A Thousand Splendid Suns (16 page)

Where is Tariq?

Why isn't he here?

Darkness. A flock of stars.

 * * * 

B
ABI AND SHE,
perched somewhere high up. He is pointing to a field of barley. A generator comes to life.

The long-faced woman is standing over her looking down.

It hurts to breathe.

Somewhere, an accordion playing.

Mercifully, the pink pill again. Then a deep hush. A deep hush falls over everything.

D
o you know who I am?”

The girl's eyes fluttered.

“Do you know what has happened?”

The girl's mouth quivered. She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Her hand grazed her left cheek. She mouthed something.

Mariam leaned in closer.

“This ear,” the girl breathed. “I can't hear.”

 * * * 

F
OR THE FIRST WEEK,
the girl did little but sleep, with help from the pink pills Rasheed paid for at the hospital. She murmured in her sleep. Sometimes she spoke gibberish, cried out, called out names Mariam did not recognize. She wept in her sleep, grew agitated, kicked the blankets off, and then Mariam had to hold her down. Sometimes she retched and retched, threw up everything Mariam fed her.

When she wasn't agitated, the girl was a sullen pair of eyes staring from under the blanket, breathing out short little answers to Mariam and Rasheed's questions. Some days she was childlike, whipped her head side to side, when Mariam, then Rasheed, tried to feed her. She went rigid when Mariam came at her with a spoon. But she tired easily and submitted eventually to their persistent badgering. Long bouts of weeping followed surrender.

Rasheed had Mariam rub antibiotic ointment on the cuts on the girl's face and neck, and on the sutured gashes on her shoulder, across her forearms and lower legs. Mariam dressed them with bandages, which she washed and recycled. She held the girl's hair back, out of her face, when she had to retch.

“How long is she staying?” she asked Rasheed.

“Until she's better. Look at her. She's in no shape to go. Poor thing.”

 * * * 

I
T WAS
R
ASHEED
who found the girl, who dug her out from beneath the rubble.

“Lucky I was home,” he said to the girl. He was sitting on a folding chair beside Mariam's bed, where the girl lay. “Lucky for you, I mean. I dug you out with my own hands. There was a scrap of metal this big—” Here, he spread his thumb and index finger apart to show her, at least doubling, in Mariam's estimation, the actual size of it. “This big. Sticking right out of your shoulder. It was really embedded in there. I thought I'd have to use a pair of pliers. But you're all right. In no time, you'll be
nau socha
. Good as new.”

It was Rasheed who salvaged a handful of Hakim's books.

“Most of them were ash. The rest were looted, I'm afraid.”

He helped Mariam watch over the girl that first week. One day, he came home from work with a new blanket and pillow. Another day, a bottle of pills.

“Vitamins,” he said.

It was Rasheed who gave Laila the news that her friend Tariq's house was occupied now.

“A gift,” he said. “From one of Sayyaf's commanders to three of his men. A gift. Ha!”

The three
men
were actually boys with suntanned, youthful faces. Mariam would see them when she passed by, always dressed in their fatigues, squatting by the front door of Tariq's house, playing cards and smoking, their Kalashnikovs leaning against the wall. The brawny one, the one with the self-satisfied, scornful demeanor, was the leader. The youngest was also the quietest, the one who seemed reluctant to wholeheartedly embrace his friends' air of impunity. He had taken to smiling and tipping his head
salaam
when Mariam passed by. When he did, some of his surface smugness dropped away, and Mariam caught a glint of humility as yet uncorrupted.

Then one morning rockets slammed into the house. They were rumored later to have been fired by the Hazaras of Wahdat. For some time, neighbors kept finding bits and pieces of the boys.

“They had it coming,” said Rasheed.

 * * * 

T
HE GIRL WAS
extraordinarily lucky, Mariam thought, to escape with relatively minor injuries, considering the rocket had turned her house into smoking rubble. And so, slowly, the girl got better. She began to eat more, began to brush her own hair. She took baths on her own. She began taking her meals downstairs, with Mariam and Rasheed.

But then some memory would rise, unbidden, and there would be stony silences or spells of churlishness. Withdrawals and collapses. Wan looks. Nightmares and sudden attacks of grief. Retching.

And sometimes regrets.

“I shouldn't even be here,” she said one day.

Mariam was changing the sheets. The girl watched from the floor, her bruised knees drawn up against her chest.

“My father wanted to take out the boxes. The books. He said they were too heavy for me. But I wouldn't let him. I was so eager. I should have been the one inside the house when it happened.”

Mariam snapped the clean sheet and let it settle on the bed. She looked at the girl, at her blond curls, her slender neck and green eyes, her high cheekbones and plump lips. Mariam remembered seeing her on the streets when she was little, tottering after her mother on the way to the tandoor, riding on the shoulders of her brother, the younger one, with the patch of hair on his ear. Shooting marbles with the carpenter's boy.

The girl was looking back as if waiting for Mariam to pass on some morsel of wisdom, to say something encouraging. But what wisdom did Mariam have to offer? What encouragement? Mariam remembered the day they'd buried Nana and how little comfort she had found when Mullah Faizullah had quoted the Koran for her.
Blessed is He in Whose hand is the kingdom, and He Who has power over all things, Who created death and life that He may try you
. Or when he'd said of her own guilt,
These thoughts are no good, Mariam jo. They will destroy you. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault
.

What could she say to this girl that would ease her burden?

As it turned out, Mariam didn't have to say anything. Because the girl's face twisted, and she was on all fours then saying she was going to be sick.

“Wait! Hold on. I'll get a pan. Not on the floor. I just cleaned…Oh. Oh.
Khodaya.
God.”

 * * * 

T
HEN ONE DAY,
about a month after the blast that killed the girl's parents, a man came knocking. Mariam opened the door. He stated his business.

“There is a man here to see you,” Mariam said.

The girl raised her head from the pillow.

“He says his name is Abdul Sharif.”

“I don't know any Abdul Sharif.”

“Well, he's here asking for you. You need to come down and talk to him.”

L
aila sat across from Abdul Sharif, who was a thin, small-headed man with a bulbous nose pocked with the same cratered scars that pitted his cheeks. His hair, short and brown, stood on his scalp like needles in a pincushion.

“You'll have to forgive me,
hamshira,
” he said, adjusting his loose collar and dabbing at his brow with a handkerchief. “I still haven't quite recovered, I fear. Five more days of these, what are they called…sulfa pills.”

Laila positioned herself in her seat so that her right ear, the good one, was closest to him. “Were you a friend of my parents?”

“No, no,” Abdul Sharif said quickly. “Forgive me.” He raised a finger, took a long sip of the water that Mariam had placed in front of him.

“I should begin at the beginning, I suppose.” He dabbed at his lips, again at his brow. “I am a businessman. I own clothing stores, mostly men's clothing.
Chapan
s
,
hats,
tumban
s
,
suits, ties—you name it. Two stores here in Kabul, in Taimani and Shar-e-Nau, though I just sold those. And two in Pakistan, in Peshawar. That's where my warehouse is as well. So I travel a lot, back and forth. Which, these days”—he shook his head and chuckled tiredly—“let's just say that it's an adventure.

“I was in Peshawar recently, on business, taking orders, going over inventory, that sort of thing. Also to visit my family. We have three daughters,
alhamdulellah
. I moved them and my wife to Peshawar after the Mujahideen began going at each other's throats. I won't have their names added to the
shaheed
list. Nor mine, to be honest. I'll be joining them there very soon,
inshallah
.

“Anyway, I was supposed to be back in Kabul the Wednesday before last. But, as luck would have it, I came down with an illness. I won't bother you with it,
hamshira,
suffice it to say that when I went to do my private business, the simpler of the two, it felt like passing chunks of broken glass. I wouldn't wish it on Hekmatyar himself. My wife, Nadia jan, Allah bless her, she begged me to see a doctor. But I thought I'd beat it with aspirin and a lot of water. Nadia jan insisted and I said no, back and forth we went. You know the saying
A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver.
This time, I'm afraid, the ass won. That would be me.”

He drank the rest of this water and extended the glass to Mariam. “If it's not too much
zahmat.
”

Mariam took the glass and went to fill it.

“Needless to say, I should have listened to her. She's always been the more sensible one, God give her a long life. By the time I made it to the hospital, I was burning with a fever and shaking like a
beid
tree in the wind. I could barely stand. The doctor said I had blood poisoning. She said two or three more days and I would have made my wife a widow.

“They put me in a special unit, reserved for really sick people, I suppose. Oh,
tashakor.
” He took the glass from Mariam and from his coat pocket produced a large white pill. “The
size
of these things.”

Laila watched him swallow his pill. She was aware that her breathing had quickened. Her legs felt heavy, as though weights had been tethered to them. She told herself that he wasn't done, that he hadn't told her anything as yet. But he would go on in a second, and she resisted an urge to get up and leave, leave before he told her things she didn't want to hear.

Abdul Sharif set his glass on the table.

“That's where I met your friend, Mohammad Tariq Walizai.”

Laila's heart sped up. Tariq in a hospital? A special unit?
For really sick people?

She swallowed dry spit. Shifted on her chair. She had to steel herself. If she didn't, she feared she would come unhinged. She diverted her thoughts from hospitals and special units and thought instead about the fact that she hadn't heard Tariq called by his full name since the two of them had enrolled in a Farsi winter course years back. The teacher would call roll after the bell and say his name like that—Mohammad Tariq Walizai. It had struck her as comically officious then, hearing his full name uttered.

“What happened to him I heard from one of the nurses,” Abdul Sharif resumed, tapping his chest with a fist as if to ease the passage of the pill. “With all the time I've spent in Peshawar, I've become pretty proficient in Urdu. Anyway, what I gathered was that your friend was in a lorry full of refugees, twenty-three of them, all headed for Peshawar. Near the border, they were caught in cross fire. A rocket hit the lorry. Probably a stray, but you never know with these people, you never know. There were only six survivors, all of them admitted to the same unit. Three died within twenty-four hours. Two of them lived—sisters, as I understood it—and had been discharged. Your friend Mr. Walizai was the last. He'd been there for almost three weeks by the time I arrived.”

So he was alive. But how badly had they hurt him? Laila wondered frantically. How badly? Badly enough to be put in a special unit, evidently. Laila was aware that she had started sweating, that her face felt hot. She tried to think of something else, something pleasant, like the trip to Bamiyan to see the Buddhas with Tariq and Babi. But instead an image of Tariq's parents presented itself: Tariq's mother trapped in the lorry, upside down, screaming for Tariq through the smoke, her arms and chest on fire, the wig melting into her scalp…

Laila had to take a series of rapid breaths.

“He was in the bed next to mine. There were no walls, only a curtain between us. So I could see him pretty well.”

Abdul Sharif found a sudden need to toy with his wedding band. He spoke more slowly now.

“Your friend, he was badly—very badly—injured, you understand. He had rubber tubes coming out of him everywhere. At first—” He cleared his throat. “At first, I thought he'd lost both legs in the attack, but a nurse said no, only the right, the left one was on account of an old injury. There were internal injuries too. They'd operated three times already. Took out sections of intestines, I don't remember what else. And he was burned. Quite badly. That's all I'll say about that. I'm sure you have your fair share of nightmares,
hamshira.
No sense in me adding to them.”

Tariq was legless now. He was a torso with two stumps.
Legless.
Laila thought she might collapse. With deliberate, desperate effort, she sent the tendrils of her mind out of this room, out the window, away from this man, over the street outside, over the city now, and its flat-topped houses and bazaars, its maze of narrow streets turned to sand castles.

“He was drugged up most of the time. For the pain, you understand. But he had moments when the drugs were wearing off when he was clear. In pain but clear of mind. I would talk to him from my bed. I told him who I was, where I was from. He was glad, I think, that there was a
hamwatan
next to him.

“I did most of the talking. It was hard for him to. His voice was hoarse, and I think it hurt him to move his lips. So I told him about my daughters, and about our house in Peshawar and the veranda my brother-in-law and I are building out in the back. I told him I had sold the stores in Kabul and that I was going back to finish up the paperwork. It wasn't much. But it occupied him. At least, I like to think it did.

“Sometimes he talked too. Half the time, I couldn't make out what he was saying, but I caught enough. He described where he'd lived.

He talked about his uncle in Ghazni. And his mother's cooking and his father's carpentry, him playing the accordion.

“But, mostly, he talked about you,
hamshira.
He said you were—how did he put it—his earliest memory. I think that's right, yes. I could tell he cared a great deal about you.
Balay,
that much was plain to see. But he said he was glad you weren't there. He said he didn't want you seeing him like that.”

Laila's feet felt heavy again, anchored to the floor, as if all her blood had suddenly pooled down there. But her mind was far away, free and fleet, hurtling like a speeding missile beyond Kabul, over craggy brown hills and over deserts ragged with clumps of sage, past canyons of jagged red rock and over snowcapped mountains…

“When I told him I was going back to Kabul, he asked me to find you. To tell you that he was thinking of you. That he missed you. I promised him I would. I'd taken quite a liking to him, you see. He was a decent sort of boy, I could tell.”

Abdul Sharif wiped his brow with the handkerchief.

“I woke up one night,” he went on, his interest in the wedding band renewed, “I think it was night anyway, it's hard to tell in those places. There aren't any windows. Sunrise, sundown, you just don't know. But I woke up, and there was some sort of commotion around the bed next to mine. You have to understand that I was full of drugs myself, always slipping in and out, to the point where it was hard to tell what was real and what you'd dreamed up. All I remember is, doctors huddled around the bed, calling for this and that, alarms bleeping, syringes all over the ground.

“In the morning, the bed was empty. I asked a nurse. She said he fought valiantly.”

Laila was dimly aware that she was nodding. She'd known. Of course she'd known. She'd known the moment she had sat across from this man why he was here, what news he was bringing.

“At first, you see, at first I didn't think you even existed,” he was saying now. “I thought it was the morphine talking. Maybe I even
hoped
you didn't exist; I've always dreaded bearing bad news. But I promised him. And, like I said, I'd become rather fond of him. So I came by here a few days ago. I asked around for you, talked to some neighbors. They pointed to this house. They also told me what had happened to your parents. When I heard about that, well, I turned around and left. I wasn't going to tell you. I decided it would be too much for you. For anybody.”

Abdul Sharif reached across the table and put a hand on her kneecap. “But I came back. Because, in the end, I think he would have wanted you to know. I believe that. I'm so sorry. I wish…”

Laila wasn't listening anymore. She was remembering the day the man from Panjshir had come to deliver the news of Ahmad's and Noor's deaths. She remembered Babi, white-faced, slumping on the couch, and Mammy, her hand flying to her mouth when she heard. Laila had watched Mammy come undone that day and it had scared her, but she hadn't felt any true sorrow. She hadn't understood the awfulness of her mother's loss. Now another stranger bringing news of another death. Now
she
was the one sitting on the chair. Was this her penalty, then, her punishment for being aloof to her own mother's suffering?

Laila remembered how Mammy had dropped to the ground, how she'd screamed, torn at her hair. But Laila couldn't even manage that. She could hardly move. She could hardly move a muscle.

She sat on the chair instead, hands limp in her lap, eyes staring at nothing, and let her mind fly on. She let it fly on until it found the place, the good and safe place, where the barley fields were green, where the water ran clear and the cottonwood seeds danced by the thousands in the air; where Babi was reading a book beneath an acacia and Tariq was napping with his hands laced across his chest, and where she could dip her feet in the stream and dream good dreams beneath the watchful gaze of gods of ancient, sun-bleached rock.