A Thousand Splendid Suns

aluminum table. The top shelf had a soot-colored blanket on it; the
bottom shelf was empty.
One of the women saw Mariam looking.
"They put the live ones on the top," she said tiredly.
The doctor, in a dark blue burqa, was a small, harried woman with
birdlike movements. Everything she said came out sounding impatient,
urgent.
"First baby." She said it like that, not as a question but as a statement.
"Second," Mariam said.
Laila let out a cry and rolled on her side. Her fingers closed against
Mariam's.
"Any problems with the first delivery?"
'No.
"You're the mother?"
"Yes," Mariam said.
The doctor lifted the lower half of her burqa and produced a metallic,
cone-shaped instrument- She raised Laila's burqa and placed the wide
end of the instrument on her belly, the narrow end to her own ear. She
listened for
almost a minute, switched spots, listened again, switched spots again.
"I have to feel the baby now, hamshira "
She put on one of the gloves hung by a clothespin over the sink. She
pushed on Laila's belly with one hand and slid the other inside. Laila
whimpered. When the doctor was done, she gave the glove to a nurse,
who rinsed it and
pinned it back on the string.
"Your daughter needs a caesarian. Do you know what that is? We have
to open her womb and take the baby out, because it is in the breech
position."