It’s
the whistling," Laila said to Tariq, "the damn whistling, I hate more
than anything" Tariq nodded knowingly.
It wasn't so much the whistling itself, Laila
thought later, but the seconds between the start of it and impact. The brief and interminable time of feeling suspended. The not knowing. The waiting. Like a defendant about to hear the verdict.
Often it happened at dinner, when she and Babi
were at the table. When it started, their heads snapped up. They listened to
the whistling, forks in midair, unchewed food in their mouths. Laila saw the
reflection of their half lit faces in the pitch black window, their shadows
unmoving on the wall. The whistling. Then the blast, blissfully elsewhere,
followed by an expulsion of breath and the knowledge that they had been spared
for now while somewhere else, amid cries and choking clouds of smoke, there was
a scrambling, a barehanded frenzy of digging, of pulling from the debris, what
remained of a sister, a brother, a grandchild.
At night, Laila lay in bed and watched the sudden white flashes reflected in her window. She listened to the rattling of automatic gunfire and counted the rockets whining overhead as the house shook and flakes of plaster rained down on her from the ceiling. Some nights, when the light of rocket fire was so bright a person could read a book by it, sleep never came. And, if it did, Laila's dreams were suffused with fire and detached
limbs and the moaning of the wounded.
Morning brought no relief.
The muezzin's call for namaz rang out, and the Mujahideen set down their guns, faced west, and
prayed. Then the rugs were folded, the guns loaded, and the mountains fired on
Kabul, and Kabul fired back at the mountains, as Laila and the rest of the city
watched as helpless as old Santiago watching the sharks take bites out of his prize fish.
