A Thousand Splendid Suns

unsettling about the way Rasheed seemed to loom over the woman. His
hands on her shoulders. His savoring, tight-lipped smile and her
unsmiling, sullen face. The way her body tilted forward subtly, as though
she were trying to wriggle free of his hands.
Mariam put everything back where she'd found it.
Later, as she was doing laundry, she regretted that she had sneaked
around in his room. For what? What thing of substance had she learned
about him? That he owned a gun, that he was a man with the needs of a
man? And she shouldn't have stared at the photo of him and his wife for
as long as she had. Her eyes had read meaning into what was random
body posture captured in a single moment of time.
What Mariam felt now, as the loaded clotheslines bounced heavily
before her, was sorrow for Rasheed. He too had had a hard life, a life
marked by loss and sad turns of fate. Her thoughts returned to his boy
Yunus, who had once built snowmen in this yard, whose feet had
pounded these same stairs. The lake had snatched him from Rasheed,
swallowed him up, just as a whale had swallowed the boy's namesake
prophet in the Koran. It pained Mariam-it pained her considerably-to
picture Rasheed panic-stricken and helpless, pacing the banks of the lake
and pleading with it to spit his son back onto dry land. And she felt for
the first time a kinship with her husband. She told herself that they
would make good companions after all.
13.
On the bus ride home from the doctor, the strangest thing was
happening to Mariam. Everywhere she looked, she saw bright colors: on
the drab, gray concrete apartments, on the tin-roofed, open-fronted