A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [67]
Then Laila struck the wall. Crashed to the ground. On her face and arms, a shower of dirt and pebbles and glass. The last thing she was aware of was seeing something thud to the ground nearby. A bloody chunk of something. On it, the tip of a red bridge poking through thick fog.
SHAPES MOVING ABOUT. A fluorescent light shines from the ceiling above. A woman’s face appears, hovers over hers.
Laila fades back to the dark.
* * *
ANOTHER FACE. This time a man’s. His features seem broad and droopy. His lips move but make no sound. All Laila hears is ringing.
The man waves his hand at her. Frowns. His lips move again.
It hurts. It hurts to breathe. It hurts everywhere.
A glass of water. A pink pill.
Back to the darkness.
THE WOMAN AGAIN. Long face, narrow-set eyes. She says something. Laila can’t hear anything but the ringing. But she can see the words, like thick black syrup, spilling out of the woman’s mouth.
Her chest hurts. Her arms and legs hurt.
All around, shapes moving.
Where is Tariq?
Why isn’t he here?
Darkness. A flock of stars.
BABI AND SHE, perched somewhere high up. He is pointing to a field of barley. A generator comes to life.
The long-faced woman is standing over her looking down.
It hurts to breathe.
Somewhere, an accordion playing.
Mercifully, the pink pill again. Then a deep hush. A deep hush falls over everything.
PART THREE
27.
Mariam
Do you know who I am?”
The girl’s eyes fluttered.
“Do you know what has happened?”
The girl’s mouth quivered. She closed her eyes.
Swallowed. Her hand grazed her left cheek. She mouthed something.
Mariam leaned in closer.
“This ear,” the girl breathed. “I can’t hear.”
FOR THE FIRST WEEK, the girl did little but sleep, with help from the pink pills Rasheed paid for at the hospital. She murmured in her sleep. Sometimes she spoke gibberish, cried out, called out names Mariam did not recognize. She wept in her sleep, grew agitated, kicked the blankets off, and then Mariam had to hold her down. Sometimes she retched and retched, threw up everything Mariam fed her.
When she wasn’t agitated, the girl was a sullen pair of eyes staring from under the blanket, breathing out short little answers to Mariam and Rasheed’s questions. Some days she was childlike, whipped her head side to side, when Mariam, then Rasheed, tried to feed her. She went rigid when Mariam came at her with a spoon. But she tired easily and submitted eventually to their persistent badgering. Long bouts of weeping followed surrender.
Rasheed had Mariam rub antibiotic ointment on the cuts on the girl’s face and neck, and on the sutured gashes on her shoulder, across her forearms and lower legs. Mariam dressed them with bandages, which she washed and recycled. She held the girl’s hair back, out of her face, when she had to retch.
“How long is she staying?” she asked Rasheed.
“Until she’s better. Look at her. She’s in no shape to go.
Poor thing.”
IT WAS RASHEED who found the girl, who dug her out from beneath the rubble.
“Lucky I was home,” he said to the girl. He was sitting on a folding chair beside Mariam’s bed, where the girl lay.
“Lucky for you, I mean. I dug you out with my own hands. There was a scrap of metal this big—” Here, he spread his thumb and index finger apart to show her, at least doubling, in Mariam’s estimation, the actual size of it. “This big. Sticking right out of your shoulder. It was really embedded in there. I thought I’d have to use a pair of pliers. But you’re all right. In no time, you’ll be nau socha. Good as new.”
It was Rasheed who salvaged a handful of Hakim’s books.
“Most of them were ash. The rest were looted, I’m afraid.”
He helped Mariam watch over the girl that first week.
One day, he came home from work with a new blanket and pillow. Another day, a bottle of pills.
“Vitamins,