A Thousand Splendid Suns(81)

At one point, Khala Rangmaal looked up and caught her gaze, but Laila saw no lingering, no light of recognition, in her old teacher's eyes.

"THEY'RE FRACTURES along the earth's crust," said Aziza. "They're called faults."

It was a warm afternoon, a Friday, in June of 2001. They were sitting in the orphanage's back lot, the four of them, Laila, Zalmai, Mariam, and Aziza. Rasheed had relented this time - as he infrequently did - and accompanied the four of them. He was waiting down the street, by the bus stop.

Barefoot kids scampered about around them. A flat soccer ball was kicked around, chased after listlessly.

"And, on either side of the faults, there are these sheets of rock that make up the earth's crust," Aziza was saying.

Someone had pulled the hair back from Aziza's face, braided it, and pinned it neatly on top of her head. Laila begrudged whoever had gotten to sit behind her daughter, to flip sections of her hair one over the other, had asked her to sit still.

Aziza was demonstrating by opening her hands, palms up, and rubbing them against each other. Zalmai watched this with intense interest.

"Kectonic plates, they're called?"

"Tectonic," Laila said. It hurt to talk. Her jaw was still sore, her back and neck ached. Her lip was swollen, and her tongue kept poking the empty pocket of the lower incisor Rasheed had knocked loose two days before. Before Mammy and Babi had died and her life turned upside down, Laila never would have believed that a human body could withstand this much beating, this viciously, this regularly, and keep functioning.

"Right. And when they slide past each other, they catch and slip - see, Mammy? - and it releases energy, which travels to the earth's surface and makes it shake."

"You're getting so smart," Mariam said. "So much smarter than your dumb khala."

Aziza's face glowed, broadened. "You're not dumb, Khala Mariam. And Kaka Zaman says that, sometimes, the shifting of rocks is deep, deep below, and it's powerful and scary down there, but all we feel on the surface is a slight tremor. Only a slight tremor."

The visit before this one, it was oxygen atoms in the atmosphere scattering the blue light from the sun. If the earth had no atmosphere, Aziza had said a little breathlessly, the sky wouldn't be blue at all but a pitch-black sea and the sun a big bright star in the dark.

"Is Aziza coming home with us this time?" Zalmai said.

"Soon, my love," Laila said. "Soon."

Laila watched him wander away, walking like his father, stooping forward, toes turned in. He walked to the swing set, pushed an empty seat, ended up sitting on the concrete, ripping weeds from a crack.

Water evaporates from the leaves - Mammy, did you know? -

the way it does from laundry hanging from a line. And that drives the flow of water up the tree. From the ground and through the roots, then all the way up the tree trunk, through the branches and into the leaves. It's called transpiration.

More than once, Laila had wondered what the Taliban would do about Kaka Zaman's clandestine lessons if they found out.

During visits, Aziza didn't allow for much silence. She filled all the spaces with effusive speech, delivered in a high, ringing voice. She was tangential with her topics, and her hands gesticulated wildly, flying up with a nervousness that wasn't like her at all. She had a new laugh, Aziza did. Not so much a laugh, really, as nervous punctuation, meant, Laila suspected, to reassure.

And there were other changes. Laila would notice the dirt under Aziza's fingernails, and Aziza would notice her noticing and bury her hands under her thighs. Whenever a kid cried in their vicinity, snot oozing from his nose, or if a kid walked by bare-assed, hair clumped with dirt, Aziza's eyelids fluttered and she was quick to explain it away. She was like a hostess embarrassed in front of her guests by the squalor of her home, the untidiness of her children.

Questions of how she was coping were met with vague but cheerful replies.

Doing fine, Khala. I'm fine.

Do kids pick on you?

They don't, Mammy. Everyone is nice.

Are you eating? Sleeping all right?

Eating. Sleeping too. Yes. We had lamb last night. Maybe it was last week.

When Aziza spoke like this, Laila saw more than a little of Mariam in her.

Aziza stammered now. Mariam noticed it first. It was subtle but perceptible, and more pronounced with words that began with t. Laila asked Zaman about it. He frowned and said, "I thought she'd always done that."

They left the orphanage with Aziza that Friday afternoon for a short outing and met Rasheed, who was waiting for them by the bus stop. When Zalmai spotted his father, he uttered an excited squeak and impatiently wriggled from Laila's arms. Aziza's greeting to Rasheed was rigid but not hostile.

Rasheed said they should hurry, he had only two hours before he had to report back to work. This was his first week as a doorman for the Intercontinental. From noon to eight, six days a week, Rasheed opened car doors, carried luggage, mopped up the occasional spill. Sometimes, at day's end, the cook at the buffet-style restaurant let Rasheed bring home a few leftovers - as long as he was discreet about it - cold meatballs sloshing in oil; fried chicken wings, the crust gone hard and dry; stuffed pasta shells turned chewy; stiff, gravelly rice. Rasheed had promised Laila that once he had some money saved up, Aziza could move back home.

Rasheed was wearing his uniform, a burgundy red polyester suit, white shirt, clip-on tie, visor cap pressing down on his white hair. In this uniform, Rasheed was transformed. 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.