Adel wanted to say that he knew how Gholam felt. He wanted to tell him how much he missed Kabul, and his friends, and his half brothers over in Jalalabad. But he had a feeling Gholam might laugh. Instead he said, “Well, it ispretty boring around here.”

Gholam laughed anyway. “I don’t think that’s quite what they meant,” he said.

Adel understood vaguely that he’d been chastised.

Gholam took a drag and blew out a run of rings. Together, they watched the rings gently float away and disintegrate.

“My father said to me and my brothers, he said, ‘Wait … wait until you breathe the air in Shadbagh, boys, and taste the water.’ He was born here, my father, raised here too. He said, ‘You’ve never had water this cool and this sweet, boys.’ He was always talking to us about Shadbagh, which I guess was nothing but a small village back when he lived here. He said there was a kind of grape that you could grow only in Shadbagh and nowhere else in the world. You’d think he was describing Paradise.”

Adel asked him where he was staying now. Gholam tossed the cigarette butt, looked up at the sky, squinting at the brightness. “You know the open field over by the windmill?”

“Yes.”

Adel waited for more, but there was no more.

“You live in a field?”

“For the time being,” Gholam mumbled. “We got a tent.”

“Don’t you have family here?”

“No. They’re either dead or gone. Well, my father does have an uncle in Kabul. Or he did. Who knows if he’s still alive. He was my grandmother’s brother, worked for a rich family there. But I guess Nabi and my grandmother haven’t spoken in decades—fifty years or more, I think. They’re strangers practically. I guess if he really had to, my father would go to him. But he wants to make a go of it on his own here. This is his home.”

They spent a few quiet moments sitting on the tree stump, watching the leaves in the orchards shiver in surges of warm wind. Adel thought of Gholam and his family sleeping nights in a tent, scorpions and snakes crawling in the field all around them.

Adel didn’t quite know why he ended up telling Gholam about the reason he and his parents moved here from Kabul. Or, rather, he couldn’t choose among the reasons. He wasn’t sure if he did it to dispel Gholam’s impression that he led a carefree existence simply because he lived in a big house. Or as a kind of school-yard one-upmanship. Maybe a plea for sympathy. Did he do it to narrow the gap between them? He didn’t know. Maybe all of these things. Nor did Adel know why it seemed important that Gholam like him, only that he dimly understood the reason to be more complicated than the mere fact of his frequent loneliness and his desire for a friend.

“We moved to Shadbagh because someone tried to kill us in Kabul,” he said. “A motorcycle pulled up to the house one day and its rider sprayed our house with bullets. He wasn’t caught. But, thank God, none of us was hurt.”

He didn’t know what reaction he had expected, but it did surprise him that Gholam had none. Still squinting up at the sun, Gholam said, “Yeah, I know.”

“You know?”

“Your father picks his nose and people hear about it.”

Adel watched him crush the empty cigarette box into a ball and stuff it into the front pocket of his jeans.

“He doeshave his enemies, your father,” Gholam sighed.

Adel knew this. Baba jan had explained to him that some of the people who had fought alongside him against the Soviets in the 1980s had become both powerful and corrupt. They had lost their way, he said. And because he wouldn’t join in their criminal schemes, they always tried to undermine him, to pollute his name by spreading false, hurtful rumors about him. This was why Baba jan always tried to shield Adel—he didn’t allow newspapers in the house, for instance, didn’t want Adel watching the news on TV or surfing the Internet.

Gholam leaned in and said, “I also hear he’s quite the farmer.”

Adel shrugged. “You can see for yourself. Just a few acres of orchards. Well, and the cotton fields in Helmand too, I guess, for the factory.”

Gholam searched Adel’s eyes as a grin slowly spread across his face, exposing his rotting canine. “Cotton. You’re a piece of work. I don’t know what to say.”

Adel didn’t really understand this. He got up and bounced the ball. “You can say, ‘Rematch!’”

“Rematch!”

“Let’s go.”

“Only, this time, I bet you don’t score one goal.”

Now Adel was the one grinning. “Name your bet.”

“That’s easy. The Zidane.”

“And if I win, no, whenI win?”

“I were you,” Gholam said, “I wouldn’t worry about that improbability.”

It was a brilliant hustle. Gholam dove left and right, saved all of Adel’s shots. Taking off the jersey, Adel felt stupid for getting cheated out of what was rightfully his, what was probably his most prized possession. He handed it over. With some alarm, he felt the sting of tears and fought them back.

At least Gholam had the tact not to put it on in his presence. As he was leaving, he grinned over his shoulder. “Your father, he’s not really gone for three months, is he?”

“I’ll play you for it tomorrow,” Adel said. “The jersey.”

“I may have to think about that.”

Gholam headed back toward the main road. Halfway there, he paused, fished the rolled-up cigarette box from his pocket, and hurled it over the wall of Adel’s house.

Every day for about a week, after his morning lessons, Adel took his ball and left the compound. He was able to time his escapades with the armed guard’s schedule of rounds for the first couple of tries. But on the third try, the guard caught him and wouldn’t let him leave. Adel went back to the house and returned with an iPod and a watch. From then on, the guard surreptitiously let Adel in and out provided he venture no farther than the edge of the orchards. As for Kabir and his mother, they barely noticed his one- or two-hour absences. It was one of the advantages of living in a house as big as this.

Adel played alone behind the compound, over by the old tree stump in the clearing, each day hoping to see Gholam sauntering up. He kept an eye on the unpaved path stretching to the main road as he juggled, as he sat on the stump watching a fighter jet streak across the sky, as he listlessly flicked pebbles at nothing. After a while, he picked up his ball and plodded back to the compound.

Then one day Gholam showed up, carrying a paper bag.

“Where have you been?”

“Working,” Gholam said.

He told Adel that he and his father had been hired for a few days to make bricks. Gholam’s job was to mix mortar. He said he lugged pails of water back and forth, dragged bags of masonry cement and builder’s sand heavier than himself. He explained to Adel how he mixed mortar in the wheelbarrow, folding the mixture in the water with a hoe, folding it again and again, adding water, then sand, until the batch gained a smooth consistency that didn’t crumble. He would then push the wheelbarrow to the bricklayers and trot back to start a new batch. He opened his palms and showed Adel his blisters.

“Wow,” Adel said—stupidly, he knew, but he couldn’t think of another reply. The closest he had ever come to manual labor was one afternoon three years ago when he’d helped the gardener plant a few apple saplings in the backyard of their house in Kabul.

“Got you a surprise,” Gholam said. He reached into the bag and tossed Adel the Zidane jersey.

“I don’t understand,” Adel said, surprised and cautiously thrilled.

“I see some kid in town the other day wearing it,” Gholam said, asking for the ball with his fingers. Adel kicked it to him and Gholam juggled as he told the story. “Can you believe it? I go up to him and say, ‘Hey that’s my buddy’s shirt on you.’ He gives me a look. To make a long story short, we settle it in an alley. By the end, he’s begging meto take the shirt!” He caught the ball midair, spat, and grinned at Adel. “All right, so maybe I’d sold it to him a couple of days earlier.”