Mariam turned her attention to the
wives.
"I'll
live with Mullah Faizullah," she said. "He'll take me in. I know he
will."
"That'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.
"He'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."
"Actually,
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."
"Tell
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.
"Jalil
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.
"Say
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.
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.
