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A Thousand Splendid Suns

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A Thousand Splendid Suns

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KHALED HOSSEINI

This eBook was produced by: Lynn Feng

A Thousand Splendid Suns

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A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

KHALED HOSSEINI

A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS

RIVEKHEAD BOOKS

A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

New York

2007

A Thousand Splendid Suns

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This book is dedicated to Haris and Farah, both the noor of my eyes,

and to the women of Afghanistan.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

1

PART ONE

1.

ariam was five years old the first time she heard the word harami.

It happened on a Thursday. It must have, because Mariam remembered that she had been restless and

preoccupied that day, the way she was only on Thursdays, the day when Jalil visited her at the kolba. To

pass the time until the moment that she would see him at last, crossing the knee-high grass in the clearing

and waving, Mariam had climbed a chair and taken down her mother's Chinese tea set. The tea set was

the sole relic that Mariam's mother, Nana, had of her own mother, who had died when Nana was two.

Nana cherished each blue-and-white porcelain piece, the graceful curve of the pot's spout, the

hand-painted finches and chrysanthemums, the dragon on the sugar bowl, meant to ward off evil.It was

this last piece that slipped from Mariam's fingers, that fell to the wooden floor boards of the kolba and

shattered.When Nana saw the bowl, her face flushed red and her upper lip shivered, and her eyes, both

the lazy one and the good, settled on Mariam in a flat, unblinking way. Nana looked so mad that Mariam

feared the jinn would enter her mother's body again. But the jinn didn't come, not that time. Instead,

Nana grabbed Mariam by the wrists, pulled her close, and, through gritted teeth, said, "You are a clumsy

little harami This is my reward for everything I've endured An heirloom-breaking, clumsy little

harami."At the time, Mariam did not understand. She did not know what this word

harami--bastard--meant Nor was she old enough to appreciate the injustice, to see that it is the creators of

the harami who are culpable, not the harami, whose only sin is being born. Mariam did surmise, by the

way Nana said the word, that it was an ugly, loathsome thing to be a harami, like an insect, like the

scurrying cockroaches Nana was always cursing and sweeping out of the kolba.Later, when she was

older, Mariam did understand. It was the way Nana uttered the word not so much saying it as spitting it at

her that made Mariam feel the full sting of it. She understood then what Nana meant, that a harami was

an unwanted thing; that she, Mariam, was an illegitimate person who would never have legitimate claim

to the things other people had, things such as love, family, home, acceptance.Jalil never called Mariam

this name. Jalil said she was his little flower. He was fond of sitting her on his lap and telling her stories,

like the time he told her that Herat, the city where Mariam was born, in 1959, had once been the cradle of

Persian culture, the home of writers, painters, and Sufis."You couldn't stretch a leg here without poking a

poet in the ass," he laughed.

Jalil told her the story of Queen Gauhar Shad, who had raised the famous minarets as her loving ode to

Herat back in the fifteenth century. He described to her the green wheat fields of Herat, the orchards, the

vines pregnant with plump grapes, the city's crowded, vaulted bazaars."There is a pistachio tree," Jalil

said one day, "and beneath it, Mariam jo, is buried none other than the great poet Jami." He leaned in and

whispered, "Jami lived over five hundred years ago. He did. I took you there once, to the tree. You were

little. You wouldn't remember."It was true. Mariam didn't rememb