Khaled Hosseini - And the Mountains Echoed

the only place you could find it. They barely made an effort to disguise their intent. At the door, their eyes always flew over my shoulder. They craned their necks, stood on tiptoes. Most of them weren’t even neighbors. They’d walked miles for a cup of sugar. Of course I never let them in. It gave me some satisfaction to close the door on their faces. But I also felt gloomy, dispirited, aware that if I stayed my life would be too deeply touched by these people. I would, in the end, become one of them.

The kids were worse and far bolder. Every day I caught one prowling outside, climbing our wall. We would be working, and Thalia would tap my shoulder with her pencil, tip her chin, and I would turn to find a face, sometimes more than one, pressed to the window. It got so bad, we had to go upstairs and pull all the curtains. One day I opened the door to a boy I knew from school, Petros, and three of his friends. He offered me a

handful of coins for a peek. I said no, where did he think he was, a circus?

In the end, I had to tell Mamá. A deep red flush marched up her face when she heard. She clenched her teeth.

The next morning she had our books and two sandwiches ready on the table. Thalia understood before I did and she curled up like a leaf. Her protests started when it came time to leave.

“Aunt Odie, no.” “Give me your hand.” “No. Please.”

“Go on. Give it to me.” “I don’t want to go.” “We’re going to be late.”

“Don’t make me, Aunt Odie.”

Mamá pulled Thalia up from the seat by the hands, leaned in, and fixed her with a gaze I knew well. Not a thing on this earth could deter her now. “Thalia,” she said,

managing to sound both soft and firm, “I am not ashamed of you.”

We set out, the three of us—Mamá, with her lips pursed, pushing forth like she was plowing against a fierce wind, her feet working quick, mincing little steps. I imagined Mamá walking in this same determined manner to Madaline’s father’s house all those years ago, rifle in hand.

People gawked and gasped as we blew past them along the winding footpaths. They stopped to stare. Some of them pointed. I tried not to look. They were a blur of pale faces and open mouths in the corners of my vision.

In the school yard, children parted to let us pass. I heard some girl scream. Mamá rolled through them like a bowling ball through pins, all but dragging Thalia behind her. She shoved and pushed her way to the corner of the yard, where there was a bench. She climbed the bench, helped Thalia up,

and then blew her whistle three times. A hush fell over the yard.

“This is Thalia Gianakos,” Mamá cried. “As of today …” She paused. “Whoever is crying, shut your mouth before I give you reason to. Now, as of today, Thalia is a student at this school. I expect all of you to treat her with decency and good manners. If I hear rumors of taunting, I will find you and I will make you sorry. You know I will. I have no more to say about this business.”

She climbed down from the bench and, holding Thalia’s hand, headed toward the classroom.

From that day forth, Thalia never again wore the mask, either in public or at home.

A couple of weeks before Christmas that year, we received a letter

from Madaline. The shoot had run into unexpected delays. First, the director of photo- graphy—Madaline wrote DOP and Thalia had to explain it to me and Mamá—had fallen off a scaffold on the set and broken his arm in three places. Then the weather had complicated all the location shoots.

So we are in a bit of a “holding pattern,” as they say. It would not be an entirely bad thing, since it gives us time to work out some wrinkles in the script, if it did not also mean that we won’t be reunited as I had hoped. I am crushed, my darlings. I miss you all so dearly, especially you, Thalia, my love. I can only count the days until later this spring when this shoot has wrapped and we can be together again. I carry all three of you in my heart every minute of every day.

“She’s not coming back,” Thalia said flatly, handing the letter back to Mamá.

“Of course she is!” I said, dumbfounded. I turned to Mamá, waiting for her to say something, at least pipe a word of encouragement. But Mamá folded the letter, put it on the table, and quietly went to boil water for coffee. And I remember thinking how thoughtless it was of her to not comfort Thalia even if she agreed that Madaline wasn’t coming back. But I didn’t know—not yet—that they already understood each other, perhaps better than I did either of them. Mamá respected Thalia too much to coddle her. She would not insult Thalia with false assurances.

Spring came, in all of its flush green glory, and went. We received from Madaline one postcard and what felt like a hastily written letter, in which she informed us of more troubles on the set, this time having to do with financiers who were threatening to balk because of all the delays. In this letter, unlike

the last, she did not set a time line as to when she would come back.

One warm afternoon early in the sum- mer—that would be 1968—Thalia and I went to the beach with a girl named Dori. By then, Thalia had lived with us on Tinos for a year and her disfigurement no longer drew whispers and lingering stares. She was still, and always would be, girded by an orb of curiosity, but even that was waning. She had friends of her own now—Dori among them—who were no longer spooked by her appearance, friends with whom she ate lunch, gossiped, played after school, did her studies. She had become, improbably enough, almost ordinary, and I had to admit to a degree of admiration for the way the islanders had accepted her as one of their own.

That afternoon, the three of us had planned to swim, but the water was still too cold and we had ended up lying on the rocks, dozing off. When Thalia and I came home,

we found Mamá in the kitchen, peeling carrots. Another letter sat unopened on the table.

“It’s from your stepfather,” Mamá said. Thalia picked up the letter and went up-

stairs. It was a long time before she came down. She dropped the sheet of paper on the table, sat down, picked up a knife and a carrot.

“He wants me to come home.”

“I see,” Mamá said. I thought I heard the faintest flutter in her voice.

“Not home, exactly. He says he has contacted a private school in England. I could enroll in the fall. He’d pay for it, he said.”

“What about Aunt Madaline?” I asked. “She’s gone. With Elias. They’ve eloped.” “What about the film?”

Mamá and Thalia exchanged a glance and simultaneously tipped their gaze up toward me, and I saw what they knew all along.

One morning in 2002, more than thirty years later, around the time I am preparing to move from Athens to Kabul, I stumble upon Madaline’s obituary in the newspaper. Her last name is listed now as Kouris, but I recognize in the old woman’s face a familiar bright-eyed grin, and more than detritus of her youthful beauty. The small paragraph below says that she had briefly been an actress in her youth prior to founding her own theater company in the early 1980s. Her company had received critical praise for several productions, most notably for extended runs of Eugene O’Neill’s

Long Day’s Journey into Night in the mid-1990s, Chekhov’s The Seagull, and Dimitrios Mpogris’s Engagements. The obituary says she was well known among Athens’s artistic community for her charity work, her wit, her sense of style, her lavish

parties, and her willingness to take chances on unheralded playwrights. The piece says she died after a lengthy battle with emphysema but makes no mention of a surviving spouse or children. I am further stunned to learn that she lived in Athens for more than two decades, at a house barely six blocks from my own place on Kolonaki.

I put down the paper. To my surprise, I feel a tinge of impatience with this dead woman I have not seen for over thirty years. A surge of resistance to this story of how she had turned out. I had always pictured her living a tumultuous, wayward life, hard years of bad luck—fits and starts, collapse, re- gret—and ill-advised, desperate love affairs. I had always imagined that she’d self-destruc- ted, likely drank herself to the kind of early death that people always call tragic. Part of me had even credited her with the possibility that she had known this, that she had brought Thalia to Tinos to spare her, rescue