‘The Patience Stone’ by Atiq Rahimi

Books have many incarnations. Some come back as plays or movies. If they have questionable karma, they come back as paperback remainders or Saturday morning cartoon shows. “The Patience Stone” would make a fabulous one-woman play. It is set in a bedroom in Afghanistan, where a woman has watched over her husband for 16 days. He is comatose, with a bullet in his neck. The woman changes the bag of fluids and adjusts the tube that keeps him alive. She breathes alongside him.
Outside, the sounds of tanks, gunshots, screaming and, most terrifying, silence. Inside, her two frightened daughters call to her from the hallway. A Koran lies on the kilim. As she tries to keep her husband alive, the woman rages against men, war, culture, God. She confesses many secrets; things that have been done to her and things she has done. In confessing, she feels more free, if such a thing were possible in that room, in that war.
Her husband’s body reminds her of the legend of the patience stone, a stone that hears all confessions until it explodes. “One should never rely on a man who has known the pleasure of weapons!” she berates herself. “You men, you’re all cowards!” All the times she has betrayed herself, just to stay alive. “The Patience Stone” is perfectly written: spare, close to the bone, sometimes bloody, with a constant echo, like a single mistake that repeats itself over and over and over.

The Patience Stone
Atiq Rahimi
Translated from the French by Polly McLean
Other Press: 160 pp., $16.95