It's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything" Tariq 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 window, their shadows unmoving on the wall.
The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere, followed by an expulsion of breath and the
knowledge that they had been spared for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds
of smoke, there was a scrambling, a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what
remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild.
But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't. After every rocket blast,
Laila raced to the street, stammering a prayer, certain that, this time, surely this time, it was Tariq
they would find buried beneath the rubble and smoke.
At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden white flashes reflected in her window. She
listened to the rattling of automatic gunfire and counted the rockets whining overhead as the house
shook and flakes of plaster rained down on her from the ceiling. Some nights, when the light of rocket
fire was so bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never came. And, if it did, Laila's dreams
were suffused with fire and detached limbs and the moaning of the wounded.
Morning brought no relief. The muezzin's call fornamaz rang out, and the Mujahideen set down their
guns, faced west, and prayed. Then the rugs were folded, the guns loaded, and the mountains fired on
Kabul, and Kabul fired back at the mountains, as Laila and the rest of the city watched as helpless as
old Santiago watching the sharks take bites out of his prize fish.
* * *
Everywhere Laila "went, she saw Massoud's men. She saw them roam the streets and every few
hundred yards stop cars for questioning. They sat and smoked atop tanks, dressed in their fatigues and
ubiquitouspakols.They peeked at passersby from behind stacked sandbags at intersections.
Not that Laila went out much anymore. And, when she did, she was always accompanied by Tariq,
who seemed to relish this chivalric duty.
"I bought a gun," he said one day. They were sitting outside, on the ground beneath the pear tree in Laila's yard. He showed her. He said it was a semiautomatic, a Beretta. To Laila, it merely looked
black and deadly.
"I don't like it," she said. "Guns scare me."
Tariq turned the magazine over in his hand
"They found three bodies in a house in Karteh-Seh last week," he said. "Did you hear? Sisters. All
three raped Their throats slashed. Someone had bitten the rings off their fingers. You could tell, they
had teeth marks-"
"I don't want to hear this."
"I don't mean to upset you," Tariq said "But I just…Ifeel better carrying this."
He was her lifeline to the streets now. He heard the word of mouth and passed it on to her. Tariq
was the one who told her, for instance, that militiamen stationed in the mountains sharpened their
marksmanship-and settled wagers over said marksmanship-by shooting civilians down below, men,
women, children, chosen at random. He told her that they fired rockets at cars but, for some reason,
left taxis alone-which explained to Laila the recent rash of people spraying their cars yellow.
Tariq explained to her the treacherous, shifting boundaries within Kabul. Laila learned from him, for
instance, that this road, up to the second acacia tree on the left, belonged to one warlord; that the next
four blocks, ending with the bakery shop next to the demolished pharmacy, was another warlord's
sector; and that if she crossed that street and walked half a mile west, she would find herself in the
territory of yet another warlord and, therefore, fair game for sniper fire. And this was what Mammy's
heroes were called now. Warlords. Laila heard them callediofangdar too. Riflemen. Others still
called them Mujahideen, but, when they did, they made a face-a sneering, distasteful face-the word
reeking of deep aversion and deep scorn. Like an insult.
Tariq snapped the magazine back into his handgun. "Doyou have it in you?" Laila said."To what?"
"To use this thing. To kill with it."
Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. "For
you," he said. "I'd kill with it for you, Laila."
He slid closer to her and their hands brushed, once, then again. When Tariq's fingers tentatively
began to slip into hers, Laila let them. And when suddenly he leaned over and pressed his lips to hers,
she let him again.
At that moment, all of Mammy's talk of reputations and mynah birds sounded immaterial to Laila.
Absurd, even. In the midst of all this killing and looting, all this ugliness, it was a harmless thing to sit
here beneath a tree and kiss Tariq. A small thing. An easily forgivable indulgence. So she let him kiss
her, and when he pulled back she leaned in and kissedhim, heart pounding in her throat, her face
tingling, a fire burning in the pit of her belly.
In June of that yeah, 1992, there was heavy fighting in West Kabul between the Pashtun forces of the
warlord Sayyaf and the Hazaras of the Wahdat faction. The shelling knocked down power lines,
pulverized entire blocks of shops and homes. Laila heard that Pashtun militiamen were attacking
Hazara households, breaking in and shooting entire families, execution style, and that Hazaras were
retaliating by abducting Pashtun civilians, raping Pashtun girls, shelling Pashtun neighborhoods, and
killing indiscriminately. Every day, bodies were found tied to trees, sometimes burned beyond
recognition. Often, they'd been shot in the head, had had their eyes gouged out, their tongues cut out.
Babi tried again to convince Mammy to leave Kabul.
"They'll work it out," Mammy said. "This fighting is temporary. They'll sit down and figure
something out."
"Fariba, all these peopleknow is war," said Babi. "They learned to walk with a milk bottle in one
hand and a gun in the other."
"Whozrtyou to say?" Mammy shot back. "Did you fight jihad? Did you abandon everything you had
and risk your life? If not for the Mujahideen, we'd still be the Soviets' servants, remember. And now
you'd have us betray them!"
"We aren't the ones doing the betraying, Fariba."
"You go, then. Take your daughter and run away. Send me a postcard. But peace is coming, and I, for
one, am going to wait for it."
The streets became so unsafe that Babi did an unthinkable thing: He had Laila drop out of school.
He took over the teaching duties himself. Laila went into his study every day after sundown, and, as
Hekmatyar launched his rockets at Massoud from the southern outskirts of the city, Babi and she
discussedtheghazals of Hafez and the works of the beloved Afghan poet Ustad Khalilullah Khalili.
Babi taught her to derive the quadratic equation, showed her how to factor polynomials and plot
parametric curves. When he was teaching, Babi was transformed. In his element, amid his books, he
looked taller to Laila. His voice seemed to rise from a calmer, deeper place, and he didn't blink
nearly as much. Laila pictured him as he must have been once, erasing his blackboard with graceful
swipes, looking over a student's shoulder, fatherly and attentive.
But it wasn't easy to pay attention. Laila kept getting distracted.
"What is the area of a pyramid?" Babi would ask, and all Laila could think of was the fullness of
Tariq's lips, the heat of his breath on her mouth, her own reflection in his hazel eyes. She'd kissed him
twice more since the time beneath the tree, longer, more passionately, and, she thought, less clumsily.
Both times, she'd met him secretly in the dim alley where he'd smoked a cigarette the day of Mammy's
lunch party. The second time, she'd let him touch her breast.
"Laila?"
"Yes, Babi."
"Pyramid. Area. Where are you?"
"Sorry, Babi. I was, uh…Let's see. Pyramid. Pyramid. One-third the area of the base times the
height."
Babi nodded uncertainly, his gaze lingering on her, and Laila thought of Tariq's hands, squeezing her
breast, sliding down the small of her back, as the two of them kissed and kissed.
* * *
One daY that same month of June, Giti was walking home from school with two classmates. Only
three blocks from Giti's house, a stray rocket struck the girls. Later that terrible day, Laila learned that
Nila, Giti's mother, had run up and down the street where Giti was killed, collecting pieces of her
daughter's flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically. Giti's decomposing right foot, still in its nylon
sock and purple sneaker, would be found on a rooftop two weeks later.
AtGiti'sfaiiha, the day after the killings, Laila sat stunned in a roomful of weeping women. This was
the first time that someone whom Laila had known, been close to, loved, had died. She couldn't get
around the unfathomable reality that Giti wasn't alive anymore. Giti, with whom Laila had exchanged
secret notes in class, whose fingernails she had polished, whose chin hair she had plucked with
tweezers. Giti, who was going to marry Sabir the goalkeeper. Giti was dead.Dead. Blown to pieces.
At last, Laila began to weep for her friend. And all the tears that she hadn't been able to shed at her
brothers' funeral came pouring down.