On Mariam's last day at Walayat, Naghma gave her a tangerine. She put it in Mariam's palm and closed her fingers around it.
Then she burst into tears. “You're the best friend I ever had,” she said.
Mariam spent the rest of the day by the barred window watching the inmates below.
Someone was cooking a meal, and a stream of cumin scented smoke and warm air wafted through the window.
Mariam could see the children playing a blindfolded game. Two little girls were singing a rhyme,
and Mariam remembered it from her childhood, remembered Jalil singing it to her as they'd sat on a rock, fishing in the stream:
“Lili lili birdbath, Sitting on a dirt path, Minnow sat on the rim and drank, Slipped, and in the water she sank.”
Mariam had disjointed dreams that last night. She dreamed of pebbles, eleven of them, arranged vertically.
Jalil, young again, all winning smiles and dimpled chins and sweat patches, coat flung over his shoulder,
come at last to take his daughter away for a ride in his shiny black Buick Roadmaster.
Mullah Faizullah twirling his rosary beads, walking with her along the stream,
their twin shadows gliding on the water and on the grassy banks sprinkled with a blue lavender wild iris that, in this dream, smelled like cloves.
전체재생
다음페이지
문장검색