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.
6.
T hey buried Nana in a corner of the cemetery in Gul Daman. Mariam stood beside Bibi jo, with the women, as Mullah Faizullah
recited prayers at the graveside and the men lowered Nana’s shrouded body into the ground.
Afterward, Jalil walked Mariam to the kolba, where, in front of the villagers who accompanied them, he made a great show of tending to Mariam. He collected a few of her
things, put them in a suitcase. He sat beside her cot, where she lay down, and fanned her face. He stroked her forehead, and,
with a woebegone expression on his face, asked if she needed anything? anything?— he said it like that, twice.
“I want Mullah Faizullah,” Mariam said.
“Of course. He’s outside. I’ll get him for you.”
It was when Mullah Faizullah’s slight, stooping figure appeared in the kolba ’s doorway that Mariam cried for the first time that day.
“Oh, Mariam jo.”
He sat next to her and cupped her face in his hands. “You go on and cry, Mariam jo. Go on. There is no shame in it. But remember,
my girl, what the Koran says, ‘Blessed is He in Whose hand is the kingdom, and He Who has power over all things, Who created
death and life that He may try you.’ The Koran speaks the truth, my girl. Behind every trial and every sorrow that He makes
us shoulder, God has a reason.”
But Mariam could not hear comfort in God’s words. Not that day. Not then. All she could hear was Nana saying, I’ll die if you go. I’ll just die. All she could do was cry and cry and let her tears fall on the spotted, paper-thin skin of Mullah Faizullah’s hands.
ON THE RIDE to his house, Jalil sat in the backseat of his car with Mariam, his arm draped over her shoulder.
“You can stay with me, Mariam jo,” he said. “I’ve asked them already to clean a room for you. It’s upstairs. You’ll like it,
I think. You’ll have a view of the garden.”
For the first time, Mariam could hear him with Nana’s ears. She could hear so clearly now the insincerity that had always
lurked beneath, the hollow, false assurances. She could not bring herself to look at him.
When the car stopped before Jalil’s house, the driver opened the door for them and carried Mariam’s suitcase. Jalil guided
her, one palm cupped around each of her shoulders, through the same gates outside of which, two days before, Mariam had slept
on the sidewalk waiting for him. Two days before—when Mariam could think of nothing in the world she wanted more than to walk
in this garden with Jalil—felt like another lifetime. How could her life have turned upside down so quickly, Mariam asked
herself. She kept her gaze to the ground, on her feet, stepping on the gray stone path.