A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [135]
IN HERAT, most of the streets are paved, lined with fragrant pines. There are municipal parks and libraries in midconstruction, manicured courtyards, freshly painted buildings. The traffic lights work, and, most surprisingly to Laila, electricity is steady. Laila has heard that Herat’s feudal-style warlord, Ismail Khan, has helped rebuild the city with the considerable customs revenue that he collects at the Afghan-Iranian border, money that Kabul says belongs not to him but to the central government. There is both a reverential and fearful tone when the taxi driver who takes them to Muwaffaq Hotel mentions Ismail Khan’s name.
The two-night stay at the Muwaffaq will cost them nearly a fifth of their savings, but the trip from Mashad has been long and wearying, and the children are exhausted. The elderly clerk at the desk tells Tariq, as he fetches the room key, that the Muwaffaq is popular with journalists and NGO workers.
“Bin Laden slept here once,” he boasts.
The room has two beds, and a bathroom with running cold water. There is a painting of the poet Khaja Abdullah Ansary on the wall between the beds. From the window, Laila has a view of the busy street below, and of a park across the street with pastel-colored-brick paths cutting through thick clusters of flowers. The children, who have grown accustomed to television, are disappointed that there isn’t one in the room. Soon enough, though, they are asleep. Soon enough, Tariq and Laila too have collapsed. Laila sleeps soundly in Tariq’s arms, except for once in the middle of the night when she wakes from a dream she cannot remember.
THE NEXT MORNING, after a breakfast of tea with fresh bread, quince marmalade, and boiled eggs, Tariq finds her a taxi.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come along?” Tariq says. Aziza is holding his hand. Zalmai isn’t, but he is standing close to Tariq, leaning one shoulder on Tariq’s hip.
“I’m sure.”
“I worry.”
“I’ll be fine,” Laila says. “I promise. Take the children to a market. Buy them something.”
Zalmai begins to cry when the taxi pulls away, and, when Laila looks back, she sees that he is reaching for Tariq. That he is beginning to accept Tariq both eases and breaks Laila’s heart.
“YOU’RE NOT FROM HERAT,” the driver says.
He has dark, shoulder-length hair—a common thumbing of the nose at the departed Taliban, Laila has discovered—and some kind of scar interrupting his mustache on the left side. There is a photo taped to the windshield, on his side. It’s of a young girl with pink cheeks and hair parted down the middle into twin braids.
Laila tells him that she has been in Pakistan for the last year, that she is returning to Kabul. “Deh-Mazang.”
Through the windshield, she sees coppersmiths welding brass handles to jugs, saddlemakers laying out cuts of rawhide to dry in the sun.
“Have you lived here long, brother?” she asks.
“Oh, my whole life. I was born here. I’ve seen everything. You remember the uprising?”
Laila says she does, but he goes on.
“This was back in March 1979, about nine months before the Soviets invaded. Some angry Heratis killed a few Soviet advisers, so the Soviets sent in tanks and helicopters and pounded this place. For three days, hamshira, they fired on the city. They collapsed buildings, destroyed one of the minarets, killed thousands of people.
Thousands. I lost two sisters in those three days. One of them was twelve years old.” He taps the photo on his windshield. “That’s her.”
“I’m sorry,” Laila says, marveling at how every Afghan story is marked by death and loss and unimaginable grief. And yet, she sees, people find a way to survive, to go on. Laila thinks of her own life and all that has happened to her, and she is astonished that she too has survived, that she