A thousand Splendid Suns

them. It is His will, my girl. 
 
36. 
 
  Laila 
  As daylight steadily bleached darkness from the skythat spring morning of1994, Laila 
became certain that Rasheed knew. That, any moment now, he would drag her out of 
bed and ask whether she'd really taken him for such akhar, such a donkey, that he wo-
uldn't find out. Butazan rang out, and then the morning sun was falling flat on the roof-
tops and the roosters were crowing and nothing out of the ordinary happened 
  She could hear him now in the bathroom, the tapping of his razor against the edge of 
the basin. Then downstairs, moving about, heating tea. The keys jingled. Now he was 
crossing the yard, walking his bicycle. 
  Laila peered through a crack in the living-room curtains. She watched him pedal away, 
a big man on a small bicycle, the morning sun glaring off the handlebars. 
  "Laila?" 
  Mariam was in the doorway. Laila could tell that she hadn't slept either. She wondered 
if Mariam too had been seized all night by bouts of euphoria and attacks of mouth-
drying anxiety. 
  "We'll leave in half an hour," Laila said. 
 
* * * 
 
  In the backseat of the taxi, they did not speak. Aziza sat on Mariam's lap, clutching her 
doll, looking with wide-eyed puzzlement at the city speeding by. 
  "Ona!"she cried, pointing to a group of little girls skipping rope. "Mayam!Ona" 
  Everywhere she looked, Laila saw Rasheed. She spotted him coming out of barbers-
hops with windows the color of coal dust, from tiny booths that sold partridges, from 
battered, open-fronted stores packed with old tires piled from floor to ceiling. 
  She sank lower in her seat. 

---

  Beside her, Mariam was muttering a prayer. Laila wished she could see her face, but 
Mariam was in burqa-they both were-and all she could see was the glitter of her eyes 
through the grid. 
  This was Laila's first time out of the house in weeks, discounting the short trip to the 
pawnshop the day before-where she had pushed her wedding ring across a glass counter, 
where she'd walked out thrilled by the finality of it, knowing there was no going back. 
  All around her now, Laila saw the consequences of the recent fighting whose sounds 
she'd heard from the house. Homes that lay in roofless ruins of brick and jagged stone, 
gouged buildings with fallen beams poking through the holes, the charred, mangled 
husks of cars, upended, sometimes stacked on top of each other, walls pocked by holes 
of every conceivable caliber, shattered glass everywhere. She saw a funeral procession 
marching toward a mosque, a black-clad old woman at the rear tearing at her hair. They 
passed a cemetery littered with rock-piled graves and raggedshaheed flags fluttering in 
the breeze. 
  Laila  reached  across the suitcase, wrapped her fingers around the softness of her da-
ughter's arm. 
 
* * * 
 
  At the Lahore Gate bus station, near Pol Mahmood Khan in East Kabul, a row of buses 
sat idling along the curbside. Men in turbans were busy heaving bundles and crates onto 
bus tops, securing suitcases down with ropes. Inside the station, men stood in a long line 
at the ticket booth. Burqa-clad women stood in groups and chatted, their belongings pi-
led at their feet. Babies were bounced, children scolded for straying too far. 
  Mujahideen militiamen patrolled the station and the curbside, barking curt orders here 
and there. They wore boots,pakols, dusty green fatigues. They all carried Kalashnikovs. 
  Laila felt watched. She looked no one in the face, but she felt as though every person 
in this place knew, that they were looking on with disapproval at what she and Mariam 
were doing. 
  "Do you see anybody?" Laila asked. 
  Mariam shifted Aziza in her arms. "I'm looking." 
 
  This, Laila had known, would be the first risky part, finding a man suitable to pose 
with them as a family member. The freedoms and opportunities that women had enj-
oyed between 1978 and 1992 were a thing of the past now- Laila could still remember 
Babi saying of those years of communist rule,It's a good time to be a woman in Afgha-