A Thousand Splendid Suns

dinner to celebrate. All morning, Mariam cleaned lentils and moistened
rice. She sliced eggplants for borani, and cooked leeks and ground beef
for aushak. She swept the floor, beat the curtains, aired the house,
despite the snow that had started up again. She arranged mattresses and
cushions along the walls of the living room, placed bowls of candy and
roasted almonds on the table.
She was in her room by early evening before the first of the men
arrived. She lay in bed as the hoots and laughter and bantering voices
downstairs began to mushroom. She couldn't keep her hands from
drifting to her belly. She thought of what was growing there, and
happiness rushed in like a gust of wind blowing a door wide open. Her
eyes watered.
Mariam thought of her six-hundred-and-fifty-kilometer bus trip with
Rasheed, from Herat in the west, near the border with Iran, to Kabul in
the east. They had passed small towns and big towns, and knots of little
villages that kept springing up one after another. They had gone over
mountains and across raw-burned deserts, from one province to the next.
And here she was now, over those boulders and parched hills, with a
home of her own, a husband of her own, heading toward one final,
cherished province: Motherhood. How delectable it was to think of
this baby, her baby, their baby. How glorious it was to know that her
love for it already dwarfed anything she had ever felt as a human being,
to know that there was no need any longer for pebble games.
Downstairs, someone was tuning a harmonium. Then the clanging of a
hammer tuning a tabla. Someone cleared his throat. And then there was
whistling and clapping and yipping and singing.