M
ariam loved having visitors at the
kolba.
The village
arbab
and his gifts, Bibi jo and her aching hip and endless gossiping, and, of course, Mullah Faizullah. But there was no one, no
one, that Mariam longed to see more than Jalil.
The anxiety set in on Tuesday nights. Mariam would sleep poorly, fretting that some business entanglement would prevent Jalil
from coming on Thursday, that she would have to wait a whole other week to see him. On Wednesdays, she paced outside, around
the
kolba,
tossed chicken feed absentmindedly into the coop. She went for aimless walks, picking petals from flowers and batting at the
mosquitoes nibbling on her arms. Finally, on Thursdays, all she could do was sit against a wall, eyes glued to the stream,
and wait. If Jalil was running late, a terrible dread filled her bit by bit. Her knees would weaken, and she would have to
go somewhere and lie down.
Then Nana would call, “And there he is, your father. In all his glory.”
Mariam would leap to her feet when she spotted him hopping stones across the stream, all smiles and hearty waves. Mariam knew
that Nana was watching her, gauging her reaction, and it always took effort to stay in the doorway, to wait, to watch him
slowly make his way to her, to not run to him. She restrained herself, patiently watched him walk through the tall grass,
his suit jacket slung over his shoulder, the breeze lifting his red necktie.
When Jalil entered the clearing, he would throw his jacket on the tandoor and open his arms. Mariam would walk, then finally
run, to him, and he would catch her under the arms and toss her up high. Mariam would squeal.
Suspended in the air, Mariam would see Jalil’s upturned face below her, his wide, crooked smile, his widow’s peak, his cleft
chin—a perfect pocket for the tip of her pinkie—his teeth, the whitest in a town of rotting molars. She liked his trimmed
mustache, and she liked that no matter the weather he always wore a suit on his visits—dark brown, his favorite color, with
the white triangle of a handkerchief in the breast pocket—and cuff links too, and a tie, usually red, which he left loosened.
Mariam could see herself too, reflected in the brown of Jalil’s eyes: her hair billowing, her face blazing with excitement,
the sky behind her.
Nana said that one of these days he would miss, that she, Mariam, would slip through his fingers, hit the ground, and break
a bone. But Mariam did not believe that Jalil would drop her. She believed that she would always land safely into her father’s
clean, well-manicured hands.
They sat outside the
kolba,
in the shade, and Nana served them tea. Jalil and she acknowledged each other with an uneasy smile and a nod. Jalil never
brought up Nana’s rock throwing or her cursing.
Despite her rants against him when he wasn’t around, Nana was subdued and mannerly when Jalil visited. Her hair was always
washed. She brushed her teeth, wore her best
hijab
for him. She sat quietly on a chair across from him, hands folded on her lap. She did not look at him directly and never used
coarse language around him. When she laughed, she covered her mouth with a fist to hide the bad tooth.
Nana asked about his businesses. And his wives too. When she told him that she had heard, through Bibi jo, that his youngest
wife, Nargis, was expecting her third child, Jalil smiled courteously and nodded.
“Well. You must be happy,” Nana said. “How many is that for you, now? Ten, is it,
mashallah
? Ten?”
Jalil said yes, ten.
“Eleven, if you count Mariam, of course.”
Later, after Jalil went home, Mariam and Nana had a small fight about this. Mariam said she had tricked him.
After tea with Nana, Mariam and Jalil always went fishing in the stream. He showed her how to cast her line, how to reel in
the trout. He taught her the proper way to gut a trout, to clean it, to lift the meat off the bone in one motion. He drew
pictures for her as they waited for a strike, showed her how to draw an elephant in one stroke without ever lifting the pen
off the paper. He taught her rhymes. Together they sang:
Lili lili birdbath,
Sitting on a dirt path,
Minnow sat on the rim and drank,
Slipped, and in the water she sank.
Jalil brought clippings from Herat’s newspaper,
Ittifaq-i
Islam
, and read from them to her. He was Mariam’s link, her proof that there existed a world at large, beyond the
kolba
, beyond Gul Daman and Herat too, a world of presidents with unpronounceable names, and trains and museums and soccer, and
rockets that orbited the earth and landed on the moon, and, every Thursday, Jalil brought a piece of that world with him to
the
kolba
.
He was the one who told her in the summer of 1973, when Mariam was fourteen, that King Zahir Shah, who had ruled from Kabul
for forty years, had been overthrown in a bloodless coup.
“His cousin Daoud Khan did it while the king was in Italy getting medical treatment. You remember Daoud Khan, right? I told
you about him. He was prime minister in Kabul when you were born. Anyway, Afghanistan is no longer a monarchy, Mariam. You
see, it’s a republic now, and Daoud Khan is the president. There are rumors that the socialists in Kabul helped him take power.
Not that he’s a socialist himself, mind you, but that they helped him. That’s the rumor anyway.”
Mariam asked him what a socialist was and Jalil began to explain, but Mariam barely heard him.
“Are you listening?”
“I am.”
He saw her looking at the bulge in his coat’s side pocket. “Ah. Of course. Well. Here, then. Without further ado . . .”
He fished a small box from his pocket and gave it to her. He did this from time to time, bring her small presents. A carnelian
bracelet cuff one time, a choker with lapis lazuli beads another. That day, Mariam opened the box and found a leaf-shaped
pendant, tiny coins etched with moons and stars hanging from it.
“Try it on, Mariam jo.”
She did. “What do you think?”
Jalil beamed. “I think you look like a queen.”
After he left, Nana saw the pendant around Mariam’s neck.
“Nomad jewelry,” she said. “I’ve seen them make it. They melt the coins people throw at them and make jewelry. Let’s see him
bring you gold next time, your precious father. Let’s see him.”
When it was time for Jalil to leave, Mariam always stood in the doorway and watched him exit the clearing, deflated at the
thought of the week that stood, like an immense, immovable object, between her and his next visit. Mariam always held her
breath as she watched him go. She held her breath and, in her head, counted seconds. She pretended that for each second that
she didn’t breathe, God would grant her another day with Jalil.
At night, Mariam lay in her cot and wondered what his house in Herat was like. She wondered what it would be like to live
with him, to see him every day. She pictured herself handing him a towel as he shaved, telling him when he nicked himself.
She would brew tea for him. She would sew on his missing buttons. They would take walks in Herat together, in the vaulted
bazaar where Jalil said you could find anything you wanted. They would ride in his car, and people would point and say, “There
goes Jalil Khan with his daughter.” He would show her the famed tree that had a poet buried beneath it.
One day soon, Mariam decided, she would tell Jalil these things. And when he heard, when he saw how much she missed him when
he was gone, he would surely take her with him. He would bring her to Herat, to live in his house, just like his other children.
I
know what I want,” Mariam said to Jalil.
It was the spring of 1974, the year Mariam turned fifteen. The three of them were sitting outside the
kolba,
in a patch of shade thrown by the willows, on folding chairs arranged in a triangle.
“For my birthday . . . I know what I want.”
“You do?” said Jalil, smiling encouragingly.
Two weeks before, at Mariam’s prodding, Jalil had let on that an American film was playing at his cinema. It was a special
kind of film, what he’d called a cartoon. The entire film was a series of drawings, he said, thousands of them, so that when
they were made into a film and projected onto a screen you had the illusion that the drawings were moving. Jalil said the
film told the story of an old, childless toymaker who is lonely and desperately wants a son. So he carves a puppet, a boy,
who magically comes to life. Mariam had asked him to tell her more, and Jalil said that the old man and his puppet had all
sorts of adventures, that there was a place called Pleasure Island, and bad boys who turned into donkeys. They even got swallowed
by a whale at the end, the puppet and his father. Mariam had told Mullah Faizullah all about this film.
“I want you to take me to your cinema,” Mariam said now. “I want to see the cartoon. I want to see the puppet boy.”
With this, Mariam sensed a shift in the atmosphere. Her parents stirred in their seats. Mariam could feel them exchanging
looks.
“That’s not a good idea,” said Nana. Her voice was calm, had the controlled, polite tone she used around Jalil, but Mariam
could feel her hard, accusing glare.
Jalil shifted on his chair. He coughed, cleared his throat.
“You know,” he said, “the picture quality isn’t that good. Neither is the sound. And the projector’s been malfunctioning recently.
Maybe your mother is right. Maybe you can think of another present, Mariam jo.”
“
Aneh,”
Nana said. “You see? Your father agrees.”
BUT LATER, at the stream, Mariam said, “Take me.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Jalil said. “I’ll send someone to pick you up and take you. I’ll make sure they get you a good seat
and all the candy you want.”
“
Nay.
I want
you
to take me.”
“Mariam jo—”
“And I want you to invite my brothers and sisters too. I want to meet them. I want us all to go, together. It’s what I want.”
Jalil sighed. He was looking away, toward the mountains.
Mariam remembered him telling her that on the screen a human face looked as big as a house, that when a car crashed up there
you felt the metal twisting in your bones. She pictured herself sitting in the private balcony seats, lapping at ice cream,
alongside her siblings and Jalil. “It’s what I want,” she said.
Jalil looked at her with a forlorn expression.
“Tomorrow. At noon. I’ll meet you at this very spot. All right? Tomorrow?”
“Come here,” he said. He hunkered down, pulled her to him, and held her for a long, long time.
AT FIRST, Nana paced around the
kolba,
clenching and unclenching her fists.
“Of all the daughters I could have had, why did God give me an ungrateful one like you? Everything I endured for you! How
dare you! How dare you abandon me like this, you treacherous little
harami
!”
Then she mocked.
“What a stupid girl you are! You think you matter to him, that you’re wanted in his house? You think you’re a daughter to
him? That he’s going to take you in? Let me tell you something. A man’s heart is a wretched, wretched thing, Mariam. It isn’t
like a mother’s womb. It won’t bleed, it won’t stretch to make room for you. I’m the only one who loves you. I’m all you have
in this world, Mariam, and when I’m gone you’ll have nothing. You’ll have nothing. You
are
nothing!”
Then she tried guilt.
“I’ll die if you go. The
jinn
will come, and I’ll have one of my fits. You’ll see, I’ll swallow my tongue and die. Don’t leave me, Mariam jo. Please stay.
I’ll die if you go.”
Mariam said nothing.
“You know I love you, Mariam jo.”
Mariam said she was going for a walk.
She feared she might say hurtful things if she stayed: that she knew the
jinn
was a lie, that Jalil had told her that what Nana had was a disease with a name and that pills could make it better. She might
have asked Nana why she refused to see Jalil’s doctors, as he had insisted she do, why she wouldn’t take the pills he’d bought
for her. If she could articulate it, she might have said to Nana that she was tired of being an instrument, of being lied
to, laid claim to, used. That she was sick of Nana twisting the truths of their life and making her, Mariam, another of her
grievances against the world.
You’re
afraid, Nana,
she might have said.
You’re
afraid that
I might find the happiness you never had. And you
don’t
want me
to be happy. You
don’t
want a good life for me.
You’re
the one with
the wretched heart.
THERE WAS A LOOKOUT, on the edge of the clearing, where Mariam liked to go. She sat there now, on dry, warm grass. Herat was
visible from here, spread below her like a child’s board game: the Women’s Garden to the north of the city, Char-suq Bazaar
and the ruins of Alexander the Great’s old citadel to the south. She could make out the minarets in the distance, like the
dusty fingers of giants, and the streets that she imagined were milling with people, carts, mules. She saw swallows swooping
and circling overhead. She was envious of these birds. They had been to Herat. They had flown over its mosques, its bazaars.
Maybe they had landed on the walls of Jalil’s home, on the front steps of his cinema.
She picked up ten pebbles and arranged them vertically, in three columns. This was a game that she played privately from time
to time when Nana wasn’t looking. She put four pebbles in the first column, for Khadija’s children, three for Afsoon’s, and
three in the third column for Nargis’s children. Then she added a fourth column. A solitary, eleventh pebble.
THE NEXT MORNING, Mariam wore a cream-colored dress that fell to her knees, cotton trousers, and a green
hijab
over her hair. She agonized a bit over the
hijab,
its being green and not matching the dress, but it would have to do—moths had eaten holes into her white one.
She checked the clock. It was an old hand-wound clock with black numbers on a mint green face, a present from Mullah Faizullah.
It was nine o’clock. She wondered where Nana was. She thought about going outside and looking for her, but she dreaded the
confrontation, the aggrieved looks. Nana would accuse her of betrayal. She would mock her for her mistaken ambitions.
Mariam sat down. She tried to make time pass by drawing an elephant in one stroke, the way Jalil had shown her, over and over.
She became stiff from all the sitting but wouldn’t lie down for fear that her dress would wrinkle.
When the hands finally showed eleven-thirty, Mariam pocketed the eleven pebbles and went outside. On her way to the stream,
she saw Nana sitting on a chair, in the shade, beneath the domed roof of a weeping willow. Mariam couldn’t tell whether Nana
saw her or not.
At the stream, Mariam waited by the spot they had agreed on the day before. In the sky, a few gray, cauliflower-shaped clouds
drifted by. Jalil had taught her that gray clouds got their color by being so dense that their top parts absorbed the sunlight
and cast their own shadow along the base.
That’s
what you see, Mariam jo,
he had said,
the dark in their underbelly.
Some time passed.
Mariam went back to the
kolba.
This time, she walked around the west-facing periphery of the clearing so she wouldn’t have to pass by Nana. She checked the
clock. It was almost one o’clock.
He’s
a businessman,
Mariam thought.
Something has come
up.
She went back to the stream and waited awhile longer. Blackbirds circled overhead, dipped into the grass somewhere. She watched
a caterpillar inching along the foot of an immature thistle.
She waited until her legs were stiff. This time, she did not go back to the
kolba.
She rolled up the legs of her trousers to the knees, crossed the stream, and, for the first time in her life, headed down
the hill for Herat.
NANA WAS WRONG about Herat too. No one pointed. No one laughed. Mariam walked along noisy, crowded, cypress-lined boulevards,
amid a steady stream of pedestrians, bicycle riders, and mule-drawn
gari
s, and no one threw a rock at her. No one called her a
harami.
Hardly anyone even looked at her. She was, unexpectedly, marvelously, an ordinary person here.
For a while, Mariam stood by an oval-shaped pool in the center of a big park where pebble paths crisscrossed. With wonder,
she ran her fingers over the beautiful marble horses that stood along the edge of the pool and gazed down at the water with
opaque eyes. She spied on a cluster of boys who were setting sail to paper ships. Mariam saw flowers everywhere, tulips, lilies,
petunias, their petals awash in sunlight. People walked along the paths, sat on benches and sipped tea.
Mariam could hardly believe that she was here. Her heart was battering with excitement. She wished Mullah Faizullah could
see her now. How daring he would find her. How brave! She gave herself over to the new life that awaited her in this city,
a life with a father, with sisters and brothers, a life in which she would love and be loved back, without reservation or
agenda, without shame.
Sprightly, she walked back to the wide thoroughfare near the park. She passed old vendors with leathery faces sitting under
the shade of plane trees, gazing at her impassively behind pyramids of cherries and mounds of grapes.
Barefoot boys gave chase to cars and buses, waving bags of quinces. Mariam stood at a street corner and watched the passersby,
unable to understand how they could be so indifferent to the marvels around them.
After a while, she worked up the nerve to ask the elderly owner of a horse-drawn
gari
if he knew where Jalil, the cinema’s owner, lived. The old man had plump cheeks and wore a rainbow-striped
chapan.
“You’re not from Herat, are you?” he said companionably. “Everyone knows where Jalil Khan lives.”
“Can you point me?”
He opened a foil-wrapped toffee and said, “Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Climb on. I’ll take you.”
“I can’t pay you. I don’t have any money.”
He gave her the toffee. He said he hadn’t had a ride in two hours and he was planning on going home anyway. Jalil’s house
was on the way.
Mariam climbed onto the
gari.
They rode in silence, side by side. On the way there, Mariam saw herb shops, and open-fronted cubbyholes where shoppers bought
oranges and pears, books, shawls, even falcons. Children played marbles in circles drawn in dust. Outside teahouses, on carpet-covered
wooden platforms, men drank tea and smoked tobacco from hookahs.
The old man turned onto a wide, conifer-lined street. He brought his horse to a stop at the midway point.
“There. Looks like you’re in luck,
dokhtar jo.
That’s his car.”
Mariam hopped down. He smiled and rode on.
MARIAM HAD NEVER before touched a car. She ran her fingers along the hood of Jalil’s car, which was black, shiny, with glittering
wheels in which Mariam saw a flattened, widened version of herself. The seats were made of white leather. Behind the steering
wheel, Mariam saw round glass panels with needles behind them.
For a moment, Mariam heard Nana’s voice in her head, mocking, dousing the deep-seated glow of her hopes. With shaky legs,
Mariam approached the front door of the house. She put her hands on the walls. They were so tall, so foreboding, Jalil’s walls.
She had to crane her neck to see where the tops of cypress trees protruded over them from the other side. The treetops swayed
in the breeze, and she imagined they were nodding their welcome to her. Mariam steadied herself against the waves of dismay
passing through her.
A barefoot young woman opened the door. She had a tattoo under her lower lip.
“I’m here to see Jalil Khan. I’m Mariam. His daughter.”
A look of confusion crossed the girl’s face. Then, a flash of recognition. There was a faint smile on her lips now, and an
air of eagerness about her, of anticipation. “Wait here,” the girl said quickly.
She closed the door.
A few minutes passed. Then a man opened the door. He was tall and square-shouldered, with sleepy-looking eyes and a calm face.
“I’m Jalil Khan’s chauffeur,” he said, not unkindly.
“His what?”
“His driver. Jalil Khan is not here.”
“I see his car,” Mariam said.
“He’s away on urgent business.”
“When will he be back?”
“He didn’t say.”
Mariam said she would wait.
He closed the gates. Mariam sat, and drew her knees to her chest. It was early evening already, and she was getting hungry.
She ate the
gari
driver’s toffee. A while later, the driver came out again.
“You need to go home now,” he said. “It’ll be dark in less than an hour.”
“I’m used to the dark.”
“It’ll get cold too. Why don’t you let me drive you home? I’ll tell him you were here.”
Mariam only looked at him.
“I’ll take you to a hotel, then. You can sleep comfortably there. We’ll see what we can do in the morning.”
“Let me in the house.”
“I’ve been instructed not to. Look, no one knows when he’s coming back. It could be days.”
Mariam crossed her arms.
The driver sighed and looked at her with gentle reproach.
Over the years, Mariam would have ample occasion to think about how things might have turned out if she had let the driver
take her back to the
kolba.
But she didn’t. She spent the night outside Jalil’s house. She watched the sky darken, the shadows engulf the neighboring
house-fronts. The tattooed girl brought her some bread and a plate of rice, which Mariam said she didn’t want. The girl left
it near Mariam. From time to time, Mariam heard footsteps down the street, doors swinging open, muffled greetings. Electric
lights came on, and windows glowed dimly. Dogs barked. When she could no longer resist the hunger, Mariam ate the plate of
rice and the bread. Then she listened to the crickets chirping from gardens. Overhead, clouds slid past a pale moon.