A Thousand Splendid Suns

with Laila. He had bought him a new crib and had lions and crouching
leopards painted on the side panels. He'd paid for new clothes, new
rattles, new bottles, new diapers, even though they could not afford them
and Aziza's old ones were still serviceable. One day, he came home with
a battery-run mobile, which he hung over Zalmai's crib. Little
yellow-and-black bumblebees dangled from a sunflower, and they
crinkled and squeaked when squeezed. A tune played when it was turned
on.
"I thought you said business was slow," Laila said.
"I have friends I can borrow from," he said dismissively.
"How will you pay them back?"
"Things will turn around. They always do. Look, he likes it. See?"
Most days, Laila was deprived of her son. Rasheed took him to the
shop, let him crawl around under his crowded workbench, play with old
rubber soles and spare scraps of leather. Rasheed drove in his iron nails
and turned the sandpaper wheel, and kept a watchful eye on him. If
Zalmai toppled a rack of shoes, Rasheed scolded him gently, in a calm,
half-smiling way. If he did it again, Rasheed put down his hammer, sat
him up on his desk, and talked to him softly.
His patience with Zalmai was a well that ran deep and never dried.
They came home together in the evening, Zalmai's head bouncing on
Rasheed's shoulder, both of them smelling of glue and leather. They
grinned the way people who share a secret do, slyly, like they'd sat in
that dim shoe shop all day not making shoes at all but devising secret
plots. Zalmai liked to sit beside his father at dinner, where they played
private games, as Mariam, Laila, and Aziza set plates on thesojrah.
They took turns poking each other on the chest, giggling, pelting each
other with bread crumbs, whispering things the others couldn't hear. If
Laila spoke to them, Rasheed looked up with displeasure at the