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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 collarbone. He breathed in the coppery smell of desert dust and looked up at a sky thick with stars like ice crystals, flas.h.i.+ng and flickering. A delicate crescent moon cradled the dim ghostly outline of its full self.

Abdullah thought back to the winter before last, everything plunged into darkness, the wind coming in around the door, whistling slow and long and loud, and whistling from every little crack in the ceiling. Outside, the village’s features obliterated by snow. The nights long and starless, daytime brief, gloomy, the sun rarely out, and then only to make a cameo appearance before it vanished. He remembered Omar’s labored cries, then his silence, then Father grimly carving a wooden board with a sickle moon, just like the one above them now, pounding the board into the hard ground burnt with frost at the head of the small grave.

And now autumn’s end was in sight once more. Winter was already lurking around the corner, though neither Father nor Parwana spoke about it, as though saying the word might hasten its arrival.

“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 s.h.i.+fted 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 a.s.signed 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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.

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