That night, she ate.

A few days later, Nila summoned me into the house and said she was going to throw a party. We rarely, if ever, had parties at the house back when Mr. Wahdati was single. After Nila moved in, she arranged them two or three times a month. The day prior to the party, Nila would give me detailed instructions on what appetizers and meals I was to prepare, and I would drive to the market to purchase the necessary items. Chief among these necessary items was alcohol, which I had never procured before, as Mr. Wahdati did not drink—though his reasons had nothing to do with religion, he merely disliked its effects. Nila, however, was well acquainted with certain establishments— pharmacies, as she called them jokingly—where for the equivalent of double my monthly salary a bottle of medicinecould be purchased subversively. I had mixed feelings about running this particular errand, playing the part of sin enabler, but, as always, pleasing Nila superseded everything else.

You must understand, Mr. Markos, that when we had parties in Shadbagh, be it for a wedding or to celebrate a circumcision, the proceedings took place at two separate houses, one for women, the other for us men. At Nila’s parties, men and women mingled with one another. Most of the women dressed as Nila did, in dresses that showed the entire lengths of their arms and a good deal of their legs as well. They smoked, and they drank too, their glasses half filled with colorless or red- or copper-colored liquor, and they told jokes and laughed and freely touched the arms of men I knew to be married to someone else in the room. I carried small platters of bolaniand lola kabobfrom one end of the smoke-filled room to the other, from one cluster of guests to another, as a record played on the turntable. The music was not Afghan but something Nila called jazz, a kind of music that, I learned decades later, you appreciate as well, Mr. Markos. To my ears, the random tinkling of piano and the strange wailing of horns sounded an inharmonious mess. But Nila loved it, and I kept overhearing her telling guests how they simply had to hear this recording or that. All night, she held a glass and tended to it far more than the food I served.

Mr. Wahdati made limited effort to engage his guests. He made a token show of mingling, but mostly he occupied a corner, with a remote expression on his face, swirling a glass of soda, smiling a courteous, closemouthed smile when someone talked to him. And, as was his habit, he excused himself when the guests began asking Nila to recite her poetry.

This was my favorite part, by far, of the evening. When she started, I always found some task that would keep me nearby. There I would be, frozen in place, towel in hand, straining to hear. Nila’s poems did not resemble any I had grown up with. As you well know, we Afghans love our poetry; even the most uneducated among us can recite verses of Hafez or Khayyám or Saadi. Do you recall, Mr. Markos, telling me last year how much you loved Afghans? And I asked you why, and you laughed and said, Because even your graffiti artists spray Rumi on the walls.

But Nila’s poems defied tradition. They followed no preset meter or rhyming pattern. Nor did they deal with the usual things, trees and spring flowers and bulbul birds. Nila wrote about love, and by love I do not mean the Sufi yearnings of Rumi or Hafez but instead physical love. She wrote about lovers whispering across pillows, touching each other. She wrote about pleasure. I had never heard language such as this spoken by a woman. I would stand there, listening to Nila’s smoky voice drift down the hallway, my eyes closed and my ears burning red, imagining she was reading to me, that wewere the lovers in the poem, until someone’s call for tea or fried eggs would break the spell, and then Nila would call my name and I would run.

That night, the poem she chose to read caught me off guard. It was about a man and his wife, in a village, mourning the death of the infant they had lost to the winter cold. The guests seemed to love the poem, judging by the nods and the murmurs of approval around the room, and by their hearty applause when Nila looked up from the page. Still, I felt some surprise, and disappointment, that my sister’s misfortune had been used to entertain guests, and I could not shake the sense that some vague betrayal had been committed.

A couple of days after the party, Nila said she needed a new purse. Mr. Wahdati was reading the newspaper at the table, where I had served him a lunch of lentil soup and naan.

“Do you need anything, Suleiman?” Nila asked.

“No, aziz. Thank you,” he said. I rarely heard him address her by anything other than aziz, which means “beloved,” “darling,” and yet never did the couple seem more distant from each other than when he said it, and never did this term of endearment sound so starched as when it came from Mr. Wahdati’s lips.

On the way to the store, Nila said she wanted to pick up a friend and gave me directions to the home. I parked on the street and watched her walk up the block to a two-story house with bright pink walls. At first, I left the engine running, but when five minutes passed and Nila hadn’t returned I shut it off. It was a good thing I did for it was not until two hours later that I saw her slim figure gliding down the sidewalk toward the car. I opened the rear passenger door and, as she slid in, I smelled on her, underneath her own familiar perfume, a second scent, something faintly like cedarwood and perhaps a trace of ginger, an aroma I recognized from having breathed it at the party two nights before.

“I didn’t find one I liked,” Nila said from the backseat as she applied a fresh coat of lipstick.

She caught my puzzled face in the rearview mirror. She lowered the lipstick and gazed at me from under her lashes. “You took me to two different stores but I couldn’t find a purse to my liking.”

Her eyes locked onto mine in the mirror and lingered there awhile, waiting, and I understood that I had been made privy to a secret. She was putting my allegiance to the test. She was asking me to choose.

“I think maybe you visited three stores,” I said weakly.

She grinned. “Parfois je pense que tu es mon seul ami, Nabi.”

I blinked.

“It means ‘Sometimes I think you are my only friend.’ ”

She smiled radiantly at me, but it could not lift my sagging spirits.

The rest of that day, I set about my chores at half my normal speed and with a fraction of my customary enthusiasm. When the men came over for tea that night, one of them sang for us, but his song failed to cheer me. I felt as though I had been the one cuckolded. And I was sure that the hold she had on me had loosened at last.

But in the morning I rose and there it was, filling my living quarters once more, from floor to ceiling, seeping into the walls, saturating the air I breathed, like vapor. It was no use, Mr. Markos.

I cannot tell you when, precisely, the idea took hold. Perhaps it was the windy autumn morning I was serving tea to Nila, when I had stooped and was cutting for her a slice of roatcake, that from the radio sitting on her windowsill came a report that the coming winter of 1952 might prove even more brutal than the previous one. Perhaps it was earlier, the day I took her to the house with the bright pink walls, or perhaps earlier still, the time I held her hand in the car as she sobbed.

Whatever the timing, once the idea entered my head there was no purging it.

Let me say, Mr. Markos, that I proceeded with a mostly clean conscience, and with the conviction that my proposal was born of goodwill and honest intentions. Something that, though painful in the short term, would lead to a greater long-term good for all involved. But I had less honorable, self-serving motives as well. Chief among them this: that I would give Nila something no other man—not her husband, not the owner of that big pink house—could.