A Thousand Splendid Suns (22 page)

40.

Laila
FALL 1999

I
t was Mariam’s idea to dig the hole. One morning, she pointed to a patch of soil behind the toolshed. “We can do it
here,” she said. “This is a good spot.”

They took turns striking the ground with a spade, then shoveling the loose dirt aside. They hadn’t planned on a big hole,
or a deep one, so the work of digging shouldn’t have been as demanding as it turned out. It was the drought, started in 1998,
in its second year now, that was wreaking havoc everywhere. It had hardly snowed that past winter and didn’t rain at all that
spring. All over the country, farmers were leaving behind their parched lands, selling off their goods, roaming from village
to village looking for water. They moved to Pakistan or Iran. They settled in Kabul. But water tables were low in the city
too, and the shallow wells had dried up. The lines at the deep wells were so long, Laila and Mariam would spend hours waiting
their turn. The Kabul River, without its yearly spring floods, had turned bone-dry. It was a public toilet now, nothing in
it but human waste and rubble.

So they kept swinging the spade and striking, but the sun-blistered ground had hardened like a rock, the dirt unyielding,
compressed, almost petrified.

Mariam was forty now. Her hair, rolled up above her face, had a few stripes of gray in it. Pouches sagged beneath her eyes,
brown and crescent-shaped. She’d lost two front teeth. One fell out, the other Rasheed knocked out when she’d accidentally
dropped Zalmai. Her skin had coarsened, tanned from all the time they were spending in the yard sitting beneath the brazen
sun. They would sit and watch Zalmai chase Aziza.

When it was done, when the hole was dug, they stood over it and looked down.

“It should do,” Mariam said.

ZALMAI WAS TWO now. He was a plump little boy with curly hair. He had small brownish eyes, and a rosy tint to his cheeks,
like Rasheed, no matter the weather. He had his father’s hairline too, thick and half-moon-shaped, set low on his brow.

When Laila was alone with him, Zalmai was sweet, good-humored, and playful. He liked to climb Laila’s shoulders, play hide-and-seek
in the yard with her and Aziza. Sometimes, in his calmer moments, he liked to sit on Laila’s lap and have her sing to him.
His favorite song was “Mullah Mohammad Jan.” He swung his meaty little feet as she sang into his curly hair and joined in
when she got to the chorus, singing what words he could make with his raspy voice:

Come and
let’s
go to Mazar, Mullah Mohammad jan,
To see the fields of tulips, o beloved companion.

Laila loved the moist kisses Zalmai planted on her cheeks, loved his dimpled elbows and stout little toes. She loved tickling
him, building tunnels with cushions and pillows for him to crawl through, watching him fall asleep in her arms with one of
his hands always clutching her ear. Her stomach turned when she thought of that afternoon, lying on the floor with the spoke
of a bicycle wheel between her legs. How close she’d come. It was unthinkable to her now that she could have even entertained
the idea. Her son was a blessing, and Laila was relieved to discover that her fears had proved baseless, that she loved Zalmai
with the marrow of her bones, just as she did Aziza.

But Zalmai worshipped his father, and, because he did, he was transformed when his father was around to dote on him. Zalmai
was quick then with a defiant cackle or an impudent grin. In his father’s presence, he was easily offended. He held grudges.
He persisted in mischief in spite of Laila’s scolding, which he never did when Rasheed was away.

Rasheed approved of all of it. “A sign of intelligence,” he said. He said the same of Zalmai’s recklessness—when he swallowed,
then pooped, marbles; when he lit matches; when he chewed on Rasheed’s cigarettes.

When Zalmai was born, Rasheed had moved him into the bed he shared with Laila. He had bought him a new crib and had lions
and crouching leopards painted on the side panels. He’d paid for new clothes, new rattles, new bottles, new diapers, even
though they could not afford them and Aziza’s old ones were still serviceable. One day, he came home with a battery-run mobile,
which he hung over Zalmai’s crib. Little yellow-and-black bumblebees dangled from a sunflower, and they crinkled and squeaked
when squeezed. A tune played when it was turned on.

“I thought you said business was slow,” Laila said.

“I have friends I can borrow from,” he said dismissively.

“How will you pay them back?”

“Things will turn around. They always do. Look, he likes it. See?”

Most days, Laila was deprived of her son. Rasheed took him to the shop, let him crawl around under his crowded workbench,
play with old rubber soles and spare scraps of leather. Rasheed drove in his iron nails and turned the sandpaper wheel, and
kept a watchful eye on him. If Zalmai toppled a rack of shoes, Rasheed scolded him gently, in a calm, half-smiling way. If
he did it again, Rasheed put down his hammer, sat him up on his desk, and talked to him softly.

His patience with Zalmai was a well that ran deep and never dried.

They came home together in the evening, Zalmai’s head bouncing on Rasheed’s shoulder, both of them smelling of glue and leather.
They grinned the way people who share a secret do, slyly, like they’d sat in that dim shoe shop all day not making shoes at
all but devising secret plots. Zalmai liked to sit beside his father at dinner, where they played private games, as Mariam,
Laila, and Aziza set plates on the
sofrah.
They took turns poking each other on the chest, giggling, pelting each other with bread crumbs, whispering things the others
couldn’t hear. If Laila spoke to them, Rasheed looked up with displeasure at the unwelcome intrusion. If she asked to hold
Zalmai—or, worse, if Zalmai reached for her—Rasheed glowered at her.

Laila walked away feeling stung.

THEN ONE NIGHT, a few weeks after Zalmai turned two, Rasheed came home with a television and a VCR. The day had been warm,
almost balmy, but the evening was cooler and already thickening into a starless, chilly night.

He set it down on the living-room table. He said he’d bought it on the black market.

“Another loan?” Laila asked.

“It’s a Magnavox.”

Aziza came into the room. When she saw the TV, she ran to it.

“Careful, Aziza jo,” said Mariam. “Don’t touch.”

Aziza’s hair had become as light as Laila’s. Laila could see her own dimples on her cheeks. Aziza had turned into a calm,
pensive little girl, with a demeanor that to Laila seemed beyond her six years. Laila marveled at her daughter’s manner of
speech, her cadence and rhythm, her thoughtful pauses and intonations, so adult, so at odds with the immature body that housed
the voice. It was Aziza who with lighthearted authority had taken it upon herself to wake Zalmai every day, to dress him,
feed him his breakfast, comb his hair. She was the one who put him down to nap, who played even-tempered peacemaker to her
volatile sibling. Around him, Aziza had taken to giving an exasperated, queerly adult headshake.

Aziza pushed the TV’s POWER button. Rasheed scowled, snatched her wrist and set it on the table, not gently at all.

“This is Zalmai’s TV,” he said.

Aziza went over to Mariam and climbed in her lap. The two of them were inseparable now. Of late, with Laila’s blessing, Mariam
had started teaching Aziza verses from the Koran. Aziza could already recite by heart the surah of
ikhlas,
the surah of
fatiha,
and already knew how to perform the four
ruqat
s of morning prayer.

It’s
all I have to give her,
Mariam had said to Laila,
this
knowledge, these prayers.
They’re
the only true possession
I’ve
ever had
.

Zalmai came into the room now. As Rasheed watched with anticipation, the way people wait the simple tricks of street magicians,
Zalmai pulled on the TV’s wire, pushed the buttons, pressed his palms to the blank screen. When he lifted them, the condensed
little palms faded from the glass. Rasheed smiled with pride, watched as Zalmai kept pressing his palms and lifting them,
over and over.

The Taliban had banned television. Videotapes had been gouged publicly, the tapes ripped out and strung on fence posts. Satellite
dishes had been hung from lampposts. But Rasheed said just because things were banned didn’t mean you couldn’t find them.

“I’ll start looking for some cartoon videos tomorrow,” he said. “It won’t be hard. You can buy anything in underground bazaars.”

“Then maybe you’ll buy us a new well,” Laila said, and this won her a scornful gaze from him.

It was later, after another dinner of plain white rice had been consumed and tea forgone again on account of the drought,
after Rasheed had smoked a cigarette, that he told Laila about his decision.

“No,” Laila said.

He said he wasn’t asking.

“I don’t care if you are or not.”

“You would if you knew the full story.”

He said he had borrowed from more friends than he let on, that the money from the shop alone was no longer enough to sustain
the five of them. “I didn’t tell you earlier to spare you the worrying.”

“Besides,” he said, “you’d be surprised how much they can bring in.”

Laila said no again. They were in the living room. Mariam and the children were in the kitchen. Laila could hear the clatter
of dishes, Zalmai’s high-pitched laugh, Aziza saying something to Mariam in her steady, reasonable voice.

“There will be others like her, younger even,” Rasheed said. “Everyone in Kabul is doing the same.”

Laila told him she didn’t care what other people did with their children.

“I’ll keep a close eye on her,” Rasheed said, less patiently now. “It’s a safe corner. There’s a mosque across the street.”

“I won’t let you turn my daughter into a street beggar!” Laila snapped.

The slap made a loud smacking sound, the palm of his thick-fingered hand connecting squarely with the meat of Laila’s cheek.
It made her head whip around. It silenced the noises from the kitchen. For a moment, the house was perfectly quiet. Then a
flurry of hurried footsteps in the hallway before Mariam and the children were in the living room, their eyes shifting from
her to Rasheed and back.

Then Laila punched him.

It was the first time she’d struck anybody, discounting the playful punches she and Tariq used to trade. But those had been
open-fisted, more pats than punches, self-consciously friendly, comfortable expressions of anxieties that were both perplexing
and thrilling. They would aim for the muscle that Tariq, in a professorial voice, called the
deltoid.

Laila watched the arch of her closed fist, slicing through the air, felt the crinkle of Rasheed’s stubbly, coarse skin under
her knuckles. It made a sound like dropping a rice bag to the floor. She hit him hard. The impact actually made him stagger
two steps backward.

From the other side of the room, a gasp, a yelp, and a scream. Laila didn’t know who had made which noise. At the moment,
she was too astounded to notice or care, waiting for her mind to catch up with what her hand had done. When it did, she believed
she might have smiled. She might have
grinned
when, to her astonishment, Rasheed calmly walked out of the room.

Suddenly, it seemed to Laila that the collective hardships of their lives—hers, Aziza’s, Mariam’s—simply dropped away, vaporized
like Zalmai’s palms from the TV screen. It seemed worthwhile, if absurdly so, to have endured all they’d endured for this
one crowning moment, for this act of defiance that would end the suffering of all indignities.

Laila did not notice that Rasheed was back in the room. Until his hand was around her throat. Until she was lifted off her
feet and slammed against the wall.

Up close, his sneering face seemed impossibly large. Laila noticed how much puffier it was getting with age, how many more
broken vessels charted tiny paths on his nose. Rasheed didn’t say anything. And, really, what could be said, what needed saying,
when you’d shoved the barrel of your gun into your wife’s mouth?

IT WAS THE RAIDS, the reason they were in the yard digging. Sometimes monthly raids, sometimes weekly. Of late, almost daily.
Mostly, the Taliban confiscated stuff, gave a kick to someone’s rear, whacked the back of a head or two. But sometimes there
were public beatings, lashings of soles and palms.

“Gently,” Mariam said now, her knees over the edge. They lowered the TV into the hole by each clutching one end of the plastic
sheet in which it was wrapped.

“That should do it,” Mariam said.

They patted the dirt when they were done, filling the hole up again. They tossed some of it around so it wouldn’t look conspicuous.

“There,” Mariam said, wiping her hands on her dress.

When it was safer, they’d agreed, when the Taliban cut down on their raids, in a month or two or six, or maybe longer, they
would dig the TV up.

IN LAILA’S DREAM, she and Mariam are out behind the toolshed digging again. But, this time, it’s Aziza they’re lowering into
the ground. Aziza’s breath fogs the sheet of plastic in which they have wrapped her. Laila sees her panicked eyes, the whiteness
of her palms as they slap and push against the sheet. Aziza pleads. Laila can’t hear her screams.
Only for a while,
she calls down,
it’s
only for a while.
It’s
the raids,
don’t
you know, my love? When the raids are over,
Mammy and Khala Mariam will dig you out. I promise, my love.
Then we can play. We can play all you want.
She fills the shovel. Laila woke up, out of breath, with a taste of soil in her mouth, when the first granular lumps of dirt
hit the plastic.

41.

Mariam

I
n the summer of 2000, the drought reached its third and worst year.

In Helmand, Zabol, Kandahar, villages turned into herds of nomadic communities, always moving, searching for water and green
pastures for their livestock. When they found neither, when their goats and sheep and cows died off, they came to Kabul. They
took to the Kareh-Ariana hillside, living in makeshift slums, packed in huts, fifteen or twenty at a time.

That was also the summer of
Titanic,
the summer that Mariam and Aziza were a tangle of limbs, rolling and giggling, Aziza insisting
she
get to be Jack.

“Quiet, Aziza jo.”

“Jack! Say my name, Khala Mariam. Say it. Jack!”

“Your father will be angry if you wake him.”

“Jack! And you’re Rose.”

It would end with Mariam on her back, surrendering, agreeing again to be Rose. “Fine, you be Jack,” she relented. “You die
young, and I get to live to a ripe old age.”

“Yes, but I die a hero,” said Aziza, “while you, Rose, you spend your entire, miserable life longing for me.” Then, straddling
Mariam’s chest, she’d announce, “Now we must kiss!” Mariam whipped her head side to side, and Aziza, delighted with her own
scandalous behavior, cackled through puckered lips.

Sometimes Zalmai would saunter in and watch this game. What did
he
get to be, he asked.

“You can be the iceberg,” said Aziza.

That summer,
Titanic
fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan—sometimes in their underwear. After curfew,
everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers
of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more,
they unearthed the TV from behind the toolshed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.

At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river’s sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy
Titanic
carpets, and
Titanic
cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was
Titanic
deodorant,
Titanic
toothpaste,
Titanic
perfume,
Titanic pakora,
even
Titanic
burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling himself “Titanic Beggar.”

“Titanic City” was born.

It’s
the song,
they said.

No, the sea. The luxury. The ship.

It’s
the sex,
they whispered.

Leo,
said Aziza sheepishly.
It’s
all about Leo.

“Everybody wants Jack,” Laila said to Mariam. “That’s what it is. Everybody wants Jack to rescue them from disaster. But there
is no Jack. Jack is not coming back. Jack is dead.”

THEN, late that summer, a fabric merchant fell asleep and forgot to put out his cigarette. He survived the fire, but his store
did not. The fire took the adjacent fabric store as well, a secondhand clothing store, a small furniture shop, a bakery.

They told Rasheed later that if the winds had blown east instead of west, his shop, which was at the corner of the block,
might have been spared.

THEY SOLD EVERYTHING.

First to go were Mariam’s things, then Laila’s. Aziza’s baby clothes, the few toys Laila had fought Rasheed to buy her. Aziza
watched the proceedings with a docile look. Rasheed’s watch too was sold, his old transistor radio, his pair of neckties,
his shoes, and his wedding ring. The couch, the table, the rug, and the chairs went too. Zalmai threw a wicked tantrum when
Rasheed sold the TV.

After the fire, Rasheed was home almost every day. He slapped Aziza. He kicked Mariam. He threw things. He found fault with
Laila, the way she smelled, the way she dressed, the way she combed her hair, her yellowing teeth.

“What’s happened to you?” he said. “I married a
pari,
and now I’m saddled with a hag. You’re turning into Mariam.”

He got fired from the kebab house near Haji Yaghoub Square because he and a customer got into a scuffle. The customer complained
that Rasheed had rudely tossed the bread on his table. Harsh words had passed. Rasheed had called the customer a monkey-faced
Uzbek. A gun had been brandished. A skewer pointed in return. In Rasheed’s version, he held the skewer. Mariam had her doubts.

Fired from the restaurant in Taimani because customers complained about the long waits, Rasheed said the cook was slow and
lazy.

“You were probably out back napping,” said Laila.

“Don’t provoke him, Laila jo,” Mariam said.

“I’m warning you, woman,” he said.

“Either that or smoking.”

“I swear to God.”

“You can’t help being what you are.”

And then he was on Laila, pummeling her chest, her head, her belly with fists, tearing at her hair, throwing her to the wall.
Aziza was shrieking, pulling at his shirt; Zalmai was screaming too, trying to get him off his mother. Rasheed shoved the
children aside, pushed Laila to the ground, and began kicking her. Mariam threw herself on Laila. He went on kicking, kicking
Mariam now, spittle flying from his mouth, his eyes glittering with murderous intent, kicking until he couldn’t anymore.

“I swear you’re going to make me kill you, Laila,” he said, panting. Then he stormed out of the house.

WHEN THE MONEY ran out, hunger began to cast a pall over their lives. It was stunning to Mariam how quickly alleviating hunger
became the crux of their existence.

Rice, boiled plain and white, with no meat or sauce, was a rare treat now. They skipped meals with increasing and alarming
regularity. Sometimes Rasheed brought home sardines in a can and brittle, dried bread that tasted like sawdust. Sometimes
a stolen bag of apples, at the risk of getting his hand sawed off. In grocery stores, he carefully pocketed canned ravioli,
which they split five ways, Zalmai getting the lion’s share. They ate raw turnips sprinkled with salt. Limp leaves of lettuce
and blackened bananas for dinner.

Death from starvation suddenly became a distinct possibility. Some chose not to wait for it. Mariam heard of a neighborhood
widow who had ground some dried bread, laced it with rat poison, and fed it to all seven of her children. She had saved the
biggest portion for herself.

Aziza’s ribs began to push through the skin, and the fat from her cheeks vanished. Her calves thinned, and her complexion
turned the color of weak tea. When Mariam picked her up, she could feel her hip bone poking through the taut skin. Zalmai
lay around the house, eyes dulled and half closed, or in his father’s lap limp as a rag. He cried himself to sleep, when he
could muster the energy, but his sleep was fitful and sporadic. White dots leaped before Mariam’s eyes whenever she got up.
Her head spun, and her ears rang all the time. She remembered something Mullah Faizullah used to say about hunger when Ramadan
started:
Even the snakebitten man
finds sleep, but not the hungry.

“My children are going to die,” Laila said. “Right before my eyes.”

“They are not,” Mariam said. “I won’t let them. It’s going to be all right, Laila jo. I know what to do.”

ONE BLISTERING-HOT DAY, Mariam put on her burqa, and she and Rasheed walked to the Intercontinental Hotel. Bus fare was an
unaffordable luxury now, and Mariam was exhausted by the time they reached the top of the steep hill. Climbing the slope,
she was struck by bouts of dizziness, and twice she had to stop, wait for it to pass.

At the hotel entrance, Rasheed greeted and hugged one of the doormen, who was dressed in a burgundy suit and visor cap. There
was some friendly-looking talk between them. Rasheed spoke with his hand on the doorman’s elbow. He motioned toward Mariam
at one point, and they both looked her way briefly. Mariam thought there was something vaguely familiar about the doorman.

When the doorman went inside, Mariam and Rasheed waited. From this vantage point, Mariam had a view of the Polytechnic Institute,
and, beyond that, the old Khair khana district and the road to Mazar. To the south, she could see the bread factory, Silo,
long abandoned, its pale yellow façade pocked with yawning holes from all the shelling it had endured. Farther south, she
could make out the hollow ruins of Darulaman Palace, where, many years back, Rasheed had taken her for a picnic. The memory
of that day was a relic from a past that no longer seemed like her own.

Mariam concentrated on these things, these landmarks. She feared she might lose her nerve if she let her mind wander.

Every few minutes, jeeps and taxis drove up to the hotel entrance. Doormen rushed to greet the passengers, who were all men,
armed, bearded, wearing turbans, all of them stepping out with the same self-assured, casual air of menace. Mariam heard bits
of their chatter as they vanished through the hotel’s doors. She heard Pashto and Farsi, but Urdu and Arabic too.

“Meet our
real
masters,” Rasheed said in a low-pitched voice. “Pakistani and Arab Islamists. The Taliban are puppets.
These
are the big players and Afghanistan is their playground.”

Rasheed said he’d heard rumors that the Taliban were allowing these people to set up secret camps all over the country, where
young men were being trained to become suicide bombers and jihadi fighters.

“What’s taking him so long?” Mariam said.

Rasheed spat, and kicked dirt on the spit.

An hour later, they were inside, Mariam and Rasheed, following the doorman. Their heels clicked on the tiled floor as they
were led across the pleasantly cool lobby.

Mariam saw two men sitting on leather chairs, rifles and a coffee table between them, sipping black tea and eating from a
plate of syrup-coated
jelabi,
rings sprinkled with powdered sugar. She thought of Aziza, who loved
jelabi
, and tore her gaze away.

The doorman led them outside to a balcony. From his pocket, he produced a small black cordless phone and a scrap of paper
with a number scribbled on it. He told Rasheed it was his supervisor’s satellite phone.

“I got you five minutes,” he said. “No more.”

“
Tashakor,”
Rasheed said. “I won’t forget this.”

The doorman nodded and walked away. Rasheed dialed. He gave Mariam the phone.

As Mariam listened to the scratchy ringing, her mind wandered. It wandered to the last time she’d seen Jalil, thirteen years
earlier, back in the spring of 1987. He’d stood on the street outside her house, leaning on a cane, beside the blue Benz with
the Herat license plates and the white stripe bisecting the roof, the hood, and trunk. He’d stood there for hours, waiting
for her, now and then calling her name, just as she had once called
his
name outside
his
house. Mariam had parted the curtain once, just a bit, and caught a glimpse of him. Only a glimpse, but long enough to see
that his hair had turned fluffy white, and that he’d started to stoop. He wore glasses, a red tie, as always, and the usual
white handkerchief triangle in his breast pocket. Most striking, he was thinner, much thinner, than she remembered, the coat
of his dark brown suit drooping over his shoulders, the trousers pooling at his ankles.

Jalil had seen her too, if only for a moment. Their eyes had met briefly through a part in the curtains, as they had met many
years earlier through a part in another pair of curtains. But then Mariam had quickly closed the curtains. She had sat on
the bed, waited for him to leave.

She thought now of the letter Jalil had finally left at her door. She had kept it for days, beneath her pillow, picking it
up now and then, turning it over in her hands. In the end, she had shredded it unopened.

And now here she was, after all these years, calling him.

Mariam regretted her foolish, youthful pride now. She wished now that she had let him in. What would have been the harm to
let him in, sit with him, let him say what he’d come to say? He was her father. He’d not been a good father, it was true,
but how ordinary his faults seemed now, how forgivable, when compared to Rasheed’s malice, or to the brutality and violence
that she had seen men inflict on one another.

She wished she hadn’t destroyed his letter.

A man’s deep voice spoke in her ear and informed her that she’d reached the mayor’s office in Herat.

Mariam cleared her throat. “
Salaam,
brother, I am looking for someone who lives in Herat. Or he did, many years ago. His name is Jalil Khan. He lived in Shar-e-Nau
and owned the cinema. Do you have any information as to his whereabouts?”

The irritation was audible in the man’s voice. “This is why you call the mayor’s office?”

Mariam said she didn’t know who else to call. “Forgive me, brother. I know you have important things to tend to, but it is
life and death, a question of life and death I am calling about.”

“I don’t know him. The cinema’s been closed for many years.”

“Maybe there’s someone there who might know him, someone—”

“There is no one.”

Mariam closed her eyes. “Please, brother. There are children involved. Small children.”

A long sigh.

“Maybe someone there—”

“There’s a groundskeeper here. I think he’s lived here all of his life.”

“Yes, ask him, please.”

“Call back tomorrow.”

Mariam said she couldn’t. “I have this phone for five minutes only. I don’t—”

There was a click at the other end, and Mariam thought he had hung up. But she could hear footsteps, and voices, a distant
car horn, and some mechanical humming punctuated by clicks, maybe an electric fan. She switched the phone to her other ear,
closed her eyes.

She pictured Jalil smiling, reaching into his pocket.

Ah. Of course. Well. Here then. Without further ado . . .

A leaf-shaped pendant, tiny coins etched with moons and stars
hanging from it.

Try it on, Mariam jo.