"The empty headed girls who think you're sexy."
"You know."
"Know what?"
"That I only have eyes for you."
Laila swooned inside. She tried to read his face but was met by a look that was
indecipherable: the cheerful, cretinous grin at odds with the narrow, half desperate look in
his eyes. A clever look, calculated to fall precisely at the midpoint between mockery and
sincerity.
Tariq crushed his cigarette with the heel of his good foot. "So what do you think about all
this?"
"The party?"
"Who's the half wit now? I meant the Mujahideen, Laila. Their coming to Kabul."
Oh.
She started to tell him something Babi had said, about the troublesome marriage of guns
and ego, when she heard a commotion coming from the house. Loud voices. Screaming.
Laila took off running. Tariq hobbled behind her.
There was a melee in the yard. In the middle of it were two snarling men, rolling on the
ground, a knife between them. Laila recognized one of them as a man from the table who
had been discussing politics earlier. The other was the man who had been fanning the
kebab skewers. Several men were trying to pull them apart. Babi wasn't among them. He
stood by the wall, at a safe distance from the fight, with Tariq's father, who was crying.
From the excited voices around her, Laila caught snippets that she put together: The
fellow at the politics table, a Pashtun, had called Ahmad Shah Massoud a traitor for
"making a deal" with the Soviets in the 1980s. The kebab man, a Tajik, had taken offense
and demanded a retraction. The Pashtun had refused. The Tajik had said that if not for
Massoud, the other man's sister would still be "giving it" to Soviet soldiers. They had come
to blows. One of them had then brandished a knife; there was disagreement as to who.
With horror, Laila saw that Tariq had thrown himself into the scuffle. She also saw that
some of the peacemakers were now throwing punches of their own. She thought she spotted
a second knife.
Later that evening, Laila thought of how the melee had toppled over, with men falling on
top of one another, amid yelps and cries and shouts and flying punches, and, in the middle
of it, a grimacing Tariq, his hair disheveled, his leg come undone, trying to crawl out.