And the Mountains Echoed

“Let’s try them on.”

Mrs. Wahdati helped Pari slip on the shoes, working the strap and buckle for her. She peered up at Abdullah over her glasses. “You could use a pair too, I think. I can’t believe you walked all the way from your village in those sandals.”

Abdullah shook his head and looked away. Down the alleyway, an old man with a ragged beard and two clubfeet begged passersby.

“Look, Abollah!” Pari raised one foot, then the other. She stomped her feet on the ground, hopped. Mrs. Wahdati called Uncle Nabi over and told him to walk Pari down the alley, see how the shoes felt. Uncle Nabi took Pari’s hand and led her up the lane.

Mrs. Wahdati looked down at Abdullah.

“You think I’m a bad person,” she said. “The way I spoke earlier.”

Abdullah watched Pari and Uncle Nabi pass by the old beggar with the clubfeet. The old man said something to Pari, Pari turned her face up to Uncle Nabi and said something, and Uncle Nabi tossed the old man a coin.

Abdullah began to cry soundlessly.

“Oh, you sweet boy,” Mrs. Wahdati said, startled. “You poor darling.” She fetched a handkerchief from her purse and offered it.

Abdullah swiped it away. “Please don’t do it,” he said, his voice cracking.

She hunkered down beside him now, her glasses pushed up on her hair. There was wetness in her eyes too, and when she dabbed at them with the handkerchief, it came away with black smudges. “I don’t blame you if you hate me. It’s your right. But—and I don’t expect you to understand, not now—this is for the best. It really is, Abdullah. It’s for the best. One day you’ll see.”

Abdullah turned his face up to the sky and wailed just as Pari came skipping back to him, her eyes dripping with gratitude, her face shining with happiness.

One morning that winter, Father fetched his ax and cut down the giant oak tree. He had Mullah Shekib’s son, Baitullah, and a few other men help him. No one tried to intervene. Abdullah stood alongside other boys and watched the men. The very first thing Father did was take down the swing. He climbed the tree and cut the ropes with a knife. Then he and the other men hacked away at the thick trunk until late afternoon, when the old tree finally toppled with a massive groan. Father told Abdullah they needed the firewood for winter. But he had swung his ax at the old tree with violence, with his jaw firmly set and a cloud over his face like he couldn’t bear to look at it any longer.

Now, beneath a stone-colored sky, men were striking at the felled trunk, their noses and cheeks flushed in the cold, their blades echoing hollowly when they hit the wood. Farther up the tree, Abdullah snapped small branches off the big ones. The first of the winter snow had fallen two days before. Not heavy, not yet, only a promise of things to come. Soon, winter would descend on Shadbagh, winter and its icicles and weeklong snowdrifts and winds that cracked the skin on the back of hands in a minute flat. For now, the white on the ground was scant, pocked from here to the steep hillsides with pale brown blotches of earth.

Abdullah gathered an armful of slim branches and carried them to a growing communal pile nearby. He was wearing his new snow boots, gloves, and winter coat. It was secondhand, but other than the broken zipper, which Father had fixed, it was as good as new—padded, dark blue, with orange fur lining inside. It had four deep pockets that snapped open and shut and a quilted hood that tightened around Abdullah’s face when he drew its cords. He pushed back the hood from his head now and let out a long foggy breath.

The sun was dropping into the horizon. Abdullah could still make out the old windmill, looming stark and gray over the village’s mud walls. Its blades gave a creaky groan whenever a nippy gust blew in from the hills. The windmill was home mainly to blue herons in the summer, but now that winter was here the herons had gone and the crows had moved in. Every morning, Abdullah awoke to their squawks and harsh croaks.

Something caught his eye, off to his right, on the ground. He walked over to it and knelt down.

A feather. Small. Yellow.

He took off one glove and picked it up.

Tonight they were going to a party, he, his father, and his little half brother Iqbal. Baitullah had a new infant boy. A motrebwould sing for the men, and someone would tap on a tambourine. There would be tea and warm, freshly baked bread, and shorwasoup with potatoes. Afterward, Mullah Shekib would dip his finger in a bowl of sweetened water and let the baby suckle it. He would produce his shiny black stone and his double-edged razor, lift the cloth from the boy’s midriff. An ordinary ritual. Life rolling on in Shadbagh.

Abdullah turned the feather over in his hand.

I won’t have any crying, Father had said. No crying. I won’t have it.

And there hadn’t been any. No one in the village asked after Pari. No one even spoke her name. It astonished Abdullah how thoroughly she had vanished from their lives.

Only in Shuja did Abdullah find a reflection of his own grief. The dog turned up at their door every day. Parwana threw rocks at him. Father went at him with a stick. But he kept returning. Every night he could be heard whimpering mournfully and every morning they found him lying by the door, chin on his front paws, blinking up at his assailants with melancholy, unaccusing eyes. This went on for weeks until one morning Abdullah saw him hobbling toward the hills, head hung low. No one in Shadbagh had seen him since.

Abdullah pocketed the yellow feather and began walking toward the windmill.

Sometimes, in unguarded moments, he caught Father’s face clouding over, drawn into confusing shades of emotion. Father looked diminished to him now, stripped of something essential. He loped sluggishly about the house or else sat in the heat of their big new cast-iron stove, little Iqbal on his lap, and stared unseeingly into the flames. His voice dragged now in a way that Abdullah did not remember, as though something weighed on each word he spoke. He shrank into long silences, his face closed off. He didn’t tell stories anymore, had not told one since he and Abdullah had returned from Kabul. Maybe, Abdullah thought, Father had sold the Wahdatis his muse as well.

Gone.

Vanished.

Nothing left.

Nothing said.

Other than these words from Parwana: It had to be her. I am sorry, Abdullah. She had to be the one.

The finger cut, to save the hand.

He knelt on the ground behind the windmill, at the base of the decaying stone tower. He took off his gloves and dug at the ground. He thought of her heavy eyebrows and her wide rounded forehead, her gap-toothed smile. He heard in his head the tinkle of her laughter rolling around the house like it used to. He thought of the scuffle that had broken out when they had come back from the bazaar. Pari panicking. Shrieking. Uncle Nabi quickly whisking her away. Abdullah dug until his fingers struck metal. Then he maneuvered his hands underneath and lifted the tin tea box from the hole. He swiped cold dirt off the lid.

Lately, he thought a lot about the story Father had told them the night before the trip to Kabul, the old peasant Baba Ayub and the div. Abdullah would find himself on a spot where Pari had once stood, her absence like a smell pushing up from the earth beneath his feet, and his legs would buckle, and his heart would collapse in on itself, and he would long for a swig of the magic potion the divhad given Baba Ayub so he too could forget.

But there was no forgetting. Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of Abdullah’s vision everywhere he went. She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell. Some nights he dreamed that he was in the desert again, alone, surrounded by the mountains, and in the distance a single tiny glint of light flickering on, off, on, off, like a message.