A thousand Splendid Suns

you, cousin? The only solace I find is in knowing that I walk the same ground that so-
aked up their blood. No. Never. 
 
  And Babi would never leave without her, Laila knew, even though Mammy was no 
more a wife to him now than she was a mother to Laila. For Mammy, he would brush 
aside this daydream of his the way he flicked specks of flour from his coat when he got 
home from work. And so they would stay. They would stay until the war ended And 
they would stay for whatever came after war. 
  Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no 
convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a 
mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her. 
 
* * * 
 
  Later, after they'd eaten a lunch of boiled eggs and potatoes with bread, Tariq napped 
beneath a tree on the banks of a gurgling stream. He slept with his coat neatly folded in-
to a pillow, his hands crossed on his chest. The driver went to the village to buy al-

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monds. Babi sat at the foot of a thick-trunked acacia tree reading a paperback. Laila 
knew the book; he'd read it to her once. It told the story of an old fisherman named San-
tiago who catches an enormous fish. But by the time he sails his boat to safety, there is 
nothing left of his prize fish; the sharks have torn it to pieces. 
 
  Laila sat on the edge of the stream, dipping her feet into the cool water. Overhead, 
mosquitoes hummed and cottonwood seeds danced. A dragonfly whirred nearby. Laila 
watched its wings catch glints of sunlight as it buzzed from one blade of grass to anot-
her. They flashed purple, then green, orange. Across the stream, a group of local Hazara 
boys were picking patties of dried cow dung from the ground and stowing them into 
burlap sacks tethered to their backs. Somewhere, a donkey brayed. A generator sputte-
red to life. 
 
  Laila thought again about Babi's little dream.Somewhere near the sea 
  There was something she hadn't told Babi up there atop the Buddha: that, in one im-
portant way, she was glad they couldn't go. She would miss Giti and her pinch-faced 
earnestness, yes, and Hasina too, with her wicked laugh and reckless clowning around 
But, mostly, Laila remembered all too well the inescapable drudgery of those four we-
eks without Tariq when he had gone to Ghazni. She remembered all too well how time 
had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. 
How could she ever cope with his permanent absence? 
 
  Maybe it was senseless to want to be near a person so badly here in a country where 
bullets had shredded her own brothers to pieces. But all Laila had to do was picture Ta-
riq going at Khadim with his leg and then nothing in the world seemed more sensible to 
her.