“Now I have a beautiful young wife who is Muslim and virtuous. I thank God for making me realize what is right,” said the man.

Farah felt a surge at his words. He sounded just like her first husband, who wanted to go between the legs of a young virgin, to feel control after all those years of foreign prostitutes and cheap women. He would speak with God’s words spattered on top of his own and people thought him virtuous, so virtuous he beat his own baby out of her and then beat her more and told her she was careless for letting a child die inside her very own body. Again she pushed the ache back behind her breast.

“It’s very dangerous too,” said the woman.

“I didn’t know that,” said Farah, for some reason thinking about the dog her current husband ran over by accident a couple of weeks ago, just before she crossed the river to see her daughter. It used to hang around behind their house and wasn’t dangerous at all; in fact, Farah liked that it came to visit. When it was hungry, it would come by their house and bark and she would come out and throw it whatever tiny leftover scraps they had. Then it chose the wrong time to come and bark, oblivious of the van speeding toward it. Fate ran it over, but didn’t kill it. Her husband left it to die and Farah found it whimpering in a pile of blood under the bushes by a tree. For some reason the sight of it made her insides ache with sadness and she patted the dog, which was too much in pain and close to dying to move more than to bare its teeth halfheartedly at her. She sat with it under the fig tree, trying to give it a couple of minutes of company before she went into the house for a knife to slit its throat and put it out of its misery. She even dug a hole to bury it, feeling such anger toward her husband that if he had come to her while she was digging, she might have hit him over the head with the shovel. But what can you expect from a man married to a woman who has been married twice before him?

“We had a very hard time when we were there,” the woman was saying, and for a moment Farah forgot what she was talking about. “There is so much crime. Several times we were robbed at gunpoint. I lost all my gold to thieves. The houses are like prisons with built-in bars to keep the evil out, but it doesn’t work; the evil comes in anyway.”

The woman’s son, who up to this point had been kneeling on the seat with his head hanging out the window, was now looking at his mother, engrossed.