A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [115]
The British had built it as a hill station near their military headquarters in Rawalpindi, he said, for the Victorians to escape the heat. You could still spot a few relics of the colonial times, Tariq said, the occasional tearoom, tin-roofed bungalows, called cottages, that sort of thing. The town itself was small and pleasant. The main street was called the Mall, where there was a post office, a bazaar, a few restaurants, shops that overcharged tourists for painted glass and hand-knotted carpets. Curiously, the Mall’s one-way traffic flowed in one direction one week, the opposite direction the next week.
“The locals say that Ireland’s traffic is like that too in places,” Tariq said. “I wouldn’t know. Anyway, it’s nice. It’s a plain life, but I like it. I like living there.”
“With your goat. With Alyona.”
Laila meant this less as a joke than as a surreptitious entry into another line of talk, such as who else was there with him worrying about wolves eating goats. But Tariq only went on nodding.
“I’m sorry about your parents too,” he said.
“You heard.”
“I spoke to some neighbors earlier,” he said. A pause, during which Laila wondered what else the neighbors had told him. “I don’t recognize anybody. From the old days, I mean.”
“They’re all gone. There’s no one left you’d know.”
“I don’t recognize Kabul.”
“Neither do I,” Laila said. “And I never left.”
“MAMMY HAS A new friend,” Zalmai said after dinner later that same night, after Tariq had left. “A man.”
Rasheed looked up. “Does she, now?”
* * *
TARIQ ASKED IF he could smoke.
They had stayed awhile at the Nasir Bagh refugee camp near Peshawar, Tariq said, tapping ash into a saucer. There were sixty thousand Afghans living there already when he and his parents arrived.
“It wasn’t as bad as some of the other camps like, God forbid, Jalozai,” he said. “I guess at one point it was even some kind of model camp, back during the Cold War, a place the West could point to and prove to the world they weren’t just funneling arms into Afghanistan.”
But that had been during the Soviet war, Tariq said, the days of jihad and worldwide interest and generous funding and visits from Margaret Thatcher.
“You know the rest, Laila. After the war, the Soviets fell apart, and the West moved on. There was nothing at stake for them in Afghanistan anymore and the money dried up. Now Nasir Bagh is tents, dust, and open sewers. When we got there, they handed us a stick and a sheet of canvas and told us to build ourselves a tent.”
Tariq said what he remembered most about Nasir Bagh, where they had stayed for a year, was the color brown. “Brown tents. Brown people. Brown dogs. Brown porridge.”
There was a leafless tree he climbed every day, where he straddled a branch and watched the refugees lying about in the sun, their sores and stumps in plain view. He watched little emaciated boys carrying water in their jerry cans, gathering dog droppings to make fire, carving toy AK-47s out of wood with dull knives, lugging the sacks of wheat flour that no one could make bread from that held together. All around the refugee town, the wind made the tents flap. It hurled stubbles of weed everywhere, lifted kites flown from the roofs of mud hovels.
“A lot of kids died. Dysentery, TB, hunger—you name it. Mostly, that damn dysentery. God, Laila. I saw so many kids buried. There’s nothing worse a person can see.”
He crossed his legs. It grew quiet again between them for a while.
“My father didn’t survive that first winter,” he said. “He died in his sleep. I don’t think there was any pain.”
That same winter, he said, his mother caught pneumonia and almost died, would have died, if not for a camp doctor who worked out of a station wagon made into a mobile clinic. She would wake up all night long, feverish, coughing out thick, rust-colored phlegm. The queues were long to see the doctor, Tariq said. Everyone was shivering in line, moaning, coughing, some with shit running down their legs, others too tired or hungry or sick to make words.
“But he was