Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

older than her age. Bad rheumatoid arthritis. The knobby hands, especially, still functional, but the day is coming and she knew it. It made me think of Mamá and the coming of her day.

Pari Wahdati stayed a week with me at the house in Kabul. I gave her a tour of it when she arrived from Paris. She had last seen the house back in 1955 and seemed quite surprised at the vividness of her own memory of the place, its general layout, the two steps between the living room and dining room, for instance, where she said she would sit in a band of sunlight midmornings and read her books. She was struck by how much smaller the house really was compared to the version of it in her memory. When I took her upstairs, she knew which had been her bedroom, though it’s currently taken up by a German colleague of mine who works for the World Food Program. I remember her breath catching when she spotted the short

little armoire in the corner of the bed- room—one of the few surviving relics of her childhood. I remembered it from the note that Nabi had left me prior to his death. She squatted next to it and ran her fingertips over the chipped yellow paint and over the fading giraffes and long-tailed monkeys on its doors. When she looked up at me, I saw that her eyes had teared a little, and she asked, very shyly and apologetically, if it would be possible to have it shipped to Paris. She offered to pay for a replacement. It was the only thing she wanted from the house. I told her it would be my pleasure to do it.

In the end, other than the armoire, which I had shipped a few days after her departure, Pari Wahdati returned to France with nothing but Suleiman Wahdati’s sketch pads, Nabi’s letter, and a few of her mother Nila’s poems, which Nabi had saved. The only other thing she asked of me during her stay was to arrange a ride to take her to Shadbagh so

she could see the village where she had been born and where she hoped to find her half brother, Iqbal.

“I assume she’ll sell the house,” Mamá says, “now that it’s hers.”

“She said I could stay on as long as I liked, actually,” I say. “Rent-free.”

I can all but see Mamá’s lips tighten skeptically. She’s an islander. She suspects the motives of all mainlanders, looks askance at their apparent acts of goodwill. This was one of the reasons I knew, when I was a boy, that I would leave Tinos one day when I had the chance. A kind of despair used to get hold of me whenever I heard people talking this way.

“How is the dovecote coming along?” I ask to change the subject.

“I had to give it a rest. It tired me out.” Mamá was diagnosed in Athens six

months ago by a neurologist I had insisted she see after Thalia told me Mamá was twitching and dropping things all the time. It

was Thalia who took her. Since the trip to the neurologist, Mamá has been on a tear. I know this through the e-mails Thalia sends me. Repainting the house, fixing water leaks, coaxing Thalia into helping her build a whole new closet upstairs, even replacing cracked shingles on the roof, though thankfully Thalia put an end to that. Now the dovecote. I picture Mamá with her sleeves rolled high, hammer in hand, sweat staining her back, pounding nails and sanding planks of wood. Racing against her own failing neurons. Wringing every last drop of use from them while there is still time.

“When are you coming home?” Mamá says.

“Soon,” I say. Soon was what I said the year before too when she asked the same question. It has been two years since my last visit to Tinos.

A brief pause. “Don’t wait too long. I want to see you before they strap me in the iron

lung.” She laughs. This is an old habit, this joke making and clowning in the face of bad luck, this disdain of hers for the slightest show of self-pity. It has the paradoxical—and I know calculated—effect of both shrinking and augmenting the misfortune.

“Come for Christmas if you can,” she says. “Before the fourth of January, at any rate. Thalia says there is going to be a solar eclipse over Greece that day. She read it on the Internet. We could watch it together.”

“I’ll try, Mamá,” I say.

It was like waking up one morning and finding that a wild animal has wandered into your house. No place felt safe to me. She was there at every corner and turn, prowling, stalking, forever dabbing at her cheek with a handkerchief to dry the

dribble that constantly flowed from her mouth. The small dimensions of our house rendered escape from her impossible. I especially dreaded mealtime when I had to endure the spectacle of Thalia lifting the bottom of the mask to deliver spoonfuls of food to her mouth. My stomach turned at the sight and at the sound. She ate noisily, bits of half-chewed food always falling with a wet splat onto her plate, or the table, or even the floor. She was forced to take all liquids, even soup, through a straw, of which her mother kept a stash in her purse. She slurped and gurgled when she sucked broth up the straw, and it always stained the mask and dripped down the side of her jaw onto her neck. The first time, I asked to be excused from the table, and Mamá shot me a hard look. And so I trained myself to avert my gaze and not hear, but it wasn’t easy. I would walk into the kitchen and there she would be, sitting still while Madaline rubbed ointment onto her

cheek to prevent chafing. I began keeping a calendar, a mental countdown, of the four weeks Mamá had said Madaline and Thalia were staying.

I wished Madaline had come by herself. I liked Madaline just fine. We sat, the four of us, in the small square-shaped courtyard outside our front door, and she sipped coffee and smoked cigarettes one after the other, the angles of her face shaded by our olive tree and a gold straw cloche that should have looked absurd on her, would have on anyone else—like Mamá, for instance. But Madaline was one of those people to whom elegance came effortlessly as though it were a genetic skill, like the ability to curl your tongue into the shape of a tube. With Madaline, there was never a lull in the conversation; stories just trilled out of her. One morning she told us about her travels—to Ankara, for instance, where she had strolled the banks of the Enguri Su and sipped green tea laced with raki,

or the time she and Mr. Gianakos had gone to Kenya and ridden the backs of elephants among thorny acacias and even sat down to eat cornmeal mush and coconut rice with the local villagers.

Madaline’s stories stirred up an old restlessness in me, an urge I’d always had to strike out headlong into the world, to be dauntless. By comparison, my own life on Tinos seemed crushingly ordinary. I foresaw my life unfolding as an interminable stretch of nothingness and so I spent most of my childhood years on Tinos floundering, feeling like a stand-in for myself, a proxy, as though my real self resided elsewhere, waiting to unite someday with this dimmer, more hollow self. I felt marooned. An exile in my own home.

Madaline said that in Ankara she had gone to a place called Kuğulu Park and watched swans gliding in the water. She said the water was dazzling.

“I’m rhapsodizing,” she said, laughing. “You’re not,” Mamá said.

“It’s an old habit. I talk too much. I always did. You remember how much grief I’d bring us, chattering in class? You were never at fault, Odie. You were so responsible and studious.”

“They’re interesting, your stories. You have an interesting life.”

Madaline rolled her eyes. “Well, you know the Chinese curse.”

“Did you like Africa?” Mamá asked Thalia. Thalia pressed the handkerchief to her cheek and didn’t answer. I was glad. She had the oddest speech. There was a wet quality to

it, a strange mix of lisp and gargle.

“Oh, Thalia doesn’t like to travel,” Madaline said, crushing her cigarette. She said this like it was the unassailable truth. There was no looking to Thalia for confirmation or protest. “She hasn’t got a taste for it.”

“Well, neither do I,” Mamá said, again to Thalia. “I like being home. I guess I’ve just never found a compelling reason to leave Tinos.”

“And I one to stay,” Madaline said. “Other than you, naturally.” She touched Mamá’s wrist. “You know my worst fear when I left? My biggest worry? How am I going to get on without Odie? I swear, I was petrified at the thought.”

“You’ve managed fine, it seems,” Mamá said slowly, dragging her gaze from Thalia.

“You don’t understand,” Madaline said, and I realized I was the one who didn’t understand because she was looking directly at me. “I wouldn’t have kept it together without your mother. She saved me.”

“Now you’re rhapsodizing,” Mamá said. Thalia upturned her face. She was squint-

ing. A jet, up in the blue, silently marking its trajectory with a long, single vapor trail.