Page 91 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

gleaming, turned into a war zone. Bullets hit every house. Rockets whistled

overhead. RPGs landed up and down the street and blasted craters in the asphalt.
At night, red-and-white tracers flew every which way until dawn. Some days, we
would have a bit of reprieve, a few hours of quiet, and then sudden bursts of fire
would break it, rounds cracking off from every direction, people on the street
screaming.
It was during those years, Mr. Markos, that the house absorbed most of the
damage that you witnessed when you first saw it in 2002. Granted, some of it
was due to the passage of time and neglect—I had aged into an old man by then
and no longer had the wherewithal to tend to the house as I once had. The trees
were dead by then—they had not borne fruit in years—the lawn had yellowed,
the flowers perished. But war was ruthless on the once beautiful house.
Windows shattered by nearby RPG blasts. A rocket pulverized the wall on the
eastern face of the garden as well as half of the veranda, where Nila and I had
held so many conversations. A grenade damaged the roof. Bullets scarred the

walls.
And then the looting, Mr. Markos. Militiamen would walk in at will and
make off with whatever struck their fancy. They whisked away most of the
furniture, the paintings, the Turkoman rugs, the statues, the silver candlesticks,
the crystal vases. They chiseled loose lapis tiles from the bathroom counters. I
woke one morning to the sound of men in the foyer. I found a band of Uzbek
militiamen ripping the rug from the stairwell with a set of curved knives. I stood
by and watched them. What could I do? What was another old man with a bullet
in the head to them?

Like the house, Suleiman and I too were wearing down. My eyesight
dimmed, and my knees took to aching most days. Forgive me this vulgarity, Mr.
Markos, but the mere act of urinating turned into a test of endurance.
Predictably, the aging hit Suleiman harder than it did me. He shrank and became
thin and startlingly frail. Twice, he nearly died, once during the worst days of the
fighting between Ahmad Shah Massoud’s group and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s,
when bodies lay unclaimed for days on the streets. Suleiman had pneumonia that
time, which the doctor said he got from aspirating his own saliva. Though both
doctors and the medicines they prescribed were in short supply, I managed to
nurse Suleiman back from what was surely the brink of death.
Perhaps because of the daily confinement and the close proximity to each
other, we argued often in those days, Suleiman and I. We argued the way

married couples do, stubbornly, heatedly, and over trivial things.
You already cooked beans this week.