"Most of them were ash. The rest were looted, I'm afraid."
He helped Mariam watch over the girl that first week. One day, he came home from work
with a new blanket and pillow. Another day, a bottle of pills.
"Vitamins," he said.
It was Rasheed who gave Laila the news that her friend Tariq's house was occupied now.
"A gift," he said. "From one of Sayyaf s commanders to three of his men. A gift. Ha!"
The three men were actually boys with suntanned, youthful faces. Mariam would see them
when she passed by, always dressed in their fatigues, squatting by the front door of Tariq's
house, playing cards and smoking, their Kalashnikovs leaning against the wall. The brawny
one, the one with the self satisfied, scornful demeanor, was the leader. The youngest was
also the quietest, the one who seemed reluctant to wholeheartedly embrace his friends' air
of impunity. He had taken to smiling and tipping his head salaam when Mariam passed by.
When he did, some of his surface smugness dropped away, and Mariam caught a glint of
humility as yet uncorrupted.
Then one morning rockets slammed into the house. They were rumored later to have been
fired by the Hazaras of Wahdat. For some time, neighbors kept finding bits and pieces of
the boys.
"They had it coming," said Rasheed.
The girl was extraordinarily lucky, Mariam thought, to escape with relatively minor
injuries, considering the rocket had turned her house into smoking rubble. And so, slowly,
the girl got better. She began to eat more, began to brush her own hair. She took baths on
her own. She began taking her meals downstairs, with Mariam and Rasheed.
But then some memory would rise, unbidden, and there would be stony silences or spells
of churlishness. Withdrawals and collapses. Wan looks. Nightmares and sudden attacks of
grief. Retching.
And sometimes regrets.
"I shouldn't even be here," she said one day.
Mariam was changing the sheets. The girl watched from the floor, her bruised knees
drawn up against her chest.
"My father wanted to take out the boxes. The books. He said they were too heavy for me.
But I wouldn't let him. I was so eager. I should have been the one inside the house when it
happened."
Mariam snapped the clean sheet and let it settle on the bed She looked at the girl, at her
blond curls, her slender neck and green eyes, her high cheekbones and plump lips. Mariam
remembered seeing her on the streets when she was little, tottering after her mother on the
way to the tandoor, riding on the shoulders of her brother, the younger one, with the patch
of hair on his ear. Shooting marbles with the carpenter's boy.
The girl was looking back as if waiting for Mariam to pass on some morsel of wisdom, to
say something encouraging But what wisdom did Mariam have to offer? What
encouragement? Mariam remembered the day they'd buried Nana and how little comfort
she had found when Mullah Faizullah had quoted the Koran for her. Blessed is He in Whose
hand is the kingdom, and He Who has power over all things, Who created death and life