Page 110 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

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 senseless springs 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.”