Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

and privileges, he said, because God sees to it that those who sacrifice the most justly reap the rewards as well.

Both in this life and the next, Baba jan said, pointing his thick finger first down, then up.

Looking at the pictures, Adel wished he had been around to fight jihad alongside his father in those more adventurous days. He liked to picture himself and Baba jan shooting at Russian helicopters together, blowing up tanks, dodging gunfire, living in mountains and sleeping in caves. Father and son, war heroes.

There was also a large framed photo of Baba jan smiling alongside President Karzai at Arg, the Presidential Palace in Kabul. This one was more recent, taken in the course of a small ceremony during which Baba jan had been handed an award for his humanitarian work in Shadbagh-e-Nau. It was an award that Baba jan had more than earned. The

new school for girls was merely his latest project. Adel knew that women in town used to die regularly giving birth. But they didn’t anymore because his father had opened a large clinic, run by two doctors and three midwives whose salaries he paid for out of his own pocket. All the townspeople received free care at the clinic; no child in Shadbagh- e-Nau went unimmunized. Baba jan had dispatched teams to locate water points all over town and dig wells. It was Baba jan who had helped finally bring full-time electricity to Shadbagh-e-Nau. At least a dozen businesses had opened thanks to his loans that, Adel had learned from Kabir, were rarely, if ever, paid back.

Adel had meant what he had said to the teacher earlier. He knew he was lucky to be the son of such a man.

Just as the rounds of handshaking were coming to an end, Adel spotted a slight man approaching his father. He wore round, thin-

framed spectacles and a short gray beard and had little teeth like the heads of burnt matches. Trailing him was a boy roughly Adel’s own age. The boy’s big toes poked through matching holes in his sneakers. His hair sat on his head as a matted, unmoving mess. His jeans were stiff with dirt, and they were too short besides. By contrast, his T- shirt hung almost to his knees.

Kabir planted himself between the old man and Baba jan. “I told you already this wasn’t a good time,” he said.

“I just want to have a brief word with the commander,” the old man said.

Baba jan took Adel by the arm and gently guided him into the backseat of the Land Cruiser. “Let’s go, son. Your mother is waiting for you.” He climbed in beside Adel and shut the door.

Inside, as his tinted window rolled up, Adel watched Kabir say something to the old man that Adel couldn’t hear. Then Kabir

made his way around the front of the SUV and let himself into the driver’s seat, laying his Kalashnikov on the passenger seat before turning the ignition.

“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 par- ents—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 fel- low—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.