A Thousand Splendid Suns

behind their parched lands, selling off their goods, roaming from village
to village looking for water. They moved to Pakistan or Iran. They
settled in Kabul. But water tables were low in the city too, and the
shallow wells had dried up. The lines at the deep wells were so long,
Laila and Mariam would spend hours waiting their turn. The Kabul River,
without its yearly spring floods, had turned bone-dry. It was a public
toilet now, nothing in it but human waste and rubble.
So they kept swinging the spade and striking, but the sun-blistered
ground had hardened like a rock, the dirt unyielding, compressed, almost
petrified.
Mariam was forty now. Her hair, rolled up above her face, had a few
stripes of gray in it. Pouches sagged beneath her eyes, brown and
crescent-shaped. She'd lost two front teeth. One fell out, the other
Rasheed knocked out when she'd accidentally dropped Zalmai. Her skin
had coarsened, tanned from all the time they were spending in the yard
sitting beneath the brazen sun. They would sit and watch Zalmai chase
Aziza.
When it was done, when the hole was dug, they stood over it and
looked down.
"It should do," Mariam said.
* * *
Zalmai was two now. He was a plump little boy with curly hair. He had
small brownish eyes, and a rosy tint to his cheeks, like Rasheed, no
matter the weather. He had his father's hairline too, thick and
half-moon-shaped, set low on his brow.
When Laila was alone with him, Zalmai was sweet, good-humored, and
playful. He liked to climb Laila's shoulders, play hide-and-seek in the