A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [134]
Tariq nods slowly. “This is what you want, then?
You’re sure?”
“I want it, yes, I’m sure. But it’s more than that. I feel like I have to go back. Staying here, it doesn’t feel right anymore.”
Tariq looks at his hands, then back up at her.
“But only—only—if you want to go too.”
Tariq smiles. The furrows from his brow clear, and for a brief moment he is the old Tariq again, the Tariq who did not get headaches, who had once said that in Siberia snot turned to ice before it hit the ground. It may be her imagination, but Laila believes there are more frequent sightings of this old Tariq these days.
“Me?” he says. “I’ll follow you to the end of the world, Laila.”
She pulls him close and kisses his lips. She believes she has never loved him more than at this moment. “Thank you,” she says, her forehead resting against his.
“Let’s go home.”
“But first, I want to go to Herat,” she says.
“Herat?”
Laila explains.
* * *
THE CHILDREN NEED reassuring, each in their own way.
Laila has to sit down with an agitated Aziza, who still has nightmares, who’d been startled to tears the week before when someone had shot rounds into the sky at a wedding nearby. Laila has to explain to Aziza that when they return to Kabul the Taliban won’t be there, that there will not be any fighting, and that she will not be sent back to the orphanage. “We’ll all live together. Your father, me, Zalmai. And you, Aziza. You’ll never, ever, have to be apart from me again. I promise.” She smiles at her daughter. “Until the day you want to, that is. When you fall in love with some young man and want to marry him.”
On the day they leave Murree, Zalmai is inconsolable. He has wrapped his arms around Alyona’s neck and will not let go.
“I can’t pry him off of her, Mammy,” says Aziza.
“Zalmai. We can’t take a goat on the bus,” Laila explains again.
It isn’t until Tariq kneels down beside him, until he promises Zalmai that he will buy him a goat just like Alyona in Kabul, that Zalmai reluctantly lets go.
There are tearful farewells with Sayeed as well. For good luck, he holds a Koran by the doorway for Tariq, Laila, and the children to kiss three times, then holds it high so they can pass under it. He helps Tariq load the two suitcases into the trunk of his car. It is Sayeed who drives them to the station, who stands on the curb waving goodbye as the bus sputters and pulls away.
As she leans back and watches Sayeed receding in the rear window of the bus, Laila hears the voice of doubt whispering in her head. Are they being foolish, she wonders, leaving behind the safety of Murree? Going back to the land where her parents and brothers perished, where the smoke of bombs is only now settling?
And then, from the darkened spirals of her memory, rise two lines of poetry, Babi’s farewell ode to Kabul:
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.
Laila settles back in her seat, blinking the wetness from her eyes. Kabul is waiting. Needing. This journey home is the right thing to do.
But first there is one last farewell to be said.
THE WARS IN Afghanistan have ravaged the roads connecting Kabul, Herat, and Kandahar. The easiest way to Herat now is through Mashad, in Iran. Laila and her family are there only overnight. They spend the night at a hotel, and, the next morning, they board another bus.
Mashad is a crowded, bustling city. Laila watches as parks, mosques, and chelo kebab restaurants pass by. When the bus passes the shrine to Imam Reza, the eighth Shi’a imam, Laila cranes her neck to get a better view of its glistening tiles, the minarets, the magnificent golden dome, all of it immaculately and lovingly preserved. She thinks of the Buddhas in her own country. They are grains of dust now, blowing about the Bamiyan Valley in the wind.
The bus ride to the Iranian-Afghan border takes almost