A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [116]
That same winter, Tariq had cornered a kid.
“Twelve, maybe thirteen years old,” he said evenly. “I held a shard of glass to his throat and took his blanket from him. I gave it to my mother.”
He made a vow to himself, Tariq said, after his mother’s illness, that they would not spend another winter in camp. He’d work, save, move them to an apartment in Peshawar with heating and clean water. When spring came, he looked for work. From time to time, a truck came to camp early in the morning and rounded up a couple of dozen boys, took them to a field to move stones or an orchard to pick apples in exchange for a little money, sometimes a blanket, a pair of shoes. But they never wanted him, Tariq said.
“One look at my leg and it was over.”
There were other jobs. Ditches to dig, hovels to build, water to carry, feces to shovel from outhouses. But young men fought over these jobs, and Tariq never stood a chance.
Then he met a shopkeeper one day, that fall of 1993.
“He offered me money to take a leather coat to Lahore. Not a lot but enough, enough for one or maybe two months’ apartment rent.”
The shopkeeper gave him a bus ticket, Tariq said, and the address of a street corner near the Lahore Rail Station where he was to deliver the coat to a friend of the shopkeeper’s.
“I knew already. Of course I knew,” Tariq said. “He said that if I got caught, I was on my own, that I should remember that he knew where my mother lived. But the money was too good to pass up. And winter was coming again.”
“How far did you get?” Laila asked.
“Not far,” he said and laughed, sounding apologetic, ashamed. “Never even got on the bus. But I thought I was immune, you know, safe. As though there was some accountant up there somewhere, a guy with a pencil tucked behind his ear who kept track of these things, who tallied things up, and he’d look down and say, ‘Yes, yes, he can have this, we’ll let it go. He’s paid some dues already, this one.’ ”
It was in the seams, the hashish, and it spilled all over the street when the police took a knife to the coat.
Tariq laughed again when he said this, a climbing, shaky kind of laugh, and Laila remembered how he used to laugh like this when they were little, to cloak embarrassment, to make light of things he’d done that were foolhardy or scandalous.
“HE HAS A LIMP,” Zalmai said.
“Is this who I think it is?”
“He was only visiting,” Mariam said.
“Shut up, you,” Rasheed snapped, raising a finger. He turned back to Laila. “Well, what do you know? Laili and Majnoon reunited. Just like old times.” His face turned stony. “So you let him in. Here. In my house. You let him in. He was in here with my son.”
“You duped me. You lied to me,” Laila said, gritting her teeth. “You had that man sit across from me and . . . You knew I would leave if I thought he was alive.”
“AND YOU DIDN’T LIE TO ME?” Rasheed roared.
“You think I didn’t figure it out? About your harami? You take me for a fool, you whore?”
THE MORE TARIQ TALKED, the more Laila dreaded the moment when he would stop. The silence that would follow, the signal that it was her turn to give account, to provide the why and how and when, to make official what he surely already knew. She felt a faint nausea whenever he paused. She averted his eyes. She looked down at his hands, at the coarse, dark hairs that had sprouted on the back of them in the intervening years.
Tariq wouldn’t say much about his years in prison save that he’d learned to speak Urdu there. When Laila asked, he gave an impatient shake of his head. In this gesture, Laila saw rusty bars and unwashed bodies, violent men and crowded halls, and ceilings rotting with moldy deposits. She read in his face that it had been a place of abasement, of degradation and despair.
Tariq said his mother tried to visit him after his arrest.
“Three times she came. But I never got to see her,” he said.
He wrote her a letter, and a few more after that, even though he doubted that she would receive them.
“And I wrote