And the Mountains Echoed (32 page)

“What was that about?” Adel asked.

“Nothing important,” Kabir said.

They turned onto the road. Some of the boys who had stood in the crowd gave chase for a short while before the Land Cruiser pulled away. Kabir drove through the main crowded strip that bisected the town of Shadbagh-e-Nau, honking frequently as he needled the car through traffic. Everyone yielded. Some people waved. Adel watched the crowded sidewalks on either side of him, his gaze settling on and then off familiar sights—the carcasses hanging from hooks in butcher shops; the blacksmiths working their wooden wheels, hand-pumping their bellows; the fruit merchants fanning flies off their grapes and cherries; the sidewalk barber on the wicker chair stropping his razor. They passed tea shops, kabob houses, an auto-repair shop, a mosque, before Kabir veered the car through the town's big public square, at the center of which stood a blue fountain and a nine-foot-tall black stone mujahid, looking east, turban gracefully wrapped atop his head, an RPG launcher on his shoulder. Baba jan had personally commissioned a sculptor from Kabul to build the statue.

North of the strip were a few blocks of residential area, mostly composed of narrow, unpaved streets and small, flat-roofed little houses painted white or yellow or blue. Satellite dishes sat on the roofs of a few; Afghan flags draped a number of windows. Baba jan
had told Adel that most of the homes and businesses in Shadbagh-e-Nau had been built in the last fifteen years or so. He'd had a hand in the construction of many of them. Most people who lived here considered him the founder of Shadbagh-e-Nau, and Adel knew that the town elders had offered to name the town after Baba jan but he had declined the honor.

From there, the main road ran north for two miles before it connected with Shadbagh-e-Kohna, Old Shadbagh. Adel had never seen the village as it had once looked decades ago. By the time Baba jan had moved him and his mother from Kabul to Shadbagh, the village had all but vanished. All the homes were gone. The only surviving relic of the past was a decaying windmill. At Shadbagh-e-Kohna, Kabir veered left from the main road onto a wide, quarter-mile-long unpaved track that connected the main road to the thick twelve-foot-high walls of the compound where Adel lived with his parents—the only standing structure now in Shadbagh-e-Kohna, discounting the windmill. Adel could see the white walls now as the SUV jostled and bounced on the track. Coils of barbed wire ran along the top of the walls.

A uniformed guard, who always stood watch at the main gates to the compound, saluted and opened the gates. Kabir drove the SUV through the walls and up a graveled path toward the house.

The house stood three stories high and was painted bright pink and turquoise green. It had soaring columns and pointed eaves and mirrored skyscraper glass that sparkled in the sun. It had parapets, a veranda with sparkly mosaics, and wide balconies with curved wrought-iron railings. Inside, they had nine bedrooms and seven bathrooms, and sometimes when Adel and Baba jan played hide-and-seek, Adel wandered around for an hour or more before he found his father. All the counters in the bathrooms and
kitchen had been made of granite and lime marble. Lately, to Adel's delight, Baba jan had been talking about building a swimming pool in the basement.

Kabir pulled into the circular driveway outside the tall front gates of the house. He killed the engine.

“Why don't you give us a minute?” Baba jan said.

Kabir nodded and exited the car. Adel watched him walk up the marble steps to the gates and ring. It was Azmaray, the other bodyguard—a short, stocky, gruff fellow—who opened the gate. The two men said a few words, then lingered on the steps, lighting a cigarette each.

“Do you really have to go?” Adel said. His father was leaving for the south in the morning to oversee his fields of cotton in Helmand and to meet with workers at the cotton factory he had built there. He would be gone for two weeks, a span of time that, to Adel, seemed interminable.

Baba jan turned his gaze to him. He dwarfed Adel, taking up more than half the backseat. “Wish I didn't, son.”

Adel nodded. “I was proud today. I was proud of you.”

Baba jan lowered the weight of his big hand on Adel's knee. “Thank you, Adel. I appreciate that. But I take you to these things so you learn, so you understand that it's important for the fortunate, for people like us, to live up to their responsibilities.”

“I just wish you didn't have to leave all the time.”

“Me too, son. Me too. But I'm not leaving until tomorrow. I'll be home later in the evening.”

Adel nodded, casting his gaze down at his hands.

“Look,” his father said in a soft voice, “the people in this town, they need me, Adel. They need my help to have a home and find work and make a livelihood. Kabul has its own problems. It can't
help them. So if I don't, no one else will. Then these people would suffer.”

“I know that,” Adel muttered.

Baba jan squeezed his knee gently. “You miss Kabul, I know, and your friends. It's been a hard adjustment here, for both you and your mother. And I know that I'm always off traveling and going to meetings and that a lot of people have demands on my time. But … Look at me, son.”

Adel raised his eyes to meet Baba jan's. They shone at him kindly from beneath the canopy of his bushy brows.

“No one on this earth matters to me more than you, Adel. You are my son. I would gladly give up all of this for you. I would give up my life for you, son.”

Adel nodded, his eyes watering a little. Sometimes, when Baba jan spoke like this, Adel felt his heart swell and swell until he found it hard to draw a breath.

“Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Baba jan.”

“Do you believe me?”

“I do.”

“Good. Then give your father a kiss.”

Adel threw his arms around Baba jan's neck and his father held him tightly and patiently. Adel remembered when he was little, when he would tap his father on the shoulder in the middle of the night still shaking from a nightmare, and his father would push back his blanket and let him climb into bed, folding him in and kissing the crown of his head until Adel stopped shivering and slipped back into sleep.

“Maybe I'll bring you a little something from Helmand,” Baba jan said.

“You don't have to,” Adel said, his voice muffled. He already had more toys than he knew what to do with. And there wasn't a toy on earth that could make up for his father's absence.

Late that day, Adel perched midstairway and spied on the scene unfolding below him. The doorbell had rung and Kabir had answered. Now Kabir was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, blocking the entrance, as he spoke to the person on the other side. It was the old man from earlier at the school, Adel saw, the bespectacled man with the burnt-match teeth. The boy with the holes in his shoes was there too, standing beside him.

The old man said, “Where has he gone to?”

Kabir said, “Business. In the south.”

“I heard he was leaving tomorrow.”

Kabir shrugged.

“How long will he be gone?”

“Two, maybe three months. Who's to say.”

“That's not what I heard.”

“Now you're testing my patience, old man,” Kabir said, uncrossing his arms.

“I'll wait for him.”

“Not here, you won't.”

“Over by the road, I meant.”

Kabir shifted impatiently on his feet. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But the commander is a busy man. No telling when he'll be back.”

The old man nodded and backed away, the boy following him.

Kabir shut the door.

Adel pulled the curtain in the family room and out the window
watched the old man and the boy walking up the unpaved road that connected the compound to the main road.

“You lied to him,” Adel said.

“It's part of what I'm paid to do: protect your father from buzzards.”

“What does he want anyway, a job?”

“Something like that.”

Kabir moved to the couch and removed his shoes. He looked up at Adel and gave him a wink. Adel liked Kabir, far more than Azmaray, who was unpleasant and rarely said a word to him. Kabir played cards with Adel and invited him to watch DVDs together. Kabir loved movies. He owned a collection that he had bought on the black market and watched ten to twelve movies a week—Iranian, French, American, of course Bollywood—he didn't care. And sometimes if Adel's mother was in another room and Adel promised not to tell his father, Kabir emptied the magazine on his Kalashnikov and let Adel hold it, like a mujahid. Now the Kalashnikov sat propped against the wall by the front door.

Kabir lay down on the couch and propped his feet up on the arm. He started flipping through a newspaper.

“They looked harmless enough,” Adel said, releasing the curtain and turning to Kabir. He could see the bodyguard's forehead over the top of the newspaper.

“Maybe I should have asked them in for tea, then,” Kabir murmured. “Offer them some cake too.”

“Don't make fun.”

“They all look harmless.”

“Is Baba jan going to help them?”

“Probably,” Kabir sighed. “Your father is a river to his people.” He lowered the paper and grinned. “What's that from? Come on, Adel. We saw it last month.”

Adel shrugged. He started heading upstairs.

“Lawrence,”
Kabir called from the couch. “
Lawrence of Arabia
. Anthony Quinn.” And then, just as Adel had reached the top of the stairs: “They're buzzards, Adel. Don't fall for their act. They'd pick your father clean if they could.”

One morning, a couple of days after his father had left for Helmand, Adel went up to his parents' bedroom. The music from the other side of the door was loud and thumping. He let himself in and found his mother, in shorts and a T-shirt in front of the giant flat-screen TV, mimicking the moves of a trio of sweaty blond women, a series of leaps and squats and lunges and planks. She spotted him in the big mirror of her dresser.

“Want to join me?” she panted over the loud music.

“I'll just sit here,” he said. He slid down to the carpeted floor and watched his mother, whose name was Aria, leapfrog her way across the room and back.

Adel's mother had delicate hands and feet, a small upturned nose, and a pretty face like an actress from one of Kabir's Bollywood films. She was lean, agile, and young—she had been only fourteen when she'd married Baba jan. Adel had another, older mother too, and three older half brothers, but Baba jan had put them up in the east, in Jalalabad, and Adel saw them only once a month or so when Baba jan took him there to visit. Unlike his mother and stepmother, who disliked each other, Adel and his half brothers got along fine. When he visited them in Jalalabad, they took him with them to parks, to bazaars, the cinema, and Buzkashi tournaments. They played
Resident Evil
with him and shot the zombies in
Call of Duty
with him, and they always picked him on their
team during neighborhood soccer matches. Adel wished so badly that they lived here, near him.

Adel watched his mother lie on her back and raise her straightened legs off the floor and lower them down again, a blue plastic ball tucked between her bare ankles.

The truth was, the boredom here in Shadbagh was crushing Adel. He hadn't made a single friend in the two years they had lived here. He could not bike into town, certainly not on his own, not with the rash of kidnappings everywhere in the region—though he did sneak out now and then briefly, always staying within the perimeter of the compound. He had no classmates because Baba jan wouldn't let him attend the local school—for “security reasons,” he said—so a tutor came to the house every morning for lessons. Mostly, Adel passed the time reading or kicking the soccer ball around on his own or watching movies with Kabir, often the same ones over and over. He wandered listlessly around the wide, high-ceilinged hallways of their massive home, through all the big empty rooms, or else he sat looking out the window of his bedroom upstairs. He lived in a mansion, but in a shrunken world. Some days he was so bored, he wanted to chew wood.