A Thousand Splendid Suns

walls. She watched the winds stir mutiny in the dust, whipping it into
violent spirals that ripped through the courtyard. Everyone-the guards,
the inmates, the children, Mariam-burrowed their faces in the hook of
their elbows, but the dust would not be denied. It made homes of ear
canals and nostrils, of eyelashes and skin folds, of the space between
molars. Only at dusk did the winds die down. And then if a night breeze
blew, it did so timidly, as if to atone for the excesses of its daytime
sibling.
On Mariam's last day at Walayat, Naghma gave her a tangerine. She
put it in Mariam's palm and closed her fingers around it. Then she burst
into tears.
"You're the best friend I ever had," she said.
Mariam spent the rest of the day by the barred window watching the
inmates below. Someone was cooking a meal, and a stream of
cumin-scented smoke and warm air wafted through the window. Mariam
could see the children playing a blindfolded game. Two little girls were
singing a rhyme, and Mariam remembered it from her childhood,
remembered Jalil singing it to her as they'd sat on a rock, fishing in the
stream:
Lili Mi birdbath, Sitting on a dirt path, Minnow sat on the rim and drank,
Slipped, and in the water she sank
Mariam had disjointed dreams that last night. She dreamed of pebbles,
eleven of them, arranged vertically. Jalil, young again, all winning smiles
and dimpled chins and sweat patches, coat flung over his shoulder, come
at last to take his daughter away for a ride in his shiny black Buick