A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [20]
“Don’t leave like this,” he said in a thin voice.
“You didn’t even have the decency to give me the time to say good-bye to Mullah Faizullah.”
She turned and walked around to the side of the bus. She could hear him following her. When she reached the hydraulic doors, she heard him behind her.
“Mariam jo.”
She climbed the stairs, and though she could spot Jalil out of the corner of her eye walking parallel to her she did not look out the window. She made her way down the aisle to the back, where Rasheed sat with her suitcase between his feet. She did not turn to look when Jalil’s palms pressed on the glass, when his knuckles rapped and rapped on it. When the bus jerked forward, she did not turn to see him trotting alongside it. And when the bus pulled away, she did not look back to see him receding, to see him disappear in the cloud of exhaust and dust.
Rasheed, who took up the window and middle seat, put his thick hand on hers.
“There now, girl. There. There,” he said. He was squinting out the window as he said this, as though something more interesting had caught his eye.
9.
It was early evening the following day by the time they arrived at Rasheed’s house.
I“We’re in Deh-Mazang,” he said. They were outside, on the sidewalk. He had her suitcase in one hand and was unlocking the wooden front gate with the other. “In the south and west part of the city. The zoo is nearby, and the university too.”
Mariam nodded. Already she had learned that, though she could understand him, she had to pay close attention when he spoke. She was unaccustomed to the Kabuli dialect of his Farsi, and to the underlying layer of Pashto accent, the language of his native Kandahar. He, on the other hand, seemed to have no trouble understanding her Herati Farsi.
Mariam quickly surveyed the narrow, unpaved road along which Rasheed’s house was situated. The houses on this road were crowded together and shared common walls, with small, walled yards in front buffering them from the street. Most of the homes had flat roofs and were made of burned brick, some of mud the same dusty color as the mountains that ringed the city. Gutters separated the sidewalk from the road on both sides and flowed with muddy water. Mariam saw small mounds of flyblown garbage littering the street here and there. Rasheed’s house had two stories. Mariam could see that it had once been blue.
When Rasheed opened the front gate, Mariam found herself in a small, unkempt yard where yellow grass struggled up in thin patches. Mariam saw an outhouse on the right, in a side yard, and, on the left, a well with a hand pump, a row of dying saplings. Near the well was a tool-shed, and a bicycle leaning against the wall.
“Your father told me you like to fish,” Rasheed said as they were crossing the yard to the house. There was no backyard, Mariam saw. “There are valleys north of here. Rivers with lots of fish. Maybe I’ll take you someday.”
He unlocked the front door and let her into the house.
Rasheed’s house was much smaller than Jalil’s, but, compared to Mariam and Nana’s kolba, it was a mansion.
There was a hallway, a living room downstairs, and a kitchen in which he showed her pots and pans and a pressure cooker and a kerosene ishtop. The living room had a pistachio green leather couch. It had a rip down its side that had been clumsily sewn together. The walls were bare. There was a table, two cane-seat chairs, two folding chairs, and, in the corner, a black, cast-iron stove.
Mariam stood in the middle of the living room, looking around. At the kolba, she could touch the ceiling with her fingertips. She could lie in her cot and tell the time of day by the angle of sunlight pouring through the window. She knew how far her door would open before its hinges creaked. She knew every splinter and crack in each of the thirty wooden floorboards. Now all those familiar things were gone. Nana was dead, and she was here, in a strange city, separated from the life she’d known by valleys and chains of snow-capped mountains and entire deserts. She was in a stranger’s house, with