Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

for Athens and leaving Thalia with us, at least for a short while.

“Just for a few weeks,” she said.

We were having dinner, the four of us, a dish of white bean soup that Mamá and Madaline had prepared together. I glanced across the table at Thalia to see if I was the only one on whom Madaline had sprung the news. It appeared I was. Thalia was calmly feeding spoonfuls into her mouth, lifting her mask just a bit with each trip of the spoon. By then, her speech and eating didn’t bother me anymore, or at least no more than watching an old person eat through ill-fitting dentures, like Mamá would years later.

Madaline said she would send for Thalia after she had shot her film, which she said should wrap well before Christmas.

“Actually, I will bring you all to Athens,” she said, her face rinsed with the customary cheer. “And we will go to the opening together! Wouldn’t that be marvelous, Markos?

The four of us, dressed up, waltzing into the theater in style?”

I said it would be, though I had trouble picturing Mamá in a fancy gown or waltzing into anything.

Madaline explained how it would work out just fine, how Thalia could resume her studies when school opened in a couple of weeks—at home, of course—with Mamá. She said she would send us postcards and letters, and pictures of the film set. She said more, but I didn’t hear much of it. What I was feeling was enormous relief and outright giddiness. My dread of the coming end of summer was like a knot in my belly, winding tighter with each passing day as I steeled myself against the approaching farewell. I woke every morning now eager to see Thalia at the breakfast table, to hear the bizarre sound of her voice. We barely ate before we were out climbing trees, chasing each other through the barley fields, plowing through the stalks

and letting out war cries, lizards scattering away from our feet. We stashed make-believe treasures in caves, found spots on the island with the best and loudest echoes. We shot photos of windmills and dovecotes with our pinhole camera and took them to Mr. Roussos, who developed them for us. He even let us into his darkroom and taught us about different developers, fixers, and stop baths.

The night of Madaline’s announcement, she and Mamá shared a bottle of wine in the kitchen, Madaline doing most of the drinking, while Thalia and I were upstairs, playing a game of tavli. Thalia had the mana position and had already moved half her checkers onto her home board.

“She has a lover,” Thalia said, rolling the dice.

I jumped. “Who?”

“ ‘Who?’ he says. Who do you think?”

I had learned, over the course of the summer, to read Thalia’s expressions through

her eyes, and she was looking at me now like I was standing on the beach asking where the water was. I tried to recover quickly. “I know who,” I said, my cheeks burning. “I mean, who’s the … you know …” I was a twelve- year-old boy. My vocabulary didn’t include words like lover.

“Can’t you guess? The director.” “I was going to say that.”

“Elias. He’s something. He plasters his hair down like it’s the 1920s. He has a thin little mustache too. I guess he thinks it makes him look rakish. He’s ridiculous. He thinks he’s a great artist, of course. Mother does too. You should see her with him, all timid and submissive, like she needs to bow to him and pamper him because of his genius. I can’t understand how she doesn’t see it.”

“Is Aunt Madaline going to marry him?” Thalia shrugged. “She has the worst taste

in men. The worst.” She shook the dice in

her hands, seemed to reconsider. “Except for Andreas, I suppose. He’s nice. Nice enough. But, of course, she’s leaving him. It’s always the bastards she falls for.”

“You mean, like your father?”

She frowned a little. “My father was a stranger she met on her way to Amsterdam. At a train station during a rainstorm. They spent one afternoon together. I have no idea who he is. And neither does she.”

“Oh. I remember she said something about her first husband. She said he drank. I just assumed …”

“Well, that would be Dorian,” Thalia said. “He was something too.” She moved another checker onto her home board. “He used to beat her. He could go from nice and pleasant to furious in a blink. Like the weather, how it can change suddenly? He was like that. He drank most of the day, didn’t do much but lie around the house. He got real forgetful when he drank. He’d leave the water running, for

instance, and flood the house. I remember he forgot to turn off the stove once and almost burned everything down.”

She made a little tower with a stack of chips. Worked quietly for a while straightening it.

“The only thing Dorian really loved was Apollo. All the neighborhood kids were scared of him—of Apollo, I mean. And hardly any of them had even seen him; they’d only heard his bark. That was enough for them. Dorian kept him chained in the back of the yard. Fed him big slabs of lamb.”

Thalia didn’t tell me any more. I pictured it easily enough, though. Dorian passed out, the dog forgotten, roaming the yard unchained. An open screen door.

“How old were you?” I asked in a low voice.

“Five.”

Then I asked the question that had been on my mind since the beginning of summer.

“Isn’t there something that … I mean, can’t they do—”

Thalia snagged her gaze away. “Please don’t ask,” she said heavily with what I sensed to be a deep ache. “It tires me out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll tell you someday.”

And she did tell me, later. The botched surgery, the catastrophic post-op wound infection that turned septic, shut down her kidneys, threw her into liver failure, ate through the new surgical flap and forced the surgeons to slice off not only the flap but yet more of what remained of her left cheek and part of her jawbone as well. The complications had kept her in the hospital for nearly three months. She’d almost died, should have died. After that, she wouldn’t let them touch her again.

“Thalia,” I said, “I’m sorry too for what happened when we met.”

She tipped her eyes up at me. The old playful shine was back. “You should be sorry. But I knew even before you hurled all over the floor.”

“Knew what?”

“That you were an ass.”

Madaline left two days before school started. She wore a tight butter yellow sleeveless dress that clung to her slim frame, horn-rimmed sunglasses, and a firmly knotted white silk scarf to hold down her hair. She was dressed as though she worried parts of her might come loose—like she was, literally, holding herself together. At the ferry port in Tinos town, she embraced us all. She held Thalia the tightest, and the longest, her lips on the crown of Thalia’s head in an

extended, unbroken kiss. She didn’t take off her sunglasses.

“Hug me back,” I heard her whisper. Rigidly, Thalia obliged.

When the ferry groaned and lurched away, leaving behind a trail of churned-up water, I thought Madaline would stand at the stern and wave and blow us kisses. But she quickly moved toward the bow and took a seat. She didn’t look our way.

When we got home, Mamá told us to sit down. She stood before us and said, “Thalia, I want you to know that you don’t have to wear that thing in this house anymore. Not on my account. Nor his. Do it only if it suits you. I have no more to say about this business.”

It was then that, with sudden clarity, I understood what Mamá already had seen. That the mask had been for Madaline’s benefit. To save her embarrassment and shame.

For a long time Thalia didn’t make a move or say a word. Then, slowly, her hands rose, and she untied the bands at the back of her head. She lowered the mask. I looked at her directly in the face. I felt an involuntary urge to recoil, the way you would at a sudden loud noise. But I didn’t. I held my gaze. And I made it a point to not blink.

Mamá said she would homeschool me until Madaline came back so Thalia wouldn’t have to stay home by herself. She gave us our lessons in the evening, after dinner, and assigned us homework to do in the morning while she went off to school. It sounded workable, at least in theory.

But doing our studies, especially with Mamá away, proved nearly impossible. News of Thalia’s disfigurement had spread all over the island, and people kept knocking on the door, fueled by curiosity. You would have thought the island was suddenly running out of flour, garlic, even salt, and our house was