Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

ravines, the fields of thorny bushes, the mountains, the sea.

One day, I wandered off toward town. We lived on the southwestern shore of the island, and Tinos town was only a few miles’ walk south. There was a little knickknack shop there run by a heavy-faced widower named Mr. Roussos. On any given day, you were apt to find in the window of his shop anything from a 1940s typewriter to a pair of leather work boots, or a weathervane, an old plant stand, giant wax candles, a cross, or, of course, copies of the Panagia Evangelistria icon. Or maybe even a brass gorilla. He was also an amateur photographer and had a makeshift darkroom in the back of the shop. When the pilgrims came to Tinos every August to visit the icon, Mr. Roussos sold rolls of film to them and developed their photos in his darkroom for a fee.

About a month back, I had spotted a camera in his display window, sitting on its worn

rust-colored leather case. Every few days, I strolled over to the shop, stared at this camera, and imagined myself in India, the leather case hanging by the strap over my shoulder, taking photos of the paddies and tea estates I had seen in National Geographic. I would shoot the Inca Trail. On camelback, in some dust-choked old truck, or on foot, I would brave the heat until I stood gazing up at the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and I would shoot them too and see my photos published in magazines with glossy pages. This was what drew me to Mr. Roussos’s window that morning—though the shop was closed for the day—to stand outside, my forehead pressed to the glass, and daydream.

“What kind is it?”

I pulled back a bit, caught Thalia’s reflection in the window. She dabbed at her left cheek with the handkerchief.

“The camera.” I shrugged.

“Looks like a C3 Argus,” she said. “How would you know?”

“It’s only the best-selling thirty-five millimeter in the world for the last thirty years,” she said a little chidingly. “Not much to look at, though. It’s ugly. It looks like a brick. So you want to be a photographer? You know, when you’re all grown up? Your mother says you do.”

I turned around. “Mamá told you that?” “So?”

I shrugged. I was embarrassed that Mamá had discussed this with Thalia. I wondered how she’d said it. She could unsheathe from her arsenal a mockingly grave way of talking about things she found either portentous or frivolous. She could shrink your aspirations before your very eyes. Markos wants to walk the earth and capture it with his lens.

Thalia sat on the sidewalk and pulled her skirt over her knees. It was a hot day, the sun biting the skin like it had teeth. Hardly

anyone was out and about except for an elderly couple trudging stiffly up the street. The husband—Demis something—wore a gray flat cap and a brown tweed jacket that looked too heavy for the season. He had a frozen, wide-eyed look to his face, I remember, the way some old people do, like they are perpetually startled by the monstrous surprise that is old age—it wasn’t until years later, in medical school, that I suspected he had Parkinson’s. They waved as they passed and I waved back. I saw them take notice of Thalia, a momentary pause in their stride, and then they moved on.

“Do you have a camera?” Thalia said. “No.”

“Have you ever taken a picture?” “No.”

“And you want to be a photographer?” “You find that strange?”

“A little.”

“So if I said I wanted to be a policeman, you’d think that was strange too? Because I’ve never slapped handcuffs on anyone?”

I could tell from the softening in her eyes that, if she could, she would be smiling. “So you’re a clever ass,” she said. “Word of advice: Don’t mention the camera in my mother’s presence or she’ll buy it for you. She’s very eager to please.” The handkerchief went to the cheek and back. “But I doubt that Odelia would approve. I guess you already know that.”

I was both impressed and a little unsettled by how much she seemed to have grasped in so little time. Maybe it was the mask, I thought, the advantage of cover, the freedom to be watchful, to observe and scrutinize.

“She’d probably make you give it back.”

I sighed. It was true. Mamá would not allow such easy amends, and most certainly not if it involved money.

Thalia rose to her feet and beat the dust from her behind. “Let me ask you, do you have a box at home?”

Madaline was sipping wine with Mamá in the kitchen, and Thalia and I were upstairs, using black markers on a shoe box. The shoe box belonged to Madaline and contained a new pair of lime green leather pumps with high heels, still wrapped in tissue paper.

“Where was she planning on wearing those?” I asked.

I could hear Madaline downstairs, talking about an acting class she had once taken where the instructor had asked her, as an exercise, to pretend she was a lizard sitting motionless on a rock. A swell of laughter—hers—followed.

We finished the second coat, and Thalia said we should put on a third, to make sure we hadn’t missed any spots. The black had to be uniform and flawless.

“That’s all a camera is,” she said, “a black box with a hole to let in the light and something to absorb the light. Give me the needle.”

I passed her a sewing needle of Mamá’s. I was skeptical, to say the least, about the prospects of this homemade camera, of it doing anything at all—a shoe box and a needle? But Thalia had attacked the project with such faith and self-assured confidence that I had to leave room for the unlikely possibility that it just might work. She made me think she knew things I did not.

“I’ve made some calculations,” she said, carefully piercing the box with the needle. “Without a lens, we can’t set the pinhole on the small face, the box is too long. But the width is just about right. The key is to make

the correct-sized pinhole. I figure point-six millimeter, roughly. There. Now we need a shutter.”

Downstairs, Madaline’s voice had dropped to a low, urgent murmur. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell that she was speaking more slowly than before, enunciating well, and I pictured her leaning forward, elbows on knees, making eye contact, not blinking. Over the years, I have come to know this tone of voice intimately. When people speak this way, they’re likely disclosing, revealing, confessing some catastrophe, beseeching the listener. It’s a staple of the military’s casualty notification teams knocking on doors, lawyers touting the merits of plea deals to clients, policemen stopping cars at 3 A.M., cheating husbands. How many times have I used it myself at hospitals here in Kabul? How many times have I guided entire families into a quiet room, asked them to sit, pulled a chair up for myself, gathering

the will to give them news, dreading the coming conversation?

“She’s talking about Andreas,” Thalia said evenly. “I bet she is. They had a big fight. Pass me the tape and those scissors.”

“What is he like? Besides being rich, I mean?”

“Who, Andreas? He’s all right. He travels a lot. When he’s home, he always has people over. Important people—ministers, generals, that kind. They have drinks by the fireplace and they talk all night, mostly business and politics. I can hear them from my room. I’m supposed to stay upstairs when Andreas has company. I’m not supposed to come down. But he buys me things. He pays for a tutor to come to the house. And he speaks to me nicely enough.”

She taped a rectangular piece of cardboard, which we’d also colored black, over the pinhole.

Things were quiet downstairs. I choreographed the scene in my head. Madaline weeping without a sound, absently fiddling with a handkerchief like it was a clump of Play-Doh, Mamá not much help, looking on stiffly with a pinch-faced little smile like she’s got something sour melting under her tongue. Mamá can’t stand it when people cry in her presence. She can barely look at their puffy eyes, their open, pleading faces. She sees crying as a sign of weakness, a garish appeal for attention, and she won’t indulge it. She can’t bring herself to console. Growing up, I learned that it was not one of her strong suits. Sorrow ought to be private, she thinks, not flaunted. Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.

At the funeral? I mean, the burial? No, I did not.

Because you weren’t sad?

Because it was nobody’s business if I was.