A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [59]
“That we’re canoeing down the River of Sin,” he said.
“Eating a slice of Impiety Cake.”
“Riding the Rickshaw of Wickedness?” Laila chimed in.
“Making Sacrilege Qurma.”
They both laughed. Then Tariq remarked that her hair was getting longer. “It’s nice,” he said.
Laila hoped she wasn’t blushing. “You changed the subject.”
“From what?”
“The empty-headed girls who think you’re sexy.”
“You know.”
“Know what?”
“That I only have eyes for you.”
Laila swooned inside. She tried to read his face but was met by a look that was indecipherable: the cheerful, cretinous grin at odds with the narrow, half-desperate look in his eyes. A clever look, calculated to fall precisely at the midpoint between mockery and sincerity.
Tariq crushed his cigarette with the heel of his good foot. “So what do you think about all this?”
“The party?”
“Who’s the half-wit now? I meant the Mujahideen, Laila. Their coming to Kabul.”
“Oh.”
She started to tell him something Babi had said, about the troublesome marriage of guns and ego, when she heard a commotion coming from the house. Loud voices. Screaming.
Laila took off running. Tariq hobbled behind her.
There was a melee in the yard. In the middle of it were two snarling men, rolling on the ground, a knife between them. Laila recognized one of them as a man from the table who had been discussing politics earlier. The other was the man who had been fanning the kebab skewers. Several men were trying to pull them apart. Babi wasn’t among them. He stood by the wall, at a safe distance from the fight, with Tariq’s father, who was crying.
From the excited voices around her, Laila caught snippets that she put together: The fellow at the politics table, a Pashtun, had called Ahmad Shah Massoud a traitor for “making a deal” with the Soviets in the 1980s. The kebab man, a Tajik, had taken offense and demanded a retraction. The Pashtun had refused. The Tajik had said that if not for Massoud, the other man’s sister would still be “giving it” to Soviet soldiers. They had come to blows. One of them had then brandished a knife; there was disagreement as to who.
With horror, Laila saw that Tariq had thrown himself into the scuffle. She also saw that some of the peacemakers were now throwing punches of their own. She thought she spotted a second knife.
Later that evening, Laila thought of how the melee had toppled over, with men falling on top of one another, amid yelps and cries and shouts and flying punches, and, in the middle of it, a grimacing Tariq, his hair disheveled, his leg come undone, trying to crawl out.
* * *
IT WAS DIZZYING how quickly everything unraveled.
The leadership council was formed prematurely. It elected Rabbani president. The other factions cried nepotism. Massoud called for peace and patience.
Hekmatyar, who had been excluded, was incensed. The Hazaras, with their long history of being oppressed and neglected, seethed.
Insults were hurled. Fingers pointed. Accusations flew. Meetings were angrily called off and doors slammed. The city held its breath. In the mountains, loaded magazines snapped into Kalashnikovs.
The Mujahideen, armed to the teeth but now lacking a common enemy, had found the enemy in each other.
Kabul’s day of reckoning had come at last.
And when the rockets began to rain down on Kabul, people ran for cover. Mammy did too, literally. She changed into black again, went to her room, shut the curtains, and pulled the blanket over her head.
24.
It’s the whistling,” Laila said to Tariq, “the damn whistling, I hate more than anything.”
ITariq nodded knowingly.
It wasn’t so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict.
Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half-lit faces in the pitch-black