A Thousand Splendid Suns

you'll find yourself in a bidding war with someone just as desperate.
There is no time. This baby needs to come out now."
"Tell me what's going on!" Laila said She had propped herself up on her
elbows.
The doctor took a breath, then told Laila that the hospital had no
anesthetic.
"But if we delay, you will lose your baby."
"Then cut me open," Laila said. She dropped back on the bed and drew
up her knees. "Cut me open and give me my baby."
* * *
Inside the old, dingy operating room, Laila lay on a gurney bed as the
doctor scrubbed her hands in a basin. Laila was shivering. She drew in
air through her teeth every time the nurse wiped her belly with a cloth
soaked in a yellow-brown liquid. Another nurse stood at the door. She
kept cracking it open to take a peek outside.
The doctor was out of her burqa now, and Mariam saw that she had a
crest of silvery hair, heavy-lidded eyes, and little pouches of fatigue at
the corners of her mouth.
"They want us to operate in burqa," the doctor explained, motioning
with her head to the nurse at the door. "She keeps watch. She sees them
coming; I cover."
She said this in a pragmatic, almost indifferent, tone, and Mariam
understood that this was a woman far past outrage. Here was a woman,
she thought, who had understood that she was lucky to even be working,
that there was always something, something else, that they could take
away.
There were two vertical, metallic rods on either side of Laila's
shoulders. With clothespins, the nurse who'd cleansed Laila's belly pinned