What the War Leaves Unfinished in A Thousand Splendid Suns
Reading Note: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
This essay contains major spoilers for A Thousand Splendid Suns.
On a hillside above Herat, Mariam arranges ten pebbles in three columns, one column for each of her father’s wives, one pebble for each of their children. “A solitary, eleventh pebble” goes in a column of its own. She plays this game when her mother, Nana, can’t see her. The girl who waits until Thursday for a visit from her father can put herself beside her brothers and sisters any day she likes. Even in her own version of the family, she leaves a space between herself and the others.
Jalil has told Mariam about the poets of Herat, taught her to draw an elephant without lifting her pencil, and described his cinema down to its trellised ceiling. He tells her about a film in which a lonely toymaker carves himself a son. When she asks to see it with him, he offers to send someone in his place. A good seat and all the candy she wants, he says. She pockets the pebbles before going to meet him. He never comes. In town, where she has feared being jeered at, strangers scarcely look twice at her. At her father’s house, she spends the night outside the gates. In the morning she glimpses him at an upstairs window. The pebbles spill from her pocket when the driver picks her up. On the ride home, she’s ashamed of having dressed so carefully for the visit.
After Nana dies, Jalil’s wives present a marriage to a much older man in Kabul as good fortune for a girl of fifteen. Mariam thinks of two half sisters her own age who are at school and plan to go to university. The promise of a family of her own is made across a table from the family she already has. She can see what the marriage offers the wives. Once she leaves, they can go on without a daily reminder of Jalil’s affair. Jalil, who could once keep her listening for hours, turns his wedding ring as she asks him to stop the marriage.
Five books for the journey
Years later, the novel turns to Laila, a schoolgirl in Kabul. When the streets grow too dangerous, her father takes her out of school and starts teaching her at home. A former high school teacher, Babi takes on his old bearing so completely that Laila thinks he looks taller. They discuss Persian poetry and factor polynomials. One evening he asks her a question about pyramids. Laila is so absorbed in remembering a kiss that she barely hears him. The rockets can be falling and there is still an excellent reason, as far as Laila is concerned, to be thinking about Tariq.
Laila’s friend Hasina has already been promised to an older cousin. She’s met him twice, long enough to report to Laila that he chews with his mouth open. Giti, the third girl in their group, is killed by a rocket on her way home from school. At the funeral Laila remembers plucking a hair from Giti’s chin with tweezers. Giti had wanted to marry Sabir the goalkeeper. The position he plays stays in the sentence, as it would in a conversation between the girls. Laila sheds the tears she couldn’t shed for her two older brothers, young men she barely knew whose futures she mostly heard about from her grieving mother.
When Laila’s mother, Fariba, finally agrees to leave Kabul, she lets Babi take her hands and rests her face against his neck. Then there’s the work of getting out. In his study Babi faces the old desert-island game of choosing five books. He can remember only two lines of a poem about Kabul that he once knew in full, including the line about the suns hidden behind its walls. When Laila looks up, he’s weeping.
Laila carries out boxes for the sale, thinking ahead to seeing Tariq in Pakistan. Fariba calls down about lunch. Laila mistakes the rising whine of a rocket for the sound of sand in a dream she’s had about the two of them at the beach. The paragraphs shrink to a roar or a flash. Once Laila is in the air, the sentences lengthen and there’s time to see the glass split sunlight into rainbows. What lands beside her goes unnamed. It bears the red bridge we’ve already seen on Babi’s T-shirt.
The man in the photograph
Mariam’s husband, Rasheed, keeps a photograph of the son he lost to drowning. In the same drawer is a picture of his first wife leaning forward under his hands. Mariam wonders whether the woman was trying to pull away, then distrusts her own reading. Out doing the laundry, she imagines Rasheed beside the lake, helpless and pleading for his boy. The novel returns to the drowning once we’re following Laila, by then Rasheed’s second wife. She remembers a neighbor’s story that puts him passed out drunk in a chair as Yunus goes into the water. Hosseini leaves the actual moment of the drowning outside the novel’s direct view. What we can see of Rasheed depends, for a time, on what Mariam is able to imagine about her husband.
Early in the marriage, Rasheed is scandalized by husbands who let him fit shoes on their wives’ bare feet. “Where I come from, a woman’s face is her husband’s business only.” In the next chapter, Mariam watches Afghan women go bareheaded on a busy Kabul street. Years later, when Rasheed welcomes the approach of the Taliban, he talks about going out to buy milk without getting shot. We’ve spent enough time with a family under fire to know the value of such an errand. We’ve also watched him force Mariam to chew pebbles for serving rice he says is undercooked. She once used pebbles to count herself into a household. He uses them to tell her what he thinks she’s brought to his. When he talks up the coming peace, he’s looking at the ceiling. To Mariam it feels as if he’s speaking to someone else in the room, someone whose opinion he’d consider worth hearing.
A lesson at the orphanage
On the morning of the women’s attempted escape from Kabul, Laila lies in bed and hears Rasheed tap his razor against the basin. She’s saved money for a year and is sure he knows. It’s still more than two years before the Taliban take the city. Under the Mujahideen’s rules, the women need a man at the station to pass for a relative. A man Laila picks out of the crowd agrees to buy their tickets and pass her off as his cousin. Laila can’t hear what he tells the militiaman at the bus door. She hears the order to step aside.
Years later, after hunger has forced Laila to place her daughter in an orphanage, Hosseini gathers her repeated trips into a few paragraphs. She wears extra sweaters under her burqa to soften the blows if she is stopped. Then the book settles on a Friday in the orphanage yard. Aziza has learned about earthquakes from Zaman, who teaches the children in secret. She moves her palms against one another to demonstrate how the earth’s crust shifts. “Kectonic,” she says. When Laila says tectonic, we feel the correction pass through a mouth still sore from a tooth Rasheed knocked out.
Laila has time to envy the person who braided Aziza’s hair. Aziza’s little brother, Zalmai, watches her hands with great interest, asks whether she’s coming home this time, and goes to push an empty swing. Only after we’ve heard Aziza explain earthquakes do we learn that she’s begun to stammer, especially on words beginning with t. Laila suspects that the girl is talking so much in part to reassure her. Hosseini has let us hear the lesson as an accomplishment before asking us to hear what else is going on in Aziza’s voice.
The second blow
A false report of Tariq’s death and his sudden reappearance have the neat symmetry of melodrama. Zalmai tells Rasheed that a man came to see Laila. The violence that follows has a terrible hesitation in it. Rasheed is choking Laila. Mariam hears Zalmai’s palms beating against a locked door as she goes for a shovel. Her first blow knocks Rasheed off Laila. For a moment, she thinks she sees his face soften. The pause is long enough for her to wonder whether he sees, at last, what it has taken to live with him. Then his lip curls. He has a key to the upstairs room and a gun there, and Mariam has to decide what he’ll do if she lets him get up. She turns the blade and strikes again.
In the next chapter, with Laila, we follow the women into the toolshed. Years ago, when Mariam lost her first pregnancy, the shed held an unfinished crib. On the workbench now lies a piece of wood that Rasheed had meant to carve for Zalmai. Soon Laila has to tell her son that his father has gone away. The boy who used to run into his father’s arms wants to know when he’s coming back.
By morning, Laila is trying to persuade Mariam to escape with them. She promises to do all the cooking and cleaning. There will be fruit trees to plant, chickens to raise. Mariam meant that life for Laila and the children. She packs Zalmai bread and dried figs for the journey. He’s holding his basketball in both hands when she bends down to tell him how sorry she is. It’s a goodbye to a child whose loss she has caused and whose life with his mother she has made possible.
Mariam stays behind and is sentenced to death. On her last night she dreams of eleven pebbles, and of Jalil coming at last to take her for a ride. Later his apology reaches Laila. He writes of a wife and children he lost in the fighting. He also leaves a videotape of the film Mariam had wanted to see with him. In a hotel suite in Herat, Laila stops the tape, fast-forwards, and finds the same cartoon. She has no way to know why he chose it. We’ve been carrying the answer since Mariam was fifteen.
At the end, Laila teaches in the orphanage where she once had to leave Aziza. Before they go out in the morning, she packs the children’s lunches in a paper bag, as Mariam did when she sent them away. Aziza’s stutter is easing. On their way a car with tinted windows nearly hits them. Tariq and Zaman have repaired the orphanage roof. Men Laila holds responsible for her parents’ deaths have been given government jobs. Hosseini keeps both the car and the lesson in the present tense. The classroom floor is still cracked under a tarpaulin. Aziza is there, talking to the girl in the next row. The children open their books. At a window with no curtain, Laila watches the boys line up to shoot free throws and the sunlight catch on the rim of the hoop.
Sources
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Riverhead Books, 2007, digital ISBN 1-4295-1460-4. Chapters 1, 5, 7, 10–16, 20, 24, 26–28, 32, 36–37, 42, 44–47, and 50–51. Also consulted the Bloomsbury 2009 ebook (ISBN 978-1-4088-0373-8). English original.
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