A Thousand Splendid Suns

by Khaled Hosseini

In that week, Laila came to believe that of all the hardships a person had to face none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.

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

“We’ll take care of her, Laila jan,” one of the women said with an air of self-importance. Laila had been to funerals before where she had seen women like this, women who relished all things that had to do with death, official consolers who let no one trespass on their self-appointed duties. “It’s under control. You go on now, girl, and do something else. Leave your mother be.”

But the feeling didn’t last. 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. It was Tariq who was real, flesh and blood. Tariq, who taught her cusswords in Pashto, who liked salted clover leaves, who frowned and made a low, moaning sound when he chewed, who had a light pink birthmark just beneath his left collarbone shaped like an upside-down mandolin. So she sat beside Mammy and dutifully mourned Ahmad and Noor, but, in Laila’s heart, her true brother was alive and well.

“Some days,” Mammy said in a hoarse voice, “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.”

“That’s called Shahr-e-Zohak. The Red City. It used to be a fortress. It was built some nine hundred years ago to defend the valley from invaders. Genghis Khan’s grandson attacked it in the thirteenth century, but he was killed. It was Genghis Khan himself who then destroyed it.” “And that, my young friends, is the story of our country, one invader after another,” the driver said, flicking cigarette ash out the window. “Macedonians. Sassanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we’re like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing. Isn’t that the truth, badar?” “Indeed it is,” said Babi. *

“It’s what I always remember about being up here,” Babi said. “The silence. The peace of it. I wanted you to experience it. But I also wanted you to see your country’s heritage, children, to learn of its rich past. You see, some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, well, you just have to see and feel.”

He slid closer to her and their hands brushed, once, then again. When Tariq’s fingers tentatively began to slip into hers, Laila let them. And when suddenly he leaned over and pressed his lips to hers, she let him again.

In the midst of all this killing and looting, all this ugliness, it was a harmless thing to sit here beneath a tree and kiss Tariq.

It was selfish and irrational, but she was furious with him for abandoning her, Tariq, who was like an extension of her, whose shadow sprung beside hers in every memory.

She could go. They could be together. They would have more afternoons like this. “I want to marry you, Laila.”

Laila remembered Wajma raising a finger and her voice quivering with piety. “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.”

Rasheed was wearing his uniform, a burgundy red polyester suit, white shirt, clip-on tie, visor cap pressing down on his white hair. In this uniform, Rasheed was transformed. He looked vulnerable, pitiably bewildered, almost harmless. Like someone who had accepted without a sigh of protest the indignities life had doled out to him. Someone both pathetic and admirable in his docility.

She thought of Aziza’s stutter, and of what Aziza had said earlier about fractures and powerful collisions deep down and how sometimes all we see on the surface is a slight tremor.

“And I wrote you.” “You did?” “Oh, volumes,” he said. “Your friend Rumi would have envied my production.”

Then Tariq’s face changed, turned grave. She knew this expression. It was the same look he’d had on his face that day, all those years ago when they’d both been children, when he’d unstrapped his leg and gone after Khadim. He reached with one hand now and touched the corner of her lower lip. “He did this to you,” he said coldly.

And, in the end, when the words dried up, the tears did not, and all Laila could do was surrender and sob like a child over-whelmed by an adult’s unassailable logic.

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.