A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [69]
Laila positioned herself in her seat so that her right ear, the good one, was closest to him. “Were you a friend of my parents?”
“No, no,” Abdul Sharif said quickly. “Forgive me.” He raised a finger, took a long sip of the water that Mariam had placed in front of him.
“I should begin at the beginning, I suppose.” He dabbed at his lips, again at his brow. “I am a businessman. I own clothing stores, mostly men’s clothing. Chapans, hats, tumbans, suits, ties—you name it. Two stores here in Kabul, in Taimani and Shar-e-Nau, though I just sold those. And two in Pakistan, in Peshawar. That’s where my warehouse is as well. So I travel a lot, back and forth.
Which, these days”—he shook his head and chuckled tiredly—“let’s just say that it’s an adventure.
“I was in Peshawar recently, on business, taking orders, going over inventory, that sort of thing. Also to visit my family. We have three daughters, alhamdulellah. I moved them and my wife to Peshawar after the Mujahideen began going at each other’s throats. I won’t have their names added to the shaheed list. Nor mine, to be honest. I’ll be joining them there very soon, inshallah.
“Anyway, I was supposed to be back in Kabul the Wednesday before last. But, as luck would have it, I came down with an illness. I won’t bother you with it, hamshira, suffice it to say that when I went to do my private business, the simpler of the two, it felt like passing chunks of broken glass. I wouldn’t wish it on Hekmatyar himself. My wife, Nadia jan, Allah bless her, she begged me to see a doctor. But I thought I’d beat it with aspirin and a lot of water. Nadia jan insisted and I said no, back and forth we went. You know the saying A stubborn ass needs a stubborn driver. This time, I’m afraid, the ass won. That would be me.”
He drank the rest of this water and extended the glass to Mariam. “If it’s not too much zahmat.”
Mariam took the glass and went to fill it.
“Needless to say, I should have listened to her. She’s always been the more sensible one, God give her a long life. By the time I made it to the hospital, I was burning with a fever and shaking like a beid tree in the wind. I could barely stand. The doctor said I had blood poisoning. She said two or three more days and I would have made my wife a widow.
“They put me in a special unit, reserved for really sick people, I suppose. Oh, tashakor.” He took the glass from Mariam and from his coat pocket produced a large white pill. “The size of these things.”
Laila watched him swallow his pill. She was aware that her breathing had quickened. Her legs felt heavy, as though weights had been tethered to them. She told herself that he wasn’t done, that he hadn’t told her anything as yet. But he would go on in a second, and she resisted an urge to get up and leave, leave before he told her things she didn’t want to hear.
Abdul Sharif set his glass on the table.
“That’s where I met your friend, Mohammad Tariq Walizai.”
Laila’s heart sped up. Tariq in a hospital? A special unit? For really sick people?
She swallowed dry spit. Shifted on her chair. She had to steel herself. If she didn’t, she feared she would come unhinged. She diverted her thoughts from hospitals and special units and thought instead about the fact that she hadn’t heard Tariq called by his full name since the two of them had enrolled in a Farsi winter course years back. The teacher would call roll after the bell and say his name like that—Mohammad Tariq Walizai. It had struck her as comically officious then, hearing his full name uttered.
“What happened to him I heard from one of the nurses,”
Abdul Sharif resumed, tapping his chest with a fist as if to ease the passage of the pill. “With all the time I’ve spent in Peshawar, I’ve become pretty proficient in Urdu. Anyway, what I gathered was that your friend was in a lorry full of refugees, twenty-three of them, all headed for Peshawar. Near the border, they were caught in cross fire. A rocket hit the lorry. Probably a stray, but you never know with these people, you never