Jtvamadan came in the fall that year, 1974. For the first time in her life, Mariam saw how the
sighting of the new crescent moon could transform an entire city, alter its rhythm and mood. She
noticed a drowsy hush overtaking Kabul Traffic became languid, scant, even quiet. Shops emptied.
Restaurants turned off their lights, closed their doors. Mariam saw no smokers on the streets, no cups
of tea steaming from window ledges. And atifiar, when the sun dipped in the west and the cannon
fired from the Shir Darwaza mountain, the city broke its fast, and so did Mariam, with bread and a
date, tasting for the first time in her fifteen years the sweetness of sharing in a communal experience.
Except for a handful of days, Rasheed didn't observe the fast. The few times he did, he came home in
a sour mood. Hunger made him curt, irritable, impatient. One night, Mariam was a few minutes late
with dinner, and he started eating bread with radishes. Even after Mariam put the rice and the lamb
and okraqurma in front of him, he wouldn't touch it. He said nothing, and went on chewing the bread,
his temples working, the vein on his forehead, full and angry. He went on chewing and staring ahead,
and when Mariam spoke to him he looked at her without seeing her face and put another piece of
bread into his mouth.
Mariam was relieved when Ramadan ended.
Back at thekolba, on the first of three days of Eid-ul-Fitr celebration that followed Ramadan, Jalil
would visit Mariam and Nana. Dressed in suit and tie, he would come bearing Eid presents. One
year, he gave Mariam a wool scarf. The three of them would sit for tea and then Jalil would excuse
himself "Off to celebrate Eid with his real family," Nana would say as he crossed the stream and
waved-Mullah Faizullah would come too. He would bring Mariam chocolate candy wrapped in foil,
a basketful of dyed boiled eggs, cookies. After he was gone, Mariam would climb one of the willows
with her treats. Perched on a high branch, she would eat Mullah Faizullah's chocolates and drop the
foil wrappers until they lay scattered about the trunk of the tree like silver blossoms. When the
chocolate was gone, she would start in on the cookies, and, with a pencil, she would draw faces on
the eggs he had brought her now. But there was little pleasure in this for her. Mariam dreaded Eid,
this time of hospitality and ceremony, when families dressed in their best and visited each other. She
would imagine the air in Herat crackling with merriness, and high-spirited, bright-eyed people
showering each other with endearments and goodwill. A forlornness would descend on her like a
shroud then and would lift only when Eid had passed.
This year, for the first time, Mariam saw with her eyes the Eid of her childhood imaginings.
Rasheed and she took to the streets. Mariam had never walked amid such liveliness. Undaunted by
the chilly weather, families had flooded the city on their frenetic rounds to visit relatives. On their
own street, Mariam saw Fariba and her son Noor, who was dressed in a suit. Fariba, wearing a white
scarf, walked beside a small-boned, shy-looking man with eyeglasses. Her older son was there too-
Mariam somehow remembered Fariba saying his name, Ahmad, at the tandoor that first time. He had deep-set, brooding eyes, and his face was more thoughtful, more solemn, than his younger brother's, a
face as suggestive of early maturity as his brother's was of lingering boyishness. Around Ahmad's
neck was a glittering allah pendant.
Fariba must have recognized her, walking in burqa beside Rasheed. She waved, and called
out,"Eidmubarak!"
From inside the burqa, Mariam gave her a ghost of a nod.
"So you know that woman, the teacher's wife?" Rasheed said
Mariam said she didn't.
"Best you stay away. She's a nosy gossiper, that one. And the husband fancies himself some kind of
educated intellectual But he's a mouse. Look at him. Doesn't he look like a mouse?"
They went to Shar-e-Nau, where kids romped about in new shirts and beaded, brightly colored vests
and compared Eid gifts. Women brandished platters of sweets. Mariam saw festive lanterns hanging
from shopwindows, heard music blaring from loudspeakers. Strangers called out"Eidmubarak" to her
as they passed.
That night they went toChaman, and, standing behind Rasheed, Mariam watched fireworks light up
the sky, in flashes of green, pink, and yellow. She missed sitting with Mullah Faizullah outside
thekolba, watching the fireworks explode over Herat in the distance, the sudden bursts of color
reflected in her tutor's soft, cataract-riddled eyes. But, mostly, she missed Nana. Mariam wished her
mother were alive to see this. To seeher, amid all of it. To see at last that contentment and beauty
were not unattainable things. Even for the likes of them.
* * *
They had Eid visitors at the house. They were all men, friends of Rasheed's. When a knock came,
Mariam knew to go upstairs to her room and close the door. She stayed there, as the men sipped tea
downstairs with Rasheed, smoked, chatted. Rasheed had told Mariam that she was not to come down
until the visitors had left
Mariam didn't mind. In truth, she was even flattered. Rasheed saw sanctity in what they had together.
Her honor, hernamoos, was something worth guarding to him. She felt prized by his protectiveness.
Treasured and significant.
On the third and last day of Eid, Rasheed went to visit some friends. Mariam, who'd had a queasy
stomach all night, boiled some water and made herself a cup of green tea sprinkled with crushed
cardamom. In the living room, she took in the aftermath of the previous night's Eid visits: the
overturned cups, the half-chewed pumpkin seeds stashed between mattresses, the plates crusted with
the outline of last night's meal. Mariam set about cleaning up the mess, marveling at how energetically
lazy men could be.
She didn't mean to go into Rasheed's room. But the cleaning took her from the living room to the stairs, and then to the hallway upstairs and to his door, and, the next thing she knew, she was in his
room for the first time, sitting on his bed, feeling like a trespasser.
She took in the heavy, green drapes, the pairs of polished shoes lined up neatly along the wall, the
closet door, where the gray paint had chipped and showed the wood beneath. She spotted a pack of
cigarettes atop the dresser beside his bed. She put one between her lips and stood before the small
oval mirror on the wall. She puffed air into the mirror and made ash-tapping motions. She put it back.
She could never manage the seamless grace with which Kabuli women smoked. On her, it looked
coarse, ridiculous.
Guiltily, she slid open the top drawer of his dresser.
She saw the gun first. It was black, with a wooden grip and a short muzzle. Mariam made sure to
memorize which way it was facing before she picked it up. She turned it over in her hands. It was
much heavier than it looked. The grip felt smooth in her hand, and the muzzle was cold. It was
disquieting to her that Rasheed owned something whose sole purpose was to kill another person. But
surely he kept it for their safety. Her safety.
Beneath the gun were several magazines with curling corners. Mariam opened one. Something inside
her dropped. Her mouth gaped of its own will.
On every page were women, beautiful women, who wore no shirts, no trousers, no socks or
underpants. They wore nothing at all. They lay in beds amid tumbled sheets and gazed back at Mariam
with half-lidded eyes. In most of the pictures, their legs were apart, and Mariam had a full view of the
dark place between. In some, the women were prostrated as if-God forbid this thought-insujda for
prayer. They looked back over their shoulders with a look of bored contempt.
Mariam quickly put the magazine back where she'd found it. She felt drugged. Who were these
women? How could they allow themselves to be photographed this way? Her stomach revolted with
distaste. Was this what he did then, those nights that he did not visit her room? Had she been a
disappointment to him in this particular regard? And what about all his talk of honor and propriety,
his disapproval of the female customers, who, after all, were only showing him their feet to get fitted
for shoes?A woman's face, he'd said,is her husband's business only. Surely the women on these pages
had husbands, some of them must. At the least, they had brothers. If so, why did Rasheed insist thatshe
cover when he thought nothing of looking at the private areas of other men's wives and sisters?
Mariam sat on his bed, embarrassed and confused She cupped her face with her hands and closed
her eyes. She breathed and breathed until she felt calmer.
Slowly, an explanation presented itself He was a man, after all, living alone for years before she
had moved in. His needs differed from hers. For her, all these months later, their coupling was still an
exercise in tolerating pain. His appetite, on the other hand, was fierce, sometimes bordering on the
violent. The way he pinned her down, his hard squeezes at her breasts, how furiously his hips
worked. He was a man. All those years without a woman. Could she fault him for being the way God
had created him?Mariam knew that she could never talk to him about this. It was unmentionable. But was it
unforgivable? She only had to think of the other man in her life. Jalil, a husband of three and father of
nine at the time, having relations with Nana out of wedlock. Which was worse, Rasheed's magazine
or what Jalil had done? And what entitled her anyway, a villager, aharami, to pass judgment?
Mariam tried the bottom drawer of the dresser.
It was there that she found a picture of the boy, Yunus. It was black-and-white. He looked four,
maybe five. He was wearing a striped shirt and a bow tie. He was a handsome little boy, with a
slender nose, brown hair, and dark, slightly sunken eyes. He looked distracted, as though something
had caught his eye just as the camera had flashed.
Beneath that, Mariam found another photo, also black-and-white, this one slightly more grainy. It
was of a seated woman and, behind her, a thinner, younger Rasheed, with black hair. The woman was
beautiful. Not as beautiful as the women in the magazine, perhaps, but beautiful. Certainly more
beautiful than her, Mariam. She had a delicate chin and long, black hair parted in the center. High
cheekbones and a gentle forehead. Mariam pictured her own face, her thin lips and long chin, and felt
a flicker of jealousy.
She looked at this photo for a long time. There was something vaguely unsettling about the way
Rasheed seemed to loom over the woman. His hands on her shoulders. His savoring, tight-lipped
smile and her unsmiling, sullen face. The way her body tilted forward subtly, as though she were
trying to wriggle free of his hands.
Mariam put everything back where she'd found it.
Later, as she was doing laundry, she regretted that she had sneaked around in his room. For what?
What thing of substance had she learned about him? That he owned a gun, that he was a man with the
needs of a man? And she shouldn't have stared at the photo of him and his wife for as long as she had.
Her eyes had read meaning into what was random body posture captured in a single moment of time.
What Mariam felt now, as the loaded clotheslines bounced heavily before her, was sorrow for
Rasheed. He too had had a hard life, a life marked by loss and sad turns of fate. Her thoughts returned
to his boy Yunus, who had once built snowmen in this yard, whose feet had pounded these same
stairs. The lake had snatched him from Rasheed, swallowed him up, just as a whale had swallowed
the boy's namesake prophet in the Koran. It pained Mariam-it pained her considerably-to picture
Rasheed panic-stricken and helpless, pacing the banks of the lake and pleading with it to spit his son
back onto dry land. And she felt for the first time a kinship with her husband. She told herself that they
would make good companions after all.