They "went our that day, the four of them, Rasheed leading them from one bus to the next,
to greet their new world, their new leaders. In every battered neighborhood, Mariam found
people materializing from the rubble and moving into the streets. She saw an old woman
wasting handfuls of rice, tossing it at passersby, a drooping, toothless smile on her face.
Two men were hugging by the remains of a gutted building, in the sky above them the
whistle, hiss, and pop of a few firecrackers set off by boys perched on rooftops. The
national anthem played on cassette decks, competing with the honking of cars.
"Look, Mayam!" Aziza pointed to a group of boys running down Jadeh Maywand. They
were pounding their fists into the air and dragging rusty cans tied to strings. They were
yelling that Massoud and Rabbani had withdrawn from Kabul.
Everywhere, there were shouts: Ailah u akbar!
Mariam saw a bedsheet hanging from a window on Jadeh Maywand. On it, someone had
painted three words in big, black letters: zendabaad taliban! Long live the Taliban!
As they walked the streets, Mariam spotted more signs painted on windows, nailed to
doors, billowing from car antennas that proclaimed the same.
Mariam saw her first of the Taliban later that day, at Pashtunistan Square, with Rasheed,
Laila, and Aziza. A melee of people had gathered there. Mariam saw people craning their
necks, people crowded around the blue fountain in the center of the square, people perched
on its dry bed. They were trying to get a view of the end of the square, near the old Khyber
Restaurant.
Rasheed used his size to push and shove past the onlookers, and led them to where
someone was speaking through a loudspeaker.
When Aziza saw, she let out a shriek and buried her face in Mariam's burqa.
The loudspeaker voice belonged to a slender, bearded young man who wore a black
turban. He was standing on some sort of makeshift scaffolding. In his free hand, he held a
rocket launcher. Beside him, two bloodied men hung from ropes tied to traffic light posts.
Their clothes had been shredded. Their bloated faces had turned purple blue.
"I know him," Mariam said, "the one on the left."
A young woman in front of Mariam turned around and said it was Najibullah. The other
man was his brother. Mariam remembered Najibullah's plump, mustachioed face, beaming
from billboards and storefront windows during the Soviet years.
She would later hear that the Taliban had dragged Najibullah from his sanctuary at the UN
headquarters near Darulaman Palace. That they had tortured him for hours, then tied his
legs to a truck and dragged his lifeless body through the streets.
"He killed many, many Muslims!" the young Talib was shouting through the loudspeaker.
He spoke Farsi with a Pashto accent, then would switch to Pashto. He punctuated his words
by pointing to the corpses with his weapon. "His crimes are known to everybody. He was a
communist and akqfir This is what we do with infidels who commit crimes against Islam!"
Rasheed was smirking.
In Mariam's arms, Aziza began to cry.