Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

time to see blue sky and the ax whooshing down. And then nothing.

Amra stops. Inside, Leonard Cohen sings a live version of “Who By Fire.”

Even if he could talk, which he cannot at the moment, Idris wouldn’t know the proper thing to say. He might have said something, some offering of impotent outrage, if this had been the work of the Taliban, or alQaeda, or some megalomaniacal Mujahideen commander. But this cannot be blamed on Hekmatyar, or Mullah Omar, or Bin Laden, or Bush and his War on Terror. The ordinary, utterly mundane reason behind the massacre makes it somehow more terrible, and far more depressing. The word senseless springs to mind, and Idris thwarts it. It’s what people always say. A senseless act of violence. A senseless murder. As if you could commit sensible murder.

He thinks of the girl, Roshi, back at the hospital, curled up against the wall, her toes

knotted, the infantile look on her face. The crack in the crown of her shaved head, the fist-sized mass of glistening brain tissue leaking from it, sitting on her head like the knot of a sikh’s turban.

“She told you this story herself?” he finally asks.

Amra nods heavily. “She remember very clearly. Every detail. She can tell to you every detail. I wish she can forget because of the bad dreams.”

“The brother, what happened to him?” “Too many burns.”

“And the uncle?” Amra shrugs.

“They say be careful,” she says. “In my job, they say be careful, be professional. It’s not good idea to get attached. But Roshi and me...”

The music suddenly dies. Another power outage. For a few moments all is dark, save for the moonlight. Idris hears people

groaning inside the house. Halogen torches promptly come to life.

“I fight for her,” Amra says. She never looks up. “I don’t stop.”

The next day, Timur rides with the Germans to the town of Istalif, known for its clay pottery. “You should come.”

“I’m going to stay in and read,” Idris says. “You can read in San Jose, bro.”

“I need the rest. I might have had too much to drink last night.”

After the Germans pick up Timur, Idris lies in bed for a while, staring at a faded sixties-era advertising poster hanging on the wall, a quartet of smiling blond tourists hiking along Band-e-Amir Lake, a relic from his own childhood here in Kabul before the

wars, before the unraveling. Early afternoon, he goes for a walk. At a small restaurant, he eats kabob for lunch. It’s hard to enjoy the meal with all the grimy young faces peering through the glass, watching him eat. It’s overwhelming. Idris admits to himself that Timur is better at this than he is. Timur makes a game of it. Like a drill sergeant, he whistles and makes the beggar kids queue up, whips out a few bills from the Bakhsheesh bundle. As he hands out the bills, one by one, he clicks his heels and salutes. The kids love it. They salute back. They call him Kaka. Sometimes they climb up his legs.

After lunch, Idris catches a taxi and asks to be taken to the hospital.

“But stop at a bazaar first,” he says.

Carrying the box, he walks down the hallway, past graffiti-spangled walls, rooms with plastic sheeting for doors, a shuffling barefoot old man with an eye patch, patients lying in stifling-hot rooms with missing lightbulbs. A sour-body smell everywhere. At the end of the hallway, he pauses at the curtain before pulling it back. He feels a lurch in his heart when he sees the girl sitting on the edge of the bed. Amra is kneeling before her, brushing her small teeth.

There is a man sitting on the other side of the bed, gaunt, sunburned, with a rat’s-nest beard and stubbly dark hair. When Idris enters, the man quickly gets up, flattens a hand against his chest, and bows. Idris is struck again by how easily the locals can tell he is a westernized Afghan, how the whiff of money and power affords him unwarranted

privilege in this city. The man tells Idris he is Roshi’s uncle, from the mother’s side.

“You’re back,” Amra says, dipping the brush into a bowl of water.

“I hope that’s okay.” “Why not,” she says.

Idris clears his throat. “Salaam, Roshi.” The girl looks to Amra for permission. Her

voice is a tentative, high-pitched whisper.

“Salaam.”

“I brought you a present.” Idris lowers the box and opens it. Roshi’s eyes come to life when Idris takes out the small TV and VCR. He shows her the four films he has bought. Most of the tapes at the store were Indian movies, or else action flicks, martial-arts films with Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, all of Steven Seagal’s pictures. But he was able to find E.T., Babe, Toy Story, and The Iron Giant. He has watched them all with his own boys back home.

In Farsi, Amra asks Roshi which one she wants to watch. Roshi picks The Iron Giant.

“You’ll love that one,” Idris says. He finds it difficult to look at her directly. His gaze keeps sliding toward the mess on her head, the shiny clump of brain tissue, the crisscrossing network of veins and capillaries.

There is no electric outlet at the end of this hallway, and it takes Amra some time to find an extension cord, but when Idris plugs in the cord, and the picture comes on, Roshi’s mouth spreads into a smile. In her smile, Idris sees how little of the world he has known, even at thirty-five years of age, its savageness, its cruelty, the boundless brutality.

When Amra excuses herself to go see other patients, Idris takes a seat beside Roshi’s bed and watches the movie with her. The uncle is a silent, inscrutable presence in the room. Halfway through the film, the power goes out. Roshi begins to cry, and the uncle leans

over from his chair and roughly clutches her hand. He whispers a few quick, terse words in Pashto, which Idris does not speak. Roshi winces and tries to pull away. Idris looks at her small hand, lost in the uncle’s strong, white-knuckled grasp.

Idris puts on his coat. “I’ll come back tomorrow, Roshi, and we can watch another tape if you like. You want that?”

Roshi shrinks into a ball beneath the covers. Idris looks at the uncle, pictures what Timur would do to this man—Timur, who, unlike him, has no capacity to resist the easy emotion. Give me ten minutes alone with him, he’d say.

The uncle follows him outside. On the steps, he stuns Idris by saying, “I am the real victim here, Sahib.” He must have seen the look on Idris’s face because he corrects himself and says, “Of course she is the victim. But, I mean, I am a victim too. You see that,

of course, you are Afghan. But these foreigners, they don’t understand.”

“I have to go,” Idris says.

“I am a mazdoor, a simple laborer. I earn a dollar, maybe two, on a good day, Sahib. And I already have five children of my own. One of them blind. Now this.” He sighs. “I think to myself sometimes—God forgive me—I say to myself, maybe Allah should have let Roshi … well, you understand. It might have been better. Because I ask you, Sahib, what boy would marry her now? She will never find a husband. And then who will take care of her? I will have to. I will have to do it forever.”

Idris knows he has been cornered. He reaches for his wallet.

“Whatever you can spare, Sahib. Not for me, of course. For Roshi.”

Idris hands him a pair of bills. The uncle blinks, looks up from the money. He begins to say, “Two—” then clamps his mouth shut

as though worried that he will alert Idris to a mistake.

“Buy her some decent shoes,” Idris says, walking down the steps.

“Allah bless you, Sahib,” the uncle calls out behind him. “You are a good man. You are a kind and good man.”

Idris visits the next day, and the day after that. Soon, it becomes a routine, and he is at Roshi’s side every day. He comes to know the orderlies by name, the male nurses who work the ground floor, the janitor, the underfed, tired-looking guards at the hospital gates. He keeps the visits as secret as possible. On his calls overseas, he has not told Nahil about Roshi. He does not tell Timur where he is going either, why he isn’t joining him on the trip to Paghman or