KITE RUNNER 20 страница

IN THE DAYTIME, the hospital was a maze of teeming, angled hallways, a blur of blazing-white overhead fluorescence. I came to know its layout, came to know that the fourth-floor button in the east wing

elevator didn’t light up, that the door to the men’s room on that same floor was jammed and you had to ram your shoulder into it to open it. I came to know that hospital life has a rhythm, the flurry of activity

just before the morning shift change, the midday hustle, the stillness and quiet of the late-night hours interrupted occasionally by a blur of doctors and nurses rushing to revive someone. I kept vigil at

Sohrab’s bedside in the daytime and wandered through the hospital’s serpentine corridors at night, listening to my shoe heels clicking on the tiles, thinking of what I would say to Sohrab when he woke up.

I’d end up back in the ICU, by the whooshing ventilator beside his bed, and I’d be no closer to knowing.

After three days in the ICU, they withdrew the breathing tube and transferred him to a ground-level bed. I wasn’t there when they moved him. I had gone back to the hotel that night to get some sleep and

ended up tossing around in bed all night. In the morning, I tried to not look at the bathtub. It was clean now, someone had wiped off the blood, spread new floor mats on the floor, and scrubbed the walls.

But I couldn’t stop myself from sitting on its cool, porcelain edge. I pictured Sohrab filling it with warm water. Saw him undressing. Saw him twisting the razor handle and opening the twin safety latches on

the head, sliding the blade out, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. I pictured him lowering himself into the water, lying there for a while, his eyes closed. I wondered what his last thought had been

as he had raised the blade and brought it down.

I was exiting the lobby when the hotel manager, Mr. Fayyaz, caught up with me. “I am very sorry for you, ” he said, “but I am asking for you to leave my hotel, please. This is bad for my business, very bad. ”

I told him I understood and I checked out. He didn’t charge me for the three days I’d spent at the hospital. Waiting for a cab outside the hotel lobby, I thought about what Mr. Fayyaz had said to me that

night we’d gone looking for Sohrab: The thing about you Afghanis is that... well, you people are a little reckless. I had laughed at him, but now I wondered. Had I actually gone to sleep after I had given

Sohrab the news he feared most?

When I got in the cab, I asked the driver if he knew any Persian bookstores. He said there was one a couple of kilometers south. We stopped there on the way to the hospital.

SOHRAB’S NEW ROOM had cream-colored walls, chipped, dark gray moldings, and glazed tiles that might have once been white. He shared the room with a teenaged Punjabi boy who, I later learned

from one of the nurses, had broken his leg when he had slipped off the roof of a moving bus. His leg was in a cast, raised and held bytongs strapped to several weights.

Sohrab’s bed was next to the window, the lower half lit by the late-morning sunlight streaming through the rectangular panes. A uniformed security guard was standing at the window, munching on

cooked watermelon seeds--Sohrab was under twenty-four hours-a-day suicide watch. Hospital protocol, Dr. Nawaz had informed me. The guard tipped his hat when he saw me and left the room.

Sohrab was wearing short-sleeved hospital pajamas and lying on his back, blanket pulled to his chest, face turned to the window. I thought he was sleeping, but when I scooted a chair up to his bed his

eyelids fluttered and opened. He looked at me, then looked away. He was so pale, even with all the blood they had given him, and there was a large purple bruise in the crease of his right arm.

“How are you? ” I said.

He didn’t answer. He was looking through the window at a fenced-in sandbox and swing set in the hospital garden. There was an arch-shaped trellis near the playground, in the shadow of a row of

hibiscus trees, a few green vines climbing up the timber lattice. A handful of kids were playing with buckets and pails in the sand box. The sky was a cloudless blue that day, and I saw a tiny jet leaving

behind twin white trails. I turned back to Sohrab. “I spoke to Dr. Nawaz a few minutes ago and he thinks you’ll be discharged in a couple of days. That’s good news, nay? ”

Again I was met by silence. The Punjabi boy at the other end of the room stirred in his sleep and moaned something. “I like your room, ” I said, trying not to look at Sohrab’s bandaged wrists. “It’s bright,

and you have a view. ” Silence. A few more awkward minutes passed, and a light sweat formed on my brow, my upper lip. I pointed to the untouched bowl of green pea aush on his nightstand, the unused

plastic spoon. “You should try to eat some thing. Gain your quwat back, your strength. Do you want me to help you? ”

He held my glance, then looked away, his face set like stone. His eyes were still lightless, I saw, vacant, the way I had found them when I had pulled him out of the bathtub. I reached into the paper bag

between my feet and took out the used copy of the Shah namah I had bought at the Persian bookstore. I turned the cover so it faced Sohrab. “I used to read this to your father when we were children. We’d

go up the hill by our house and sit beneath the pomegranate... ” I trailed off. Sohrab was looking through the window again. I forced a smile. “Your father’s favorite was the story of Rostam and Sohrab and

that’s how you got your name, I know you know that. ” I paused, feeling a bit like an idiot. “Any way, he said in his letter that it was your favorite too, so I thought I’d read you some of it. Would you like that? ”

Sohrab closed his eyes. Covered them with his arm, the one with the bruise.

I flipped to the page I had bent in the taxicab. “Here we go, ” I said, wondering for the first time what thoughts had passed through Hassan’s head when he had finally read the ‘Shahnamah’ for himself

and discovered that I had deceived him all those times. I cleared my throat and read. “Give ear unto the combat of Sohrab against Rostam, though it be a tale replete with tears, ” I began. “It came about

that on a certain day Rostam rose from his couch and his mind was filled with forebodings. He bethought him... ” I read him most of chapter 1, up to the part where the young warrior Sohrab comes to his mother, Tahmineh, the princess of Samen gan, and demands to know the identity of his father. I closed the book. “Do you want me to go on? There are battles coming up, remember? Sohrab leading his

army to the White Castle in Iran? Should I read on? ”

He shook his head slowly. I dropped the book back in the paper bag. “That’s fine, ” I said, encouraged that he had responded at all. “Maybe we can continue tomorrow. How do you feel? ”

Sohrab’s mouth opened and a hoarse sound came out. Dr. Nawaz had told me that would happen, on account of the breathing tube they had slid through his vocal cords. He licked his lips and tried

again. “Tired. ”

“I know. Dr. Nawaz said that was to be expected--” He was shaking his head.

“What, Sohrab? ”

He winced when he spoke again in that husky voice, barely above a whisper. “Tired of everything. ”

I sighed and slumped in my chair. There was a band of sunlight on the bed between us, and, for just a moment, the ashen gray face looking at me from the other side of it was a dead ringer for

Hassan’s, not the Hassan I played marbles with until the mullah belted out the evening azan and Ali called us home, not the Hassan I chased down our hill as the sun dipped behind clay rooftops in the

west, but the Hassan I saw alive for the last time, dragging his belongings behind Ali in a warm summer downpour, stuffing them in the trunk of Baba’s car while I watched through the rain-soaked window

of my room.

He gave a slow shake of his head. “Tired of everything, ” he repeated.

“What can I do, Sohrab? Please tell me. ”

“I want--” he began. He winced again and brought his hand to his throat as if to clear whatever was blocking his voice. My eyes were drawn again to his wrist wrapped tightly with white gauze bandages.

“I want my old life back, ” he breathed.

“Oh, Sohrab. ”

“I want Father and Mother jan. I want Sasa. I want to play with Rahim Khan sahib in the garden. I want to live in our house again. ” He dragged his forearm across his eyes. “I want my old life back. ”

I didn’t know what to say, where to look, so I gazed down at my hands. Your old life, I thought. My old life too. I played in the same yard, Sohrab. I lived in the same house. But the grass is dead and a

stranger’s jeep is parked in the driveway of our house, pissing oil all over the asphalt. Our old life is gone, Sohrab, and everyone in it is either dead or dying. It’s just you and me now. Just you and me.

“I can’t give you that, ” I said. “I wish you hadn’t--”

“Please don’t say that. ”

“--wish you hadn’t... I wish you had left me in the water. ”

“Don’t ever say that, Sohrab, ” I said, leaning forward. “I can’t bear to hear you talk like that. ” I touched his shoulder and he flinched. Drew away. I dropped my hand, remembering ruefully how in the last

days before I’d broken my promise to him he had finally become at ease with my touch. “Sohrab, I can’t give you your old life back, I wish to God I could. But I can take you with me. That was what I was

coming in the bathroom to tell you. You have a visa to go to America, to live with me and my wife. It’s true. I promise. ”

He sighed through his nose and closed his eyes. I wished I hadn’t said those last two words. “You know, I’ve done a lot of things I regret in my life, ” I said, “and maybe none more than going back on the

promise I made you. But that will never happen again, and I am so very profoundly sorry. I ask for your bakhshesh, your forgiveness. Can you do that? Can you forgive me? Can you believe me? ” I dropped

my voice. “Will you come with me? ”

As I waited for his reply, my mind flashed back to a winter day from long ago, Hassan and I sitting on the snow beneath a leafless sour cherry tree. I had played a cruel game with Hassan that day, toyed

with him, asked him if he would chew dirt to prove his loyalty to me. Now I was the one under the microscope, the one who had to prove my worthiness. I deserved this.

Sohrab rolled to his side, his back to me. He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then, just as I thought he might have drifted to sleep, he said with a croak, “I am so khasta. ” So very tired. I sat by his

bed until he fell asleep. Something was lost between Sohrab and me. Until my meeting with the lawyer, Omar Faisal, a light of hope had begun to enter Sohrab’s eyes like a timid guest. Now the light was

gone, the guest had fled, and I wondered when it would dare return. I wondered how long before Sohrab smiled again. How long before he trusted me. If ever.

So I left the room and went looking for another hotel, unaware that almost a year would pass before I would hear Sohrab speak another word.

IN THE END, Sohrab never accepted my offer. Nor did he decline it. But he knew that when the bandages were removed and the hospital garments returned, he was just another homeless Hazara

orphan. What choice did he have? Where could he go? So what I took as a yes from him was in actuality more of a quiet surrender, not so much an acceptance as an act of relinquishment by one too

weary to decide, and far too tired to believe. What he yearned for was his old life. What he got was me and America. Not that it was such a bad fate, everything considered, but I couldn’t tell him that.

Perspective was a luxury when your head was constantly buzzing with a swarm of demons.

And so it was that, about a week later, we crossed a strip of warm, black tarmac and I brought Hassan’s son from Afghanistan to America, lifting him from the certainty of turmoil and dropping him in a

turmoil of uncertainty.

ONE DAY, maybe around 1983 or 1984, I was at a video store in Fremont. I was standing in the Westerns section when a guy next to me, sipping Coke from a 7-Eleven cup, pointed to ‘The Magnificent

Seven’ and asked me if I had seen it. “Yes, thirteen times, ” I said. “Charles Bronson dies in it, so do James Coburn and Robert Vaughn. ” He gave me a pinch-faced look, as if I had just spat in his soda.

“Thanks a lot, man, ” he said, shaking his head and muttering something as he walked away. That was when I learned that, in America, you don’t reveal the ending of the movie, and if you do, you will be

scorned and made to apologize profusely for having committed the sin of Spoiling the End.

In Afghanistan, the ending was all that mattered. When Hassan and I came home after watching a Hindi film at Cinema Zainab, what Ali, Rahim Khan, Baba, or the myriad of Baba’s friends--second and

third cousins milling in and out of the house--wanted to know was this: Did the Girl in the film find happiness? Did the bacheh film, the Guy in the film, become katnyab and fulfill his dreams, or was he nahkam,

doomed to wallow in failure?

Was there happiness at the end, they wanted to know.

If someone were to ask me today whether the story of Hassan, Sohrab, and me ends with happiness, I wouldn’t know what to say.

Does anybody’s?

After all, life is not a Hindi movie. Zendagi migzara, Afghans like to say: Life goes on, unmindful of beginning, end, kamyab, nah-kam, crisis or catharsis, moving forward like a slow, dusty caravan of kochis.

I wouldn’t know how to answer that question. Despite the matter of last Sunday’s tiny miracle.

WE ARRIVED HOME about seven months ago, on a warm day in August 2001. Soraya picked us up at the airport. I had never been away from Soraya for so long, and when she locked her arms

around my neck, when I smelled apples in her hair, I realized how much I had missed her. “You’re still the morning sun to my yelda, ” I whispered.

“What? ”

“Never mind. ” I kissed her ear.

After, she knelt to eye level with Sohrab. She took his hand and smiled at him. “Sataam, Sohrab jan, I’m your Khala Soraya. We’ve all been waiting for you. ”

Looking at her smiling at Sohrab, her eyes tearing over a little, I had a glimpse of the mother she might have been, had her own womb not betrayed her.

Sohrab shifted on his feet and looked away.

SORAYA HAD TURNED THE STUDY upstairs into a bedroom for Sohrab. She led him in and he sat on the edge of the bed. The sheets showed brightly colored kites flying in indigo blue skies. She

had made inscriptions on the wall by the closet, feet and inches to measure a child’s growing height. At the foot of the bed, I saw a wicker basket stuffed with books, a locomotive, a water color set.

Sohrab was wearing the plain white T-shirt and new denims I had bought him in Islamabad just before we’d left--the shirt hung loosely over his bony, slumping shoulders. The color still hadn’t seeped

back into his face, save for the halo of dark circles around his eyes. He was looking at us now in the impassive way he looked at the plates of boiled rice the hospital orderly placed before him.

Soraya asked if he liked his room and I noticed that she was trying to avoid looking at his wrists and that her eyes kept swaying back to those jagged pink lines. Sohrab lowered his head. Hid his hands

under his thighs and said nothing. Then he simply lay his head on the pillow. Less than five minutes later, Soraya and I watching from the doorway, he was snoring.

We went to bed, and Soraya fell asleep with her head on my chest. In the darkness of our room, I lay awake, an insomniac once more. Awake. And alone with demons of my own. Sometime in the

middle of the night, I slid out of bed and went to Sohrab’s room. I stood over him, looking down, and saw some thing protruding from under his pillow. I picked it up. Saw it was Rahim Khan’s Polaroid, the

one I had given to Sohrab the night we had sat by the Shah Faisal Mosque. The one of Hassan and Sohrab standing side by side, squinting in the light of the sun, and smiling like the world was a good

and just place. I wondered how long Sohrab had lain in bed staring at the photo, turning it in his hands.

I looked at the photo. Your father was a man torn between two halves, Rahim Khan had said in his letter. I had been the entitled half, the society-approved, legitimate half, the unwitting embodiment of

Baba’s guilt. I looked at Hassan, showing those two missing front teeth, sunlight slanting on his face. Baba’s other half. The unentitled, unprivileged half. The half who had inherited what had been pure and

noble in Baba. The half that, maybe, in the most secret recesses of his heart, Baba had thought of as his true son.

I slipped the picture back where I had found it. Then I realized something: That last thought had brought no sting with it. Closing Sohrab’s door, I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded, not with

the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.

THE GENERAL AND KHALA JAMILA came over for dinner the following night. Khala Jamila, her hair cut short and a darker shade of red than usual, handed Soraya the plate of almondtopped maghout

she had brought for dessert. She saw Sohrab and beamed. “‘Mashallah’! Soraya jan told us how khoshteep you were, but you are even more handsome in person, Sohrab jan. ” She handed him a blue

turtleneck sweater. “I knitted this for you, ” she said. “For next winter. ‘Inshallah’, it will fit you. ”

Sohrab took the sweater from her.

“Hello, young man, ” was all the general said, leaning with both hands on his cane, looking at Sohrab the way one might study a bizarre decorative item at someone’s house.

I answered, and answered again, Khala Jamila’s questions about my injuries--I’d asked Soraya to tell them I had been mugged--reassuring her that I had no permanent damage, that the wires would

come out in a few weeks so I’d be able to eat her cooking again, that, yes, I would try rubbing rhubarb juice and sugar on my scars to make them fade faster.

The general and I sat in the living room and sipped wine while Soraya and her mother set the table. I told him about Kabul and the Taliban. He listened and nodded, his cane on his lap, and tsk’ed when I

told him of the man I had spotted selling his artificial leg. I made no mention of the executions at Ghazi Stadium and Assef. He asked about Rahim Khan, whom he said he had met in Kabul a few times,

and shook his head solemnly when I told him of Rahim Khan’s illness. But as we spoke, I caught his eyes drifting again and again to Sohrab sleeping on the couch. As if we were skirting around the edge

of what he really wanted to know.

The skirting finally came to an end over dinner when the general put down his fork and said, “So, Amir jan, you’re going to tell us why you have brought back this boy with you? ”

“Iqbal jan! What sort of question is that? ” Khala Jamila said.

" While you’re busy knitting sweaters, my dear, I have to deal with the community’s perception of our family. People will ask. They will want to know why there is a Hazara boy living with our daughter.

What do I tell them? ”

Soraya dropped her spoon. Turned on her father. “You can tell them--”

“It’s okay, Soraya, ” I said, taking her hand. “It’s okay. General Sahib is quite right. People will ask. ”

“Amir--” she began.

“It’s all right. ” I turned to the general. “You see, General Sahib, my father slept with his servant’s wife. She bore him a son named Hassan. Hassan is dead now. That boy sleeping on the couch is

Hassan’s son. He’s my nephew. That’s what you tell people when they ask. ”

They were all staring at me.

“And one more thing, General Sahib, ” I said. “You will never again refer to him as ‘Hazara boy’ in my presence. He has a name and it’s Sohrab. ”

No one said anything for the remainder of the meal.

IT WOULD BE ERRONEOUS to say Sohrab was quiet. Quiet is peace. Tranquillity. Quiet is turning down the VOLUME knob on life.

Silence is pushing the OFF button. Shutting it down. All of it.

Sohrab’s silence wasn’t the self-imposed silence of those with convictions, of protesters who seek to speak their cause by not speaking at all. It was the silence of one who has taken cover in a dark

place, curled up all the edges and tucked them under.

He didn’t so much live with us as occupy space. And precious little of it. Sometimes, at the market, or in the park, I’d notice how other people hardly seemed to even see him, like he wasn’t there at all I’d look up from a book and realize Sohrab had entered the room, had sat across from me, and I hadn’t noticed. He walked like he was afraid to leave behind footprints. He moved as if not to stir the air

around him. Mostly, he slept.

Sohrab’s silence was hard on Soraya too. Over that long-distance line to Pakistan, Soraya had told me about the things she was planning for Sohrab. Swimming classes. Soccer. Bowling league. Now

she’d walk past Sohrab’s room and catch a glimpse of books sitting unopened in the wicker basket, the growth chart unmarked, the jigsaw puzzle unassembled, each item a reminder of a life that could

have been. A reminder of a dream that was wilting even as it was budding. But she hadn’t been alone. I’d had my own dreams for Sohrab.

While Sohrab was silent, the world was not. One Tuesday morning last September, the Twin Towers came crumbling down and, overnight, the world changed. The American flag suddenly appeared

everywhere, on the antennae of yellow cabs weaving around traffic, on the lapels of pedestrians walking the sidewalks in a steady stream, even on the grimy caps of San Francisco’s pan handlers sitting

beneath the awnings of small art galleries and open-fronted shops. One day I passed Edith, the homeless woman who plays the accordion every day on the corner of Sutter and Stockton, and spotted an

American flag sticker on the accordion case at her feet.

Soon after the attacks, America bombed Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance moved in, and the Taliban scurried like rats into the caves. Suddenly, people were standing in grocery store lines and talking

about the cities of my childhood, Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif. When I was very little, Baba took Hassan and me to Kunduz. I don’t remember much about the trip, except sitting in the shade of an

acacia tree with Baba and Hassan, taking turns sipping fresh watermelon juice from a clay pot and seeing who could spit the seeds farther. Now Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and people sipping lattes at

Starbucks were talking about the battle for Kunduz, the Taliban’s last stronghold in the north. That December, Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras gathered in Bonn and, under the watchful eye of the

UN, began the process that might someday end over twenty years of unhappiness in their watan. Hamid Karzai’s caracul hat and green chapan became famous.

Sohrab sleepwalked through it all.

Soraya and I became involved in Afghan projects, as much out of a sense of civil duty as the need for something--anything--to fill the silence upstairs, the silence that sucked everything in like a black

hole. I had never been the active type before, but when a man named Kabir, a former Afghan ambassador to Sofia, called and asked if I wanted to help him with a hospital project, I said yes. The small

hospital had stood near the Afghan-Pakistani border and had a small surgical unit that treated Afghan refugees with land mine injuries. But it had closed down due to a lack of funds. I became the project

manager, Soraya my comanager. I spent most of my days in the study, e-mailing people around the world, applying for grants, organizing fund-raising events. And telling myself that bringing Sohrab here

had been the right thing to do.

The year ended with Soraya and me on the couch, blanket spread over our legs, watching Dick Clark on TV. People cheered and kissed when the silver ball dropped, and confetti whitened the screen.

In our house, the new year began much the same way the last one had ended. In silence.

THEN, FOUR DAYS AGO, on a cool rainy day in March 2002, a small, wondrous thing happened.

I took Soraya, Khala Jamila, and Sohrab to a gathering of Afghans at Lake Elizabeth Park in Fremont. The general had finally been summoned to Afghanistan the month before for a ministry position,

and had flown there two weeks earlier--he had left behind his gray suit and pocket watch. The plan was for Khala Jamila to join him in a few months once he had settled. She missed him terribly--and

worried about his health there--and we had insisted she stay with us for a while.

The previous Thursday, the first day of spring, had been the Afghan New Year’s Day--the Sawl-e-Nau--and Afghans in the Bay Area had planned celebrations throughout the East Bay and the peninsula.

Kabir, Soraya, and I had an additional reason to rejoice: Our little hospital in Rawalpindi had opened the week before, not the surgical unit, just the pediatric clinic. But it was a good start, we all agreed.

It had been sunny for days, but Sunday morning, as I swung my legs out of bed, I heard raindrops pelting the window. Afghan luck, I thought. Snickered. I prayed morning ‘namaz’ while Soraya slept--I

didn’t have to consult the prayer pamphlet I had obtained from the mosque anymore; the verses came naturally now, effortlessly.

We arrived around noon and found a handful of people taking cover under a large rectangular plastic sheet mounted on six poles spiked to the ground. Someone was already frying bolani; steam rose

from teacups and a pot of cauliflower aush. A scratchy old Ahmad Zahir song was blaring from a cassette player. I smiled a little as the four of us rushed across the soggy grass field, Soraya and I in the

lead, Khala Jamila in the middle, Sohrab behind us, the hood of his yellow raincoat bouncing on his back.

“What’s so funny? ” Soraya said, holding a folded newspaper over her head.

“You can take Afghans out of Paghman, but you can’t take Paghman out of Afghans, ” I said.

We stooped under the makeshift tent. Soraya and Khala Jamila drifted toward an overweight woman frying spinach bolani. Sohrab stayed under the canopy for a moment, then stepped back out into the

rain, hands stuffed in the pockets of his raincoat, his hair--now brown and straight like Hassan’s--plastered against his scalp. He stopped near a coffee-colored puddle and stared at it. No one seemed to

notice. No one called him back in. With time, the queries about our adopted--and decidedly eccentric--little boy had mercifully ceased, and, considering how tactless Afghan queries can be sometimes,

that was a considerable relief. People stopped asking why he never spoke. Why he didn’t play with the other kids. And best of all, they stopped suffocating us with their exaggerated empathy, their slow

head shaking, their tsk tsks, their “Oh gung bichara. ” Oh, poor little mute one. The novelty had worn off. Like dull wallpaper, Sohrab had blended into the background.

I shook hands with Kabir, a small, silver-haired man. He introduced me to a dozen men, one of them a retired teacher, another an engineer, a former architect, a surgeon who was now running a hot dog

stand in Hayward. They all said they’d known Baba in Kabul, and they spoke about him respectfully. In one way or another, he had touched all their lives. The men said I was lucky to have had such a great

man for a father.

We chatted about the difficult and maybe thankless job Karzai had in front of him, about the upcoming Loya jirga, and the king’s imminent return to his homeland after twenty-eights years of exile. I

remembered the night in 1973, the night Zahir Shah’s cousin overthrew him; I remembered gunfire and the sky lighting up silver--Ali had taken me and Hassan in his arms, told us not to be afraid, that they

were just shooting ducks.

Then someone told a Mullah Nasruddin joke and we were all laughing. “You know, your father was a funny man too, ” Kabir said.

“He was, wasn’t he? ” I said, smiling, remembering how, soon after we arrived in the U. S., Baba started grumbling about American flies. He’d sit at the kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies

darting from wall to wall, buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed. “In this country, even flies are pressed for time, ” he’d groan. How I had laughed. I smiled at the memory now.

By three o’clock, the rain had stopped and the sky was a curdled gray burdened with lumps of clouds. A cool breeze blew through the park. More families turned up. Afghans greeted each other,

hugged, kissed, exchanged food. Someone lighted coal in a barbecue and soon the smell of garlic and morgh kabob flooded my senses. There was music, some new singer I didn’t know, and the

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