t was, by far, the hottest day of the year. The mountains trapped the bone scorching heat,
stifled the city like smoke. Power had been out for days. All over Kabul, electric fans sat
idle, almost mockingly so.
Laila was lying still on the living room couch, sweating through her blouse. Every exhaled
breath burned the tip of her nose. She was aware of her parents talking in Mammy's room.
Two nights ago, and again last night, she had awakened and thought she heard their voices
downstairs. They were talking every day now, ever since the bullet, ever since the new hole
in the gate.
Outside, the far off boom of artillery, then, more closely, the stammering of a long string
of gunfire, followed by another.
Inside Laila too a battle was being waged: guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on
the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been
natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never
see each other again.
Laila rolled to her side on the couch now and tried to remember something: At one point,
when they were on the floor, Tariq had lowered his forehead on hers. Then he had panted
something, either Am I hurting you? Or Is this hurting you?
Laila couldn't decide which he had said.
Am I hurting you?
Is this hurting you?
Only two weeks since he had left, and it was already happening Time, blunting the
edges of those sharp memories. Laila bore down mentally. What had he said? It seemed
vital, suddenly, that she know.
Laila closed her eyes. Concentrated.
With the passing of time, she would slowly tire of this exercise. She would find it
increasingly exhausting to conjure up, to dust off, to resuscitate once again what was long
dead. There would come a day, in fact, years later, when Laila would no longer bewail his
loss. Or not as relentlessly; not nearly. There would come a day when the details of his face
would begin to slip from memory's grip, when overhearing a mother on the street call after
her child by Tariq's name would no longer cut her adrift. She would not miss him as she did
now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion like the phantom pain
of an amputee.
Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or
pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet
beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger's forehead, would set off a memory
of that afternoon together. And it would all come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their
astonishing imprudence. Their clumsiness. The pain of the act, the pleasure of it, the
sadness of it. The heat of their entangled bodies.
It would flood her, steal her breath.
But then it would pass. The moment would pass. Leave her deflated, feeling nothing but a
vague restlessness.
She decided that he had saidAmi hurting you? Yes. That wasit. Laila was happy that she'd