بخش 11

“It may not be such a bad thing,” Tariq says.

They have finished making love. He’s lying beside her, his head on her chest, his arm draped over her belly. The first few times they tried, there was difficulty. Tariq was all apologies, Laila all reassurances. There are still difficulties, not physical now but logistical. The shack they share with the children is small. The children sleep on cots below them and so there is little privacy. Most times, Laila and Tariq make love in silence, with controlled, muted passion, fully clothed beneath the blanket as a precaution against interruptions by the children. They are forever wary of the rustling sheets, the creaking bedsprings. But for Laila, being with Tariq is worth weathering these apprehensions. When they make love, Laila feels anchored, she feels sheltered. Her anxieties, that their life together is a temporary blessing, that soon it will come loose again in strips and tatters, are allayed. Her fears of separation vanish.

“What do you mean?” she says now.

“What’s going on back home. It may not be so bad in the end.”

Back home, bombs are falling once again, this time American bombs-Laila has been watching images of the war every day on the television as she changes sheets and vacuums. The Americans have armed the warlords once more, and enlisted the help of the Northern Alliance to drive out the Taliban and find bin Laden.

But it rankles Laila, what Tariq is saying. Shepushes his head roughly off her chest.

“Not so bad? People dying? Women, children, old people? Homes destroyed again? Not so bad?”

“Shh.You’ll wake the children.”

“How can you say that, Tariq?” she snaps. “After the so-called blunder in Karam? A hundred innocent people! You saw the bodies for yourself!”

“No,” Tariq says. He props himself up on his elbow, looks down at Laila. “You misunderstand. What I meant was-“

“You wouldn’t know,” Laila says. She is aware that her voice is rising, that they are having their first fight as husband and wife. “You left when the Mujahideen began fighting, remember? I’m the one who stayed behind. Me. Iknow war.I lost my parents to war. Myparents, Tariq. And now to hear you say that war is not so bad?”

“I’m sorry, Laila. I’m sorry.” He cups her face in his hands. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Forgive me. What I meant was that maybe there will be hope at the other end of this war, that maybe for the first time in a long time-“

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Laila says, surprised at how she has lashed out at him. It’s unfair, she knows, what she said to him-hadn’t war taken his parents too?-and whatever flared in her is softening already. Tariq continues to speak gently, and, when he pulls her to him, she lets him. When he kisses her hand, then her brow, she lets him. She knows that he is probably right. She knows how his comment was intended. Maybe thisis necessary. Maybe theremil be hope when Bush’s bombs stop falling. But she cannot bring herself to say it, not when what happened to Babi and Mammy is happening to someone now in Afghanistan, not when some unsuspecting girl or boy back home has just been orphaned by a rocket as she was. Laila cannot bring herself to say it. It’s hard to rejoice. It seems hypocritical, perverse.

That night, Zalmai wakes up coughing. Before Laila can move, Tariq swings his legs over the side of the bed. He straps on his prosthesis and walks over to Zalmai, lifts him up into his arms. From the bed, Laila watches Tariq’s shape moving back and forth in the darkness. She sees the outline of Zalmai’s head on his shoulder, the knot of his hands at Tariq’s neck, his small feet bouncing by Tariq’s hip.

When Tariq comes back to bed, neither of them says anything. Laila reaches over and touches his face. Tariq’s cheeks are wet.

50.

For Laila, life in Murree is one of comfort and tranquillity. The work is not cumbersome, and, on their days off, she and Tariq take the children to ride the chairlift to Patriata hill, or go to Pindi Point, where, on a clear day, you can see as far as Islamabad and downtown Rawalpindi. There, they spread a blanket on the grass and eat meatball sandwiches with cucumbers and drink cold ginger ale.

It is a good life, Laila tells herself, a life to be thankful for. It is, in fact, precisely the sort of life she used to dream for herself in her darkest days with Rasheed. Every day, Laila reminds herself of this.

Then one warm night in July 2002, she and Tariq are lying in bed talking in hushed voices about all the changes back home. There have been so many. The coalition forces have driven the Taliban out of every major city, pushed them across the border to Pakistan and to the mountains in the south and east of Afghanistan. ISAF, an international peacekeeping force, has been sent to Kabul. The country has an interim president now, Hamid Karzai.

Laila decides that now is the time to tell Tariq.

A year ago, she would have gladly given an arm to get out of Kabul. But in the last few months, she has found herself missing the city of her childhood. She misses the bustle of Shor Bazaar, the Gardens of Babur, the call of the water carriers lugging their goatskin bags. She misses the garment hagglers at Chicken Street and the melon hawkers in Karteh-Parwan.

But it isn’t mere homesickness or nostalgia that has Laila thinking of Kabul so much these days. She has become plagued by restlessness. She hears of schools built in Kabul, roads repaved, women returning to work, and her life here, pleasant as it is, grateful as she is for it, seems… insufficient to her. Inconsequential Worse yet, wasteful. Of late, she has started hearing Babi’s voice in her head.You can be anything you want, Laila, he says.I know this about you. And Ialso know that when this war is over, Afghanistan is going to need you.

Laila hears Mammy’s voice too. She remembers Mammy’s response to Babi when he would suggest that they leave Afghanistan.Iwant to see my sons’ dream come true. I want to be there when it happens, when Afghanistan is free, so the boys see it too. They’ll see it through my eyes. There is a part of Laila now that wants to return to Kabul, for Mammy and Babi, for them to see it throughher eyes.

And then, most compellingly for Laila, there is Mariam. Did Mariam die for this? Laila asks herself. Did she sacrifice herself so she, Laila, could be a maid in a foreign land? Maybe it wouldn’t matter to Mariam what Laila did as long as she and the children were safe and happy. But it matters to Laila. Suddenly, it matters very much.

“I want to go back,” she says.

Tariq sits up in bed and looks down at her.

Laila is struck again by how beautiful he is, the perfect curve of his forehead, the slender muscles of his arms, his brooding, intelligent eyes. A year has passed, and still there are times, at moments like this, when Laila cannot believe that they have found each other again, that he is really here, with her, that he is her husband.

“Back? To Kabul?” he asks.

“Onlyif you want it too.”

“Are you unhappy here? You seem happy. The children too.”

Laila sits up. Tariq shifts on the bed, makes room for her.

“Iam happy,” Laila says. “Of course I am. But…where do we go from here, Tariq? How long do we stay? This isn’t home. Kabul is, and back there so much is happening, a lot of it good. I want to be a part of it all. I want todo something. I want to contribute. Do you understand?”

Tariq nods slowly. “This is what you want, then? You’re sure?”

“I want it, yes, I’m sure. But it’s more than that. I feel like Ihave to go back. Staying here, it doesn’t feel right anymore.”

Tariq looks at his hands, then back up at her.

“But only-only-if you want to go too.”

Tariq smiles. The furrows from his brow clear, and for a brief moment he is the old Tariq again, the Tariq who did not get headaches, who had once said that in Siberia snot turned to ice before it hit the ground. It may be her imagination, but Laila believes there are more frequent sightings of this old Tariq these clays.

“Me?” he says. “I’ll follow you to the end of the world, Laila.”

She pulls him close and kisses his lips. She believes she has never loved him more than at this moment. “Thank you,” she says, her forehead resting against his.

“Let’s go home.”

“But first, I want to go to Herat,” she says.

“Herat?”

Laila explains.

The children need reassuring, each in their own way. Laila has to sit down with an agitated Aziza, who still has nightmares, who’d been startled to tears the week before when someone had shot rounds into the sky at a wedding nearby. Laila has to explain to Aziza that when they return to Kabul the Taliban won’t be there, that there will not be any fighting, and that she will not be sent back to the orphanage. “We’ll all live together. Your father, me, Zalmai. And you, Aziza. You’ll never, ever, have to be apart from me again. I promise.” She smiles at her daughter. “Until the dayyou want to, that is. When you fall in love with some young man and want to marry him.”

On the day they leave Murree, Zalmai is inconsolable. He has wrapped his arms around Alyona’s neck and will not let go.

“I can’t pry him off of her, Mammy,” says Aziza.

“Zalmai. We can’t take a goat on the bus,” Laila explains again.

It isn’t until Tariq kneels down beside him, until he promises Zalmai that he will buy him a goat just like Alyona in Kabul, that Zalmai reluctantly lets go.

There are tearful farewells with Sayeed as well For good luck, he holds a Koran by the doorway for Tariq, Laila, and the children to kiss three times, then holds it high so they can pass under it. He helps Tariq load the two suitcases into the trunk of his car. It is Sayeed who drives them to the station, who stands on the curb waving good-bye as the bus sputters and pulls away.

As she leans back and watches Sayeed receding in the rear window of the bus, Laila hears the voice of doubt whispering in her head. Are they being foolish, she wonders, leaving behind the safety of Murree? Going back to the land where her parents and brothers perished, where the smoke of bombs is only now settling?

And then, from the darkened spirals of her memory, rise two lines of poetry, Babi’s farewell ode to Kabul: One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her -walls.

Laila settles back in her seat, blinking the wetness from her eyes. Kabul is waiting. Needing. This journey home is the right thing to do.

But first there is one last farewell to be said.

The wars in Afghanistan have ravaged the roads connecting Kabul, Herat, and Kandahar. The easiest way to Herat now is through Mashad, in Iran. Laila and her family are there only overnight. They spend the night at a hotel, and, the next morning, they board another bus.

Mashad is a crowded, bustling city. Laila watches as parks, mosques, andchelo kebab restaurants pass by. When the bus passes the shrine to Imam Reza, the eighth Shi’a imam, Laila cranes her neck to get a better view of its glistening tiles, the minarets, the magnificent golden dome, all of it immaculately and lovingly preserved. She thinks of the Buddhas in her own country. They are grains of dust now, blowing about the Bamiyan Valley in the wind.

The bus ride to the Iranian-Afghan border takes almost ten hours. The terrain grows more desolate, more barren, as they near Afghanistan. Shortly before they cross the border into Herat, they pass an Afghan refugee camp. To Laila, it is a blur of yellow dust and black tents and scanty structures made of corrugated-steel sheets. She reaches across the seat and takes Tariq’s hand.

In Herat, most of the streets are paved, lined with fragrant pines. There are municipal parks and libraries in reconstruction, manicured courtyards, freshly painted buildings. The traffic lights work, and, most surprisingly to Laila, electricity is steady. Laila has heard that Herat’s feudal-style warlord, Ismail Khan, has helped rebuild the city with the considerable customs revenue that he collects at the Afghan-Iranian border, money that Kabul says belongs not to him but to the central government. There is both a reverential and fearful tone when the taxi driver who takes them to Muwaffaq Hotel mentions Ismail Khan’s name.

The two-night stay at the Muwaffaq will cost them nearly a fifth of their savings, but the trip from Mashad has been long and wearying, and the children are exhausted. The elderly clerk at the desk tells Tariq, as he fetches the room key, that the Muwaffaq is popular with journalists and NGO workers.

“Bin Laden slept here once,” he boasts.

The room has two beds, and a bathroom with running cold water. There is a painting of the poet Khaja Abdullah Ansary on the wall between the beds. From the window, Laila has a view of the busy street below, and of a park across the street with pastel-colored-brick paths cutting through thick clusters of flowers. The children, who have grown accustomed to television, are disappointed that there isn’t one in the room. Soon enough, though, they are asleep. Soon enough, Tariq and Laila too have collapsed. Laila sleeps soundly in Tariq’s arms, except for once in the middle of the night when she wakes from a dream she cannot remember.

The next morning, after a breakfast of tea with fresh bread, quince marmalade, and boiled eggs, Tariq finds her a taxi.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come along?” Tariq says. Aziza is holding his hand Zalmai isn’t, but he is standing close to Tariq, leaning one shoulder on Tariq’s hip.

“I’m sure.”

“I worry.”

“I’ll be fine,” Laila says. “I promise. Take the children to a market. Buy them something.”

Zalmai begins to cry when the taxi pulls away, and, when Laila looks back, she sees that he is reaching for Tariq. That he is beginning to accept Tariq both eases and breaks Laila’s heart.

“You’re not from herat,” the driver says.

He has dark, shoulder-length hair-a common thumbing of the nose at the departed Taliban, Laila has discovered-and some kind of scar interrupting his mustache on the left side. There is a photo taped to the windshield, on his side. It’s of a young girl with pink cheeks and hair parted down the middle into twin braids.

Laila tells him that she has been in Pakistan for the last year, that she is returning to Kabul. “Deh-Mazang.”

Through the windshield, she sees coppersmiths welding brass handles to jugs, saddlemakers laying out cuts of rawhide to dry in the sun.

“Have you lived here long, brother?” she asks.

“Oh, my whole life. I was born here. I’ve seen everything. You remember the uprising?”

Laila says she does, but he goes on.

“This was back in March 1979, about nine months before the Soviets invaded. Some angry Heratis killed a few Soviet advisers, so the Soviets sent in tanks and helicopters and pounded this place. For three days,hamshira, they fired on the city. They collapsed buildings, destroyed one of the minarets, killed thousands of people.Thousands. I lost two sisters in those three days. One of them was twelve years old.” He taps the photo on his windshield. “That’s her.”

“I’m sorry,” Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on. Laila thinks of her own life and all that has happened to her, and she is astonished that she too has survived, that she is alive and sitting in this taxi listening to this man’s story.

Gul Daman is a village of a few walled houses rising among flatkolbas built with mud and straw. Outside thekolbas, Laila sees sunburned women cooking, their faces sweating in steam rising from big blackened pots set on makeshift firewood grills. Mules eat from troughs. Children giving chase to chickens begin chasing the taxi. Laila sees men pushing wheelbarrows filled with stones. They stop and watch the car pass by. The driver takes a turn, and they pass a cemetery with a weather-worn mausoleum in the center of it. The driver tells her that a village Sufi is buried there.

There is a windmill too. In the shadow of its idle, rust-colored vanes, three little boys are squatting, playing with mud. The driver pulls over and leans out of the window. The oldest-looking of the three boys is the one to answer. He points to a house farther up the road. The driver thanks him, puts the car back in gear.

He parks outside the walled, one-story house. Laila sees the tops of fig trees above the walls, some of the branches spilling over the side.

“I won’t be long,” she says to the driver.

The middle-aged man who opens the door is short, thin, russet-haired. His beard is streaked with parallel stripes of gray. He is wearing achapan over hispirhan-tumban.

They exchangesalaam alaykums.

“Is this Mullah Faizullah’s house?” Laila asks.

“Yes. I am his son, Hamza. Is there something I can do for you,hamshireh? ” “I’ve come here about an old friend of your father’s, Mariam.”

Hamza blinks. A puzzled look passes across his face. “Mariam…”

“Jalil Khan’s daughter.”

He blinks again. Then he puts a palm to his cheek and his face lights up with a smile that reveals missing and rotting teeth. “Oh!” he says. It comes out sounding likeOhhhhhh, like an expelled breath. “Oh! Mariam! Are you her daughter? Is she-“ He is twisting his neck now, looking behind her eagerly, searching. “Is she here? It’s been so long! Is Mariam here?”

“She has passed on, I’m afraid.”

The smile fades from Hamza’s face.

For a moment, they stand there, at the doorway, Hamza looking at the ground. A donkey brays somewhere.

“Come in,” Hamza says. He swings the door open. “Please come in.”

They srr on the floor in a sparsely furnished room. There is a Herati rug on the floor, beaded cushions to sit on, and a framed photo of Mecca on the wall They sit by the open window, on either side of an oblong patch of sunlight- Laila hears women’s voices whispering from another room. A little barefoot boy places before them a platter of green tea and pistachiogaaz nougats. Hamza nods at him.

“My son.”

The boy leaves soundlessly.

“So tell me,” Hamza says tiredly.

Laila does. She tells him everything. It takes longer than she’d imagined. Toward the end, she struggles to maintain composure. It still isn’t easy, one year later, talking about Mariam.

When she’s done, Hamza doesn’t say anything for a long time. He slowly turns his teacup on its saucer, one way, then the other.

“My father, may he rest in peace, was so very fond of her,” he says at last. “He was the one who sangazan in her ear when she was born, you know. He visited her every week, never missed. Sometimes he took me with him. He was her tutor, yes, but he was a friend too. He was a charitable man, my father. It nearly broke him when Jalil Khan gave her away.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your father. May God forgive him.”

Hamza nods his thanks. “He lived to be a very old man. He outlived Jalil Khan, in fact. We buried him in the village cemetery, not far from where Mariam’s mother is buried. My father was a dear, dear man, surely heaven-bound.”

Laila lowers her cup.

“May I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Can you show me?” she says. “Where Mariam lived. Can you take me there?”

The driver agrees to wait awhile longer.

Hamza and Laila exit the village and walk downhill on the road that connects Gul Daman to Herat. After fifteen minutes or so, he points to a narrow gap in the tall grass that flanks the road on both sides.

“That’s how you get there,” he says. “There is a path there.”

The path is rough, winding, and dim, beneath the vegetation and undergrowth. The wind makes the tall grass slam against Laila’s calves as she and Hamza climb the path, take the turns. On either side of them is a kaleidoscope of wilciflowers swaying in the wind, some tall with curved petals, others low, fan-leafed. Here and there a few ragged buttercups peep through the low bushes. Laila hears the twitter of swallows overhead and the busy chatter of grasshoppers underfoot.

They walk uphill this way for two hundred yards or more. Then the path levels, and opens into a flatter patch of land. They stop, catch their breath. Laila dabs at her brow with her sleeve and bats at a swarm of mosquitoes hovering in front of her face. Here she sees the low-slung mountains in the horizon, a few cottonwoods, some poplars, various wild bushes that she cannot name.

“There used to be a stream here,” Hamza says, a little out of breath. “But it’s long dried up now.”

He says he will wait here. He tells her to cross the dry streambed, walk toward the mountains.

“I’ll wait here,” he says, sitting on a rock beneath a poplar. “You go on.”

“I won’t-“

“Don’t worry. Take your time. Go on,hamshireh. “

Laila thanks him. She crosses the streambed, stepping from one stone to another. She spots broken soda bottles amid the rocks, rusted cans, and a mold-coated metallic container with a zinc lid half buried in the ground.

She heads toward the mountains, toward the weeping willows, which she can see now, the long drooping branches shaking with each gust of wind. In her chest, her heart is drumming. She sees that the willows are arranged as Mariam had said, in a circular grove with a clearing in the middle. Laila walks faster, almost running now. She looks back over her shoulder and sees that Hamza is a tiny figure, hischapan a burst of color against the brown of the trees’ bark. She trips over a stone and almost falls, then regains her footing. She hurries the rest of the way with the legs of her trousers pulled up. She is panting by the time she reaches the willows.

Mariam’skolba is still here.

When she approaches it, Laila sees that the lone windowpane is empty and that the door is gone. Mariam had described a chicken coop and a tandoor, a wooden outhouse too, but Laila sees no sign of them. She pauses at the entrance to thekolba She can hear flies buzzing inside.

To get in, she has to sidestep a large fluttering spiderweb. It’s dim inside. Laila has to give her eyes a few moments to adjust. When they do, she sees that the interior is even smaller than she’d imagined. Only half of a single rotting, splintered board remains of the floorboards. The rest, she imagines, have been ripped up for burning as firewood. The floor is carpeted now with dry-edged leaves, broken bottles, discarded chewing gum wrappers, wild mushrooms, old yellowed cigarette butts. But mostly with weeds, some stunted, some springing impudently halfway up the walls.

Fifteen years, Laila thinks. Fifteen years in this place.

Laila sits down, her back to the wall. She listens to the wind filtering through the willows. There are more spiderwebs stretched across the ceiling. Someone has spray-painted something on one of the walls, but much of it has sloughed off, and Laila cannot decipher what it says. Then she realizes the letters are Russian. There is a deserted bird’s nest in one corner and a bat hanging upside down in another corner, where the wall meets the low ceiling.

Laila closes her eyes and sits there awhile.

In Pakistan, it was difficult sometimes to remember the details of Mariam’s face. There were times when, like a word on the tip of her tongue, Mariam’s face eluded her. But now, here in this place, it’s easy to summon Mariam behind the lids of her eyes: the soft radiance of her gaze, the long chin, the coarsened skin of her neck, the tight-lipped smile. Here, Laila can lay her cheek on the softness of Mariam’s lap again, can feel Mariam swaying back and forth, reciting verses from the Koran, can feel the words vibrating down Mariam’s body, to her knees, and into her own ears.

Then, suddenly, the weeds begin to recede, as if something is pulling them by the roots from beneath the ground. They sink lower and lower until the earth in thekolba has swallowed the last of their spiny leaves. The spiderwebs magically unspin themselves. The bird’s nest self-disassembles, the twigs snapping loose one by one, flying out of thekolba end over end. An invisible eraser wipes the Russian graffiti off the wall.

The floorboards are back. Laila sees a pair of sleeping cots now, a wooden table, two chairs, a cast-iron stove in the corner, shelves along the walls, on which sit clay pots and pans, a blackened teakettle, cups and spoons. She hears chickens clucking outside, the distant gurgling of the stream.

A young Mariam is sitting at the table making a doll by the glow of an oil lamp. She’s humming something. Her face is smooth and youthful, her hair washed, combed back. She has all her teeth.

Laila watches Mariam glue strands of yam onto her doll’s head. In a few years, this little girl will be a woman who will make small demands on life, who will never burden others, who will never let on that she too has had sorrows, disappointments, dreams that have been ridiculed. A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied butshaped by the turbulence that washes over her. Already Laila sees something behind this young girl’s eyes, something deep in her core, that neither Rasheed nor the Taliban will be able to break. Something as hard and unyielding as a block of limestone. Something that, in the end, will beher undoing and Laila’s salvation.

The little girl looks up. Puts down the doll. Smiles.

Laila jo?

Laila’s eyes snap open. She gasps, and her body pitches forward. She startles the bat, which zips from one end of thekolba to the other, its beating wings like the fluttering pages of a book, before it flies out the window.

Laila gets to her feet, beats the dead leaves from the seat of her trousers. She steps out of thekolba Outside, the light has shifted slightly. A wind is blowing, making the grass ripple and the willow branches click.

Before she leaves the clearing, Laila takes one last look at thekolba where Mariam had slept, eaten, dreamed, held her breath for Jalil. On sagging walls, the willows cast crooked patterns that shift with each gust of wind. A crow has landed on the flat roof. It pecks at something, squawks, flies off.

“Good-bye, Mariam.”

And, with that, unaware that she is weeping, Laila begins to run through the grass.

She finds Hamza still sitting on the rock. When he spots her, he stands up.

“Let’s go back,” he says. Then, “I have something to give you.”

Laila watts for Hamza in the garden by the front door. The boy who had served them tea earlier is standing beneath one of the fig trees holding a chicken, watching her impassively. Laila spies two faces, an old woman and a young girl inhijab observing her demurely from a window.

The door to the house opens and Hamza emerges. He is carrying a box.

He gives it to Laila.

“Jalil Khan gave this to my father a month or so before he died/’ Hamza says. “He asked my father to safeguard it for Mariam until she came to claim it. My father kept it for two years. Then, just before he passed away, he gave it to me, and asked me to save it for Mariam. But she…you know, she never came.”

Laila looks down at the oval-shaped tin box. It looks like an old chocolate box. It’s olive green, with fading gilt scrolls all around the hinged lid There is a little rust on the sides, and two tiny dents on the front rim of the lid. Laila tries to open the box, but the latch is locked.

“What’s in it?” she asks.

Hamza puts a key in her palm. “My father never unlocked it. Neither did 1.Isuppose it was God’s will that it be you.”

Back at the hotel, Tariq and the children are not back yet.

Laila sits on the bed, the box on her lap. Part of her wants to leave it unopened, let whatever Jalil had intended remain a secret. But, in the end, the curiosity proves too strong. She slides in the key. It takes some rattling and shaking, but she opens the box.

In it, she finds three things: an envelope, a burlap sack, and a videocassette.

Laila takes the tape and goes down to the reception desk. She learns from the elderly clerk who had greeted them the day before that the hotel has only one VCR, in its biggest suite. The suite is vacant at the moment, and he agrees to take her. He leaves the desk to a mustachioed young man in a suit who is talking on a cellular phone.

The old clerk leads Laila to the second floor, to a door at the end of a long hallway. He works the lock, lets her in.

Laila’s eyes find the TV in the corner. They register nothing else about the suite-She turns on the TV, turns on the VCR. Puts the tape in and pushes the play button. The screen is blank for a few moments, and Laila begins to wonder why Jalil had gone to the trouble of passing a blank tape to Mariam. But then there is music, and images begin to play on the screen.

Laila frowns. She keeps watching for a minute or two. Then she pushes stop, fast-forwards the tape, and pushes play again. It’s the same film.

The old man is looking at her quizzically.

The film playing on the screen is Walt Disney’sPinocchio. Laila does not understand.

Tariq and the children come back to the hotel just after six o’clock. Aziza runs to Laila and shows her the earrings Tariq has bought for her, silver with an enamel butterfly on each. Zalmai is clutching an inflatable dolphin that squeaks when its snout is squeezed.

“How are you?” Tariq asks, putting his arm around her shoulder.

“I’m fine,” Laila says. “I’ll tell you later.”

They walk to a nearby kebab house to eat. It’s a small place, with sticky, vinyl tablecloths, smoky and loud But the lamb is tender and moist and the bread hot. They walk the streets for a while after. Tariq buys the children rosewater ice cream from a street-side kiosk. They eat, sitting on a bench, the mountains behind them silhouetted against the scarlet red of dusk. The air is warm, rich with the fragrance of cedar.

Laila had opened the envelope earlier when she’d come back to the room after viewing the videotape. In it was a letter, handwritten in blue ink on a yellow, lined sheet of paper.

It read:

May 13, 1987

My dear Mariam:

I pray that this letter finds you in good health

As you kno w, I came to Kabul a month ago to speak with you. Bui you would not see me. Iwas disappointed but could not blame you. In your place, Imight have done the same. Ilost the privilege of your good graces a long time ago and for that I only have myself to blame. Bui if you are reading this letter, then you have read the letter that Ilefi at your door. You have read it and you have come to see Mullah Faizullah, as I had asked that you do. Iam grateful that you did, Mariam jo. Iam grateful for this chance to say a few words to you.

Where do I begin?

Your father has known so much sorrow since we last spoke, Mariamjo. Your stepmother Afsoon was killed on the first day of the 1979 uprising. A stray bullet killed your sister Niloufar that same day. Ican still see her, my Utile Niloufar, doing headsiands to impress guests. Your brother Farhad joined the jihad in J 980. The Soviets killed him in J 982, just outside ofHelmand. I never got to see his body. I don ‘i know if you have children of your own, Mariamjo, but if you do I pray that God look after them and spare you the grief that Ihave known. I still dream of them. I still dream of my dead children.

I have dreams of you too, Mariam jo. Imiss you. Imiss the sound of your voice, your laughter. I miss reading to you, and all those times we fished together. Do you remember all those times we fished together? You were a good daughter, Mariam jo, and I cannot ever think of you without feeling shame and regret. Regret… When it comes to you, Mariamjo, I have oceans of it. I regret that I did not see you the day you came to Herat. I regret that I did not open the door and take you in. I regret that I did not make you a daughter to me, ihatl leiyou live in that place for all those years. Andfor what? Fear of losing face? Of staining my so-called good name? How Utile those things matter to me now after all the loss, all the terrible things Ihave seen in this cursed war. Bui now, of course, it is too late. Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone. Now all Ican do is say that you were a good daughter, Mariamjo, and that Inever deserved you. Now all I can do is ask for your forgiveness. So forgive me, Mariamjo. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

I am not the wealthy man you once knew. The communists confiscated so much of my land, and all of my stores as well. But it is petty to complain, for God-for reasons that I do not understand-has still blessed me with far more than most people. Since my return from Kabul, Ihave managed to sell what Utile remained of my land. I have enclosed for you your share of the inheritance. You can see that it is far from afortune, but it is something. It is something. (You will also notice that I have taken the liberty of exchanging the money into dollars. I think it is for the best God alone knows the fate of our own beleaguered currency.) I hope you do not think that I am trying to buy your forgiveness. I hope you will credit me with knowing that your forgiveness is not for sale. It never was. I am merely giving you, if belatedly, what was rightfully yours all along. I was not a dutiful father to you in life. Perhaps in death I can be.

Ah, death. I won’t burden you with details, but death is within sight for me now. Weak heart, the doctors say. It is a fitting manner of death, I think, for a weak man.

Mariamjo,

I dare, I dare allow myself the hope that, after you read this, you will be more charitable to me than I ever was to you. That you might find it in your heart to come and see your father. That you will knock on my door one more time and give me the chance to open it this time, to welcome you, to take you in my arms, my daughter, as I should have all those years ago. It is a hope as weak as my heart. This I know. But I will be waiting. I will be listening for your knock I will be hoping.

May God grant you a long and prosperous life, my daughter. May God give you many healthy and beautiful children. May you find the happiness, peace, and acceptance that I did not give you. Be well. I leave you in the loving hands of God.

Your undeserving father, Jalil

That night, after they return to the hotel, after the children have played and gone to bed, Laila tells Tariq about the letter. She shows him the money in the burlap sack. When she begins to cry, he kisses her face and holds her in his arms.

51.

April 2003

Thedrought has ended. It snowed at last this past winter, kneedeep, and now it has been raining for days.The Kabul River is flowing once again. Its spring floods have washed away Titanic City.

There is mud on the streets now. Shoes squish. Cars get trapped. Donkeys loaded with apples slog heavily, their hooves splattering muck from rain puddles. But no one is complaining about the mud, no one is mourning Titanic City.We need Kabul to be green again, people say.

Yesterday, Laila watched her children play in the downpour, hopping from one puddle to another in their backyard beneath a lead-colored sky. She was watching from the kitchen window of the small two-bedroom house that they are renting in Deh-Mazang. There is a pomegranate tree in the yard and a thicket of sweetbriar bushes. Tariq has patched the walls and built the children a slide, a swing set, a little fenced area for Zalmai’s new goat. Laila watched the rain slide off Zalmai’s scalp-he has asked that he be shaved, like Tariq, who is in charge now of saying theBabaloo prayers. The rain flattened Aziza’s long hair, turned it into sodden tendrils that sprayed Zalmai when she snapped her head.

Zalmai is almost six. Aziza is ten. They celebrated her birthday last week, took her to Cinema Park, where, at last,Titanic was openly screened for the people of Kabul.

“Come on, children, we’re going to be late,” Laila calls, putting their lunches in a paper bag-It’s eight o’clock in the morning. Laila was up at five. As always, it was Aziza who shook her awake for morningnamaz. The prayers, Laila knows, are Aziza’s way of clinging to Mariam, her way of keeping Mariam close awhile yet before time has its way, before it snatches Mariam from the garden of her memory like a weed pulled by its roots.

Afternamaz, Laila had gone back to bed, and was still asleep when Tariq left the house. She vaguely remembers him kissing her cheek. Tariq has found work with a French NGO that fits land mine survivors and amputees with prosthetic limbs.

Zalmai comes chasing Aziza into the kitchen.

“You have your notebooks, you two? Pencils? Textbooks?”

“Right here,” Aziza says, lifting her backpack. Again, Laila notices how her stutter is lessening.

“Let’s go, then.”

Laila lets the children out of the house, locks the door. They step out into the cool morning. It isn’t raining today. The sky is blue, and Laila sees no clumps of clouds in the horizon. Holding hands, the three of them make their way to the bus stop. The streets are busy already, teeming with a steady stream of rickshaws, taxicabs, UN trucks, buses, ISAF jeeps. Sleepy-eyed merchants are unlocking store gates that had been rolled down for the night-Vendors sit behind towers of chewing gum and cigarette packs. Already the widows have claimed their spots at street corners, asking the passersby for coins.

Laila finds it strange to be back in Kabul The city has changed Every day now she sees people planting saplings, painting old houses, carrying bricks for new ones. They dig gutters and wells. On windowsills, Laila spots flowers potted in the empty shells of old Mujahideen rockets-rocket flowers, Kabulis call them. Recently, Tariq took Laila and the children to the Gardens of Babur, which are being renovated. For the first time in years, Laila hears music at Kabul’s street corners,rubab and tabla,dooiar, harmonium and tamboura, old Ahmad Zahir songs.

Laila wishes Mammy and Babi were alive to see these changes. But, like Mil’s letter, Kabul’s penance has arrived too late.

Laila and the children are about to cross the street to the bus stop when suddenly a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows blows by. It swerves at the last instant and misses Laila by less than an arm’s length. It splatters tea-colored rainwater all over the children’s shirts.

Laila yanks her children back onto the sidewalk, heart somersaulting in her throat.

The Land Cruiser speeds down the street, honks twice, and makes a sharp left.

Laila stands there, trying to catch her breath, her fingers gripped tightly around her children’s wrists.

It slays Laila. It slays her that the warlords have been allowed back to Kabul That her parents’ murderers live in posh homes with walled gardens, that they have been appointed minister of this and deputy minister of that, that they ride with impunity in shiny, bulletproof SUVs through neighborhoods that they demolished. It slays her.

But Laila has decided that she will not be crippled by resentment. Mariam wouldn’t want it that way.What’s the sense? she would say with a smile both innocent and wise.What good is it, Laila jo? And so Laila has resigned herself to moving on. For her own sake, for Tariq’s, for her children’s. And for Mariam, who still visits Laila in her dreams, who is never more than a breath or two below her consciousness. Laila has moved on. Because in the end she knows that’s all she can do. That and hope.

Zamanis standing at the free throw line, his knees bent, bouncing a basketball. He is instructing a group of boys in matching jerseys sitting in a semicircle on the court. Zaman spots Laila, tucks the ball under his arm, and waves. He says something to the boys, who then wave and cry out,”Salaam, moalim sahib!”

Laila waves back.

The orphanage playground has a row of apple saplings now along the east-facing wall. Laila is planning to plant some on the south wall as well as soon as it is rebuilt. There is a new swing set, new monkey bars, and a jungle gym.

Laila walks back inside through the screen door.

They have repainted both the exterior and the interior of the orphanage. Tariq and Zaman have repaired all the roof leaks, patched the walls, replaced the windows, carpeted the rooms where the children sleep and play. This past winter, Laila bought a few beds for the children’s sleeping quarters, pillows too, and proper wool blankets. She had cast-iron stoves installed for the winter.

Anis,one of Kabul’s newspapers, had run a story the month before on the renovation of the orphanage. They’d taken a photo too, of Zaman, Tariq, Laila, and one of the attendants, standing in a row behind the children. When Laila saw the article, she’d thought of her childhood friends Giti and Hasina, and Hasina saying,By the time we’re twenty, Giti and I, we’ll have pushed out four, five kids each Bui you, Laila, you’ll make us two dummies proud. You ‘re going to be somebody. I know one day I’ll pick up a newspaper and find your picture on the frontpage. The photo hadn’t made the front page, but there it was nevertheless, as Hasina had predicted.

Laila takes a turn and makes her way down the same hallway where, two years before, she and Mariam had delivered Aziza to Zaman. Laila still remembers how they had to pry Aziza’s fingers from her wrist. She remembers running down this hallway, holding back a howl, Mariam calling after her, Aziza screaming with panic. The hallway’s walls are covered now with posters, of dinosaurs, cartoon characters, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, and displays of artwork by the orphans. Many of the drawings depict tanks running over huts, men brandishing AK-47s, refugee camp tents, scenes of jihad.

Laila turns a corner in the hallway and sees the children now, waiting outside the classroom. She is greeted by their scarves, their shaved scalps covered by skullcaps, their small, lean figures, the beauty of their drabness.

When the children spot Laila, they come running. They come running at full tilt. Laila is swarmed. There is a flurry of high-pitched greetings, of shrill voices, of patting, clutching, tugging, groping, of jostling with one another to climb into her arms. There are outstretched little hands and appeals for attention. Some of them call herMother. Laila does not correct them.

It takes Laila some work this morning to calm the children down, to get them to form a proper queue, to usher them into the classroom.

It was Tariq and Zaman who built the classroom by knocking down the wall between two adjacent rooms. The floor is still badly cracked and has missing tiles. For the time being, it is covered with tarpaulin, but Tariq has promised to cement some new tiles and lay down carpeting soon.

Nailed above the classroom doorway is a rectangular board, which Zaman has sanded and painted in gleaming white. On it, with a brush, Zaman has written four lines of poetry, his answer, Laila knows, to those who grumble that the promised aid money to Afghanistan isn’t coming, that the rebuilding is going too slowly, that there is corruption, that the Taliban are regrouping already and will come back with a vengeance, that the world will forget once again about Afghanistan. The lines are from his favorite of Hafez’sghazals: Joseph shall return to Canaan, grieve not, Hovels shall turn to rose gardens, grieve not. If a flood should arrive, to drown all that’s alive, Noah is your guide in the typhoon’s eye, grieve not Laila passes beneath the sign and enters the classroom. The children are taking their seats, flipping notebooks open, chattering- Aziza is talking to a girl in the adjacent row. A paper airplane floats across the room in a high arc. Someone tosses it back.

“Open your Farsi books, children,” Laila says, dropping her own books on her desk.

To a chorus of flipping pages, Laila makes her way to the curtainless window. Through the glass, she can see the boys in the playground lining up to practice their free throws. Above them, over the mountains, the morning sun is rising. It catches the metallic rim of the basketball hoop, the chain link of the tire swings, the whistle hanging around Zaman’s neck, his new, unchipped spectacles. Laila flattens her palms against the warm glass panes. Closes her eyes. She lets the sunlight fall on her cheeks, her eyelids, her brow.

When they first came back to Kabul, it distressed Laila that she didn’t know where the Taliban had buried Mariam. She wished she could visit Mariam’s grave, to sit with her awhile, leave a flower or two. But Laila sees now that it doesn’t matter. Mariam is never very far. She is here, in these walls they’ve repainted, in the trees they’ve planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children’s laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westward. But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.

Someone has been calling her name, Laila realizes. She turns around, instinctively tilts her head, lifting her good ear just a tad. It’s Aziza.

“Mammy? Are you all right?”

The room has become quiet. The children are watching her.

Laila is about to answer when her breath suddenly catches. Her hands shoot down. They pat the spot where, a moment before, she’d felt a wave go through her. She waits. But there is no more movement.

“Mammy?”

“Yes, my love.” Laila smiles. “I’m all right. Yes. Very much.”

As she walks to her desk at the front of the class, Laila thinks of the naming game they’d played again over dinner the night before. It has become a nightly ritual ever since Laila gave Tariq and the children the news. Back and forth they go, making a case for their own choice. Tariq likes Mohammad. Zalmai, who has recently watchedSuperman on tape, is puzzled as to why an Afghan boy cannot be named Clark. Aziza is campaigning hard for Aman. Laila likes Omar.

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.