A thousand Splendid Suns

Laila jo?
Laila’s eyes snap open. She gasps, and her body pitches forward. She startles the bat, which zips from one end of the kolba to the other, its beating wings like the fluttering pages of a book, before it flies out the window.
Laila gets to her feet, beats the dead leaves from the seat of her trousers. She steps out of the kolba. Outside, the light has shifted slightly. A wind is blowing, making the grass ripple and the willow branches click.
Before she leaves the clearing, Laila takes one last look at the kolba where Mariam had slept, eaten, dreamed, held her breath for Jalil. On sagging walls, the willows cast crooked patterns that shift with each gust of wind. A crow has landed on the flat roof. It pecks at something, squawks, flies off.
“Good-bye, Mariam.”
And, with that, unaware that she is weeping, Laila begins to run through the grass.
She finds Hamza still sitting on the rock. When he spots her, he stands up.
“Let’s go back,” he says. Then, “I have something to give you.”
LAILA WAITS FOR Hamza in the garden by the front door. The boy who had served them tea earlier is standing beneath one of the fig trees holding a chicken, watching her impassively. Laila spies two faces, an old woman and a young girl in hijabs, observing her demurely from a window.
The door to the house opens and Hamza emerges. He is carrying a box.
He gives it to Laila.
“Jalil Khan gave this to my father a month or so before he died,” Hamza says. “He asked my father to safeguard it for Mariam until she came to claim it. My father kept it for two years. Then, just before he passed away, he gave it to me, and asked me to save it for Mariam. But she ... you know, she never came.”
Laila looks down at the oval-shaped tin box. It looks like an old chocolate box. It’s olive green, with fading gilt scrolls all around the hinged lid. There is a little rust on the sides, and two tiny dents on the front rim of the lid. Laila tries to open the box, but the latch is locked.
“What’s in it?” she asks.
Hamza puts a key in her palm. “My father never unlocked it. Neither did I. I suppose it was God’s will that it be you.”
BACK AT THE HOTEL, Tariq and the children are not back yet.
Laila sits on the bed, the box on her lap. Part of her wants to leave it unopened, let whatever Jalil had intended remain a secret. But, in the end, the curiosity proves too




strong. She slides in the key. It takes some rattling and shaking, but she opens the box.
In it, she finds three things: an envelope, a burlap sack, and a videocassette.
Laila takes the tape and goes down to the reception desk. She learns from the elderly clerk who had greeted them the day before that the hotel has only one VCR, in its biggest suite. The suite is vacant at the moment, and he agrees to take her. He leaves the desk to a mustachioed young man in a suit who is talking on a cellular phone.
The old clerk leads Laila to the second floor, to a door at the end of a long hallway. He works the lock, lets her in. Laila’s eyes find the TV in the corner. They register nothing else about the suite.
She turns on the TV, turns on the VCR. Puts the tape in and pushes the PLAY button. The screen is blank for a few moments, and Laila begins to wonder why Jalil had gone to the trouble of passing a blank tape to Mariam. But then there is music, and images begin to play on the screen.
Laila frowns. She keeps watching for a minute or two. Then she pushes STOP, fast­forwards the tape, and pushes PLAY again. It’s the same film.
The old man is looking at her quizzically.
The film playing on the screen is Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. Laila does not understand.
TARIQ AND THE children come back to the hotel just after six o’clock. Aziza runs to Laila and shows her the earrings Tariq has bought for her, silver with an enamel butterfly on each. Zalmai is clutching an inflatable dolphin that squeaks when its snout is squeezed.
“How are you?” Tariq asks, putting his arm around her shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Laila says. “I’ll tell you later.”
They walk to a nearby kebab house to eat. It’s a small place, with sticky, vinyl tablecloths, smoky and loud. But the lamb is tender and moist and the bread hot. They walk the streets for a while after. Tariq buys the children rosewater ice cream from a street-side kiosk. They eat, sitting on a bench, the mountains behind them silhouetted against the scarlet red of dusk. The air is warm, rich with the fragrance of cedar.
Laila had opened the envelope earlier when she’d come back to the room after viewing the videotape. In it was a letter, handwritten in blue ink on a yellow, lined sheet of paper.
It read: