And the Mountains Echoed

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.
    â€œThey 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.
    â€œMaybe I should have asked them in for tea, then,” Kabir murmured. “Offer them some cake too.”
    â€œDon’t make fun.”
    â€œThey all look harmless.”
    â€œIs Baba jan going to help them?”
    â€œProbably,” 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.
    â€œLawrence,”
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.
    â€œWant to join me?” she panted over the loud music.
    â€œI’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 theirteam 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.
    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