t's the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more than anything"
Tariq nodded knowingly.It wasn't so much the whistling itself, Laila thought later, but the seconds between the start
of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing.
The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict.
Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi were at the table. When it started, their
heads snapped up. They listened to the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their
mouths. Laila saw the reflection of their half lit faces in the pitch black window, their
shadows unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere,
followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared for now
while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was a scrambling, a
barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what remained of a sister, a
brother, a grandchild.
But the flip side of being spared was the agony of wondering who hadn't. After every
rocket blast, Laila raced to the street, stammering a prayer, certain that, this time, surely
this time, it was Tariq they would find buried beneath the rubble and smoke.
At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden white flashes reflected in her window.
She listened to the rattling of automatic gunfire and counted the rockets whining overhead
as the house shook and flakes of plaster rained down on her from the ceiling. Some nights,
when the light of rocket fire was so bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never
came. And, if it did, Laila's dreams were suffused with fire and detached limbs and the
moaning of the wounded.
Morning brought no relief. The muezzin's call for namaz rang out, and the Mujahideen set
down their guns, faced west, and prayed. Then the rugs were folded, the guns loaded, and
the mountains fired on Kabul, and Kabul fired back at the mountains, as Laila and the rest
of the city watched as helpless as old Santiago watching the sharks take bites out of his
prize fish.
Everywhere Laila "went, she saw Massoud's men. She saw them roam the streets and
every few hundred yards stop cars for questioning. They sat and smoked atop tanks,
dressed in their fatigues and ubiquitous pakols. They peeked at passersby from behind
stacked sandbags at intersections.
Not that Laila went out much anymore. And, when she did, she was always accompanied
by Tariq, who seemed to relish this chivalric duty.
"I bought a gun," he said one day. They were sitting outside, on the ground beneath the
pear tree in Laila's yard. He showed her. He said it was a semiautomatic, a Beretta. To Laila,