A Thousand Splendid Suns, Passage Fifteen (Chapter 39: pages 286-288)

The waiting room at Rabia Balkhi was teeming with women in burqas and their children. The air stank of sweat and unwashed bodies, of feet, urine, cigarettesmoke, and antiseptic. Beneath the idle ceiling fan, children chased each other, hopping over the stretched out legs of dozing fathers.

Mariam helped Laila sit against a wall from which patches of plaster shaped like foreign countries had slid off Laila rocked back and forth, hands pressing against her belly.

"I'll get you seen, Laila jo. I promise."

"Be quick," said Rasheed.

Before the registration window was a horde of women, shoving and pushing against each other. Some were still holding their babies. Some broke from the mass and charged the double doors that led to the treatment rooms. An armed Talib guard blocked their way, sent them back.

Mariam waded in. She dug in her heels and burrowed against the elbows, hips, andshoulder blades of strangers. Someone elbowed her in the ribs, and she elbowedback. A hand made a desperate grab at her face. She swatted it away. To propelherself forward, Mariam clawed at necks, at arms and elbows, at hair, and, whena woman nearby hissed, Mariam hissed back.

Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one. She thought ruefully of Nana, of the sacrifices that she too had made. Nana, who could have given her away, or tossed her in a ditch somewhere and run. But she hadn't. Instead, Nana had endured the shame of bearing a harami, had shaped her life around the thankless task of raising Mariam and, in her own way, of loving her. And, in the end, Mariam had chosen Jalil over her. As she fought her way with impudent resolve to the front of the melee, Mariam wished she had been a better daughter to Nana. She wished she'd understood then what she understood now about motherhood.

She found herself face to face with a nurse, who was covered head to toe in a dirty gray burqa. The nurse was talking to a young woman, whose burqa headpiece had soaked through with a patch of matted blood.

"My daughter's water broke and the baby won't come," Mariam called.

"I'm talking to her!" the bloodied young woman cried "Wait your turn!"

The whole mass of them swayed side to side, like the tall grass around the kolba when the breeze swept across the clearing. A woman behind Mariam was yelling that her girl had broken her elbow falling from a tree. Another woman cried that she was passing bloody stools.

"Does she have a fever?" the nurse asked. It took Mariam a moment to realize she was being spoken to.

"No," Mariam said. Bleeding?

"No."

"Where is she?"

 Over the covered heads, Mariam pointed to where Laila was sitting with Rasheed.

"We'll get to her," the nurse said.

"How long?" Mariam cried Someone had grabbed her by the shoulders and was pulling

her back.

"I don't know," the nurse said. She said they had only two doctors and both were operating

at the moment.

"She's in pain," Mariam said.

"Me too!" the woman with the bloodied scalp cried. "Wait your turn!"

Mariam was being dragged back. Her view of the nurse was blocked now by shoulders

and the backs of heads. She smelled a baby's milky burp.

"Take her for a walk," the nurse yelled. "And wait."