It was early evening the following day by the time they arrived at Rasheed’s house.
I“We’re in Deh-Mazang,” he said. They were outside, on the sidewalk.
He had her suitcase in one hand and was unlocking the wooden front gate with the other. “In the south and west part of the city. The zoo is nearby, and the university too.”
Mariam nodded. Already she had learned that, though she could understand him, she had to pay close attention when he spoke. She was unaccustomed to the Kabuli dialect of his Farsi, and to the underlying layer of Pashto accent, the language of his native Kandahar. He, on the other hand, seemed to have no trouble understanding her Herati Farsi.
Mariam quickly surveyed the narrow, unpaved road along which Rasheed’s house was situated. The houses on this road were crowded together and shared common walls, with small, walled yards in front buffering them from the street. Most of the homes had flat roofs and were made of burned brick, some of mud the same dusty color as the mountains that ringed the city. Gutters separated the sidewalk from the road on both sides and flowed with muddy water. Mariam saw small mounds of flyblown garbage littering the street here and there. Rasheed’s house had two stories. Mariam could see that it had once been blue.
When Rasheed opened the front gate, Mariam found herself in a small, unkempt yard where yellow grass struggled up in thin patches. Mariam saw an outhouse on the right, in a side yard, and, on the left, a well with a hand pump, a row of dying saplings. Near the well was a toolshed, and a bicycle leaning against the wall.
“Your father told me you like to fish,” Rasheed said as they were crossing the yard to the house. There was no backyard, Mariam saw. “There are valleys north of here. Rivers with lots of fish. Maybe I’ll take you someday.”
He unlocked the front door and let her into the house.
Rasheed’s house was much smaller than Jalil’s, but, compared to
Mariam and Nana’s kolba, it was a mansion.
There was a hallway, a living room downstairs, and a kitchen in which he showed her pots and pans and a pressure cooker and a kerosene ishtop. The living room had a pistachio green leather couch. It had a rip down its side that had been clumsily sewn together. The walls were bare. There was a table, two cane-seat chairs, two folding chairs, and, in the corner, a black, cast-iron stove.
Mariam stood in the middle of the living room, looking around. At the kolba, she could touch the ceiling with her fingertips. She could lie in her cot and tell the time of day by the angle of sunlight pouring through the window. She knew how far her door would open before its hinges creaked. She knew every splinter and crack in each of the thirty wooden floorboards. Now all those familiar things were gone. Nana was dead,
and she was here, in a strange city, separated from the life she’d known by valleys and chains of snow-capped mountains and entire deserts. She was in a stranger’s house, with all its different rooms and its smell of cigarette smoke, with its unfamiliar cupboards full of unfamiliar utensils, its heavy, dark green curtains, and a ceiling she knew she could not reach. The space of it suffocated Mariam. Pangs of longing bore into her, for Nana, for Mullah Faizullah, for her old life.
Then she was crying.
“What’s this crying about?” Rasheed said crossly. He reached into the pocket of his pants, uncurled Mariam’s fingers, and pushed a handkerchief into her palm. He lit himself a cigarette and leaned against the wall. He watched as Mariam pressed the handkerchief to her eyes.
“Done?” Mariam nodded. “Sure?”
“Yes.”
He took her by the elbow then and led her to the living-room window. “This window looks north,” he said, tapping the glass with the crooked
nail of his index finger. “That’s the Asmai mountain directly in front of us—see?—and, to the left, is the Ali Abad mountain. The university is at the foot of it. Behind us, east, you can’t see from here, is the Shir Darwaza mountain. Every day, at noon, they shoot a cannon from it.
Stop your crying, now. I mean it.” Mariam dabbed at her eyes.
“That’s one thing I can’t stand,” he said, scowling, “the sound of a woman crying. I’m sorry. I have no patience for it.”
“I want to go home,” Mariam said.
Rasheed sighed irritably. A puff of his smoky breath hit Mariam’s face. “I won’t take that personally. This time.”
Again, he took her by the elbow, and led her upstairs.
There was a narrow, dimly lit hallway there and two bedrooms. The door to the bigger one was ajar. Through it Mariam could see that it, like the rest of the house, was sparsely furnished: bed in the corner, with a brown blanket and a pillow, a closet, a dresser. The walls were bare except for a small mirror. Rasheed closed the door.
“This is my room.”
He said she could take the guest room. “I hope you don’t mind. I’m accustomed to sleeping alone.”
Mariam didn’t tell him how relieved she was, at least about this.
The room that was to be Mariam’s was much smaller than the room she’d stayed in at Jalil’s house. It had a bed, an old, gray-brown dresser, a small closet. The window looked into the yard and, beyond that, the street below. Rasheed put her suitcase in a corner.
Mariam sat on the bed.
“You didn’t notice,” he said. He was standing in the doorway, stooping a little to fit. “Look on the windowsill. You know what kind they are? I put them there before leaving for Herat.”
Only now Mariam saw a basket on the sill. White tuberoses spilled from its sides.
“You like them? They please you?” “Yes.”
“You can thank me then.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry. Tashakor—”
“You’re shaking. Maybe I scare you. Do I scare you? Are you frightened of me?”
Mariam was not looking at him, but she could hear something slyly playful in these questions, like a needling. She quickly shook her head in what she recognized as her first lie in their marriage.
“No? That’s good, then. Good for you. Well, this is your home now.
You’re going to like it here. You’ll see. Did I tell you we have electricity? Most days and every night?”
He made as if to leave. At the door, he paused, took a long drag, crinkled his eyes against the smoke. Mariam thought he was going to say something. But he didn’t. He closed the door, left her alone with her suitcase and her flowers.
