Jabril was humming again as he got ready to leave for the surgery. As far as he could see, nothing would be lost with this deal: no lives would be put at risk, and in the end Massoud would still get his just desserts. As he left the house he decided lunchtime would be a good time to visit Massoud, and after the deal was struck he’d call Ishmael to cancel the article. When lunchtime came, though, Jabril found himself particularly hungry. Nothing would be lost by having the conversation with Massoud after he had eaten.
As he and Mustafa were finishing their teas, Jabril saw Zahra crossing the square, heading for Sofia’s surgery, which reminded him that they had planned to take inventory in their surgeries after lunch. Massoud or inventory? He couldn’t decide which one he wanted to do less. Finally, he decided he had to tell Massoud. Inventory would have to wait.
‘Don’t let work interrupt your fine lunch,’ Zahra snapped without looking his way.
He had hoped the idea of this new plan where no one got hurt would have appeased her, but Zahra had not wanted to hear about it. That evening he hoped he would have good news for her, but first he had to tell her and Sofia he was not going to be able to help take the inventory. Jabril sighed loudly for Mustafa’s benefit. ‘Some days are better than others, my friend. This day is not one of my best.’
Jabril saw the man walking toward him as he rose from his chair and in that moment he knew. The first bullet ripped through his shoulder like a ball of fire, shattering bone, severing blood vessels and ripping through muscle as it spun him sideward. Knees buckling under him, Jabril instinctively grabbed the side of the table to break his fall. When the second bullet smashed into his abdomen, the shock to his body ended all conscious thought.
41
SOFIA HAD BEEN standing by the window looking down over the square while Zahra was in the bathroom. Later she would often think back to the fact that she had noticed the stranger in the square immediately and had been watching him, but she could not say why. Perhaps it was the way he was walking. Most people generally strolled into the square, but this man was in a hurry, heading with purpose toward the chaikhana where Jabril and Mustafa were sitting. Maybe that was it, or maybe what was about to happen had registered in her subconscious before it had time to register as a thought? She watched him pull out the gun. Her scream reached Jabril long after the bullets. That’s part of the horror of the memory: knowing and not being able to stop it. Like when you know a car accident is about to happen and there’s nothing you can do, or you see a child’s foot slip and know they are going to fall, or you see words coming out of a mouth moving through the air toward you, words that you somehow know will shatter you, but you can’t stop them from arriving. Those moments are strangely drawn out, as if you’re being given a fraction more time to prepare yourself.
As Jabril collapsed, taking the table with him, Sofia turned and ran. Taking the stairs two at a time, swinging off the rail, she ran out into the square to see Rashid standing over the man’s body, his AK-47 pointed at his head. By the way the body was sprawled out on the cobblestones she guessed he was already dead. She watched Rashid lift his gun and fire into the corpse. She saw the recoil of the gun and the corpse jump but there was no sound in her ears. The world was filled with the white noise of shock.
In front of the chaikhana Jabril’s body was lying motionless in a pool of blood. The upturned table had rolled on top of him and Babur and another man were lifting it off before kneeling down beside Jabril. Mustafa, confused and frightened with his unseeing eyes, was frozen, standing behind his upturned chair as Babur’s cook reached him to take his arm and lead him away.
‘Get out of the way,’ Sofia yelled at Babur, unaware she was speaking English, bringing noise back into the world. She pushed through the men. ‘Move!’ Blood was seeping out of Jabril’s lower abdomen and his shoulder, dark crimson stains spreading out at an alarming rate across his white shirt and the cobblestones beneath him, but he was still breathing.
‘Stay with me,’ Sofia said, ripping open his shirt to send small white buttons skipping across the cobblestones. ‘Call an ambulance!’ she yelled in English. When no one responded she realised her mistake. She looked directly at Babur and spoke again in Dari.
‘It’s coming,’ Babur said. Jabril was going into shock. She would have to deal with that later. She did a quick scan. The shoulder was shattered, but it was his stomach that really worried her. ‘I need to put pressure here. Get me something,’ she said to no one in particular, holding out her hand. A man handed her his soft felt hat. For a second she looked at it before applying it to the hole in Jabril’s abdomen. ‘Here,’ she said,
