T
o Jalil and his wives, I was a pokeroot. A mugwort.
You too. And you weren’t even born yet.”
“What’s a mugwort?” Mariam asked.
“A weed,” Nana said. “Something you rip out and toss aside.”
Mariam frowned internally. Jalil didn’t treat her as a weed. He never had. But Mariam thought it wise to suppress this protest.
“Unlike weeds, I had to be replanted, you see, given food and water. On account of you. That was the deal Jalil made with
his family.”
Nana said she had refused to live in Herat.
“For what? To watch him drive his
kinchini
wives around town all day?”
She said she wouldn’t live in her father’s empty house either, in the village of Gul Daman, which sat on a steep hill two
kilometers north of Herat. She said she wanted to live somewhere removed, detached, where neighbors wouldn’t stare at her
belly, point at her, snicker, or, worse yet, assault her with insincere kindnesses.
“And, believe me,” Nana said, “it was a relief to your father having me out of sight. It suited him just fine.”
It was Muhsin, Jalil’s eldest son by his first wife, Khadija, who suggested the clearing. It was on the outskirts of Gul Daman.
To get to it, one took a rutted, uphill dirt track that branched off the main road between Herat and Gul Daman. The track
was flanked on either side by knee-high grass and speckles of white and bright yellow flowers. The track snaked uphill and
led to a flat field where poplars and cottonwoods soared and wild bushes grew in clusters. From up there, one could make out
the tips of the rusted blades of Gul Daman’s windmill, on the left, and, on the right, all of Herat spread below. The path
ended perpendicular to a wide, trout-filled stream, which rolled down from the Safid-koh mountains surrounding Gul Daman.
Two hundred yards upstream, toward the mountains, there was a circular grove of weeping willow trees. In the center, in the
shade of the willows, was the clearing.
Jalil went there to have a look. When he came back, Nana said, he sounded like a warden bragging about the clean walls and
shiny floors of his prison.
“And so, your father built us this rathole.”
NANA HAD ALMOST married once, when she was fifteen. The suitor had been a boy from Shindand, a young parakeet seller. Mariam
knew the story from Nana herself, and, though Nana dismissed the episode, Mariam could tell by the wistful light in her eyes
that she had been happy. Perhaps for the only time in her life, during those days leading up to her wedding, Nana had been
genuinely happy.
As Nana told the story, Mariam sat on her lap and pictured her mother being fitted for a wedding dress. She imagined her on
horseback, smiling shyly behind a veiled green gown, her palms painted red with henna, her hair parted with silver dust, the
braids held together by tree sap. She saw musicians blowing the
shahnai
flute and banging on
dohol
drums, street children hooting and giving chase.
Then, a week before the wedding date, a
jinn
had entered Nana’s body. This required no description to Mariam. She had witnessed it enough times with her own eyes: Nana
collapsing suddenly, her body tightening, becoming rigid, her eyes rolling back, her arms and legs shaking as if something
were throttling her from the inside, the froth at the corners of her mouth, white, sometimes pink with blood. Then the drowsiness,
the frightening disorientation, the incoherent mumbling.
When the news reached Shindand, the parakeet seller’s family called off the wedding.
“They got spooked” was how Nana put it.
The wedding dress was stashed away. After that, there were no more suitors.
IN THE CLEARING, Jalil and two of his sons, Farhad and Muhsin, built the small kolba where Mariam would live the first fifteen
years of her life. They raised it with sun-dried bricks and plastered it with mud and handfuls of straw. It had two sleeping
cots, a wooden table, two straight-backed chairs, a window, and shelves nailed to the walls where Nana placed clay pots and
her beloved Chinese tea set. Jalil put in a new cast-iron stove for the winter and stacked logs of chopped wood behind the
kolba
. He added a tandoor outside for making bread and a chicken coop with a fence around it. He brought a few sheep, built them
a feeding trough. He had Farhad and Muhsin dig a deep hole a hundred yards outside the circle of willows and built an outhouse
over it.
Jalil could have hired laborers to build the
kolba,
Nana said, but he didn’t.
“His idea of penance.”
IN NANA’S ACCOUNT of the day that she gave birth to Mariam, no one came to help. It happened on a damp, overcast day in the
spring of 1959, she said, the twenty-sixth year of King Zahir Shah’s mostly uneventful forty-year reign. She said that Jalil
hadn’t bothered to summon a doctor, or even a midwife, even though he knew that the
jinn
might enter her body and cause her to have one of her fits in the act of delivering. She lay all alone on the
kolba
’s floor, a knife by her side, sweat drenching her body.
“When the pain got bad, I’d bite on a pillow and scream into it until I was hoarse. And still no one came to wipe my face
or give me a drink of water. And you, Mariam jo, you were in no rush. Almost two days you made me lay on that cold, hard floor.
I didn’t eat or sleep, all I did was push and pray that you would come out.”
“I’m sorry, Nana.”
“I cut the cord between us myself. That’s why I had a knife.”
“I’m sorry.”
Nana always gave a slow, burdened smile here, one of lingering recrimination or reluctant forgiveness, Mariam could never
tell. It did not occur to young Mariam to ponder the unfairness of apologizing for the manner of her own birth.
By the time it
did
occur to her, around the time she turned ten, Mariam no longer believed this story of her birth. She believed Jalil’s version,
that though he’d been away he’d arranged for Nana to be taken to a hospital in Herat where she had been tended to by a doctor.
She had lain on a clean, proper bed in a well-lit room. Jalil shook his head with sadness when Mariam told him about the knife.
Mariam also came to doubt that she had made her mother suffer for two full days.
“They told me it was all over within under an hour,” Jalil said. “You were a good daughter, Mariam jo. Even in birth you were
a good daughter.”
“He wasn’t even there!” Nana spat. “He was in Takht-e-Safar, horseback riding with his precious friends.”
When they informed him that he had a new daughter, Nana said, Jalil had shrugged, kept brushing his horse’s mane, and stayed
in Takht-e-Safar another two weeks.
“The truth is, he didn’t even hold you until you were a month old. And then only to look down once, comment on your longish
face, and hand you back to me.”
Mariam came to disbelieve this part of the story as well. Yes, Jalil admitted, he had been horseback riding in Takht-e-Safar,
but, when they gave him the news, he had not shrugged. He had hopped on the saddle and ridden back to Herat. He had bounced
her in his arms, run his thumb over her flaky eyebrows, and hummed a lullaby. Mariam did not picture Jalil saying that her
face was long, though it was true that it was long.
Nana said she was the one who’d picked the name Mariam because it had been the name of her mother. Jalil said he chose the
name because Mariam, the tuberose, was a lovely flower.
“Your favorite?” Mariam asked.
“Well, one of,” he said and smiled.
O
ne of Mariam’s earliest memories was the sound of a wheelbarrow’s squeaky iron wheels bouncing over rocks. The wheelbarrow
came once a month, filled with rice, flour, tea, sugar, cooking oil, soap, toothpaste. It was pushed by two of Mariam’s half
brothers, usually Muhsin and Ramin, sometimes Ramin and Farhad. Up the dirt track, over rocks and pebbles, around holes and
bushes, the boys took turns pushing until they reached the stream. There, the wheelbarrow had to be emptied and the items
hand-carried across the water. Then the boys would transfer the wheelbarrow across the stream and load it up again. Another
two hundred yards of pushing followed, this time through tall, dense grass and around thickets of shrubs. Frogs leaped out
of their way. The brothers waved mosquitoes from their sweaty faces.
“He has servants,” Mariam said. “He could send a servant.”
“His idea of penance,” Nana said.
The sound of the wheelbarrow drew Mariam and Nana outside. Mariam would always remember Nana the way she looked on Ration
Day: a tall, bony, barefoot woman leaning in the doorway, her lazy eye narrowed to a slit, arms crossed in a defiant and mocking
way. Her short-cropped, sunlit hair would be uncovered and uncombed. She would wear an ill-fitting gray shirt buttoned to
the throat. The pockets were filled with walnut-sized rocks.
The boys sat by the stream and waited as Mariam and Nana transferred the rations to the
kolba.
They knew better than to get any closer than thirty yards, even though Nana’s aim was poor and most of the rocks landed well
short of their targets. Nana yelled at the boys as she carried bags of rice inside, and called them names Mariam didn’t understand.
She cursed their mothers, made hateful faces at them. The boys never returned the insults.
Mariam felt sorry for the boys. How tired their arms and legs must be, she thought pityingly, pushing that heavy load. She
wished she were allowed to offer them water. But she said nothing, and if they waved at her she didn’t wave back. Once, to
please Nana, Mariam even yelled at Muhsin, told him he had a mouth shaped like a lizard’s ass—and was consumed later with
guilt, shame, and fear that they would tell Jalil. Nana, though, laughed so hard, her rotting front tooth in full display,
that Mariam thought she would lapse into one of her fits. She looked at Mariam when she was done and said, “You’re a good
daughter.”
When the barrow was empty, the boys scuffled back and pushed it away. Mariam would wait and watch them disappear into the
tall grass and flowering weeds.
“Are you coming?”
“Yes, Nana.”
“They laugh at you. They do. I hear them.”
“I’m coming.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Here I am.”
“You know I love you, Mariam jo.”
IN THE MORNINGS, they awoke to the distant bleating of sheep and the high-pitched toot of a flute as Gul Daman’s shepherds
led their flock to graze on the grassy hillside. Mariam and Nana milked the goats, fed the hens, and collected eggs. They
made bread together. Nana showed her how to knead dough, how to kindle the tandoor and slap the flattened dough onto its inner
walls. Nana taught her to sew too, and to cook rice and all the different toppings:
shalqam
stew with turnip, spinach
sabzi,
cauliflower with ginger.
Nana made no secret of her dislike for visitors—and, in fact, people in general—but she made exceptions for a select few.
And so there was Gul Daman’s leader, the village
arbab,
Habib Khan, a small-headed, bearded man with a large belly who came by once a month or so, tailed by a servant, who carried
a chicken, sometimes a pot of
kichiri
rice, or a basket of dyed eggs, for Mariam.
Then there was a rotund, old woman that Nana called Bibi jo, whose late husband had been a stone carver and friends with Nana’s
father. Bibi jo was invariably accompanied by one of her six brides and a grandchild or two. She limped and huffed her way
across the clearing and made a great show of rubbing her hip and lowering herself, with a pained sigh, onto the chair that
Nana pulled up for her. Bibi jo too always brought Mariam something, a box of
dishlemeh
candy, a basket of quinces. For Nana, she first brought complaints about her failing health, and then gossip from Herat and
Gul Daman, delivered at length and with gusto, as her daughter-in-law sat listening quietly and dutifully behind her.
But Mariam’s favorite, other than Jalil of course, was Mullah Faizullah, the elderly village Koran tutor, its
akhund.
He came by once or twice a week from Gul Daman to teach Mariam the five daily
namaz
prayers and tutor her in Koran recitation, just as he had taught Nana when she’d been a little girl. It was Mullah Faizullah
who had taught Mariam to read, who had patiently looked over her shoulder as her lips worked the words soundlessly, her index
finger lingering beneath each word, pressing until the nail bed went white, as though she could squeeze the meaning out of
the symbols. It was Mullah Faizullah who had held her hand, guided the pencil in it along the rise of each
alef,
the curve of each
beh,
the three dots of each
seh.
He was a gaunt, stooping old man with a toothless smile and a white beard that dropped to his navel. Usually, he came alone
to the
kolba,
though sometimes with his russet-haired son Hamza, who was a few years older than Mariam. When he showed up at the
kolba,
Mariam kissed Mullah Faizullah’s hand—which felt like kissing a set of twigs covered with a thin layer of skin—and he kissed
the top of her brow before they sat inside for the day’s lesson. After, the two of them sat outside the
kolba,
ate pine nuts and sipped green tea, watched the bulbul birds darting from tree to tree. Sometimes they went for walks among
the bronze fallen leaves and alder bushes, along the stream and toward the mountains. Mullah Faizullah twirled the beads of
his
tasbeh
rosary as they strolled, and, in his quivering voice, told Mariam stories of all the things he’d seen in his youth, like the
two-headed snake he’d found in Iran, on Isfahan’s Thirty-three Arch Bridge, or the watermelon he had split once outside the
Blue Mosque in Mazar, to find the seeds forming the words
Allah
on one half,
Akbar
on the other.
Mullah Faizullah admitted to Mariam that, at times, he did not understand the meaning of the Koran’s words. But he said he
liked the enchanting sounds the Arabic words made as they rolled off his tongue. He said they comforted him, eased his heart.
“They’ll comfort you too, Mariam jo,” he said. “You can summon them in your time of need, and they won’t fail you. God’s words
will never betray you, my girl.”
Mullah Faizullah listened to stories as well as he told them. When Mariam spoke, his attention never wavered. He nodded slowly
and smiled with a look of gratitude, as if he had been granted a coveted privilege. It was easy to tell Mullah Faizullah things
that Mariam didn’t dare tell Nana.
One day, as they were walking, Mariam told him that she wished she would be allowed to go to school.
“I mean a real school,
akhund
sahib. Like in a classroom. Like my father’s other kids.”
Mullah Faizullah stopped.
The week before, Bibi jo had brought news that Jalil’s daughters Saideh and Naheed were going to the Mehri School for girls
in Herat. Since then, thoughts of classrooms and teachers had rattled around Mariam’s head, images of notebooks with lined
pages, columns of numbers, and pens that made dark, heavy marks. She pictured herself in a classroom with other girls her
age. Mariam longed to place a ruler on a page and draw important-looking lines.
“Is that what you want?” Mullah Faizullah said, looking at her with his soft, watery eyes, his hands behind his stooping back,
the shadow of his turban falling on a patch of bristling buttercups.
“Yes.”
“And you want me to ask your mother for permission.”
Mariam smiled. Other than Jalil, she thought there was no one in the world who understood her better than her old tutor.
“Then what can I do? God, in His wisdom, has given us each weaknesses, and foremost among my many is that I am powerless to
refuse you, Mariam jo,” he said, tapping her cheek with one arthritic finger.
But later, when he broached Nana, she dropped the knife with which she was slicing onions. “What for?”
“If the girl wants to learn, let her, my dear. Let the girl have an education.”
“Learn? Learn what, Mullah sahib?” Nana said sharply. “What is there to learn?” She snapped her eyes toward Mariam.
Mariam looked down at her hands.
“What’s the sense schooling a girl like you? It’s like shining a spittoon. And you’ll learn nothing of value in those schools.
There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don’t teach it in school. Look at me.”
“You should not speak like this to her, my child,”
Mullah Faizullah said.
“Look at me.”
Mariam did.
“Only one skill. And it’s this:
tahamul.
Endure.”
“Endure what, Nana?”
“Oh, don’t you fret about
that,
” Nana said. “There won’t be any shortage of things.”
She went on to say how Jalil’s wives had called her an ugly, lowly stone carver’s daughter. How they’d made her wash laundry
outside in the cold until her face went numb and her fingertips burned.
“It’s our lot in life, Mariam. Women like us. We endure. It’s all we have. Do you understand? Besides, they’ll laugh at you
in school. They will. They’ll call you
harami.
They’ll say the most terrible things about you. I won’t have it.”
Mariam nodded.
“And no more talk about school. You’re all I have. I won’t lose you to them. Look at me. No more talk about school.”
“Be reasonable. Come now. If the girl wants—” Mullah Faizullah began.
“And you,
akhund
sahib, with all due respect, you should know better than to encourage these foolish ideas of hers. If you really care about
her, then you make her see that she belongs here at home with her mother. There is nothing out there for her. Nothing but
rejection and heartache. I know
, akhund
sahib. I
know.
”