A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [117]
“You did?”
“Oh, volumes,” he said. “Your friend Rumi would have envied my production.” Then he laughed again, uproariously this time, as though he was both startled at his own boldness and embarrassed by what he had let on.
Zalmai began bawling upstairs.
* * *
“JUST LIKE OLD TIMES, then,” Rasheed said. “The two of you. I suppose you let him see your face.”
“She did,” said Zalmai. Then, to Laila, “You did, Mammy. I saw you.”
“YOUR SON DOESN’T care for me much,” Tariq said when Laila returned downstairs.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not that. He just . . . Don’t mind him.” Then quickly she changed the subject because it made her feel perverse and guilty to feel that about Zalmai, who was a child, a little boy who loved his father, whose instinctive aversion to this stranger was understandable and legitimate.
And I wrote you.
Volumes.
Volumes.
“How long have you been in Murree?”
“Less than a year,” Tariq said.
He befriended an older man in prison, he said, a fellow named Salim, a Pakistani, a former field hockey player who had been in and out of prison for years and who was serving ten years for stabbing an undercover policeman. Every prison has a man like Salim, Tariq said. There was always someone who was cunning and connected, who worked the system and found you things, someone around whom the air buzzed with both opportunity and danger. It was Salim who had sent out Tariq’s queries about his mother, Salim who had sat him down and told him, in a soft, fatherly voice, that she had died of exposure.
Tariq spent seven years in the Pakistani prison. “I got off easy,” he said. “I was lucky. The judge sitting on my case, it turned out, had a brother who’d married an Afghan woman. Maybe he showed mercy. I don’t know.”
When Tariq’s sentence was up, early in the winter of 2000, Salim gave him his brother’s address and phone number. The brother’s name was Sayeed.
“He said Sayeed owned a small hotel in Murree,” Tariq said. “Twenty rooms and a lounge, a little place to cater to tourists. He said tell him I sent you.”
Tariq had liked Murree as soon as he’d stepped off the bus: the snow-laden pines; the cold, crisp air; the shuttered wooden cottages, smoke curling up from chimneys.
Here was a place, Tariq had thought, knocking on Sayeed’s door, a place not only worlds removed from the wretchedness he’d known but one that made even the notion of hardship and sorrow somehow obscene, unimaginable.
“I said to myself, here is a place where a man can get on.”
Tariq was hired as a janitor and handyman. He did well, he said, during the one-month trial period, at half pay, that Sayeed granted him. As Tariq spoke, Laila saw Sayeed, whom she imagined narrow-eyed and ruddy-faced, standing at the reception office window watching Tariq chop wood and shovel snow off the driveway. She saw him stooping over Tariq’s legs, observing, as Tariq lay beneath the sink fixing a leaky pipe. She pictured him checking the register for missing cash.
Tariq’s shack was beside the cook’s little bungalow, he said. The cook was a matronly old widow named Adiba. Both shacks were detached from the hotel itself, separated from the main building by a scattering of almond trees, a park bench, and a pyramid-shaped stone fountain that, in the summer, gurgled water all day. Laila pictured Tariq in his shack, sitting up in bed, watching the leafy world outside his window.
At the end of the grace period, Sayeed raised Tariq’s pay to full, told him his lunches were free, gave him a wool coat, and fitted him for a new leg. Tariq said he’d wept at the man’s kindness.
With his first month’s full salary in his pocket, Tariq had gone to town and bought Alyona.
“Her fur is perfectly white,” Tariq said, smiling. “Some mornings, when it’s snowed all night, you look out the window and all you see of her is two eyes and a muzzle.”
Laila nodded. Another silence ensued. Upstairs, Zalmai had begun bouncing his ball again against the wall.
“I thought you were dead,” Laila said.
“I know. You told me.”
Laila’s voice broke. She had to clear her throat, collect