APRIL 1978n April 17, 1978, the year Mariam turned nineteen, a man named Mir Akbar Khyber
was found murdered Two days later, there was a large demonstration in Kabul.
Everyone in the neighborhood was in the streets talking about it. Through the window,
Mariam saw neighbors milling about, chatting excitedly, transistor radios pressed to their
ears. She saw Fariba leaning against the wall of her house, talking with a woman who was
new to Deh Mazang. Fariba was smiling, and her palms were pressed against the swell of
her pregnant belly. The other woman, whose name escaped Mariam, looked older than
Fariba, and her hair had an odd purple tint to it. She was holding a little boy's hand. Mariam
knew the boy's name was Tariq, because she had heard this woman on the street call after
him by that name.
Mariam and Rasheed didn't join the neighbors. They listened in on the radio as some ten
thousand people poured into the streets and marched up and down Kabul's government
district. Rasheed said that Mir Akbar Khyber had been a prominent communist, and that his
supporters were blaming the murder on President Daoud Khan's government. He didn't
look at her when he said this. These days, he never did anymore, and Mariam wasn't ever
sure if she was being spoken to.
"What's a communist?" she asked.
Rasheed snorted, and raised both eyebrows. "You don't know what a communist is? Such
a simple thing.
Everyone knows. It's common knowledge. You don't...Bah. I don't know why I'm
surprised." Then he crossed his ankles on the table and mumbled that it was someone who
believed in Karl Marxist.
"Who's Karl Marxist?"
Rasheed sighed.
On the radio, a woman's voice was saying that Taraki, the leader of the Khalq branch of
the PDPA, the Afghan communist party, was in the streets giving rousing speeches to
demonstrators.
"What I meant was, what do they want?" Mariam asked. "These communists, what is it
that they believe?"
Rasheed chortled and shook his head, but Mariam thought she saw uncertainty in the way
he crossed his arms, the way his eyes shifted. "You know nothing, do you? You're like a
child. Your brain is empty. There is no information in it."