A Thousand Splendid Suns

precisely at the midpoint between mockery and sincerity.
Tariq crushed his cigarette with the heel of his good foot. "So what do
you think about all this?"
"The party?"
"Who's the half-wit now? I meant the Mujahideen, Laila. Their coming
to Kabul."
Oh.
She started to tell him something Babi had said, about the troublesome
marriage of guns and ego, when she heard a commotion coming from
the house. Loud voices. Screaming.
Laila took off running. Tariq hobbled behind her.
There was a melee in the yard. In the middle of it were two snarling
men, rolling on the ground, a knife between them. Laila recognized one
of them as a man from the table who had been discussing politics earlier.
The other was the man who had been fanning the kebab skewers.
Several men were trying to pull them apart. Babi wasn't among them. He
stood by the wall, at a safe distance from the fight, with Tariq's father,
who was crying.
From the excited voices around her, Laila caught snippets that she put
together: The fellow at the politics table, a Pashtun, had called Ahmad
Shah Massoud a traitor for "making a deal" with the Soviets in the 1980s.
The kebab man, a Tajik, had taken offense and demanded a retraction.
The Pashtun had refused. The Tajik had said that if not for Massoud, the
other man's sister would still be "giving it" to Soviet soldiers. They had
come to blows. One of them had then brandished a knife; there was