Rasheed lifted a long, narrow board. As he began to saw it in half, he said the stairs
worried him. "Something will have to be done about them later, when he's old enough to
climb." The stove worried him too, he said. The knives and forks would have to be stowed
somewhere out of reach. "You can't be too careful Boys are reckless creatures."
Mariam pulled the shawl around her against the chill.
The next morning, Rasheed said he wanted to invite his friends for dinner to celebrate. All
morning, Mariam cleaned lentils and moistened rice. She sliced eggplants for borani, and
cooked leeks and ground beef for aushak. She swept the floor, beat the curtains, aired the
house, despite the snow that had started up again. She arranged mattresses and cushions
along the walls of the living room, placed bowls of candy and roasted almonds on the table.
She was in her room by early evening before the first of the men arrived. She lay in bed as
the hoots and laughter and bantering voices downstairs began to mushroom. She couldn't
keep her hands from drifting to her belly. She thought of what was growing there, and
happiness rushed in like a gust of wind blowing a door wide open. Her eyes watered.
Mariam thought of her six hundred and fifty kilometer bus trip with Rasheed, from Herat
in the west, near the border with Iran, to Kabul in the east. They had passed small towns
and big towns, and knots of little villages that kept springing up one after another. They had
gone over mountains and across raw burned deserts, from one province to the next. And
here she was now, over those boulders and parched hills, with a home of her own, a
husband of her own, heading toward one final, cherished province: Motherhood. How
delectable it was to think of
this baby, her baby, their baby. How glorious it was to know that her love for it already
dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being, to know that there was no need any
longer for pebble games.
Downstairs, someone was tuning a harmonium. Then the clanging of a hammer tuning a
tabla. Someone cleared his throat. And then there was whistling and clapping and yipping
and singing.
Mariam stroked the softness of her belly. No bigger than a fingernail, the doctor had said.
I'm going to be a mother, she thought.
"I'm going to be a mother," she said. Then she was laughing to herself, and saying it over
and over, relishing the words.
When Mariam thought of this baby, her heart swelled inside of her. It swelled and swelled
until all the loss, all the grief, all the loneliness and self abasement of her life washed away.
This was why God had brought her here, all the way across the country. She knew this now.
She remembered a verse from the Koran that Mullah Faizullah had taught her: And Allah is