Mariam's first miscarriage

Mariam's first miscarriage is a catastrophic event that transforms her marriage and her sense of self. It happens at the women's hamam, a place of communal bathing that Rasheed had recommended as a pleasure, and it ends with Mariam screaming in a pool of blood, her baby lost before she ever held it. The loss is not merely physical; it dismantles the fragile happiness she had built and unleashes a cycle of grief, blame, and escalating violence that will define the rest of her life with Rasheed.

The Bathhouse and the Bleeding

Rasheed had insisted on taking Mariam to the hamam, telling her there was nothing finer than stepping out into the cold air afterward, feeling the heat rising from the skin. In the women's section, shapes moved through the steam—a glimpse of a hip, the contour of a shoulder—and Mariam sat apart, working on her heels with a pumice stone, insulated by the wall of vapor. Then there was blood, and she was screaming. The sound of feet slapping on wet cobblestones followed; faces peered at her through the steam, tongues clucking. Fariba, the neighbor, later told her husband that when she heard the cry and rushed over, she found Rasheed's wife shriveled into a corner, hugging her knees, a pool of blood at her feet. Mariam had asked in a high, supplicating voice, "It's normal, isn't it? Isn't it? Isn't it normal?"

The Aftermath and Rasheed's Reaction

Rasheed took her home on another bus ride, snow falling thick this time, piling in heaps on sidewalks and roofs. He did not hum; his eyes were closed. At the house, he covered her with a quilt, but there was a stiff, perfunctory air about the gesture. When Mariam suggested they have a proper burial for the baby—just a few prayers, nothing more—Rasheed snapped, "What for? It's idiotic." He added, "I've already buried one son. I won't bury another," referring to his first son, Yunus, who had drowned years before. He turned up the radio and leaned back, closing his eyes. Mariam, alone, dug a hole in the yard, placed the suede coat Rasheed had bought for the baby into it, and shoveled dirt over it, reciting a prayer under her breath: "You make the night to pass into the day and You make the day to pass into the night, and You bring forth the living from the dead and You bring forth the dead from the living, and You give sustenance to whom You please without measure."

The Transformation of the Marriage

After the miscarriage, a change came over Rasheed. Most nights he hardly talked anymore; he ate, smoked, went to bed, sometimes coming back in the middle of the night for a brief and increasingly rough session of coupling. He was more apt to sulk, to fault her cooking, to complain about clutter around the yard or point out even minor uncleanliness in the house. On Fridays, when he took her around town, he walked quickly and always a few steps ahead of her, without speaking, unmindful of Mariam, who almost had to run to keep up. He wasn't so ready with a laugh anymore; he didn't buy her sweets or gifts, didn't stop and name places to her as he used to. Her questions seemed to irritate him. When Mariam asked if he was angry with her, he snapped, "Is that the kind of man you take me for, after everything I've done for you?" and then, "Then stop pestering me!"

The Cycle of Loss and Violence

In the four years following the miscarriage, there were six more cycles of hopes raised then dashed—each loss, each collapse, each trip to the doctor more crushing for Mariam than the last. With each disappointment, Rasheed grew more remote and resentful. Nothing she did pleased him. She cleaned the house, made sure he always had a supply of clean shirts, cooked him his favorite dishes. Once, disastrously, she even bought makeup and put it on for him, but when he came home he took one look at her and winced with such distaste that she rushed to the bathroom and washed it all off, tears of shame mixing with soapy water, rouge, and mascara. Mariam lived in fear of his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies and sometimes not. The miscarriage was the first wound in a long war of attrition, and it set the pattern for everything that followed: hope, failure, blame, and violence.