A Thousand Splendid Suns

gone, he would surely take her with him. He would bring her to Herat, to
live in his house, just like his other children.
5.
I know what I want," Mariam said to Jalil.
It was the spring of 1974, the year Mariam turned fifteen. The three of
them were sitting outside the kolba, in a patch of shade thrown by the
willows, on folding chairs arranged in a triangle.
"For my birthday…1 know what I want."
"You do?" said Jalil, smiling encouragingly.
Two weeks before, at Mariam's prodding, Jalil had let on that an
American film was playing at his cinema. It was a special kind of film,
what he'd called a cartoon. The entire film was a series of drawings, he
said, thousands of them, so that when they were made into a film and
projected onto a screen you had the illusion that the drawings were
moving. Jalil said the film told the story of an old, childless toymaker
who is lonely and desperately wants a son. So he carves a puppet, a boy,
who magically comes to life. Mariam had asked him to tell her more, and
Jalil said that the old man and his puppet had all sorts of adventures,
that there was a place called Pleasure Island, and bad boys who turned
into donkeys. They even got swallowed by a whale at the end, the
puppet and his father. Mariam had told Mullah Faizullah all about this
film.
"I want you to take me to your cinema," Mariam said now. "I want to
see the cartoon. I want to see the puppet boy."