A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini Read Free Book Online Page A

They will destroy you. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault. No.”
    Mariam nodded, but as desperately as she wanted to she could not bring herself to believe him.
    ONE AFTERNOON, a week later, there was a knock on the door, and a tall woman walked in. She was fair-skinned, had reddish
     hair and long fingers.
    “I’m Afsoon,” she said. “Niloufar’s mother. Why don’t you wash up, Mariam, and come downstairs?”
    Mariam said she would rather stay in her room.
    “No, na fahmidi, you don’t understand. You need to come down. We have to talk to you. It’s important.”

7.
    T hey sat across from her, Jalil and his wives, at a long, dark brown table. Between them, in the center of the table,
     was a crystal vase of fresh marigolds and a sweating pitcher of water. The red-haired woman who had introduced herself as
     Niloufar’s mother, Afsoon, was sitting on Jalil’s right. The other two, Khadija and Nargis, were on his left. The wives each
     had on a flimsy black scarf, which they wore not on their heads but tied loosely around the neck like an afterthought. Mariam,
     who could not imagine that they would wear black for Nana, pictured one of them suggesting it, or maybe Jalil, just before
     she’d been summoned.
    Afsoon poured water from the pitcher and put the glass before Mariam on a checkered cloth coaster. “Only spring and it’s warm
     already,” she said. She made a fanning motion with her hand.
    “Have you been comfortable?” Nargis, who had a small chin and curly black hair, asked. “We hope you’ve been comfortable. This
     . . . ordeal . . . must be very hard for you. So difficult.”
    The other two nodded. Mariam took in their plucked eyebrows, the thin, tolerant smiles they were giving her. There was an
     unpleasant hum in Mariam’s head. Her throat burned. She drank some of the water.
    Through the wide window behind Jalil, Mariam could see a row of flowering apple trees. On the wall beside the window stood
     a dark wooden cabinet. In it was a clock, and a framed photograph of Jalil and three young boys holding a fish. The sun caught
     the sparkle in the fish’s scales. Jalil and the boys were grinning.
    “Well,” Afsoon began. “I—that is, we—have brought you here because we have some very good news to give you.”
    Mariam looked up.
    She caught a quick exchange of glances between the women over Jalil, who slouched in his chair looking unseeingly at the pitcher
     on the table. It was Khadija, the oldest-looking of the three, who turned her gaze to Mariam, and Mariam had the impression
     that this duty too had been discussed, agreed upon, before they had called for her.
    “You have a suitor,” Khadija said.
    Mariam’s stomach fell. “A what?” she said through suddenly numb lips.
    “A khastegar. A suitor. His name is Rasheed,” Khadija went on. “He is a friend of a business acquaintance of your father’s. He’s a Pashtun,
     from Kandahar originally, but he lives in Kabul, in the Deh-Mazang district, in a two-story house that he owns.”
    Afsoon was nodding. “And he does speak Farsi, like us, like you. So you won’t have to learn Pashto.”
    Mariam’s chest was tightening. The room was reeling up and down, the ground shifting beneath her feet.
    “He’s a shoemaker,” Khadija was saying now. “But not some kind of ordinary street-side moochi, no, no. He has his own shop, and he is one of the most sought-after shoemakers in Kabul. He makes them for diplomats, members
     of the presidential family—that class of people. So you see, he will have no trouble providing for you.”
    Mariam fixed her eyes on Jalil, her heart somersaulting in her chest. “Is this true? What she’s saying, is it true?”
    But Jalil wouldn’t look at her. He went on chewing the corner of his lower lip and staring at the pitcher.
    “Now he is a little older than you,” Afsoon chimed in. “But he can’t be more than . . . forty. Forty-five at the most. Wouldn’t you say,