A thousand Splendid Suns

40. 
 
  Laila Fall 1999 
 
  It was Mariam's idea to dig the hole. One morning, she pointed to a patch of soil be-
hind the toolshed. "We can do it here," she said. "This is a good spot" 
  They took turns striking the ground with a spade, then shoveling the loose dirt aside. 
They hadn't planned on a big hole, or a deep one, so the work of digging shouldn't have 
been as demanding as it turned out. It was the drought, started in 1998, in its second ye-
ar now, that was wreaking havoc everywhere. It had hardly snowed that past winter and 
didn't rain at all that spring. All over the country, farmers were leaving behind their 
parched lands, selling off their goods, roaming from village to village looking for water. 
They moved to Pakistan or Iran. They settled in Kabul. But water tables were low in the 
city too, and the shallow wells had dried up. The lines at the deep wells were so long, 
Laila and Mariam would spend hours waiting their turn. The Kabul River, without its 
yearly spring floods, had turned bone-dry. It was a public toilet now, nothing in it but 
human waste and rubble. 
  So they kept swinging the spade and striking, but the sun-blistered ground had harde-
ned like a rock, the dirt unyielding, compressed, almost petrified. 
  Mariam was forty now. Her hair, rolled up above her face, had a few stripes of gray in 
it. Pouches sagged beneath her eyes, brown and crescent-shaped. She'd lost two front te-
eth. One fell out, the other Rasheed knocked out when she'd accidentally dropped Zal-
mai. Her skin had coarsened, tanned from all the time they were spending in the yardsit-
ting beneath the brazen sun. They would sit and watch Zalmai chase Aziza. 
  When it was done, when the hole was dug, they stood over it and looked down. 
  "It should do," Mariam said.