your welfare was no longer someone else’s responsibility.

What he wanted to say was that two thousand years of peace could be undone in a month of war. Roksana understood. “Yes, well, people are very good at destroying things, good things.”

But Saleem was also thankful that neither of his parents was here at this moment, to see their son, a fugitive in the night, blood on his hands.

Though he was far from Afghanistan, the war and bloodshed followed him still. Refugees didn’t just escape a place. They had to escape a thousand memories until they’d put enough time and distance between them and their misery to wake to a better day.

Would he ever look at a father and son and not feel the poison pulse through his body?

Mimi came from a poor family in Albania. She’d been the third daughter, and two more followed after her. When she was fifteen, her parents arranged for her to be married to a man nearly twice her age. She protested but it made no difference. She lived with her husband for nearly three months, picking up the empty bottles and suffering the rage of his alcoholic fits. After three months, she returned to her parents, but they refused to take her in again. Mimi went to live with her aunt.

She fell in love with a local boy who asked her to move to Italy with him where they would marry and start a new life. He arranged for them to travel by speedboat from Albania to Italy’s coast. Mimi did not tell her aunt or anyone else about her decision to leave. When they got to Italy, they lived in a small apartment, and for a week or two, Mimi believed she was beginning the gilded life he’d promised her. But before long, the boy began to complain that they needed money. He could not find work, he’d said, and told his fiancée that her beauty could earn enough to support them both. He promised it would not be for long and that things would not change between them. Saleem did not interrupt.

The boy took all the money Mimi brought home. He spent her earnings on drugs and went out with friends while she worked. One day, he took her to an apartment and unceremoniously traded her to another man. She’d pleaded with him, reminding him of the promises he’d made and all that she’d done for him, but he turned his back and never returned. The new man wanted her to work. When she refused, he beat her and locked her in a room with two other girls until they had no choice but ...