A Thousand Splendid Suns

by Khaled Hosseini

“Look at me, Mariam.” Reluctantly, Mariam did. Nana said, “Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.”

or the watermelon he had split once outside the Blue Mosque in Mazar, to find the seeds forming the words Allah on one half, Akbar on the other. Mullah Faizullah admitted to Mariam that, at times, he did not understand the meaning of the Koran’s words. But he said he liked the enchanting sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they comforted him, eased his heart. “They’ll comfort you too, Mariam jo,” he said. “You can summon them in your time of need, and they won’t fail you. God’s words will never betray you, my girl.”

She might have asked Nana why she refused to see Jalil’s doctors, as he had insisted she do, why she wouldn’t take the pills he’d bought for her. If she could articulate it, she might have said to Nana that she was tired of being an instrument, of being lied to, laid claim to, used. That she was sick of Nana twisting the truths of their life and making her, Mariam, another of her grievances against the world.

Mariam wondered how so many women could suffer the same miserable luck, to have married, all of them, such dreadful men. Or was this a wifely game that she did not know about, a daily ritual, like soaking rice or making dough? Would they expect her soon to join in?

She remembered Nana saying once that each snowflake was a sigh heaved by an aggrieved woman somewhere in the world. That all the sighs drifted up the sky, gathered into clouds, then broke into tiny pieces that fell silently on the people below. As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.

She was envious, suddenly, of the neighborhood women and their wealth of children. Some had seven or eight and didn’t understand how fortunate they were, how blessed that their children had flourished in their wombs, lived to squirm in their arms and take the milk from their breasts. Children that they had not bled away with soapy water and the bodily filth of strangers down some bathhouse drain. Mariam resented them when she overheard them complaining about misbehaving sons and lazy daughters.

“Beans. No less than four cans. On the evening the toothless lizard comes to ask for your hand. But the timing, ladies, the timing is everything. You have to suppress the fireworks ’til it’s time to serve him his tea.”

Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.

Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.

“Who is going to tell? You?” Laila tapped her foot. “Tell your secret to the wind, but don’t blame it for telling the trees.”

“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”

“This is why the Holy Koran forbids sharab. Because it always falls on the sober to pay for the sins of the drunk. So it does.”

And the past held only this wisdom: that love was a damaging mistake, and its accomplice, hope, a treacherous illusion.

Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.

And then, from the darkened spirals of her memory, rise two lines of poetry, Babi’s farewell ode to Kabul: One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.

A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.

Laila frowns. She keeps watching for a minute or two. Then she pushes STOP, fast-forwards the tape, and pushes PLAY again. It’s the same film. The old man is looking at her quizzically. The film playing on the screen is Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. Laila does not understand.

Ah, death. I won’t burden you with details, but death is within sight for me now. Weak heart, the doctors say. It is a fitting manner of death, I think, for a weak man.

But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila’s own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.

But the game involves only male names. Because, if it’s a girl, Laila has already named her.