By Khalid Hosseini
Mariam was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim to the things other people had, things such as family, love, home, acceptance.
There’s only one skill you need—to endure. To endure what? You won’t need to worry about that. There will be plenty.
You’re afraid that I might find the happiness you never had.
She was being sent away as the walking and breathing embodiment of their shame.
A flare of pride caught her off guard. It surprised her this thrill she felt over a small compliment.
But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid.
Leila came to believe that of all the hardships a person had to face none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting.
But she knew that her future was no match for her brothers’ past.
You see some things I can teach you. Some you learn from books. But there are things that, we’ll, you just have to see and feel.
Time blunting the edges of those sharp memories.
Mariam had never before been wanted like this. Love had never been declared to her so guilelessly, so unreservedly.
But how ordinary his faults seemed now, how forgivable when compared to Rasheed’s malice.
He looked vulnerable, pitiably bewildered, almost harmless. Like someone who had accepted without a sigh of protest the indignities life had doled out to him. Someone both pathetic and admirable in his docility.
Though there had been moments of beauty in it, Mariam knew that life for the most part had been unkind to her. But as she walked the final twenty paces, she could not help but wish for more of it.
And one day it will hit him, walking along some meandering river or gazing out at an untracked snowfield that his fathers disappearance is no longer an open raw wound. That it has become something else altogether. Something more soft edge and indolent. Like a more. Something to be revered, mystified by.
A woman who will be like a rock in a riverbed, enduring without complaint, her grace not sullied but shaped by the turbulence that washes over her.