A Thousand Splendid Suns

31.
Madam
In the daytime, the girl was no more than a creaking bedspring, a
patter of footsteps overhead. She was water splashing in the bathroom,
or a teaspoon clinking against glass in the bedroom upstairs.
Occasionally, there were sightings: a blur of billowing dress in the
periphery of Madam's vision, scurrying up the steps, arms folded across
the chest, sandals slapping the heels.
But it was inevitable that they would run into each other. Madam
passed the girl on the stairs, in the narrow hallway, in the kitchen, or by
the door as she was coming in from the yard. When they met like this,
an awkward tension rushed into the space between them. The girl
gathered her skirt and breathed out a word or two of apology, and, as
she hurried past, Madam would chance a sidelong glance and catch a
blush. Sometimes she could smell Rasheed on her. She could smell his
sweat on the girl's skin, his tobacco, his appetite. Sex, mercifully, was a
closed chapter in her own life. It had been for some time, and now even
the thought of those laborious sessions of lying beneath Rasheed made
Madam queasy in the gut.
At night, however, this mutually orchestrated dance of avoidance
between her and the girl was not possible. Rasheed said they were a
family. He insisted they were, and families had to eat together, he said.
"What is this?" he said, his fingers working the meat off a bone-the
spoon-and-fork charade was abandoned a week after he married the girl.
"Have I married a pair of statues? Go on, Madam, gap bezan, say
something to her. Where are your manners?"
Sucking marrow from a bone, he said to the girl, "But you mustn't
blame her. She is quiet. A blessing, really, because, wallah, if a person