A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [70]
So he was alive. But how badly had they hurt him? Laila wondered frantically. How badly? Badly enough to be put in a special unit, evidently. Laila was aware that she had started sweating, that her face felt hot. She tried to think of something else, something pleasant, like the trip to Bamiyan to see the Buddhas with Tariq and Babi. But instead an image of Tariq’s parents presented itself: Tariq’s mother trapped in the lorry, upside down, screaming for Tariq through the smoke, her arms and chest on fire, the wig melting into her scalp . . .
Laila had to take a series of rapid breaths.
“He was in the bed next to mine. There were no walls, only a curtain between us. So I could see him pretty well.”
Abdul Sharif found a sudden need to toy with his wedding band. He spoke more slowly now.
“Your friend, he was badly—very badly—injured, you understand. He had rubber tubes coming out of him everywhere. At first—” He cleared his throat. “At first, I thought he’d lost both legs in the attack, but a nurse said no, only the right, the left one was on account of an old injury. There were internal injuries too. They’d operated three times already. Took out sections of intestines, I don’t remember what else. And he was burned. Quite badly. That’s all I’ll say about that. I’m sure you have your fair share of nightmares, hamshira. No sense in me adding to them.”
Tariq was legless now. He was a torso with two stumps. Legless. Laila thought she might collapse. With deliberate, desperate effort, she sent the tendrils of her mind out of this room, out the window, away from this man, over the street outside, over the city now, and its flat-topped houses and bazaars, its maze of narrow streets turned to sand castles.
“He was drugged up most of the time. For the pain, you understand. But he had moments when the drugs were wearing off when he was clear. In pain but clear of mind. I would talk to him from my bed. I told him who I was, where I was from. He was glad, I think, that there was a hamwatan next to him.
“I did most of the talking. It was hard for him to. His voice was hoarse, and I think it hurt him to move his lips. So I told him about my daughters, and about our house in Peshawar and the veranda my brother-in-law and I are building out in the back. I told him I had sold the stores in Kabul and that I was going back to finish up the paperwork. It wasn’t much. But it occupied him. At least, I like to think it did.
“Sometimes he talked too. Half the time, I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but I caught enough. He described where he’d lived. He talked about his uncle in Ghazni. And his mother’s cooking and his father’s carpentry, him playing the accordion.
“But, mostly, he talked about you, hamshira. He said you were—how did he put it—his earliest memory. I think that’s right, yes. I could tell he cared a great deal about you. Balay, that much was plain to see. But he said he was glad you weren’t there. He said he didn’t want you seeing him like that.”
Laila’s feet felt heavy again, anchored to the floor, as if all her blood had suddenly pooled down there. But her mind was far away, free and fleet, hurtling like a speeding missile beyond Kabul, over craggy brown hills and over deserts ragged with clumps of sage, past canyons of jagged red rock and over snowcapped mountains . . .
“When I told him I was going back to Kabul, he asked me to find you. To tell you that he was thinking of you.
That he missed you. I promised him I would. I’d taken quite a liking to him, you see. He was a decent sort of boy, I could tell.”
Abdul Sharif wiped his brow with the handkerchief.
“I woke up one night,” he went on, his interest in the wedding band renewed, “I think it was night anyway, it’s hard to tell in those places. There aren’t any windows. Sunrise,