Free The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi Page B

absolutely, one hundred percent sure. I knew in my blood that it was her. So I managed to lose your mother in the crowd. Began trailing my aunt. I didn’t let her out of my sight, all the way to her house. I stopped her at her front door. She burst into tears. Gave me a big hug, and asked me in. At the time she was living in a brothel.” She falls silent, giving her man, behind the green curtain, the chance to take a few breaths. And herself, too.
    In the city, the shooting continues. Far away, nearby, sporadic.
    In the room, everything is sunk in darkness.
    Saying “I’m hungry,” she stands up and feels her way into the passage, and then into the kitchen to find something to eat. First she kindles a lamp, which brightens part of the passage and sheds a little light into the room as well. Then, after the slamming ofa few cupboard doors, she returns. A hard crust of several-day-old bread and an onion in one hand, the hurricane lamp in the other. She sits back down near her man, by the green curtain, which she pulls aside in the yellowish lamplight to check that her
sang-e saboor
has not exploded. No. It is still there. In one piece. Eyes open. Mocking expression, even with the tube thrust into the pathetically half-open mouth. The chest continues to, miraculously, rise and fall at the same pace as before.
    “And now, it’s that aunt who has taken me in. She likes my children. And the girls like her, too. That’s why I’m slightly more relaxed.” She peels the onion. “She tells them loads of stories … as she used to before. I grew up with her stories, too.” She puts a layer of onion on a bit of bread, and shoves the whole thing into her mouth. The cracking of the dry bread mingles with the softness of her voice. “The other night, she wanted to tell a particular story that her mother used to tell us. I begged her not to tell it to my girls. It’s a very disturbing tale. Cruel. But full of power and magic! My girls are still too young to understand it.” She takes a sip from the glass of water she had brought to moisten her man’s eyes.
    “As you know, in my family we were all girls. Seven girls! And no boy! Our parents hated that. It was also the reason our grandmother told my sisters and me that story. For a long time, I thought she had invented it especially for us. But then my aunt told me that she had first heard that story from her great-grandmother.”
    A second layer of onion on a second crust of bread.
    “In any case, our grandmother warned us in advance, by telling us that the story was a magical tale that could bring us either happiness or misfortune in our actual lives. This warning frightened us, but it was also exciting. And so her lovely voice rang out to the frenetic beating of our hearts.
Once upon a time there was, or was not, a king. A charming king. A brave king. This king, however, had one constraint in his life—just one, but of the utmost importance: he was never to have a daughter. On his wedding night, the astrologers told him that if ever his wife should give birth to a girl, she would bring disgrace upon the crown. As fate would have it, his wife gave birth to nothing but girls. And so, at each birth, the king would order his executioner to kill the newborn baby!
”
    Lost in her memories, the woman suddenly takes on the appearance of an old lady—her grandmother, no doubt—telling this story to her grandchildren.
    “
The executioner killed the first baby girl, and the second. With the third, he was stopped by a little voice
emanating from the mouth of the newborn. It begged him to tell her mother that if she kept her alive, the queen would have her own kingdom! Troubled by these words, the executioner visited the queen in secret, and told her what he had seen and heard. The queen, not breathing a word to the king, immediately came to take a look at this newborn with the gift of speech. Full of wonder yet terrified, she asked the executioner to prepare a cart so they could