the cold, crisp air; the shuttered wooden cottages, smoke curling up from chimneys.
Here was a place, Tariq had thought, knocking on Sayeed's door, a place not only worlds removed from the wretchedness he'd known
but one that made even the notion of hardship and sorrow somehow obscene, unimaginable.
“I said to myself, here is a place where a man can get on.”
Tariq was hired as a janitor and handyman. He did well, he said, during the one-month trial period, at half pay, that Sayeed granted him.
As Tariq spoke, Laila saw Sayeed, whom she imagined narrow-eyed and ruddy-faced,
standing at the reception office window watching Tariq chop wood and shovel snow off the driveway.
She saw him stooping over Tariq's legs, observing, as Tariq lay beneath the sink fixing a leaky pipe.
She pictured him checking the register for missing cash. Tariq's shack was beside the cook's little bungalow, he said.
The cook was a matronly old widow named Adiba. Both shacks were detached from the hotel itself,
separated from the main building by a scattering of almond trees, a park bench,
and a pyramid-shaped stone fountain that, in the summer, gurgled water all day.
전체재생
다음페이지
문장검색