A Thousand Splendid Suns

(Nancy Kaufman) #1

Rasheed's magazine or what Jalil had done? And what entitled her anyway, a villager,
aharami, to pass judgment?


Mariam tried the bottom drawer of the dresser.


It was there that she found a picture of the boy, Yunus. It was black and white. He looked
four, maybe five. He was wearing a striped shirt and a bow tie. He was a handsome little
boy, with a slender nose, brown hair, and dark, slightly sunken eyes. He looked distracted,
as though something had caught his eye just as the camera had flashed.


Beneath that, Mariam found another photo, also black and white, this one slightly more
grainy. It was of a seated woman and, behind her, a thinner, younger Rasheed, with black
hair. The woman was beautiful. Not as beautiful as the women in the magazine, perhaps,
but beautiful. Certainly more beautiful than her, Mariam. She had a delicate chin and long,
black hair parted in the center. High cheekbones and a gentle forehead. Mariam pictured
her own face, her thin lips and long chin, and felt a flicker of jealousy.
She looked at this photo for a long time. There was something vaguely unsettling about
the way Rasheed seemed to loom over the woman. His hands on her shoulders. His
savoring, tight lipped smile and her unsmiling, sullen face. The way her body tilted forward
subtly, as though she were trying to wriggle free of his hands.


Mariam put everything back where she'd found it.


Later, as she was doing laundry, she regretted that she had sneaked around in his room.
For what? What thing of substance had she learned about him? That he owned a gun, that
he was a man with the needs of a man? And she shouldn't have stared at the photo of him
and his wife for as long as she had. Her eyes had read meaning into what was random body
posture captured in a single moment of time.
What Mariam felt now, as the loaded clotheslines bounced heavily before her, was sorrow
for Rasheed. He too had had a hard life, a life marked by loss and sad turns of fate. Her
thoughts returned to his boy Yunus, who had once built snowmen in this yard, whose feet
had pounded these same stairs. The lake had snatched him from Rasheed, swallowed him
up, just as a whale had swallowed the boy's namesake prophet in the Koran. 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.

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