A Thousand Splendid Suns: Part 1

She did not know what this word harami—bastard—meant. Nor was she old enough to appreciate the injustice, to see that it is the creators of the harami who are culpable, not the harami, whose only sin is being born.

Mariam did surmise, by the way Nana said the word, that it was an ugly, loathsome thing to be a harami, like an insect, like the scurrying cockroaches Nana was always cursing and sweeping out of the kolba.

Nana smiled demurely when he said this.

She waited until he had left the kolba, before snickering and saying, “The children of strangers get ice cream. What do you get, Mariam? Stories of ice cream.”

Mariam knew the story from Nana herself, and, though Nana dis­missed the episode, Mariam could tell by the wistful light in her eyes that she had been happy.

Nana always gave a slow, burdened smile here, one of linger­ing recrimination or reluctant forgiveness, Mariam could never tell.

He was a gaunt, stooping old man with a toothless smile and a white beard that dropped to his navel.

Despite her rants against him when he wasn’t around, Nana was subdued and mannerly when Jalil visited.

Her hair was always washed. She brushed her teeth, wore her best hijab for him. She sat quietly on a chair across from him, hands folded on her lap.

He was the one who told her in the summer of 1973, when Mariam was fourteen, that King Zahir Shah, who had ruled from Kabul for forty years, had been overthrown in a bloodless coup.

“You know,” he said, “the picture quality isn’t that good. Nei­ther is the sound. And the projector’s been malfunctioning re­cently.

Jalil looked at her with a forlorn expression.

Herat was visible from here, spread below her like a child’s board game: the Women’s Garden to the north of the city, Char-suq Bazaar and the ruins of Alexander the Great’s old citadel to the south.

She thought about going outside and looking for her, but she dreaded the confrontation, the aggrieved looks.

With wonder, she ran her fingers over the beautiful marble horses that stood along the edge of the pool and gazed down at the water with opaque eyes.

She passed old vendors with leathery faces sitting under the shade of plane trees, gazing at her impassively behind pyra­mids of cherries and mounds of grapes.

For a moment, Mariam heard Nana’s voice in her head, mock­ing, dousing the deep-seated glow of her hopes.

She put her hands on the walls. They were so tall, so foreboding, Jalil’s walls.

This . . . ordeal. . . must be very hard for you. So difficult.

It was the thought of these intimacies in particular, which she imagined as painful acts of perversity, that filled her with dread and made her break out in a sweat.

Her eyes traced the sleek shape of the table’s legs, the sinuous curves of its corners, the gleam of its reflective, dark brown surface.

His harsh, raspy voice re­minded Mariam of the sound of dry autumn leaves crushed underfoot.

In the mirror, Mariam had her first glimpse of Rasheed: the big, square, ruddy face; the hooked nose; the flushed cheeks that gave the impression of sly cheerfulness; the watery, bloodshot eyes; the crowded teeth, the front two pushed together like a gabled roof; the impossibly low hairline, barely two finger widths above the bushy eyebrows; the wall of thick, coarse, salt-and-pepper hair.

She looked through the ill-fitting drawers, at the mismatched spoons and knives, the colander and chipped, wooden spatulas, these would-be instruments of her new daily life, all of it reminding her of the havoc that had struck her life, making her feel uprooted, displaced, like an intruder on someone else’s life.

This endless conversation, the tone plaintive but oddly cheerful, flew around and around in a circle.

Husbands who doted on their mothers and wouldn’t spend a rupiah on them, the wives.

Mariam wondered how so many women could suffer the same miserable luck, to have married, all of them, such dreadful men.

And then suddenly, as if emboldened, the other women pushed past Fariba and swarmed Mariam, forming a circle around her with alarming speed.

Mariam backed away. She was hyperventilating. Her ears buzzed, her pulse fluttered, her eyes darted from one face to another.

This man’s will felt to Mariam as imposing and immovable as the Safid-koh moun­tains looming over Gul Daman.

The loss of peripheral vision was unnerving, and she did not like the suffocating way the pleated cloth kept pressing against her mouth.

And the burqa, she learned to her surprise, was also comforting. It was like a one-way window. Inside it, she was an observer, buffered from the scrutinizing eyes of strangers. She no longer worried that people knew, with a single glance, all the shameful secrets of her past.

They had been halfhearted tokens of penance, insincere, corrupt gestures meant more for his own appeasement than hers.

Undaunted by the chilly weather, families had flooded the city on their frenetic rounds to visit relatives.

Mariam, who’d had a queasy stomach all night, boiled some water and made herself a cup of green tea sprinkled with crushed cardamom.

It was disquieting to her that Rasheed owned something whose sole purpose was to kill an­other person.

Then there were days when the dreariness didn’t seem quite as unrelenting to Mariam.

In these dreams, Nana cackled with delight and vindication.

Other days, Mariam was besieged with anger.

It was Rasheed’s fault for his premature celebration. For his foolhardy faith that she was carrying a boy. Naming the baby as he had. Taking God’s will for granted.

But it did no good, all this fault laying, all these harangues of accusations bouncing in her head.

It was kofr, sacrilege, to think these thoughts. Allah was not spiteful. He was not a petty God.

“You make the night to pass into the day and You make the day to pass into the night, and You bring forth the living from the dead and You bring forth the dead from the living, and You give sustenance to whom You please without measure.”

She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not.

There was always something, some minor thing that would infuriate him, because no matter what she did to please him, no matter how thoroughly she submitted to his wants and demands, it wasn’t enough.