A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [37]
Then he was gone, leaving Mariam to spit out pebbles, blood, and the fragments of two broken molars.
PART TWO
16.
KABUL, SPRING 1987
Nine-year-old Laila rose from bed, as she did most mornings, hungry for the sight of her friend Tariq. This morning, however, she knew there would be no Tariq sighting.
“How long will you be gone?” she’d asked when Tariq had told her that his parents were taking him south, to the city of Ghazni, to visit his paternal uncle.
“Thirteen days.”
“Thirteen days?”
“It’s not so long. You’re making a face, Laila.”
“I am not.”
“You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“I am not going to cry! Not over you. Not in a thousand years.”
She’d kicked at his shin, not his artificial but his real one, and he’d playfully whacked the back of her head.
Thirteen days. Almost two weeks. And, just five days in, Laila had learned a fundamental truth about time: Like the accordion on which Tariq’s father sometimes played old Pashto songs, time stretched and contracted depending on Tariq’s absence or presence.
Downstairs, her parents were fighting. Again. Laila knew the routine: Mammy, ferocious, indomitable, pacing and ranting; Babi, sitting, looking sheepish and dazed, nodding obediently, waiting for the storm to pass. Laila closed her door and changed. But she could still hear them. She could still hear her. Finally, a door slammed. Pounding footsteps. Mammy’s bed creaked loudly. Babi, it seemed, would survive to see another day.
“Laila!” he called now. “I’m going to be late for work!”
“One minute!”
Laila put on her shoes and quickly brushed her shoulder-length, blond curls in the mirror. Mammy always told Laila that she had inherited her hair color—as well as her thick-lashed, turquoise green eyes, her dimpled cheeks, her high cheekbones, and the pout of her lower lip, which Mammy shared—from her great-grandmother, Mammy’s grandmother. She was a pari, a stunner, Mammy said. Her beauty was the talk of the valley. It skipped two generations of women in our family, but it sure didn’t bypass you, Laila. The valley Mammy referred to was the Panjshir, the Farsi-speaking Tajik region one hundred kilometers northeast of Kabul. Both Mammy and Babi, who were first cousins, had been born and raised in Panjshir; they had moved to Kabul back in 1960 as hopeful, bright-eyed newlyweds when Babi had been admitted to Kabul University.
Laila scrambled downstairs, hoping Mammy wouldn’t come out of her room for another round. She found Babi kneeling by the screen door.
“Did you see this, Laila?”
The rip in the screen had been there for weeks. Laila hunkered down beside him. “No. Must be new.”
“That’s what I told Fariba.” He looked shaken, reduced, as he always did after Mammy was through with him. “She says it’s been letting in bees.”
Laila’s heart went out to him. Babi was a small man, with narrow shoulders and slim, delicate hands, almost like a woman’s. At night, when Laila walked into Babi’s room, she always found the downward profile of his face burrowing into a book, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose. Sometimes he didn’t even notice that she was there. When he did, he marked his page, smiled a close-lipped, companionable smile. Babi knew most of Rumi’s and Hafez’s ghazals by heart. He could speak at length about the struggle between Britain and czarist Russia over Afghanistan. He knew the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite, and could tell you that the distance between the earth and the sun was the same as going from Kabul to Ghazni one and a half million times. But if Laila needed the lid of a candy jar forced open, she had to go to Mammy, which felt like a betrayal. Ordinary tools befuddled Babi. On his watch, squeaky door hinges never got oiled. Ceilings went on leaking after he plugged them. Mold thrived defiantly in kitchen cabinets. Mammy said that before he left with Noor to join the jihad against the Soviets, back in 1980, it was Ahmad who had dutifully and competently minded these things.
“But if you have a book that needs