I thought about the last time I had seen Rahim Khan, in 1981. He had come to say good-bye the night Baba and I had fled Kabul. I remember Baba and him embracing in the foyer, crying softly. When Baba and I arrived in the U.S., he and Rahim Khan kept in touch. They would speak four or five times a year and, sometimes, Baba would pass me the receiver. The last time I had spoken to Rahim Khan had been shortly after Baba’s death. The news had reached Kabul and he had called. We’d only spoken for a few minutes and lost the connection.

The driver pulled up to a narrow building at a busy corner where two winding streets intersected. I paid the driver, took my lone suitcase, and walked up to the intricately carved door. The building had wooden balconies with open shutters--from many of them, laundry was hanging to dry in the sun. I walked up the creaky stairs to the second floor, down a dim hallway to the last door on the right. Checked the address on the piece of stationery paper in my palm. Knocked.

Then, a thing made of skin and bones pretending to be Rahim Khan opened the door.

A CREATIVE WRITING TEACHER at San Jose State used to say about clichés: “Avoid them like the plague.” Then he’d laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they’re dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché. For example, the “elephant in the room” saying. Nothing could more correctly describe the initial moments of my reunion with Rahim Khan.

We sat on a wispy mattress set along the wall, across the window overlooking the noisy street below. Sunlight slanted in and cast a triangular wedge of light onto the Afghan rug on the floor. Two folding chairs rested against one wall and a small copper samovar sat in the opposite corner. I poured us tea from it.

“How did you find me?” I asked.

“It’s not difficult to find people in America. I bought a map of the U.S., and called up information for cities in Northern California,” he said. “It’s wonderfully strange to see you as a grown man.”

I smiled and dropped three sugar cubes in my tea. He liked his black and bitter, I remembered. “Baba didn’t get the chance to tell you but I got married fifteen years ago.”

The truth was, by then, the cancer in Baba’s brain had made him forgetful, negligent.

“You are married? To whom?”

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“Her name is Soraya Taheri.” I thought of her back home, worrying about me. I was glad she wasn’t alone.

“Taheri... whose daughter is she?”

I told him. His eyes brightened. “Oh, yes, I remember now. Isn’t General Taheri married to Sharif jan’s sister? What was her name...”

“Jamila jan.”

“Balay!” he said, smiling. “I knew Sharif jan in Kabul, long time ago, before he moved to America.”

“He’s been working for the INS for years, handles a lot of Afghan cases.”

“Haiiii,” he sighed. “Do you and Soraya jan have children?”

“Nay.”

“Oh.” He slurped his tea and didn’t ask more; Rahim Khan had always been one of the most instinctive people I’d ever met.

I told him a lot about Baba, his job, the flea market, and how, at the end, he’d died happy. I told him about my schooling, my books--four published novels to my credit now. He smiled at this, said he had never had any doubt. I told him I had written short stories in the leather-bound notebook he’d given me, but he didn’t remember the notebook.

The conversation inevitably turned to the Taliban.

“Is it as bad as I hear?” I said.

“Nay, it’s worse. Much worse,” he said. “They don’t let you be human.” He pointed to a scar above his right eye cutting a crooked path through his bushy eyebrow. “I was at a soccer game in Ghazi Stadium in 1998. Kabul against Mazar-i-Sharif, I think, and by the way the players weren’t allowed to wear shorts. Indecent exposure, I guess.” He gave a tired laugh. “Anyway, Kabul scored a goal and the man next to me cheered loudly.

Suddenly this young bearded fellow who was patrolling the aisles, eighteen years old at most by the look of him, he walked up to me and struck me on the forehead with the butt of his Kalashnikov. ‘Do that again and I’ll cut out your tongue, you old donkey!’ he said.” Rahim Khan rubbed the scar with a gnarled finger. “I was old enough to be his

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grandfather and I was sitting there, blood gushing down my face, apologizing to that son of a dog.”

I poured him more tea. Rahim Khan talked some more. Much of it I knew already, some not. He told me that, as arranged between Baba and him, he had lived in Baba’s house since 1981--this I knew about. Baba had “sold” the house to Rahim Khan shortly before he and I fled Kabul. The way Baba had seen it those days, Afghanistan’s troubles were only a temporary interruption of our way of life--the days of parties at the Wazir Akbar Khan house and picnics in Paghman would surely return. So he’d given the house to Rahim Khan to keep watch over until that day.

Rahim Khan told me how, when the Northern Alliance took over Kabul between 1992

and 1996, different factions claimed different parts of Kabul. “If you went from the Share-Nau section to Kerteh-Parwan to buy a carpet, you risked getting shot by a sniper or getting blown up by a rocket--if you got past all the checkpoints, that was. You practically needed a visa to go from one neighborhood to the other. So people just stayed put, prayed the next rocket wouldn’t hit their home.” He told me how people knocked holes in the walls of their homes so they could bypass the dangerous streets and would move down the block from hole to hole. In other parts, people moved about in underground tunnels.

“Why didn’t you leave?” I said.

“Kabul was my home. It still is.” He snickered. “Remember the street that went from your house to the Qishla, the military bar racks next to Istiqial School?”

“Yes.” It was the shortcut to school. I remembered the day Hassan and I crossed it and the soldiers had teased Hassan about his mother. Hassan had cried in the cinema later, and I’d put an arm around him.

“When the Taliban rolled in and kicked the Alliance out of Kabul, I actually danced on that street,” Rahim Khan said. “And, believe me, I wasn’t alone. People were celebrating at _Chaman_, at Deh-Mazang, greeting the Taliban in the streets, climbing their tanks and posing for pictures with them. People were so tired of the constant fighting, tired of the rockets, the gunfire, the explosions, tired of watching Gulbuddin and his cohorts firing on any thing that moved. The Alliance did more damage to Kabul than the Shorawi. They destroyed your father’s orphanage, did you know that?”

“Why?” I said. “Why would they destroy an orphanage?” I remembered sitting behind Baba the day they opened the orphanage. The wind had knocked off his caracul hat and everyone had laughed, then stood and clapped when he’d delivered his speech.

And now it was just another pile of rubble. All the money Baba had spent, all those nights he’d sweated over the blueprints, all the visits to the construction site to make sure every brick, every beam, and every block was laid just right...

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“Collateral damage,” Rahim Khan said. “You don’t want to know, Amir jan, what it was like sifting through the rubble of that orphanage. There were body parts of children...”

“So when the Taliban came...”

“They were heroes,” Rahim Khan said. “Peace at last.”

“Yes, hope is a strange thing. Peace at last. But at what price?” A violent coughing fit gripped Rahim Khan and rocked his gaunt body back and forth. When he spat into his handkerchief, it immediately stained red. I thought that was as good a time as any to address the elephant sweating with us in the tiny room.

“How are you?” I asked. “I mean really, how are you?”

“Dying, actually,” he said in a gurgling voice. Another round of coughing. More blood on the handkerchief. He wiped his mouth, blotted his sweaty brow from one wasted temple to the other with his sleeve, and gave me a quick glance. When he nodded, I knew he had read the next question on my face. “Not long,” he breathed.

“How long?”

He shrugged. Coughed again. “I don’t think I’ll see the end of this summer,” he said.

“Let me take you home with me. I can find you a good doctor. They’re coming up with new treatments all the time. There are new drugs and experimental treatments, we could enroll you in one...” I was rambling and I knew it. But it was better than crying, which I was probably going to do anyway.

He let out a chuff of laughter, revealed missing lower incisors. It was the most tired laughter I’d ever heard. “I see America has infused you with the optimism that has made her so great. That’s very good. We’re a melancholic people, we Afghans, aren’t we?

Often, we wallow too much in ghamkhori and self-pity. We give in to loss, to suffering, accept it as a fact of life, even see it as necessary. Zendagi migzara, we say, life goes on. But I am not surrendering to fate here, I am being pragmatic. I have seen several good doctors here and they have given the same answer. I trust them and believe them.

There is such a thing as God’s will.”

“There is only what you do and what you don’t do,” I said.

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Rahim Khan laughed. “You sounded like your father just now. I miss him so much. But it is God’s will, Amir jan. It really is.” He paused. “Besides, there’s another reason I asked you to come here. I wanted to see you before I go, yes, but something else too.”

“Anything.”

“You know all those years I lived in your father’s house after you left?”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t alone for all of them. Hassan lived there with me.”

“Hassan,” I said. When was the last time I had spoken his name? Those thorny old barbs of guilt bore into me once more, as if speaking his name had broken a spell, set them free to torment me anew. Suddenly the air in Rahim Khan’s little flat was too thick, too hot, too rich with the smell of the street.

“I thought about writing you and telling you before, but I wasn’t sure you wanted to know. Was I wrong?”

The truth was no. The lie was yes. I settled for something in between. “I don’t know.”

He coughed another patch of blood into the handkerchief. When he bent his head to spit, I saw honey-crusted sores on his scalp. “I brought you here because I am going to ask something of you. I’m going to ask you to do something for me. But before I do, I want to tell you about Hassan. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I murmured.

“I want to tell you about him. I want to tell you everything. You will listen?”

I nodded.

Then Rahim Khan sipped some more tea. Rested his head against the wall and spoke.

SIXTEEN

There were a lot of reasons why I went to Hazarajat to find Hassan in 1986. The biggest one, Allah forgive me, was that I was lonely. By then, most of my friends and relatives

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had either been killed or had escaped the country to Pakistan or Iran. I barely knew anyone in Kabul anymore, the city where I had lived my entire life. Everybody had fled. I would take a walk in the Karteh Parwan section--where the melon vendors used to hang out in the old days, you remember that spot?--and I wouldn’t recognize anyone there.

No one to greet, no one to sit down with for chai, no one to share stories with, just Roussi soldiers patrolling the streets. So eventually, I stopped going out to the city. I would spend my days in your father’s house, up in the study, reading your mother’s old books, listening to the news, watching the communist propaganda on television. Then I would pray natnaz, cook something, eat, read some more, pray again, and go to bed. I would rise in the morning, pray, do it all over again.

And with my arthritis, it was getting harder for me to maintain the house. My knees and back were always aching--I would get up in the morning and it would take me at least an hour to shake the stiffness from my joints, especially in the wintertime. I did not want to let your father’s house go to rot; we had all had many good times in that house, so many memories, Amir jan. It was not right--your father had designed that house himself; it had meant so much to him, and besides, I had promised him I would care for it when he and you left for Pakistan. Now it was just me and the house and... I did my best. I tried to water the trees every few days, cut the lawn, tend to the flowers, fix things that needed fixing, but, even then, I was not a young man anymore.

But even so, I might have been able to manage. At least for a while longer. But when news of your father’s death reached me... for the first time, I felt a terrible loneliness in that house. An unbearable emptiness.

So one day, I fueled up the Buick and drove up to Hazarajat. I remembered that, after Ali dismissed himself from the house, your father told me he and Hassan had moved to a small village just outside Bamiyan. Ali had a cousin there as I recalled. I had no idea if Hassan would still be there, if anyone would even know of him or his whereabouts. After all, it had been ten years since Ali and Hassan had left your father’s house. Hassan would have been a grown man in 1986, twenty-two, twenty-three years old. If he was even alive, that is--the Shorawi, may they rot in hell for what they did to our watan, killed so many of our young men. I don’t have to tell you that.

But, with the grace of God, I found him there. It took very little searching--all I had to do was ask a few questions in Bamiyan and people pointed me to his village. I do not even recall its name, or whether it even had one. But I remember it was a scorching summer day and I was driving up a rutted dirt road, nothing on either side but sunbaked bushes, gnarled, spiny tree trunks, and dried grass like pale straw. I passed a dead donkey rotting on the side of the road. And then I turned a corner and, right in the middle of that barren land, I saw a cluster of mud houses, beyond them nothing but broad sky and mountains like jagged teeth.

The people in Bamiyan had told me I would find him easily--he lived in the only house in the village that had a walled garden. The mud wall, short and pocked with holes, enclosed the tiny house--which was really not much more than a glorified hut. Barefoot children were playing on the street, kicking a ragged tennis ball with a stick, and they

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stared when I pulled up and killed the engine. I knocked on the wooden door and stepped through into a yard that had very little in it save for a parched strawberry patch and a bare lemon tree. There was a tandoor in the corner in the shadow of an acacia tree and I saw a man squatting beside it. He was placing dough on a large wooden spatula and slapping it against the walls of the _tandoor_. He dropped the dough when he saw me. I had to make him stop kissing my hands.

“Let me look at you,” I said. He stepped away. He was so tall now--I stood on my toes and still just came up to his chin. The Bamiyan sun had toughened his skin, and turned it several shades darker than I remembered, and he had lost a few of his front teeth.

There were sparse strands of hair on his chin. Other than that, he had those same narrow green eyes, that scar on his upper lip, that round face, that affable smile. You would have recognized him, Amir jan. I am sure of it.

We went inside. There was a young light-skinned Hazara woman, sewing a shawl in a corner of the room. She was visibly expecting. “This is my wife, Rahim Khan,” Hassan said proudly. “Her name is Farzana jan.” She was a shy woman, so courteous she spoke in a voice barely higher than a whisper and she would not raise her pretty hazel eyes to meet my gaze. But the way she was looking at Hassan, he might as well have been sitting on the throne at the _Arg_.

“When is the baby coming?” I said after we all settled around the adobe room. There was nothing in the room, just a frayed rug, a few dishes, a pair of mattresses, and a lantern.

“_Inshallah_, this winter,” Hassan said. “I am praying for a boy to carry on my father’s name.”

“Speaking of Ali, where is he?”

Hassan dropped his gaze. He told me that Ali and his cousin--who had owned the house--had been killed by a land mine two years before, just outside of Bamiyan. A land mine. Is there a more Afghan way of dying, Amir jan? And for some crazy reason, I became absolutely certain that it had been Ali’s right leg--his twisted polio leg--that had finally betrayed him and stepped on that land mine. I was deeply saddened to hear Ali had died. Your father and I grew up together, as you know, and Ali had been with him as long as I could remember. I remember when we were all little, the year Ali got polio and almost died. Your father would walk around the house all day crying.

Farzana made us shorwa with beans, turnips, and potatoes. We washed our hands and dipped fresh _naan_ from the tandoor into the shorwa--it was the best meal I had had in months. It was then that I asked Hassan to move to Kabul with me. I told him about the house, how I could not care for it by myself anymore. I told him I would pay him well, that he and his _khanum_ would be comfortable. They looked to each other and did not say anything. Later, after we had washed our hands and Farzana had served us

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grapes, Hassan said the village was his home now; he and Farzana had made a life for themselves there.

“And Bamiyan is so close. We know people there. Forgive me, Rahim Khan. I pray you understand.”

“Of course,” I said. “You have nothing to apologize for. I understand.”

It was midway through tea after shorwa that Hassan asked about you. I told him you were in America, but that I did not know much more. Hassan had so many questions about you. Had you married? Did you have children? How tall were you? Did you still fly kites and go to the cinema? Were you happy? He said he had befriended an old Farsi teacher in Bamiyan who had taught him to read and write. If he wrote you a letter, would I pass it on to you? And did I think you would write back? I told him what I knew of you from the few phone conversations I had had with your father, but mostly I did not know how to answer him. Then he asked me about your father. When I told him, Hassan buried his face in his hands and broke into tears. He wept like a child for the rest of that night.

They insisted that I spend the night there. Farzana fixed a cot for me and left me a glass of well water in case I got thirsty. All night, I heard her whispering to Hassan, and heard him sobbing.

In the morning, Hassan told me he and Farzana had decided to move to Kabul with me.

“I should not have come here,” I said. “You were right, Hassan jan. You have a zendagi, a life here. It was presumptuous of me to just show up and ask you to drop everything. It is me who needs to be forgiven.”

“We don’t have that much to drop, Rahim Khan,” Hassan said. His eyes were still red and puffy. “We’ll go with you. We’ll help you take care of the house.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

He nodded and dropped his head. “Agha sahib was like my second father... God give him peace.”

They piled their things in the center of a few worn rags and tied the corners together.

We loaded the bundle into the Buick. Hassan stood in the threshold of the house and held the Koran as we all kissed it and passed under it. Then we left for Kabul. I remember as I was pulling away, Hassan turned to take a last look at their home.

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When we got to Kabul, I discovered that Hassan had no intention of moving into the house. “But all these rooms are empty, Hassan jan. No one is going to live in them,” I said.

But he would not. He said it was a matter of ihtiram, a matter of respect. He and Farzana moved their things into the hut in the backyard, where he was born. I pleaded for them to move into one of the guest bedrooms upstairs, but Hassan would hear nothing of it. “What will Amir agha think?” he said to me. “What will he think when he comes back to Kabul after the war and finds that I have assumed his place in the house?” Then, in mourning for your father, Hassan wore black for the next forty days.

I did not want them to, but the two of them did all the cooking, all the cleaning. Hassan tended to the flowers in the garden, soaked the roots, picked off yellowing leaves, and planted rosebushes. He painted the walls. In the house, he swept rooms no one had slept in for years, and cleaned bathrooms no one had bathed in. Like he was preparing the house for someone’s return. Do you remember the wall behind the row of corn your father had planted, Amir jan? What did you and Hassan call it, “the Wall of Ailing Corn”?

A rocket destroyed a whole section of that wall in the middle of the night early that fall.

Hassan rebuilt the wall with his own hands, brick by brick, until it stood’ whole again. I do not know what I would have done if he had not been there. Then late that fall, Farzana gave birth to a stillborn baby girl. Hassan kissed the baby’s lifeless face, and we buried her in the backyard, near the sweetbrier bushes. We covered the little mound with leaves from the poplar trees. I said a prayer for her. Farzana stayed in the hut all day and wailed--it is a heartbreaking sound, Amir jan, the wailing of a mother. I pray to Allah you never hear it.

Outside the walls of that house, there was a war raging. But the three of us, in your father’s house, we made our own little haven from it. My vision started going by the late 1980s, so I had Hassan read me your mother’s books. We would sit in the foyer, by the stove, and Hassan would read me from _Masnawi_ or _Khayyám_, as Farzana cooked in the kitchen. And every morning, Hassan placed a flower on the little mound by the sweetbrier bushes.

In early 1990, Farzana became pregnant again. It was that same year, in the middle of the summer, that a woman covered in a sky blue burqa knocked on the front gates one morning. When I walked up to the gates, she was swaying on her feet, like she was too weak to even stand. I asked her what she wanted, but she would not answer.

“Who are you?” I said. But she just collapsed right there in the driveway. I yelled for Hassan and he helped me carry her into the house, to the living room. We lay her on the sofa and took off her burqa. Beneath it, we found a toothless woman with stringy graying hair and sores on her arms. She looked like she had not eaten for days. But the worst of it by far was her face. Someone had taken a knife to it and... Amir jan, the slashes cut this way and that way. One of the cuts went from cheekbone to hairline and it had not spared her left eye on the way. It was grotesque. I patted her brow with a wet cloth and she opened her eyes. “Where is Hassan?” she whispered.

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“I’m right here,” Hassan said. He took her hand and squeezed it.

Her good eye rolled to him. “I have walked long and far to see if you are as beautiful in the flesh as you are in my dreams. And you are. Even more.” She pulled his hand to her scarred face. “Smile for me. Please.”

Hassan did and the old woman wept. “You smiled coming out of me, did anyone ever tell you? And I wouldn’t even hold you. Allah forgive me, I wouldn’t even hold you.”

None of us had seen Sanaubar since she had eloped with a band of singers and dancers in 1964, just after she had given birth to Hassan. You never saw her, Amir, but in her youth, she was a vision. She had a dimpled smile and a walk that drove men crazy. No one who passed her on the street, be it a man or a woman, could look at her only once. And now...

Hassan dropped her hand and bolted out of the house. I went after him, but he was too fast. I saw him running up the hill where you two used to play, his feet kicking up plumes of dust. I let him go. I sat with Sanaubar all day as the sky went from bright blue to purple. Hassan still had not come back when night fell and moonlight bathed the clouds.

Sanaubar cried that coming back had been a mistake, maybe even a worse one than leaving. But I made her stay. Hassan would return, I knew.

He came back the next morning, looking tired and weary, like he had not slept all night.

He took Sanaubar’s hand in both of his and told her she could cry if she wanted to but she needn’t, she was home now, he said, home with her family. He touched the scars on her face, and ran his hand through her hair.

Hassan and Farzana nursed her back to health. They fed her and washed her clothes. I gave her one of the guest rooms upstairs. Sometimes, I would look out the window into the yard and watch Hassan and his mother kneeling together, picking tomatoes or trimming a rosebush, talking. They were catching up on all the lost years, I suppose. As far as I know, he never asked where she had been or why she had left and she never told. I guess some stories do not need telling.

It was Sanaubar who delivered Hassan’s son that winter of 1990. It had not started snowing yet, but the winter winds were blowing through the yards, bending the flowerbeds and rustling the leaves. I remember Sanaubar came out of the hut holding her grandson, had him wrapped in a wool blanket. She stood beaming under a dull gray sky tears streaming down her cheeks, the needle-cold wind blowing her hair, and clutching that baby in her arms like she never wanted to let go. Not this time. She handed him to Hassan and he handed him to me and I sang the prayer of Ayat-ul-kursi in that little boy’s ear.

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They named him Sohrab, after Hassan’s favorite hero from the _Shahnamah_, as you know, Amir jan. He was a beautiful little boy, sweet as sugar, and had the same temperament as his father. You should have seen Sanaubar with that baby, Amir jan.

He became the center of her existence. She sewed clothes for him, built him toys from scraps of wood, rags, and dried grass. When he caught a fever, she stayed up all night, and fasted for three days. She burned isfand for him on a skillet to cast out nazar, the evil eye. By the time Sohrab was two, he was calling her Sasa. The two of them were inseparable.

She lived to see him turn four, and then, one morning, she just did not wake up. She looked calm, at peace, like she did not mind dying now. We buried her in the cemetery on the hill, the one by the pomegranate tree, and I said a prayer for her too. The loss was hard on Hassan--it always hurts more to have and lose than to not have in the first place. But it was even harder on little Sohrab. He kept walking around the house, looking for Sasa, but you know how children are, they forget so quickly.

By then--that would have been 1995--the Shorawi were defeated and long gone and Kabul belonged to Massoud, Rabbani, and the Mujahedin. The infighting between the factions was fierce and no one knew if they would live to see the end of the day. Our ears became accustomed to the whistle of falling shells, to the rumble of gunfire, our eyes familiar with the sight of men digging bodies out of piles of rubble. Kabul in those days, Amir jan, was as close as you could get to that proverbial hell on earth. Allah was kind to us, though. The Wazir Akbar Khan area was not attacked as much, so we did not have it as bad as some of the other neighborhoods.

On those days when the rocket fire eased up a bit and the gunfighting was light, Hassan would take Sohrab to the zoo to see Marjan the lion, or to the cinema. Hassan taught him how to shoot the slingshot, and, later, by the time he was eight, Sohrab had become deadly with that thing: He could stand on the terrace and hit a pinecone propped on a pail halfway across the yard. Hassan taught him to read and write--his son was not going to grow up illiterate like he had. I grew very attached to that little boy--I had seen him take his first step, heard him utter his first word. I bought children’s books for Sohrab from the bookstore by Cinema Park--they have destroyed that too now--and Sohrab read them as quickly as I could get them to him. He reminded me of you, how you loved to read when you were little, Amir jan. Sometimes, I read to him at night, played riddles with him, taught him card tricks. I miss him terribly.

In the wintertime, Hassan took his son kite running. There were not nearly as many kite tournaments as in the old days--no one felt safe outside for too long--but there were still a few scattered tournaments. Hassan would prop Sohrab on his shoulders and they would go trotting through the streets, running kites, climbing trees where kites had dropped. You remember, Amir Jan, what a good kite runner Hassan was? He was still just as good. At the end of winter, Hassan and Sohrab would hang the kites they had run all winter on the walls of the main hallway. They would put them up like paintings.

I told you how we all celebrated in 1996 when the Taliban rolled in and put an end to the daily fighting. I remember coming home that night and finding Hassan in the kitchen,

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listening to the radio. He had a sober look in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong, and he just shook his head. “God help the Hazaras now, Rahim Khan sahib,” he said.

“The war is over, Hassan,” I said. “There’s going to be peace, _Inshallah_, and happiness and calm. No more rockets, no more killing, no more funerals!” But he just turned off the radio and asked if he could get me anything before he went to bed.

A few weeks later, the Taliban banned kite fighting. And two years later, in 1998, they massacred the Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif.

SEVENTEEN

Rahim Khan slowly uncrossed his legs and leaned against the bare wall in the wary, deliberate way of a man whose every movement triggers spikes of pain. Outside, a donkey was braying and some one was shouting something in Urdu. The sun was beginning to set, glittering red through the cracks between the ramshackle buildings.

It hit me again, the enormity of what I had done that winter and that following summer.

The names rang in my head: Hassan, Sohrab, Ali, Farzana, and Sanaubar. Hearing Rahim Khan speak Ali’s name was like finding an old dusty music box that hadn’t been opened in years; the melody began to play immediately: Who did you eat today, Babalu? Who did you eat, you slant-eyed Babalu? I tried to conjure Ali’s frozen face, to really see his tranquil eyes, but time can be a greedy thing--sometimes it steals all the details for itself.

“Is Hassan still in that house now?” I asked.

Rahim Khan raised the teacup to his parched lips and took a sip. He then fished an envelope from the breast pocket of his vest and handed it to me. “For you.”

I tore the sealed envelope. Inside, I found a Polaroid photograph and a folded letter. I stared at the photograph for a full minute.

A tall man dressed in a white turban and a green-striped chapan stood with a little boy in front of a set of wrought-iron gates. Sunlight slanted in from the left, casting a shadow on half of his rotund face. He was squinting and smiling at the camera, showing a pair of missing front teeth. Even in this blurry Polaroid, the man in the chapan exuded a sense of self-assuredness, of ease. It was in the way he stood, his feet slightly apart, his arms comfortably crossed on his chest, his head titled a little toward the sun. Mostly, it was in the way he smiled. Looking at the photo, one might have concluded that this was a man who thought the world had been good to him. Rahim Khan was right: I would have recognized him if I had bumped into him on the street. The little boy stood bare foot, one

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arm wrapped around the man’s thigh, his shaved head resting against his father’s hip.

He too was grinning and squinting.

I unfolded the letter. It was written in Farsi. No dots were omitted, no crosses forgotten, no words blurred together--the handwriting was almost childlike in its neatness. I began to read:

In the name of Allah the most beneficent, the most merciful, Amir agha, with my deepest respects,

Farzana jan, Sohrab, and I pray that this latest letter finds you in good health and in the light of Allah’s good graces. Please offer my warmest thanks to Rahim Khan sahib for carrying it to you. I am hopeful that one day I will hold one of your letters in my hands and read of your life in America. Perhaps a photograph of you will even grace our eyes.

I have told much about you to Farzana jan and Sohrab, about us growing up together and playing games and running in the streets. They laugh at the stories of all the mischief you and I used to cause!

Amir agha,

Alas the Afghanistan of our youth is long dead. Kindness is gone from the land and you cannot escape the killings. Always the killings. In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadium, in the markets, it is a part of our lives here, Amir agha. The savages who rule our watan don’t care about human decency. The other day, I accompanied Farzana Jan to the bazaar to buy some potatoes and _naan_. She asked the vendor how much the potatoes cost, but he did not hear her, I think he had a deaf ear. So she asked louder and suddenly a young Talib ran over and hit her on the thighs with his wooden stick. He struck her so hard she fell down. He was screaming at her and cursing and saying the Ministry of Vice and Virtue does not allow women to speak loudly. She had a large purple bruise on her leg for days but what could I do except stand and watch my wife get beaten? If I fought, that dog would have surely put a bullet in me, and gladly! Then what would happen to my Sohrab? The streets are full enough already of hungry orphans and every day I thank Allah that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan.

I wish you could see Sohrab. He is a good boy. Rahim Khan sahib and I have taught him to read and write so he does not grow up stupid like his father. And can he shoot with that slingshot! I take Sohrab around Kabul sometimes and buy him candy. There is still a monkey man in Shar-e Nau and if we run into him, I pay him to make his monkey dance for Sohrab. You should see how he laughs! The two of us often walk up to the cemetery on the hill. Do you remember how we used to sit under the pomegranate tree there and read from the _Shahnamah_? The droughts have dried the hill and the tree hasn’t borne fruit in years, but Sohrab and I still sit under its shade and I read to him from the _Shahnamah_. It is not necessary to tell you that his favorite part is the one with his namesake, Rostam and Sohrab. Soon he will be able to read from the book himself. I am a very proud and very lucky father.

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Amir agha,

Rahim Khan sahib is quite ill. He coughs all day and I see blood on his sleeve when he wipes his mouth. He has lost much weight and I wish he would eat a little of the shorwa and rice that Farzana Jan cooks for him. But he only takes a bite or two and even that I think is out of courtesy to Farzana jan. I am so worried about this dear man I pray for him every day. He is leaving for Pakistan in a few days to consult some doctors there and, _Inshallah_, he will return with good news. But in my heart I fear for him. Farzana jan and I have told little Sohrab that Rahim Khan sahib is going to be well. What can we do? He is only ten and he adores Rahim Khan sahib. They have grown so close to each other. Rahim Khan sahib used to take him to the bazaar for balloons and biscuits but he is too weak for that now.

I have been dreaming a lot lately, Amir agha. Some of them are nightmares, like hanged corpses rotting in soccer fields with bloodred grass. I wake up from those short of breath and sweaty. Mostly, though, I dream of good things, and praise Allah for that. I dream that Rahim Khan sahib will be well. I dream that my son will grow up to be a good person, a free person, and an important person. I dream that lawla flowers will bloom in the streets of Kabul again and rubab music will play in the samovar houses and kites will fly in the skies. And I dream that someday you will return to Kabul to revisit the land of our childhood. If you do, you will find an old faithful friend waiting for you.

May Allah be with you always.

-Hassan

I read the letter twice. I folded the note and looked at the photograph for another minute.

I pocketed both. “How is he?” I asked.

“That letter was written six months ago, a few days before I left for Peshawar,” Rahim Khan said. “I took the Polaroid the day before I left. A month after I arrived in Peshawar, I received a telephone call from one of my neighbors in Kabul. He told me this story: Soon after I took my leave, a rumor spread that a Hazara family was living alone in the big house in Wazir Akbar Khan, or so the Taliban claim. A pair of Talib officials came to investigate and interrogated Hassan. They accused him of lying when Hassan told them he was living with me even though many of the neighbors, including the one who called me, supported Hassan’s story. The Talibs said he was a liar and a thief like all Hazaras and ordered him to get his family out of the house by sundown. Hassan protested. But my neighbor said the Talibs were looking at the big house like--how did he say it?--yes, like ‘wolves looking at a flock of sheep.’ They told Hassan they would be moving in to supposedly keep it safe until I return. Hassan protested again. So they took him to the street--”

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“No,” I breathed.

“--and order him to kneel--”

“No. God, no.”

“--and shot him in the back of the head.”

“--Farzana came screaming and attacked them--”

“No.”

“--shot her too. Self-defense, they claimed later--”

But all I could manage was to whisper “No. No. No” over and over again.

I KEPT THINKING OF THAT DAY in 1974, in the hospital room, Just after Hassan’s harelip surgery. Baba, Rahim Khan, Ali, and I had huddled around Hassan’s bed, watched him examine his new lip in a handheld mirror. Now everyone in that room was either dead or dying. Except for me.

Then I saw something else: a man dressed in a herringbone vest pressing the muzzle of his Kalashnikov to the back of Hassan’s head. The blast echoes through the street of my father’s house. Hassan slumps to the asphalt, his life of unrequited loyalty drifting from him like the windblown kites he used to chase.

“The Taliban moved into the house,” Rahim Khan said. “The pretext was that they had evicted a trespasser. Hassan’s and Farzana’s murders were dismissed as a case of self-defense. No one said a word about it. Most of it was fear of the Taliban, I think. But no one was going to risk anything for a pair of Hazara servants.”

“What did they do with Sohrab?” I asked. I felt tired, drained. A coughing fit gripped Rahim Khan and went on for a long time. When he finally looked up, his face was flushed and his eyes bloodshot. “I heard he’s in an orphanage somewhere in Karteh Seh. Amir jan--” then he was coughing again. When he stopped, he looked older than a few moments before, like he was aging with each coughing fit. “Amir jan, I summoned you here because I wanted to see you before I die, but that’s not all.”

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I said nothing. I think I already knew what he was going to say.

“I want you to go to KabuL I want you to bring Sohrab here,” he said.

I struggled to find the right words. I’d barely had time to deal with the fact that Hassan was dead.

“Please hear me. I know an American pair here in Peshawar, a husband and wife named Thomas and Betty Caldwell. They are Christians and they run a small charity organization that they manage with private donations. Mostly they house and feed Afghan children who have lost their parents. I have seen the place. It’s clean and safe, the children are well cared for, and Mr. and Mrs. Caldwell are kind people. They have already told me that Sohrab would be welcome to their home and--”

“Rahim Khan, you can’t be serious.”

“Children are fragile, Amir Jan. Kabul is already full of broken children and I don’t want Sohrab to become another.”

“Rahim Khan, I don’t want to go to Kabul. I can’t!” I said.

“Sohrab is a gifted little boy. We can give him a new life here, new hope, with people who would love him. Thomas agha is a

good man and Betty khanum is so kind, you should see how she treats those orphans.”

“Why me? Why can’t you pay someone here to go? I’ll pay for it if it’s a matter of money.”

“It isn’t about money, Amir!” Rahim Khan roared. “I’m a dying man and I will not be insulted! It has never been about money with me, you know that. And why you? I think we both know why it has to be you, don’t we?”

I didn’t want to understand that comment, but I did. I understood it all too well. “I have a wife in America, a home, a career, and a family. Kabul is a dangerous place, you know that, and you’d have me risk everything for...“ I stopped.

“You know,” Rahim Khan said, “one time, when you weren’t around, your father and I were talking. And you know how he always worried about you in those days. I remember he said to me, ‘Rahim, a boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.’ I wonder, is that what you’ve become?”

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I dropped my eyes.

“What I’m asking from you is to grant an old man his dying wish,” he said gravely.

He had gambled whh that comment. Played his best card. Or so I thought then. His words hung in limbo between us, but at least he’d known what to say. I was still searching for the right words, and I was the writer in the room. Finally, I settled for this:

“Maybe Baba was right.”

“I’m sorry you think that, Amir.”

I couldn’t look at him. “And you don’t?”

“If I did, I would not have asked you to come here.”

I toyed with my wedding ring. “You’ve always thought too highly of me, Rahim Khan.”

“And you’ve always been far too hard on yourself.” He hesitated. “But there’s something else. Something you don’t know.”

“Please, Rahim Khan--”

“Sanaubar wasn’t Ali’s first wife.”

Now I looked up.

“He was married once before, to a Hazara woman from the Jaghori area. This was long before you were born. They were married for three years.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“She left him childless after three years and married a man in Khost. She bore him three daughters. That’s what I am trying to tell you.”

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I began to see where he was going. But I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. I had a good life in California, pretty Victorian home with a peaked roof, a good marriage, a promising writing career, in-laws who loved me. I didn’t need any of this shit.

“Ali was sterile,” Rahim Khan said.

“No he wasn’t. He and Sanaubar had Hassan, didn’t they? They had Hassan--”

“No they didn’t,” Rahim Khan said.

“Yes they did!”

“No they didn’t, Amir.”

“Then who--”

“I think you know who.”

I felt like a man sliding down a steep cliff, clutching at shrubs and tangles of brambles and coming up empty-handed. The room was swooping up and down, swaying side to side. “Did Hassan know?” I said through lips that didn’t feel like my own. Rahim Khan closed his eyes. Shook his head.

“You bastards,” I muttered. Stood up. “You goddamn bastards!” I screamed. “All of you, you bunch of lying goddamn bastards!”

“Please sit down,” Rahim Khan said.

“How could you hide this from me? From him?” I bellowed. “Please think, Amir Jan. It was a shameful situation. People would talk. All that a man had back then, all that he was, was his honor, his name, and if people talked... We couldn’t tell anyone, surely you can see that.” He reached for me, but I shed his hand. Headed for the door.

“Amir jan, please don’t leave.”

I opened the door and turned to him. “Why? What can you possibly say to me? I’m thirty-eight years old and I’ve Just found out my whole life is one big fucking lie! What can you possibly say to make things better? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing!”

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And with that, I stormed out of the apartment.

EIGHTEEN

The sun had almost set and left the sky swathed in smothers of purple and red. I walked down the busy, narrow street that led away from Rahim Khan’s building. The street was a noisy lane in a maze of alleyways choked with pedestrians, bicycles, and rickshaws.

Billboards hung at its corners, advertising Coca-Cola and cigarettes; Hollywood movie posters displayed sultry actresses dancing with handsome, brown-skinned men in fields of marigolds.

I walked into a smoky little samovar house and ordered a cup of tea. I tilted back on the folding chair’s rear legs and rubbed my face. That feeling of sliding toward a fall was fading. But in its stead, I felt like a man who awakens in his own house and finds all the furniture rearranged, so that every familiar nook and cranny looks foreign now.

Disoriented, he has to reevaluate his surroundings, reorient himself.

How could I have been so blind? The signs had been there for me to see all along; they came flying back at me now: Baba hiring Dr. Kumar to fix Hassan’s harelip. Baba never missing Hassan’s birthday. I remembered the day we were planting tulips, when I had asked Baba if he’d ever consider getting new servants. Hassan’s not going anywhere, he’d barked. He’s staying right here with us, where he belongs. This is his home and we’re his family. He had wept, wept, when Ali announced he and Hassan were leaving us.

The waiter placed a teacup on the table before me. Where the table’s legs crossed like an X, there was a ring of brass balls, each walnut-sized. One of the balls had come unscrewed. I stooped and tightened it. I wished I could fix my own life as easily. I took a gulp of the blackest tea I’d had in years and tried to think of Soraya, of the general and Khala Jamila, of the novel that needed finishing. I tried to watch the traffic bolting by on the street, the people milling in and out of the little sweetshops. Tried to listen to the Qawali music playing on the transistor radio at the next table. Anything. But I kept seeing Baba on the night of my graduation, sitting in the Ford he’d just given me, smelling of beer and saying, I wish Hassan had been with us today.

How could he have lied to me all those years? To Hassan? He had sat me on his lap when I was little, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, There is only one sin. And that is theft... When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. Hadn’t he said those words to me? And now, fifteen years after I’d buried him, I was learning that Baba had been a thief. And a thief of the worst kind, because the things he’d stolen had been sacred: from me the right to know I had a brother, from Hassan his identity, and from Ali his honor. His nang. His namoos.

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The questions kept coming at me: How had Baba brought himself to look Ali in the eye?

How had Ali lived in that house, clay in and day out, knowing he had been dishonored by his master in the single worst way an Afghan man can be dishonored?

And how was I going to reconcile this new image of Baba with the one that had been imprinted on my mind for so long, that of him in his old brown suit, hobbling up the Taheris’ driveway to ask for Soraya’s hand?

Here is another cliché my creative writing teacher would have scoffed at; like father, like son. But it was true, wasn’t it? As it turned out, Baba and I were more alike than I’d ever known. We had both betrayed the people who would have given their lives for us. And with that came this realization: that Rahim Khan had summoned me here to atone not just for my sins but for Baba’s too.

Rahim Khan said I’d always been too hard on myself. But I wondered. True, I hadn’t made Ali step on the land mine, and I hadn’t brought the Taliban to the house to shoot Hassan. But I had driven Hassan and Ali out of the house. Was it too far-fetched to imagine that things might have turned out differently if I hadn’t? Maybe Baba would have brought them along to America. Maybe Hassan would have had a home of his own now, a job, a family, a life in a country where no one cared that he was a Hazara, where most people didn’t even know what a Hazara was. Maybe not. But maybe so.

I can’t go to Kabul, I had said to Rahim Khan. I have a wife in America, a home, a career, and a family. But how could I pack up and go back home when my actions may have cost Hassan a chance at those very same things?

I wished Rahim Khan hadn’t called me. I wished he had let me live on in my oblivion.

But he had called me. And what Rahim Khan revealed to me changed things. Made me see how my entire life, long before the winter of 1975, dating back to when that singing Hazara woman was still nursing me, had been a cycle of lies, betrayals, and secrets.

There is a way to be good again, he’d said.

A way to end the cycle.

With a little boy. An orphan. Hassan’s son. Somewhere in Kabul.

ON THE RICKSHAW RIDE back to Rahim Khan’s apartment, I remembered Baba saying that my problem was that someone had always done my fighting for me. I was thirty-eight flow. My hair was receding and streaked with gray, and lately I’d traced little crow’s-feet etched around the corners of my eyes. I was older now, but maybe not yet

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too old to start doing my own fighting. Baba had lied about a lot of things as it turned out but he hadn’t lied about that.

I looked at the round face in the Polaroid again, the way the sun fell on it. My brother’s face. Hassan had loved me once, loved me in a way that no one ever had or ever would again. He was gone now, but a little part of him lived on. It was in Kabul.

Waiting.

I FOUND RAHIM KHAN praying _namaz_ in a corner of the room. He was just a dark silhouette bowing eastward against a bloodred sky. I waited for him to finish.

Then I told him I was going to Kabul. Told him to call the Caldwells in the morning.

“I’ll pray for you, Amir jan,” he said.

NINETEEN

Again, the car sickness. By the time we drove past the bulletriddled sign that read THE

KHYBER PASS WELCOMES YOU, my mouth had begun to water. Something inside my stomach churned and twisted. Farid, my driver, threw me a cold glance. There was no empathy in his eyes.

“Can we roll down the window?” I asked.

He lit a cigarette and tucked it between the remaining two fingers of his left hand, the one resting on the steering wheel. Keeping his black eyes on the road, he stooped forward, picked up the screwdriver lying between his feet, and handed it to me. I stuck it in the small hole in the door where the handle belonged and turned it to roll down my window.

Farid gave me another dismissive look, this one with a hint of barely suppressed animosity, and went back to smoking his cigarette. He hadn’t said more than a dozen words since we’d departed from Jamrud Fort.

“Tashakor,” I muttered. I leaned my head out of the window and let the cold midafternoon air rush past my face. The drive through the tribal lands of the Khyber Pass, winding between cliffs of shale and limestone, was just as I remembered it--Baba and I had driven through the broken terrain back in 1974. The arid, imposing mountains sat along deep gorges and soared to jagged peaks. Old fortresses, adobe-walled and

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crumbling, topped the crags. I tried to keep my eyes glued to the snowcapped Hindu Kush on the north side, but each time my stomach settled even a bit, the truck skidded around yet another turn, rousing a fresh wave of nausea.

“Try a lemon.”

“What?”

“Lemon. Good for the sickness,” Farid said. “I always bring one for this drive.”

“Nay, thank you,” I said. The mere thought of adding acidity to my stomach stirred more nausea. Farid snickered. “It’s not fancy like American medicine, I know, just an old remedy my mother taught me.”

I regretted blowing my chance to warm up to him. “In that case, maybe you should give me some.”

He grabbed a paper bag from the backseat and plucked a half lemon out of it. I bit down on it, waited a few minutes. “You were right. I feel better,” I lied. As an Afghan, I knew it was better to be miserable than rude. I forced a weak smile.

“Old watani trick, no need for fancy medicine,” he said. His tone bordered on the surly.

He flicked the ash off his cigarette and gave himself a self-satisfied look in the rearview mirror. He was a Tajik, a lanky, dark man with a weather-beaten face, narrow shoulders, and a long neck punctuated by a protruding Adam’s apple that only peeked from behind his beard when he turned his head. He was dressed much as I was, though I suppose it was really the other way around: a rough-woven wool blanket wrapped over a gray pirhan-tumban and a vest. On his head, he wore a brown pakol, tilted slightly to one side, like the Tajik hero Ahmad Shah Massoud--referred to by Tajiks as “the Lion of Panjsher.”

It was Rahim Khan who had introduced me to Farid in Peshawar. He told me Farid was twenty-nine, though he had the wary, lined face of a man twenty years older. He was born in Mazar-i-Sharif and lived there until his father moved the family to Jalalabad when Farid was ten. At fourteen, he and his father had joined the jihad against the Shorawi. They had fought in the Panjsher Valley for two years until helicopter gunfire had torn the older man to pieces. Farid had two wives and five children. “He used to have seven,” Rahim Khan said with a rueful look, but he’d lost his two youngest girls a few years earlier in a land mine blast just outside Jalalabad, the same explosion that had severed toes from his feet and three fingers from his left hand. After that, he had moved his wives and children to Peshawar.

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“Checkpoint,” Farid grumbled. I slumped a little in my seat, arms folded across my chest, forgetting for a moment about the nausea. But I needn’t have worried. Two Pakistani militia approached our dilapidated Land Cruiser, took a cursory glance inside, and waved us on.

Farid was first on- the list of preparations Rahim Khan and I made, a list that included exchanging dollars for Kaldar and Afghani bills, my garment and pakol--ironically, I’d never worn either when I’d actually lived in Afghanistan--the Polaroid of Hassan and Sohrab, and, finally, perhaps the most important item: an artificial beard, black and chest length, Shari’a friendly--or at least the Taliban version of Shari’a. Rahim Khan knew of a fellow in Peshawar who specialized in weaving them, sometimes for Western journalists who covered the war.

Rahim Khan had wanted me to stay with him a few more days, to plan more thoroughly.

But I knew I had to leave as soon as possible. I was afraid I’d change my mind. I was afraid I’d deliberate, ruminate, agonize, rationalize, and talk myself into not going. I was afraid the appeal of my life in America would draw me back, that I would wade back into that great, big river and let myself forget, let the things I had learned these last few days sink to the bottom. I was afraid that I’d let the waters carry me away from what I had to do. From Hassan. From the past that had come calling. And from this one last chance at redemption. So I left before there was any possibility of that happening. As for Soraya, telling her I was going back to Afghanistan wasn’t an option. If I had, she would have booked herself on the next flight to Pakistan.

We had crossed the border and the signs of poverty were every where. On either side of the road, I saw chains of little villages sprouting here and there, like discarded toys among the rocks, broken mud houses and huts consisting of little more than four wooden poles and a tattered cloth as a roof. I saw children dressed in rags chasing a soccer ball outside the huts. A few miles later, I spotted a cluster of men sitting on their haunches, like a row of crows, on the carcass of an old burned-out Soviet tank, the wind fluttering the edges of the blankets thrown around them. Behind them, a woman in a brown burqa carried a large clay pot on her shoulder, down a rutted path toward a string of mud houses.

“Strange,” I said.

“What?”

“I feel like a tourist in my own country,” I said, taking in a goatherd leading a half-dozen emaciated goats along the side of the road.

Farid snickered. Tossed his cigarette. “You still think of this place as your country?”

“I think a part of me always will,” I said, more defensively than I had intended.

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“After twenty years of living in America,” he said, swerving the truck to avoid a pothole the size of a beach ball.

I nodded. “I grew up in Afghanistan.” Farid snickered again.

“Why do you do that?”

“Never mind,” he murmured.

“No, I want to know. Why do you do that?”

In his rearview mirror, I saw something flash in his eyes. “You want to know?” he sneered. “Let me imagine, Agha sahib. You probably lived in a big two- or three-story house with a nice back yard that your gardener filled with flowers and fruit trees. All gated, of course. Your father drove an American car. You had servants, probably Hazaras. Your parents hired workers to decorate the house for the fancy mehmanis they threw, so their friends would come over to drink and boast about their travels to Europe or America. And I would bet my first son’s eyes that this is the first time you’ve ever worn a pakol.” He grinned at me, revealing a mouthful of prematurely rotting teeth.

“Am I close?”

“Why are you saying these things?” I said.

“Because you wanted to know,” he spat. He pointed to an old man dressed in ragged clothes trudging down a dirt path, a large burlap pack filled with scrub grass tied to his back. “That’s the real Afghanistan, Agha sahib. That’s the Afghanistan I know. You?

You’ve always been a tourist here, you just didn’t know it.”

Rahim Khan had warned me not to expect a warm welcome in Afghanistan from those who had stayed behind and fought the wars. “I’m sorry about your father,” I said. “I’m sorry about your daughters, and I’m sorry about your hand.”

“That means nothing to me,” he said. He shook his head. “Why are you coming back here anyway? Sell off your Baba’s land? Pocket the money and run back to your mother in America?”

“My mother died giving birth to me,” I said.

He sighed and lit another cigarette. Said nothing.

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“Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull over, goddamn it!” I said. “I’m going to be sick.” I tumbled out of the truck as it was coming to a rest on the gravel alongside the road.

BY LATE AFTERNOON, the terrain had changed from one of sun-beaten peaks and barren cliffs to a greener, more rural land scape. The main pass had descended from Landi Kotal through Shinwari territory to Landi Khana. We’d entered Afghanistan at Torkham. Pine trees flanked the road, fewer than I remembered and many of them bare, but it was good to see trees again after the arduous drive through the Khyber Pass. We were getting closer to Jalalabad, where Farid had a brother who would take us in for the night.

The sun hadn’t quite set when we drove into Jalalabad, capital of the state of Nangarhar, a city once renowned for its fruit and warm climate. Farid drove past the buildings and stone houses of the city’s central district. There weren’t as many palm trees there as I remembered, and some of the homes had been reduced to roofless walls and piles of twisted clay.

Farid turned onto a narrow unpaved road and parked the Land Cruiser along a dried-up gutter. I slid out of the truck, stretched, and took a deep breath. In the old days, the winds swept through the irrigated plains around Jalalabad where farmers grew sugarcane, and impregnated the city’s air with a sweet scent. I closed my eyes and searched for the sweetness. I didn’t find it.

“Let’s go,” Farid said impatiently. We walked up the dirt road past a few leafless poplars along a row of broken mud walls. Farid led me to a dilapidated one-story house and knocked on the woodplank door.

A young woman with ocean-green eyes and a white scarf draped around her face peeked out. She saw me first, flinched, spotted Farid and her eyes lit up. “Salaam alaykum, Kaka Farid!”

“Salaam, Maryam jan,” Farid replied and gave her something he’d denied me all day: a warm smile. He planted a kiss on the top of her head. The young woman stepped out of the way, eyeing me a little apprehensively as I followed Farid into the small house.

The adobe ceiling was low, the dirt walls entirely bare, and the only light came from a pair of lanterns set in a corner. We took off our shoes and stepped on the straw mat that covered the floor. Along one of the walls sat three young boys, cross-legged, on a

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mattress covered with a blanket with shredded borders. A tall bearded man with broad shoulders stood up to greet us. Farid and he hugged and kissed on the cheek. Farid introduced him to me as Wahid, his older brother. “He’s from America,” he said to Wahid, flicking his thumb toward me. He left us alone and went to greet the boys.

Wahid sat with me against the wall across from the boys, who had ambushed Farid and climbed his shoulders. Despite my protests, Wahid ordered one of the boys to fetch another blanket so I’d be more comfortable on the floor, and asked Maryam to bring me some tea. He asked about the ride from Peshawar, the drive over the Khyber Pass.

“I hope you didn’t come across any dozds,” he said. The Khyber Pass was as famous for its terrain as for the bandits who used that terrain to rob travelers. Before I could answer, he winked and said in a loud voice, “Of course no dozd would waste his time on a car as ugly as my brother’s.”

Farid wrestled the smallest of the three boys to the floor and tickled him on the ribs with his good hand. The kid giggled and kicked. “At least I have a car,” Farid panted. “How is your donkey these days?”

“My donkey is a better ride than your car.”

“Khar khara mishnassah,” Farid shot back. Takes a donkey to know a donkey. They all laughed and I joined in. I heard female voices from the adjoining room. I could see half of the room from where I sat. Maryam and an older woman wearing a brown hijab--presumably her mother--were speaking in low voices and pouring tea from a kettle into a pot.

“So what do you do in America, Amir agha?” Wahid asked.

“I’m a writer,” I said. I thought I heard Farid chuckle at that.

“A writer?” Wahid said, clearly impressed. “Do you write about Afghanistan?”

“Well, I have. But not currently,” I said. My last novel, A Season for Ashes, had been about a university professor who joins a clan of gypsies after he finds his wife in bed with one of his stu dents. It wasn’t a bad book. Some reviewers had called it a “good”

book, and one had even used the word “riveting.” But suddenly I was embarrassed by it.

I hoped Wahid wouldn’t ask what it was about.

“Maybe you should write about Afghanistan again,” Wahid said. “Tell the rest of the world what the Taliban are doing to our country.”

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“Well, I’m not... I’m not quite that kind of writer.”

“Oh,” Wahid said, nodding and blushing a bit. "You know best, of course. It’s not for me to suggest...

Just then, Maryam and the other woman came into the room with a pair of cups and a teapot on a small platter. I stood up in respect, pressed my hand to my chest, and bowed my head. “Salaam alaykum,” I said.

The woman, who had now wrapped her hijab to conceal her lower face, bowed her head too. “Sataam,” she replied in a barely audible voice. We never made eye contact.

She poured the tea while I stood.

The woman placed the steaming cup of tea before me and exited the room, her bare feet making no sound at all as she disappeared. I sat down and sipped the strong black tea. Wahid finally broke the uneasy silence that followed.

“So what brings you back to Afghanistan?”

“What brings them all back to Afghanistan, dear brother?” Farid said, speaking to Wahid but fixing me with a contemptuous gaze.

“Bas!” Wahid snapped.

“It’s always the same thing,” Farid said. “Sell this land, sell that house, collect the money, and run away like a mouse. Go back to America, spend the money on a family vacation to Mexico.”

“Farid!” Wahid roared. His children, and even Farid, flinched. “Have you forgotten your-manners? This is my house! Amir agha is my guest tonight and I will not allow you to dishonor me like this!”

Farid opened his mouth, almost said something, reconsidered and said nothing. He slumped against the wall, muttered some thing under his breath, and crossed his mutilated foot over the good one. His accusing eyes never left me.

“Forgive us, Amir agha,” Wahid said. “Since childhood, my brother’s mouth has been two steps ahead of his head.”

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“It’s my fault, really,” I said, trying to smile under Farid’s intense gaze. “I am not offended. I should have explained to him my business here in Afghanistan. I am not here to sell property. I’m going to Kabul to find a boy.”

“A boy,” Wahid repeated.

“Yes.” I fished the Polaroid from the pocket of my shirt. Seeing Hassan’s picture again tore the fresh scab off his death. I had to turn my eyes away from it. I handed it to Wahid. He studied the photo. Looked from me to the photo and back again. “This boy?”

I nodded.

“This Hazara boy.”

“Yes.”

“What does he mean to you?”

“His father meant a lot to me. He is the man in the photo. He’s dead now.”

Wahid blinked. “He was a friend of yours?”

My instinct was to say yes, as if, on some deep level, I too wanted to protect Baba’s secret. But there had been enough lies already. “He was my half-brother.” I swallowed.

Added, “My illegitimate half brother.” I turned the teacup. Toyed with the handle.

“I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You’re not prying,” I said.

“What will you do with him?”

“Take him back to Peshawar. There are people there who will take care of him.”

Wahid handed the photo back and rested his thick hand on my shoulder. “You are an honorable man, Amir agha. A true Afghan.”

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I cringed inside.

“I am proud to have you in our home tonight,” Wahid said. I thanked him and chanced a glance over to Farid. He was looking down now, playing with the frayed edges of the straw mat.

A SHORT WHILE LATER, Maryam and her mother brought two steaming bowls of vegetable shorwa and two loaves of bread. “I’m sorry we can’t offer you meat,” Wahid said. “Only the Taliban can afford meat now.”

“This looks wonderful,” I said. It did too. I offered some to him, to the kids, but Wahid said the family had eaten before we arrived. Farid and I rolled up our sleeves, dipped our bread in the shorwa, and ate with our hands.

As I ate, I noticed Wahid’s boys, all three thin with dirtcaked faces and short-cropped brown hair under their skullcaps, stealing furtive glances at my digital wristwatch. The youngest whispered something in his brother’s ear. The brother nodded, didn’t take his eyes off my watch. The oldest of the boys--I guessed his age at about twelve--rocked back and forth, his gaze glued to my wrist. After dinner, after I’d washed my hands with the water Maryam poured from a clay pot, I asked for Wahid’s permission to give his boys a hadia, a gift. He said no, but, when I insisted, he reluctantly agreed. I unsnapped the wristwatch and gave it to the youngest of the three boys. He muttered a sheepish

“Tashakor.”

“It tells you the time in any city in the world,” I told him. The boys nodded politely, passing the watch between them, taking

turns trying it on. But they lost interest and, soon, the watch sat abandoned on the straw mat.

“You COULD HAVE TOLD ME,” Farid saidlater. The two ofus were lying next to each other on the straw mats Wahid’s wife had spread for us.

“Told you what?”

“Why you’ve come to Afghanistan.” His voice had lost the rough edge I’d heard in it since the moment I had met him.

“You didn’t ask,” I said.

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“You should have told me.”

“You didn’t ask.”

He rolled to face me. Curled his arm under his head. “Maybe I will help you find this boy.”

“Thank you, Farid,” I said.

“It was wrong of me to assume.”

I sighed. “Don’t worry. You were more right than you know.”

HIS HANDS ARE TIED BEHIND HIM with roughly woven rope cutting through the flesh of his wrists. He is blindfolded with black cloth. He is kneeling on the street, on the edge of a gutter filled with still water, his head drooping between his shoulders. His knees roll on the hard ground and bleed through his pants as he rocks in prayer. It is late afternoon and his long shadow sways back and forth on the gravel. He is muttering something under his breath. I step closer. A thousand times over, he mutters. For you a thousand times over. Back and forth he rocks. He lifts his face. I see a faint scar above his upper lip.

We are not alone.

I see the barrel first. Then the man standing behind him. He is tall, dressed in a herringbone vest and a black turban. He looks down at the blindfolded man before him with eyes that show nothing but a vast, cavernous emptiness. He takes a step back and raises the barrel. Places it on the back of the kneeling man’s head. For a moment, fading sunlight catches in the metal and twinkles.

The rifle roars with a deafening crack.

I follow the barrel on its upward arc. I see the face behind the plume of smoke swirling from the muzzle. I am the man in the herringbone vest.

I woke up with a scream trapped in my throat.

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I STEPPED OUTSIDE. Stood in the silver tarnish of a half-moon and glanced up to a sky riddled with stars. Crickets chirped in the shuttered darkness and a wind wafted through the trees. The ground was cool under my bare feet and suddenly, for the first time since we had crossed the border, I felt like I was back. After all these years, I was home again, standing on the soil of my ancestors. This was the soil on which my great-grandfather had married his third wife a year before dying in the cholera epidemic that hit Kabul in 1915. She’d borne him what his first two wives had failed to, a son at last. It was on this soil that my grandfather had gone on a hunting trip with King Nadir Shah and shot a deer. My mother had died on this soil. And on this soil, I had fought for my father’s love.

I sat against one of the house’s clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land...

it surprised me. I’d been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn’t. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistan humming under my feet.

Maybe Afghanistan hadn’t forgotten me either.

I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death. Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil.

I was about to go back inside when I heard voices coming from the house. I recognized one as Wahid’s.

“--nothing left for the children.”

“We’re hungry but we’re not savages! He is a guest! What was I supposed to do?” he said in a strained voice.

“--to find something tomorrow” She sounded near tears. “What do I feed--”

I tiptoed away. I understood now why the boys hadn’t shown any interest in the watch.

They hadn’t been staring at the watch at all. They’d been staring at my food.

WE SAID OUR GOOD - BYE S early the next morning. Just before I climbed into the Land Cruiser, I thanked Wahid for his hospitality. He pointed to the little house behind him. “This is your home,” he said. His three sons were standing in the doorway watching us. The little one was wearing the watch--it dangled around his twiggy wrist.

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I glanced in the side-view mirror as we pulled away. Wahid stood surrounded by his boys in a cloud of dust whipped up by the truck. It occurred to me that, in a different world, those boys wouldn’t have been too hungry to chase after the car.

Earlier that morning, when I was certain no one was looking, I did something I had done twenty-six years earlier: I planted a fistful of crumpled money under a mattress.

TWENTY

Farid had warned me. He had. But, as it turned out, he had wasted his breath.

We were driving down the cratered road that winds from Jalalabad to Kabul. The last time I’d traveled that road was in a tarpaulin-covered truck going the other way. Baba had nearly gotten himself shot by a singing, stoned Roussi officer--Baba had made me so mad that night, so scared, and, ultimately, so proud. The trek between Kabul and Jalalabad, a bone-jarring ride down a teetering pass snaking through the rocks, had become a relic now, a relic of two wars. Twenty years earlier, I had seen some of the first war with my own eyes. Grim reminders of it were strewn along the road: burned carcasses of old Soviet tanks, overturned military trucks gone to rust, a crushed Russian jeep that had plunged over the mountainside. The second war, I had watched on my TV screen. And now I was seeing it through Farid’s eyes.

Swerving effortlessly around potholes in the middle of the broken road, Farid was a man in his element. He had become much chattier since our overnight stay at Wahid’s house. He had me sit in the passenger seat and looked at me when he spoke. He even smiled once or twice. Maneuvering the steering wheel with his mangled hand, he pointed to mud-hut villages along the way where he’d known people years before. Most of those people, he said, were either dead or in refugee camps in Pakistan. “And sometimes the dead are luckier,” he said.

He pointed to the crumbled, charred remains of a tiny village. It was just a tuft of blackened, roofless walls now. I saw a dog sleeping along one of the walls. “I had a friend there once,” Farid said. “He was a very good bicycle repairman. He played the tabla well too. The Taliban killed him and his family and burned the village.”

We drove past the burned village, and the dog didn’t move.

IN THE OLD DAYS, the drive from Jalalabad to Kabul took two hours, maybe a little more. It took Farid and me over four hours to reach Kabul. And when we did... Farid warned me just after we passed the Mahipar dam.

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“Kabul is not the way you remember it,” he said.

“So I hear.”

Farid gave me a look that said hearing is not the same as seeing. And he was right.

Because when Kabul finally did unroll before us, I was certain, absolutely certain, that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Farid must have seen my stupefied expression; shuttling people back and forth to Kabul, he would have become familiar with that expression on the faces of those who hadn’t seen Kabul for a long time.

He patted me on the shoulder. “Welcome back,” he said morosely.

RUBBLE AND BEGGARS. Everywhere I looked, that was what I saw. I remembered beggars in the old days too--Baba always carried an extra handful of Afghani bills in his pocket just for them; I’d never seen him deny a peddler. Now, though, they squatted at every street corner, dressed in shredded burlap rags, mud-caked hands held out for a coin. And the beggars were mostly children now, thin and grim-faced, some no older than five or six. They sat in the laps of their burqa-clad mothers alongside gutters at busy street corners and chanted “Bakhshesh, bakhshesh!” And something else, something I hadn’t noticed right away: Hardly any of them sat with an adult male--the wars had made fathers a rare commodity in Afghanistan.

We were driving westbound toward the Karteh-Seh district on what I remembered as a major thoroughfare in the seventies:

Jadeh Maywand. Just north of us was the bone-dry Kabul River. On the hills to the south stood the broken old city wall. Just east of it was the Bala Hissar Fort--the ancient citadel that the warlord Dostum had occupied in 1992--on the Shirdarwaza mountain range, the same mountains from which Mujahedin forces had showered Kabul with rockets between 1992 and 1996, inflicting much of the damage I was witnessing now.

The Shirdarwaza range stretched all the way west. It was from those mountains that I remember the firing of the Topeh chasht, the “noon cannon.” It went off every day to announce noontime, and also to signal the end of daylight fasting during the month of Ramadan. You’d hear the roar of that cannon all through the city in those days.

“I used to come here to Jadeh Maywand when I was a kid,” I mumbled. “There used to be shops here and hotels. Neon lights

and restaurants. I used to buy kites from an old man named Saifo. He ran a little kite shop by the old police headquarters.”

“The police headquarters is still there,” Farid said. “No shortage of police in this city But you won’t find kites or kite shops on Jadeh Maywand or anywhere else in Kabul. Those days are over.”

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Jadeh Maywand had turned into a giant sand castle. The buildings that hadn’t entirely collapsed barely stood, with caved in roofs and walls pierced with rockets shells. Entire blocks had been obliterated to rubble. I saw a bullet-pocked sign half buried at an angle in a heap of debris. It read DRINK COCA CO--. I saw children playing in the ruins of a windowless building amid jagged stumps of brick and stone. Bicycle riders and mule-drawn carts swerved around kids, stray dogs, and piles of debris. A haze of dust hovered over the city and, across the river, a single plume of smoke rose to the sky.

“Where are the trees?” I said.

“People cut them down for firewood in the winter,” Farid said. “The Shorawi cut a lot of them down too.”

“Why?”

“Snipers used to hide in them.”

A sadness came over me. Returning to Kabul was like running into an old, forgotten friend and seeing that life hadn’t been good to him, that he’d become homeless and destitute.

“My father built an orphanage in Shar-e-Kohna, the old city, south of here,” I said.

“I remember it,” Farid said. “It was destroyed a few years ago.”

“Can you pull over?” I said. “I want to take a quick walk here.”

Farid parked along the curb on a small backstreet next to a ramshackle, abandoned building with no door. “That used to be a pharmacy,” Farid muttered as we exited the truck. We walked back to Jadeh Maywand and turned right, heading west. “What’s that smell?” I said. Something was making my eyes water.

“Diesel,” Farid replied. “The city’s generators are always going down, so electricity is unreliable, and people use diesel fuel.”

“Diesel. Remember what this street smelled like in the old days?”

Farid smiled. “Kabob.”

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“Lamb kabob,” I said.

“Lamb,” Farid said, tasting the word in his mouth. “The only people in Kabul who get to eat lamb now are the Taliban.” He pulled on my sleeve. “Speaking of which...”

A vehicle was approaching us. “Beard Patrol,” Farid murmured.

That was the first time I saw the Taliban. I’d seen them on TV on the Internet, on the cover of magazines, and in newspapers. But here I was now, less than fifty feet from them, telling myself that the sudden taste in my mouth wasn’t unadulterated, naked fear.

Telling myself my flesh hadn’t suddenly shrunk against my bones and my heart wasn’t battering. Here they came. In all their glory.

The red Toyota pickup truck idled past us. A handful of sternfaced young men sat on their haunches in the cab, Kalashnikovs slung on their shoulders. They all wore beards and black turbans. One of them, a dark-skinned man in his early twenties with thick, knitted eyebrows twirled a whip in his hand and rhythmically swatted the side of the truck with it. His roaming eyes fell on me. Held my gaze. I’d never felt so naked in my entire life. Then the Talib spat tobacco-stained spittle and looked away. I found I could breathe again. The truck rolled down Jadeh Maywand, leaving in its trail a cloud of dust.

“What is the matter with you?” Farid hissed.

“What?”

“Don’t ever stare at them! Do you understand me? Never!”

“I didn’t mean to,” I said.

“Your friend is quite right, Agha. You might as well poke a rabid dog with a stick,”

someone said. This new voice belonged to an old beggar sitting barefoot on the steps of a bullet-scarred building. He wore a threadbare chapan worn to frayed shreds and a dirt-crusted turban. His left eyelid drooped over an empty socket. With an arthritic hand, he pointed to the direction the red truck had gone. “They drive around looking. Looking and hoping that someone will provoke them. Sooner or later, someone always obliges.

Then the dogs feast and the day’s boredom is broken at last and everyone says ‘Allah-u-akbar!’ And on those days when no one offends, well, there is always random violence, isn’t there?”

“Keep your eyes on your feet when the Talibs are near,” Farid said.

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“Your friend dispenses good advice,” the old beggar chimed in. He barked a wet cough and spat in a soiled handkerchief. “Forgive me, but could you spare a few Afghanis?” he breathed.

“Bas. Let’s go,” Farid said, pulling me by the arm.

I handed the old man a hundred thousand Afghanis, or the equivalent of about three dollars. When he leaned forward to take the money, his stench--like sour milk and feet that hadn’t been washed in weeks--flooded my nostrils and made my gorge rise. He hurriedly slipped the money in his waist, his lone eye darting side to side. “A world of thanks for your benevolence, Agha sahib.”

“Do you know where the orphanage is in Karteh-Seh?” I said.

“It’s not hard to find, it’s just west of Darulaman Boulevard,” he said. “The children were moved from here to Karteh-Seh after the rockets hit the old orphanage. Which is like saving someone from the lion’s cage and throwing them in the tiger’s.”

“Thank you, Agha,” I said. I turned to go.

“That was your first time, nay?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The first time you saw a Talib.”

I said nothing. The old beggar nodded and smiled. Revealed a handful of remaining teeth, all crooked and yellow. “I remember the first time I saw them rolling into Kabul.

What a joyous day that was!” he said. “An end to the killing! Wah wah! But like the poet says: ‘How seamless seemed love and then came trouble!”

A smile sprouted on my face. “I know that ghazal. That’s Hãfez.”

“Yes it is. Indeed,” the old man replied. “I should know. I used to teach it at the university.”

“You did?”

The old man coughed. “From 1958 to 1996. I taught Hãfez, Khayyám, Rumi, Beydel, Jami, Saadi. Once, I was even a guest lecturer in Tehran, 1971 that was. I gave a

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lecture on the mystic Beydel. I remember how they all stood and clapped. Ha!” He shook his head. “But you saw those young men in the truck. What value do you think they see in Sufism?”

“My mother taught at the university,” I said.

“And what was her name?”

“Sofia Akrami.”

His eye managed to twinkle through the veil of cataracts. “The desert weed lives on, but the flower of spring blooms and wilts.’ Such grace, such dignity, such a tragedy.”

“You knew my mother?” I asked, kneeling before the old man.

“Yes indeed,” the old beggar said. “We used to sit and talk after class. The last time was on a rainy day just before final exams when we shared a marvelous slice of almond cake together. Almond cake with hot tea and honey. She was rather obviously pregnant by then, and all the more beautiful for it. I will never forget what she said to me that day.”

“What? Please tell me.” Baba had always described my mother to me in broad strokes, like, “She was a great woman.” But what I had always thirsted for were the details: the way her hair glinted in the sunlight, her favorite ice cream flavor, the songs she liked to hum, did she bite her nails? Baba took his memories of her to the grave with him.

Maybe speaking her name would have reminded him of his guilt, of what he had done so soon after she had died. Or maybe his loss had been so great, his pain so deep, he couldn’t bear to talk about her. Maybe both.

“She said, ‘I’m so afraid.’ And I said, ‘Why?,’ and she said, ‘Because I’m so profoundly happy, Dr. Rasul. Happiness like this is frightening.’ I asked her why and she said,

‘They only let you be this happy if they’re preparing to take something from you,’ and I said, ‘Hush up, now. Enough of this silliness.”

Farid took my arm. “We should go, Amir agha,” he said softly. I snatched my arm away.

“What else? What else did she say?”

The old man’s features softened. “I wish I remembered for you. But I don’t. Your mother passed away a long time ago and my memory is as shattered as these buildings. I am sorry.”

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“But even a small thing, anything at all.”

The old man smiled. “I’ll try to remember and that’s a promise. Come back and find me.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much.” And I meant it. Now I knew my mother had liked almond cake with honey and hot tea, that she’d once used the word “profoundly,”

that she’d fretted

about her happiness. I had just learned more about my mother from this old man on the street than I ever did from Baba.

Walking back to the truck, neither one of us commented about what most non-Afghans would have seen as an improbable coincidence, that a beggar on the street would happen to know my mother. Because we both knew that in Afghanistan, and particularly in Kabul, such absurdity was commonplace. Baba used to say, “Take two Afghans who’ve never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they’ll figure out how they’re related.”

We left the old man on the steps of that building. I meant to take him up on his offer, come back and see if he’d unearthed any more stories about my mother. But I never saw him again.

WE FOUND THE NEW ORPHANAGE in the northern part of Karteh-Seh, along the banks of the dried-up Kabul River. It was a flat, barracks-style building with splintered walls and windows boarded with planks of wood. Farid had told me on the way there that Karteh-Seh had been one of the most war-ravaged neighborhoods in Kabul, and, as we stepped out of the truck, the evidence was overwhelming. The cratered streets were flanked by little more than ruins of shelled buildings and abandoned homes. We passed the rusted skeleton of an overturned car, a TV set with no screen half-buried in rubble, a wall with the words ZENDA BAD TAL IRAN! (Long live the Taliban!) sprayed in black.

A short, thin, balding man with a shaggy gray beard opened the door. He wore a ragged tweed jacket, a skullcap, and a pair of eyeglasses with one chipped lens resting on the tip of his nose. Behind the glasses, tiny eyes like black peas flitted from me to Farid.

“Salaam alaykum,” he said.

“Salaam alaykum,” I said. I showed him the Polaroid. “We’re searching for this boy.”

He gave the photo a cursory glance. “I am sorry. I have never seen him.”

“You barely looked at the picture, my friend,” Farid said. “Why not take a closer look?”

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“Lotfan,” I added. Please.

The man behind the door took the picture. Studied it. Handed it back to me. “Nay, sorry.

I know just about every single child in this institution and that one doesn’t look familiar.

Now, if you’ll permit me, I have work to do.” He closed the door. Locked the bolt.

I rapped on the door with my knuckles. “Agha! Agha, please open the door. We don’t mean him any harm.”

“I told you. He’s not here,” his voice came from the other side. “Now, please go away.”

Farid stepped up to the door, rested his forehead on it. “Friend, we are not with the Taliban,” he said in a low, cautious voice. “The man who is with me wants to take this boy to a safe place.”

“I come from Peshawar,” I said. “A good friend of mine knows an American couple there who run a charity home for children.” I felt the man’s presence on the other side of the door. Sensed him standing there, listening, hesitating, caught between suspicion and hope. “Look, I knew Sohrab’s father,” I said. “His name was Hassan. His mother’s name was Farzana. He called his grand mother Sasa. He knows how to read and write. And he’s good with the slingshot. There’s hope for this boy, Agha, a way out. Please open the door.”

From the other side, only silence.

“I’m his half uncle,” I said.

A moment passed. Then a key rattled in the lock. The man’s narrow face reappeared in the crack. He looked from me to Farid and back. “You were wrong about one thing.”

“What?”

“He’s great with the slingshot.”

I smiled.

“He’s inseparable from that thing. He tucks it in the waist of his pants everywhere he goes.”

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THE MAN WHO LET US IN introduced himself as Zaman, the director of the orphanage. “I’ll take you to my office,” he said.

We followed him through dim, grimy hallways where barefoot children dressed in frayed sweaters ambled around. We walked past rooms with no floor covering but matted carpets and windows shuttered with sheets of plastic. Skeleton frames of steel beds, most with no mattress, filled the rooms.

“How many orphans live here?” Farid asked.

“More than we have room for. About two hundred and fifty,” Zaman said over his shoulder. “But they’re not all yateem. Many of them have lost their fathers in the war, and their mothers can’t feed them because the Taliban don’t allow them to work. So they bring their children here.” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand and added ruefully, “This place is better than the street, but not that much better. This building was never meant to be lived in--it used to be a storage warehouse for a carpet manufacturer.

So there’s no water heater and they’ve let the well go dry.” He dropped his voice. “I’ve asked the Taliban for money to dig a new well more times than I remember and they just twirl their rosaries and tell me there is no money. No money.” He snickered.

He pointed to a row of beds along the wall. “We don’t have enough beds, and not enough mattresses for the beds we do have. Worse, we don’t have enough blankets.”

He showed us a lit tle girl skipping rope with two other kids. “You see that girl? This past winter, the children had to share blankets. Her brother died of exposure.” He walked on.

“The last time I checked, we have less than a month’s supply of rice left in the warehouse, and, when that runs out, the children will have to eat bread and tea for breakfast and dinner.” I noticed he made no mention of lunch.

He stopped and turned to me. “There is very little shelter here, almost no food, no clothes, no clean water. What I have in ample supply here is children who’ve lost their childhood. But the tragedy is that these are the lucky ones. We’re filled beyond capacity and every day I turn away mothers who bring their children.” He took a step toward me.

“You say there is hope for Sohrab? I pray you don’t lie, Agha. But... you may well be too late.”

“What do you mean?”

Zaman’s eyes shifted. “Follow me.”

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WHAT PASSED FOR THE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE was four bare, cracked walls, a mat on the floor, a table, and two folding chairs. As Zaman and I sat down, I saw a gray rat poke its head from a burrow in the wall and flit across the room. I cringed when it sniffed at my shoes, then Zaman’s, and scurried through the open door.

“What did you mean it may be too late?” I said.

“Would you like some chai? I could make some.”

“Nay, thank you. I’d rather we talk.”

Zaman tilted back in his chair and crossed his arms on his chest. “What I have to tell you is not pleasant. Not to mention that it may be very dangerous.”

“For whom?”

“You. Me. And, of course, for Sohrab, if it’s not too late already.”

“I need to know,” I said.

He nodded. “So you say. But first I want to ask you a question: How badly do you want to find your nephew?”

I thought of the street fights we’d get into when we were kids, all the times Hassan used to take them on for me, two against one, sometimes three against one. I’d wince and watch, tempted to step in, but always stopping short, always held back by something.

I looked at the hallway, saw a group of kids dancing in a circle. A little girl, her left leg amputated below the knee, sat on a ratty mattress and watched, smiling and clapping along with the other children. I saw Farid watching the children too, his own mangled hand hanging at his side. I remembered Wahid’s boys and... I realized something: I would not leave Afghanistan without finding Sohrab. “Tell me where he is,” I said.

Zaman’s gaze lingered on me. Then he nodded, picked up a pencil, and twirled it between his fingers. “Keep my name out of it.”

“I promise.”

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He tapped the table with the pencil. “Despite your promise, I think I’ll live to regret this, but perhaps it’s just as well. I’m damned anyway. But if something can be done for Sohrab... I’ll tell you because I believe you. You have the look of a desperate man.” He was quiet for a long time. “There is a Talib official,” he muttered. “He visits once every month or two. He brings cash with him, not a lot, but better than nothing at all.” His shifty eyes fell on me, rolled away. “Usually he’ll take a girl. But not always.”

“And you allow this?” Farid said behind me. He was going around the table, closing in on Zaman.

“What choice do I have?” Zaman shot back. He pushed himself away from the desk.

“You’re the director here,” Farid said. “Your job is watch over these children.”

“There’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

“You’re selling children!” Farid barked.

“Farid, sit down! Let it go!” I said. But I was too late. Because suddenly Farid was leaping over the table. Zaman’s chair went flying as Farid fell on him and pinned him to the floor. The director thrashed beneath Farid and made muffled screaming sounds. His legs kicked a desk drawer free and sheets of paper spilled to the floor.

I ran around the desk and saw why Zaman’s screaming was muffled: Farid was strangling him. I grasped Farid’s shoulders with both hands and pulled hard. He snatched away from me. “That’s enough!” I barked. But Farid’s face had flushed red, his lips pulled back in a snarl. “I’m killing him! You can’t stop me! I’m killing him,” he sneered.

“Get off him!”

“I’m killing him!” Something in his voice told me that if I didn’t do something quickly I’d witness my first murder.

“The children are watching, Farid. They’re watching,” I said. His shoulder muscles tightened under my grip and, for a moment, I thought he’d keep squeezing Zaman’s neck anyway. Then he turned around, saw the children. They were standing silently by the door, holding hands, some of them crying. I felt Farid’s muscles slacken. He dropped his hands, rose to his feet. He looked down on Zaman and dropped a mouthful of spit on his face. Then he walked to the door and closed it.

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Zaman struggled to his feet, blotted his bloody lips with his sleeve, wiped the spit off his cheek. Coughing and wheezing, he put on his skullcap, his glasses, saw both lenses had cracked, and took them off. He buried his face in his hands. None of us said anything for a long time.

“He took Sohrab a month ago,” Zaman finally croaked, hands still shielding his face.

“You call yourself a director?” Farid said.

Zaman dropped his hands. “I haven’t been paid in over six months. I’m broke because I’ve spent my life’s savings on this orphanage. Everything I ever owned or inherited I sold to run this godforsaken place. You think I don’t have family in Pakistan and Iran? I could have run like everyone else. But I didn’t. I stayed. I stayed because of them.” He pointed to the door. “If I deny him one child, he takes ten. So I let him take one and leave the judging to Allah. I swallow my pride and take his goddamn filthy... dirty money.

Then I go to the bazaar and buy food for the children.”

Farid dropped his eyes.

“What happens to the children he takes?” I asked.

Zaman rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb. “Some times they come back.”

“Who is he? How do we find him?” I said.

“Go to Ghazi Stadium tomorrow. You’ll see him at halftime. He’ll be the one wearing black sunglasses.” He picked up his broken glasses and turned them in his hands. “I want you to go now. The children are frightened.”

He escorted us out.

As the truck pulled away, I saw Zaman in the side-view mirror, standing in the doorway.

A group of children surrounded him, clutching the hem of his loose shirt. I saw he had put on his broken glasses.

TWENTY-ONE

We crossed the river and drove north through the crowded Pashtunistan Square. Baba used to take me to Khyber Restaurant there for kabob. The building was still standing, but its doors were padlocked, the windows shattered, and the letters K and R missing from its name.

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I saw a dead body near the restaurant. There had been a hanging. A young man dangled from the end of a rope tied to a beam, his face puffy and blue, the clothes he’d worn on the last day of his life shredded, bloody. Hardly anyone seemed to notice him.

We rode silently through the square and headed toward the WazirAkbar Khan district.

Everywhere I looked, a haze of dust covered the city and its sun-dried brick buildings. A few blocks north of Pashtunistan Square, Farid pointed to two men talking animatedly at a busy street corner. One of them was hobbling on one leg, his other leg amputated below the knee. He cradled an artificial leg in his arms. “You know what they’re doing?

Haggling over the leg.”

“He’s selling his leg?”

Farid nodded. “You can get good money for it on the black market. Feed your kids for a couple of weeks.”

To MY SURPRISE, most of the houses in the WazirAkbar Khan district still had roofs and standing walls. In fact, they were in pretty good shape. Trees still peeked over the walls, and the streets weren’t nearly as rubble-strewn as the ones in Karteh-Seh. Faded streets signs, some twisted and bullet-pocked, still pointed the way.

“This isn’t so bad,” I remarked.

“No surprise. Most of the important people live here now.”

“Taliban?”

“Them too,” Farid said.

“Who else?”

He drove us into a wide street with fairly clean sidewalks and walled homes on either side. “The people behind the Taliban. The real brains of this government, if you can call it that: Arabs, Chechens, Pakistanis,” Farid said. He pointed northwest. “Street 15, that way, is called Sarak-e-Mehmana.” Street of the Guests. “That’s what they call them here, guests. I think someday these guests are going to pee all over the carpet.”

“I think that’s it!” I said. “Over there!” I pointed to the landmark that used to serve as a guide for me when I was a kid. If you ever get lost, Baba used to say, remember that

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our street is the one with the pink house at the end of it. The pink house with the steeply pitched roof had been the neighborhood’s only house of that color in the old days. It still was.

Farid turned onto the street. I saw Baba’s house right away.

WE FIND THE LITTLE TURTLE behind tangles of sweetbrier in the yard. We don’t know how it got there and we’re too excited to care. We paint its shell a bright red, Hassan’s idea, and a good one:

This way, we’ll never lose it in the bushes. We pretend we’re a pair of daredevil explorers who’ve discovered a giant prehistoric monster in some distant jungle and we’ve brought it back for the world to see. We set it down in the wooden wagon Ali built Hassan last winter for his birthday, pretend it’s a giant steel cage. Behold the firebreathing monstrosity! We march on the grass and pull the wagon behind us, around apple and cherry trees, which become skyscrap ers soaring into clouds, heads poking out of thousands of windows to watch the spectacle passing below. We walk over the little semi lunar bridge Baba has built near a cluster of fig trees; it becomes a great suspension bridge joining cities, and the little pond below, a foamy sea. Fireworks explode above the bridge’s massive pylons and armed soldiers salute us on both sides as gigantic steel cables shoot to the sky. The little turtle bouncing around in the cab, we drag the wagon around the circular red brick driveway outside the wroughtiron gates and return the salutes of the world’s leaders as they stand and applaud. We are Hassan and Amir, famed adventurers and the world’s greatest explorers, about to receive a medal of honor for our courageous feat...

GINGERLY, I WALKED up the driveway where tufts of weed now grew between the sun-faded bricks. I stood outside the gates of my father’s house, feeling like a stranger. I set my hands on the rusty bars, remembering how I’d run through these same gates thousands of times as a child, for things that mattered not at all now and yet had seemed so important then. I peered in.

The driveway extension that led from the gates to the yard, where Hassan and I took turns falling the summer we learned to ride a bike, didn’t look as wide or as long as I remembered it. The asphalt had split in a lightning-streak pattern, and more tangles of weed sprouted through the fissures. Most of the poplar trees had been chopped down--the trees Hassan and I used to climb to shine our mirrors into the neighbors’ homes.

The ones still standing were nearly leafless. The Wall of Ailing Corn was still there, though I saw no corn, ailing or otherwise, along that wall now. The paint had begun to peel and sections of it had sloughed off altogether. The lawn had turned the same brown as the haze of dust hovering over the city, dotted by bald patches of dirt where nothing grew at all.

A jeep was parked in the driveway and that looked all wrong:

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Baba’s black Mustang belonged there. For years, the Mustang’s eight cylinders roared to life every morning, rousing me from sleep. I saw that oil had spilled under the jeep and stained the driveway like a big Rorschach inkblot. Beyond the jeep, an empty wheelbarrow lay on its side. I saw no sign of the rosebushes that Baba and Ali had planted on the left side of the driveway, only dirt that spilled onto the asphalt. And weeds.

Farid honked twice behind me. “We should go, Agha. We’ll draw attention,” he called.

“Just give me one more minute,” I said.

The house itself was far from the sprawling white mansion I remembered from my childhood. It looked smaller. The roof sagged and the plaster was cracked. The windows to the living room, the foyer, and the upstairs guest bathroom were broken, patched haphazardly with sheets of clear plastic or wooden boards nailed across the frames. The paint, once sparkling white, had faded to ghostly gray and eroded in parts, revealing the layered bricks beneath. The front steps had crumbled. Like so much else in Kabul, my father’s house was the picture of fallen splendor.

I found the window to my old bedroom, second floor, third window sOuth of the main steps to the house. I stood on tiptoes, saw nothing behind the window but shadows.

Twenty-five years earlier, I had stood behind that same window, thick rain dripping down the panes and my breath fogging up the glass. I had watched Hassan and Ali load their belongings into the trunk of my father’s car.

“Amir agha,” Farid called again.

“I’m coming,” I shot back.

Insanely, I wanted to go in. Wanted to walk up the front steps where Ali used to make Hassan and me take off our snow boots. I wanted to step into the foyer, smell the orange peel Ali always tossed into the stove to burn with sawdust. Sit at the kitchen table, have tea with a slice of _naan_, listen to Hassan sing old Hazara songs.

Another honk. I walked back to the Land Cruiser parked along the sidewalk. Farid sat smoking behind the wheel.

“I have to look at one more thing,” I told him.

“Can you hurry?”

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“Give me ten minutes.”

“Go, then.” Then, just as I was turning to go: “Just forget it all. Makes it easier.”

“To what?”

“To go on,” Farid said. He flicked his cigarette out of the window. “How much more do you need to see? Let me save you the trouble: Nothing that you remember has survived. Best to forget.”

“I don’t want to forget anymore,” I said. “Give me ten minutes.”

WE HARDLY BROKE A SWEAT, Hassan and I, when we hiked up the hill just north of Baba’s house. We scampered about the hilltop chasing each other or sat on a sloped ridge where there was a good view of the airport in the distance. We’d watch airplanes take off and land. Go running again.

Now, by the time I reached the top of the craggy hill, each ragged breath felt like inhaling fire. Sweat trickled down my face. I stood wheezing for a while, a stitch in my side. Then I went looking for the abandoned cemetery. It didn’t take me long to find it. It was still there, and so was the old pomegranate tree.

I leaned against the gray stone gateway to the cemetery where Hassan had buried his mother. The old metal gates hanging off the hinges were gone, and the headstones were barely visible through the thick tangles of weeds that had claimed the plot. A pair of crows sat on the low wall that enclosed the cemetery.

Hassan had said in his letter that the pomegranate tree hadn’t borne fruit in years.

Looking at the wilted, leafless tree, I doubted it ever would again. I stood under it, remembered all the times we’d climbed it, straddled its branches, our legs swinging, dappled sunlight flickering through the leaves and casting on our faces a mosaic of light and shadow. The tangy taste of pomegranate crept into my mouth.

I hunkered down on my knees and brushed my hands against the trunk. I found what I was looking for. The carving had dulled, almost faded altogether, but it was still there:

“Amir and Hassan. The Sultans of Kabul.” I traced the curve of each letter with my fingers. Picked small bits of bark from the tiny crevasses.

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I sat cross-legged at the foot of the tree and looked south on the city of my childhood. In those days, treetops poked behind the walls of every house. The sky stretched wide and blue, and laundry drying on clotheslines glimmered in the sun. If you listened hard, you might even have heard the call of the fruit seller passing through Wazir Akbar Khan with his donkey: Cherries! Apricots! Grapes! In the early evening, you would have heard azan, the mueszzin’s call to prayer from the mosque in Shar-e-Nau.

I heard a honk and saw Farid waving at me. It was time to go.

WE DROVE SOUTH AGAIN, back toward Pashtunistan Square. We passed several more red pickup trucks with armed, bearded young men crammed into the cabs. Farid cursed under his breath every time we passed one.

I paid for a room at a small hotel near Pashtunistan Square. Three little girls dressed in identical black dresses and white scarves clung to the slight, bespectacled man behind the counter. He charged me $75, an unthinkable price given the run-down appearance of the place, but I didn’t mind. Exploitation to finance a beach house in Hawaii was one thing. Doing it to feed your kids was another.

There was no hot running water and the cracked toilet didn’t flush. Just a single steel-frame bed with a worn mattress, a ragged blanket, and a wooden chair in the corner.

The window overlooking the square had broken, hadn’t been replaced. As I lowered my suitcase, I noticed a dried bloodstain on the wall behind the bed.

I gave Farid some money and he went out to get food. He returned with four sizzling skewers of kabob, fresh _naan_, and a bowl of white rice. We sat on the bed and all but devoured the food. There was one thing that hadn’t changed in Kabul after all: The kabob was as succulent and delicious as I remembered.

That night, I took the bed and Farid lay on the floor, wrapped himself with an extra blanket for which the hotel owner charged me an additional fee. No light came into the room except for the moonbeams streaming through the broken window. Farid said the owner had told him that Kabul had been without electricity for two days now and his generator needed fixing. We talked for a while. He told me about growing up in Mazar-i-Sharif, in Jalalabad. He told me about a time shortly after he and his father joined the jihad and fought the Shorawi in the Panjsher Valley. They were stranded without food and ate locust to survive. He told me of the day helicopter gunfire killed his father, of the day the land mine took his two daughters. He asked me about America. I told him that in America you could step into a grocery store and buy any of fifteen or twenty different types of cereal. The lamb was always fresh and the milk cold, the fruit plentiful and the water clear. Every home had a TV, and every TV a remote, and you could get a satellite dish if you wanted. Receive over five hundred channels.

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“Five hundred?” Farid exclaimed.

“Five hundred.”

We fell silent for a while. Just when I thought he had fallen asleep, Farid chuckled.

“Agha, did you hear what Mullah Nasrud din did when his daughter came home and complained that her husband had beaten her?” I could feel him smiling in the dark and a smile of my own formed on my face. There wasn’t an Afghan in the world who didn’t know at least a few jokes about the bumbling mullah.

“What?”

“He beat her too, then sent her back to tell the husband that Mullah was no fool: If the bastard was going to beat his daughter, then Mullah would beat his wife in return.”

I laughed. Partly at the joke, partly at how Afghan humor never changed. Wars were waged, the Internet was invented, and a robot had rolled on the surface of Mars, and in Afghanistan we were still telling Mullah Nasruddin jokes. “Did you hear about the time Mullah had placed a heavy bag on his shoulders and was riding his donkey?” I said.

“No.”

“Someone on the street said why don’t you put the bag on the donkey? And he said,

“That would be cruel, I’m heavy enough already for the poor thing.”

We exchanged Mullah Nasruddin jokes until we ran out of them and we fell silent again.

“Amir agha?” Farid said, startling me from near sleep.

“Yes?”

“Why are you here? I mean, why are you really here?”

“I told you.”

“For the boy?”

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“For the boy.”

Farid shifted on the ground. “It’s hard to believe.”

“Sometimes I myself can hardly believe I’m here.”

“No... What I mean to ask is why that boy? You come all the way from America for... a Shi’a?”

That killed all the laughter in me. And the sleep. “I am tired,” I said. “Let’s just get some sleep.”

Farid’s snoring soon echoed through the empty room. I stayed awake, hands crossed on my chest, staring into the starlit night through the broken window, and thinking that maybe what people said about Afghanistan was true. Maybe it was a hopeless place.

A BUSTLING CROWD was filling Ghazi Stadium when we walked through the entrance tunnels. Thousands of people milled about the tightly packed concrete terraces.

Children played in the aisles and chased each other up and down the steps. The scent of garbanzo beans in spicy sauce hung in the air, mixed with the smell of dung and sweat. Farid and I walked past street peddlers selling cigarettes, pine nuts, and biscuits.

A scrawny boy in a tweed jacket grabbed my elbow and spoke into my ear. Asked me if I wanted to buy some “sexy pictures.”

“Very sexy, Agha,” he said, his alert eyes darting side to side-- reminding me of a girl who, a few years earlier, had tried to sell me crack in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco. The kid peeled one side of his jacket open and gave me a fleeting glance of his sexy pictures: postcards of Hindi movies showing doe-eyed sultry actresses, fully dressed, in the arms of their leading men. “So sexy,” he repeated.

“Nay, thanks,” I said, pushing past him.

“He gets caught, they’ll give him a flogging that will waken his father in the grave,” Farid muttered.

There was no assigned seating, of course. No one to show us politely to our section, aisle, row, and seat. There never had been, even in the old days of the monarchy. We found a decent spot to sit, just left of midfield, though it took some shoving and elbowing on Farid’s part.

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I remembered how green the playing field grass had been in the ‘70s when Baba used to bring me to soccer games here. Now the pitch was a mess. There were holes and craters everywhere, most notably a pair of deep holes in the ground behind the southend goalposts. And there was no grass at all, just dirt. When the two teams finally took the field--all wearing long pants despite the heat--and play began, it became difficult to follow the ball in the clouds of dust kicked up by the players. Young, whip-toting Talibs roamed the aisles, striking anyone who cheered too loudly.

They brought them out shortly after the halftime whistle blew. A pair of dusty red pickup trucks, like the ones I’d seen around town since I’d arrived, rode into the stadium through the gates. The crowd rose to its feet. A woman dressed in a green burqa sat in the cab of one truck, a blindfolded man in the other. The trucks drove around the track, slowly, as if to let the crowd get a long look. It had the desired effect: People craned their necks, pointed, stood on tiptoes. Next to me, Farid’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he mumbled a prayer under his breath.

The red trucks entered the playing field, rode toward one end in twin clouds of dust, sunlight reflecting off their hubcaps. A third truck met them at the end of the field. This one’s cab was filled with something and I suddenly understood the purpose of those two holes behind the goalposts. They unloaded the third truck. The crowd murmured in anticipation.

“Do you want to stay?” Farid said gravely.

“No,” I said. I had never in my life wanted to be away from a place as badly as I did now.

“But we have to stay.”

Two Talibs with Kalashnikovs slung across their shoulders helped the blindfolded man from the first truck and two others helped the burqa-clad woman. The woman’s knees buckled under her and she slumped to the ground. The soldiers pulled her up and she slumped again. When they tried to lift her again, she screamed and kicked. I will never, as long as I draw breath, forget the sound of that scream. It was the cry of a wild animal trying to pry its mangled leg free from the bear trap. Two more Talibs joined in and helped force her into one of the chest-deep holes. The blindfolded man, on the other hand, quietly allowed them to lower him into the hole dug for him. Now only the accused pair’s torsos protruded from the ground.

A chubby, white-bearded cleric dressed in gray garments stood near the goalposts and cleared his throat into a handheld microphone. Behind him the woman in the hole was still screaming. He recited a lengthy prayer from the Koran, his nasal voice undulating through the sudden hush of the stadium’s crowd. I remem bered something Baba had said to me a long time ago: Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys.

They do nothing but thumb their rosaries and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand. God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands.

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When the prayer was done, the cleric cleared his throat. “Brothers and sisters!” he called, speaking in Farsi, his voice booming through the stadium. “We are here today to carry out Shari’a. We are here today to carry out justice. We are here today because the will of Allah and the word of the Prophet Muham mad, peace be upon him, are alive and well here in Afghanistan, our beloved homeland. We listen to what God says and we obey because we are nothing but humble, powerless creatures before God’s greatness.

And what does God say? I ask you! WHAT DOES GOD SAY? God says that every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin. Those are not my words, nor the words of my brothers. Those are the words of GOD!” He pointed with his free hand to the sky. My head was pounding and the sun felt much too hot.

“Every sinner must be punished in a manner befitting his sin!” the cleric repeated into the mike, lowering his voice, enunciating each word slowly, dramatically. “And what manner of punishment, brothers and sisters, befits the adulterer? How shall we punish those who dishonor the sanctity of marriage? How shall we deal with those who spit in the face of God? How shall we answer those who throw stones at the windows of God’s house? WE SHALL THROW THE STONES BACK!” He shut off the microphone. A low-pitched murmur spread through the crowd.

Next to me, Farid was shaking his head. “And they call themselves Muslims,” he whispered.

Then a tall, broad-shouldered man stepped out of the pickup truck. The sight of him drew cheers from a few spectators. This time, no one was struck with a whip for cheering too loudly. The tall man’s sparkling white garment glimmered in the afternoon sun. The hem of his loose shirt fluttered in the breeze, his arms spread like those of Jesus on the cross. He greeted the crowd by turning slowly in a full circle. When he faced our section, I saw he was wearing dark round sunglasses like the ones John Lennon wore.

“That must be our man,” Farid said.

The tall Talib with the black sunglasses walked to the pile of stones they had unloaded from the third truck. He picked up a rock and showed it to the crowd. The noise fell, replaced by a buzzing sound that rippled through the stadium. I looked around me and saw that everyone was tsk’ing. The Talib, looking absurdly like a baseball pitcher on the mound, hurled the stone at the blindfolded man in the hole. It struck the side of his head. The woman screamed again. The crowd made a startled “OH!” sound. I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hands. The spectators’ “OH!” rhymed with each flinging of the stone, and that went on for a while. When they stopped, I asked Farid if it was over. He said no. I guessed the people’s throats had tired. I don’t know how much longer I sat with my face in my hands. I know that I reopened my eyes when I heard people around me asking, “Mord? Mord? Is he dead?”

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The man in the hole was now a mangled mess of blood and shredded rags. His head slumped forward, chin on chest. The Talib in the John Lennon sunglasses was looking down at another man squatting next to the hole, tossing a rock up and down in his hand. The squatting man had one end of a stethoscope to his ears and the other pressed on the chest of the man in the hole. He removed the stethoscope from his ears and shook his head no at the Talib in the sunglasses. The crowd moaned.

John Lennon walked back to the mound.

When it was all over, when the bloodied corpses had been unceremoniously tossed into the backs of red pickup trucks--separate ones--a few men with shovels hurriedly filled the holes. One of them made a passing attempt at covering up the large blood stains by kicking dirt over them. A few minutes later, the teams took the field. Second half was under way.

Our meeting was arranged for three o’clock that afternoon. The swiftness with which the appointment was set surprised me. I’d expected delays, a round of questioning at least, perhaps a check of our papers. But I was reminded of how unofficial even official matters still were in Afghanistan: all Farid had to do was tell one of the whip-carrying Talibs that we had personal business to discuss with the man in white. Farid and he exchanged words. The guy with the whip then nodded and shouted something in Pashtu to a young man on the field, who ran to the south-end goalposts where the Talib in the sunglasses was chatting with the plump cleric who’d given the sermon. The three spoke. I saw the guy in the sunglasses look up. He nodded. Said something in the messenger’s ear. The young man relayed the message back to us.

It was set, then. Three o’clock.

TWENTY-TWO

Farid eased the Land Cruiser up the driveway of a big house in Wazir Akbar Khan. He parked in the shadows of willow trees that spilled over the walls of the compound located on Street 15, Sarak-e-Mehmana, Street of the Guests. He killed the engine and we sat for a minute, listening to the tink-tink of the engine cooling off, neither one of us saying anything. Farid shifted on his seat and toyed with the keys still hanging from the ignition switch. I could tell he was readying himself to tell me something.

“I guess I’ll wait in the car for you,” he said finally, his tone a little apologetic. He wouldn’t look at me. “This is your business now. I--”

I patted his arm. “You’ve done much more than I’ve paid you for. I don’t expect you to go with me.” But I wished I didn’t have to go in alone. Despite what I had learned about Baba, I wished he were standing alongside me now. Baba would have busted through the front doors and demanded to be taken to the man in charge, piss on the beard of

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anyone who stood in his way. But Baba was long dead, buried in the Afghan section of a little cemetery in Hayward. Just last month, Soraya and I had placed a bouquet of daisies and freesias beside his headstone. I was on my own.

I stepped out of the car and walked to the tall, wooden front gates of the house. I rang the bell but no buzz came--still no electricity--and I had to pound on the doors. A moment later, I heard terse voices from the other side and a pair of men toting Kalash nikovs answered the door.

I glanced at Farid sitting in the car and mouthed, I’ll be back, not so sure at all that I would be.

The armed men frisked me head to toe, patted my legs, felt my crotch. One of them said something in Pashtu and they both chuckled. We stepped through the front gates. The two guards escorted me across a well-manicured lawn, past a row of geraniums and stubby bushes lined along the wall. An old hand-pump water well stood at the far end of the yard. I remembered how Kaka Homayoun’s house in Jalalabad had had a water well like that--the twins, Fazila and Karima, and I used to drop pebbles in it, listen for the plink.

We climbed a few steps and entered a large, sparsely decorated house. We crossed the foyer--a large Afghan flag draped one of the walls--and the men took me upstairs to a room with twin mint green sofas and a big-screen TV in the far corner. A prayer rug showing a slightly oblong Mecca was nailed to one of the walls. The older of the two men motioned toward the sofa with the barrel of his weapon. I sat down. They left the room.

I crossed my legs. Uncrossed them. Sat with my sweaty hands on my knees. Did that make me look nervous? I clasped them together, decided that was worse and just crossed my arms on my chest. Blood thudded in my temples. I felt utterly alone.

Thoughts were flying around in my head, but I didn’t want to think at all, because a sober part of me knew that what I had managed to get myself into was insanity. I was thousands of miles from my wife, sitting in a room that felt like a holding cell, waiting for a man I had seen murder two people that same day. It was insanity. Worse yet, it was irresponsible. There was a very realistic chance that I was going to render Soraya a biwa, a widow, at the age of thirty-six. This isn’t you, Amir, part of me said. You’re gutless. It’s how you were made. And that’s not such a bad thing because your saving grace is that you’ve never lied to yourself about it. Not about that. Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.

There was a coffee table by the sofa. The base was X-shaped, walnut-sized brass balls studding the ring where the metallic legs crossed. I’d seen a table like that before.

Where? And then it came to me: at the crowded tea shop in Peshawar, that night I’d gone for a walk. On the table sat a bowl of red grapes. I plucked one and tossed it in my mouth. I had to preoccupy myself with something, anything, to silence the voice in my

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head. The grape was sweet. I popped another one in, unaware that it would be the last bit of solid food I would eat for a long time.

The door opened and the two armed men returned, between them the tall Talib in white, still wearing his dark John Lennon glasses, looking like some broad-shouldered, NewAge mystic guru.

He took a seat across from me and lowered his hands on the armrests. For a long time, he said nothing. Just sat there, watching me, one hand drumming the upholstery, the other twirling turquoise blue prayer beads. He wore a black vest over the white shirt now, and a gold watch. I saw a splotch of dried blood on his left sleeve. I found it morbidly fascinating that he hadn’t changed clothes after the executions earlier that day.

Periodically, his free hand floated up and his thick fingers batted at something in the air.

They made slow stroking motions, up and down, side to side, as if he were caressing an invisible pet. One of his sleeves retracted and I saw marks on his forearm--I’d seen those same tracks on homeless people living in grimy alleys in San Francisco.

His skin was much paler than the other two men’s, almost sallow, and a crop of tiny sweat beads gleamed on his forehead just below the edge of his black turban. His beard, chest-length like the others, was lighter in color too.

“Salaam alaykum,” he said.

“Salaam.”

“You can do away with that now, you know,” he said.

“Pardon?”

He turned his palm to one of the armed men and motioned. Rrrriiiip. Suddenly my cheeks were stinging and the guard was tossing my beard up and down in his hand, giggling. The Talib grinned. “One of the better ones I’ve seen in a while. But it really is so much better this way, I think. Don’t you?” He twirled his fingers, snapped them, fist opening and closing. “So, _Inshallah_, you enjoyed the show today?”

“Was that what it was?” I said, rubbing my cheeks, hoping my voice didn’t betray the explosion of terror I felt inside.

“Public justice is the greatest kind of show, my brother. Drama. Suspense. And, best of all, education en masse.” He snapped his fingers. The younger of the two guards lit him

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a cigarette. The Talib laughed. Mumbled to himself. His hands were shaking and he almost dropped the cigarette. “But you want a real show, you should have been with me in Mazar. August 1998, that was.”

“I’m sorry?”

“We left them out for the dogs, you know.”

I saw what he was getting at.

He stood up, paced around the sofa once, twice. Sat down again. He spoke rapidly.

“Door to door we went, calling for the men and the boys. We’d shoot them right there in front of their families. Let them see. Let them remember who they were, where they belonged.” He was almost panting now. “Sometimes, we broke down their doors and went inside their homes. And... I’d... I’d sweep the barrel of my machine gun around the room and fire and fire until the smoke blinded me.” He leaned toward me, like a man about to share a great secret. “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘liberating’ until you’ve done that, stood in a roomful of targets, let the bullets fly, free of guilt and remorse, knowing you are virtuous, good, and decent. Knowing you’re doing God’s work. It’s breathtaking.” He kissed the prayer beads, tilted his head. “You remember that, Javid?”

“Yes, Agha sahib,” the younger of the guards replied. “How could I forget?”

I had read about the Hazara massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif in the papers. It had happened just after the Taliban took over Mazar, one of the last cities to fall. I remembered Soraya handing me the article over breakfast, her face bloodless.

“Door-to-door. We only rested for food and prayer,” the Talib said. He said it fondly, like a man telling of a great party he’d attended. “We left the bodies in the streets, and if their families tried to sneak out to drag them back into their homes, we’d shoot them too. We left them in the streets for days. We left them for the dogs. Dog meat for dogs.”

He crushed his cigarette. Rubbed his eyes with tremulous hands. “You come from America?”

“Yes.”

“How is that whore these days?”

I had a sudden urge to urinate. I prayed it would pass. “I’m looking for a boy.”

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“Isn’t everyone?” he said. The men with the Kalashnikovs laughed. Their teeth were stained green with naswar.

“I understand he is here, with you,” I said. “His name is Sohrab.”

“I’ll ask you something: What are you doing with that whore? Why aren’t you here, with your Muslim brothers, serving your country?”

“I’ve been away a long time,” was all I could think of saying. My head felt so hot. I pressed my knees together, held my bladder.

The Talib turned to the two men standing by the door. “That’s an answer?” he asked them.

“Nay, Agha sahib,” they said in unison, smiling.

He turned his eyes to me. Shrugged. “Not an answer, they say.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “There are those in my circle who believe that abandoning watan when it needs you the most is the same as treason. I could have you arrested for treason, have you shot for it even. Does that frighten you?”

“I’m only here for the boy.”

“Does that frighten you?”

“Yes.”

“It should,” he said. He leaned back in the sofa. Crushed the cigarette.

I thought about Soraya. It calmed me. I thought of her sickleshaped birthmark, the elegant curve of her neck, her luminous eyes. I thought of our wedding night, gazing at each other’s reflection in the mirror under the green veil, and how her cheeks blushed when I whispered that I loved her. I remembered the two of us dancing to an old Afghan song, round and round, everyone watching and clapping, the world a blur of flowers, dresses, tuxedos, and smiling faces.

The Talib was saying something.

“Pardon?”

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“I said would you like to see him? Would you like to see my boy?” His upper lip curled up in a sneer when he said those last two words.

“Yes.”

The guard left the room. I heard the creak of a door swinging open. Heard the guard say something in Pashtu, in a hard voice. Then, footfalls, and the jingle of bells with each step. It reminded me of the Monkey Man Hassan and I used to chase down in Shar e-Nau. We used to pay him a rupia of our allowance for a dance. The bell around his monkey’s neck had made that same jingling sound.

Then the door opened and the guard walked in. He carried a stereo--a boom box--on his shoulder. Behind him, a boy dressed in a loose, sapphire blue pirhan-tumban followed.

The resemblance was breathtaking. Disorienting. Rahim Khan’s Polaroid hadn’t done justice to it.

The boy had his father’s round moon face, his pointy stub of a chin, his twisted, seashell ears, and the same slight frame. It was the Chinese doll face of my childhood, the face peering above fanned-out playing cards all those winter days, the face behind the mosquito net when we slept on the roof of my father’s house in the summer. His head was shaved, his eyes darkened with mascara, and his cheeks glowed with an unnatural red. When he stopped in the middle of the room, the bells strapped around his anklets stopped jingling. His eyes fell on me. Lingered. Then he looked away. Looked down at his naked feet.

One of the guards pressed a button and Pashtu music filled the room. Tabla, harmonium, the whine of a dil-roba. I guessed music wasn’t sinful as long as it played to Taliban ears. The three men began to clap.

“Wah wah! _Mashallah_!” they cheered.

Sohrab raised his arms and turned slowly. He stood on tiptoes, spun gracefully, dipped to his knees, straightened, and spun again. His little hands swiveled at the wrists, his fingers snapped, and his head swung side to side like a pendulum. His feet pounded the floor, the bells jingling in perfect harmony with the beat of the tabla. He kept his eyes closed.

“_Mashallah_!” they cheered. “Shahbas! Bravo!” The two guards whistled and laughed.

The Talib in white was tilting his head back and forth with the music, his mouth half-open in a leer.

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Sohrab danced in a circle, eyes closed, danced until the music stopped. The bells jingled one final time when he stomped his foot with the song’s last note. He froze in midspin.

“Bia, bia, my boy,” the Talib said, calling Sohrab to him. Sohrab went to him, head down, stood between his thighs. The Talib wrapped his arms around the boy. “How talented he is, nay, my Hazara boy!” he said. His hands slid down the child’s back, then up, felt under his armpits. One of the guards elbowed the other and snickered. The Talib told them to leave us alone.

“Yes, Agha sahib,” they said as they exited.

The Talib spun the boy around so he faced me. He locked his arms around Sohrab’s belly, rested his chin on the boy’s shoulder. Sohrab looked down at his feet, but kept stealing shy, furtive glances at me. The man’s hand slid up and down the boy’s belly.

Up and down, slowly, gently.

“I’ve been wondering,” the Talib said, his bloodshot eyes peering at me over Sohrab’s shoulder. “Whatever happened to old Babalu, anyway?”

The question hit me like a hammer between the eyes. I felt the color drain from my face.

My legs went cold. Numb.

He laughed. “What did you think? That you’d put on a fake beard and I wouldn’t recognize you? Here’s something I’ll bet you never knew about me: I never forget a face. Not ever.” He brushed his lips against Sohrab’s ear, kept his eye on me. “I heard your father died. Tsk-tsk. I always did want to take him on. Looks like I’ll have to settle for his weakling of a son.” Then he took off his sunglasses and locked his bloodshot blue eyes on mine.

I tried to take a breath and couldn’t. I tried to blink and couldn’t. The moment felt surreal--no, not surreal, absurd--it had knocked the breath out of me, brought the world around me to a standstill. My face was burning. What was the old saying about the bad penny? My past was like that, always turning up. His name rose from the deep and I didn’t want to say it, as if uttering it might conjure him. But he was already here, in the flesh, sitting less than ten feet from me, after all these years. His name escaped my lips:

“Assef.”

“Ainir jan.”

“What are you doing here?” I said, knowing how utterly foolish the question sounded, yet unable to think of anything else to say.

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“Me?” Assef arched an eyebrow “I’m in my element. The question is what are you doing here?”

“I already told you,” I said. My voice was trembling. I wished it wouldn’t do that, wished my flesh wasn’t shrinking against my bones.

“The boy?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’ll pay you for him,” I said. “I can have money wired.”

“Money?” Assef said. He tittered. “Have you ever heard of Rockingham? Western Australia, a slice of heaven. You should see it, miles and miles of beach. Green water, blue skies. My parents live there, in a beachfront villa. There’s a golf course behind the villa and a little lake. Father plays golf every day. Mother, she prefers tennis--Father says she has a wicked backhand. They own an Afghan restaurant and two jewelry stores; both businesses are doing spectacularly.” He plucked a red grape. Put it, lovingly, in Sohrab’s mouth. “So if I need money, I’ll have them wire it to me.” He kissed the side of Sohrab’s neck. The boy flinched a little, closed his eyes again. “Besides, I didn’t fight the Shorawi for money. Didn’t join the Taliban for money either. Do you want to know why I joined them?”

My lips had gone dry. I licked them and found my tongue had dried too.

“Are you thirsty?” Assef said, smirking.

“I think you’re thirsty.”

“I’m fine,” I said. The truth was, the room felt too hot suddenly--sweat was bursting from my pores, prickling my skin. And was this really happening? Was I really sitting across from Assef?

“As you wish,” he said. “Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, how I joined the Taliban. Well, as you may remember, I wasn’t much of a religious type. But one day I had an epiphany. I had it in jail. Do you want to hear?”

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I said nothing.

“Good. I’ll tell you,” he said. “I spent some time in jail, at Poleh-Charkhi, just after Babrak Karmal took over in 1980. I ended up there one night, when a group of Parc hami soldiers marched into our house and ordered my father and me at gun point to follow them. The bastards didn’t give a reason, and they wouldn’t answer my mother’s questions. Not that it was a mys tery; everyone knew the communists had no class.

They came from poor families with no name. The same dogs who weren’t fit to lick my shoes before the Shorawi came were now ordering me at gunpoint, Parchami flag on their lapels, making their little point about the fall of the bourgeoisie and acting like they were the ones with class. It was happening all over: Round up the rich, throw them in jail, make an example for the comrades.

“Anyway, we were crammed in groups of six in these tiny cells each the size of a refrigerator. Every night the commandant, a haif-Hazara, half-Uzbek thing who smelled like a rotting donkey, would have one of the prisoners dragged out of the cell and he’d beat him until sweat poured from his fat face. Then he’d light a cigarette, crack his joints, and leave. The next night, he’d pick someone else. One night, he picked me. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’d been peeing blood for three days. Kidney stones. And if you’ve never had one, believe me when I say it’s the worst imaginable pain. My mother used to get them too, and I remember she told me once she’d rather give birth than pass a kidney stone. Anyway, what could I do? They dragged me out and he started kick ing me. He had knee-high boots with steel toes that he wore every night for his little kicking game, and he used them on me. I was screaming and screaming and he kept kicking me and then, suddenly, he kicked me on the left kidney and the stone passed. Just like that! Oh, the relief!” Assef laughed. “And I yelled ‘Allah-u akbar’ and he kicked me even harder and I started laughing. He got mad and hit me harder, and the harder he kicked me, the harder I laughed. They threw me back in the cell laughing. I kept laughing and laughing because suddenly I knew that had been a message from God: He was on my side. He wanted me to live for a reason.

“You know, I ran into that commandant on the battlefield a few years later--funny how God works. I found him in a trench just outside Meymanah, bleeding from a piece of shrapnel in his chest. He was still wearing those same boots. I asked him if he remembered me. He said no. I told him the same thing I just told you, that I never forget a face. Then I shot him in the balls. I’ve been on a mission since.”

“What mission is that?” I heard myself say. “Stoning adulterers? Raping children?

Flogging women for wearing high heels? Massacring Hazaras? All in the name of Islam?” The words spilled suddenly and unexpectedly, came out before I could yank the leash. I wished I could take them back. Swallow them. But they were out. I had crossed a line, and whatever little hope I had of getting out alive had vanished with those words.

A look of surprise passed across Assef’s face, briefly, and disappeared. “I see this may turn out to be enjoyable after all,” he said, snickering. “But there are things traitors like you don’t understand.”

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“Like what?”

Assef’s brow twitched. “Like pride in your people, your customs, your language.

Afghanistan is like a beautiful mansion littered with garbage, and someone has to take out the garbage.”

“That’s what you were doing in Mazar, going door-to-door? Taking out the garbage?”

“Precisely.”

“In the west, they have an expression for that,” I said. “They call it ethnic cleansing.”

“Do they?” Assef’s face brightened. “Ethnic cleansing. I like it. I like the sound of it.”

“All I want is the boy.”

“Ethnic cleansing,” Assef murmured, tasting the words.

“I want the boy,” I said again. Sohrab’s eyes flicked to me. They were slaughter sheep’s eyes. They even had the mascara--I remembered how, on the day of Eid of qorban, the mullah in our backyard used to apply mascara to the eyes of the sheep and feed it a cube of sugar before slicing its throat. I thought I saw pleading in Sohrab’s eyes.

“Tell me why,” Assef said. He pinched Sohrab’s earlobe between his teeth. Let go.

Sweat beads rolled down his brow.

“That’s my business.”

“What do you want to do with him?” he said. Then a coy smile. “Or to him.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“How would you know? Have you tried it?”

“I want to take him to a better place.”

“Tell me why.”

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“That’s my business,” I said. I didn’t know what had emboldened me to be so curt, maybe the fact that I thought I was going to die anyway.

“I wonder,” Assef said. “I wonder why you’ve come all this way, Amir, come all this way for a Hazara? Why are you here? Why are you really here?”

“I have my reasons,” I said.

“Very well then,” Assef said, sneering. He shoved Sohrab in the back, pushed him right into the table. Sohrab’s hips struck the table, knocking it upside down and spilling the grapes. He fell on them, face first, and stained his shirt purple with grape juice. The table’s legs, crossing through the ring of brass balls, were now pointing to the ceiling.

“Take him, then,” Assef said. I helped Sohrab to his feet, swat ted the bits of crushed grape that had stuck to his pants like bar nacles to a pier.

“Go, take him,” Assef said, pointing to the door.

I took Sohrab’s hand. It was small, the skin dry and calloused. His fingers moved, laced themselves with mine. I saw Sohrab in that Polaroid again, the way his arm was wrapped around Hassan’s leg, his head resting against his father’s hip. They’d both been smiling. The bells jingled as we crossed the room.

We made it as far as the door.

“Of course,” Assef said behind us, “I didn’t say you could take him for free.”

I turned. “What do you want?”

“You have to earn him.”

“What do you want?”

“We have some unfinished business, you and I,” Assef said. “You remember, don’t you?”

He needn’t have worried. I would never forget the day after Daoud Khan overthrew the king. My entire adult life, whenever I heard Daoud Khan’s name, what I saw was

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Hassan with his sling shot pointed at Assef’s face, Hassan saying that they’d have to start calling him One-Eyed Assef. instead of Assef Goshkhor. I remember how envious I’d been of Hassan’s bravery. Assef had backed down, promised that in the end he’d get us both. He’d kept that promise with Hassan. Now it was my turn.

“All right,” I said, not knowing what else there was to say. I wasn’t about to beg; that would have only sweetened the moment for him.

Assef called the guards back into the room. “I want you to listen to me,” he said to them.

“In a moment, I’m going to close the door. Then he and I are going to finish an old bit of business. No matter what you hear, don’t come in! Do you hear me? Don’t come in.

The guards nodded. Looked from Assef to me. “Yes, Agha sahib.”

“When it’s all done, only one of us will walk out of this room alive,” Assef said. “If it’s him, then he’s earned his freedom and you let him pass, do you understand?”

The older guard shifted on his feet. “But Agha sahib--”

“If it’s him, you let him pass!” Assef screamed. The two men flinched but nodded again.

They turned to go. One of them reached for Sohrab.

“Let him stay,” Assef said. He grinned. “Let him watch. Lessons are good things for boys.”

The guards left. Assef put down his prayer beads. Reached in the breast pocket of his black vest. What he fished out of that pocket didn’t surprise me one bit: stainless-steel brass knuckles.

HE HAS GEL IN HIS HAIR and a Clark Gable mustache above his thick lips. The gel has soaked through the green paper surgical cap, made a dark stain the shape of Africa. I remember that about him. That, and the gold Allah chain around his dark neck.

He is peering down at me, speaking rapidly in a language I don’t understand, Urdu, I think. My eyes keep going to his Adam’s apple bob bing up and down, up and down, and I want to ask him how old he is anyway--he looks far too young, like an actor from some foreign soap opera--but all I can mutter is, I think I gave him a good fight. I think I gave him a good fight.

I DON’T KNOW if I gave Assef a good fight. I don’t think I did. How could I have? That was the first time I’d fought anyone. I had never so much as thrown a punch in my entire life.

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My memory of the fight with Assef is amazingly vivid in stretches: I remember Assef turning on the music before slipping on his brass knuckles. The prayer rug, the one with the oblong, woven Mecca, came loose from the wall at one point and landed on my head; the dust from it made me sneeze. I remember Assef shoving grapes in my face, his snarl all spit-shining teeth, his bloodshot eyes rolling. His turban fell at some point, let loose curls of shoulder-length blond hair.

And the end, of course. That, I still see with perfect clarity. I always will.

Mostly, I remember this: His brass knuckles flashing in the afternoon light; how cold they felt with the first few blows and how quickly they warmed with my blood. Getting thrown against the wall, a nail where a framed picture may have hung once jabbing at my back. Sohrab screaming. Tabla, harmonium, a dil-roba. Getting hurled against the wall. The knuckles shattering my jaw. Choking on my own teeth, swallowing them, thinking about all the countless hours I’d spent flossing and brushing. Getting hurled against the wall. Lying on the floor, blood from my split upper lip staining the mauve carpet, pain ripping through my belly, and wondering when I’d be able to breathe again.

The sound of my ribs snapping like the tree branches Hassan and I used to break to swordfight like Sinbad in those old movies. Sohrab screaming. The side of my face slamming against the corner of the television stand. That snapping sound again, this time just under my left eye. Music. Sohrab screaming. Fingers grasping my hair, pulling my head back, the twinkle of stainless steel. Here they ëome. That snapping sound yet again, now my nose. Biting down in pain, noticing how my teeth didn’t align like they used to. Getting kicked. Sohrab screaming.

I don’t know at what point I started laughing, but I did. It hurt to laugh, hurt my jaws, my ribs, my throat. But I was laughing and laughing. And the harder I laughed, the harder he kicked me, punched me, scratched me.

“WHAT’S SO FUNNY?” Assef kept roaring with each blow. His spittle landed in my eye.

Sohrab screamed.

“WHAT’S SO FUNNY?” Assef bellowed. Another rib snapped, this time left lower. What was so funny was that, for the first time since the winter of 1975, I felt at peace. I laughed because I saw that, in some hidden nook in a corner of my mind, I’d even been looking forward to this. I remembered the day on the hill I had pelted Hassan with pomegranates and tried to provoke him. He’d just stood there, doing nothing, red juice soaking through his shirt like blood. Then he’d taken the pomegranate from my hand, crushed it against his forehead. Are you satisfied now? he’d hissed. Do you feel better?

I hadn’t been happy and I hadn’t felt better, not at all. But I did now. My body was broken--just how badly I wouldn’t find out until later--but I felt healed. Healed at last. I laughed.

Then the end. That, I’ll take to my grave:

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I was on the ground laughing, Assef straddling my chest, his face a mask of lunacy, framed by snarls of his hair swaying inches from my face. His free hand was locked around my throat. The other, the one with the brass knuckles, cocked above his shoulder. He raised his fist higher, raised it for another blow.

Then:“Bas.”A thin voice.

We both looked.

“Please, no more.”

I remembered something the orphanage director had said when he’d opened the door to me and Farid. What had been his name? Zaman? He’s inseparable from that thing, he had said. He tucks it in the waist of his pants everywhere he goes.

“No more.”

Twin trails of black mascara, mixed with tears, had rolled down his cheeks, smeared the rouge. His lower lip trembled. Mucus seeped from his nose. “Bas,” he croaked.

His hand was cocked above his shoulder, holding the cup of the slingshot at the end of the elastic band which was pulled all the way back. There was something in the cup, something shiny and yellow. I blinked the blood from my eyes and saw it was one of the brass balls from the ring in the table base. Sohrab had the slingshot pointed to Assef’s face.

“No more, Agha. Please,” he said, his voice husky and trembling. “Stop hurting him.”

Assef’s mouth moved wordlessly. He began to say something, stopped. “What do you think you’re you doing?” he finally said.

“Please stop,” Sohrab said, fresh tears pooling in his green eyes, mixing with mascara.

“Put it down, Hazara,” Assef hissed. “Put it down or what I’m doing to him will be a gentle ear twisting compared to what I’ll do to you.”

The tears broke free. Sohrab shook his head. “Please, Agha,” he said. “Stop.”

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“Put it down.”

“Don’t hurt him anymore.”

“Put it down.”