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Pages 83 - 112 Go to the beginning Chapter 14: (Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com) Mariam struggles with her grief over the loss of her baby. Rasheed takes his own grief and anger out on her. Gone are his few awkward attempts at courting her: his attempts to talk to her, their walks in Kabul, the occasional gift. Now he's surly and snappish, and his attempts at sex (not shown) grow rough and sadistic. Mariam holds a burial ceremony on her own for her baby, burying its clothes in the backyard. Chapter 15: It's April 17, 1978, the year that Mariam turns nineteen. A man named Mir Akbar Khyber gets murdered. The people of Kabul turn out by the thousands to march in protest; they blame his murder on President Daoud's government. Rasheed stays in and listens on the radio. He tells Mariam that the murder victim was a prominent Communist. She asks him what a Communist is. He sneers at her for not knowing, and then makes a confused attempt to explain. He obviously doesn't know either. Mariam thinks to herself that every since her first miscarriage, they've been trying for six years to have a baby. It never works. Rasheed has grown harder and harder to please, and Mariam is now afraid of him. Later that day, the Afghan Communists take over the country and execute President Daoud. Reports start circulating about the atrocities committed under Daoud's regime. Meanwhile, the neighbor woman Fariba gives birth to a baby girl whom she and her husband Hakim name Laila. Across the street, Rasheed flies into a rage over some imagined imperfection in Mariam's cooking, and forces her to chew on a handful of pebbles which cracks two of her molars. End of Part One. Part Two. Chapter 16. We're in Kabul in the spring of 1987. Nine year-old Laila misses her friend Tariq, a little neighbor boy who is her best friend. Laila has grown up to be a beautiful girl with blonde hair and green eyes. She's unhappy, however, because her mother Fariba suffers deep depressions and expresses much contempt for Laila's refined and bookish father Hakim. Laila loves Hakim, but feels little for her mother whom she knows feels little for her. Fariba has suffered depressions ever since her two beloved sons went to the countryside in 1980 to join the jihad against the Soviet occupation. Laila goes to school, learns her lessons from a Communist instructor, and then walks home with her girl friends after school. Her two girlfriends are only about ten years old, but they will soon face being given away in marriage by their fathers. Unlike them, Laila will go to university because her father values her education. Her girlfriends reach their homes first, and she has to walk the last few blocks alone where she gets confronted by a nasty little bully named Khadim. Chapter 17. Khadim and his friends have filled squirt-guns with their own urine, and now they spray it on Laila. Horrified, she runs home to wash. Her mother is no comfort; Fariba is having a bad day, and languishing in bed. |
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