KITE RUNNER 2 страница

Baba heaved a sigh of impatience. That stung too, because he was not an impatient man. I remembered all the times he didn’t come home until after dark, all the times I ate dinner alone. I’d ask Ali

where Baba was, when he was coming home, though I knew full well he was at the construction site, overlooking this, supervising that. Didn’t that take patience? I already hated all the kids he was building

the orphanage for; sometimes I wished they’d all died along with their parents.

“When you kill a man, you steal a life, ” Baba said. “You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal

the right to fairness. Do you see? ”

I did. When Baba was six, a thief walked into my grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. My grandfather, a respected judge, confronted him, but the thief stabbed him in the throat, killing him

instantly--and robbing Baba of a father. The townspeople caught the killer just before noon the next day; he turned out to be a wanderer from the Kunduz region. They hanged him from the branch of an oak

tree with still two hours to go before afternoon prayer. It was Rahim Khan, not Baba, who had told me that story. I was always learning things about Baba from other people.

“There is no act more wretched than stealing, Amir, ” Baba said. “A man who takes what’s not his to take, be it a life or a loaf of ‘naan’... I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help

him. Do you understand? ”

I found the idea of Baba clobbering a thief both exhilarating and terribly frightening. “Yes, Baba. ”

“If there’s a God out there, then I would hope he has more important things to attend to than my drinking scotch or eating pork. Now, hop down. All this talk about sin has made me thirsty again. ”

I watched him fill his glass at the bar and wondered how much time would pass before we talked again the way we just had. Because the truth of it was, I always felt like Baba hated me a little. And why

not? After all, I ‘had’ killed his beloved wife, his beautiful princess, hadn’t I? The least I could have done was to have had the decency to have turned out a little more like him. But I hadn’t turned out like him.

Not at all.

IN SCHOOL, we used to play a game called ‘Sherjangi’, or “Battle of the Poems. ” The Farsi teacher moderated it and it went something like this: You recited a verse from a poem and your opponent

had sixty seconds to reply with a verse that began with the same letter that ended yours. Everyone in my class wanted me on their team, because by the time I was eleven, I could recite dozens of verses

from Khayyam, Hã fez, or Rumi’s famous ‘Masnawi’. One time, I took on the whole class and won. I told Baba about it later that night, but he just nodded, muttered, “Good. ”

That was how I escaped my father’s aloofness, in my dead mother’s books. That and Hassan, of course. I read everything, Rumi, Hã fez, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Ian Fleming. When

I had finished my mother’s books--not the boring history ones, I was never much into those, but the novels, the epics--I started spending my allowance on books. I bought one a week from the bookstore

near Cinema Park, and stored them in cardboard boxes when I ran out of shelf room.

Of course, marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting... well, that wasn’t how Baba had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn’t read

poetry--and God forbid they should ever write it! Real men--real boys--played soccer just as Baba had when he had been young. Now ‘that’ was something to be passionate about. In 1970, Baba took a

break from the construction of the orphanage and flew to Tehran for a month to watch the World Cup games on television, since at the time Afghanistan didn’t have TVs yet. He signed me up for soccer

teams to stir the same passion in me. But I was pathetic, a blundering liability to my own team, always in the way of an opportune pass or unwittingly blocking an open lane. I shambled about the field on

scraggy legs, squalled for passes that never came my way. And the harder I tried, waving my arms over my head frantically and screeching, “I’m open! I’m open! ” the more I went ignored. But Baba

wouldn’t give up. When it became abundantly clear that I hadn’t inherited a shred of his athletic talents, he settled for trying to turn me into a passionate spectator. Certainly I could manage that, couldn’t I? I

faked interest for as long as possible. I cheered with him when Kabul’s team scored against Kandahar and yelped insults at the referee when he called a penalty against our team. But Baba sensed my

lack of genuine interest and resigned himself to the bleak fact that his son was never going to either play or watch soccer.

I remember one time Baba took me to the yearly ‘Buzkashi’ tournament that took place on the first day of spring, New Year’s Day. Buzkashi was, and still is, Afghanistan’s national passion. A

‘chapandaz’, a highly skilled horseman usually patronized by rich aficionados, has to snatch a goat or cattle carcass from the midst of a melee, carry that carcass with him around the stadium at full gallop,

and drop it in a scoring circle while a team of other ‘chapandaz’ chases him and does everything in its power--kick, claw, whip, punch--to snatch the carcass from him. That day, the crowd roared with

excitement as the horsemen on the field bellowed their battle cries and jostled for the carcass in a cloud of dust. The earth trembled with the clatter of hooves. We watched from the upper bleachers as

riders pounded past us at full gallop, yipping and yelling, foam flying from their horses’ mouths.

At one point Baba pointed to someone. “Amir, do you see that man sitting up there with those other men around him? ”

I did.

“That’s Henry Kissinger. ”

“Oh, ” I said. I didn’t know who Henry Kissinger was, and I might have asked. But at the moment, I watched with horror as one of the ‘chapandaz’ fell off his saddle and was trampled under a score of

hooves. His body was tossed and hurled in the stampede like a rag doll, finally rolling to a stop when the melee moved on. He twitched once and lay motionless, his legs bent at unnatural angles, a pool of

his blood soaking through the sand.

I began to cry.

I cried all the way back home. I remember how Baba’s hands clenched around the steering wheel. Clenched and unclenched. Mostly, I will never forget Baba’s valiant efforts to conceal the disgusted

look on his face as he drove in silence.

Later that night, I was passing by my father’s study when I overheard him speaking to Rahim Khan. I pressed my ear to the closed door.

“--grateful that he’s healthy, ” Rahim Khan was saying.

“I know, I know. But he’s always buried in those books or shuffling around the house like he’s lost in some dream. ”

“And? ”

“I wasn’t like that. ” Baba sounded frustrated, almost angry.

Rahim Khan laughed. “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors. ”

“I’m telling you, ” Baba said, “I wasn’t like that at all, and neither were any of the kids I grew up with. ”

“You know, sometimes you are the most self-centered man I know, ” Rahim Khan said. He was the only person I knew who could get away with saying something like that to Baba.

“It has nothing to do with that. ”

“Nay? ”

“Nay. ”

“Then what? ”

I heard the leather of Baba’s seat creaking as he shifted on it. I closed my eyes, pressed my ear even harder against the door, wanting to hear, not wanting to hear. “Sometimes I look out this window

and I see him playing on the street with the neighborhood boys. I see how they push him around, take his toys from him, give him a shove here, a whack there. And, you know, he never fights back. Never.

He just... drops his head and... ”

“So he’s not violent, ” Rahim Khan said.

“That’s not what I mean, Rahim, and you know it, ” Baba shot back. “There is something missing in that boy. ”

“Yes, a mean streak. ”

“Self-defense has nothing to do with meanness. You know what always happens when the neighborhood boys tease him? Hassan steps in and fends them off. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And when

they come home, I say to him, ‘How did Hassan get that scrape on his face? ’ And he says, ‘He fell down. ’ I’m telling you, Rahim, there is something missing in that boy. ”

“You just need to let him find his way, ” Rahim Khan said.

“And where is he headed? ” Baba said. “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything. ”

“As usual you’re oversimplifying. ”

“I don’t think so. ”

“You’re angry because you’re afraid he’ll never take over the business for you. ”

“Now who’s oversimplifying? ” Baba said. “Look, I know there’s a fondness between you and him and I’m happy about that. Envious, but happy. I mean that. He needs someone who... understands him,

because God knows I don’t. But something about Amir troubles me in a way that I can’t express. It’s like... ” I could see him searching, reaching for the right words. He lowered his voice, but I heard him

anyway. “If I hadn’t seen the doctor pull him out of my wife with my own eyes, I’d never believe he’s my son. ”

THE NEXT MORNING, as he was preparing my breakfast, Hassan asked if something was bothering me. I snapped at him, told him to mind his own business.

Rahim Khan had been wrong about the mean streak thing.

FOUR

In 1933, the year Baba was born and the year Zahir Shah began his forty-year reign of Afghanistan, two brothers, young men from a wealthy and reputable family in Kabul, got behind the wheel of their

father’s Ford roadster. High on hashish and ‘mast’ on French wine, they struck and killed a Hazara husband and wife on the road to Paghman. The police brought the somewhat contrite young men and the

dead couple’s five-year-old orphan boy before my grandfather, who was a highly regarded judge and a man of impeccable reputation. After hearing the brothers’ account and their father’s plea for mercy,

my grandfather ordered the two young men to go to Kandahar at once and enlist in the army for one year--this despite the fact that their family had somehow managed to obtain them exemptions from the

draft. Their father argued, but not too vehemently, and in the end, everyone agreed that the punishment had been perhaps harsh but fair. As for the orphan, my grandfather adopted him into his own

household, and told the other servants to tutor him, but to be kind to him. That boy was Ali.

Ali and Baba grew up together as childhood playmates--at least until polio crippled Ali’s leg--just like Hassan and I grew up a generation later. Baba was always telling us about the mischief he and Ali

used to cause, and Ali would shake his head and say, “But, Agha sahib, tell them who was the architect of the mischief and who the poor laborer? ” Baba would laugh and throw his arm around Ali.

But in none of his stories did Baba ever refer to Ali as his friend.

The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully

functional homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that we spent entire winters flying kites, running kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned

frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile.

Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going

to change that. Nothing.

But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, ethnicity, society, or religion was going to change that either. I spent most of the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan.

Sometimes, my entire childhood seems like one long lazy summer day with Hassan, chasing each other between tangles of trees in my father’s yard, playing hide-and-seek, cops and robbers, cowboys

and Indians, insect torture--with our crowning achievement undeniably the time we plucked the stinger off a bee and tied a string around the poor thing to yank it back every time it took flight.

We chased the ‘Kochi’, the nomads who passed through Kabul on their way to the mountains of the north. We would hear their caravans approaching our neighborhood, the mewling of their sheep, the

‘baa’ing of their goats, the jingle of bells around their camels’ necks. We’d run outside to watch the caravan plod through our street, men with dusty, weather-beaten faces and women dressed in long,

colorful shawls, beads, and silver bracelets around their wrists and ankles. We hurled pebbles at their goats. We squirted water on their mules. I’d make Hassan sit on the Wall of Ailing Corn and fire

pebbles with his slingshot at the camels’ rears.

We saw our first Western together, ‘Rio Bravo’ with John Wayne, at the Cinema Park, across the street from my favorite bookstore. I remember begging Baba to take us to Iran so we could meet John

Wayne. Baba burst out in gales of his deepthroated laughter--a sound not unlike a truck engine revving up--and, when he could talk again, explained to us the concept of voice dubbing. Hassan and I were

stunned. Dazed. John Wayne didn’t really speak Farsi and he wasn’t Iranian! He was American, just like the friendly, longhaired men and women we always saw hanging around in Kabul, dressed in their

tattered, brightly colored shirts. We saw ‘Rio Bravo’ three times, but we saw our favorite Western, ‘The Magnificent Seven’, thirteen times. With each viewing, we cried at the end when the Mexican kids

buried Charles Bronson--who, as it turned out, wasn’t Iranian either.

We took strolls in the musty-smelling bazaars of the Shar-e-Nau section of Kabul, or the new city, west of the Wazir Akbar Khan district. We talked about whatever film we had just seen and walked amid

the bustling crowds of ‘bazarris’. We snaked our way among the merchants and the beggars, wandered through narrow alleys cramped with rows of tiny, tightly packed stalls. Baba gave us each a weekly

allowance of ten Afghanis and we spent it on warm Coca-Cola and rosewater ice cream topped with crushed pistachios.

During the school year, we had a daily routine. By the time I dragged myself out of bed and lumbered to the bathroom, Hassan had already washed up, prayed the morning ‘namaz’ with Ali, and

prepared my breakfast: hot black tea with three sugar cubes and a slice of toasted ‘naan’ topped with my favorite sour cherry marmalade, all neatly placed on the dining table. While I ate and complained

about homework, Hassan made my bed, polished my shoes, ironed my outfit for the day, packed my books and pencils. I’d hear him singing to himself in the foyer as he ironed, singing old Hazara songs

in his nasal voice. Then, Baba and I drove off in his black Ford Mustang--a car that drew envious looks everywhere because it was the same car Steve McQueen had driven in ‘Bullitt’, a film that played in

one theater for six months. Hassan stayed home and helped Ali with the day’s chores: hand-washing dirty clothes and hanging them to dry in the yard, sweeping the floors, buying fresh ‘naan’ from the

bazaar, marinating meat for dinner, watering the lawn.

After school, Hassan and I met up, grabbed a book, and trotted up a bowl-shaped hill just north of my father’s property in Wazir Akbar Khan. There was an old abandoned cemetery atop the hill with

rows of unmarked headstones and tangles of brushwood clogging the aisles. Seasons of rain and snow had turned the iron gate rusty and left the cemetery’s low white stone walls in decay. There was a

pomegranate tree near the entrance to the cemetery. One summer day, I used one of Ali’s kitchen knives to carve our names on it: “Amir and Hassan, the sultans of Kabul. ” Those words made it formal:

the tree was ours. After school, Hassan and I climbed its branches and snatched its bloodred pomegranates. After we’d eaten the fruit and wiped our hands on the grass, I would read to Hassan.

Sitting cross-legged, sunlight and shadows of pomegranate leaves dancing on his face, Hassan absently plucked blades of grass from the ground as I read him stories he couldn’t read for himself. That

Hassan would grow up illiterate like Ali and most Hazaras had been decided the minute he had been born, perhaps even the moment he had been conceived in Sanaubar’s unwelcoming womb--after all,

what use did a servant have for the written word? But despite his illiteracy, or maybe because of it, Hassan was drawn to the mystery of words, seduced by a secret world forbidden to him. I read him

poems and stories, sometimes riddles--though I stopped reading those when I saw he was far better at solving them than I was. So I read him unchallenging things, like the misadventures of the bumbling

Mullah Nasruddin and his donkey. We sat for hours under that tree, sat there until the sun faded in the west, and still Hassan insisted we had enough daylight for one more story, one more chapter.

My favorite part of reading to Hassan was when we came across a big word that he didn’t know. I’d tease him, expose his ignorance. One time, I was reading him a Mullah Nasruddin story and he

stopped me. “What does that word mean? ”

“Which one? ”

“Imbecile. ”

“You don’t know what it means? ” I said, grinning.

“Nay, Amir agha. ”

“But it’s such a common word! ”

“Still, I don’t know it. ” If he felt the sting of my tease, his smiling face didn’t show it.

“Well, everyone in my school knows what it means, ” I said. “Let’s see. ‘Imbecile. ’ It means smart, intelligent. I’ll use it in a sentence for you. ‘When it comes to words, Hassan is an imbecile. ’”

“Aaah, ” he said, nodding.

I would always feel guilty about it later. So I’d try to make up for it by giving him one of my old shirts or a broken toy. I would tell myself that was amends enough for a harmless prank.

Hassan’s favorite book by far was the ‘Shahnamah’, the tenth-century epic of ancient Persian heroes. He liked all of the chapters, the shahs of old, Feridoun, Zal, and Rudabeh. But his favorite story, and

mine, was “Rostam and Sohrab, ” the tale of the great warrior Rostam and his fleet-footed horse, Rakhsh. Rostam mortally wounds his valiant nemesis, Sohrab, in battle, only to discover that Sohrab is his

long-lost son. Stricken with grief, Rostam hears his son’s dying words:

If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thou didst it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought

to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting...

“Read it again please, Amir agha, ” Hassan would say. Sometimes tears pooled in Hassan’s eyes as I read him this passage, and I always wondered whom he wept for, the grief-stricken Rostam who

tears his clothes and covers his head with ashes, or the dying Sohrab who only longed for his father’s love? Personally, I couldn’t see the tragedy in Rostam’s fate. After all, didn’t all fathers in their secret

hearts harbor a desire to kill their sons?

One day, in July 1973, I played another little trick on Hassan. I was reading to him, and suddenly I strayed from the written story. I pretended I was reading from the book, flipping pages regularly, but I had

abandoned the text altogether, taken over the story, and made up my own. Hassan, of course, was oblivious to this. To him, the words on the page were a scramble of codes, indecipherable, mysterious.

Words were secret doorways and I held all the keys. After, I started to ask him if he’d liked the story, a giggle rising in my throat, when Hassan began to clap.

“What are you doing? ” I said.

“That was the best story you’ve read me in a long time, ” he said, still clapping.

I laughed. “Really? ”

“Really. ”

“That’s fascinating, ” I muttered. I meant it too. This was... wholly unexpected. “Are you sure, Hassan? ”

He was still clapping. “It was great, Amir agha. Will you read me more of it tomorrow? ”

“Fascinating, ” I repeated, a little breathless, feeling like a man who discovers a buried treasure in his own backyard. Walking down the hill, thoughts were exploding in my head like the fireworks at

‘Chaman’. ‘Best story you’ve read me in a long time’, he’d said. I had read him a ‘lot’ of stories. Hassan was asking me something.

“What? ” I said.

“What does that mean, ‘fascinating’? ”

I laughed. Clutched him in a hug and planted a kiss on his cheek.

“What was that for? ” he said, startled, blushing.

I gave him a friendly shove. Smiled. “You’re a prince, Hassan. You’re a prince and I love you. ”

That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But

even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed

grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife’s slain body in his arms.

That evening, I climbed the stairs and walked into Baba’s smoking room, in my hands the two sheets of paper on which I had scribbled the story. Baba and Rahim Khan were smoking pipes and sipping

brandy when I came in.

“What is it, Amir? ” Baba said, reclining on the sofa and lacing his hands behind his head. Blue smoke swirled around his face. His glare made my throat feel dry. I cleared it and told him I’d written a

story.

Baba nodded and gave a thin smile that conveyed little more than feigned interest. “Well, that’s very good, isn’t it? ” he said. Then nothing more. He just looked at me through the cloud of smoke.

I probably stood there for under a minute, but, to this day, it was one of the longest minutes of my life. Seconds plodded by, each separated from the next by an eternity. Air grew heavy damp, almost

solid. I was breathing bricks. Baba went on staring me down, and didn’t offer to read.

As always, it was Rahim Khan who rescued me. He held out his hand and favored me with a smile that had nothing feigned about it. “May I have it, Amir jan? I would very much like to read it. ” Baba

hardly ever used the term of endearment ‘jan’ when he addressed me.

Baba shrugged and stood up. He looked relieved, as if he too had been rescued by Rahim Khan. “Yes, give it to Kaka Rahim. I’m going upstairs to get ready. ” And with that, he left the room. Most days I

worshiped Baba with an intensity approaching the religious. But right then, I wished I could open my veins and drain his cursed blood from my body.

An hour later, as the evening sky dimmed, the two of them drove off in my father’s car to attend a party. On his way out, Rahim Khan hunkered before me and handed me my story and another folded

piece of paper. He flashed a smile and winked. “For you. Read it later. ” Then he paused and added a single word that did more to encourage me to pursue writing than any compliment any editor has ever

paid me. That word was ‘Bravo’.

When they left, I sat on my bed and wished Rahim Khan had been my father. Then I thought of Baba and his great big chest and how good it felt when he held me against it, how he smelled of Brut in the

morning, and how his beard tickled my face. I was overcome with such sudden guilt that I bolted to the bathroom and vomited in the sink.

Later that night, curled up in bed, I read Rahim Khan’s note over and over. It read like this:

Amir jan, I enjoyed your story very much. ‘Mashallah’, God has granted you a special talent. It is now your duty to hone that talent, because a person who wastes his God-given talents is a donkey. You have written

your story with sound grammar and interesting style. But the most impressive thing about your story is that it has irony. You may not even know what that word means. But you will someday. It is something

that some writers reach for their entire careers and never attain. You have achieved it with your first story.

My door is and always will be open to you, Amir jan. I shall hear any story you have to tell. Bravo.

Your friend,

Rahim

Buoyed by Rahim Khan’s note, I grabbed the story and hurried downstairs to the foyer where Ali and Hassan were sleeping on a mattress. That was the only time they slept in the house, when Baba was

away and Ali had to watch over me. I shook Hassan awake and asked him if he wanted to hear a story.

He rubbed his sleep-clogged eyes and stretched. “Now? What time is it? ”

“Never mind the time. This story’s special. I wrote it myself, ” I whispered, hoping not to wake Ali. Hassan’s face brightened.

“Then I ‘have’ to hear it, ” he said, already pulling the blanket off him.

I read it to him in the living room by the marble fireplace. No playful straying from the words this time; this was about me! Hassan was the perfect audience in many ways, totally immersed in the tale, his

face shifting with the changing tones in the story. When I read the last sentence, he made a muted clapping sound with his hands.

“‘Mashallah’, Amir agha. Bravo! ” He was beaming.

“You liked it? ” I said, getting my second taste--and how sweet it was--of a positive review.

“Some day, ‘Inshallah’, you will be a great writer, ” Hassan said. “And people all over the world will read your stories. ”

“You exaggerate, Hassan, ” I said, loving him for it.

“No. You will be great and famous, ” he insisted. Then he paused, as if on the verge of adding something. He weighed his words and cleared his throat. “But will you permit me to ask a question about

the story? ” he said shyly.

“Of course. ”

“Well... ” he started, broke off.

“Tell me, Hassan, ” I said. I smiled, though suddenly the insecure writer in me wasn’t so sure he wanted to hear it.

“Well, ” he said, “if I may ask, why did the man kill his wife? In fact, why did he ever have to feel sad to shed tears? Couldn’t he have just smelled an onion? ”

I was stunned. That particular point, so obvious it was utterly stupid, hadn’t even occurred to me. I moved my lips soundlessly. It appeared that on the same night I had learned about one of writing’s

objectives, irony, I would also be introduced to one of its pitfalls: the Plot Hole. Taught by Hassan, of all people. Hassan who couldn’t read and had never written a single word in his entire life. A voice, cold

and dark, suddenly whispered in my ear, ‘What does he know, that illiterate Hazara? He’ll never be anything but a cook. How dare he criticize you? ’

“Well, ” I began. But I never got to finish that sentence.

Because suddenly Afghanistan changed forever.

FIVE

Something roared like thunder. The earth shook a little and we heard the ‘rat-a-tat-tat’ of gunfire. “Father! ” Hassan cried. We sprung to our feet and raced out of the living room. We found Ali hobbling

frantically across the foyer.

“Father! What’s that sound? ” Hassan yelped, his hands outstretched toward Ali. Ali wrapped his arms around us. A white light flashed, lit the sky in silver. It flashed again and was followed by a rapid

staccato of gunfire.

“They’re hunting ducks, ” Ali said in a hoarse voice. “They hunt ducks at night, you know. Don’t be afraid. ”

A siren went off in the distance. Somewhere glass shattered and someone shouted. I heard people on the street, jolted from sleep and probably still in their pajamas, with ruffled hair and puffy eyes.

Hassan was crying. Ali pulled him close, clutched him with tenderness. Later, I would tell myself I hadn’t felt envious of Hassan. Not at all.

We stayed huddled that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard

gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generation of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of bombs and gunfire was not yet born. Huddled together in

the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any notion that a way of life had ended. Our way of life. If not quite yet, then at least it was the beginning of the end. The end, the ‘official’ end,

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