بخش 4

کتاب: هزار خورشید تابان / فصل 4

هزار خورشید تابان

11 فصل

بخش 4

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دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

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A week passed, but there was still no sign of Tariq. Then another week came and went.

To fill the time, Laila fixed the screen door that Babi still hadn’t got around to. She took down Babi’s books, dusted and alphabetized them. She went to Chicken Street with Hasina,Giti, and Giti’s mother, Nila, who was a seamstress and sometime sewing partner of Mammy’s. In that week, Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person had to face none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

Another week passed.

Laila found herself caught in a net of terrible thoughts.

He would never come back. His parents had moved away for good; the trip to Ghazni had been a ruse. An adult scheme to spare the two of them an upsetting farewell.

A land minehad gotten to him again. The way it did in 1981, when he was five, the last time his parents took him south to Ghazni. That was shortly after Laila’s third birthday. He’d been lucky that time, losing only a leg; lucky that he’d survived at all.

Her head rang and rang with these thoughts.

Then one night Laila saw a tiny flashing light from down the street. A sound, something between a squeak and a gasp, escaped herlips. She quickly fished her own flashlight from under the bed, but it wouldn’t work. Laila banged it against her palm, cursed the dead batteries. But it didn’t matter. He was back. Laila sat on the edge of her bed, giddy with relief, and watched that beautiful, yellow eye winking on and off.

On her way to Tariq’s house the next day, Laila saw Khadim and a group of his friends across the street. Khadim was squatting, drawing something in the dirt with a stick. When he saw her, he dropped the stick and wiggled his fingers. He said something and there was a round of chuckles. Laila dropped her head and hurried past.

“What did youdo1?” she exclaimed when Tariq opened the door. Only then did she remember that his uncle was a barber.

Tariq ran his hand over his newly shaved scalp and smiled, showing white, slightly uneven teeth.

“Like it?”

“You look like you’re enlisting in the army.”

“You want to feel?” He lowered his head.

The tiny bristles scratched Laila’s palm pleasantly. Tariq wasn’t like some of the other boys, whose hair concealed cone-shaped skulls and unsightly lumps. Tariq’s head was perfectly curved and lump-free.

When he looked up, Laila saw that his cheeks and brow had sunburned

“What took you so long?” she said

“My uncle was sick. Come on. Come inside.”

He led her down the hallway to the family room. Laila loved everything about this house. The shabby old rug in the family room, the patchwork quilt on the couch, the ordinary clutter of Tariq’s life: his mother’s bolts of fabric, her sewing needles embedded in spools, the old magazines, the accordion case in the corner waiting to be cracked open.

“Who is it?”

It was his mother calling from the kitchen.

“Laila,” he answered

He pulled her a chair. The family room was brightly lit and had double windows that opened into the yard. On the sill were empty jars in which Tariq’s mother pickled eggplant and made carrot marmalade.

“You mean ouraroos,our daughter-in-law,”his father announced, entering the room. He was a carpenter, a lean, white-haired man in his early sixties. He had gaps between his front teeth, and the squinty eyes of someone who had spent most of his life outdoors. He opened his arms and Laila went into them, greeted by his pleasant and familiar smell of sawdust. They kissed on the cheek three times.

“You keep calling her that and she’ll stop coming here,” Tariq’s mother said, passing by them. She was carrying a tray with a large bowl, a serving spoon, and four smaller bowls on it. She set the tray on the table. “Don’t mind the old man.” She cupped Laila’s face. “It’s good to see you, my dear. Come, sit down. I brought back some water-soaked fruit with me.”

The table was bulky and made of a light, unfinished wood-Tariq’s father had built it, as well as the chairs. It was covered with a moss green vinyl tablecloth with little magenta crescents and stars on it. Most of the living-room wall was taken up with pictures of Tariq at various ages. In some of the very early ones, he had two legs.

“I heard your brother was sick,” Laila said to Tariq’s father, dipping a spoon into her bowl of soaked raisins, pistachios, and apricots.

He was lighting a cigarette. “Yes, but he’s fine now,shokr e Khoda, thanks to God.”

“Heart attack. His second,” Tariq’s mother said, giving her husband an admonishing look.

Tariq’s father blew smoke and winked at Laila. It struck her again that Tariq’s parents could easily pass for his grandparents. His mother hadn’t had him until she’d been well into her forties.

“How is your father, my dear?” Tariq’s mother said, looking on over her bowl-As long as Laila had known her, Tariq’s mother had worn a wig. It was turning a dull purple with age. It was pulled low on her brow today, and Laila could see the gray hairs of her sideburns.Some days,it rode high on her forehead. But, to Laila, Tariq’s mother never looked pitiable in it- What Laila saw was the calm, self-assured face beneath the wig, the clever eyes, the pleasant, unhurried manners.

“He’s fine,” Laila said. “Still at Silo, of course. He’s fine.”

“And your mother?”

“Good days. Bad ones too. The same-“

“Yes,” Tariq’s mother said thoughtfully, lowering her spoon into the bowl “How hard it must be, how terribly hard, for a mother to be away from her sons.”

“You’re staying for lunch?” Tariq said-

“You have to,” said his mother. “I’m makingshorwa”

“I don’t want to be amozahem. “

“Imposing?” Tariq’s mother said. “We leave for a couple of weeks and you turn polite on us?”

“All right, I’ll stay,” Laila said, blushing and smiling.

“It’s settled, then.”

The truth was, Laila loved eating meals at Tariq’s house as much as she disliked eating them at hers. At Tariq’s, there was no eating alone; they always ate as a family. Laila liked the violet plastic drinking glasses they used and the quarter lemon that always floated in the water pitcher. She liked how they started each meal with a bowl of fresh yogurt, how they squeezed sour oranges on everything, even their yogurt, and how they made small, harmless jokes at each other’s expense.

Over meals, conversation always flowed. Though Tariq and his parents were ethnic Pashtuns, they spoke Farsi when Laila was around for her benefit, even though Laila more or less understood their native Pashto, having learned it in school. Babi said that there were tensions between their people-the Tajiks, who were a minority, and Tariq’s people, the Pashtuns, who were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan.Tajiks have always felt slighted, Babi had said.Pashiun kings ruled this country for almost two hundred and’fifty years, Laila, and Tajiks for all of nine months, back in 1929.

And you,Laila had asked,do you feel slighted, Babi?

Babi had wiped his eyeglasses clean with the hem of his shirt.To me, it’s nonsense -and very dangerous nonsense at that-all this talk of I’m Tajik and you ‘re Pashiun and he’s Hazara and she’s Uzbek. We ‘re all Afghans, and that’s all that should matter. But when one group rules over the others for so long…Theref s contempt. Rivalry. There is. There always has been.

Maybe so. But Laila never felt it in Tariq’s house, where these matters never even came up. Her time with Tariq’s family always felt natural to Laila, effortless, uncomplicated by differences in tribe or language, or by the personal spites and grudges that infected the air at her own home.

“How about a game of cards?” Tariq said.

“Yes, go upstairs,” his mother said, swiping disapprovingly at her husband’s cloud of smoke. “I’ll getthe shorwa going.”

They lay on their stomachs in the middle of Tariq’s room and took turns dealing forpanjpar. Pedaling air with his foot, Tariq told her about his trip. The peach saplings he had helped his uncle plant. A garden snake he had captured.

This room was where Laila and Tariq did their homework, where they built playing-card towers and drew ridiculous portraits of each other. If it was raining, they leaned on the windowsill, drinking warm, fizzy orange Fanta, and watched the swollen rain droplets trickle down the glass.

“All right, here’s one,” Laila said, shuffling. “What goes around the world but stays in a corner?”

“Wait.” Tariq pushed himself up and swung his artificial left leg around. Wincing, he lay on his side, leaning on his elbow. “Hand me that pillow.” He placed it under his leg. “There. That’s better.”

Laila remembered the first time he’d shown her his stump. She’d been six. With one finger, she had poked the taut.

shiny skin just below his left knee. Her finger had found little hard lumps there, and Tariq had told her they were spurs of bone that sometimes grew after an amputation. She’d asked him if his stump hurt, and he said it got sore at the end of the day, when it swelled and didn’t fit the prosthesis like it was supposed to, like a finger in a thimble.And sometimes it gets rubbed Especially when it’s hot. Then I get rashes and blisters, but my mother has creams that help. It’s not so bad.

Laila had burst into tears.

What are you crying for?He’d strapped his leg back on.You asked to see it, you giryanok,you crybaby! If I’d known you were going to bawl, I wouldn ‘i have shown you.

“A stamp,” he said.

“What?”

“The riddle. The answer is a stamp. We should go to the zoo after lunch.” “You knew that one. Did you?” “Absolutely not.”

“You’re a cheat.”

“And you’re envious.” “Of what?”

“My masculine smarts.”

“Yourmasculine smarts? Really? Tell me, who always wins at chess?”

“I let you win.” He laughed. They both knew that wasn’t true.

“And who failed math? Who do you come to for help with your math homework even though you’re a grade ahead?”

“I’d be two grades ahead if math didn’t bore me.”

“I suppose geography bores you too.”

“How did you know? Now, shut up. So are we going to the zoo or not?”

Laila smiled. “We’re going.”

“Good.”

“I missed you.”

There was a pause. Then Tariq turned to her with a half-grinning, half-grimacing look of distaste. “What’s thematter with you?”

How many times had she, Hasina, and Giti said those same three words to each other, Laila wondered, said it without hesitation, after only two or three days of not seeing each other? /missed you, Hasina Oh, I missed you too. In Tariq’s grimace, Laila learned that boys differed from girls in this regard. They didn’t make a show of friendship. They felt no urge, no need, for this sort of talk. Laila imagined it had been this way for her brothers too. Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

“I was trying to annoy you,” she said.

He gave her a sidelong glance. “It worked.”

But she thought his grimace softened. And she thought that maybe the sunburn on his cheeks deepened momentarily.

Laila didn’t mean to tell him. She’d, in fact, decided that telling him would be a very bad idea. Someone would get hurt, because Tariq wouldn’t be able to let it pass. But when they were on the street later, heading down to thebus stop, she saw Khadim again, leaning against a wall He was surrounded by his friends, thumbs hooked in his belt loops. He grinned at her defiantly.

And so she told Tariq. The story spilled out of her mouth before she could stop it.

“He did what?”

She told him again.

He pointed to Khadim. “Him? He’s the one? You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Tariq clenched his teeth and muttered something to himself in Pashto that Laila didn’t catch. “You wait here,” he said, in Farsi now.

“No, Tariq-“

He was already crossing the street.

Khadim was the first to see him. His grin faded, and he pushed himself off the wall. He unhooked his thumbs from the belt loops and made himself more upright, taking on a self-conscious air of menace. The others followed his gaze.

Laila wished she hadn’t said anything. What if they banded together? How many of them were there-ten? eleven? twelve? What if they hurt him?

Then Tariq stopped a few feet from Khadim and his band. There was a moment of consideration, Laila thought, maybe a change of heart, and, when he bent down, she imagined he would pretend his shoelace had come undone and walk back to her. Then his hands went to work, and she understood.

The others understood too when Tariq straightened up, standing on one leg. When he began hopping toward Khadim, then charging him, his unstrapped leg raised high over his shoulder like a sword.

The boys stepped aside in a hurry. They gave him a clear path to Khadim.

Then it was all dust and fists and kicks and yelps.

Khadim never bothered Laila again.

That night, as most nights, Laila set the dinner table for two only. Mammy said she wasn’t hungry. On those nights that she was, she made a point of taking a plate to her room before Babi even came home. She was usually asleep or lying awake in bed by the time Laila and Babi sat down to eat.

Babi came out of the bathroom, his hair-peppered white with flour when he’d come home-washed clean now and combed back.

“What are we having, Laila?”

“Leftoveraush soup.”

“Sounds good,” he said, folding the towel with which he’d dried his hair. “So what are we working on tonight? Adding fractions?”

“Actually, converting fractions to mixed numbers.”

“Ah. Right.”

Every night after dinner, Babi helped Laila with her homework and gave her some of his own. This was only to keep Laila a step or two ahead of her class, not because he disapproved of the work assigned by the school-the propaganda teaching notwithstanding. In fact, Babi thought that the one thing the communists had done right-or at least intended to-ironically, was in the field of education, the vocation from which they had fired him. More specifically, the education of women. The government had sponsored literacy classes for all women. Almost two-thirds of the students at Kabul University were women now, Babi said, women who were studying law, medicine, engineering.

Women have always had it hard in this country, Laila, but they’re probably more free now, under the communists, and have more rights than they’ve ever had before,Babi said, always lowering his voice, aware of how intolerant Mammy was of even remotely positive talk of the communists.But it’s true, Babi said,it’sagood time to be a woman in Afghanistan. And you can take advantage of that, Laila Of course, women’s freedom - here, he shook his head ruefully-is also one of the reasons people out there took up arms in the first place.

By “out there,” he didn’t mean Kabul, which had always been relatively liberal and progressive. Here in Kabul, women taught at the university, ran schools, held office in the government- No, Babi meant the tribal areas, especially the Pashtun regions in the south or in the east near the Pakistani border, where women were rarely seen on the streets and only then in burqa and accompanied by men. He meant those regions where men who lived by ancient tribal laws had rebelled against the communists and their decrees to liberate women, to abolish forced marriage, to raise the minimum marriage age to sixteen for girls. There, men saw it as an insult to their centuries-old tradition, Babi said, to be told by the government-and a godless one at that-that their daughters had to leave home, attend school, and work alongside men.

God forbid that should happen!Babi liked to say sarcastically. Then he would sigh, and say,Laila, my love, the only enemy an Afghan cannot defeat is himself Babi took his seat at the table, dipped bread into his bowl ofaush.

Laila decided that she would tell him about what Tariq had done to Khadim, over the meal, before they started in on fractions. But she never got the chance. Because, right then, there was a knock at the door, and, on the other side of the door, a stranger with news.

19.

I need to speak to your parents,dokhiarjan” he said when Laila opened the door. He was a stocky man, with a sharp, weather-roughened face. He wore a potato-colored coat, and a brown woolpakol on his head “Can I tell them who’s here?”

Then Babi’s hand was on Laila’s shoulder, and he gently pulled her from the door.

“Why don’t you go upstairs, Laila. Go on.”

As she moved toward the steps, Laila heard the visitor say to Babi that he had news from Panjshir. Mammy was in the room now too. She had one hand clamped over her mouth, and her eyes were skipping from Babi to the man in thepakol Laila peeked from the top of the stairs. She watched the stranger sit down with her parents. He leaned toward them. Said a few muted words. Then Babi’s face was white, and getting whiter, and he was looking at his hands, and Mammy was screaming, screaming, and tearing at her hair.

The next morning, the day ofthefaiiha, a flock of neighborhood women descended on the house and took charge of preparations for thekhatm dinner that would take place after the funeral Mammy sat on the couch the whole morning, her fingers working a handkerchief, her face bloated. She was tended to by a pair of sniffling women who took turns patting Mammy’s hand gingerly, like she was the rarest and most fragile doll in the world. Mammy did not seem aware of their presence.

Laila kneeled before her mother and took her hands. “Mammy.”

Mammy’s eyes drifted down. She blinked.

“We’ll take care of her, Laila jan,” one of the women said with an air of self-importance. Laila had been to funerals before where she had seen women like this, women who relished all things that had to do with death, official consolers who let no one trespass on their self-appointed duties.

“It’s under control. You go on now, girl, and do something else. Leave your mother be.”

Shooed away, Laila felt useless. She bounced from one room to the next. She puttered around the kitchen for a while. An uncharacteristically subdued Hasina and her mother came. So did Giti and her mother. When Giti saw Laila, she hurried over, threw her bony arms around her, and gave Laila a very long, and surprisingly strong, embrace. When she pulled back, tears had pooled in her eyes. “I am so sorry, Laila,” she said. Laila thanked her. The three girls sat outside in the yard until one of the women assigned them the task of washing glasses and stacking plates on the table.

Babi too kept walking in and out of the house aimlessly, looking, it seemed, for something to do.

“Keep him away from me.” That was the only time Mammy said anything all morning.

Babi ended up sitting alone on a folding chair in the hallway, looking desolate and small Then one of the women told him he was in the way there. He apologized and disappeared into his study.

That apternoon, the men went to a hall in Karteh-Seh that Babi had rented for thefatiha. The women came to the house. Laila took her spot beside Mammy, next to the living-room entrance where it was customary for the family of the deceased to sit. Mourners removed their shoes at the door, nodded at acquaintances as they crossed the room, and sat on folding chairs arranged along the walls. Laila saw Wajma, the elderly midwife who had delivered her. She saw Tariq’s mother too, wearing a black scarf over the wig. She gave Laila a nod and a slow, sad, close-lipped smile.

From a cassette player, a man’s nasal voice chanted verses from the Koran. In between, the women sighed and shifted and sniffled. There were muted coughs, murmurs, and, periodically, someone let out a theatrical, sorrow-drenched sob.

Rasheed’s wife, Mariam, came in. She was wearing a blackhijab. Strands of her hair strayed from it onto her brow. She took a seat along the wall across from Laila.

Next to Laila, Mammy kept rocking back and forth. Laila drew Mammy’s hand into her lap and cradled it with both of hers, but Mammy did not seem to notice.

“Do you want some water, Mammy?” Laila said in her ear. “Are you thirsty?”

But Mammy said nothing. She did nothing but sway back and forth and stare at the rug with a remote, spiritless look.

Now and then, sitting next to Mammy, seeing the drooping, woebegone looks around the room, the magnitude of the disaster that had struck her family would register with Laila. The possibilities denied. The hopes dashed.

But the feeling didn’t last. It was hard to feel,really feel, Mammy’s loss. Hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never really thought of as alive in the first place. Ahmad and Noor had always been like lore to her. Like characters in a fable. Kings in a history book.

It was Tariq who was real, flesh and blood. Tariq, who taught her cusswords in Pashto, who liked salted clover leaves, who frowned and made a low, moaning sound when he chewed, who had a light pink birthmark just beneath his left collarbone shaped like an upside-down mandolin.

So she sat beside Mammy and dutifully mourned Ahmad and Noor, but, in Laila’s heart, her true brother was alive and well.

20.

The ailments that would hound Mammy for the rest of her days began. Chest pains and headaches, joint aches and night sweats, paralyzing pains in her ears, lumps no one else could feel. Babi took her to a doctor, who took blood and urine, shot X-rays of Mammy’s body, but found no physical illness.

Mammy lay in bed most days. She wore black. She picked at her hair and gnawed on the mole below her lip. When Mammy was awake, Laila found her staggering through the house. She always ended up in Laila’s room, as though she would run into the boys sooner or later if she just kept walking into the room where they had once slept and farted and fought with pillows. But all she ran into was their absence. And Laila. Which, Laila believed, had become one and the same to Mammy.

The only task Mammy never neglected was her five dailynamaz prayers. She ended eachnamaz with her head hung low, hands held before her face, palms up, muttering a prayer for God to bring victory to the Mujahideen. Laila had to shoulder more and more of the chores. If she didn’t tend to the house, she was apt to find clothes, shoes, open rice bags, cans of beans, and dirty dishes strewn about everywhere. Laila washed Mammy’s dresses and changed her sheets. She coaxed her out of bed for baths and meals. She was the one who ironed Babi’s shirts and folded his pants. Increasingly, she was the cook.

Sometimes, after she was done with her chores, Laila crawled into bed next to Mammy. She wrapped her arms around her, laced her fingers with her mother’s, buried her face in her hair. Mammy would stir, murmur something. Inevitably, she would start in on a story about the boys.

One day, as they were lying this way, Mammy said, “Ahmad was going to be a leader. He had the charisma for it-People three times his age listened to him with respect, Laila. It was something to see. And Noon Oh, my Noor. He was always making sketches of buildingsand bridges. He was going to be an architect, you know. He was going to transform Kabul with his designs. And now they’re bothshaheed, my boys, both martyrs.”

Laila lay there and listened, wishing Mammy would notice thatshe, Laila, hadn’t becomeshaheed, that she was alive, here, in bed with her, that she had hopes and a future. But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers’ past. They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death. Mammy was now the curator of their lives’ museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. A receptacle for their myths. Theparchment on which Mammy meant to ink their legends.

“The messenger who came with the news, he said that when they brought the boys back to camp, Ahmad Shah Massoud personally oversaw the burial. He said a prayer for them at the gravesite. That’s the kind of brave young men your brothers were, Laila, that Commander Massoud himself, the Lion of Panjshir, God bless him, would oversee their burial.”

Mammy rolled onto her back. Laila shifted, rested her head on Mammy’s chest.

“Some days,” Mammy said in a hoarse voice, “I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart, Laila. I get so weak. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.”

“I wish there was something I could do,” Laila said, meaning it. But it came out sounding broad, perfunctory, like the token consolation of a kind stranger.

“You’re a good daughter,” Mammy said, after a deep sigh. “And I haven’t been much of a mother to you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Oh, it’s true. I know it and I’m sorry for it, my love.”

“Mammy?”

“Mm.”

Laila sat up, looking down at Mammy. There were gray strands in Mammy’s hair now. And it startled Laila howmuch weight Mammy, who’d always been plump, had lost. Her cheeks had a sallow, drawn look. The blouseshe was wearing drooped over her shoulders, and there was a gaping space between her neck and the collar. More than once Laila had seen the wedding bandslide off Mammy’s finger.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“What is it?”

“You wouldn’t…” Laila began.

She’d talked about it to Hasina. At Hasina’s suggestion, the two of them had emptied the bottle of aspirin in the gutter, hidden the kitchen knives and the sharp kebab skewers beneath the rug under the couch. Hasina had found a rope in the yard. When Babi couldn’t find his razors, Laila had to tell him of her fears. He dropped on the edge of the couch, hands between his knees. Laila waited for some kind of reassurance from him. But all she got was a bewildered, hollow-eyed look.

“You wouldn’t…Mammy I worry that-“

“I thought about it the night we got the news,” Mammy said. “I won’t lie to you, I’ve thought about it since too. But, no. Don’t worry, Laila. I want to see my sons’ dream come true. I want to see the day the Soviets go home disgraced, the day the Mujahideen come to Kabul in victory. 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.”

Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung thatshe was not the reason.She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.

21.

The driver pulled his taxi over to let pass another long convoy of Soviet jeeps and armored vehicles. Tariq leaned across the front seat, over the driver, and yelled,”Pajalmia! Pajalmta!”

A jeep honked and Tariq whistled back, beaming and waving cheerfully. “Lovely guns!” he yelled “Fabulous jeeps! Fabulous army! Too bad you’re losing to a bunch of peasants firing slingshots!”

The convoy passed. The driver merged back onto the road

“How much farther?” Laila asked

“An hour at the most,” the driver said. “Barring any more convoys or checkpoints.”

They were taking a day trip, Laila, Babi, and Tariq. Hasina had wanted to come too, had begged her father, but he wouldn’t allow it. The trip was Babi’s idea. Though he could hardly afford it on his salary, he’d hired a driver for the day. He wouldn’t disclose anything to Laila about their destination except to say that, with it, he was contributing to her education.

They had been on the road since five in the morning. Through Laila’s window, the landscape shifted from snowcapped peaks to deserts to canyons and sun-scorched outcroppings of rocks. Along the way, they passed mud houses with thatched roofs and fields dotted with bundles of wheat. Pitched out in the dusty fields, here and there, Laila recognized the black tents of Koochi nomads. And, frequently, the carcasses of burned-out Soviet tanks and wrecked helicopters. This, she thought, was Ahmad and Noor’s Afghanistan. This, here in the provinces, was where the war was being fought, after all. Not in Kabul. Kabul was largely at peace. Back in Kabul, if not for the occasional bursts of gunfire, if not for the Soviet soldiers smoking on the sidewalks and the Soviet jeeps always bumping through the streets, war might as well have been a rumor.

It was late morning, after they’d passed two more checkpoints, when they entered a valley. Babi had Laila lean across the seat and pointed to a series of ancient-looking walls of sun-dried red in the distance.

“That’s called Shahr-e-Zohak. The Red City. It used to be a fortress. It was built some nine hundred years ago to defend the valley from invaders. Genghis Khan’s grandson attacked it in the thirteenth century, but he was killed. It was Genghis Khan himself who then destroyed it.”

“And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another,” the driver said, flicking cigarette ash out the window. “Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn’t that the truth,badar?’

“Indeed it is,” said Babi.

Half an hour later,the driver pulled over.

“Come on, you two,” Babi said. “Come outside and have a look.”

They got out of the taxi. Babi pointed “There they are. Look.”

Tariq gasped. Laila did too. And she knew then that she could live to be a hundred and she would never again see a thing as magnificent.

The two Buddhas were enormous, soaring much higher than she had imagined from all the photos she’d seen of them. Chiseled into a sun-bleached rock cliff, they peered down at them, as they had nearly two thousand years before, Laila imagined, at caravans crossing the valley on the Silk Road. On either side of them, along the overhanging niche, the cliff was pocked with myriad caves.

“I feel so small,” Tariq said.

“You want to climb up?” Babi said.

“Up the statues?” Laila asked. “We can do that?”

Babi smiled and held out his hand. “Come on.”

Theclimb washard for Tariq, who had to hold on to both Laila and Babi as they inched up a winding, narrow, dimly lit staircase. They saw shadowy caves along the way, and tunnels honeycombing the cliff every which way.

“Careful where you step,” Babi said His voice made a loud echo. “The ground is treacherous.”

In some parts, the staircase was open to the Buddha’s cavity.

“Don’t look down, children. Keep looking straight ahead.”

As they climbed, Babi told them that Bamiyan had once been a thriving Buddhist center until it had fallen under Islamic Arab rule in the ninth century. The sandstone cliffs were home to Buddhist monks who carved caves in them to use as living quarters and as sanctuary for weary traveling pilgrims. The monks, Babi said, painted beautiful frescoes along the walls and roofs of their caves.

“At one point,” he said, “there were five thousand monks living as hermits in these caves.”

Tariq was badly out of breath when they reached the top. Babi was panting too. But his eyes shone with excitement.

“We’re standing atop its head,” he said, wiping his brow with a handkerchief “There’s a niche over here where we can look out.”

They inched over to the craggy overhang and, standing side by side, with Babi in the middle, gazed down on the valley.

“Look at this!” said Laila.

Babi smiled.

The Bamiyan Valley below was carpeted by lush farming fields. Babi said they were green winter wheat and alfalfa, potatoes too. The fields were bordered by poplars and crisscrossed by streams and irrigation ditches, on the banks of which tiny female figures squatted and washed clothes. Babi pointed to rice paddies and barley fields draping the slopes. It was autumn, and Laila could make out people in bright tunics on the roofs of mud brick dwellings laying out the harvest to dry. The main road going through the town was poplar-lined too. There were small shops and teahouses and street-side barbers on either side of it. Beyond the village, beyond the river and the streams, Laila saw foothills, bare and dusty brown, and, beyond those, as beyond everything else in Afghanistan, the snowcapped Hindu Kush.

The sky above all of this was an immaculate, spotless blue.

“It’s so quiet,” Laila breathed. She could see tiny sheep and horses but couldn’t hear their bleating and whinnying.

“It’s what I always remember about being up here,” Babi said. “The silence. The peace of it. I wanted you to experience it. But I also wanted you to see your country’s heritage, children, to learn of its rich past. You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have tosee andfeel.”

“Look,” said Tariq.

They watched a hawk, gliding in circles above the village.

“Did you ever bring Mammy up here?” Laila asked

“Oh, many times. Before the boys were born. After too. Your mother, she used to be adventurous then, and…soalive. She was just about the liveliest, happiest person I’d ever met.” He smiled at the memory. “She had this laugh. I swear it’s why I married her, Laila, for that laugh. It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it.”

A wave of affection overcame Laila. From then on, she would always remember Babi this way: reminiscing about Mammy, with his elbows on the rock, hands cupping his chin, his hair ruffled by the wind, eyes crinkled against the sun.

“I’m going to look at some of those caves,” Tariq said.

“Be careful,” said Babi.

“I will,Kakajan,” Tariq’s voice echoed back.

Laila watched a trio of men far below, talking near a cow tethered to a fence. Around them, the trees had started to turn, ochre and orange, scarlet red.

“I miss the boys too, you know,” Babi said. His eyes had welled up a tad. His chin was trembling. “I may not… With your mother, both her joy and sadness are extreme. She can’t hide either. She never could. Me, I suppose I’m different. I tend to…But it broke me too, the boys dying. I miss them too. Not a day passes that I…It’s very hard, Laila. So very hard.” He squeezed the inner corners of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. When he tried to talk, his voice broke. He pulled his lips over his teeth and waited. He took a long, deep breath, looked at her. “But I’m glad I have you. Every day, I thank God for you. Every single day. Sometimes, when your mother’s having one of her really dark days, I feel like you’re all I have, Laila.”

Laila drew closer to him and rested her cheek up against his chest. He seemed slightly startled-unlike Mammy, he rarely expressed his affection physically. He planted a brisk kiss on the top of her head and hugged her back awkwardly. They stood this way for a while, looking down on the Bamiyan Valley.

“As much as I love this land, some days I think about leaving it,” Babi said.

“Whereto?”

“Anyplace where it’s easy to forget. Pakistan first, I suppose. For a year, maybe two. Wait for our paperwork to get processed.”

“And then?”

“And then, well, itis a big world. Maybe America. Somewhere near the sea. Like California.”

Babi said the Americans were a generous people. They would help them with money and food for a while, until they could get on their feet.

“I would find work, and, in a few years, when we had enough saved up, we’d open a little Afghan restaurant-Nothing fancy, mind you, just a modest little place, a few tables, some rugs. Maybe hang some pictures of Kabul. We’d give the Americans a taste of Afghan food. And with your mother’s cooking, they’d line up and down the street.

“And you, you would continue going to school, of course. You know how I feel about that. That would be our absolute top priority, to get you a good education, high school then college. But in your free time,if you wanted to, you could help out, take orders, fill water pitchers, that sort of thing.”

Babi said they would hold birthday parties at the restaurant, engagement ceremonies, New Year’s get-togethers. It would turn into a gathering place for other Afghans who, like them, had fled the war. And, late at night, after everyone had left and the place was cleaned up, they would sit for tea amid the empty tables, the three of them, tired but thankful for their good fortune.

When Babi was done speaking, he grew quiet. They both did. They knew that Mammy wasn’t going anywhere. Leaving Afghanistan had been unthinkable to her while Ahmad and Noor were still alive. Now that they wereshaheed, packing up and running was an even worse affront, a betrayal, a disavowal of the sacrifice her sons had made.

How can you think of it?Laila could hear her saying.Does their dying mean nothing to you, cousin? The only solace I find is in knowing that I walk the same ground that soaked up their blood. No. Never.

And Babi would never leave without her, Laila knew, even though Mammy was no more a wife to him now than she was a mother to Laila. For Mammy, he would brush aside this daydream of his the way he flicked specks of flour from his coat when he got home from work. And so they would stay. They would stay until the war ended And they would stay for whatever came after war.

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn’t understand. She didn’t understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her.

Later, after they’d eaten a lunch of boiled eggs and potatoes with bread, Tariq napped beneath a tree on the banks of a gurgling stream. He slept with his coat neatly folded into a pillow, his hands crossed on his chest. The driver went to the village to buy almonds. Babi sat at the foot of a thick-trunked acacia tree reading a paperback. Laila knew the book; he’d read it to her once. It told the story of an old fisherman named Santiago who catches an enormous fish. But by the time he sails his boat to safety, there is nothing left of his prize fish; the sharks have torn it to pieces.

Laila sat on the edge of the stream, dipping her feet into the cool water. Overhead, mosquitoes hummed and cottonwood seeds danced. A dragonfly whirred nearby. Laila watched its wings catch glints of sunlight as it buzzed from one blade of grass to another. They flashed purple, then green, orange. Across the stream, a group of local Hazara boys were picking patties of dried cow dung from the ground and stowing them into burlap sacks tethered to their backs. Somewhere, a donkey brayed. A generator sputtered to life.

Laila thought again about Babi’s little dream.Somewhere near the sea

There was something she hadn’t told Babi up there atop the Buddha: that, in one important way, she was glad they couldn’t go. She would miss Giti and her pinch-faced earnestness, yes, and Hasina too, with her wicked laugh and reckless clowning around But, mostly, Laila remembered all too well the inescapable drudgery of those four weeks without Tariq when he had gone to Ghazni. She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How could she ever cope with his permanent absence?

Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where bullets had shredded her own brothers to pieces. But all Laila had to do was picture Tariq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more sensible to her.

Six months later, in April 1988, Babi came home with big news.

“They signed a treaty!” he said. “In Geneva. It’s official! They’re leaving. Within nine months, there won’t be any more Soviets in Afghanistan!”

Mammy was sitting up in bed. She shrugged.

“But the communist regime is staying,” she said. “Najibullah is the Soviets’ puppet president. He’s not going anywhere. No, the war will go on. This is not the end”

“Najibullah won’t last,” said Babi.

“They’re leaving, Mammy! They’re actually leaving!”

“You two celebrate if you want to. But I won’t rest until the Mujahideen hold a victory parade right here in Kabul”

And, with that, she lay down again and pulled up the blanket.

22.

January1989

One cold, overcast day in January 1989, three months before Laila turned eleven, she, her parents, and Hasina went to watch one of the last Soviet convoys exit the city. Spectators had gathered on both sides of the thoroughfare outside the Military Club near Wazir Akbar Khan. They stood in muddy snow and watched the line of tanks, armored trucks, and jeeps as light snow flew across the glare of the passing headlights. There were heckles and jeers. Afghan soldiers kept people off the street. Every now and then, they had to fire a warning shot.

Mammy hoisted a photo of Ahmad and Noor high over her head. It was the one of them sitting back-to-back under the pear tree. There were others like her, women with pictures of theirshaheed husbands, sons, brothers held high.

Someone tapped Laila and Hasina on the shoulder. It was Tariq.

“Where did you get that thing?” Hasina exclaimed.

“I thought I’d come dressed for the occasion.” Tariq said. He was wearing an enormous Russian fur hat, complete with earflaps, which he had pulled down.

“How do I look?”

“Ridiculous,” Laila laughed.

“That’s the idea.”

“Your parents came here with you dressed like this?”

“They’re home, actually,” he said.

The previous fall, Tariq’s uncle in Ghazni had died of a heart attack, and, a few weeks later, Tariq’s father had suffered a heart attack of his own, leaving him frail and tired, prone to anxiety and bouts of depression that overtook him for weeks at a time. Laila was glad to see Tariq like this, like his old self again. For weeks after his father’s illness, Laila had watched him moping around, heavy-faced and sullen.

The three of them stole away while Mammy and Babi stood watching the Soviets. From a street vendor, Tariq bought them each a plate of boiled beans topped with thick cilantro chutney. They ate beneath the awning of a closed rug shop, then Hasina went to find her family.

On the bus ride home, Tariq and Laila sat behind her parents. Mammy was by the window, staring out, clutching the picture against her chest. Beside her, Babi was impassively listening to a man who was arguing that the Soviets might be leaving but that they would send weapons to Najibullah in Kabul.

“He’s their puppet. They’ll keep the war going through him, you can bet on that.”

Someone in the next aisle voiced his agreement.

Mammy was muttering to herself, long-winded prayers that rolled on and on until she had no breath left and had to eke out the last few words in a tiny, high-pitched squeak.

They “went to Cinema Park later that day, Laila and Tariq, and had to settle for a Soviet film that was dubbed, to unintentionally comic effect, in Farsi. There was a merchant ship, and a first mate in love with the captain’s daughter. Her name was Alyona. Then came a fierce storm, lightning, rain, the heaving sea tossing the ship. One of the frantic sailors yelled something. An absurdly calm Afghan voice translated: “My dear sir, would you kindly pass the rope?”

At this, Tariq burst out cackling. And, soon, they both were in the grips of a hopeless attack of laughter. Just when one became fatigued, the other would snort, and off they would go on another round. A man sitting two rows up turned around and shushed them.

There was a wedding scene near the end. The captain had relented and let Alyona marry the first mate. The newlyweds were smiling at each other. Everyone was drinking vodka.

“I’m never getting married,” Tariq whispered.

“Me neither,” said Laila, but not before a moment of nervous hesitation. She worried that her voice had betrayed her disappointment at what he had said. Her heart galloping, she added, more forcefully this time, “Never.”

“Weddings are stupid.” “All the fuss.”

“All the money spent.” “For what?”

“For clothes you’ll never wear again.”

“Ha!”

“If I everdo get married,” Tariq said, “they’ll have to make room for three on the wedding stage. Me, the bride, and the guy holding the gun to my head.”

The man in the front row gave them another admonishing look.

On the screen, Alyona and her new husband locked lips.

Watching the kiss, Laila felt strangely conspicuous all at once. She became intensely aware of her heart thumping, of the blood thudding in her ears, of the shape of Tariq beside her, tightening up, becoming still. The kiss dragged on. It seemed of utmost urgency to Laila, suddenly, that she not stir or make a noise. She sensed that Tariq was observing her-one eye on the kiss, the other on her-as she was observinghim. Was he listening to the air whooshing in and out of her nose, she wondered, waiting for a subtle faltering, a revealing irregularity, that would betray her thoughts?

And what would it be like to kiss him, to feel the fuzzy hair above his lip tickling her own lips?

Then Tariq shifted uncomfortably in his seat. In a strained voice, he said, “Did you know that if you fling snot in Siberia, it’s a green icicle before it hits the ground?”

They both laughed, but briefly, nervously, this time. And when the film ended and they stepped outside, Laila was relieved to see that the sky had dimmed, that she wouldn’t have to meet Tariq’s eyes in the bright daylight.

23.

April1992

Three years passed.

In that time, Tariq’s father had a series of strokes. They left him with a clumsy left hand and a slight slur to his speech. When he was agitated, which happened frequently, the slurring got worse.

Tariq outgrew his leg again and was issued a new leg by the Red Cross, though he had to wait six months for it.

As Hasina had feared, her family took her to Lahore, where she was made to marry the cousin who owned the auto shop. The morning that they took her, Laila and Giti went to Hasina’s house to say good-bye. Hasina told them that the cousin, her husband-to-be, had already started the process to move them to Germany, where his brothers lived. Within the year, she thought, they would be in Frankfurt. They cried then in a three-way embrace. Giti was inconsolable. The last time Laila ever saw Hasina, she was being helped by her father into the crowded backseat of a taxi.

The Soviet Union crumbled with astonishing swiftness. Every few weeks, it seemed to Laila, Babi was coming home with news of the latest republic to declare independence. Lithuania. Estonia. Ukraine. The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin. The Republic of Russia was born.

In Kabul, Najibullah changed tactics and tried to portray himself as a devout Muslim. “Too little and far too late,” said Babi. “You can’t be the chief of KHAD one day and the next day pray in a mosque with people whose relatives you tortured and killed” Feeling the noose tightening around Kabul, Najibullah tried to reach a settlement with the Mujahideen but the Mujahideen balked.

From her bed, Mammy said, “Good for them.” She kept her vigils for the Mujahideen and waited for her parade. Waited for her sons’ enemies to fall.

And, eventually, they did. In April 1992, the year Laila turned fourteen.

Najibullah surrendered at last and was given sanctuary in the UN compound near Darulaman Palace, south of the city.

The jihad was over. The various communist regimes that had held power since the night Laila was born were all defeated. Mammy’s heroes, Ahmad’s and Noor’s brothers-in-war, had won. And now, after more than a decade of sacrificing everything, of leaving behind their families to live in mountains and fight for Afghanistan’s sovereignty, the Mujahideen were coming to Kabul, in flesh, blood, and battle-weary bone.

Mammy knew all of their names.

There was Dostum, the flamboyant Uzbek commander, leader of the Junbish-i-Milli faction, who had a reputation for shifting allegiances. The intense, surly Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami faction, a Pashtun who had studied engineering and once killed a Maoist student. Rabbani, Tajik leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami faction, who had taught Islam at Kabul University in the days of the monarchy. Sayyaf, a Pashtun from Paghman with Arab connections, a stout Muslim and leader of the Ittehad-i-Islami faction. Abdul Ali Mazari, leader of the Hizb-e-Wahdat faction, known as Baba Mazari among his fellow Hazaras, with strong Shi’a ties to Iran.

And, of course, there was Mammy’s hero, Rabbani’s ally, the brooding, charismatic Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir. Mammy had nailed up a poster of him in her room. Massoud’s handsome, thoughtful face, eyebrow cocked and trademarkpakoltilted, would become ubiquitous in Kabul. His soulful black eyes would gaze back from billboards, walls, storefront windows, from little flags mounted on the antennas of taxicabs.

For Mammy, this was the day she had longed for. This brought to fruition all those years of waiting.

At last, she could end her vigils, and her sons could rest in peace.

The day after Najibullah surrendered, Mammy rose from bed a new woman. For the first time in the five years since Ahmad and Noor had becomeshaheed,she didn’t wear black. She put on a cobalt blue linen dress with white polka dots. She washed the windows, swept the floor, aired the house, took a long bath. Her voice was shrill with merriment.

“A party is in order,” she declared-She sent Laila to invite neighbors. “Tell them we’re having a big lunch tomorrow!”

In the kitchen, Mammy stood looking around, hands on her hips, and said, with friendly reproach, “What have you done to my kitchen, Laila?Wboy. Everything is in a different place.”

She began moving pots and pans around, theatrically, as though she were laying claim to them anew, restaking her territory, now that she was back. Laila stayed out of her way. It was best. Mammy could be as indomitable in her fits of euphoria as in her attacks of rage. With unsettling energy, Mammy set about cooking:aush soup with kidney beans and dried dill,kofia, steaming hotmaniu drenched with fresh yogurt and topped with mint.

“You’re plucking your eyebrows,” Mammy said, as she was opening a large burlap sack of rice by the kitchen counter.

“Only a little.”

Mammy poured rice from the sack into a large black pot of water. She rolled up her sleeves and began stirring.

“How is Tariq?”

“His father’s been ill,” Laila said “How old is he now anyway?”

“I don’t know. Sixties, I guess.”

“I meant Tariq.”

“Oh. Sixteen.”

“He’s a nice boy. Don’t you think?”

Laila shrugged.

“Not really a boy anymore, though, is he? Sixteen. Almost a man. Don’t you think?”

“What are you getting at, Mammy?”

“Nothing,” Mammy said, smiling innocently. “Nothing. It’s just that you…Ah, nothing. I’d better not say anyway.”

“I see you want to,” Laila said, irritated by this circuitous, playful accusation.

“Well.” Mammy folded her hands on the rim of the pot. Laila spotted an unnatural, almost rehearsed, quality to the way she said “Well” and to this folding of hands. She feared a speech was coming.

“It was one thing when you were little kids running around. No harm in that. It was charming- But now. Now. I notice you’re wearing a bra, Laila.”

Laila was caught off guard.

“And you could have told me, by the way, about the bra. I didn’t know. I’m disappointed you didn’t tell me.” Sensing her advantage, Mammy pressed on.

“Anyway, this isn’t about me or the bra. It’s about you and Tariq. He’s a boy, you see, and, as such, what does he care about reputation? But you? The reputation of a girl, especially one as pretty as you, is a delicate thing, Laila. Like a mynah bird in your hands. Slacken your grip and away it flies.”

“And what about all your wall climbing, the sneaking around with Babi in the orchards?” Laila said, pleased with her quick recovery.

“We were cousins. And we married. Has this boy asked for your hand?”

“He’s a friend. Arqfiq. It’s not like that between us,” Laila said, sounding defensive, and not very convincing. “He’s like a brother to me,” she added, misguidedly. And she knew, even before a cloud passed over Mammy’s face and her features darkened, that she’d made a mistake.

“Thathe is not,” Mammy said flatly. “You will not liken that one-legged carpenter’s boy to your brothers. There isno one like your brothers.”

“I didn’t say he…That’s not how I meant it.”

Mammy sighed through the nose and clenched her teeth.

“Anyway,” she resumed, but without the coy lightheadedness of a few moments ago, “what I’m trying to say is that if you’re not careful, people will talk.”

Laila opened her mouth to say something. It wasn’t that Mammy didn’t have a point. Laila knew that the days of innocent, unhindered frolicking in the streets with Tariq had passed. For some time now, Laila had begun to sense a new strangeness when the two of them were out in public. An awareness of being looked at, scrutinized, whispered about, that Laila had never felt before. Andwouldn’t have felt even now but for one fundamental fact: She had fallen for Tariq. Hopelessly and desperately. When he was near, she couldn’t help but be consumed with the most scandalous thoughts, of his lean, bare body entangled with hers. Lying in bed at night, she pictured him kissing her belly, wondered at the softness of his lips, at the feel of his hands on her neck, her chest, her back, and lower still. When she thought of him this way, she was overtaken with guilt, but also with a peculiar, warm sensation that spread upward from her belly until it felt as if her face were glowing pink.

No. Mammy had a point. More than she knew, in fact. Laila suspected that some, if not most, of the neighbors were already gossiping about her and Tariq. Laila had noticed the sly grins, was aware of the whispers in the neighborhood that the two of them were a couple. The other day, for instance, she and Tariq were walking up the street together when they’d passed Rasheed, the shoemaker, with his burqa-clad wife, Mariam, in tow. As he’d passed by them, Rasheed had playfully said, “If it isn’t Laili and Majnoon,” referring to the star-crossed lovers of Nezami’s popular twelfth-century romantic poem-a Farsi version ofRomeo and Juliet,Babi said, though he added thatNezami had written his tale of ill-fated lovers four centuries before Shakespeare.

Mammy had a point.

What rankled Laila was that Mammy hadn’t earned the right to make it. It would have been one thing if Babi had raised this issue. But Mammy? All those years of aloofness, of cooping herself up and not caring where Laila went and whom she saw and what she thought…It was unfair. Laila felt like she was no better than these pots and pans, something that could go neglected, then laid claim to, at will, whenever the mood struck.

But this was a big day, an important day, for all of them. It would be petty to spoil it over this. In the spirit of things, Laila let it pass.

“I get your point,” she said.

“Good!” Mammy said. “That’s resolved, then. Now, where is Hakim? Where, oh where, is that sweet little husband of mine?”

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