PART THREE
Mariam
o you know who I am?"
The girl's eyes fluttered
"Do you know what has happened?"
The girl's mouth quivered. She closed her eyes. Swallowed. Her hand grazed her left
cheek. She mouthed something.
Mariam leaned in closer.
"This ear," the girl breathed. "I can't hear."
For the first "week, the girl did little but sleep, with help from the pink pills Rasheed paid
for at the hospital. She murmured in her sleep. Sometimes she spoke gibberish, cried out,
called out names Mariam did not recognize. She wept in her sleep, grew agitated, kicked
the blankets off, and then Mariam had to hold her down. Sometimes she retched and
retched, threw up everything Mariam fed her.
When she wasn't agitated, the girl was a sullen pair of eyes staring from under the blanket,
breathing out short little answers to Mariam and Rasheed's questions. Some days she was
childlike, whipped her head side to side, when Mariam, then Rasheed, tried to feed her. She
went rigid when Mariam came at her with a spoon. But she tired easily and submitted
eventually to their persistent badgering. Long bouts of weeping followed surrender.
Rasheed had Mariam rub antibiotic ointment on the cuts on the girl's face and neck, and
on the sutured gashes on her shoulder, across her forearms and lower legs. Mariam dressed
them with bandages, which she washed and recycled. She held the girl's hair back, out of
her face, when she had to retch.
"How long is she staying?" she asked Rasheed.
"Until she's better. Look at her. She's in no shape to go. Poor thing."
It was Rasheed who found the girl, who dug her out from beneath the rubble.
"Lucky I was home," he said to the girl. He was sitting on a folding chair beside Mariam's
bed, where the girl lay. "Lucky for you, I mean. I dug you out with my own hands. There
was a scrap of metal this big " Here, he spread his thumb and index finger apart to show her,
at least doubling, in Mariam's estimation, the actual size of it. "This big. Sticking right out
of your shoulder. It was really embedded in there. I thought I'd have to use a pair of pliers.
But you're all right. In no time, you'll benau socha. Good as new."
It was Rasheed who salvaged a handful of Hakim's books.