A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [50]
21.
The driver pulled his taxi over to let pass another long convoy of Soviet jeeps and armored vehicles. Tariq leaned across the front seat, over the driver, and yelled, “Pajalusta! Pajalusta!”
A jeep honked and Tariq whistled back, beaming and waving cheerfully. “Lovely guns!” he yelled. “Fabulous jeeps! Fabulous army! Too bad you’re losing to a bunch of peasants firing slingshots!”
The convoy passed. The driver merged back onto the road.
“How much farther?” Laila asked.
“An hour at the most,” the driver said. “Barring any more convoys or checkpoints.”
They were taking a day trip, Laila, Babi, and Tariq.
Hasina had wanted to come too, had begged her father, but he wouldn’t allow it. The trip was Babi’s idea. Though he could hardly afford it on his salary, he’d hired a driver for the day. He wouldn’t disclose anything to Laila about their destination except to say that, with it, he was contributing to her education.
They had been on the road since five in the morning.
Through Laila’s window, the landscape shifted from snowcapped peaks to deserts to canyons and sun-scorched outcroppings of rocks. Along the way, they passed mud houses with thatched roofs and fields dotted with bundles of wheat. Pitched out in the dusty fields, here and there, Laila recognized the black tents of Koochi nomads. And, frequently, the carcasses of burned-out Soviet tanks and wrecked helicopters. This, she thought, was Ahmad and Noor’s Afghanistan. This, here in the provinces, was where the war was being fought, after all. Not in Kabul. Kabul was largely at peace. Back in Kabul, if not for the occasional bursts of gunfire, if not for the Soviet soldiers smoking on the sidewalks and the Soviet jeeps always bumping through the streets, war might as well have been a rumor.
It was late morning, after they’d passed two more checkpoints, when they entered a valley. Babi had Laila lean across the seat and pointed to a series of ancient-looking walls of sun-dried red in the distance.
“That’s called Shahr-e-Zohak. The Red City. It used to be a fortress. It was built some nine hundred years ago to defend the valley from invaders. Genghis Khan’s grandson attacked it in the thirteenth century, but he was killed. It was Genghis Khan himself who then destroyed it.”
“And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another,” the driver said, flicking cigarette ash out the window. “Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn’t that the truth, badar?”
“Indeed it is,” said Babi.
* * *
HALF AN HOUR LATER, the driver pulled over.
“Come on, you two,” Babi said. “Come outside and have a look.”
They got out of the taxi. Babi pointed. “There they are. Look.”
Tariq gasped. Laila did too. And she knew then that she could live to be a hundred and she would never again see a thing as magnificent.
The two Buddhas were enormous, soaring much higher than she had imagined from all the photos she’d seen of them. Chiseled into a sun-bleached rock cliff, they peered down at them, as they had nearly two thousand years before, Laila imagined, at caravans crossing the valley on the Silk Road. On either side of them, along the overhanging niche, the cliff was pocked with myriad caves.
“I feel so small,” Tariq said.
“You want to climb up?” Babi said.
“Up the statues?” Laila asked. “We can do that?”
Babi smiled and held out his hand. “Come on.”
THE CLIMB WAS HARD for Tariq, who had to hold on to both Laila and Babi as they inched up a winding, narrow, dimly lit staircase. They saw shadowy caves along the way, and tunnels honeycombing the cliff every which way.
“Careful where you step,” Babi said. His voice made a loud echo. “The ground is treacherous.”
In some parts, the staircase was open to the Buddha’s cavity.
“Don’t look down, children. Keep looking straight ahead.”
As they climbed, Babi told them that Bamiyan had once been a thriving Buddhist center until it had fallen under Islamic Arab rule