Page 200 - And the Mountains Echoed (novel)

Perhaps she had accepted out of fear of her husband. Or as a bargain for the life

of luxury she led. Mostly, Adel suspected, she had accepted for the same reason
he would: because she had to. What choice was there? Adel could not run from
his life any more than Gholam could from his. People learned to live with the
most unimaginable things. As would he. This was his life. This was his mother.
This was his father. And this was him, even if he hadn’t always known it.
Adel knew he would not love his father again as he had before, when he
would sleep happily curled in the bay of his thick arms. That was inconceivable
now. But he would learn to love him again even if now it was a different, more
complicated, messier business. Adel could almost feel himself leapfrogging over
childhood. Soon, he would land as an adult. And when he did, there would be no
going back because adulthood was akin to what his father had once said about
being a war hero: once you became one, you died one.

Lying in bed at night, Adel thought that one day—maybe the next day or the
one after that, or maybe one day the following week—he would leave the house
and walk over to the field by the windmill where Gholam had told him his
family was squatting. He thought he would find the field empty. He would stand
on the side of the road, picture Gholam and his mother and his brothers and his
grandmother, the family a straggling line lugging roped-up belongings, padding
along the dusty shoulders of country roads, looking for some place to land.
Gholam was the head of the family now. He would have to work. He would now
spend his youth clearing canals, digging ditches, making bricks, and harvesting
fields. Gholam would gradually turn into one of those stooping leather-faced
men Adel always saw behind plows.

Adel thought he would stand there a while in the field, watching the hills and
the mountains looming over New Shadbagh. And then he thought he would
reach into his pocket for what he had found one day walking through the
orchards, the left half of a pair of spectacles, snapped at the bridge, the lens a
spiderweb of cracks, the temple crusted with dried blood. He would toss the
broken spectacles into a ditch. Adel suspected that as he turned back around and
walked home, what he would feel mostly would be relief.