“I thought you said the truck broke down last week.”
Karim rubbed his throat. “It might have been the week before,” he croaked.
“How long?”
“What?”
“How long for the parts?” Baba roared. Karim flinched but said nothing. I was glad for the darkness. I didn’t want to see the murderous look on Baba’s face.
THE STENCH OF SOMETHING DANK, like mildew, bludgeoned my nostrils the moment Karim opened the door that led down the creaky steps to the basement. We descended in single file. The steps groaned under Baba’s weight. Standing in the cold basement, I felt watched by eyes blinking in the dark. I saw shapes huddled around the room, their silhouettes thrown on the walls by the dim light of a pair of kerosene lamps. A low murmur buzzed through the basement, beneath it the sound of water drops trickling somewhere, and, something else, a scratching sound.
Baba sighed behind me and dropped the bags.
Karim told us it should be a matter of a couple of short days before the truck was fixed. Then we’d be on our way to Peshawar. On to freedom. On to safety.
The basement was our home for the next week and, by the third night, I discovered the source of the scratching sounds. Rats.
ONCE MY EYES ADJUSTED to the dark, I counted about thirty refugees in that basement. We sat shoulder to shoulder along the walls, ate crackers, bread with dates, apples. That first night, all the men prayed together. One of the refugees asked Baba why he wasn’t joining them. “God is going to save us all. Why don’t you pray to him?”
Baba snorted a pinch of his snuff. Stretched his legs. “What’ll save us is eight cylinders and a good carburetor.” That silenced the rest of them for good about the matter of God.
It was later that first night when I discovered that two of the people hiding with us were Kamal and his father. That was shocking enough, seeing Kamal sitting in the basement just a few feet away from me. But when he and his father came over to our side of the room and I saw Kamal’s face, really saw it...
He had withered--there was simply no other word for it. His eyes gave me a hollow look and no recognition at all registered in them. His shoulders hunched and his cheeks sagged like they were too tired to cling to the bone beneath. His father, who’d owned a movie theater in Kabul, was telling Baba how, three months before, a stray bullet had struck his wife in the temple and killed her. Then he told Baba about Kamal. I caught only snippets of it: Should have never let him go alone... always so handsome, you know... four of them... tried to fight... God... took him... bleeding down there... his pants... doesn’t talk any more... just stares...