can remember now is two lines:
"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns
that hide behind her walls."
Laila looked up, saw he was weeping. She put an arm around his waist. "Oh, Babi. We'll
come back. When this war is over. We'll come back to Kabul, inshallah. You'll see."
On the third morning, Laila began moving the piles of things to the yard and depositing
them by the front door. They would fetch a taxi then and take it all to a pawnshop.
Laila kept shuffling between the house and the yard, back and forth, carrying stacks of
clothes and dishes and box after box of Babi's books. She should have been exhausted by
noon, when the mound of belongings by the front door had grown waist high. But, with
each trip, she knew that she was that much closer to seeing Tariq again, and, with each trip,
her legs became more sprightly, her arms more tireless.
"We're going to need a big taxi."
Laila looked up. It was Mammy calling down from her bedroom upstairs. She was leaning
out the window, resting her elbows on the sill. The sun, bright and warm, caught in her
graying hair, shone on her drawn, thin face. Mammy was wearing the same cobalt blue
dress she had worn the day of the lunch party four months earlier, a youthful dress meant
for a young woman, but, for a moment, Mammy looked to Laila like an old woman. An old
woman with stringy arms and sunken temples and slow eyes rimmed by darkened circles of
weariness, an altogether different creature from the plump, round faced woman beaming
radiantly from those grainy wedding photos.
"Two big taxis," Laila said.
She could see Babi too, in the living room stacking boxes of books atop each other.
"Come up when you're done with those," Mammy said. "We'll sit down for lunch. Boiled
eggs and leftover beans."
"My favorite," Laila said.
She thought suddenly of her dream. She and Tariq on a quilt. The ocean. The wind. The
dunes.
What had it sounded like, she wondered now, the singing sands?
Laila stopped. She saw a gray lizard crawl out of a crack in the ground. Its head shot side
to side. It blinked. Darted under a rock.
Laila pictured the beach again. Except now the singing was all around. And growing.
Louder and louder by the moment, higher and higher. It flooded her ears. Drowned
everything else out. The gulls were feathered mimes now, opening and closing their beaks
noiselessly, and the waves were crashing with foam and spray but no roar. The sands sang
on. Screaming now. A sound like...a tinkling?
Not a tinkling. No. A whistling.
Laila dropped the books at her feet. She looked up to the sky. Shielded her eyes with one
hand.
Then a giant roar.
Behind her, a flash of white.