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She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.
“And so, your father built us this rathole.”
told him he had a mouth shaped like a lizard’s ass—and
When it was time for Jalil to leave, Mariam always stood in the doorway and watched him exit the clearing, deflated at the thought of the week that stood, like an immense, immovable object, between her and his next visit. Mariam always held her breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day with Jalil.
Let me tell you something. A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn’t like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed, it won’t stretch to make room for you. I’m the only one who loves you. I’m all you have in this world, Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You’ll have nothing. You are nothing!”
This was a game that she played privately from time to time when Nana wasn’t looking. She put four pebbles in the first column, for Khadija’s children, three for Afsoon’s, and three in the third column for Nargis’s children. Then she added a fourth column. A solitary, eleventh pebble.
Mariam shrugged. She didn’t say to this girl that she’d once named a pebble after her.
You may not get another opportunity this good. And neither would they. They had been disgraced by her birth, and this was their chance to erase, once and for all, the last trace of their husband’s scandalous mistake. She was being sent away because she was the walking, breathing embodiment of their shame.
It pained Mariam—it pained her considerably—to picture Rasheed panic-stricken and helpless, pacing the banks of the lake and pleading with it to spit his son back onto dry land. And she felt for the first time a kinship with her husband. She told herself that they would make good companions after all.
As a reminder of how women like us suffer, she’d said. How quietly we endure all that falls upon us.
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.
But Mariam’s grief wasn’t aimless or unspecific. Mariam grieved for this baby, this particular child, who had made her so happy for a while.
But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid. And Mariam was afraid.
In this most essential way, she had failed him—seven times she had failed him—and now she was nothing but a burden to him.
Because a society has no chance of success if its women are uneducated, Laila. No chance.
Laila pulled the curtains open. At the foot of the bed was an old metallic folding chair. Laila sat on it and watched the unmoving blanketed mound that was her mother.
“Mammy.” The mound stirred slightly. It emitted a groan.
Mammy began picking at her hair. This was one of life’s great mysteries to Laila, that Mammy’s picking had not made her bald as an egg.
The truth was, Laila loved eating meals at Tariq’s house as much as she disliked eating them at hers. At Tariq’s, there was no eating alone; they always ate as a family.
Babi said that there were tensions between their people—the Tajiks, who were a minority, and Tariq’s people, the Pashtuns, who were the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Tajiks have always felt slighted, Babi had said. Pashtun kings ruled this country for almost two hundred and fifty years, Laila, and Tajiks for all of nine months, back in 1929.
To me, it’s nonsense—and very dangerous nonsense at that—all this talk of I’m Tajik and you’re Pashtun and he’s Hazara and she’s Uzbek. We’re all Afghans, and that’s all that should matter.
Boys, Laila came to see, treated friendship the way they treated the sun: its existence undisputed; its radiance best enjoyed, not beheld directly.
Laila, my love, the only enemy an Afghan cannot defeat is himself.
It was hard to feel, really feel, Mammy’s loss. Hard to summon sorrow, to grieve the deaths of people Laila had never really thought of as alive in the first place. Ahmad and Noor had always been like lore to her. Like characters in a fable. Kings in a history book.
But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers’ past. They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death. Mammy was now the curator of their lives’ museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. A receptacle for their myths. The parchment on which Mammy meant to ink their legends.
“I listen to that clock ticking in the hallway. Then I think of all the ticks, all the minutes, all the hours and days and weeks and months and years waiting for me. All of it without them. And I can’t breathe then, like someone’s stepping on my heart, Laila. I get so weak. So weak I just want to collapse somewhere.”
Mammy was soon asleep, leaving Laila with dueling emotions: reassured that Mammy meant to live on, stung that she was not the reason. She would never leave her mark on Mammy’s heart the way her brothers had, because Mammy’s heart was like a pallid beach where Laila’s footprints would forever wash away beneath the waves of sorrow that swelled and crashed, swelled and crashed.
“Fabulous jeeps! Fabulous army! Too bad you’re losing to a bunch of peasants firing slingshots!”
And she knew then that she could live to be a hundred and she would never again see a thing as magnificent.
Your mother, she used to be adventurous then, and…so alive. She was just about the liveliest, happiest person I’d ever met.” He smiled at the memory. “She had this laugh. I swear it’s why I married her, Laila, for that laugh. It bulldozed you. You stood no chance against it.”
With your mother, both her joy and sadness are extreme. She can’t hide either. She never could.
Laila felt like she was no better than these pots and pans, something that could go neglected, then laid claim to, at will, whenever the mood struck.
By the time we’re twenty, Hasina used to say, Giti and I, we’ll have pushed out four, five kids each. But you, Laila, you’ll make us two dummies proud. You’re going to be somebody. I know one day I’ll pick up a newspaper and find your picture on the front page.
She changed into black again, went to her room, shut the curtains, and pulled the blanket over her head.
“Do you have it in you?” Laila said. “To what?” “To use this thing. To kill with it.” Tariq tucked the gun into the waist of his denims. Then he said a thing both lovely and terrible. “For you,” he said. “I’d kill with it for you, Laila.”
Nila, Giti’s mother, had run up and down the street where Giti was killed, collecting pieces of her daughter’s flesh in an apron, screeching hysterically.
It was, by far, the hottest day of the year. The mountains trapped the bone-scorching heat, stifled the city like smoke. Power had been out for days. All over Kabul, electric fans sat idle, almost mockingly so.
She would not miss him as she did now, when the ache of his absence was her unremitting companion—like the phantom pain of an amputee.
Except every once in a long while, when Laila was a grown woman, ironing a shirt or pushing her children on a swing set, something trivial, maybe the warmth of a carpet beneath her feet on a hot day or the curve of a stranger’s forehead, would set off a memory of that afternoon together. And it would all come rushing back. The spontaneity of it. Their astonishing imprudence. Their clumsiness. The pain of the act, the pleasure of it, the sadness of it. The heat of their entangled bodies.
Kabul’s dogs, who had developed a taste for human meat, would feast.
“One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls.”
Was this her penalty, then, her punishment for being aloof to her own mother’s suffering?
“Have I married a pair of statues? Go on, Mariam, gap bezan, say something to her. Where are your manners?”
LOL
Mariam was a thirty-three-year-old woman now, but that word, harami, still had sting. Hearing it still made her feel like she was a pest, a cockroach. She remembered Nana pulling her wrists. You are a clumsy little harami. This is my reward for everything I’ve endured. An heirloom-breaking clumsy little harami.
On and on he went. Mariam sat watching the girl out of the corner of her eye as Rasheed’s demands and judgments rained down on them like the rockets on Kabul.
“I can’t imagine what you are now,” Mariam said, picking grains of rice and bread crumbs, “if you were a Benz before.”
With snow came the kites, once the rulers of Kabul’s winter skies, now timid trespassers in territory claimed by streaking rockets and fighter jets.
“Shh,” Mariam whispered. “You’ll wake up your mother, half deaf as she is.”
“What are you so happy about? Huh? What are you smiling at? You’re not so clever as your mother says. You have a brute for a father and a fool for a mother. You wouldn’t smile so much if you knew. No you wouldn’t. Go to sleep, now. Go on.”
