Jtvamadan came in the fall that year, 1974. For the first timein her life, Mariam saw how the sighting of the new crescentmoon could transform an entire city, alter its rhythm andmood. She noticed a drowsy hush overtaking Kabul Trafficbecame languid, scant, even quiet. Shops emptied. Restaurantsturned off their lights, closed their doors. Mariam saw nosmokers on the streets, no cups of tea steaming from windowledges. And atifiar, when the sun dipped in the west and thecannon fired from the Shir Darwaza mountain, the city brokeits fast, and so did Mariam, with bread and a date, tasting forthe first time in her fifteen years the sweetness of sharing in acommunal experience.
Except for a handful of days, Rasheed didn't observe the fast.
The few times he did, he came home in a sour mood. Hungermade him curt, irritable, impatient. One night, Mariam was afew minutes late with dinner, and he started eating bread withradishes. Even after Mariam put the rice and the lamb andokraqurma in front of him, he wouldn't touch it. He saidnothing, and went on chewing the bread, his temples working,the vein on his forehead, full and angry. He went on chewingand staring ahead, and when Mariam spoke to him he lookedat her without seeing her face and put another piece of breadinto his mouth.
Mariam was relieved when Ramadan ended.
Back at thekolba, on the first of three days of Eid-ul-Fitrcelebration that followed Ramadan, Jalil would visit Mariam andNana. Dressed in suit and tie, he would come bearing Eidpresents. One year, he gave Mariam a wool scarf. The three ofthem would sit for tea and then Jalil would excuse himself "Offto celebrate Eid with his real family," Nana would say as hecrossed the stream and waved-Mullah Faizullah would cometoo. He would bring Mariam chocolate candy wrapped in foil, abasketful of dyed boiled eggs, cookies. After he was gone,Mariam would climb one of the willows with her treats. Perchedon a high branch, she would eat Mullah Faizullah's chocolatesand drop the foil wrappers until they lay scattered about thetrunk of the tree like silver blossoms. When the chocolate wasgone, she would start in on the cookies, and, with a pencil, shewould draw faces on the eggs he had brought her now. Butthere was little pleasure in this for her. Mariam dreaded Eid,this time of hospitality and ceremony, when families dressed intheir best and visited each other. She would imagine the air inHerat crackling with merriness, and high-spirited, bright-eyedpeople showering each other with endearments and goodwill. Aforlornness would descend on her like a shroud then andwould lift only when Eid had passed.
This year, for the first time, Mariam saw with her eyes theEid of her childhood imaginings.
Rasheed and she took to the streets. Mariam had neverwalked amid such liveliness. Undaunted by the chilly weather,families had flooded the city on their frenetic rounds to visitrelatives. On their own street, Mariam saw Fariba and her sonNoor, who was dressed in a suit. Fariba, wearing a white scarf,walked beside a small-boned, shy-looking man with eyeglasses.
Her older son was there too-Mariam somehow rememberedFariba saying his name, Ahmad, at the tandoor that first time.
He had deep-set, brooding eyes, and his face was morethoughtful, more solemn, than his younger brother's, a face assuggestive of early maturity as his brother's was of lingeringboyishness. Around Ahmad's neck was a glittering allahpendant.
Fariba must have recognized her, walking in burqa besideRasheed. She waved, and called out,"Eidmubarak!"From inside the burqa, Mariam gave her a ghost of a nod.
"So you know that woman, the teacher's wife?" Rasheed saidMariam said she didn't.
"Best you stay away. She's a nosy gossiper, that one. And thehusband fancies himself some kind of educated intellectual Buthe's a mouse. Look at him. Doesn't he look like a mouse?"They went to Shar-e-Nau, where kids romped about in newshirts and beaded, brightly colored vests and compared Eidgifts. Women brandished platters of sweets. Mariam saw festivelanterns hanging from shopwindows, heard music blaring fromloudspeakers. Strangers called out"Eidmubarak" to her as theypassed.
That night they went toChaman, and, standing behindRasheed, Mariam watched fireworks light up the sky, in flashesof green, pink, and yellow. She missed sitting with MullahFaizullah outside thekolba, watching the fireworks explode overHerat in the distance, the sudden bursts of color reflected inher tutor's soft, cataract-riddled eyes. But, mostly, she missedNana. Mariam wished her mother were alive to see this. Toseeher, amid all of it. To see at last that contentment andbeauty were not unattainable things. Even for the likes of them.
* * *They had Eid visitors at the house. They were all men, friendsof Rasheed's. When a knock came, Mariam knew to goupstairs to her room and close the door. She stayed there, asthe men sipped tea downstairs with Rasheed, smoked, chatted.
Rasheed had told Mariam that she was not to come downuntil the visitors had leftMariam didn't mind. In truth, she was even flattered. Rasheedsaw sanctity in what they had together. Her honor, hernamoos,was something worth guarding to him. She felt prized by hisprotectiveness. Treasured and significant.
On the third and last day of Eid, Rasheed went to visit somefriends. Mariam, who'd had a queasy stomach all night, boiledsome water and made herself a cup of green tea sprinkledwith crushed cardamom. In the living room, she took in theaftermath of the previous night's Eid visits: the overturnedcups, the half-chewed pumpkin seeds stashed betweenmattresses, the plates crusted with the outline of last night'smeal. Mariam set about cleaning up the mess, marveling athow energetically lazy men could be.
She didn't mean to go into Rasheed's room. But the cleaningtook her from the living room to the stairs, and then to thehallway upstairs and to his door, and, the next thing she knew,she was in his room for the first time, sitting on his bed,feeling like a trespasser.
She took in the heavy, green drapes, the pairs of polishedshoes lined up neatly along the wall, the closet door, where thegray paint had chipped and showed the wood beneath. Shespotted a pack of cigarettes atop the dresser beside his bed.
She put one between her lips and stood before the small ovalmirror on the wall. She puffed air into the mirror and madeash-tapping motions. She put it back. She could never managethe 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 anda short muzzle. Mariam made sure to memorize which way itwas facing before she picked it up. She turned it over in herhands. It was much heavier than it looked. The grip feltsmooth in her hand, and the muzzle was cold. It wasdisquieting to her that Rasheed owned something whose solepurpose was to kill another person. But surely he kept it fortheir safety. Her safety.
Beneath the gun were several magazines with curling corners.
Mariam opened one. Something inside her dropped. Her mouthgaped of its own will.
On every page were women, beautiful women, who wore noshirts, no trousers, no socks or underpants. They wore nothingat all. They lay in beds amid tumbled sheets and gazed backat Mariam with half-lidded eyes. In most of the pictures, theirlegs were apart, and Mariam had a full view of the dark placebetween. In some, the women were prostrated as if-God forbidthis thought-insujda for prayer. They looked back over theirshoulders 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 theyallow themselves to be photographed this way? Her stomachrevolted with distaste. Was this what he did then, those nightsthat he did not visit her room? Had she been adisappointment to him in this particular regard? And whatabout all his talk of honor and propriety, his disapproval of thefemale customers, who, after all, were only showing him theirfeet to get fitted for shoes?A woman's face, he'd said,is herhusband's business only. Surely the women on these pages hadhusbands, some of them must. At the least, they had brothers.
If so, why did Rasheed insist thatshe cover when he thoughtnothing of looking at the private areas of other men's wivesand sisters?
Mariam sat on his bed, embarrassed and confused Shecupped her face with her hands and closed her eyes. Shebreathed 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 needsdiffered from hers. For her, all these months later, theircoupling was still an exercise in tolerating pain. His appetite, onthe other hand, was fierce, sometimes bordering on the violent.
The way he pinned her down, his hard squeezes at herbreasts, how furiously his hips worked. He was a man. Allthose years without a woman. Could she fault him for beingthe way God had created him?
Mariam knew that she could never talk to him about this. Itwas unmentionable. But was it unforgivable? She only had tothink of the other man in her life. Jalil, a husband of threeand father of nine at the time, having relations with Nana outof wedlock. Which was worse, Rasheed's magazine or what Jalilhad 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. Itwas black-and-white. He looked four, maybe five. He waswearing a striped shirt and a bow tie. He was a handsomelittle boy, with a slender nose, brown hair, and dark, slightlysunken eyes. He looked distracted, as though something hadcaught his eye just as the camera had flashed.
Beneath that, Mariam found another photo, alsoblack-and-white, this one slightly more grainy. It was of aseated woman and, behind her, a thinner, younger Rasheed,with black hair. The woman was beautiful. Not as beautiful asthe women in the magazine, perhaps, but beautiful. Certainlymore beautiful than her, Mariam. She had a delicate chin andlong, black hair parted in the center. High cheekbones and agentle forehead. Mariam pictured her own face, her thin lipsand long chin, and felt a flicker of jealousy.
She looked at this photo for a long time. There wassomething vaguely unsettling about the way Rasheed seemed toloom over the woman. His hands on her shoulders. Hissavoring, tight-lipped smile and her unsmiling, sullen face. Theway her body tilted forward subtly, as though she were tryingto wriggle free of his hands.
Mariam put everything back where she'd found it.
Later, as she was doing laundry, she regretted that she hadsneaked around in his room. For what? What thing ofsubstance had she learned about him? That he owned a gun,that he was a man with the needs of a man? And sheshouldn't have stared at the photo of him and his wife for aslong as she had. Her eyes had read meaning into what wasrandom body posture captured in a single moment of time.
What Mariam felt now, as the loaded clotheslines bouncedheavily before her, was sorrow for Rasheed. He too had had ahard life, a life marked by loss and sad turns of fate. Herthoughts returned to his boy Yunus, who had once builtsnowmen in this yard, whose feet had pounded these samestairs. The lake had snatched him from Rasheed, swallowed himup, just as a whale had swallowed the boy's namesake prophetin the Koran. It pained Mariam-it pained her considerably-topicture Rasheed panic-stricken and helpless, pacing the banks ofthe lake and pleading with it to spit his son back onto dryland. And she felt for the first time a kinship with herhusband. She told herself that they would make goodcompanions after all.
Except for a handful of days, Rasheed didn't observe the fast.
The few times he did, he came home in a sour mood. Hungermade him curt, irritable, impatient. One night, Mariam was afew minutes late with dinner, and he started eating bread withradishes. Even after Mariam put the rice and the lamb andokraqurma in front of him, he wouldn't touch it. He saidnothing, and went on chewing the bread, his temples working,the vein on his forehead, full and angry. He went on chewingand staring ahead, and when Mariam spoke to him he lookedat her without seeing her face and put another piece of breadinto his mouth.
Mariam was relieved when Ramadan ended.
Back at thekolba, on the first of three days of Eid-ul-Fitrcelebration that followed Ramadan, Jalil would visit Mariam andNana. Dressed in suit and tie, he would come bearing Eidpresents. One year, he gave Mariam a wool scarf. The three ofthem would sit for tea and then Jalil would excuse himself "Offto celebrate Eid with his real family," Nana would say as hecrossed the stream and waved-Mullah Faizullah would cometoo. He would bring Mariam chocolate candy wrapped in foil, abasketful of dyed boiled eggs, cookies. After he was gone,Mariam would climb one of the willows with her treats. Perchedon a high branch, she would eat Mullah Faizullah's chocolatesand drop the foil wrappers until they lay scattered about thetrunk of the tree like silver blossoms. When the chocolate wasgone, she would start in on the cookies, and, with a pencil, shewould draw faces on the eggs he had brought her now. Butthere was little pleasure in this for her. Mariam dreaded Eid,this time of hospitality and ceremony, when families dressed intheir best and visited each other. She would imagine the air inHerat crackling with merriness, and high-spirited, bright-eyedpeople showering each other with endearments and goodwill. Aforlornness would descend on her like a shroud then andwould lift only when Eid had passed.
This year, for the first time, Mariam saw with her eyes theEid of her childhood imaginings.
Rasheed and she took to the streets. Mariam had neverwalked amid such liveliness. Undaunted by the chilly weather,families had flooded the city on their frenetic rounds to visitrelatives. On their own street, Mariam saw Fariba and her sonNoor, who was dressed in a suit. Fariba, wearing a white scarf,walked beside a small-boned, shy-looking man with eyeglasses.
Her older son was there too-Mariam somehow rememberedFariba saying his name, Ahmad, at the tandoor that first time.
He had deep-set, brooding eyes, and his face was morethoughtful, more solemn, than his younger brother's, a face assuggestive of early maturity as his brother's was of lingeringboyishness. Around Ahmad's neck was a glittering allahpendant.
Fariba must have recognized her, walking in burqa besideRasheed. She waved, and called out,"Eidmubarak!"From inside the burqa, Mariam gave her a ghost of a nod.
"So you know that woman, the teacher's wife?" Rasheed saidMariam said she didn't.
"Best you stay away. She's a nosy gossiper, that one. And thehusband fancies himself some kind of educated intellectual Buthe's a mouse. Look at him. Doesn't he look like a mouse?"They went to Shar-e-Nau, where kids romped about in newshirts and beaded, brightly colored vests and compared Eidgifts. Women brandished platters of sweets. Mariam saw festivelanterns hanging from shopwindows, heard music blaring fromloudspeakers. Strangers called out"Eidmubarak" to her as theypassed.
That night they went toChaman, and, standing behindRasheed, Mariam watched fireworks light up the sky, in flashesof green, pink, and yellow. She missed sitting with MullahFaizullah outside thekolba, watching the fireworks explode overHerat in the distance, the sudden bursts of color reflected inher tutor's soft, cataract-riddled eyes. But, mostly, she missedNana. Mariam wished her mother were alive to see this. Toseeher, amid all of it. To see at last that contentment andbeauty were not unattainable things. Even for the likes of them.
* * *They had Eid visitors at the house. They were all men, friendsof Rasheed's. When a knock came, Mariam knew to goupstairs to her room and close the door. She stayed there, asthe men sipped tea downstairs with Rasheed, smoked, chatted.
Rasheed had told Mariam that she was not to come downuntil the visitors had leftMariam didn't mind. In truth, she was even flattered. Rasheedsaw sanctity in what they had together. Her honor, hernamoos,was something worth guarding to him. She felt prized by hisprotectiveness. Treasured and significant.
On the third and last day of Eid, Rasheed went to visit somefriends. Mariam, who'd had a queasy stomach all night, boiledsome water and made herself a cup of green tea sprinkledwith crushed cardamom. In the living room, she took in theaftermath of the previous night's Eid visits: the overturnedcups, the half-chewed pumpkin seeds stashed betweenmattresses, the plates crusted with the outline of last night'smeal. Mariam set about cleaning up the mess, marveling athow energetically lazy men could be.
She didn't mean to go into Rasheed's room. But the cleaningtook her from the living room to the stairs, and then to thehallway upstairs and to his door, and, the next thing she knew,she was in his room for the first time, sitting on his bed,feeling like a trespasser.
She took in the heavy, green drapes, the pairs of polishedshoes lined up neatly along the wall, the closet door, where thegray paint had chipped and showed the wood beneath. Shespotted a pack of cigarettes atop the dresser beside his bed.
She put one between her lips and stood before the small ovalmirror on the wall. She puffed air into the mirror and madeash-tapping motions. She put it back. She could never managethe 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 anda short muzzle. Mariam made sure to memorize which way itwas facing before she picked it up. She turned it over in herhands. It was much heavier than it looked. The grip feltsmooth in her hand, and the muzzle was cold. It wasdisquieting to her that Rasheed owned something whose solepurpose was to kill another person. But surely he kept it fortheir safety. Her safety.
Beneath the gun were several magazines with curling corners.
Mariam opened one. Something inside her dropped. Her mouthgaped of its own will.
On every page were women, beautiful women, who wore noshirts, no trousers, no socks or underpants. They wore nothingat all. They lay in beds amid tumbled sheets and gazed backat Mariam with half-lidded eyes. In most of the pictures, theirlegs were apart, and Mariam had a full view of the dark placebetween. In some, the women were prostrated as if-God forbidthis thought-insujda for prayer. They looked back over theirshoulders 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 theyallow themselves to be photographed this way? Her stomachrevolted with distaste. Was this what he did then, those nightsthat he did not visit her room? Had she been adisappointment to him in this particular regard? And whatabout all his talk of honor and propriety, his disapproval of thefemale customers, who, after all, were only showing him theirfeet to get fitted for shoes?A woman's face, he'd said,is herhusband's business only. Surely the women on these pages hadhusbands, some of them must. At the least, they had brothers.
If so, why did Rasheed insist thatshe cover when he thoughtnothing of looking at the private areas of other men's wivesand sisters?
Mariam sat on his bed, embarrassed and confused Shecupped her face with her hands and closed her eyes. Shebreathed 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 needsdiffered from hers. For her, all these months later, theircoupling was still an exercise in tolerating pain. His appetite, onthe other hand, was fierce, sometimes bordering on the violent.
The way he pinned her down, his hard squeezes at herbreasts, how furiously his hips worked. He was a man. Allthose years without a woman. Could she fault him for beingthe way God had created him?
Mariam knew that she could never talk to him about this. Itwas unmentionable. But was it unforgivable? She only had tothink of the other man in her life. Jalil, a husband of threeand father of nine at the time, having relations with Nana outof wedlock. Which was worse, Rasheed's magazine or what Jalilhad 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. Itwas black-and-white. He looked four, maybe five. He waswearing a striped shirt and a bow tie. He was a handsomelittle boy, with a slender nose, brown hair, and dark, slightlysunken eyes. He looked distracted, as though something hadcaught his eye just as the camera had flashed.
Beneath that, Mariam found another photo, alsoblack-and-white, this one slightly more grainy. It was of aseated woman and, behind her, a thinner, younger Rasheed,with black hair. The woman was beautiful. Not as beautiful asthe women in the magazine, perhaps, but beautiful. Certainlymore beautiful than her, Mariam. She had a delicate chin andlong, black hair parted in the center. High cheekbones and agentle forehead. Mariam pictured her own face, her thin lipsand long chin, and felt a flicker of jealousy.
She looked at this photo for a long time. There wassomething vaguely unsettling about the way Rasheed seemed toloom over the woman. His hands on her shoulders. Hissavoring, tight-lipped smile and her unsmiling, sullen face. Theway her body tilted forward subtly, as though she were tryingto wriggle free of his hands.
Mariam put everything back where she'd found it.
Later, as she was doing laundry, she regretted that she hadsneaked around in his room. For what? What thing ofsubstance had she learned about him? That he owned a gun,that he was a man with the needs of a man? And sheshouldn't have stared at the photo of him and his wife for aslong as she had. Her eyes had read meaning into what wasrandom body posture captured in a single moment of time.
What Mariam felt now, as the loaded clotheslines bouncedheavily before her, was sorrow for Rasheed. He too had had ahard life, a life marked by loss and sad turns of fate. Herthoughts returned to his boy Yunus, who had once builtsnowmen in this yard, whose feet had pounded these samestairs. The lake had snatched him from Rasheed, swallowed himup, just as a whale had swallowed the boy's namesake prophetin the Koran. It pained Mariam-it pained her considerably-topicture Rasheed panic-stricken and helpless, pacing the banks ofthe lake and pleading with it to spit his son back onto dryland. And she felt for the first time a kinship with herhusband. She told herself that they would make goodcompanions after all.