A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini [97]
Laila pulled her thigh from him.
“Not that I would,” he said. “I wouldn’t. Nay. Probably not. You know me.”
“You’re despicable,” Laila said.
“That’s a big word,” Rasheed said. “I’ve always disliked that about you. Even when you were little, when you were running around with that cripple, you thought you were so clever, with your books and poems. What good are all your smarts to you now? What’s keeping you off the streets, your smarts or me? I’m despicable? Half the women in this city would kill to have a husband like me. They would kill for it.”
He rolled back and blew smoke toward the ceiling.
“You like big words? I’ll give you one: perspective.
That’s what I’m doing here, Laila. Making sure you don’t lose perspective.”
What turned Laila’s stomach the rest of the night was that every word Rasheed had uttered, every last one, was true.
But, in the morning, and for several mornings after that, the queasiness in her gut persisted, then worsened, became something dismayingly familiar.
ONE COLD, overcast afternoon soon after, Laila lay on her back on the bedroom floor. Mariam was napping with Aziza in her room.
In Laila’s hands was a metal spoke she had snapped with a pair of pliers from an abandoned bicycle wheel.
She’d found it in the same alley where she had kissed Tariq years back. For a long time, Laila lay on the floor, sucking air through her teeth, legs parted.
She’d adored Aziza from the moment when she’d first suspected her existence. There had been none of this self-doubt, this uncertainty. What a terrible thing it was, Laila thought now, for a mother to fear that she could not summon love for her own child. What an unnatural thing. And yet she had to wonder, as she lay on the floor, her sweaty hands poised to guide the spoke, if indeed she could ever love Rasheed’s child as she had Tariq’s.
In the end, Laila couldn’t do it.
It wasn’t the fear of bleeding to death that made her drop the spoke, or even the idea that the act was damnable—which she suspected it was. Laila dropped the spoke because she could not accept what the Mujahideen readily had: that sometimes in war innocent life had to be taken. Her war was against Rasheed. The baby was blameless. And there had been enough killing already. Laila had seen enough killing of innocents caught in the cross fire of enemies.
39.
Mariam
SEPTEMBER 1997
This hospital no longer treats women,” the guard barked. He was standing at the top of the stairs, looking down icily on the crowd gathered in front of Malalai Hospital.
A loud groan rose from the crowd.
“But this is a women’s hospital!” a woman shouted behind Mariam. Cries of approval followed this.
Mariam shifted Aziza from one arm to the other. With her free arm, she supported Laila, who was moaning, and had her own arm flung around Rasheed’s neck.
“Not anymore,” the Talib said.
“My wife is having a baby!” a heavyset man yelled.
“Would you have her give birth here on the street, brother?”
Mariam had heard the announcement, in January of that year, that men and women would be seen in different hospitals, that all female staff would be discharged from Kabul’s hospitals and sent to work in one central facility.
No one had believed it, and the Taliban hadn’t enforced the policy. Until now.
“What about Ali Abad Hospital?” another man cried.
The guard shook his head.
“Wazir Akbar Khan?”
“Men only,” he said.
“What are we supposed to do?”
“Go to Rabia Balkhi,” the guard said.
A young woman pushed forward, said she had already been there. They had no clean water, she said, no oxygen, no medications, no electricity. “There is nothing there.”
“That’s where you go,” the guard said.
There were more groans and cries, an insult or two.
Someone threw a rock.
The Talib lifted his Kalashnikov and fired rounds into the air. Another Talib behind him brandished a whip.
The crowd dispersed quickly.
THE WAITING ROOM at Rabia Balkhi was teeming with women in burqas and their children. The air stank of sweat and unwashed bodies, of feet, urine, cigarette smoke, and antiseptic.