Laila did her best not to look at him, not to give these women any more gossip fodder than they already had. So she kept her
eyes down and said nothing to him, but she remembered a dream she’d had a few nights before, of his face and hers, together
in a mirror, beneath a soft, green veil. And grains of rice, dropping from his hair, bouncing off the glass with a
tink
.
Tariq reached to sample a morsel of veal cooked with potatoes.
“
Ho
bacha!”
Giti slapped the back of his hand. Tariq stole it anyway and laughed.
He stood almost a foot taller than Laila now. He shaved. His face was leaner, more angular. His shoulders had broadened. Tariq
liked to wear pleated trousers, black shiny loafers, and short-sleeve shirts that showed off his newly muscular arms—compliments
of an old, rusty set of barbells that he lifted daily in his yard. His face had lately adopted an expression of playful contentiousness.
He had taken to a self-conscious cocking of his head when he spoke, slightly to the side, and to arching one eyebrow when
he laughed. He let his hair grow and had fallen into the habit of tossing the floppy locks often and unnecessarily. The corrupt
half grin was a new thing too.
The last time Tariq was shooed out of the kitchen, his mother caught Laila stealing a glance at him. Laila’s heart jumped,
and her eyes fluttered guiltily. She quickly occupied herself with tossing the chopped cucumber into the pitcher of salted,
watered-down yogurt. But she could sense Tariq’s mother watching, her knowing, approving half smile.
The men filled their plates and glasses and took their meals to the yard. Once they had taken their share, the women and children
settled on the floor around the
sofrah
and ate.
It was after the
sofrah
was cleared and the plates were stacked in the kitchen, when the frenzy of tea making and remembering who took green and who
black started, that Tariq motioned with his head and slipped out the door.
Laila waited five minutes, then followed.
She found him three houses down the street, leaning against the wall at the entrance of a narrow-mouthed alley between two
adjacent houses. He was humming an old Pashto song, by Ustad Awal Mir:
Da ze ma ziba watan,
da ze ma dada watan.
This is our beautiful land,
this is our beloved land.
And he was smoking, another new habit, which he’d picked up from the guys Laila spotted him hanging around with these days.
Laila couldn’t stand them, these new friends of Tariq’s. They all dressed the same way, pleated trousers, and tight shirts
that accentuated their arms and chest. They all wore too much cologne, and they all smoked. They strutted around the neighborhood
in groups, joking, laughing loudly, sometimes even calling after girls, with identical stupid, self-satisfied grins on their
faces. One of Tariq’s friends, on the basis of the most passing of resemblances to Sylvester Stallone, insisted he be called
Rambo.
“Your mother would kill you if she knew about your smoking,” Laila said, looking one way, then the other, before slipping
into the alley.
“But she doesn’t,” he said. He moved aside to make room.
“That could change.”
“Who is going to tell? You?”
Laila tapped her foot. “Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”
Tariq smiled, the one eyebrow arched. “Who said that?”
“Khalil Gibran.”
“You’re a show-off.”
“Give me a cigarette.”
He shook his head no and crossed his arms. This was a new entry in his repertoire of poses: back to the wall, arms crossed,
cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his good leg casually bent.
“Why not?”
“Bad for you,” he said.
“And it’s not bad for you?”
“I do it for the girls.”
“What girls?”
He smirked. “They think it’s sexy.”
“It’s not.”
“No?”
“I assure you.”
“Not sexy?”
“You look
khila,
like a half-wit.”
“That hurts,” he said.
“What girls anyway?”
“You’re jealous.”
“I’m indifferently curious.”
“You can’t be both.” He took another drag and squinted through the smoke. “I’ll bet they’re talking about us now.”
In Laila’s head, Mammy’s voice rang out.
Like a mynah
bird in your hands. Slacken your grip and away it flies
. Guilt bore its teeth into her. Then Laila shut off Mammy’s voice. Instead, she savored the way Tariq had said
us
. How thrilling, how conspiratorial, it sounded coming from him. And how reassuring to hear him say it like that—casually,
naturally.
Us.
It acknowledged their connection, crystallized it.
“And what are they saying?”
“That we’re canoeing down the River of Sin,” he said.
“Eating a slice of Impiety Cake.”
“Riding the Rickshaw of Wickedness?” Laila chimed in.
“Making Sacrilege
Qurma
.”
They both laughed. Then Tariq remarked that her hair was getting longer. “It’s nice,” he said.
Laila hoped she wasn’t blushing. “You changed the subject.”
“From what?”
“The empty-headed girls who think you’re sexy.”
“You know.”
“Know what?”
“That I only have eyes for you.”
Laila swooned inside. She tried to read his face but was met by a look that was indecipherable: the cheerful, cretinous grin
at odds with the narrow, half-desperate look in his eyes. A clever look, calculated to fall precisely at the midpoint between
mockery and sincerity.
Tariq crushed his cigarette with the heel of his good foot. “So what do you think about all this?”
“The party?”
“Who’s the half-wit now? I meant the Mujahideen, Laila. Their coming to Kabul.”
“Oh.”
She started to tell him something Babi had said, about the troublesome marriage of guns and ego, when she heard a commotion
coming from the house. Loud voices. Screaming.
Laila took off running. Tariq hobbled behind her.
There was a melee in the yard. In the middle of it were two snarling men, rolling on the ground, a knife between them. Laila
recognized one of them as a man from the table who had been discussing politics earlier. The other was the man who had been
fanning the kebab skewers. Several men were trying to pull them apart. Babi wasn’t among them. He stood by the wall, at a
safe distance from the fight, with Tariq’s father, who was crying.
From the excited voices around her, Laila caught snippets that she put together: The fellow at the politics table, a Pashtun,
had called Ahmad Shah Massoud a traitor for “making a deal” with the Soviets in the 1980s. The kebab man, a Tajik, had taken
offense and demanded a retraction. The Pashtun had refused. The Tajik had said that if not for Massoud, the other man’s sister
would still be “giving it” to Soviet soldiers. They had come to blows. One of them had then brandished a knife; there was
disagreement as to who.
With horror, Laila saw that Tariq had thrown himself into the scuffle. She also saw that some of the peacemakers were now
throwing punches of their own. She thought she spotted a second knife.
Later that evening, Laila thought of how the melee had toppled over, with men falling on top of one another, amid yelps and
cries and shouts and flying punches, and, in the middle of it, a grimacing Tariq, his hair disheveled, his leg come undone,
trying to crawl out.
* * *
IT WAS DIZZYING how quickly everything unraveled.
The leadership council was formed prematurely. It elected Rabbani president. The other factions cried nepotism. Massoud called
for peace and patience.
Hekmatyar, who had been excluded, was incensed. The Hazaras, with their long history of being oppressed and neglected, seethed.
Insults were hurled. Fingers pointed. Accusations flew. Meetings were angrily called off and doors slammed. The city held
its breath. In the mountains, loaded magazines snapped into Kalashnikovs.
The Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but now lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other.
Kabul’s day of reckoning had come at last.
And when the rockets began to rain down on Kabul, people ran for cover. Mammy did too, literally. She changed into black again,
went to her room, shut the curtains, and pulled the blanket over her head.
I
t’s the whistling,” Laila said to Tariq, “the damn whistling, I hate more than anything.”
ITariq nodded knowingly.
It wasn’t so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief
and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict.
Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to
the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black
window, their shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion
of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke,
there was a scrambling, a bare-handed frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a brother,
a grandchild.
But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn’t. After every rocket blast, Laila raced to the street,
stammering a prayer, certain that, this time, surely this time, it was Tariq they would find buried beneath the rubble and
smoke.
At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden white flashes reflected in her window. She listened to the rattling of automatic
gunfire and counted the rockets whining overhead as the house shook and flakes of plaster rained down on her from the ceiling.
Some nights, when the light of rocket fire was so bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never came. And, if it did,
Laila’s dreams were suffused with fire and detached limbs and the moaning of the wounded.
Morning brought no relief. The muezzin’s call for
namaz
rang out, and the Mujahideen set down their guns, faced west, and prayed. Then the rugs were folded, the guns loaded, and
the mountains fired on Kabul, and Kabul fired back at the mountains, as Laila and the rest of the city watched as helpless
as old Santiago watching the sharks take bites out of his prize fish.
EVERYWHERE LAILA WENT, she saw Massoud’s men. She saw them roam the streets and every few hundred yards stop cars for questioning.
They sat and smoked atop tanks, dressed in their fatigues and ubiquitous
pakol
s. They peeked at passersby from behind stacked sandbags at intersections.
Not that Laila went out much anymore. And, when she did, she was always accompanied by Tariq, who seemed to relish this chivalric
duty.
“I bought a gun,” he said one day. They were sitting outside, on the ground beneath the pear tree in Laila’s yard. He showed
her. He said it was a semiautomatic, a Beretta. To Laila, it merely looked black and deadly.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “Guns scare me.”
Tariq turned the magazine over in his hand.
“They found three bodies in a house in Karteh-Seh last week,” he said. “Did you hear? Sisters. All three raped. Their throats
slashed. Someone had bitten the rings off their fingers. You could tell, they had teeth marks—”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t mean to upset you,” Tariq said. “But I just . . . I feel better carrying this.”
He was her lifeline to the streets now. He heard the word of mouth and passed it on to her. Tariq was the one who told her,
for instance, that militiamen stationed in the mountains sharpened their marksmanship—and settled wagers over said marksmanship—by
shooting civilians down below, men, women, children, chosen at random. He told her that they fired rockets at cars but, for
some reason, left taxis alone—which explained to Laila the recent rash of people spraying their cars yellow.
Tariq explained to her the treacherous, shifting boundaries within Kabul. Laila learned from him, for instance, that this
road, up to the second acacia tree on the left, belonged to one warlord; that the next four blocks, ending with the bakery
shop next to the demolished pharmacy, was another warlord’s sector; and that if she crossed that street and walked half a
mile west, she would find herself in the territory of yet another warlord and, therefore, fair game for sniper fire. And this
was what Mammy’s heroes were called now. Warlords. Laila heard them called
tofangdar
too. Riflemen. Others still called them Mujahideen, but, when they did, they made a face—a sneering, distasteful face—the
word reeking of deep aversion and deep scorn. Like an insult.
Tariq snapped the magazine back into his handgun.
“Do you have it in you?” Laila said.
“To what?”
“To use this thing. To kill with it.”
Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. “For you,” he said.
“I’d kill with it for you, Laila.”
He slid closer to her and their hands brushed, once, then again. When Tariq’s fingers tentatively began to slip into hers,
Laila let them. And when suddenly he leaned over and pressed his lips to hers, she let him again.
At that moment, all of Mammy’s talk of reputations and mynah birds sounded immaterial to Laila. Absurd, even. In the midst
of all this killing and looting, all this ugliness, it was a harmless thing to sit here beneath a tree and kiss Tariq. A small
thing. An easily forgivable indulgence. So she let him kiss her, and when he pulled back she leaned in and kissed
him,
heart pounding in her throat, her face tingling, a fire burning in the pit of her belly.
IN JUNE OF THAT YEAR, 1992, there was heavy fighting in West Kabul between the Pashtun forces of the warlord Sayyaf and the
Hazaras of the Wahdat faction. The shelling knocked down power lines, pulverized entire blocks of shops and homes. Laila heard
that Pashtun militiamen were attacking Hazara households, breaking in and shooting entire families, execution style, and that
Hazaras were retaliating by abducting Pashtun civilians, raping Pashtun girls, shelling Pashtun neighborhoods, and killing
indiscriminately. Every day, bodies were found tied to trees, sometimes burned beyond recognition. Often, they’d been shot
in the head, had had their eyes gouged out, their tongues cut out.
Babi tried again to convince Mammy to leave Kabul. “They’ll work it out,” Mammy said. “This fighting is temporary. They’ll
sit down and figure something out.”
“Fariba, all these people
know
is war,” said Babi. “They learned to walk with a milk bottle in one hand and a gun in the other.”
“Who are
you
to say?” Mammy shot back. “Did you fight jihad? Did you abandon everything you had and risk your life? If not for the Mujahideen,
we’d still be the Soviets’ servants, remember. And now you’d have us betray them!”
“We aren’t the ones doing the betraying, Fariba.”
“You go, then. Take your daughter and run away. Send me a postcard. But peace is coming, and I, for one, am going to wait
for it.”
The streets became so unsafe that Babi did an unthinkable thing: He had Laila drop out of school.
He took over the teaching duties himself. Laila went into his study every day after sundown, and, as Hekmatyar launched his
rockets at Massoud from the southern outskirts of the city, Babi and she discussed the
ghazal
s of Hafez and the works of the beloved Afghan poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili. Babi taught her to derive the quadratic equation,
showed her how to factor polynomials and plot parametric curves. When he was teaching, Babi was transformed. In his element,
amid his books, he looked taller to Laila. His voice seemed to rise from a calmer, deeper place, and he didn’t blink nearly
as much. Laila pictured him as he must have been once, erasing his blackboard with graceful swipes, looking over a student’s
shoulder, fatherly and attentive.
But it wasn’t easy to pay attention. Laila kept getting distracted.
“What is the area of a pyramid?” Babi would ask, and all Laila could think of was the fullness of Tariq’s lips, the heat of
his breath on her mouth, her own reflection in his hazel eyes. She’d kissed him twice more since the time beneath the tree,
longer, more passionately, and, she thought, less clumsily. Both times, she’d met him secretly in the dim alley where he’d
smoked a cigarette the day of Mammy’s lunch party. The second time, she’d let him touch her breast.
“Laila?”
“Yes, Babi.”
“Pyramid. Area. Where are you?”
“Sorry, Babi. I was, uh . . . Let’s see. Pyramid. Pyramid. One-third the area of the base times the height.”
Babi nodded uncertainly, his gaze lingering on her, and Laila thought of Tariq’s hands, squeezing her breast, sliding down
the small of her back, as the two of them kissed and kissed.
ONE DAY THAT same month of June, Giti was walking home from school with two classmates. Only three blocks from Giti’s house,
a stray rocket struck the girls. Later that terrible day, Laila learned that Nila, Giti’s mother, had run up and down the
street where Giti was killed, collecting pieces of her daughter’s flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti’s decomposing
right foot, still in its nylon sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later.
At Giti’s
fatiha,
the day after the killings, Laila sat stunned in a roomful of weeping women. This was the first time that someone whom Laila
had known, been close to, loved, had died. She couldn’t get around the unfathomable reality that Giti wasn’t alive anymore.
Giti, with whom Laila had exchanged secret notes in class, whose fingernails she had polished, whose chin hair she had plucked
with tweezers. Giti, who was going to marry Sabir the goalkeeper. Giti was dead.
Dead.
Blown to pieces. At last, Laila began to weep for her friend. And all the tears that she hadn’t been able to shed at her brothers’
funeral came pouring down.