Leaving behind her father’s precious books

Editor’s Note: Nelofer Pazira’s family enjoyed a peaceful, middle-class existence in Kabul until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. After enduring 10 years of violence and fear in a police state, her family escaped into Pakistan and then migrated to Canada in 1989. The following excerpt is taken from her memoir “A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan,” published this month by Free Press.

AS we make our preparations to leave, I step into my father’s library. The first book I ever read came from these wooden shelves. I can see the book in the right-hand corner, between Jack London’s “White Fang” and Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. The book is “Death Row,” by Caryl Chessman, and is the story of an American criminal counting his last days before going to the gas chamber. As death got closer, his attempts to hold on to life became more desperate. I cried when I finished the book -- he was dead. I was 8 years old, and it took me three months to finish the book. When I was done, my father told me to write a two-page summary, along with the moral lesson I’d learned from the story. I concluded that one must be careful not to commit any crimes, and my father presented me with a gift: another book, “The Story of a Real Man,” by Boris Polevoi. The title is still engraved on the leather cover, as bright as when my father showed it to me for the first time. It is the story of a Russian pilot in the Second World War whose plane is shot down by the Germans. The pilot, Alexei Maresyev, survives the crash and walks for days in the cold and snow to make it safely back to the Russian lines. But frostbite costs him [parts of both legs.] The last third of the book details his struggle to fly again, which he finally does in 1943, when he shoots down seven enemy planes. The words are so powerful that I was totally caught up in his struggle. The first time he flew with his wooden legs, I felt I was flying with him. For years I thought that if the Russian with his wooden legs could fly a plane in time of war, then I could do anything. I would go back to those pages to regain my courage, especially in times of disappointment and depression. Now I’m afraid I may not have the courage to leave all this behind.

After I presented my review of “The Story of a Real Man” to my father, he took me around the entire library. “You have the right to use my books,” he said. “From now on, this is your library too -- make sure you take care of it.” For years, I have. I’m the only person in the family with such a privilege. No one else, not even my mother, is allowed to touch his library, especially since the burning of his books years earlier in Baghlan. I’ve been buying books of my own as well, adding them to the collection. Now there are some 5,000 volumes -- all in Dari, mostly translated from other languages. There are several crime novels from a couple of popular Iranian writers, Ghazi Parwez Sayed and Sadegh Hedayat. There is a collection of Greek philosophy, from Pythagoras to Plato and Aristotle. I found Homer’s “Odyssey” -- incomplete. But the image of a blind poet was more captivating than the story of a traveler. I found Dostoevsky and Gorky, and Lenin, Marx and Mao, next to a life of Buddha. I read Rousseau, Goethe and even Sartre. Among the books, I discovered a few loose pages of Lamartine’s work. There is an entire section on Persian poetry, all the classics from Jomi to Sanahi, Rumi and Sahdi. There are handwritten volumes as well. When we leave, can I not take just a few of the most precious?

Then there are the newspapers and magazines. The papers, week by week, month by month, are the product of an era that my father calls the time of a free parliament and a free press. The papers are rare copies. Not many people would have them, he says. And there are my father’s medical books, with colored drawings of human bodies, which fascinated me each time I sneaked a look at them -- especially when I was 12 and more curious about life than fearful of it.

The first love of my life has been this library and its treasures. How can I abandon them? My mother has always said it is my father’s love of his country and my attachment to his books that have stopped us from leaving. The smuggler insists we cannot take even a piece of paper with us, let alone books. Even if we could take a couple, which ones would I choose? I think of Mohammad Hajozee’s essay that describes a young woman in a flower shop sorting and separating flowers for two bouquets, one for a wedding, the other for a funeral, having to decide which will end up in the hands of a bride and which will lie over the dark soil of a grave. I understand this. Perhaps it will be easier not to take any at all. *