A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [34]
He turned up the volume again, leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
One sunny morning that week, Mariam picked a spot in the yard and dug a hole.
“In the name of Allah and with Allah, and in the name of the messenger of Allah upon whom be the blessings and peace of Allah,” she said under her breath as her shovel bit into the ground. She placed the suede coat that Rasheed had bought for the baby in the hole and shoveled dirt over it.
“You make the night to pass into the day and You make the day to pass into the night, and You bring forth the living from the dead and You bring forth the dead from the living, and You give sustenance to whom You please without measure.”
She patted the dirt with the back of the shovel. She squatted by the mound, closed her eyes.
Give sustenance, Allah.
Give sustenance to me.
15.
APRIL 1978
On April 17, 1978, the year Mariam turned nineteen, a man named Mir Akbar Khyber was found murdered. Two days later, there was a large demonstration in Kabul. Everyone in the neighborhood was in the streets talking about it. Through the window, Mariam saw neighbors milling about, chatting excitedly, transistor radios pressed to their ears. She saw Fariba leaning against the wall of her house, talking with a woman who was new to Deh-Mazang. Fariba was smiling, and her palms were pressed against the swell of her pregnant belly. The other woman, whose name escaped Mariam, looked older than Fariba, and her hair had an odd purple tint to it. She was holding a little boy’s hand. Mariam knew the boy’s name was Tariq, because she had heard this woman on the street call after him by that name.
Mariam and Rasheed didn’t join the neighbors. They listened in on the radio as some ten thousand people poured into the streets and marched up and down Kabul’s government district. Rasheed said that Mir Akbar Khyber had been a prominent communist, and that his supporters were blaming the murder on President Daoud Khan’s government. He didn’t look at her when he said this. These days, he never did anymore, and Mariam wasn’t ever sure if she was being spoken to.
“What’s a communist?” she asked.
Rasheed snorted, and raised both eyebrows. “You don’t know what a communist is? Such a simple thing. Everyone knows. It’s common knowledge. You don’t . . . Bah. I don’t know why I’m surprised.” Then he crossed his ankles on the table and mumbled that it was someone who believed in Karl Marxist.
“Who’s Karl Marxist?”
Rasheed sighed.
On the radio, a woman’s voice was saying that Taraki, the leader of the Khalq branch of the PDPA, the Afghan communist party, was in the streets giving rousing speeches to demonstrators.
“What I meant was, what do they want?” Mariam asked. “These communists, what is it that they believe?”
Rasheed chortled and shook his head, but Mariam thought she saw uncertainty in the way he crossed his arms, the way his eyes shifted. “You know nothing, do you? You’re like a child. Your brain is empty. There is no information in it.”
“I ask because—”
“Chup ko. Shut up.”
Mariam did.
It wasn’t easy tolerating him talking this way to her, to bear his scorn, his ridicule, his insults, his walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat. But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid. And Mariam was afraid. She lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not.
In the four years since the day at the bathhouse, there had been six more cycles of hopes raised then dashed, each loss, each collapse, each trip to the doctor more crushing for Mariam than the last. With each disappointment, Rasheed had grown more remote and resentful.
Now nothing she did pleased him. She cleaned the house, made sure he always had a supply of clean shirts,