And the Mountains Echoed Read Online Free PDF

and worked in the big city, Kabul.
    It was on his last visit that Uncle Nabi had told Father about the job. The wealthy people he worked for were building an addition to their home—a small guesthouse in the backyard, complete with a bathroom, separate from the main building—and Uncle Nabi had suggested they hire Father, who knew his way around a construction site. He said the job would pay well and take a month to complete, give or take.
    Father did know his way around a construction site. He’d worked in enough of them. As long as Abdullah could remember, Father was out searching for work, knocking on doors for a day’s labor. He had overheard Father one time tell the village elder, Mullah Shekib,
If I had been born an animal, Mullah Sahib, I swear I would have come out a mule
. Sometimes Father took Abdullah along on his jobs. They had picked apples once in a town that was a full day’s walk away from Shadbagh. Abdullah remembered his father mounted on the ladder until sundown, his hunched shoulders, the creased back of his neck burning in the sun, the raw skin of his forearms, his thick fingers twisting and turning apples one at a time. They had made bricks for a mosque in another town. Father had shown Abdullah how to collect the good soil, the deep lighter-colored stuff. They had sifted the dirt together, added straw, and Father had patiently taught him to titrate the water so the mixture didn’t turn runny. Over the last year, Father had lugged stones. He had shoveled dirt, tried his hand at plowing fields. He had worked on a road crew laying down asphalt.
    Abdullah knew that Father blamed himself for Omar. If hehad found more work, or better work, he could have bought the baby better winter clothes, heavier blankets, maybe even a proper stove to warm the house. This was what Father thought. He hadn’t said a word to Abdullah about Omar since the burial, but Abdullah knew.
    He remembered seeing Father once, some days after Omar died, standing alone beneath the giant oak tree. The oak towered over everything in Shadbagh and was the oldest living thing in the village. Father said it wouldn’t surprise him if it had witnessed the emperor Babur marching his army to capture Kabul. He said he had spent half his childhood in the shade of its massive crown or climbing its sweeping boughs. His own father, Abdullah’s grandfather, had tied long ropes to one of the thick boughs and suspended a swing, a contraption that had survived countless harsh seasons and the old man himself. Father said he used to take turns with Parwana and her sister, Masooma, on this swing when they were all children.
    But, these days, Father was always too exhausted from work when Pari pulled on his sleeve and asked him to make her fly on the swing.
    Maybe tomorrow, Pari
.
    Just for a while, Baba. Please get up
.
    Not now. Another time
.
    She would give up in the end, release his sleeve, and walk away resigned. Sometimes Father’s narrow face collapsed in on itself as he watched her go. He would roll over in his cot, then pull up the quilt and shut his weary eyes.
    Abdullah could not picture that Father had once swung on a swing. He could not imagine that Father had once been a boy, like him. A boy. Carefree, light on his feet. Running headlong into the open fields with his playmates. Father, whose hands were scarred,whose face was crosshatched with deep lines of weariness. Father, who might as well have been born with shovel in hand and mud under his nails.
    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