“Father?” he said.
From the other side of the fire, Father gave a soft grunt.
“Will you allow me to help you? Build the guesthouse, I mean.”
Smoke spiraled up from Father’s cigarette. He was staring off into the darkness.
“Father?”
Father shifted on the rock where he was seated. “I suppose you could help mix mortar,” he said.
“I don’t know how.”
“I’ll show you. You’ll learn.”
“What about me?” Pari said.
“You?” 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.
“Father’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.
“I’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.
“Baba,” Pari said. “Tell a story.”
“It’s getting late,” Father said.
“Please.”
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 jinns and malevolent divs 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.
“It’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.
“Father?” 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 abandoned them. Abdullah felt the true vastness of the desert, and the world, for the first time. How easily a person could lose his way in it. No one to help, no one to show the way. Then a worse thought wormed its way into his head. Father was dead. Someone had slit his throat. Bandits. They had killed him, and now they were closing in on him and Pari, taking their time, relishing it, making a game of it.
“Father?” he called out again, his voice shrill this time.
No reply came.
“Father?”
He called for his father again and again, a claw tightening itself around his windpipe. He lost track of how many times and for how long he called for his father but no answer came forth from the dark. He pictured faces, hidden in the mountains bulging from the earth, watching, grinning down at him and Pari with malice. Panic seized him, shriveled up his innards. He began to shiver, and mewl under his breath. He felt himself on the cusp of screaming.
Then, footsteps. A shape materialized from the dark.
“I thought you’d gone,” Abdullah said shakily.
Father sat down by the remains of the fire.
“Where did you go?”
“Go to sleep, boy.”
“You wouldn’t leave us. You wouldn’t do that, Father.”
Father looked at him, but in the dark his face dissolved into an expression Abdullah couldn’t make out. “You’re going to wake your sister.”
“Don’t leave us.”
“That’s enough of that now.”
Abdullah lay down again, his sister clutched tightly in his arms, his heart battering in his throat.
…
Abdullah had never been to Kabul. What he knew about Kabul came from stories Uncle Nabi had told him. He had visited a few smaller towns on jobs with Father, but never a real city, and certainly nothing Uncle Nabi had said could have prepared him for the hustle and bustle of the biggest and busiest city of them all. Everywhere, he saw traffic lights, and teahouses, and restaurants, and glass-fronted shops with bright multicolored signs. Cars rattling noisily down the crowded streets, hooting, darting narrowly among buses, pedestrians, and bicycles. Horse-drawn garis jingled up and down boulevards, their iron-rimmed wheels bouncing on the road. The sidewalks he walked with Pari and Father were crowded with cigarette and chewing-gum sellers, magazine stands, blacksmiths pounding horseshoes. At intersections, traffic policemen in ill-fitting uniforms blew their whistles and made authoritative gestures that no one seemed to heed.