A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [96]
38.
Laila
Laila was glad, when the Taliban went to work, that Babi wasn’t around to witness it. It would have crippled him.
Men wielding pickaxes swarmed the dilapidated Kabul Museum and smashed pre-Islamic statues to rubble—that is, those that hadn’t already been looted by the Mujahideen. The university was shut down and its students sent home. Paintings were ripped from walls, shredded with blades. Television screens were kicked in. Books, except the Koran, were burned in heaps, the stores that sold them closed down. The poems of Khalili, Pajwak, Ansari, Haji Dehqan, Ashraqi, Beytaab, Hafez, Jami, Nizami, Rumi, Khayyám, Beydel, and more went up in smoke.
Laila heard of men being dragged from the streets, accused of skipping namaz, and shoved into mosques. She learned that Marco Polo Restaurant, near Chicken Street, had been turned into an interrogation center. Sometimes screaming was heard from behind its black-painted windows. Everywhere, the Beard Patrol roamed the streets in Toyota trucks on the lookout for clean-shaven faces to bloody.
They shut down the cinemas too. Cinema Park. Ariana. Aryub. Projection rooms were ransacked and reels of films set to fire. Laila remembered all the times she and Tariq had sat in those theaters and watched Hindi films, all those melodramatic tales of lovers separated by some tragic turn of fate, one adrift in some faraway land, the other forced into marriage, the weeping, the singing in fields of marigolds, the longing for reunions. She remembered how Tariq would laugh at her for crying at those films.
“I wonder what they’ve done to my father’s cinema,” Mariam said to her one day. “If it’s still there, that is. Or if he still owns it.”
Kharabat, Kabul’s ancient music ghetto, was silenced. Musicians were beaten and imprisoned, their rubabs, tam-bouras, and harmoniums trampled upon. The Taliban went to the grave of Tariq’s favorite singer, Ahmad Zahir, and fired bullets into it.
“He’s been dead for almost twenty years,” Laila said to Mariam. “Isn’t dying once enough?”
RASHEED WASN’T BOTHERED much by the Taliban. All he had to do was grow a beard, which he did, and visit the mosque, which he also did. Rasheed regarded the Taliban with a forgiving, affectionate kind of bemusement, as one might regard an erratic cousin prone to unpredictable acts of hilarity and scandal.
Every Wednesday night, Rasheed listened to the Voice of Shari’a when the Taliban would announce the names of those scheduled for punishment. Then, on Fridays, he went to Ghazi Stadium, bought a Pepsi, and watched the spectacle. In bed, he made Laila listen as he described with a queer sort of exhilaration the hands he’d seen severed, the lashings, the hangings, the beheadings.
“I saw a man today slit the throat of his brother’s murderer,” he said one night, blowing halos of smoke.
“They’re savages,” Laila said.
“You think?” he said. “Compared to what? The Soviets killed a million people. Do you know how many people the Mujahideen killed in Kabul alone these last four years? Fifty thousand. Fifty thousand! Is it so insensible, by comparison, to chop the hands off a few thieves? Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. It’s in the Koran. Besides, tell me this: If someone killed Aziza, wouldn’t you want the chance to avenge her?”
Laila shot him a disgusted look.
“I’m making a point,” he said.
“You’re just like them.”
“It’s an interesting eye color she has, Aziza. Don’t you think? It’s neither yours nor mine.”
Rasheed rolled over to face her, gently scratched her thigh with the crooked nail of his index finger.
“Let me explain,” he said. “If the fancy should strike me—and I’m not saying it will, but it could—it could—I would be within my rights to give Aziza away. How would you like that? Or I could go to the Taliban one day, just walk in and say that I have my suspicions about you. That’s all it would take. Whose word do you think they would believe? What do you