A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [103]
Up close, his sneering face seemed impossibly large. Laila noticed how much puffier it was getting with age, how many more broken vessels charted tiny paths on his nose. Rasheed didn’t say anything. And, really, what could be said, what needed saying, when you’d shoved the barrel of your gun into your wife’s mouth?
IT WAS THE RAIDS, the reason they were in the yard digging. Sometimes monthly raids, sometimes weekly. Of late, almost daily. Mostly, the Taliban confiscated stuff, gave a kick to someone’s rear, whacked the back of a head or two. But sometimes there were public beatings, lashings of soles and palms.
“Gently,” Mariam said now, her knees over the edge. They lowered the TV into the hole by each clutching one end of the plastic sheet in which it was wrapped.
“That should do it,” Mariam said.
They patted the dirt when they were done, filling the hole up again. They tossed some of it around so it wouldn’t look conspicuous.
“There,” Mariam said, wiping her hands on her dress.
When it was safer, they’d agreed, when the Taliban cut down on their raids, in a month or two or six, or maybe longer, they would dig the TV up.
IN LAILA’S DREAM, she and Mariam are out behind the toolshed digging again. But, this time, it’s Aziza they’re lowering into the ground. Aziza’s breath fogs the sheet of plastic in which they have wrapped her. Laila sees her panicked eyes, the whiteness of her palms as they slap and push against the sheet. Aziza pleads. Laila can’t hear her screams. Only for a while, she calls down, it’s only for a while. It’s the raids, don’t you know, my love? When the raids are over, Mammy and Khala Mariam will dig you out. I promise, my love. Then we can play. We can play all you want. She fills the shovel. Laila woke up, out of breath, with a taste of soil in her mouth, when the first granular lumps of dirt hit the plastic.
41.
Mariam
In the summer of 2000, the drought reached its third and worst year.
In Helmand, Zabol, Kandahar, villages turned into herds of nomadic communities, always moving, searching for water and green pastures for their livestock. When they found neither, when their goats and sheep and cows died off, they came to Kabul. They took to the Kareh-Ariana hillside, living in makeshift slums, packed in huts, fifteen or twenty at a time.
That was also the summer of Titanic, the summer that Mariam and Aziza were a tangle of limbs, rolling and giggling, Aziza insisting she get to be Jack.
“Quiet, Aziza jo.”
“Jack! Say my name, Khala Mariam. Say it. Jack!”
“Your father will be angry if you wake him.”
“Jack! And you’re Rose.”
It would end with Mariam on her back, surrendering, agreeing again to be Rose. “Fine, you be Jack,” she relented. “You die young, and I get to live to a ripe old age.”
“Yes, but I die a hero,” said Aziza, “while you, Rose, you spend your entire, miserable life longing for me.” Then, straddling Mariam’s chest, she’d announce, “Now we must kiss!” Mariam whipped her head side to side, and Aziza, delighted with her own scandalous behavior, cackled through puckered lips.
Sometimes Zalmai would saunter in and watch this game. What did he get to be, he asked.
“You can be the iceberg,” said Aziza.
That summer, Titanic fever gripped Kabul. People smuggled pirated copies of the film from Pakistan—sometimes in their underwear. After curfew, everyone locked their doors, turned out the lights, turned down the volume, and reaped tears for Jack and Rose and the passengers of the doomed ship. If there was electrical power, Mariam, Laila, and the children watched it too. A dozen times or more, they unearthed the TV from behind the toolshed, late at night, with the lights out and quilts pinned over the windows.
At the Kabul River, vendors moved into the parched riverbed. Soon, from the river’s sunbaked hollows, it was possible to buy Titanic carpets, and Titanic cloth, from bolts arranged in wheelbarrows. There was Titanic deodorant, Titanic toothpaste, Titanic perfume, Titanic pakora, even Titanic burqas. A particularly persistent beggar began calling