Read Online And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini, Hosseini - Free Book Online

in the dark. “Mother was so angry with us. And Nabi too. We ruined his bicycle.”
    Parwana shuts her eyes.
    â€œParwana?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œCan you sleep by me tonight?”
    Parwana kicks off her quilt, makes her way across the hut to Masooma, and slips under the blanket beside her. Masooma rests her cheek on Parwana’s shoulder, one arm draped across her sister’s chest.
    Masooma whispers, “You deserve better than me.”
    â€œDon’t start that again,” Parwana whispers back. She plays with Masooma’s hair in long, patient strokes, the way Masooma likes it.
    They chat idly for a while in hushed voices of small, inconsequential things, one’s breath warming the other’s face. These are relatively happy minutes for Parwana. They remind her of when they were little girls, curled up nose to nose beneath the blanket, whispering secrets and gossip, giggling soundlessly. Soon, Masooma is asleep, her tongue rolling noisily around some dream, and Parwana is staring out the window at a sky burnt black. Her mind bounces from one fragmented thought to another and eventually swims to a picture she saw in an old magazine once of a pair of grim-faced brothers from Siam joined at the torso by a thick band of flesh. Two creatures inextricably bound, blood formed in the marrow of one running in the veins of the other, their union permanent. Parwana feels a constriction, despair, like a hand tightening inside her chest. She takes a breath. She tries to direct her thoughts to Saboor once more and instead finds her mind drifting to the rumor she has heard around the village: that he is looking for a new wife. She forces his face from her head. She nips the foolish thought.
    Parwana was a surprise.
    Masooma was already out, wriggling quietly in the midwife’s arms, when their mother cried out and the crown of another head parted her a second time. Masooma’s arrival was uneventful.
She delivered herself, the angel
, the midwife would say later. Parwana’s birth was prolonged, agonizing for the mother, treacherous for the baby. The midwife had to free her from the cord that had wrapped itself around Parwana’s neck, as if in a murderousfit of separation anxiety. In her worst moments, when she cannot help being swallowed up by a torrent of self-loathing, Parwana thinks that perhaps the cord knew best. Maybe it knew which was the better half.
    Masooma fed on schedule, slept on time. She cried only if in need of food or cleaning. When awake, she was playful, good-humored, easily delighted, a swaddled bundle of giggles and happy squeaks. She liked to suck on her rattle.
    What a sensible baby, people said.
    Parwana was a tyrant. She exerted upon their mother the full force of her authority. Their father, bewildered by the infant’s histrionics, took the babies’ older brother, Nabi, and escaped to sleep at his own brother’s house. Nighttime was a misery of epic proportion for the girls’ mother, punctuated by only a few moments of fitful rest. She bounced Parwana and walked her all night every night. She rocked her and sang to her. She winced as Parwana ripped into her chafed, swollen breast and gummed her nipple as though she was after the milk in her very bones. But nursing was no antidote: Even with a full belly, Parwana was flailing and shrieking, immune to her mother’s supplications.
    Masooma watched from her corner of the room with a pensive, helpless expression, as though she pitied her mother this predicament.
    Nabi was nothing like this
, their mother said one day to their father.
    Every baby is different
.
    She’s killing me, that one
.
    It will pass
, he said.
The way bad weather does
.
    And it did pass. Colic, perhaps, or some other innocuous ailment. But it was too late. Parwana had already made her mark.
    One late-summer afternoon when the twins were ten monthsold, the villagers gathered in Shadbagh after a wedding. Women worked with