Текст книги "And the Mountains Echoed"

Автор книги: Khaled Hosseini

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“The Lord and His ways,” Timur mutters.

It’s an ordinary two-story house that in Idris’s neighborhood in San Jose would draw the ire of the HOA folks. But by Kabul standards, it’s a lavish property, with high walls, metal gates, and a wide driveway. As he and Timur are led inside by an armed guard, Idris sees that, like many things he has seen in Kabul, the house has a whiff of past splendor beneath the ruin that has been visited upon it—of which there is ample evidence: bullet holes and zigzagging cracks in the sooty walls, exposed bricks beneath wide missing patches of plaster, dead bushes in the driveway, leafless trees in the garden, yellowed lawn. More than half of the veranda that overlooks the backyard is missing. But also like many things in Kabul, there is evidence of slow, hesitant rebirth. Someone has begun to repaint the house, planted rosebushes in the garden, a missing chunk of the garden’s east-facing wall has been replaced, albeit a little clumsily. A ladder is propped against the side of the house facing the street, leading Idris to think that roof repair is under way. Repair on the missing half of the veranda has apparently begun.

They meet Markos in the foyer. He has thinning gray hair and pale blue eyes. He wears gray Afghan garments and a black-and-white-checkered kaffiyehelegantly wrapped around his neck. He shows them into a noisy room thick with smoke.

“I have tea, wine, and beer. Or maybe you prefer something heavier?”

“You point and I pour,” Timur said.

“Oh, I like you. There, by the stereo. Ice is safe, by the way. Made from bottled water.”

“God bless.”

Timur is in his element at gatherings like this, and Idris cannot help but admire him for the ease of his manners, the effortless wisecracking, the self-possessed charm. He follows Timur to the bar, where Timur pours them drinks from a ruby bottle.

The twenty or so guests sit on cushions around the room. The floor is covered with a burgundy red Afghan rug. The décor is understated, tasteful, what Idris has come to think of as “expat chic.” A Nina Simone CD plays softly. Everyone is drinking, nearly everyone smoking, talking about the new war in Iraq, what it will mean for Afghanistan. The television in the corner is tuned to CNN International, the volume muted. Nighttime Baghdad, in the throes of Shock and Awe, keeps lighting up in flashes of green.

Vodka on ice in hand, they are joined by Markos and a pair of serious-looking young Germans who work for the World Food Program. Like many of the aid workers he has met in Kabul, Idris finds them slightly intimidating, world savvy, impossible to impress.

He says to Markos, “This is a nice house.”

“Tell the owner, then.” Markos goes across the room and returns with a thin, elderly man. The man has a thick wall of salt-and-pepper hair combed back from the brow. He has a closely cropped beard, and the sunken cheeks of the nearly toothless. He is wearing a shabby, oversize olive-colored suit that may have been in style back in the 1940s. Markos smiles at the old man with open affection.

“Nabi jan?” Timur exclaims, and suddenly Idris remembers too.

The old man grins back shyly. “Forgive me, have we met before?”

“I’m Timur Bashiri,” Timur says in Farsi. “My family used to live down the street from you!”

“Oh great God,” the old man breathes. “Timur jan? And you must be Idris jan?”

Idris nods, smiling back.

Nabi embraces them both. He kisses their cheeks, still grinning, and eyes them with disbelief. Idris remembers Nabi pushing his employer, Mr. Wahdati, in a wheelchair up and down the street. Sometimes he would park the chair on the sidewalk, and the two men would watch him and Timur play soccer with the neighborhood kids.

“Nabi jan has lived in this house since 1947,” Markos says, his arm around Nabi’s shoulder.

“So you ownthis place now?” Timur says.

Nabi smiles at the look of surprise on Timur’s face. “I served Mr. Wahdati here from 1947 until 2000, when he passed away. He was kind enough to will the house to me, yes.”

“He gaveit to you,” Timur says incredulously.

Nabi nods. “Yes.”

“You must have been one hell of a cook!”

“And you, if I may say, were a bit of a troublemaker, as I recall.”

Timur cackles. “Never did care for the straight and narrow, Nabi jan. I leave that to my cousin here.”

Markos, swirling his glass of wine, says to Idris, “Nila Wahdati, the wife of the previous owner, she was a poet. Of some small renown, as it turns out. Have you heard of her?”

Idris shakes his head. “All I know is that she’d already left the country by the time I was born.”

“She lived in Paris with her daughter,” one of the Germans, Thomas, says. “She died in 1974. Suicide, I think. She had problems with alcohol, or, at least, that is what I read. Someone gave me a German translation of one of her early volumes a year or two ago and I thought it was quite good, actually. Surprisingly sexual, as I recall.”

Idris nods, again feeling a little inadequate, this time because a foreigner has schooled him on an Afghan artist. A couple of feet away, he can hear Timur engaged in an animated discussion with Nabi over rent prices. In Farsi, of course.

“Do you have any idea what you could charge for a place like this, Nabi jan?” he is saying to the old man.

“Yes,” Nabi says, nodding, laughing. “I am aware of rental prices in the city.”

“You could fleece these guys!”

“Well …”

“And you’re letting them stay for free.”

“They’ve come to help our country, Timur jan. They left their homes and came here. It doesn’t seem right that I should, as you say, ‘fleece them.’ ”

Timur issues a groan, downs the rest of his drink. “Well, either you hate money, old friend, or you are a far better man than I am.”

Amra walks into the room, wearing a sapphire Afghan tunic over faded jeans. “Nabi jan!” she exclaims. Nabi seems a little startled when she kisses his cheek and coils an arm around his. “I love this man,” she says to the group. “And I love to embarrass him.” Then she says it in Farsi to Nabi. He tilts his head back and forth and laughs, blushing a little.

“How about you embarrass me too,” Timur says.

Amra taps him on the chest. “This one is big trouble.” She and Markos kiss Afghan-style, three times on the cheek, same with the Germans.

Markos slings an arm around her waist. “Amra Ademovic. The hardest-working woman in Kabul. You do not want to cross this girl. Also, she will drink you under the table.”

“Let’s put that to the test,” Timur says, reaching for a glass on the bar behind him.

The old man, Nabi, excuses himself.

For the next hour or so, Idris mingles, or tries to. As liquor levels in the bottles drop, conversations rise in pitch. Idris hears German, French, what must be Greek. He has another vodka, follows it up with a lukewarm beer. In one group, he musters the courage to slip in a Mullah Omar joke that he had learned in Farsi back in California. But the joke doesn’t translate well into English, and his delivery is harried. It falls flat. He moves on, and listens in on a conversation about an Irish pub that is set to open in Kabul. There is general agreement that it will not last.

He walks around the room, warm beer can in hand. He has never been at ease in gatherings like this. He tries to busy himself inspecting the décor. There are posters of the Bamiyan Buddhas, of a Buzkashi game, one of a harbor in a Greek island named Tinos. He has never heard of Tinos. He spots a framed photograph in the foyer, black-and-white, a little blurry, as though it had been shot with a homemade camera. It’s of a young girl with long black hair, her back to the lens. She is at a beach, sitting on a rock, facing the ocean. The lower left-hand corner of the photo looks like it had burned.

Dinner is leg of lamb with rosemary and imbedded little cloves of garlic. There is goat cheese salad and pasta topped with pesto sauce. Idris helps himself to some of the salad, and ends up toying with it in a corner of the room. He spots Timur sitting with two young, attractive Dutch women. Holding court, Idris thinks. Laughter erupts, and one of the women touches Timur’s knee.

Idris carries his wine outside to the veranda and sits on a wooden bench. It’s dark now, and the veranda is lit only by a pair of lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. From here, he can see the general shape of some sort of living quarters at the far end of the garden, and, off to the right side of the garden, the silhouette of a car—big, long, old—likely American, by the curves of it. Forties model, maybe early fifties—Idris can’t quite see—and, besides, he has never been a car guy. He is sure Timur would know. He would rattle off the model, year, engine size, all the options. It looks like the car is sitting on four flats. A neighborhood dog breaks into a staccato of barks. Inside, someone has put on a Leonard Cohen CD.

“Quiet and Sensitive.”

Amra sits beside him, ice tinkling in her glass. Her feet are bare.

“Your cousin Cowboy, he is life of party.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“He is very good-looking. He is married?”

“With three kids.”

“Too bad. I behave, then.”

“I’m sure he’d be disappointed to hear that.”

“I have rules,” she says. “You don’t like him very much.”

Idris tells her, quite truthfully, that Timur is the closest thing he has to a brother.

“But he make you embarrassed.”

It’s true. Timur hasembarrassed him. He has behaved like the quintessential ugly Afghan-American, Idris thinks. Tearing through the war-torn city like he belongs here, backslapping locals with great bonhomie and calling them brother, sister, uncle, making a show of handing money to beggars from what he calls the Bakhsheesh bundle, joking with old women he calls motherand talking them into telling their story into his camcorder as he strikes a woebegone expression, pretending he is one of them, like he’s been here all along, like he wasn’t lifting at Gold’s in San Jose, working on his pecs and abs, when these people were getting shelled, murdered, raped. It is hypocritical, and distasteful. And it astonishes Idris that no one seems to see through this act.

“It isn’t true what he told you,” Idris says. “We came here to reclaim the house that belonged to our fathers. That’s all. Nothing else.”

Amra snorts a chuckle. “Of course I know. You think I was fooled? I have done business with warlords and Taliban in this country. I have seen everything. Nothing can give me shock. Nothing, nobody, can fool me.”

“I imagine that’s true.”

“You are honest,” she says. “At least you are honest.”

“I just think these people, everything they’ve been through, we should respect them. By ‘we,’ I mean people like Timur and me. The lucky ones, the ones who weren’t here when the place was getting bombed to hell. We’re not like these people. We shouldn’t pretend we are. The stories these people have to tell, we’re not entitledto them … I’m rambling.”

“Rambling?”

“I’m not making sense.”

“No, I understand,” she says. “You say their stories, it is gift they give you.”

“A gift. Yes.”

They sip some more wine. They talk for some time, for Idris the first genuine conversation he has had since arriving in Kabul, free of the subtle mocking, the vague reproach he has sensed from the locals, the government officials, those in the aid agencies. He asks about her work, and she tells him that she has served in Kosovo with the UN, in Rwanda after the genocide, Colombia, Burundi too. She has worked with child prostitutes in Cambodia. She has been in Kabul for a year now, her third stint, this time with a small NGO, working at the hospital and running a mobile clinic on Mondays. Married twice, divorced twice, no kids. Idris finds it hard to guess at Amra’s age, though likely she’s younger than she looks. There is a fading shimmer of beauty, a roughshod sexuality, behind the yellowing teeth, the fatigue pouches under the eyes. In four, maybe five years, Idris thinks, that too will be gone.

Then she says, “You want to know what happen to Roshi?”

“You don’t have to tell,” he says.

“You think I am drunk?”

“Are you?”

“Little bit,” she says. “But you are honest guy.” She taps him on the shoulder gently, and a little playfully. “You ask to know for right reasons. For other Afghans like you, Afghans coming from West, it is like—how do you say?—stretching the neck.”

“Rubbernecking.”

“Yes.”

“Like pornography.”

“But maybe you are good guy.”

“If you tell me,” he says, “I will take it as a gift.”

So she tells him.

Roshi lived with her parents, two sisters, and her baby brother in a village a third of the way between Kabul and Bagram. One Friday last month, her uncle, her father’s older brother, came to visit. For almost a year, Roshi’s father and the uncle had had a feud over the property where Roshi lived with her family, property which the uncle felt belonged rightfully to him, being the older brother, but which his father had passed to the younger, and more favored, brother. The day he came, though, all was well.

“He say he want to end their fight.”

In preparation, Roshi’s mother had slaughtered two chickens, made a big pot of rice with raisins, bought fresh pomegranates from the market. When the uncle arrived, he and Roshi’s father kissed and embraced. Roshi’s father hugged his brother so hard, his feet lifted off the carpet. Roshi’s mother wept with relief. The family sat down to eat. Everyone had seconds, and thirds. They helped themselves to the pomegranates. After that, there was green tea and small toffee candies. The uncle then excused himself to use the outhouse.

When he came back, he had an ax in his hand.

“The kind for chopping tree,” Amra says.

The first one to go was Roshi’s father. “Roshi told me her father never even know what happened. He didn’t see anything.”

A single strike to the neck, from behind. It nearly decapitated him. Roshi’s mother was next. Roshi saw her mother try to fight, but several swings to the face and chest and she was silenced. By now the children were screaming and running. The uncle chased after them. Roshi saw one of her sisters make a run for the hallway, but the uncle grabbed her by the hair and wrestled her to the ground. The other sister did make it out to the hallway. The uncle gave chase, and Roshi could hear him kicking down the door to the bedroom, the screams, then the quiet.

“So Roshi, she decide to escape with the little brother. They run out of the house, they run for front door but it is locked. The uncle, he did it, of course.”

They ran for the yard, out of panic and desperation, perhaps forgetting that there was no gate in the yard, no way out, the walls too tall to climb. When the uncle burst out of the house and came for them, Roshi saw her little brother, who was five, throw himself into the tandoor, where, only an hour before, his mother had baked bread. Roshi could hear him screaming in the flames, when she tripped and fell. She turned onto her back in time to see blue sky and the ax whooshing down. And then nothing.

Amra stops. Inside, Leonard Cohen sings a live version of “Who By Fire.”

Even if he could talk, which he cannot at the moment, Idris wouldn’t know the proper thing to say. He might have said something, some offering of impotent outrage, if this had been the work of the Taliban, or al-Qaeda, or some megalomaniacal Mujahideen commander. But this cannot be blamed on Hekmatyar, or Mullah Omar, or Bin Laden, or Bush and his War on Terror. The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word senselesssprings to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It’s what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

He thinks of the girl, Roshi, back at the hospital, curled up against the wall, her toes knotted, the infantile look on her face. The crack in the crown of her shaved head, the fist-sized mass of glistening brain tissue leaking from it, sitting on her head like the knot of a sikh’s turban.

“She told you this story herself?” he finally asks.

Amra nods heavily. “She remember very clearly. Every detail. She can tell to you every detail. I wish she can forget because of the bad dreams.”

“The brother, what happened to him?”

“Too many burns.”

“And the uncle?”

Amra shrugs.

“They say be careful,” she says. “In my job, they say be careful, be professional. It’s not good idea to get attached. But Roshi and me...”

The music suddenly dies. Another power outage. For a few moments all is dark, save for the moonlight. Idris hears people groaning inside the house. Halogen torches promptly come to life.

“I fight for her,” Amra says. She never looks up. “I don’t stop.”

The next day, Timur rides with the Germans to the town of Istalif, known for its clay pottery. “You should come.”

“I’m going to stay in and read,” Idris says.

“You can read in San Jose, bro.”

“I need the rest. I might have had too much to drink last night.”

After the Germans pick up Timur, Idris lies in bed for a while, staring at a faded sixties-era advertising poster hanging on the wall, a quartet of smiling blond tourists hiking along Band-e-Amir Lake, a relic from his own childhood here in Kabul before the wars, before the unraveling. Early afternoon, he goes for a walk. At a small restaurant, he eats kabob for lunch. It’s hard to enjoy the meal with all the grimy young faces peering through the glass, watching him eat. It’s overwhelming. Idris admits to himself that Timur is better at this than he is. Timur makes a game of it. Like a drill sergeant, he whistles and makes the beggar kids queue up, whips out a few bills from the Bakhsheeshbundle. As he hands out the bills, one by one, he clicks his heels and salutes. The kids love it. They salute back. They call him Kaka. Sometimes they climb up his legs.

After lunch, Idris catches a taxi and asks to be taken to the hospital.

“But stop at a bazaar first,” he says.

Carrying the box, he walks down the hallway, past graffiti-spangled walls, rooms with plastic sheeting for doors, a shuffling barefoot old man with an eye patch, patients lying in stifling-hot rooms with missing lightbulbs. A sour-body smell everywhere. At the end of the hallway, he pauses at the curtain before pulling it back. He feels a lurch in his heart when he sees the girl sitting on the edge of the bed. Amra is kneeling before her, brushing her small teeth.

There is a man sitting on the other side of the bed, gaunt, sunburned, with a rat’s-nest beard and stubbly dark hair. When Idris enters, the man quickly gets up, flattens a hand against his chest, and bows. Idris is struck again by how easily the locals can tell he is a westernized Afghan, how the whiff of money and power affords him unwarranted privilege in this city. The man tells Idris he is Roshi’s uncle, from the mother’s side.

“You’re back,” Amra says, dipping the brush into a bowl of water.

“I hope that’s okay.”

“Why not,” she says.

Idris clears his throat. “Salaam, Roshi.”

The girl looks to Amra for permission. Her voice is a tentative, high-pitched whisper. “Salaam.”

“I brought you a present.” Idris lowers the box and opens it. Roshi’s eyes come to life when Idris takes out the small TV and VCR. He shows her the four films he has bought. Most of the tapes at the store were Indian movies, or else action flicks, martial-arts films with Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, all of Steven Seagal’s pictures. But he was able to find E.T., Babe, Toy Story, and The Iron Giant. He has watched them all with his own boys back home.

In Farsi, Amra asks Roshi which one she wants to watch. Roshi picks The Iron Giant.

“You’ll love that one,” Idris says. He finds it difficult to look at her directly. His gaze keeps sliding toward the mess on her head, the shiny clump of brain tissue, the crisscrossing network of veins and capillaries.

There is no electric outlet at the end of this hallway, and it takes Amra some time to find an extension cord, but when Idris plugs in the cord, and the picture comes on, Roshi’s mouth spreads into a smile. In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, the boundless brutality.

When Amra excuses herself to go see other patients, Idris takes a seat beside Roshi’s bed and watches the movie with her. The uncle is a silent, inscrutable presence in the room. Halfway through the film, the power goes out. Roshi begins to cry, and the uncle leans over from his chair and roughly clutches her hand. He whispers a few quick, terse words in Pashto, which Idris does not speak. Roshi winces and tries to pull away. Idris looks at her small hand, lost in the uncle’s strong, white-knuckled grasp.

Idris puts on his coat. “I’ll come back tomorrow, Roshi, and we can watch another tape if you like. You want that?”

Roshi shrinks into a ball beneath the covers. Idris looks at the uncle, pictures what Timur would do to this man—Timur, who, unlike him, has no capacity to resist the easy emotion. Give me ten minutes alone with him, he’d say.

The uncle follows him outside. On the steps, he stuns Idris by saying, “I am the real victim here, Sahib.” He must have seen the look on Idris’s face because he corrects himself and says, “Of course she is the victim. But, I mean, I am a victim too. You see that, of course, you are Afghan. But these foreigners, they don’t understand.”

“I have to go,” Idris says.

“I am a mazdoor, a simple laborer. I earn a dollar, maybe two, on a good day, Sahib. And I already have five children of my own. One of them blind. Now this.” He sighs. “I think to myself sometimes—God forgive me—I say to myself, maybe Allah should have let Roshi … well, you understand. It might have been better. Because I ask you, Sahib, what boy would marry her now? She will never find a husband. And then who will take care of her? I will have to. I will have to do it forever.”

Idris knows he has been cornered. He reaches for his wallet.

“Whatever you can spare, Sahib. Not for me, of course. For Roshi.”

Idris hands him a pair of bills. The uncle blinks, looks up from the money. He begins to say, “Two—” then clamps his mouth shut as though worried that he will alert Idris to a mistake.

“Buy her some decent shoes,” Idris says, walking down the steps.

“Allah bless you, Sahib,” the uncle calls out behind him. “You are a good man. You are a kind and good man.”

Idris visits the next day, and the day after that. Soon, it becomes a routine, and he is at Roshi’s side every day. He comes to know the orderlies by name, the male nurses who work the ground floor, the janitor, the underfed, tired-looking guards at the hospital gates. He keeps the visits as secret as possible. On his calls overseas, he has not told Nahil about Roshi. He does not tell Timur where he is going either, why he isn’t joining him on the trip to Paghman or for a meeting with an official at the Ministry of Interior. But Timur finds out anyway.

“Good for you,” he says. “It’s a decent thing you’re doing.” He pauses before adding, “Tread carefully, though.”

“You mean stop visiting.”

“We leave in a week, bro. You don’t want to get her too attached to you.”

Idris nods. He wonders if Timur may not be slightly jealous of his relationship with Roshi, perhaps even resentful that he, Idris, may have robbed him of a spectacular opportunity to play hero. Timur, emerging in slow motion from the blazing building, holding a baby. The crowd exploding in a cheer. Idris is determined not to let Timur parade Roshi in that way.

Still, Timur is right. They are going home in a week, and Roshi has started calling him Kaka Idris. If he arrives late, he finds her agitated. She ties her arms around his waist, a tide of relief washing over her face. His visits are what she looks forward to most, she has told him. Sometimes she clutches his hand with both of hers as they watch a tape. When he is away from her, he thinks often of the faint yellow hairs on her arms, her narrow hazel eyes, her pretty feet, her rounded cheeks, the way she cups her chin in her hands as he reads her one of the children’s books he has picked up from a bookstore near the French lycée. A few times, he has allowed himself to fleetingly imagine what it would be like to bring her to the U.S., how she would fit in with his boys, Zabi and Lemar, back home. This last year, he and Nahil had talked about the possibility of a third child.

“What now?” Amra says the day before he is scheduled to leave.

Earlier that day, Roshi had given Idris a picture, pencil-drawn on a sheet of hospital chart paper, of two stick figures watching a television. He’d pointed to the one with long hair. This is you?

And that one is you, Kaka Idris.

You had long hair, then? Before?

My sister brushed it every night. She knew how to do it so it didn’t hurt.

She must have been a good sister.

When it grows back, you can brush it.

I think I’d like that.

Don’t go, Kaka. Don’t leave.

“She is a sweet girl,” he says to Amra. And she is. Well-mannered, and humble too. With some guilt, he thinks of Zabi and Lemar back in San Jose, who have long professed their dislike of their Afghan names, who are fast turning into little tyrants, into the imperious American children he and Nahil had vowed they would never raise.

“She is survivor,” Amra says.

“Yes.”

Amra leans against the wall. A pair of orderlies rush past them, pushing a gurney. On it lies a young boy with blood-soaked bandaging around his head and some kind of open wound on his thigh.

“Other Afghans from America, or from Europe,” Amra says, “they come and take picture of her. They take video. They make promises. Then they go home and show their families. Like she is zoo animal. I allow it because I think maybe they will help. But they forget. I never hear from them. So I ask again, what now?”

“The operation she needs?” he says. “I want to make it happen.”

She looks at him hesitantly.

“We have a neurosurgery clinic in my group. I’ll speak to my chief. We’ll make arrangements to fly her over to California and have the surgery.”

“Yes, but the money.”

“We’ll get the funding. Worst comes to worst, I’ll pay for it.”

“Out of wallet.”

He laughs. “The expression is ‘out of pocket,’ but, yes.”

“We have to get uncle’s permission.”

“If he ever shows up again.” The uncle hasn’t been seen or heard from since the day Idris gave him the two hundred dollars.

Amra smiles at him. He has never done anything like this. There is something exhilarating, intoxicating, euphoric even, in throwing himself headlong into this commitment. He feels energized. It nearly takes his breath away. To his own amazement, tears prickle his eyes.

“Hvala,”she says. “Thank you.” She stands on tiptoes and kisses his cheek.

…

“Banged one of the Dutch girls,” Timur says. “From the party?”

Idris lifts his head off the window. He had been marveling at the soft brown peaks of the tightly packed Hindu Kush far beneath. He turns to look at Timur in the aisle seat.

“The brunette. Popped half a Vitamin V and rode her straight to the morning call for prayer.”

“Jesus. Will you ever grow up?” Idris says, irked that Timur has burdened him again with knowledge of his misconduct, his infidelity, his grotesque frat-boy antics.

Timur smirks. “Remember, cousin, what happens in Kabul …”

“Please don’t finish that sentence.”

Timur laughs.

Somewhere in the back of the plane, there is a little party going on. Someone is singing in Pashto, someone tapping on a Styrofoam plate like a tamboura.

“I can’t believe we ran into ol’ Nabi,” Timur mutters. “Jesus.”

Idris fishes the sleeping pill he had been saving from his breast pocket and dry-swallows it.

“So I’m coming back next month,” Timur says, crossing his arms, shutting his eyes. “Probably take a couple more trips after that, but we should be good.”

“You trust this guy Farooq?”

“Fuck no. It’s why I’m coming back.”

Farooq is the lawyer Timur has hired. His specialty is helping Afghans who have lived in exile reclaim their lost properties in Kabul. Timur goes on about the paperwork Farooq will file, the judge he is hoping will preside over the proceedings, a second cousin of Farooq’s wife. Idris rests his temple once more against the window, waits for the pill to take effect.

“Idris?” Timur says quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Sad shit we saw back there, huh?”

You’re full of startling insight, bro. “Yup,” Idris says.

“A thousand tragedies per square mile, man.”

Soon, Idris’s head begins to hum, and his vision blurs. As he drifts to sleep, he thinks of his farewell with Roshi, him holding her fingers, saying they would see each other again, her sobbing softly, almost silently, into his belly.

On the ride home from SFO, Idris recalls with fondness the manic chaos of Kabul’s traffic. It’s strange now to guide the Lexus down the orderly, pothole-free southbound lanes of the 101, the always helpful freeway signs, everyone so polite, signaling, yielding. He smiles at the memory of all the daredevil adolescent cabbies with whom he and Timur entrusted their lives in Kabul.

In the passenger seat, Nahil is all questions. Was Kabul safe? How was the food? Did he get sick? Did he take pictures and videos of everything? He does his best. He describes for her the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it’s like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. Kabul’s vivid, arresting details—the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window. Such details escape him now, and his descriptions sound to him generic, insipid, like those of an ordinary AP story.

In the backseat, the boys humor him and listen for a short while, or at least pretend to. Idris can sense their boredom. Then Zabi, who is eight, asks Nahil to start the movie. Lemar, who is two years older, tries to listen a little longer, but soon Idris hears the drone of a racing car from his Nintendo DS.

“What’s the matter with you boys?” Nahil scolds them. “Your father’s come back from Kabul. Aren’t you curious? Don’t you have questions for him?”

“It’s all right,” Idris says. “Let them.” But he isannoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged lives. He feels a sudden rift between himself and his family, even Nahil, most of whose questions about his trip revolve around restaurants and the lack of indoor plumbing. He looks at them accusingly now as the locals must have looked at him when he’d first arrived in Kabul.