殘忍而美麗的情誼:The Kite Runner 追風箏的人(143)

TWENTY
Farid had warned me. He had. But, as it turned out, he had wasted his were driving down the cratered road that winds from Jalalabad to Kabul. The last time I’d traveled that road was in a tarpaulin-covered truck going the other way. Baba had nearly gotten himself shot by a singing, stoned Roussi officer--Baba had made me so mad that night, so scared, and, ultimately, so proud. The trek between Kabul and Jalalabad, a bone-jarring ride down a teetering pass snaking through the rocks, had become a relic now, a relic of two wars. Twenty years earlier, I had seen some of the first war with my own eyes. Grim reminders of it were strewn along the road: burned carcasses of old Soviet tanks, overturned military trucks gone to rust, a crushed Russian jeep that had plunged over the mountainside. The second war, I had watched on my TV screen. And now I was seeing it through Farid’s ving effortlessly around potholes in the middle of the broken road, Farid was a man in his element. He had become much chattier since our overnight stay at Wahid’s house. He had me sit in the passenger seat and looked at me when he spoke. He even smiled once or twice. Maneuvering the steering wheel with his mangled hand, he pointed to mud-hut villages along the way where he’d known people years before. Most of those people, he said, were either dead or in refugee camps in Pakistan. “And sometimes the dead are luckier,” he said.
He pointed to the crumbled, charred remains of a tiny village. It was just a tuft of blackened, roofless walls now. I saw a dog sleeping along one of the walls. “I had a friend there once,” Farid said. “He was a very good bicycle repairman. He played the tabla well too. The Taliban killed him and his family and burned the village.”We drove past the burned village, and the dog didn’t THE OLD DAYS, the drive from Jalalabad to Kabul took two hours, maybe a little more. It took Farid and me over four hours to reach Kabul. And when we did... Farid warned me just after we passed the Mahipar dam.
“Kabul is not the way you remember it,” he said.
“So I hear.”
Farid gave me a look that said hearing is not the same as seeing. And he was right. Because when Kabul finally did unroll before us, I was certain, absolutely certain, that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Farid must have seen my stupefied expression; shuttling people back and forth to Kabul, he would have become familiar with that expression on the faces of those who hadn’t seen Kabul for a long patted me on the shoulder. “Welcome back,” he said LE AND BEGGARS. Everywhere I looked, that was what I saw. I remembered beggars in the old days too--Baba always carried an extra handful of Afghani bills in his pocket just for them; I’d never seen him deny a peddler. Now, though, they squatted at every street corner, dressed in shredded burlap rags, mud-caked hands held out for a coin. And the beggars were mostly children now, thin and grim-faced, some no older than five or six. They sat in the laps of their burqa-clad mothers alongside gutters at busy street corners and chanted “Bakhshesh, bakhshesh!” And something else, something I hadn’t noticed right away: Hardly any of them sat with an adult male--the wars had made fathers a rare commodity in Afghanistan.
We were driving westbound toward the Karteh-Seh district on what I remembered as a major thoroughfare in the seventies:

第二十章
法裏德警告過我。他警告過，可是，到頭來，他不過是白費脣舌。我們沿着彈坑密佈的道路，從賈拉拉巴特，一路蜿蜒駛向喀布爾。我上一次踏上這條征途，是在蓋着帆布的卡車中，往相反的方向而去。爸爸差點被那個嗑了毒品的、唱着歌曲的俄國兵射殺——那晚爸爸真讓我抓狂，我嚇壞了，而最終爲他感到驕傲。喀布爾到賈拉拉巴特的車程非常崎嶇，道路在山岩之間逶迤顛簸，足以震得人們的骨頭咔咔響。如今沿途景象荒涼，正是兩次戰爭遺下的殘跡。二十年前，我目睹了第一場戰爭的一部分。路邊散落的東西無情地提醒着它的存在：焚燬的舊俄軍坦克殘骸、鏽蝕的傾覆的軍車，還有一輛陷在山腳被撞得粉碎的俄軍吉普。至於第二次戰爭，我曾在電視上見過，現在正透過法裏德的眼睛審視着它。法裏德駕輕就熟地避開那條破路上的坑洞。他顯然是個性情中人。自從我們在瓦希德家借宿之後，他的話多起來了。他讓我坐在副駕駛的位置，說話的時候看着我。他甚至還微笑了一兩次。他用那隻殘廢的手熟練地把着方向盤，指着路邊座座泥屋組成的村落，說多年以前，他就認得那裏的村民，他們中多數不是死了，就是聚集在巴基斯坦的難民營。“而有時候死掉的那些更幸運一些。”他說。
他指着一座遭受祝融之災的小村落，現在它只是一些黑色的牆壁，沒有屋頂。我看見有條狗睡在那些牆壁之下。“我在這裏有過一個朋友，”法裏德說，“他修理自行車的手藝很棒，手鼓也彈得不錯。塔利班殺了他全家，放火燒掉這座村子。”我們駛過焚燬的村子，那條狗一動不動。曾幾何時，賈拉拉巴特到喀布爾只要兩個小時的車程，也許多一些。法裏德和我開了四個小時才抵達喀布爾。而當我們到達……我們剛駛過瑪希帕水庫的時候，法裏德便警告我。
“喀布爾不是你記憶中那樣了。”他說。
“我聽說過。”
法裏德看了我一眼，彷彿在說聽見和看到不是一回事。他是對的。因爲當我們最終駛進喀布爾，我敢肯定，絕對肯定，他一定開錯路了。法裏德肯定見到我目瞪口呆的表情，也許在累次載人進出喀布爾之後，他對這種久違了喀布爾的人臉上出現的神情早巳習以爲常。他拍拍我的肩頭，“歡迎你回來。”他憂鬱地說。廢墟和乞丐，觸目皆是這種景象。我記得從前也有乞丐——爸爸身上總是額外帶着一把阿富汗尼硬幣，分發給他們；我從不曾見過他拒絕乞討的人。可是如今，街頭巷尾都能見到他們，身披破麻布，伸出髒兮兮的手，乞討一個銅板。而如今乞食的多數是兒童，瘦小，臉色冷漠，有些不超過五六歲。婦女裹着長袍，坐在繁忙街道的水溝邊，膝蓋上是她們的兒子，一遍遍念着：“行行好，行行好！”還有別的，某種我一開始沒有注意到的事情：幾乎見不到有任何成年男子在他們身邊——戰爭把父親變成阿富汗的稀缺物品。
我們開在一條朝西通往卡德察區的街道上，我記得在1970年代，這可是主要的商業街：