A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [19]
He asked the question two more times. When Mariam didn’t answer, he asked it once more, this time more forcefully. Mariam could feel Jalil beside her shifting on his seat, could sense feet crossing and uncrossing beneath the table. There was more throat clearing. A small, white hand reached out and flicked a bit of dust off the table.
“Mariam,” Jalil whispered.
“Yes,” she said shakily.
A mirror was passed beneath the veil. In it, Mariam saw her own face first, the archless, unshapely eyebrows, the flat hair, the eyes, mirthless green and set so closely together that one might mistake her for being cross-eyed. Her skin was coarse and had a dull, spotty appearance. She thought her brow too wide, the chin too narrow, the lips too thin. The overall impression was of a long face, a triangular face, a bit houndlike. And yet Mariam saw that, oddly enough, the whole of these unmemorable parts made for a face that was not pretty but, somehow, not unpleasant to look at either.
In the mirror, Mariam had her first glimpse of Rasheed: the big, square, ruddy face; the hooked nose; the flushed cheeks that gave the impression of sly cheerfulness; the watery, bloodshot eyes; the crowded teeth, the front two pushed together like a gabled roof; the impossibly low hairline, barely two finger widths above the bushy eyebrows; the wall of thick, coarse, salt-and-pepper hair.
Their gazes met briefly in the glass and slid away.
This is the face of my husband, Mariam thought.
They exchanged the thin gold bands that Rasheed fished from his coat pocket. His nails were yellow-brown, like the inside of a rotting apple, and some of the tips were curling, lifting. Mariam’s hands shook when she tried to slip the band onto his finger, and Rasheed had to help her. Her own band was a little tight, but Rasheed had no trouble forcing it over her knuckles.
“There,” he said.
“It’s a pretty ring,” one of the wives said. “It’s lovely, Mariam.”
“All that remains now is the signing of the contract,” the mullah said.
Mariam signed her name—the meem, the reh, the ya, and the meem again—conscious of all the eyes on her hand. The next time Mariam signed her name to a document, twenty-seven years later, a mullah would again be present.
“You are now husband and wife,” the mullah said. “Tabreek. Congratulations.”
RASHEED WAITED in the multicolored bus. Mariam could not see him from where she stood with Jalil, by the rear bumper, only the smoke of his cigarette curling up from the open window. Around them, hands shook and farewells were said. Korans were kissed, passed under. Barefoot boys bounced between travelers, their faces invisible behind their trays of chewing gum and cigarettes.
Jalil was busy telling her that Kabul was so beautiful, the Moghul emperor Babur had asked that he be buried there. Next, Mariam knew, he’d go on about Kabul’s gardens, and its shops, its trees, and its air, and, before long, she would be on the bus and he would walk alongside it, waving cheerfully, unscathed, spared.
Mariam could not bring herself to allow it.
“I used to worship you,” she said.
Jalil stopped in midsentence. He crossed and uncrossed his arms. A young Hindi couple, the wife cradling a boy, the husband dragging a suitcase, passed between them.
Jalil seemed grateful for the interruption. They excused themselves, and he smiled back politely.
“On Thursdays, I sat for hours waiting for you. I worried myself sick that you wouldn’t show up.”
“It’s a long trip. You should eat something.” He said he could buy her some bread and goat cheese.
“I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.”
Jalil looked down, and, like an overgrown child, dug at something with the toe of his shoe.
“You were ashamed of me.”
“I’ll visit you,” he muttered. “I’ll come to Kabul and see you. We’ll—”
“No. No,” she said. “Don’t come. I won’t see you. Don’t you come. I don’t want to hear from you. Ever. Ever. ”
He gave her a wounded look.
“It ends here for you and me. Say your good-byes.