A Thousand Splendid Suns Read Online Free PDF

the Women’s Garden to the north of the city, Char-suq Bazaar
     and the ruins of Alexander the Great’s old citadel to the south. She could make out the minarets in the distance, like the
     dusty fingers of giants, and the streets that she imagined were milling with people, carts, mules. She saw swallows swooping
     and circling overhead. She was envious of these birds. They had been to Herat. They had flown over its mosques, its bazaars.
     Maybe they had landed on the walls of Jalil’s home, on the front steps of his cinema.
    She picked up ten pebbles and arranged them vertically, in three columns. This was a game that she played privately from time
     to time when Nana wasn’t looking. She put four pebbles in the first column, for Khadija’s children, three for Afsoon’s, and
     three in the third column for Nargis’s children. Then she added a fourth column. A solitary, eleventh pebble.
    THE NEXT MORNING, Mariam wore a cream-colored dress that fell to her knees, cotton trousers, and a green hijab over her hair. She agonized a bit over the hijab, its being green and not matching the dress, but it would have to do—moths had eaten holes into her white one.
    She checked the clock. It was an old hand-wound clock with black numbers on a mint green face, a present from Mullah Faizullah.
     It was nine o’clock. She wondered where Nana was. She thought about going outside and looking for her, but she dreaded the
     confrontation, the aggrieved looks. Nana would accuse her of betrayal. She would mock her for her mistaken ambitions.
    Mariam sat down. She tried to make time pass by drawing an elephant in one stroke, the way Jalil had shown her, over and over.
     She became stiff from all the sitting but wouldn’t lie down for fear that her dress would wrinkle.
    When the hands finally showed eleven-thirty, Mariam pocketed the eleven pebbles and went outside. On her way to the stream,
     she saw Nana sitting on a chair, in the shade, beneath the domed roof of a weeping willow. Mariam couldn’t tell whether Nana
     saw her or not.
    At the stream, Mariam waited by the spot they had agreed on the day before. In the sky, a few gray, cauliflower-shaped clouds
     drifted by. Jalil had taught her that gray clouds got their color by being so dense that their top parts absorbed the sunlight
     and cast their own shadow along the base. That’s what you see, Mariam jo, he had said, the dark in their underbelly.
    Some time passed.
    Mariam went back to the kolba. This time, she walked around the west-facing periphery of the clearing so she wouldn’t have to pass by Nana. She checked the
     clock. It was almost one o’clock.
    He’s a businessman, Mariam thought. Something has come up.
    She went back to the stream and waited awhile longer. Blackbirds circled overhead, dipped into the grass somewhere. She watched
     a caterpillar inching along the foot of an immature thistle.
    She waited until her legs were stiff. This time, she did not go back to the kolba. She rolled up the legs of her trousers to the knees, crossed the stream, and, for the first time in her life, headed down
     the hill for Herat.
    NANA WAS WRONG about Herat too. No one pointed. No one laughed. Mariam walked along noisy, crowded, cypress-lined boulevards,
     amid a steady stream of pedestrians, bicycle riders, and mule-drawn gari s, and no one threw a rock at her. No one called her a harami. Hardly anyone even looked at her. She was, unexpectedly, marvelously, an ordinary person here.
    For a while, Mariam stood by an oval-shaped pool in the center of a big park where pebble paths crisscrossed. With wonder,
     she ran her fingers over the beautiful marble horses that stood along the edge of the pool and gazed down at the water with
     opaque eyes. She spied on a cluster of boys who were setting sail to paper ships. Mariam saw flowers everywhere, tulips, lilies,
     petunias, their petals awash in sunlight. People walked along the paths, sat on benches and sipped tea.
    Mariam could