A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [17]
Afsoon was nodding. “And he does speak Farsi, like us, like you. So you won’t have to learn Pashto.”
Mariam’s chest was tightening. The room was reeling up and down, the ground shifting beneath her feet.
“He’s a shoemaker,” Khadija was saying now. “But not some kind of ordinary street-side moochi, no, no. He has his own shop, and he is one of the most sought-after shoemakers in Kabul. He makes them for diplomats, members of the presidential family—that class of people. So you see, he will have no trouble providing for you.”
Mariam fixed her eyes on Jalil, her heart somersaulting in her chest. “Is this true? What she’s saying, is it true?”
But Jalil wouldn’t look at her. He went on chewing the corner of his lower lip and staring at the pitcher.
“Now he is a little older than you,” Afsoon chimed in. “But he can’t be more than . . . forty. Forty-five at the most. Wouldn’t you say, Nargis?”
“Yes. But I’ve seen nine-year-old girls given to men twenty years older than your suitor, Mariam. We all have. What are you, fifteen? That’s a good, solid marrying age for a girl.” There was enthusiastic nodding at this. It did not escape Mariam that no mention was made of her half sisters Saideh or Naheed, both her own age, both students in the Mehri School in Herat, both with plans to enroll in Kabul University. Fifteen, evidently, was not a good, solid marrying age for them.
“What’s more,” Nargis went on, “he too has had a great loss in his life. His wife, we hear, died during childbirth ten years ago. And then, three years ago, his son drowned in a lake.”
“It’s very sad, yes. He’s been looking for a bride the last few years but hasn’t found anyone suitable.”
“I don’t want to,” Mariam said. She looked at Jalil. “I don’t want this. Don’t make me.” She hated the sniffling, pleading tone of her voice but could not help it.
“Now, be reasonable, Mariam,” one of the wives said.
Mariam was no longer keeping track of who was saying what. She went on staring at Jalil, waiting for him to speak up, to say that none of this was true.
“You can’t spend the rest of your life here.”
“Don’t you want a family of your own?”
“Yes. A home, children of your own?”
“You have to move on.”
“True that it would be preferable that you marry a local, a Tajik, but Rasheed is healthy, and interested in you. He has a home and a job. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it? And Kabul is a beautiful and exciting city. You may not get another opportunity this good.”
Mariam turned her attention to the wives.
“I’ll live with Mullah Faizullah,” she said. “He’ll take me in. I know he will.”
“That’s no good,” Khadija said. “He’s old and so . . .” She searched for the right word, and Mariam knew then that what she really wanted to say was He’s so close. She understood what they meant to do. You may not get another opportunity this good. And neither would they. They had been disgraced by her birth, and this was their chance to erase, once and for all, the last trace of their husband’s scandalous mistake. She was being sent away because she was the walking, breathing embodiment of their shame.
“He’s so old and weak,” Khadija eventually said. “And what will you do when he’s gone? You’d be a burden to his family.”
As you are now to us. Mariam almost saw the unspoken words exit Khadija’s mouth, like foggy breath on a cold day.
Mariam pictured herself in Kabul, a big, strange, crowded city that, Jalil had once told her, was some six hundred and fifty kilometers to the east of Herat. Six hundred and fifty kilometers. The farthest she’d ever been from the kolba was the two-kilometer walk she’d made to Jalil’s house. She pictured herself living there, in Kabul, at the other end of that unimaginable distance, living in a stranger’s house where she would have to concede to his moods and his issued demands. She would have to clean after this man, Rasheed, cook for him, wash his clothes. And there would be other chores as well—Nana had told her what husbands did to their wives. It was the thought of these intimacies in particular,