Page 21 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

He wished he could love his new mother in the same way. And perhaps

Parwana, he thought, secretly wished the same, that she could love him. The way
she did Iqbal, her one-year-old son, whose face she always kissed, whose every
cough and sneeze she fretted over. Or the way she had loved her first baby,
Omar. She had adored him. But he had died of the cold the winter before last. He
was two weeks old. Parwana and Father had barely named him. He was one of
three babies that brutal winter had taken in Shadbagh. Abdullah remembered
Parwana clutching Omar’s swaddled little corpse, her fits of grief. He
remembered the day they buried him up on the hill, a tiny mound on frozen
ground, beneath a pewter sky, Mullah Shekib saying the prayers, the wind
spraying grits of snow and ice into everyone’s eyes.
Abdullah suspected Parwana would be furious later to learn that he had traded
his only pair of shoes for a peacock feather. Father had labored hard under the
sun to pay for them. She would let him have it when she found out. She might
even hit him, Abdullah thought. She had struck him a few times before. She had

strong, heavy hands—from all those years of lifting her invalid sister, Abdullah
imagined—and they knew how to swing a broomstick or land a well-aimed slap.
But to her credit, Parwana did not seem to derive any satisfaction from hitting
him. Nor was she incapable of tenderness toward her stepchildren. There was the
time she had sewn Pari a silver-and-green dress from a roll of fabric Father had
brought from Kabul. The time she had taught Abdullah, with surprising patience,
how to crack two eggs simultaneously without breaking the yolks. And the time
she had shown them how to twist and turn husks of corn into little dolls, the way
she had with her own sister when they were little. She showed them how to
fashion dresses for the dolls out of little torn strips of cloth.

But these were gestures, Abdullah knew, acts of duty, drawn from a well far
shallower than the one she reached into for Iqbal. If one night their house caught
fire, Abdullah knew without doubt which child Parwana would grab rushing out.
She would not think twice. In the end, it came down to a simple thing: They
weren’t her children, he and Pari. Most people loved their own. It couldn’t be
helped that he and his sister didn’t belong to her. They were another woman’s
leftovers.
He waited for Parwana to take the bread inside, then watched as she
reemerged from the hut, carrying Iqbal on one arm and a load of laundry under
the other. He watched her amble in the direction of the stream and waited until
she was out of sight before he sneaked into the house, his soles throbbing each

time they met the ground. Inside, he sat down and slipped on his old plastic
sandals, the only other footwear he owned. Abdullah knew it wasn’t a sensible