بخش 2

The next morning, Mullah Faizullah came to visit her. When she saw her friend at the door, his white beard and his amiable, toothless smile, Mariam felt tears stinging the corners of her eyes again. She swung her feet over the side of the bed and hurried over. She kissed his hand as always and he her brow. She pulled him up a chair-He showed her the Koran he had brought with him and opened it. “I figured no sense in skipping our routine, eh?”

“You know I don’t need lessons anymore, Mullah sahib. You taught me everysurrah andayat in the Koran years ago.”

He smiled, and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I confess, then. I’ve been found out. But I can think of worse excuses to visit you.”

“You don’t need excuses. Not you.”

“You’re kind to say that, Mariam jo.”

He passed her his Koran. As he’d taught her, she kissed it three times-touching it to her brow between each kiss-and gave it back to him.

“How are you, my girl?”

“I keep,” Mariam began. She had to stop, feeling like a rock had lodged itself in her throat. “I keep thinking of what she said to me before I left. She-“

“Nay, nay, nay.”Mullah Faizullah put his hand on her knee. “Your mother, may Allah forgive her, was a troubled and unhappy woman, Mariam jo. She did a terrible thing to herself. To herself, to you, and also to Allah. He will forgive her, for He is all-forgiving, but Allah is saddened by what she did. He does not approve of the taking of life, be it another’s or one’s own, for He says that life is sacred You see-“ He pulled his chair closer, took Mariam’s hand in both of his own. “You see, I knew your mother before you were born, when she was a little girl, and I tell you that she was unhappy then. The seed for what she did was planted long ago, I’m afraid. What I mean to say is that this was not your fault. It wasn’t your fault, my girl.”

“I shouldn’t have left her. I should have-“

“You stop that. These thoughts are no good, Mariam jo. You hear me, child? No good. They will destroy you. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. No.”

Mariam nodded, but as desperately as she wanted to she could not bring herself to believe him.

One apternoon, a week later, there was a knock on the door, and a tall woman walked in. She was fair-skinned, had reddish hair and long fingers.

“I’m Afsoon,” she said. “Niloufar’s mother. Why don’t you wash up, Mariam, and come downstairs?”

Mariam said she would rather stay in her room.

“No,nafahmidi, you don’t understand. Youmedio come down. We have to talk to you. It’s important.”

7.

They sat across from her, Jalil and his wives, at a long, dark brown table. Between them, in the center of the table, was a crystal vase of fresh marigolds and a sweating pitcher of water. The red-haired woman who had introduced herself as Niloufar’s mother, Afsoon, was sitting on Jalil’s right. The other two, Khadija and Nargis, were on his left. The wives each had on a flimsy black scarf, which they wore not on their heads but tied loosely around the neck like an afterthought. Mariam, who could not imagine that they would wear black for Nana, pictured one of them suggesting it, or maybe Jalil, just before she’d been summoned.

Afsoon poured water from the pitcher and put the glass before Mariam on a checkered cloth coaster. “Only spring and it’s warm already,” she said. She made a fanning motion with her hand.

“Have you been comfortable?” Nargis, who had a small chin and curly black hair, asked. “We hope you’ve been comfortable. This… ordeal…must be very hard for you. So difficult.”

The other two nodded. Mariam took in their plucked eyebrows, the thin, tolerant smiles they were giving her. There was an unpleasant hum in Mariam’s head. Her throat burned. She drank some of the water.

Through the wide window behind Jalil, Mariam could see a row of flowering apple trees. On the wall beside the window stood a dark wooden cabinet. In it was a clock, and a framed photograph of Jalil and three young boys holding a fish. The sun caught the sparkle in the fish’s scales. Jalil and the boys were grinning.

“Well,” Afsoon began. “I-that is, we-have brought you here because we have some very good news to give you.”

Mariam looked up.

She caught a quick exchange of glances between the women over Jalil, who slouched in his chair looking unseeingly at the pitcher on the table. It was Khadija, the oldest-looking of the three, who turned her gaze to Mariam, and Mariam had the impression that this duty too had been discussed, agreed upon, before they had called for her.

“You have a suitor,” Khadija said.

Mariam’s stomach fell. “A what?” she said through suddenly numb lips.

“Akhasiegar. A suitor. His name is Rasheed,” Khadija went on. “He is a friend of a business acquaintance of your father’s. He’s a Pashtun, from Kandahar originally, but he lives in Kabul, in the Deh-Mazang district, in a two-story house that he owns.”

Afsoon was nodding. “And he does speak Farsi, like us, like you. So you won’t have to learn Pashto.”

Mariam’s chest was tightening. The room was reeling up and down, the ground shifting beneath her feet.

“He’s a shoemaker,” Khadija was saying now. “But not some kind of ordinary street-sidemoochi, no, no. He has his own shop, and he is one of the most sought-after shoemakers in Kabul He makes them for diplomats, members of the presidential family-that class of people. So you see, he will have no trouble providing for you.”

Mariam fixed her eyes on Jalil, her heart somersaulting in her chest. “Is this true? What she’s saying, is it true?”

But Jalil wouldn’t look at her. He went on chewing the corner of his lower lip and staring at the pitcher.

“Now heis a little older than you,” Afsoon chimed in. “But he can’t be more than…forty. Forty-five at the most. Wouldn’t you say,Nargis?”

“Yes. But I’ve seen nine-year-old girls given to men twenty years older than your suitor, Mariam. We all have. What are you, fifteen? That’s a good, solid marrying age for a girl.” There was enthusiastic nodding at this. It did not escape Mariam that no mention was made of her half sisters Saideh or Naheed, both her own age, both students in the Mehri School in Herat, both with plans to enroll in Kabul University. Fifteen, evidently, was not a good, solid marrying age for them.

“What’s more,” Nargis went on, “he too has had a great loss in his life. His wife, we hear, died during childbirth ten years ago. And then, three years ago, his son drowned in a lake.”

“It’s very sad, yes. He’s been looking for a bride the last few years but hasn’t found anyone suitable.”

“I don’t want to,” Mariam said. She looked at Jalil. “I don’t want this. Don’t make me.” She hated the sniffling, pleading tone of her voice but could not help it.

“Now, be reasonable, Mariam,” one of the wives said.

Mariam was no longer keeping track of who was saying what. She went on staring at Jalil, waiting for him to speak up, to say that none of this was true.

“You can’t spend the rest of your life here.”

“Don’t you want a family of your own?”

“Yes. A home, children of your own?”

“You have to move on.”

“True that it would be preferable that you marry a local, a Tajik, but Rasheed is healthy, and interested in you. He has a home and a job. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it? And Kabul is a beautiful and exciting city. You may not get another opportunity this good.”

Mariam turned her attention to the wives.

“I’ll live with Mullah Faizullah,” she said. “He’ll take me in. I know he will.”

“That’s no good,” Khadija said. “He’s old and so…” She searched for the right word, and Mariam knew then that what she really wanted to say wasHef s so close. She understood what they meant to do.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.

“He’s so old and weak,” Khadija eventually said. “And what will you do when he’s gone? You’d be a burden to his family.”

As you are now to us.Mariam almostsaw the unspoken words exit Khadija’s mouth, like foggy breath on a cold day.

Mariam pictured herself in Kabul, a big, strange, crowded city that, Jalil had once told her, was some six hundred and fifty kilometers to the east of Herat.Six hundred and fifty kilometers. The farthest she’d ever been from thekolba was the two-kilometer walk she’d made to Jalil’s house. She pictured herself living there, in Kabul, at the other end of that unimaginable distance, living in a stranger’s house where she would have to concede to his moods and his issued demands. She would have to clean after this man, Rasheed, cook for him, wash his clothes. And there would be other chores as well-Nana had told her what husbands did to their wives. 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.

She turned to Jalil again. “Tell them. Tell them you won’t let them do this.”

“Actually, your father has already given Rasheed his answer,” Afsoon said. “Rasheed is here, in Herat; he has come all the way from Kabul. Thenikka will be tomorrow morning, and then there is a bus leaving for Kabul at noon.”

“Tell them!” Mariam cried

The women grew quiet now. Mariam sensed that they were watching him too. Waiting. A silence fell over the room. Jalil kept twirling his wedding band, with a bruised, helpless look on his face. From inside the cabinet, the clock ticked on and on.

“Jalil jo?” one of the women said at last.

Mil’s eyes lifted slowly, met Mariam’s, lingered for a moment, then dropped. He opened his mouth, but all that came forth was a single, pained groan.

“Say something,” Mariam said.

Then Jalil did, in a thin, threadbare voice. “Goddamn it, Mariam, don’t do this to me,” he said as though he was the one to whom something was being done.

And, with that, Mariam felt the tension vanish from the room.

As JaliPs wives began a new-and more sprightly-round of reassuring, Mariam looked down at the table. 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. She noticed that every time she breathed out, the surface fogged, and she disappeared from her father’s table.

Afsoon escorted her back to the room upstairs. When Afsoon closed the door, Mariam heard the rattling of a key as it turned in the lock.

8.

In the morning, Mariam was given a long-sleeved, dark green dress to wear over white cotton trousers. Afsoon gave her a green hijab and a pair of matching sandals.

She was taken to the room with the long, brown table, except now there was a bowl of sugar-coated almond candy in the middle of the table, a Koran, a green veil, and a mirror. Two men Mariam had never seen before- witnesses, she presumed-and a mullah she did not recognize were already seated at the table.

Jalil showed her to a chair. He was wearing a light brown suit and a red tie. His hair was washed. When he pulled out the chair for her, he tried to smile encouragingly. Khadija and Afsoon sat on Mariam’s side of the table this time.

The mullah motioned toward the veil, and Nargis arranged it on Mariam’s head before taking a seat. Mariam looked down at her hands.

“You can call him in now,” Jalil said to someone.

Mariam smelled him before she saw him. Cigarette smoke and thick, sweet cologne, not faint like Jalil’s. The scent of it flooded Mariam’s nostrils. Through the veil, from the corner of her eye, Mariam saw a tall man, thick-bellied and broad-shouldered, stooping in the doorway. The size of him almost made her gasp, and she had to drop her gaze, her heart hammering away. She sensed him lingering in the doorway. Then his slow, heavy-footed movement across the room. The candy bowl on the table clinked in tune with his steps. With a thick grunt, he dropped on a chair beside her. He breathed noisily.

The mullah welcomed them. He said this would not be a traditional nikka “I understand that Rasheedagha has tickets for the bus to Kabul that leaves shortly. So, in the interest of time, we will bypass some of the traditional steps to speed up the proceedings.”

The mullah gave a few blessings, said a few words about the importance of marriage. He asked Jalil if he had any objections to this union, and Jalil shook his head. Then the mullah asked Rasheed if he indeed wished to enter into a marriage contract with Mariam. Rasheed said, “Yes.” His harsh, raspy voice reminded Mariam of the sound of dry autumn leaves crushed underfoot.

“And do you, Mariam jan, accept this man as your husband?”

Mariam stayed quiet. Throats were cleared.

“She does,” a female voice said from down the table.

“Actually,” the mullah said, “she herself has to answer. And she should wait until I ask three times. The point is, he’s seeking her, not the other way around.”

He asked the question two more times. When Mariam didn’t answer, he asked it once more, this time more forcefully- Mariam could feel Jalil beside her shifting on his seat, could sense feet crossing and uncrossing beneath the table. There was more throat clearing. A small, white hand reached out and flicked a bit of dust off the table.

“Mariam,” Jalil whispered.

“Yes,” she said shakily.

A mirror was passed beneath the veil. In it, Mariam saw her own face first, the archless, unshapely eyebrows, the flat hair, the eyes, mirthless green and set so closely together that one might mistake her for being cross-eyed. Her skin was coarse and had a dull, spotty appearance. She thought her brow too wide, the chin too narrow, the lips too thin. The overall impression was of a long face, a triangular face, a bit houndlike. And yet Mariam saw that, oddly enough, the whole of these unmemorable parts made for a face that was not pretty but, somehow, not unpleasant to look at either.

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.

Their gazes met briefly in the glass and slid away.

This is the face of my husband,Mariam thought.

They exchanged the thin gold bands that Rasheed fished from his coat pocket. His nails were yellow-brown, like the inside of a rotting apple, and some of the tips were curling, lifting. Mariam’s hands shook when she tried to slip the band onto his finger, and Rasheed had to help her. Her own band was a little tight, but Rasheed had no trouble forcing it over her knuckles.

“There,” he said.

“It’s a pretty ring,” one of the wives said. “It’s lovely, Mariam.”

“All that remains now is the signing of the contract,” the mullah said.

Mariam signed her name-themeem, thereh, the 3^ and themeem again-conscious of all the eyes on her hand. The next time Mariam signed her name to a document, twenty-seven years later, a mullah would again be present.

“You are now husband and wife,” the mullah said.”Tabreek. Congratulations.”

Rasheed waited in the multicolored bus. Mariam could not see him from where she stood with Jalil, by the rear bumper, only the smoke of his cigarette curling up from the open window. Around them, hands shook and farewells were said. Korans were kissed, passed under. Barefoot boys bounced between travelers, their faces invisible behind their trays of chewing gum and cigarettes.

Jalil was busy telling her that Kabul was so beautiful, the Moghul emperor Babur had asked that he be buried there. Next, Mariam knew, he’d go on about Kabul’s gardens, and its shops, its trees, and its air, and, before long, she would be on the bus and he would walk alongside it, waving cheerfully, unscathed, spared.

Mariam could not bring herself to allow it.

“I used to worship you,” she said.

Jalil stopped in midsentence. He crossed and uncrossed his arms. A young Hindi couple, the wife cradling a boy, the husband dragging a suitcase, passed between them. Jalil seemed grateful for the interruption. They excused themselves, and he smiled back politely.

“On Thursdays, I sat for hours waiting for you. I worried myself sick that you wouldn’t show up.”

“It’s a long trip. You should eat something.” He said he could buy her some bread and goat cheese.

“I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.”

Jalil looked down, and, like an overgrown child, dug at something with the toe of his shoe.

“You were ashamed of me.”

“I’ll visit you,” he muttered “I’ll come to Kabul and see you. We’ll-“

“No. No,” she said. “Don’t come. I won’t see you. Don’t you come. I don’t want to hear from you. Ever.Ever. “

He gave her a wounded look.

“It ends here for you and me. Say your good-byes.”

“Don’t leave like this,” he said in a thin voice.

“You didn’t even have the decency to give me the time to say good-bye to Mullah Faizullah.”

She turned and walked around to the side of the bus. She could hear him following her. When she reached the hydraulic doors, she heard him behind her.

“Mariamjo.”

She climbed the stairs, and though she could spot Jalil out of the corner of her eye walking parallel to her she did not look out the window. She made her way down the aisle to the back, where Rasheed sat with her suitcase between his feet. She did not turn to look when Jalil’s palms pressed on the glass, when his knuckles rapped and rapped on it. When the bus jerked forward, she did not turn to see him trotting alongside it. And when the bus pulled away, she did not look back to see him receding, to see him disappear in the cloud of exhaust and dust.

Rasheed, who took up the window and middle seat, put his thick hand on hers.

“There now, girl There. There,” he said. He was squinting out the window as he said this, as though something more interesting had caught his eye.

9.

It was early evening the following day by the time they arrived at Rasheed’s house.

“We’re in Deh-Mazang,” he said. They were outside, on the sidewalk. He had her suitcase in one hand and was unlocking the wooden front gate with the other. “In the south and west part of the city. The zoo is nearby, and the university too.”

Mariam nodded. Already she had learned that, though she could understand him, she had to pay close attention when he spoke. She was unaccustomed to the Kabuli dialect of his Farsi, and to the underlying layer of Pashto accent, the language of his native Kandahar. He, on the other hand, seemed to have no trouble understanding her Herati Farsi.

Mariam quickly surveyed the narrow, unpaved road along which Rasheed’s house was situated. The houses on this road were crowded together and shared common walls, with small, walled yards in front buffering them from the street. Most of the homes had flat roofs and were made of burned brick, some of mud the same dusty color as the mountains that ringed the city. Gutters separated the sidewalk from the road on both sides and flowed with muddy water. Mariam saw small mounds of flyblown garbage littering the street here and there. Rasheed’s house had two stories. Mariam could see that it had once been blue.

When Rasheed opened the front gate, Mariam found herself in a small, unkempt yard where yellow grass struggled up in thin patches. Mariam saw an outhouse on the right, in a side yard, and, on the left, a well with a hand pump, a row of dying saplings. Near the well was a toolshed, and a bicycle leaning against the wall.

“Your father told me you like to fish,” Rasheed said as they were crossing the yard to the house. There was no backyard, Mariam saw. “There are valleys north of here. Rivers with lots offish. Maybe I’ll take you someday.”

He unlocked the front door and let her into the house.

Rasheed’s house was much smaller than Jalil’s, but, compared to Mariam and Nana’skolba, it was a mansion. There was a hallway, a living room downstairs, and a kitchen in which he showed her pots and pans and a pressure cooker and a keroseneLshiop. The living room had a pistachio green leather couch. It had a rip down its side that had been clumsily sewn together. The walls were bare. There was a table, two cane-seat chairs, two folding chairs, and, in the corner, a black, cast-iron stove.

Mariam stood in the middle of the living room, looking around. At thekolba, she could touch the ceiling with her fingertips. She could lie in her cot and tell the time of day by the angle of sunlight pouring through the window. She knew how far her door would open before its hinges creaked. She knew every splinter and crack in each of the thirty wooden floorboards. Now all those familiar things were gone. Nana was dead, and she was here, in a strange city, separated from the life she’d known by valleys and chains of snow-capped mountains and entire deserts. She was in a stranger’s house, with all its different rooms and its smell of cigarette smoke, with its unfamiliar cupboards full of unfamiliar utensils, its heavy, dark green curtains, and a ceiling she knew she could not reach. The space of it suffocated Mariam. Pangs of longing bore into her, for Nana, for Mullah Faizullah, for her old life.

Then she was crying.

“What’s this crying about?” Rasheed said crossly. He reached into the pocket of his pants, uncurled Mariam’s fingers, and pushed a handkerchief into her palm. He lit himself a cigarette and leaned against the wall. He watched as Mariam pressed the handkerchief to her eyes.

“Done?”

Mariam nodded.

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

He took her by the elbow then and led her to the living-room window.

“This window looks north,” he said, tapping the glass with the crooked nail of his index finger. “That’s the Asmai mountain directly in front of us-see?-and, to the left, is the Ali Abad mountain. The university is at the foot of it. Behind us, east, you can’t see from here, is the Shir Darwaza mountain. Every day, at noon, they shoot a cannon from it. Stop your crying, now. I mean it.”

Mariam dabbed at her eyes.

“That’s one thing I can’t stand,” he said, scowling, “the sound of a woman crying. I’m sorry. I have no patience for it.”

“I want to go home,” Mariam said.

Rasheed sighed irritably. A puff of his smoky breath hit Mariam’s face. “I won’t take that personally. This time.”

Again, he took her by the elbow, and led her upstairs.

There was a narrow, dimly lit hallway there and two bedrooms. The door to the bigger one was ajar. Through it Mariam could see that it, like the rest of the house, was sparsely furnished: bed in the corner, with a brown blanket and a pillow, a closet, a dresser. The walls were bare except for a small mirror. Rasheed closed the door.

“This is my room.”

He said she could take the guest room. “I hope you don’t mind. I’m accustomed to sleeping alone.”

Mariam didn’t tell him how relieved she was, at least about this.

The room that was to be Mariam’s was much smaller than the room she’d stayed in at Jalil’s house. It had a bed, an old, gray-brown dresser, a small closet. The window looked into the yard and, beyond that, the street below. Rasheed put her suitcase in a corner.

Mariam sat on the bed.

“You didn’t notice,” he said He was standing in the doorway, stooping a little to fit.

“Look on the windowsill. You know what kind they are? I put them there before leaving for Herat.”

Only now Mariam saw a basket on the sill. White tuberoses spilled from its sides.

“You like them? They please you?”

“Yes.”

“You can thank me then.”

“Thank you. I’m sorry.Tashakor -“

“You’re shaking. Maybe I scare you. Do I scare you? Are you frightened of me?”

Mariam was not looking at him, but she could hear something slyly playful in these questions, like a needling. She quickly shook her head in what she recognized as her first lie in their marriage.

“No? That’s good, then. Good for you. Well, this is your home now. You’re going to like it here. You’ll see. Did I tell you we have electricity? Most days and every night?”

He made as if to leave. At the door, he paused, took a long drag, crinkled his eyes against the smoke. Mariam thought he was going to say something. But he didn’t. He closed the door, left her alone with her suitcase and her flowers.

10.

The first few days, Mariam hardly left her room. She was awakened every dawn for prayer by the distant cry ofazan, after which she crawled back into bed. She was still in bed when she heard Rasheed in the bathroom, washing up, when he came into her room to check on her before he went to his shop. From her window, she watched him in the yard, securing his lunch in the rear carrier pack of his bicycle, then walking his bicycle across the yard and into the street. She watched him pedal away, saw his broad, thick-shouldered figure disappear around the turn at the end of the street.

For most of the days, Mariam stayed in bed, feeling adrift and forlorn. Sometimes she went downstairs to the kitchen, ran her hands over the sticky, grease-stained counter, the vinyl, flowered curtains that smelled like burned meals. 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.

At thekolba, her appetite had been predictable. Here, her stomach rarely growled for food. Sometimes she took a plate of leftover white rice and a scrap of bread to the living room, by the window. From there, she could see the roofs of the one-story houses on their street. She could see into their yards too, the women working laundry lines and shooing their children, chickens pecking at dirt, the shovels and spades, the cows tethered to trees.

She thought longingly of all the summer nights that she and Nana had slept on the flat roof of thekolba, looking at the moon glowing over Gul Daman, the night so hot their shirts would cling to their chests like a wet leaf to a window. She missed the winter afternoons of reading in thekolba with Mullah Faizullah, the clink of icicles falling on her roof from the trees, the crows cawing outside from snow-burdened branches.

Alone in the house, Mariam paced restlessly, from the kitchen to the living room, up the steps to her room and down again. She ended up back in her room, doing her prayers or sitting on the bed, missing her mother, feeling nauseated and homesick.

It was with the sun’s westward crawl that Mariam’s anxiety really ratcheted up. Her teeth rattled when she thought of the night, the time when Rasheed might at last decide to do to her what husbands did to their wives. She lay in bed, wracked with nerves, as he ate alone downstairs.

He always stopped by her room and poked his head in.

“You can’t be sleeping already. It’s only seven. Are you awake? Answer me. Come, now.”

He pressed on until, from the dark, Mariam said, “I’m here.”

He slid down and sat in her doorway. From her bed, she could see his large-framed body, his long legs, the smoke swirling around his hook-nosed profile, the amber tip of his cigarette brightening and dimming.

He told her about his day. A pair of loafers he had custom-made for the deputy foreign minister-who, Rasheed said, bought shoes only from him. An order for sandals from a Polish diplomat and his wife. He told her of the superstitions people had about shoes: that putting them on a bed invited death into the family, that a quarrel would follow if one put on the left shoe first.

“Unless it was done unintentionally on a Friday,” he said. “And did you know it’s supposed to be a bad omen to tie shoes together and hang them from a nail?”

Rasheed himself believed none of this. In his opinion, superstitions were largely a female preoccupation.

He passed on to her things he had heard on the streets, like how the American president Richard Nixon had resigned over a scandal.

Mariam, who had never heard of Nixon, or the scandal that had forced him to resign, did not say anything back. She waited anxiously for Rasheed to finish talking, to crush his cigarette, and take his leave. Only when she’d heard him cross the hallway, heard his door open and close, only then would the metal fist gripping her belly let go-Then one night he crushed his cigarette and instead of saying good night leaned against the doorway.

“Are you ever going to unpack that thing?” he said, motioning with his head toward her suitcase. He crossed his arms. “I figured you might need some time. But this is absurd. A week’s gone and…Well, then, as of tomorrow morning I expect you to start behaving like a wife.Fahmidi? Is that understood?”

Mariam’s teeth began to chatter.

“I need an answer.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” he said. “What did you think? That this is a hotel? That I’m some kind of hotelkeeper? Well, it…Oh. Oh.

La illah u ilillah.What did I say about the crying? Mariam. What did I say to you about the crying?”

The next morning, after Rasheed left for work, Mariam unpacked her clothes and put them in the dresser. She drew a pail of water from the well and, with a rag, washed the windows of her room and the windows to the living room downstairs- She swept the floors, beat the cobwebs fluttering in the corners of the ceiling. She opened the windows to air the house.

She set three cups of lentils to soak in a pot, found a knife and cut some carrots and a pair of potatoes, left them too to soak. She searched for flour, found it in the back of one of the cabinets behind a row of dirty spice jars, and made fresh dough, kneading it the way Nana had shown her, pushing the dough with the heel of her hand, folding the outer edge, turning it, and pushing it away again. Once she had floured the dough, she wrapped it in a moist cloth, put on ahijab, and set out for the communal tandoor.

Rasheed had told her where it was, down the street, a left then a quick right, but all Mariam had to do was follow the flock of women and children who were headed the same way. The children Mariam saw, chasing after their mothers or running ahead of them, wore shirts patched and patched again. They wore trousers that looked too big or too small, sandals with ragged straps that flapped back and forth. They rolled discarded old bicycle tires with sticks.

Their mothers walked in groups of three or four, some in burqas, others not. Mariam could hear their high-pitched chatter, their spiraling laughs. As she walked with her head down, she caught bits of their banter, which seemingly always had to do with sick children or lazy, ungrateful husbands.

As if the meals cook themselves.

Wallah o billah,never a moment’s rest!

And he says to me, I swear it, it’s true, he actually says tome…

This endless conversation, the tone plaintive but oddly cheerful, flew around and around in a circle. On it went, down the street, around the corner, in line at the tandoor. Husbands who gambled. 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. 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?

In the tandoor line, Mariam caught sideways glances shot at her, heard whispers. Her hands began to sweat. She imagined they all knew that she’d been born aharami, a source of shame to her father and his family. They all knew that she’d betrayed her mother and disgraced herself.

With a corner of herhijab, she dabbed at the moisture above her upper lip and tried to gather her nerves. For a few minutes, everything went well-Then someone tapped her on the shoulder. Mariam turned around and found a light-skinned, plump woman wearing ahijab, like her. She had short, wiry black hair and a good-humored, almost perfectly round face. Her lips were much fuller than Mariam’s, the lower one slightly droopy, as though dragged down by the big, dark mole just below the lip line. She had big greenish eyes that shone at Mariam with an inviting glint.

“You’re Rasheed jan’s new wife, aren’t you?” the woman said, smiling widely.

“The one from Herat. You’re so young! Mariam jan, isn’t it? My name is Fariba. I live on your street, five houses to your left, the one with the green door. This is my sonNoor.”

The boy at her side had a smooth, happy face and wiry hair like his mother’s. There was a patch of black hairs on the lobe of his left ear. His eyes had a mischievous, reckless light in them. He raised his hand.”Salaam, Khala Jan.”

“Noor is ten. I have an older boy too, Ahmad.”

“He’s thirteen,” Noor said.

“Thirteen going on forty.” The woman Fariba laughed. “My husband’s name is Hakim,” she said. “He’s a teacher here in Deh-Mazang. You should come by sometime, we’ll have a cup-“

And then suddenly, as if emboldened, the other women pushed past Fariba and swarmed Mariam, forming a circle around her with alarming speed “So you’re Rasheed jan’s young bride-“

“How do you like Kabul?”

“I’ve been to Herat. I have a cousin there”

“Do you want a boy or a girl first?”

“The minarets! Oh, what beauty! What a gorgeous city!”

“Boy is better, Mariam jan, they carry the family name-“

“Bah! Boys get married and run off. Girls stay behind and take care of you when you’re old”

“We heard you were coming.”

“Have twins. One of each! Then everyone’s happy.”

Mariam backed away. She was hyperventilating. Her ears buzzed, her pulse fluttered, her eyes darted from one face to another. She backed away again, but there was nowhere to go to-she was in the center of a circle. She spotted Fariba, who was frowning, who saw that she was in distress.

“Let her be!” Fariba was saying. “Move aside, let her be! You’re frightening her!”

Mariam clutched the dough close to her chest and pushed through the crowd around her.

“Where are you going,hamshira?”

She pushed until somehow she was in the clear and then she ran up the street. It wasn’t until she’d reached the intersection that she realized she’d run the wrong way. She turned around and ran back in the other direction, head down, tripping once and scraping her knee badly, then up again and running, bolting past the women.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“You’re bleeding,hamshiral”

Mariam turned one corner, then the other. She found the correct street but suddenly could not remember which was Rasheed’s house. She ran up then down the street, panting, near tears now, began trying doors blindly. Some were locked, others opened only to reveal unfamiliar yards, barking dogs, and startled chickens. She pictured Rasheed coming home to find her still searching this way, her knee bleeding, lost on her own street. Now she did start crying. She pushed on doors, muttering panicked prayers, her face moist with tears, until one opened, and she saw, with relief, the outhouse, the well, the toolshed. She slammed the door behind her and turned the bolt. Then she was on all fours, next to the wall, retching. When she was done, she crawled away, sat against the wall, with her legs splayed before her. She had never in her life felt so alone.

When Rasheed came home that night, he brought with him a brown paper bag. Mariam was disappointed that he did not notice the clean windows, the swept floors, the missing cobwebs. But he did look pleased that she had already set his dinner plate, on a cleansofrah spread on the living-room floor.

“I madedaal” Mariam said.

“Good. I’m starving.”

She poured water for him from theafiawa to wash his hands with. As he dried with a towel, she put before him a steaming bowlof daal and a plate of fluffy white rice. This was the first meal she had cooked for him, and Mariam wished she had been in a better state when she made it. She’d still been shaken from the incident at the tandoor as she’d cooked, and all day she had fretted about thedaal’% consistency, its color, worried that he would think she’d stirred in too much ginger or not enough turmeric.

He dipped his spoon into the gold-coloreddaal.

Mariam swayed a bit. What if he was disappointed or angry? What if he pushed his plate away in displeasure?

“Careful,” she managed to say. “It’s hot.”

Rasheed pursed his lips and blew, then put the spoon into his mouth.

“It’s good,” he said. “A little undersalted but good. Maybe better than good, even.”

Relieved, Mariam looked on as he ate. A flare of pride caught her off guard. She had done well -maybe better than good, even- and it surprised her, this thrill she felt over his small compliment- The day’s earlier unpleasantness receded a bit.

“Tomorrow is Friday,” Rasheed said. “What do you say I show you around?”

“Around Kabul?”

“No. Calcutta.”

Mariam blinked.

“It’s a joke. Of course Kabul. Where else?” He reached into the brown paper bag. “But first, something I have to tell you.”

He fished a sky blue burqa from the bag. The yards of pleated cloth spilled over his knees when he lifted it. He rolled up the burqa, looked at Mariam.

“I have customers, Mariam, men, who bring their wives to my shop. The women come uncovered, they talk to me directly, look me in the eye without shame. They wear makeup and skirts that show their knees. Sometimes they even put their feet in front of me, the women do, for measurements, and their husbands stand there and watch. They allow it. They think nothing of a stranger touching their wives’ bare feet! They think they’re being modern men, intellectuals, on account of their education, I suppose. They don’t see that they’re spoiling their ownnang andnamoos, their honor and pride.”

He shook his head.

“Mostly, they live in the richer parts of Kabul. I’ll take you there. You’ll see. But they’re here too, Mariam, in this very neighborhood, these soft men. There’s a teacher living down the street, Hakim is his name, and I see his wife Fariba all the time walking the streets alone with nothing on her head but a scarf. It embarrasses me, frankly, to see a man who’s lost control of his wife.”

He fixed Mariam with a hard glare.

“But I’m a different breed of man, Mariam. Where I come from, one wrong look, one improper word, and blood is spilled. Where I come from, a woman’s face is her husband’s business only. I want you to remember that. Do you understand?”

Mariam nodded. When he extended the bag to her, she took it.

The earlier pleasure over his approval of her cooking had evaporated. In its stead, a sensation of shrinking. This man’s will felt to Mariam as imposing and immovable as the Safid-koh mountains looming over Gul Daman.

Rasheed passed the paper bag to her. “We have an understanding, then. Now, let me have some more of thatdaal.”

11.

Mariam had never before worn a burqa. Rasheed had to help her put it on. The padded headpiece felt tight and heavy on her skull, and it was strange seeing the world through a mesh screen. She practiced walking around her room in it and kept stepping on the hem and stumbling. The loss of peripheral vision was unnerving, and she did not like the suffocating way the pleated cloth kept pressing against her mouth.

“You’ll get used to it,” Rasheed said. “With time, I bet you’ll even like it.”

They took a bus to a place Rasheed called the Shar-e-Nau Park, where children pushed each other on swings and slapped volleyballs over ragged nets tied to tree trunks. They strolled together and watched boys fly kites, Mariam walking beside Rasheed, tripping now and then on the burqa’s hem. For lunch, Rasheed took her to eat in a small kebab house near a mosque he called the Haji Yaghoub. The floor was sticky and the air smoky. The walls smelled faintly of raw meat and the music, which Rasheed described to her aslogari, was loud. The cooks were thin boys who fanned skewers with one hand and swatted gnats with the other. Mariam, who had never been inside a restaurant, found it odd at first to sit in a crowded room with so many strangers, to lift her burqa to put morsels of food into her mouth. A hint of the same anxiety as the day at the tandoor stirred in her stomach, but Rasheed’s presence was of some comfort, and, after a while, she did not mind so much the music, the smoke, even the people. 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.

On the streets, Rasheed named various buildings with authority; this is the American Embassy, he said, that the Foreign Ministry. He pointed to cars, said their names and where they were made: Soviet Volgas, American Chevrolets, German Opels.

“Which is your favorite?” he asked

Mariam hesitated, pointed to a Volga, and Rasheed laughed

Kabul was far more crowded than the little that Mariam had seen of Herat. There were fewer trees and fewergaris pulled by horses, but more cars, taller buildings, more traffic lights and more paved roads. And everywhere Mariam heard the city’s peculiar dialect: “Dear” wasjon insteadof jo, “sister” becamehamshira instead ofhamshireh, and so on.

From a street vendor, Rasheed bought her ice cream. It was the first time she’d eaten ice cream and Mariam had never imagined that such tricks could be played on a palate. She devoured the entire bowl, the crushed-pistachio topping, the tiny rice noodles at the bottom. She marveled at the bewitching texture, the lapping sweetness of it.

They walked on to a place called Kocheh-Morgha, Chicken Street. It was a narrow, crowded bazaar in a neighborhood that Rasheed said was one of Kabul’s wealthier ones.

“Around here is where foreign diplomats live, rich businessmen, members of the royal family-that sort of people. Not like you and me.”

“I don’t see any chickens,” Mariam said.

“That’s the one thing you can’t find on Chicken Street.” Rasheed laughed The street was lined with shops and little stalls that sold lambskin hats and rainbow-coloredchapans. Rasheed stopped to look at an engraved silver dagger in one shop, and, in another, at an old rifle that the shopkeeper assured Rasheed was a relic from the first war against the British.

“And I’m Moshe Dayan,” Rasheed muttered. He half smiled, and it seemed to Mariam that this was a smile meant only for her. A private, married smile.

They strolled past carpet shops, handicraft shops, pastry shops, flower shops, and shops that sold suits for men and dresses for women, and, in them, behind lace curtains, Mariam saw young girls sewing buttons and ironing collars. From time to time, Rasheed greeted a shopkeeper he knew, sometimes in Farsi, other times in Pashto. As they shook hands and kissed on the cheek, Mariam stood a few feet away. Rasheed did not wave her over, did not introduce her.

He asked her to wait outside an embroidery shop. “I know the owner,” he said. “I’ll just go in for a minute, say mysalaam. “

Mariam waited outside on the crowded sidewalk. She watched the cars crawling up Chicken Street, threading through the horde of hawkers and pedestrians, honking at children and donkeys who wouldn’t move. She watched the bored-looking merchants inside their tiny stalls, smoking, or spitting into brass spittoons, their faces emerging from the shadows now and then to peddle textiles and fur-collaredpoosiincoats to passersby.

But it was the women who drew Mariam’s eyes the most.

The women in this part of Kabul were a different breed from the women in the poorer neighborhoods-like the one where she and Rasheed lived, where so many of the women covered fully. These women were-what was the word Rasheed had used?-“modern.” Yes, modern Afghan women married to modern Afghan men who did not mind that their wives walked among strangers with makeup on their faces and nothing on their heads. Mariam watched them cantering uninhibited down the street, sometimes with a man, sometimes alone, sometimes with rosy-cheeked children who wore shiny shoes and watches with leather bands, who walked bicycles with high-rise handlebars and gold-colored spokes-unlike the children in Deh-Mazang, who bore sand-fly scars on their cheeks and rolled old bicycle tires with sticks.

These women were all swinging handbags and rustling skirts. Mariam even spotted one smoking behind the wheel of a car. Their nails were long, polished pink or orange, their lips red as tulips. They walked in high heels, and quickly, as if on perpetually urgent business. They wore dark sunglasses, and, when they breezed by, Mariam caught a whiff of their perfume. She imagined that they all had university degrees, that they worked in office buildings, behind desks of their own, where they typed and smoked and made important telephone calls to important people. These women mystified Mariam. They made her aware of her own lowliness, her plain looks, her lack of aspirations, her ignorance of so many things.

Then Rasheed was tapping her on the shoulder and handing her something here.

It was a dark maroon silk shawl with beaded fringes and edges embroidered with gold thread “Do you like it?”

Mariam looked up. Rasheed did a touching thing then. He blinked and averted her gaze.

Mariam thought of Jalil, of the emphatic, jovial way in which he’d pushed his jewelry at her, the overpowering cheerfulness that left room for no response but meek gratitude. Nana had been right about Mil’s gifts. They had been halfhearted tokens of penance, insincere, corrupt gestures meant more for his own appeasement than hers. This shawl, Mariam saw, was a true gift.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

That night, Rasheed visited her room again. But instead of smoking in the doorway, he crossed the room and sat beside her where she lay on the bed. The springs creaked as the bed tilted to his side.

There was a moment of hesitation, and then his hand was on her neck, his thick fingers slowly pressing the knobs in the back of it. His thumb slid down, and now it was stroking the hollow above her collarbone, then the flesh beneath it. Mariam began shivering. His hand crept lower still, lower, his fingernails catching in the cotton of her blouse.

“I can’t,” she croaked, looking at his moonlit profile, his thick shoulders and broad chest, the tufts of gray hair protruding from his open collar.

His hand was on her right breast now, squeezing it hard through the blouse, and she could hear him breathing deeply through the nose.

He slid under the blanket beside her. She could feel his hand working at his belt, at the drawstring of her trousers. Her own hands clenched the sheets in fistfuls. He rolled on top of her, wriggled and shifted, and she let out a whimper. Mariam closed her eyes, gritted her teeth.

The pain was sudden and astonishing. Her eyes sprang open. She sucked air through her teeth and bit on the knuckle of her thumb. She slung her free arm over Rasheed’s back and her fingers dug at his shirt.

Rasheed buried his face into her pillow, and Mariam stared, wide-eyed, at the ceiling above his shoulder, shivering, lips pursed, feeling the heat of his quick breaths on her shoulder. The air between them smelled of tobacco, of the onions and grilled lamb they had eaten earlier. Now and then, his ear rubbed against her cheek, and she knew from the scratchy feel that he had shaved it.

When it was done, he rolled off her, panting. He dropped his forearm over his brow. In the dark, she could see the blue hands of his watch. They lay that way for a while, on their backs, not looking at each other.

“There is no shame in this, Mariam,” he said, slurring a little. “It’s what married people do. It’s what the Prophet himself and his wives did There is no shame.”

A few moments later, he pushed back the blanket and left the room, leaving her with the impression of his head on her pillow, leaving her to wait out the pain down below, to look at the frozen stars in the sky and a cloud that draped the face of the moon like a wedding veil.

12.

Jtvamadan came in the fall that year, 1974. For the first time in her life, Mariam saw how the sighting of the new crescent moon could transform an entire city, alter its rhythm and mood. She noticed a drowsy hush overtaking Kabul Traffic became languid, scant, even quiet. Shops emptied. Restaurants turned off their lights, closed their doors. Mariam saw no smokers on the streets, no cups of tea steaming from window ledges. And atifiar, when the sun dipped in the west and the cannon fired from the Shir Darwaza mountain, the city broke its fast, and so did Mariam, with bread and a date, tasting for the first time in her fifteen years the sweetness of sharing in a communal experience.

Except for a handful of days, Rasheed didn’t observe the fast. The few times he did, he came home in a sour mood. Hunger made him curt, irritable, impatient. One night, Mariam was a few minutes late with dinner, and he started eating bread with radishes. Even after Mariam put the rice and the lamb and okraqurma in front of him, he wouldn’t touch it. He said nothing, and went on chewing the bread, his temples working, the vein on his forehead, full and angry. He went on chewing and staring ahead, and when Mariam spoke to him he looked at her without seeing her face and put another piece of bread into his mouth.

Mariam was relieved when Ramadan ended.

Back at thekolba, on the first of three days of Eid-ul-Fitr celebration that followed Ramadan, Jalil would visit Mariam and Nana. Dressed in suit and tie, he would come bearing Eid presents. One year, he gave Mariam a wool scarf. The three of them would sit for tea and then Jalil would excuse himself “Off to celebrate Eid with his real family,” Nana would say as he crossed the stream and waved-Mullah Faizullah would come too. He would bring Mariam chocolate candy wrapped in foil, a basketful of dyed boiled eggs, cookies. After he was gone, Mariam would climb one of the willows with her treats. Perched on a high branch, she would eat Mullah Faizullah’s chocolates and drop the foil wrappers until they lay scattered about the trunk of the tree like silver blossoms. When the chocolate was gone, she would start in on the cookies, and, with a pencil, she would draw faces on the eggs he had brought her now. But there was little pleasure in this for her. Mariam dreaded Eid, this time of hospitality and ceremony, when families dressed in their best and visited each other. She would imagine the air in Herat crackling with merriness, and high-spirited, bright-eyed people showering each other with endearments and goodwill. A forlornness would descend on her like a shroud then and would lift only when Eid had passed.

This year, for the first time, Mariam saw with her eyes the Eid of her childhood imaginings.

Rasheed and she took to the streets. Mariam had never walked amid such liveliness. Undaunted by the chilly weather, families had flooded the city on their frenetic rounds to visit relatives. On their own street, Mariam saw Fariba and her son Noor, who was dressed in a suit. Fariba, wearing a white scarf, walked beside a small-boned, shy-looking man with eyeglasses. Her older son was there too-Mariam somehow remembered Fariba saying his name, Ahmad, at the tandoor that first time. He had deep-set, brooding eyes, and his face was more thoughtful, more solemn, than his younger brother’s, a face as suggestive of early maturity as his brother’s was of lingering boyishness. Around Ahmad’s neck was a glittering allah pendant.

Fariba must have recognized her, walking in burqa beside Rasheed. She waved, and called out,”Eidmubarak!”

From inside the burqa, Mariam gave her a ghost of a nod.

“So you know that woman, the teacher’s wife?” Rasheed said

Mariam said she didn’t.

“Best you stay away. She’s a nosy gossiper, that one. And the husband fancies himself some kind of educated intellectual But he’s a mouse. Look at him. Doesn’t he look like a mouse?”

They went to Shar-e-Nau, where kids romped about in new shirts and beaded, brightly colored vests and compared Eid gifts. Women brandished platters of sweets. Mariam saw festive lanterns hanging from shopwindows, heard music blaring from loudspeakers. Strangers called out”Eidmubarak” to her as they passed.

That night they went toChaman, and, standing behind Rasheed, Mariam watched fireworks light up the sky, in flashes of green, pink, and yellow. She missed sitting with Mullah Faizullah outside thekolba, watching the fireworks explode over Herat in the distance, the sudden bursts of color reflected in her tutor’s soft, cataract-riddled eyes. But, mostly, she missed Nana. Mariam wished her mother were alive to see this. To seeher, amid all of it. To see at last that contentment and beauty were not unattainable things. Even for the likes of them.

They had Eid visitors at the house. They were all men, friends of Rasheed’s. When a knock came, Mariam knew to go upstairs to her room and close the door. She stayed there, as the men sipped tea downstairs with Rasheed, smoked, chatted. Rasheed had told Mariam that she was not to come down until the visitors had left Mariam didn’t mind. In truth, she was even flattered. Rasheed saw sanctity in what they had together. Her honor, hernamoos, was something worth guarding to him. She felt prized by his protectiveness. Treasured and significant.