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

own?”
    â€œYes. A home, children of your own?”
    â€œYou have to move on.”
    â€œTrue that it would be preferable that you marry a local, a Tajik, but Rasheed is healthy, and interested in you. He has a home and a job. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it? And Kabul is a beautiful and exciting city. You may not get another opportunity this good.”
    Mariam turned her attention to the wives.
    â€œI’ll live with Mullah Faizullah,” she said. “He’ll take me in. I know he will.”
    â€œThat’s no good,” Khadija said. “He’s old and so…” She searched for the right word, and Mariam knew then that what she really wanted to say was He’s so close. She understood what they meant to do. You may not get another opportunity this good. And neither would they. They had been disgraced by her birth, and this was their chance to erase, once and for all, the last trace of their husband’s scandalous mistake. She was being sent away because she was the walking, breathing embodiment of their shame.
    â€œHe’s so old and weak,” Khadija eventually said. “And what will you do when he’s gone? You’d be a burden to his family.”
    As you are now to us. Mariam almost saw the unspoken words exit Khadija’s mouth, like foggy breath on a cold day.
    Mariam pictured herself in Kabul, a big, strange, crowded city that, Jalil had once told her, was some six hundred and fifty kilometers to the east of Herat. Six hundred and fifty kilometers. The farthest she’d ever been from the kolba was the two-kilometer walk she’d made to Jalil’s house. She pictured herself living there, in Kabul, at the other end of that unimaginable distance, living in a stranger’s house where she would have to concede to his moods and his issued demands. She would have to clean after this man, Rasheed, cook for him, wash his clothes. And there would be other chores as well—Nana had told her what husbands did to their wives. It was the thought of these intimacies in particular, which she imagined as painful acts of perversity, that filled her with dread and made her break out in a sweat.
    She turned to Jalil again. “Tell them. Tell them you won’t let them do this.”
    â€œActually, your father has already given Rasheed his answer,” Afsoon said. “Rasheed is here, in Herat; he has come all the way from Kabul. The nikka will be tomorrow morning, and then there is a bus leaving for Kabul at noon.”
    â€œTell them!” Mariam cried.
    The women grew quiet now. Mariam sensed that they were watching him too. Waiting. A silence fell over the room. Jalil kept twirling his wedding band, with a bruised, helpless look on his face. From inside the cabinet, the clock ticked on and on.
    â€œJalil jo?” one of the women said at last.
    Jalil’s eyes lifted slowly, met Mariam’s, lingered for a moment, then dropped. He opened his mouth, but all that came forth was a single, pained groan.
    â€œSay something,” Mariam said.
    Then Jalil did, in a thin, threadbare voice. “Goddamn it, Mariam, don’t do this to me,” he said as though he was the one to whom something was being done.
    And, with that, Mariam felt the tension vanish from the room.
    As Jalil’s wives began a new—and more sprightly—round of reassuring, Mariam looked down at the table. Her eyes traced the sleek shape of the table’s legs, the sinuous curves of its corners, the gleam of its reflective, dark brown surface. She noticed that every time she breathed out, the surface fogged, and she disappeared from her father’s table.
    Afsoon escorted her back to the room upstairs. When Afsoon closed the door, Mariam heard the rattling of a key as it turned in the lock.

8.
    I n the morning, Mariam was given a long-sleeved, dark green dress to wear over white cotton trousers. Afsoon gave her a green hijab and a pair