And the Mountains Echoed (33 page)

He knew that his mother too was terribly lonely here. She tried to fill her days with routines, exercise in the morning, shower, then breakfast, then reading, gardening, then Indian soaps on TV in the afternoon. When Baba jan was away, which was often, she always wore gray sweats and sneakers around the house, her face unmade, her hair pinned in a bun at the back of her neck. She rarely even opened the jewelry box where she kept all the rings and necklaces and earrings that Baba jan brought her from Dubai. She spent hours sometimes talking to her family down in Kabul. Only when her sister and parents visited for a few days, once every two or three months, did Adel see his mother come alive. She wore
a long print dress and high-heeled shoes; she put on her makeup. Her eyes shone, and her laughter could be heard around the house. And it was then that Adel would catch a glimpse of the person that perhaps she had been before.

When Baba jan was away, Adel and his mother tried to be each other's reprieve. They pushed pieces of jigsaw puzzles around and played golf and tennis on Adel's Wii. But Adel's favorite pastime with his mother was building toothpick houses. His mother would draw a 3-D blueprint of the house on a sheet of paper, complete with front porch, gabled roof, and with staircases inside and walls separating the different rooms. They would build the foundation first, then the interior walls and stairs, killing hours carefully applying glue to toothpicks, setting sections to dry. Adel's mother said that when she was younger, before she had married Adel's father, she had dreamed of becoming an architect.

It was while they were building a skyscraper once that she had told Adel the story of how she and Baba jan had married.

He was actually supposed to marry my older sister
, she said.

Aunt Nargis?

Yes. This was in Kabul. He saw her on the street one day and that was it. He had to marry her. He showed up at our house the next day, him and five of his men. They more or less invited themselves in. They were all wearing boots
. She shook her head and laughed like it was a funny thing Baba jan had done, but she didn't laugh the way she ordinarily did when she found something funny.
You should have seen the expression on your grandparents
.

They had sat in the living room, Baba jan, his men, and her parents. She was in the kitchen making tea while they talked. There was a problem, she said, because her sister Nargis was already engaged, promised to a cousin who lived in Amsterdam and was
studying engineering. How were they supposed to break off the engagement? her parents were asking.

And then I come in, carrying a platter of tea and sweets. I fill their cups and put the food on the table, and your father sees me, and, as I turn to go, your father, he says, “Maybe you're right, sir. It's not fair to break off an engagement. But if you tell me this one is taken too, then I'm afraid I may have no choice but to think you don't care for me.” Then he laughs. And that was how we got married
.

She lifted a tube of glue.

Did you like him?

She shrugged a little.
Truth be told, I was more frightened than anything else
.

But you like him now, right? You love him
.

Of course I do
, Adel's mother said.
What a question
.

You don't regret marrying him
.

She put down the glue and waited a few seconds before answering.
Look at our lives, Adel
, she said slowly.
Look around you. What's to regret?
She smiled and pulled gently on the lobe of his ear.
Besides, then I wouldn't have had you
.

Adel's mother turned off the TV now and sat on the floor, panting, drying sweat off her neck with a towel.

“Why don't you do something on your own this morning,” she said, stretching her back. “I'm going to shower and eat. And I was thinking of calling your grandparents. Haven't spoken to them for a couple of days.”

Adel sighed and rose to his feet.

In his room, on a lower floor and in a different wing of the house, he fetched his soccer ball and put on the Zidane jersey Baba jan had given him for his last birthday, his twelfth. When he made his way downstairs, he found Kabir napping, a newspaper
spread on his chest like a quilt. He grabbed a can of apple juice from the fridge and let himself out.

Adel walked on the gravel path toward the main entrance to the compound. The stall where the armed guard stood watch was empty. Adel knew the timing of the guard's rounds. He carefully opened the gate and stepped out, closed the gate behind him. Almost immediately, he had the impression that he could breathe better on this side of the wall. Some days, the compound felt far too much like a prison.

He walked in the wide shadow of the wall toward the back of the compound, away from the main road. Back there, behind the compound, were Baba jan's orchards, of which he was very proud. Several acres of long parallel rows of pear trees and apple trees, apricots, cherries, figs, and loquats too. When Adel took long walks with his father in these orchards, Baba jan would lift him high up on his shoulders and Adel would pluck them a ripe pair of apples. Between the compound and the orchards was a clearing, mostly empty save for a shed where the gardeners stored their tools. The only other thing there was the flat stump of what had once been, by the looks of it, a giant old tree. Baba jan had once counted its rings with Adel and concluded that the tree had likely seen Genghis Khan's army march past. He said, with a rueful shake of his head, that whoever had cut it down had been nothing but a fool.

It was a hot day, the sun glaring in a sky as unblemished blue as the skies in the crayon pictures Adel used to draw when he was little. He put down the can of apple juice on the tree stump and practiced juggling his ball. His personal best was sixty-eight touches without the ball hitting the ground. He had set that record in the spring, and now it was midsummer and he was still trying to best it. Adel had reached twenty-eight when he became aware that
someone was watching him. It was the boy, the one with the old man who had tried to approach Baba jan at the school's opening ceremony. He was squatting now in the shade of the brick shed.

“What are you doing here?” Adel said, trying to bark the words like Kabir did when he spoke to strangers.

“Getting some shade,” the boy said. “Don't report me.”

“You're not supposed to be here.”

“Neither are you.”

“What?”

The boy chuckled. “Never mind.” He stretched his arms wide and rose to his feet. Adel tried to see if his pockets were full. Maybe he had come to steal fruit. The boy walked over to Adel and flipped up the ball with one foot, gave it a pair of quick juggles, and kicked it with his heel to Adel. Adel caught the ball and cradled it under his arm.

“Where your goon had us wait, over by the road, me and my father? There's no shade. And not a damn cloud in the sky.”

Adel felt a need to rise to Kabir's defense. “He is not a goon.”

“Well, he made sure we got an eyeful of his Kalashnikov, I can tell you that.” He looked at Adel, a lazy, amused grin on his lips. He dropped a wad of spit at his feet. “So I see you're a fan of the head-butter.”

It took Adel a moment to realize who he was referring to. “You can't judge him by one mistake,” he said. “He was the best. He was a wizard in the midfield.”

“I've seen better.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

“Like Maradona.”

“Maradona?” Adel said, outraged. He'd had this debate before with one of his half brothers in Jalalabad. “Maradona was a cheater! ‘Hand of God,' remember?”

“Everyone cheats and everyone lies.”

The boy yawned and started to go. He was about the same height as Adel, maybe a hair taller, and probably just around his age too, Adel thought. But somehow he walked like he was older, without hurry and with a kind of air, as if he had seen everything there was to see and nothing surprised him.

“My name is Adel.”

“Gholam.” They shook hands. Gholam's grip was strong, his palm dry and callused.

“How old are you anyway?”

Gholam gave a shrug. “Thirteen, I guess. Could be fourteen by now.”

“You don't know your own birthday?”

Gholam grinned. “I bet you know yours. I bet you count down.”

“I do not,” Adel said defensively. “I mean, I don't count down.”

“I should go. My father's waiting alone.”

“I thought that was your grandfather.”

“You thought wrong.”

“Do you want to play a shoot-out?” Adel asked.

“You mean like a penalty shoot-out?”

“Five each … best of.”

Gholam spat again, squinted toward the road and back at Adel. Adel noticed that his chin was a bit small for his face and that he had overlapping extra canines in the front, one of them chipped badly and rotting. His left eyebrow was split in half by a short, narrow scar. Also, he smelled. But Adel hadn't had a conversation—let alone played a game—with a boy his age in nearly two years, discounting the monthly visits to Jalalabad. Adel prepared himself for disappointment, but Gholam shrugged and said, “Shit, why not? But I get first dibs on shooting.”

For goalposts, they used two rocks placed eight steps apart.
Gholam took his five shots. Scored one, off target twice, and Adel easily saved two. Gholam's goaltending was even worse than his shooting. Adel managed to score four, tricking him into leaning in the wrong direction each time, and the one shot he missed wasn't even on goal.

“Fucker,” Gholam said, bent in half, palms on his kneecaps.

“Rematch?” Adel tried not to gloat, but it was hard. He was soaring inside.

Gholam agreed, and the result was even more lopsided. He again managed one goal, and this time Adel converted all five of his attempts.

“That's it, I'm winded,” Gholam said, throwing up his hands. He trudged over to the tree stump and sat down with a tired groan. Adel cradled the ball and sat next to him.

“These probably aren't helping,” Gholam said, fishing a pack of cigarettes from the front pocket of his jeans. He had one left. He lit it with a single strike of a match, inhaled contentedly, and offered it to Adel. Adel was tempted to take it, if only to impress Gholam, but he passed, worried Kabir or his mother would smell it on him.

“Wise,” Gholam said, leaning his head back.

They talked idly about soccer for a while, and, to Adel's pleasant surprise, Gholam's knowledge turned out to be solid. They exchanged favorite match and favorite goal stories. They each offered a top-five-players list; mostly it was the same except Gholam's included Ronaldo the Brazilian and Adel's had Ronaldo the Portuguese. Inevitably, they got around to the 2006 Finals and the painful memory, for Adel, of the head-butting incident. Gholam said he watched the whole match standing with a crowd outside the window of a TV shop not far from the camp.

“‘The camp'?”

“The one where I grew up. In Pakistan.”

He told Adel that this was his first time in Afghanistan. He had lived his whole life in Pakistan in the Jalozai refugee camp where he'd been born. He said Jalozai had been like a city, a huge maze of tents and mud huts and homes built from plastic and aluminum siding in a labyrinth of narrow passageways littered with dirt and shit. It was a city in the belly of a yet greater city. He and his brothers—he was the eldest by three years—were raised in the camp. He had lived in a small mud house there with his brothers, his mother, his father, whose name was Iqbal, and his paternal grandmother, Parwana. In its alleyways, he and his brothers had learned to walk and talk. They had gone to school there. He had played with sticks and rusty old bicycle wheels on its dirt streets, running around with other refugee kids, until the sun dipped and his grandmother called him home.

“I liked it there,” he said. “I had friends. I knew everybody. We were doing all right too. I have an uncle in America, my father's half brother, Uncle Abdullah. I've never met him. But he was sending us money every few months. It helped. It helped a lot.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Had to. The Pakistanis shut down the camp. They said Afghans belong in Afghanistan. And then my uncle's money stopped coming. So my father said we might as well go home and restart, now that the Taliban had run to the Pakistani side of the border anyway. He said we were guests in Pakistan who'd outstayed their welcome. I was really depressed. This place”—he waved his hand—“this is a foreign country to me. And the kids in the camp, the ones who'd actually been to Afghanistan? None of them had a good thing to say about it.”

Adel wanted to say that he knew how Gholam felt. He wanted to tell him how much he missed Kabul, and his friends, and his
half brothers over in Jalalabad. But he had a feeling Gholam might laugh. Instead he said, “Well, it
is
pretty boring around here.”

Gholam laughed anyway. “I don't think that's quite what they meant,” he said.

Adel understood vaguely that he'd been chastised.

Gholam took a drag and blew out a run of rings. Together, they watched the rings gently float away and disintegrate.

“My father said to me and my brothers, he said, ‘Wait … wait until you breathe the air in Shadbagh, boys, and taste the water.' He was born here, my father, raised here too. He said, ‘You've never had water this cool and this sweet, boys.' He was always talking to us about Shadbagh, which I guess was nothing but a small village back when he lived here. He said there was a kind of grape that you could grow only in Shadbagh and nowhere else in the world. You'd think he was describing Paradise.”

Adel asked him where he was staying now. Gholam tossed the cigarette butt, looked up at the sky, squinting at the brightness. “You know the open field over by the windmill?”

“Yes.”