A thousand Splendid Suns

always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam. 
 
* * * 
 
  Mamam'S trial had taken place the week before. There was no legal council, no public 
hearing, no cross-examining of evidence, no appeals. Mariam declined her right to wit-
nesses. The entire thing lasted less than fifteen minutes. 
 
  The middle judge, a brittle-looking Talib, was the leader. He was strikingly gaunt, with 
yellow, leathery skin and a curly red beard. He wore eyeglasses that magnified his eyes 
and revealed how yellow the whites were. His neck looked too thin to support the intri-
cately wrapped turban on his head. 
  "You admit to this,hamshira?I he asked again in a tired voice. 
 
  "I do," Mariam said. 
 
  The man nodded. Or maybe he didn't. It was hard to tell; he had a pronounced shaking 
of his hands and head that reminded Mariam of Mullah Faizullah's tremor. When he sip-
ped tea, he did not reach for his cup. He motioned to the square-shouldered man to his 
left, who respectfully brought it to his lips. After, the Talib closed his eyes gently, a mu-
ted and elegant gesture of gratitude. 
 
  Mariam found a disarming quality about him. When he spoke, it was with a tinge of 
guile and tenderness. His smile was patient. He did not look at Mariam despisingly. He 
did not address her with spite or accusation but with a soft tone of apology. 
 
  "Do you fully understand what you're saying?" the bony-faced Talib to the judge's 
right, not the tea giver, said. This one was the youngest of the three. He spoke quickly 
and with emphatic, arrogant confidence. He'd been irritated that Mariam could not spe-
ak Pashto. He struck Mariam as the sort of quarrelsome young man who relished his 
authority, who saw offenses everywhere, thought it his birthright to pass judgment. 
 
  "I do understand," Mariam said. 
 
  "I wonder," the young Talib said. "God has made us differently, you women and us 
men. Our brains are different. You are not able to think like we can. Western doctors 
and their science have proven this. This is why we require only one male witness but 
two female ones." 
 
  "I admit to what I did, brother," Mariam said. "But, if I hadn't, he would have killed 
her. He was strangling her." 
 
  "So you say. But, then, women swear to all sorts of things all the time." 
 
  "It's the truth." 
 
  "Do you have witnesses? Other than yourambagh?’' 

---

 
  "I do not," said Mariam. 
 
  "Well, then." He threw up his hands and snickered. 
 
  It was the sickly Talib who spoke next. 
  "I have a doctor in Peshawar," he said. "A fine, young Pakistani fellow. I saw him a 
month ago, and then again last week. I said, tell me the truth, friend, and he said to me, 
three months, Mullah sahib, maybe six at most-all God's will, of course." 
  He nodded discreetly at the square-shouldered man on his left and took another sip of 
the tea he was offered. He wiped his mouth with the back of his tremulous hand. "It do-
es not frighten me to leave this life that my only son left five years ago, this life that in-
sists we bear sorrow upon sorrow long after we can bear no more. No, I believe I shall 
gladly take my leave when the time comes. 
  "What frightens me,hamshira, is the day God summons me before Him and asks,Why 
did you not do as I said, Mullah? Why did you not obey my laws? How shall I explain 
myself to Him,hamshira1? What will be my defense for not heeding His commands? 
All I can do, all any of us can do, in the time we are granted, is to go on abiding by the 
laws He has set for us. The clearer I see my end,hamshira, the nearer I am to my day of 
reckoning, the more determined I grow to carry out His word. However painful it may 
prove." 
 
  He shifted on his cushion and winced. 
 
  "I believe you when you say that your husband was a man of disagreeable tempera-
ment," he resumed, fixing Mariam with his bespectacled eyes, his gaze both stern and 
compassionate. "But I cannot help but be disturbed by the brutality of your action,hams-
hira I am troubled by what you have done; I am troubled that his little boy was crying 
for him upstairs when you did it. 
 
  "I am tired and dying, and I want to be merciful. I want to forgive you. But when God 
summons me and says,But it wasn't for you to forgive, Mullah, what shall I say?" 
 
  His companions nodded and looked at him with admiration. 
 
  "Something tells me you are not a wicked woman,hamshira But you have done a wic-
ked thing. And you must pay for this thing you have done.Shari'a is not vague on this 
matter. It says I must send you where I will soon join you myself. 
  "Do you understand,hamshira?" 
  Mariam looked down at her hands. She said she did. 
 
  "May Allah forgive you." 
 
  Before they led her out, Mariam was given a document, told to sign beneath her state-
ment and the mullah's sentence. As the three Taliban watched, Mariam wrote it out, her 
name-themeem, thereh, theyah, and themeem -remembering the last time she'd signed 
her name to a document, twenty-seven years before, at Jalil's table, beneath the watchful 
gaze of another mullah. 
 
* * * 

---

 
  Mahiam spent ten days in prison. She sat by the window of the cell, watched the prison 
life in the courtyard. When the summer winds blew, she watched bits of scrap paper ride 
the currents in a frenzied, corkscrew motion, as they were hurled this way and that, high 
above the prison walls. She watched the winds stir mutiny in the dust, whipping it into 
violent spirals that ripped through the courtyard. Everyone-the guards, the inmates, the 
children, Mariam-burrowed their faces in the hook of their elbows, but the dust would 
not be denied. It made homes of ear canals and nostrils, of eyelashes and skin folds, of 
the space between molars. Only at dusk did the winds die down. And then if a night bre-
eze blew, it did so timidly, as if to atone for the excesses of its daytime sibling. 
 
  On Mariam's last day at Walayat, Naghma gave her a tangerine. She put it in Mariam's 
palm and closed her fingers around it. Then she burst into tears. 
  "You're the best friend I ever had," she said. 
 
  Mariam spent the rest of the day by the barred window watching the inmates below. 
Someone was cooking a meal, and a stream of cumin-scented smoke and warm air waf-
ted through the window. Mariam could see the children playing a blindfolded game. 
Two little girls were singing a rhyme, and Mariam remembered it from her childhood, 
remembered Jalil singing it to her as they'd sat on a rock, fishing in the stream: 
 
  Lili Mi birdbath, Sitting on a dirt path, Minnow sat on the rim and drank, Slipped, and 
in the water she sank 
 
  Mariam had disjointed dreams that last night. She dreamed of pebbles, eleven of them, 
arranged vertically. Jalil, young again, all winning smiles and dimpled chins and sweat 
patches, coat flung over his shoulder, come at last to take his daughter away for a ride in 
his shiny black Buick Roadmaster. Mullah Faizullah twirling his rosary beads, walking 
with her along the stream, their twin shadows gliding on the water and on the grassy 
banks sprinkled with a blue-lavender wild iris that, in this dream, smelled like cloves. 
She dreamed of Nana in the doorway of thekolba, her voice dim and distant, calling her 
to dinner, as Mariam played in cool, tangled grass where ants crawled and beetles scur-
ried and grasshoppers skipped amid all the different shades of green. The squeak of a 
wheelbarrow laboring up a dusty path. Cowbells clanging. Sheep baaing on a hill.