A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [16]
He passed her his Koran. As he’d taught her, she kissed it three times—touching it to her brow between each kiss—and gave it back to him.
“How are you, my girl?”
“I keep,” Mariam began. She had to stop, feeling like a rock had lodged itself in her throat. “I keep thinking of what she said to me before I left. She—”
“Nay, nay, nay.” Mullah Faizullah put his hand on her knee. “Your mother, may Allah forgive her, was a troubled and unhappy woman, Mariam jo. She did a terrible thing to herself. To herself, to you, and also to Allah. He will forgive her, for He is all-forgiving, but Allah is saddened by what she did. He does not approve of the taking of life, be it another’s or one’s own, for He says that life is sacred. You see—” He pulled his chair closer, took Mariam’s hand in both of his own. “You see, I knew your mother before you were born, when she was a little girl, and I tell you that she was unhappy then. The seed for what she did was planted long ago, I’m afraid. What I mean to say is that this was not your fault. It wasn’t your fault, my girl.”
“I shouldn’t have left her. I should have—”
“You stop that. These thoughts are no good, Mariam jo.
You hear me, child? No good. They will destroy you. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. No.”
Mariam nodded, but as desperately as she wanted to she could not bring herself to believe him.
ONE AFTERNOON, a week later, there was a knock on the door, and a tall woman walked in. She was fair-skinned, had reddish hair and long fingers.
“I’m Afsoon,” she said. “Niloufar’s mother. Why don’t you wash up, Mariam, and come downstairs?”
Mariam said she would rather stay in her room.
“No, na fahmidi, you don’t understand. You need to come down. We have to talk to you. It’s important.”
7.
They sat across from her, Jalil and his wives, at a long, dark brown table. Between them, in the center of the table, was a crystal vase of fresh marigolds and a sweating pitcher of water. The red-haired woman who had introduced herself as Niloufar’s mother, Afsoon, was sitting on Jalil’s right. The other two, Khadija and Nargis, were on his left. The wives each had on a flimsy black scarf, which they wore not on their heads but tied loosely around the neck like an afterthought. Mariam, who could not imagine that they would wear black for Nana, pictured one of them suggesting it, or maybe Jalil, just before she’d been summoned.
Afsoon poured water from the pitcher and put the glass before Mariam on a checkered cloth coaster. “Only spring and it’s warm already,” she said. She made a fanning motion with her hand.
“Have you been comfortable?” Nargis, who had a small chin and curly black hair, asked. “We hope you’ve been comfortable. This . . . ordeal . . . must be very hard for you. So difficult.”
The other two nodded. Mariam took in their plucked eyebrows, the thin, tolerant smiles they were giving her. There was an unpleasant hum in Mariam’s head. Her throat burned. She drank some of the water.
Through the wide window behind Jalil, Mariam could see a row of flowering apple trees. On the wall beside the window stood a dark wooden cabinet. In it was a clock, and a framed photograph of Jalil and three young boys holding a fish. The sun caught the sparkle in the fish’s scales. Jalil and the boys were grinning.
“Well,” Afsoon began. “I—that is, we—have brought you here because we have some very good news to give you.”
Mariam looked up.
She caught a quick exchange of glances between the women over Jalil, who slouched in his chair looking unseeingly at the pitcher on the table. It was Khadija, the oldest-looking of the three, who turned her gaze to Mariam, and Mariam had the impression that this duty too had been discussed, agreed upon, before they had called for her.
“You have a suitor,” Khadija said.
Mariam’s stomach fell. “A what?” she said through suddenly numb lips.
“A khastegar. A suitor. His name is Rasheed,” Khadija went on. “He is a friend of a business acquaintance of your father’s. He’s a Pashtun, from Kandahar originally, but he lives in Kabul, in the Deh-Mazang