And the Mountains Echoed (5 page)

They had to sleep in the desert that night. They ate bread and the last of the boiled potatoes Parwana had packed for them. Father made a fire and set a kettle on the flames for tea.

Abdullah lay beside the fire, curled beneath the wool blanket behind Pari, the soles of her cold feet pressed against him.

Father bent over the flames and lit a cigarette.

Abdullah rolled to his back, and Pari adjusted, fitting her cheek into the familiar nook beneath his collarbone. He breathed in the coppery smell of desert dust and looked up at a sky thick with stars like ice crystals, flashing and flickering. A delicate crescent moon cradled the dim ghostly outline of its full self.

Abdullah thought back to the winter before last, everything plunged into darkness, the wind coming in around the door, whistling slow and long and loud, and whistling from every little crack in the ceiling. Outside, the village's features obliterated by snow. The nights long and starless, daytime brief, gloomy, the sun rarely out, and then only to make a cameo appearance before it vanished. He remembered Omar's labored cries, then his silence, then Father grimly carving a wooden board with a sickle moon, just like the one above them now, pounding the board into the hard ground burnt with frost at the head of the small grave.

And now autumn's end was in sight once more. Winter was already lurking around the corner, though neither Father nor Parwana spoke about it, as though saying the word might hasten its arrival.

“Father?” he said.

From the other side of the fire, Father gave a soft grunt.

“Will you allow me to help you? Build the guesthouse, I mean.”

Smoke spiraled up from Father's cigarette. He was staring off into the darkness.

“Father?”

Father shifted on the rock where he was seated. “I suppose you could help mix mortar,” he said.

“I don't know how.”

“I'll show you. You'll learn.”

“What about me?” Pari said.

“You?” Father said slowly. He took a drag of his cigarette and poked at the fire with a stick. Scattered little sparks went dancing up into the blackness. “You'll be in charge of the water. Make sure we never go thirsty. Because a man can't work if he's thirsty.”

Pari was quiet.

“Father's right,” Abdullah said. He sensed Pari wanted to get her hands dirty, climb down into the mud, and that she was disappointed with the task Father had assigned her. “Without you fetching us water, we'll never get the guesthouse built.”

Father slid the stick beneath the handle of the teakettle and lifted it from the fire. He set it aside to cool.

“I'll tell you what,” he said. “You show me you can handle the water job and I'll find you something else to do.”

Pari tilted up her chin and looked at Abdullah, her face lit up with a gapped smile.

He remembered when she was a baby, when she would sleep atop his chest, and he would open his eyes sometimes in the middle of the night and find her grinning silently at him with this same expression.

He was the one raising her. It was true. Even though he was still a child himself. Ten years old. When Pari was an infant, it was he she had awakened at night with her squeaks and mutters, he who had walked and bounced her in the dark. He had changed her soiled diapers. He had been the one to give Pari her baths. It wasn't Father's job to do—he was a man—and, besides, he was always too exhausted from work. And Parwana, already pregnant with Omar, was slow to rouse herself to Pari's needs. She never had the patience or the energy. Thus the care had fallen on Abdullah, but he didn't mind at all. He did it gladly. He loved the fact that he was the one to help with her first step, to gasp at her first uttered word. This was his purpose, he believed, the reason God had made him, so he would be there to take care of Pari when He took away their mother.

“Baba,” Pari said. “Tell a story.”

“It's getting late,” Father said.

“Please.”

Father was a closed-off man by nature. He rarely uttered more than two consecutive sentences at any time. But on occasion, for reasons unknown to Abdullah, something in Father unlocked and stories suddenly came spilling out. Sometimes he had Abdullah and Pari sit raptly before him, as Parwana banged pots in the kitchen, and told them stories his grandmother had passed on to him when he had been a boy, sending them off to lands populated by sultans and
jinn
s and malevolent
div
s and wise dervishes. Other times, he made up stories. He made them up on the spot, his tales unmasking a capacity for imagination and dream that always surprised Abdullah. Father never felt more present to Abdullah, more vibrant, revealed, more truthful, than when he told his stories, as though the tales were pinholes into his opaque, inscrutable world.

But Abdullah could tell from the expression on Father's face that there would be no story tonight.

“It's late,” Father said again. He lifted the kettle with the edge of the shawl draping his shoulders and poured himself a cup of tea. He blew the steam and took a sip, his face glowing orange in the flames. “Time to sleep. Long day tomorrow.”

Abdullah pulled the blanket over their heads. Underneath, he sang into the nape of Pari's neck:

I found a sad little fairy
Beneath the shade of a paper tree
.

Pari, already sleepy, sluggishly sang her verse.

I know a sad little fairy
Who was blown away by the wind one night
.

Almost instantly, she was snoring.

Abdullah awoke later and found Father gone. He sat up in a fright. The fire was all but dead, nothing left of it now but a few crimson speckles of ember. Abdullah's gaze darted left, then right, but his eyes could penetrate nothing in the dark, at once vast and smothering. He felt his face going white. Heart sprinting, he cocked his ear, held his breath.

“Father?” he whispered.

Silence.

Panic began to mushroom deep in his chest. He sat perfectly still, his body erect and tense, and listened for a long time. He heard nothing. They were alone, he and Pari, the dark closing in around them. They had been abandoned. Father had abandoned
them. Abdullah felt the true vastness of the desert, and the world, for the first time. How easily a person could lose his way in it. No one to help, no one to show the way. Then a worse thought wormed its way into his head. Father was dead. Someone had slit his throat. Bandits. They had killed him, and now they were closing in on him and Pari, taking their time, relishing it, making a game of it.

“Father?” he called out again, his voice shrill this time.

No reply came.

“Father?”

He called for his father again and again, a claw tightening itself around his windpipe. He lost track of how many times and for how long he called for his father but no answer came forth from the dark. He pictured faces, hidden in the mountains bulging from the earth, watching, grinning down at him and Pari with malice. Panic seized him, shriveled up his innards. He began to shiver, and mewl under his breath. He felt himself on the cusp of screaming.

Then, footsteps. A shape materialized from the dark.

“I thought you'd gone,” Abdullah said shakily.

Father sat down by the remains of the fire.

“Where did you go?”

“Go to sleep, boy.”

“You wouldn't leave us. You wouldn't do that, Father.”

Father looked at him, but in the dark his face dissolved into an expression Abdullah couldn't make out. “You're going to wake your sister.”

“Don't leave us.”

“That's enough of that now.”

Abdullah lay down again, his sister clutched tightly in his arms, his heart battering in his throat.

…

Abdullah had never been to Kabul. What he knew about Kabul came from stories Uncle Nabi had told him. He had visited a few smaller towns on jobs with Father, but never a real city, and certainly nothing Uncle Nabi had said could have prepared him for the hustle and bustle of the biggest and busiest city of them all. Everywhere, he saw traffic lights, and teahouses, and restaurants, and glass-fronted shops with bright multicolored signs. Cars rattling noisily down the crowded streets, hooting, darting narrowly among buses, pedestrians, and bicycles. Horse-drawn
gari
s jingled up and down boulevards, their iron-rimmed wheels bouncing on the road. The sidewalks he walked with Pari and Father were crowded with cigarette and chewing-gum sellers, magazine stands, blacksmiths pounding horseshoes. At intersections, traffic policemen in ill-fitting uniforms blew their whistles and made authoritative gestures that no one seemed to heed.

Pari on his lap, Abdullah sat on a sidewalk bench near a butcher's shop, sharing a tin plate of baked beans and cilantro chutney that Father had bought them from a street stall.

“Look, Abollah,” Pari said, pointing to a shop across the street. In its window stood a young woman dressed in a beautifully embroidered green dress with small mirrors and beads. She wore a long matching scarf, with silver jewelry and deep red trousers. She stood perfectly still, gazing indifferently at passersby without once blinking. She didn't move so much as a finger as Abdullah and Pari finished their beans, and remained motionless after that too. Up the block, Abdullah saw a huge poster hanging from the façade of a tall building. It showed a young, pretty Indian woman in a tulip field, standing in a downpour of rain, ducking playfully behind some kind of bungalow. She was grinning shyly, a wet sari
hugging her curves. Abdullah wondered if this was what Uncle Nabi had called a cinema, where people went to watch films, and hoped that in the coming month Uncle Nabi would take him and Pari to see a film. He grinned at the thought.

It was just after the call to prayer blared from a blue-tiled mosque up the street that Abdullah saw Uncle Nabi pull up to the curb. Uncle Nabi swung out of the driver's side, dressed in his olive suit, his door narrowly missing a young bicycle rider in a
chapan
, who swerved just in time.

Uncle Nabi hurried around the front of the car and embraced Father. When he saw Abdullah and Pari, his face erupted in a big grin. He stooped to be on the same level as them.

“How do you like Kabul, kids?”

“It's very loud,” Pari said, and Uncle Nabi laughed.

“That it is. Come on, climb in. You'll see a lot more of it from the car. Wipe your feet before you get in. Saboor, you take the front.”

The backseat was cool, hard, and light blue to match the exterior. Abdullah slid across it to the window behind the driver's seat and helped Pari onto his lap. He noticed the envious way bystanders looked at the car. Pari swiveled her head toward him, and they exchanged a grin.

They watched the city stream by as Uncle Nabi drove. He said he would take a longer route so they could see a little of Kabul. He pointed to a ridge called Tapa Maranjan and to the dome-shaped mausoleum atop it overlooking the city. He said Nāder Shah, father to King Zahir Shah, was buried there. He showed them the Bala Hissar fort atop the Koh-e-Shirdawaza mountain, which he said the British had used during their second war against Afghanistan.

“What's that, Uncle Nabi?” Abdullah tapped on the window, pointing to a big rectangular yellow building.

“That's Silo. It's the new bread factory.” Uncle Nabi drove with
one hand and craned back to wink at him. “Compliments of our friends the Russians.”

A factory that makes bread, Abdullah marveled, picturing Parwana back in Shadbagh slapping slabs of dough against the sides of their mud
tandoor
.

Eventually, Uncle Nabi turned onto a clean, wide street lined with regularly spaced cypress trees. The homes here were elegant, and bigger than any Abdullah had ever seen. They were white, yellow, light blue. Most had a couple stories, were surrounded by high walls and closed off by double metal gates. Abdullah spotted several cars like Uncle Nabi's parked along the street.

Uncle Nabi pulled up to a driveway decked by a row of neatly trimmed bushes. Beyond the driveway, the white-walled, two-story home loomed impossibly large.