Read A Thousand Splendid Suns for Free Online Page B

She was aware of the presence of people
     in the garden, murmuring, stepping aside, as she and Jalil walked past. She sensed the weight of eyes on her, looking down
     from the windows upstairs.
    Inside the house too, Mariam kept her head down. She walked on a maroon carpet with a repeating blue-and-yellow octagonal
     pattern, saw out of the corner of her eye the marble bases of statues, the lower halves of vases, the frayed ends of richly
     colored tapestries hanging from walls.
    The stairs she and Jalil took were wide and covered with a similar carpet, nailed down at the base of each step. At the top
     of the stairs, Jalil led her to the left, down another long, carpeted hallway. He stopped by one of the doors, opened it,
     and let her in.
    “Your sisters Niloufar and Atieh play here sometimes,” Jalil said, “but mostly we use this as a guest room. You’ll be comfortable
     here, I think. It’s nice, isn’t it?”
    The room had a bed with a green-flowered blanket knit in a tightly woven, honeycomb design. The curtains, pulled back to reveal
     the garden below, matched the blanket. Beside the bed was a three-drawer chest with a flower vase on it. There were shelves
     along the walls, with framed pictures of people Mariam did not recognize. On one of the shelves, Mariam saw a collection of
     identical wooden dolls, arranged in a line in order of decreasing size.
    Jalil saw her looking. “ Matryoshka dolls. I got them in Moscow. You can play with them, if you want. No one will mind.”
    Mariam sat down on the bed.
    “Is there anything you want?” Jalil said.
    Mariam lay down. Closed her eyes. After a while, she heard him softly shut the door.
    EXCEPT FOR WHEN she had to use the bathroom down the hall, Mariam stayed in the room. The girl with the tattoo, the one who
     had opened the gates to her, brought her meals on a tray: lamb kebab, sabzi, aush soup. Most of it went uneaten. Jalil came by several times a day, sat on the bed beside her, asked her if she was all right.
    “You could eat downstairs with the rest of us,” he said, but without much conviction. He understood a little too readily when
     Mariam said she preferred to eat alone.
    From the window, Mariam watched impassively what she had wondered about and longed to see for most of her life: the comings
     and goings of Jalil’s daily life. Servants rushed in and out of the front gates. A gardener was always trimming bushes, watering
     plants in the greenhouse. Cars with long, sleek hoods pulled up on the street.
    From them emerged men in suits, in chapan s and caracul hats, women in hijab s, children with neatly combed hair.
    And as Mariam watched Jalil shake these strangers’ hands, as she saw him cross his palms on his chest and nod to their wives,
     she knew that Nana had spoken the truth. She did not belong here.
    But where do I belong? What am I going to do now?
    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!
    Like the wind through the willows around the kolba, gusts of an inexpressible blackness kept passing through Mariam.
    On Mariam’s second full day at Jalil’s house, a little girl came into the room.
    “I have to get something,” she said.
    Mariam sat up on the bed and crossed her legs, pulled the blanket on her lap.
    The girl hurried across the room and opened the closet door. She fetched a square-shaped gray box.
    “You know what this is?” she said. She opened the box.
    “It’s called a gramophone. Gramo. Phone. It plays records.
    You know, music. A gramophone.”
    “You’re Niloufar. You’re eight.”
    The little girl smiled. She had Jalil’s smile and his dimpled chin. “How did you know?”
    Mariam shrugged. She didn’t say to this girl that she’d once named a pebble after her.
    “Do you want to hear a song?”
    Mariam shrugged again.
    Niloufar plugged in the gramophone. She fished a small record from a pouch beneath the box’s lid. She put it on,