And the Mountains Echoed

you. You’ll learn.”
    â€œWhat about me?” Pari said.
    â€œYou?” 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.
    â€œFather’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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œBaba,” Pari said. “Tell a story.”
    â€œIt’s getting late,” Father said.
    â€œPlease.”
    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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œFather?” 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 abandonedthem. Abdullah felt the true vastness of the desert, and the world, for the first