"A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear" (by Atiq Rahimi)

The modern history of Afghanistan is a tapestry rent and torn by invasions and internal conflict, both political and religious. Through it all, Afghanis have struggled to define what it means for them to be a united people. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear elegantly captures the essence of this tumultuous cultural narrative, with all its existential angst. To traverse the fractured mind of Farhad, the protagonist and narrator of Atiq Rahimi’s latest novel, is to glimpse the broken soul of a battered and confused country.

The backdrop of Farhad’s story is Afghanistan prior to the 1979 Soviet invasion, a time when internal politics are in upheaval. In 1973, a coup toppled Afghanistan’s constitutional monarchy, only to have the new ruling regime fall five years later after another coup.  A series of bloody wranglings for power ensued, and while the communist Hafizullah Amin eventually emerged as president, his reign was short.  The Soviet Union invaded the country in December 1979, killing Amin in the process.  A Thousand Rooms takes place sometime between Amin’s final takeover and the Soviet invasion, a time of hellish violence and instability.

A young man with a penchant for upsetting conservative religious convention, Farhad is brutally beaten by soldiers one night for drunkenly staying out after curfew. (Farhad and his friends, Enayat and Moalem, are out celebrating Enayat’s impending departure to Pakistan.) He is left for dead in the sewers, but an angelic woman, and complete stranger, comes to his aid, dragging Farhad to her home where she feeds him and nurses him back to health. Mahnaz, as she’s called, also cares for her young son, who mistakes Farhad for his dead father, and her teenage brother, who had spent three weeks in prison and emerged crippled and mentally broken and whose hair has turned a ghostly white.

Fading in and out of consciousness and teetering between states of reality and imagination, Farhad quickly realizes that to save himself he must flee to Pakistan. Doing so means abandoning his life, family, rescuer, and country. Told from Farhad’s point of view, A Thousand Rooms is an intensely intimate portrait of a man (and by extension his country) questioning reality and the limits of the possible. The confusion over Farhad’s state of mind is one of the major accomplishments of Rahimi’s novel: by the end of the story, the only thing we are sure of is the severe beating Farhad receives from the soldiers. Everything else—be it Mahnaz, her son, and brother; the memory of his doting mother; the escape to Pakistan, what he sees, or imagines seeing on his journey there, could be real, but could just as well be hallucinations. Thus the finale—which I will not divulge—remains delightfully ambiguous as to whether the events are real or simply imagined.

The story of Farhad’s harried and confused flight from his homeland, A Thousand Rooms is more complex than it appears. Farhad’s layered story is woven together with threads of imagination (of what happens to the soul when one dreams), memory (of his loving mother), hallucination (of a mystic at a mosque), confounding punishment (his senseless beating), unquenched desire (for Mahnaz), confusion, dreams, and nightmares. (Our inability to distinguish reality from a dream is both maddening and captivating). It is no coincidence that the only items Rahimi describes in detail are decorated and worn carpets that variously comfort or smother the hero.

Everything about A Thousand Rooms is compact. Shy of two hundred pages, the book can be devoured in a single sitting. Rahimi’s prose is sparse and rarely descriptive; none of the characters are given so much as eye color, which fixes the reader’s attention on Farhad’s unsettled mind. Yet, this compressed and pointed narrative does not feel claustrophobic. Rahimi’s smooth, frequent oscillations between dream (or nightmare), the present, past, and glimpses into the future, and the guesswork as to which are real and which are imaginary, leave the reader little time to feel imprisoned by Farhad’s mind frame.

The quick (and steady) pace of the novel and its deliberate lack of descriptive color, however, do not amount to a lack of illumination. Quite the contrary, the book is full of elegant evocations. For example, with the description “She rises to her feet. Picking up the oil-lamp, she unsettles the silence of the dark passageway,” one can almost see the rustling of silence. And later, “I stay behind to keep company with her unspoken words,” a phrase that demands re-reading and absorption. Or this sublime personification of patient sunshine: “Morning waits outside the window. It waits for the curtains to be drawn so it can slip into this room where I am waiting.” Cotranslators Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari are to be commended for keeping Rahimi’s prose supple and uncluttered.

Many haunting metaphors can be drawn from A Thousand Rooms and applied to modern Afghan life, from each of its bit players: the brute soldiers, the caring angelic figure, Farhad’s burdened mother, the naïve child, the anxious protagonist. It is Mahnaz’s silent, tortured, deformed brother, however, who appears to sum up the state of Afghanistan as a whole today. Crippled, mentally and physically, from traumatic experiences, he exists in a dream/nightmare state between what is and what could be. Farhad reflects on the “young man with no youth. With no soul. A body suspended between two arches. . . I want to stay alive.” Farhad is optimistic that things can—must—get better.

Still, confusion reigns:

Strange how, when you’re dreaming, the dream-reality always seems to be more real than reality itself. This is what we are like: our dreams seem more plausible than our lives. But if they didn’t, all those revolutions, those wars, those religions and ideologies, could never have been dreamed up . . .

Farhad’s existential struggle makes us question whether living through a nightmare is preferable to not living at all. This grim choice, which is really the absence of a choice, underlines Afghanistan’s existential battle.

The book’s epigraph, “Unless sleep is less restless than wakefulness, do not rest!” from a thirteenth century Sufi mystic, anticipates Farhad’s (and echoes and Afghanistan’s) constant state of anxiety. A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear resonates deeply because, no doubt, Rahimi has written a true and sad account, but the story could easily be that of any other Afghan, of any other denizen of this modern, anarchic state. In the end, we are left to wonder whether Rahimi has presented us with a story, a dream, or a nightmare, though it is likely all three.

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The novella is set in the late 1970s when Kabul was going through paroxysms of upheaval. Marxist strongman Hafizullah Amin had seized power, unleashing a wave of resentments and reactions: his anti-Islamic stance wounded traditionalists while his attempts to improve relations with the US alarmed Moscow. Demonic forces were roaming free and, as the narrator recalls, the old sufi scholars say that at such times the djinns come and sit on your chest and insult your family. Your only hope is to pray.

The narrator is a wanted man. He doesn't know why, nor does he have any hope of redress. Condemned suddenly and arbitrarily, he can only run. Rahimi expertly captures that moment of incomprehension, the awful realisation that you are nothing, that any soldier can beat you with a rifle butt and no one will stop him. Indeed, a vicious beating has already been administered. A happy night out drinking with friends has just become something rather different. Farhad, the poor hero, can never return home. He will not see his brothers and sisters. He has become part of the community of lost souls.

The uprooting of course releases all sorts of memories and resonances, but Rahimi keeps a tight grip on his words: a few references, a familiar fragrance, a momentary glimpse of a happier past. Then we are ruthlessly nailed to the present again. Farhad is briefly rescued by a woman, and even flirts with the idea of falling in love. But this is no sanctuary and such a liaison is impossible. He is trapped between the old cultural constraints and the new. Unable to escape his fate, he is driven into the arms of those who only pray. He doesn't want to be there: he prefers wine and laughter to their hashish and hatred, but the relentless logic of nightmares will not be bucked.

The tale covers only a few days in Farhad's life, but in this shard of existence we see all the tragedy of Afghanistan, and indeed a dozen other places - Somalia, Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir - all those Islamic countries that have been seized by the djinn, the incubus that sits on the chest in the night. This is both a wonderful and a dreadful little book. One comes out sweating and trembling at the end, thankful for the air we breathe, thankful that no matter how bad the nightmares, we are the lucky ones who wake up in our own beds.