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 fin 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 garis, 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.
In the morning, she was shaken awake. Mariam saw that during the night someone had covered her with a blanket.
It was the driver shaking her shoulder.
“This is enough. You’ve made a scene. Bas. It’s time to go.” Mariam sat up and rubbed her eyes. Her back and neck were sore.
“I’m going to wait for him.”
“Look at me,” he said. “Jalil Khan says that I need to take you back now. Right now. Do you understand? Jalil Khan says so.”
He opened the rear passenger door to the car. “Bia. Come on,” he said softly.
“I want to see him,” Mariam said. Her eyes were tearing over.
The driver sighed. “Let me take you home. Come on, dokhtar jo. ” Mariam stood up and walked toward him. But then, at the last moment,
she changed direction and ran to the front gates. She felt the driver’s fingers fumbling for a grip at her shoulder. She shed him and burst through the open gates.
In the handful of seconds that she was in Jalil’s garden, Mariam’s eyes registered seeing a gleaming glass structure with plants inside it, grape vines clinging to wooden trellises, a fishpond built with gray blocks of stone, fruit trees, and bushes of brightly colored flowers everywhere. Her gaze skimmed over all of these things before they found a face, across the garden, in an upstairs window. The face was there for only an instant, a flash, but long enough. Long enough for Mariam to see the eyes widen, the mouth open. Then it snapped away from view. A hand appeared and frantically pulled at a cord. The curtains fell shut.
Then a pair of hands buried into her armpits and she was lifted off the ground. Mariam kicked. The pebbles spilled from her pocket. Mariam
kept kicking and crying as she was carried to the car and lowered onto the cold leather of the backseat.
THE DRIVER TALKED in a muted, consoling tone as he drove. Mariam did not hear him. All during the ride, as she bounced in the backseat, she cried. They were tears of grief, of anger, of disillusionment. But mainly tears of a deep, deep shame at how foolishly she had given herself over to Jalil, how she had fretted over what dress to wear, over the mismatching hijab, walking all the way here, refusing to leave, sleeping on the street like a stray dog. And she was ashamed of how she
had dismissed her mother’s stricken looks, her puffy eyes. Nana, who had warned her, who had been right all along.
Mariam kept thinking of his face in the upstairs window. He let her sleep on the street. On the street. Mariam cried lying down. She didn’t sit up, didn’t want to be seen. She imagined all of Herat knew this morning how she’d disgraced herself. She wished Mullah Faizullah were here so she could put her head on his lap and let him comfort her.
After a while, the road became bumpier and the nose of the car
pointed up. They were on the uphill road between Herat and Gul Daman.
What would she say to Nana, Mariam wondered. How would she apologize? How could she even face Nana now?
The car stopped and the driver helped her out. “I’ll walk you,” he said.
She let him guide her across the road and up the track. There was honeysuckle growing along the path, and milkweed too. Bees were buzzing over twinkling wildflowers. The driver took her hand and helped her cross the stream. Then he let go, and he was talking about how Herat’s famous one hundred and twenty days’ winds would start blowing soon, from midmorning to dusk, and how the sand flies would go on a feeding frenzy, and then suddenly he was standing in front of her, trying to cover her eyes, pushing her back the way they had come and saying, “Go back! No. Don’t look now. Turn around! Go back!”
But he wasn’t fast enough. Mariam saw. A gust of wind blew and parted the drooping branches of the weeping willow like a curtain, and Mariam caught a glimpse of what was beneath the tree: the straight-backed chair, overturned. The rope dropping from a high branch. Nana dangling at the end of it.
