She took in the heavy, green drapes, the pairs of polished shoes lined up neatly along the
wall, the closet door, where the gray paint had chipped and showed the wood beneath. She
spotted a pack of cigarettes atop the dresser beside his bed. She put one between her lips
and stood before the small oval mirror on the wall. She puffed air into the mirror and made
ash tapping motions. She put it back. She could never manage the seamless grace with
which Kabuli women smoked. On her, it looked coarse, ridiculous.
Guiltily, she slid open the top drawer of his dresser.
She saw the gun first. It was black, with a wooden grip and a short muzzle. Mariam made
sure to memorize which way it was facing before she picked it up. She turned it over in her
hands. It was much heavier than it looked. The grip felt smooth in her hand, and the muzzle
was cold. It was disquieting to her that Rasheed owned something whose sole purpose was
to kill another person. But surely he kept it for their safety. Her safety.
Beneath the gun were several magazines with curling corners. Mariam opened one.
Something inside her dropped. Her mouth gaped of its own will.
On every page were women, beautiful women, who wore no shirts, no trousers, no socks
or underpants. They wore nothing at all. They lay in beds amid tumbled sheets and gazed
back at Mariam with half lidded eyes. In most of the pictures, their legs were apart, and
Mariam had a full view of the dark place between. In some, the women were prostrated as
if God forbid this thought in sujda for prayer. They looked back over their shoulders with a
look of bored contempt.
Mariam quickly put the magazine back where she'd found it. She felt drugged. Who were
these women? How could they allow themselves to be photographed this way? Her
stomach revolted with distaste. Was this what he did then, those nights that he did not visit
her room? Had she been a disappointment to him in this particular regard? And what about
all his talk of honor and propriety, his disapproval of the female customers, who, after all,
were only showing him their feet to get fitted for shoes? A woman's face, he'd said, is her
husband's business only. Surely the women on these pages had husbands, some of them
must. At the least, they had brothers. If so, why did Rasheed insist that she cover when he
thought nothing of looking at the private areas of other men's wives and sisters?
Mariam sat on his bed, embarrassed and confused She cupped her face with her hands and
closed her eyes. She breathed and breathed until she felt calmer.
Slowly, an explanation presented itself He was a man, after all, living alone for years
before she had moved in. His needs differed from hers. For her, all these months later, their
coupling was still an exercise in tolerating pain. His appetite, on the other hand, was fierce,
sometimes bordering on the violent. The way he pinned her down, his hard squeezes at her
breasts, how furiously his hips worked. He was a man. All those years without a woman.
Could she fault him for being the way God had created him?
Mariam knew that she could never talk to him about this. It was unmentionable. But was it
unforgivable? She only had to think of the other man in her life. Jalil, a husband of three
and father of nine at the time, having relations with Nana out of wedlock. Which was worse,